One Can’t Handle the Truth.

“It takes two to speak the truth,—one to speak, and another to hear.”

—H. D. Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (267).

I came across this passage in doing the research for another blog post. When I first noted it, the sentence struck me because it suggested that truth is collaborative: it has two participants who must coordinate their understandings. The expression captured another complexity in how we know the world. However, the statement now suggests something deeper.

Speaking	Hearing
Person A	Person B
Person A in the present	Person A in the past
Person A in the past	Person A in the present

Variations on "two to speak the truth"

Collaboration may be a potential attribute of truth, but it may not be an essential one. It may take “two to speak the truth,” but that does not mean it takes two different people; it can also be two versions of the same person. The gap between my original understanding of Thoreau’s statement and my subsequent understanding illustrate one aspect of how I can function like two people. We can also tell the truth to ourselves, perhaps after deluding ourselves for a while. On the other hand, we write things down, time passes, and we change, so the new person we become can learn the truth from the old person we were.

In the present or the past, we can tell the truth to ourselves, and though the gap between speaker and hearer in this case may be small, the two are not identical.

In addition to the speaker/hearer duality in “truth” is the statement/reality duality. In the Oxford English Dictionary one high-level definition for the word “truth” is “Something that conforms with fact or reality.” That definition means that the “Something” is not fact or reality; it bears a relationship but is not identical.

What fits between the arrows, we may accept, but beyond that 

right arrow we might decide the gap is too large.

Because the statement is always a translation of the case, there is always a gap between the case and the statement, even when we are doing no more than quoting someone (orally, the tone and timbre will not be identical and in print the context will differ). We accept some slippage in the case-statement relationship; we allow for adjustments, but sometimes the statement moves too far from the case and the statement is no longer a truth, even if the speaker believes it is true. No matter how close, however, necessarily a gap opens up between the case and the statement of it.

This doubleness of the truth is no basis for dismissing “truth” as an illusion or as relative, nor does it mean there are two truths involved when “two speak the truth.” The separation of the human eyes means that each eye sees something different; Nick Sousanis in Unflattening [page 4] suggests we can observe this effect by closing alternating eyes as we look at a finger held up against a background. The two separate images converge into a single image to give us our depth perception. The constituent elements of truth act in the same way; though those elements are a unity, they do not collapse into a single entity, but remain in tension, and it is in the tension among the speaker and the hearer and the case and the statement that the truth lies and does not lie. In both senses.