The Desire to Know

'If the desire to know is what defines us, and if it is the truth that we most desire to know, then what happens when the truth turns out to be that there is no truth? Welcome to a world awash in nihilism.'

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STL, STD, Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville

Our nihilistic age denies truth itself, which we are naturally ordered to know.

While Aristotle was hardly the first to stumble upon the fact that all human beings desire to know, he was certainly the first to give it formal expression, which he did in Metaphysics, his important treatise on First Philosophy, written some four centuries before the coming of Christ. He was a very bright fellow. 

Why else would he have spent twenty years steeped in the study of philosophy at Plato’s Academy in Athens? Or been asked on leaving to tutor the young Alexander the Great? Or that Dante would call him “the Master of those who know”? Or Aquinas, quite simply, “the Philosopher”? In other words, he was no blockhead. In addition to which, he went on to tell us that what we human beings most desire to know is the truth, since neither falsehood nor fantasy will ultimately satisfy.  

These are longings, by the way, which we do not share with the animals, despite the growing conceit that, really, we humans are only a slightly smarter variation upon your basic primate. We’re all monkeys under the skin, you see, only some of us dress a bit more stylishly than your average animal. But even the cleverest of chimpanzees will never pick up a book to read, much less sit down and write one for other chimps to read. And while I’ve known not a few college sophomores like that, I tend to agree with Aldous Huxley’s observation that one would need more than a million years before seeing a monkey seated before a typewriter tapping out Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be…”

All right, so how are we to access this truth that human beings are supposed to be so determined to know? Simple. By sheer intensity of attention to that which is, or, quoting the philosophers, adaequatio intellectus ad rem, which means conformity of the mind to reality. The truth of being, in other words. So that anytime you strike a connection between what is and the mind’s awareness of what is, what you’ve got is truth.  

And there is more. Not only do we have the capacity to know this, but in knowing that we know, we are perfectly free not to settle for anything less than the truth of what we know. St. Augustine clearly understood this and noted it quite shrewdly when, in Confessions, he writes: “I have met many who wanted to deceive me, but none who wanted to be deceived.”

And the worst deception of all? What is that but to learn at the end of the day that there is no truth, that life is wholly without meaning. That is the biggest lie of all, an affront to the truth no more egregious than which can be imagined. To think that in the end there is only nothing is to fall into despair. One might as well sink into the same grave as do the dumb animals. It is the fate that awaits the doomed Macbeth. “Life’s but a walking shadow,” he cries out as his enemies move in for the final kill, “a poor player,     

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

If the desire to know is what defines us, and if it is the truth that we most desire to know, then what happens when the truth turns out to be that there is no truth? Welcome to a world awash in nihilism. Who can possibly survive on such a diet? One would sooner slit one’s throat than go on having to endure a world completely shorn of meaning, whose very pith is without purpose or point.  

“The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,” writes the poet W.H. Auden. “Not to be born is the best for man; / The second best is a formal order, / The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.”

But in a world bereft of meaning? Who in his right mind would wish to dance at all? It is only those for whom meaning exists, and who believe that it is both real and binding upon the whole world, that are able to go on with the dance day after day.    

In Fides et Ratio, Pope St. John Paul’s signature encyclical letter, released in 1998 during the last years of his papacy, we are reminded that when something is true, “it presents itself as universal, and that it must be true for all people and at all times.” And the reason for this is neither distant nor difficult to know. It is because we long for real certitude about the things that matter. “Beyond this universality,” he says, 

people seek an absolute which might give to all their searching a meaning and an answer—something ultimate, which might serve as the ground of all things…a final explanation, a supreme value, which refers to nothing beyond itself and which puts an 

end to all questioning. Hypotheses may fascinate, but they do not satisfy. Whether we admit it or not, there comes for everyone the moment when personal existence must be anchored to a truth recognized as final…a certitude no longer open to doubt.  

This is not a requirement on which we depend only in facing life; it is above all before the fact of death that we require this certitude of knowing that there is something more. “In all their celebrations,” writes Joseph Ratzinger, 

men have always searched for that life which is greater than death. Man’s appetite for joy, the ultimate quest for which he wanders restlessly from place to place, only makes sense if it can face the question of death. 

Because in death what we most fear is that final cancellation of whatever meaning or purpose we’ve managed to squirrel away in a world that seems to be closing in on us at every turn. Leaving us with no exit save the grave, toward which we see ourselves relentlessly moving. 

To free us from death, from a nihilism powerless to do anything about it, God sent us His Son, who came among us not only to give voice to the truth, but to give such flesh and blood and bone to it that He Himself has become the pure and perfect embodiment of truth.  

Praise Him…