Modal Confusion

You can't have your cake and be it too.

A lot of money is made by selling a “what”. It’s the “how” that usually solves the problem.

From the Holistic Psychologist:

“What truth is for you” is an interesting phrasing- because it isn’t “which” truth is for you, but rather “what” truth is for you, and that emphasizes the idea is that Truth is something to “find.”

Truth is a pathless land- you don’t need to find it, you just need to stop searching. You already know what it is. And I think that’s what THP’s post is getting at.

Though, “What truth is for you” implies that a truth for me isn’t a truth for you- and I think that’s fundamentally incorrect. Assuming that you’re living in roughly the same period as I am, then the truth is the same for both of us.

Living truthfully isn’t a rubric that can be articulated. It’s not a series of Yes/No questions for which you must have the correct answers. Living truthfully is an existential endeavor, not an external one. Our problem arises when we view truth as something that can be believed, attained, grasped, or otherwise had. Put differently, truth is an adverb, not a noun.

I think this is what John Vervaeke is getting at when he talks about modal confusion. He (and Fromm and a few others) suggest that there are two fundamental types of operating in the world- the “having mode” and the “being mode.” The having mode is a conceptualization-o-rama where you classify things that share similar properties in similar situations. It’s category labeling that allows for the accumulation of goods, experiences, and propositions or beliefs.

You can see this type of modal confusion in some religious communities that rely on non-somatic verbal rituals. It’s most obviously apparent to me in the Nicene Creed.

You can also see this type of modal confusion in scientific communities that rely on non-somatic verbal rituals. It’s most obviously apparent to me when someone says “I believe in Science.” The “March for Science” also comes to mind- as if Science were something that needed to be traveled to, demonstrated for, and safe-guarded.

Science is the mindset that you can develop functional models of the world that gets closer and closer to reality, and you don’t have to take anyone else’s word for it- be it religious institutions, governments, or corporations. It’s not a “thing” you get to fight over or possess. If I’m more scientific, that doesn’t mean I have taken some portion of science from someone else. And yet, popular discourse frames science as a thing that is at risk.

Similarly, you don’t get to posses truth. You don’t get to control it or manipulate (manus- from latin, hand). One property of truth is that it has a no-thing-ness to it. You can’t hold it, or study truth in the same way that (Vervaeke’s analogy) you can’t study “Things that happen on Tuesday” because there’s no over-arching, encompassing category that it can be contained in. The fundamental no-thing-ness to truth is what causes the confusion about it when approached from the having mode. Anytime you try to grasp nothingness, you’re bound to run into trouble.

In order to get out of this trap (which plagues a large portion of current controversial political conversations), we must learn to navigate move from the “Having Mode'“ to the “Being Mode”.

If we can give up our fantasy of possession and re-engage with life at the level of being, then there’s no telling what else we can do.