Is truth hidden in guilt or is “nothing is true, everything is permitted”? Philosophers have been trying to answer these and many other questions for more than one millennium. With each new attempt to find real knowledge on the Promised Land, even more insoluble questions and paradoxes appear at this particular moment. In this article, we briefly describe the various types of truth in humanities and philosophy.
Before proceeding directly to classification, it is worth noting that in modern humanitarian knowledge there are as many truths as there are professions and occupations that existed and exist in various societies. So, for a religious person, the misfortune of a neighbor is a punishment for his sins or an omen of God, for a lawyer it can be a crime or violation of the law, and for a poet and writer, it’s a touching and enchanting story of a person’s struggle with his grief. All these types of truth have a right to exist, because they lie in different fields of knowledge.
According to the most popular classification, truth is divided into absolute and relative. The first is a complete and complete knowledge of an object or phenomenon. Relative truth, on the other hand, suggests that the absolute is unattainable. It is impossible to comprehend everything in knowledge, although one can come close to this. Such types of truth in philosophy gave rise to two theories: metaphysics, which claims that absolute knowledge is real, and relativism, lamenting the relativity of any knowledge.
Since ancient times, people doubted the absoluteness of truth. Sophists in Ancient Greece expressed relativistic views in relation to this, for which they were criticized by Socrates. Hobbes, Didro, Descartes and Leibniz after the Christian scholasticism in the 16th century also argued that the idea of creating God as absolute truth has many gaps and is essentially untenable.
Serving relative truth is vehemently criticized by Friedrich Nietzsche in his work, “So Said Zarathustra.” Its relativity is manifested in the beliefs of the people or one of the rulers. Pretending to be true knowledge, a false theory, which, for example, in the middle of the twentieth century was eugenics, a person manipulates others for his own selfish purposes. The real philosopher, according to the German immoralist, should serve a true, non-transcendental truth.
How to understand what is truth? Its criteria and types are described in many philosophical and other scientific works. In short, truth must obey the laws of logic, not contradict the already discovered facts of science, conform to fundamental knowledge, be simple and understandable, put into practice, and should not depend on humanity.
The types of truth about which it has already been said above are also supplemented by its objective type. Such a truth is knowledge that does not depend on the activities of the individual and humanity as a whole.
Whatever types of truth may exist, philosophers believe that they can be known only through experience, sensations, and reason. Or, as Ivan Karamazov said in the novel by F. M. Dostoevsky: "If there is no God, everything is allowed."
