Truth occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, resisting reduction to any single epistemological framework. The passages collected here reveal at least four distinct orientations. McGilchrist argues, with etymological force, that truth is not a propositional but a dispositional matter — rooted in trust, faithfulness, and relational engagement rather than in correspondence or coherence theories, both of which he subjects to sustained critique. He further insists that truth is not a human invention: it transcends the assertions of language and exceeds what either the left or right hemisphere, taken alone, can capture. Giegerich, by contrast, advances a rigorously dialectical account: the dismissal of truth from imaginal psychology (chiefly Hillman's) reflects an unexamined positivistic concept of truth, and what depth psychology genuinely requires is a negative, logical notion of truth — truth not as a content but as a mode of being-in-the-world into which the soul is drawn through dismemberment. Heidegger grounds truth in Dasein's own disclosedness and thrownness, making truth an existential condition rather than a predicate. Aurobindo and the Orthodox thinkers represented by Louth locate absolute truth in supramental or divine personhood. Nietzsche, meanwhile, calls the very foundations of truth-designations arbitrary, and the will to truth an expression of the will to power. These divergent orientations converge on one shared insistence: that truth cannot be confined to scientific propositionalism without catastrophic impoverishment of what it means to know.
In the library
25 passages
We now tend to think of truth as a matter of propositions. The word 'truth' in its origin indicates not a proposition, but a disposition. 'True' (cf German treu, faithful) is related to 'trust,' and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case.
McGilchrist argues etymologically that truth is originally dispositional — a matter of faithfulness and trust — rather than propositional, connecting it to the relational fabric of society and selfhood.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
We now tend to think of truth as a matter of propositions. The word 'truth' in its origin indicates not a proposition, but a disposition. 'True' (cf German treu, faithful) is related to 'trust,' and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case.
Duplicate entry reinforcing the etymological and dispositional account of truth as trust and faithfulness rather than abstract propositional correspondence.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Truth in our context is nothing positive, not even anything like the so-called 'eternal truths' … Truth is negatively a form of being-in-the-world, a state of existence. It is nothing that has to be 'accepted' or could be 'doubted.'
Giegerich redefines truth for depth psychology as a negative, existential mode of being-in-the-world, explicitly rejecting positive, propositional, or dogmatic conceptions of truth.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
truth lies in the cohesion of what it is that goes on in our minds … A whole set of beliefs could be mutually coherent and entirely false: everything depends on where you start from … why do we suppose that truths may not conflict? Opposites may both be true.
McGilchrist subjects coherence theory to critical scrutiny, arguing that mutual coherence is insufficient as a criterion of truth and that opposites may simultaneously be true.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
truth lies in the cohesion of what it is that goes on in our minds … A whole set of beliefs could be mutually coherent and entirely false: everything depends on where you start from … why do we suppose that truths may not conflict? Opposites may both be true.
Parallel entry restating the critique of coherence theory and the possibility that contradictory truths may coexist.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The value is, of course, truth: a value that is essential, timeless, and of the highest importance. By contrast, the assumption is adventitious and culture-bound: that truth requires maintaining an ideal of meaninglessness.
McGilchrist distinguishes the timeless value of truth from the culturally contingent scientific assumption that truth demands the exclusion of meaning from the world.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The value is, of course, truth: a value that is essential, timeless, and of the highest importance. By contrast, the assumption is adventitious and culture-bound: that truth requires maintaining an ideal of meaninglessness.
Duplicate passage reiterating the argument that contemporary science confuses the value of truth with the ideological assumption that truth excludes meaning.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The truth is great, and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not. Truth is not a human invention. It is possible to construe both truth and falsehood as having meaning only in relation to assertions in language, but that is to miss their depth.
McGilchrist, citing Coventry Patmore, asserts that truth transcends human invention and language-bound assertion, possessing a depth that purely linguistic accounts cannot capture.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
The truth is great, and shall prevail, When none cares whether it prevail or not. Truth is not a human invention. It is possible to construe both truth and falsehood as having meaning only in relation to assertions in language, but that is to miss their depth.
Duplicate entry asserting that truth's reality is independent of human acknowledgment and irreducible to linguistic assertion.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
Actaion had beheld absolute truth. It is in his Dionysian dismemberment that Truth is fully brought home to him … As long as it is merely a 'higher' principle, an ideal or a Goddess vis-à-vis an adoring spectator, it is neither absolute nor truth.
Giegerich uses the myth of Actaeon to argue that absolute truth demands full subjective dissolution — logical, not merely emotional, affectedness — rather than detached contemplation.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The allegation that one has to choose between soulfulness or truth (and logic) is a false alternative … To set soul and truth up as alternatives releases you from the task of asking and answering the indispensable question how the notion of logic, the notion of truth can become soulful.
Giegerich challenges imaginal psychology's false opposition between soul and truth, insisting that depth psychology must develop a concept of truth adequate to the soul's own logical life.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
If truth means positive truths, dogmatic truths, scientific 'truths,' then he was right to dispel the notion of truth from psychology … he seems to have held on to a positive ('literal') notion of truth.
Giegerich diagnoses Hillman's rejection of truth as stemming from an unexamined positive concept of truth, arguing that a negative, non-literal notion of truth is required for genuine depth psychology.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The problem is not that truth figures in psychology. The problem is the mindless positivistic idea we ordinarily have about truth ('scientific truth,' 'dogma,' etc.).
Giegerich locates the problem not in truth's presence within psychology but in the unreflective positivism that governs the ordinary concept of truth, which must be alchemically transformed.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Our myth, as the myth of the Notion and of the soul's relation to Truth (its own Truth), shows the Notion not only as the final result. The Notion is the unity of the final result and the whole movement to this result.
Giegerich reads the Actaeon myth as mapping the soul's dialectical relation to its own truth, where truth is understood as the unity of process and result rather than a static attainment.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Truth, this thing, would be conceived of as existing in the realm of subjectivity (in the mind) as a suitable representation … this truth would be impersonal … timeless and unchanging … Note the words 'representation', 'fact', 'perfect', 'precise', 'certain' … They all suggest a process that has now stopped.
McGilchrist critiques the representationalist model of truth as static, impersonal, and concluded, arguing that such a conception suppresses the living, temporal, contextual character of genuine knowing.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
truth, as Dasein's disclosedness, must be … the truth, must be. This belongs to Dasein's essential thrownness into the world … Now that we have an existential conception of the kind of Being that belongs to truth, the meaning of 'presupposing the truth' also becomes intelligible.
Heidegger grounds truth in Dasein's existential disclosedness and thrownness, making truth an ontological condition of Being-in-the-world rather than a property of propositions.
The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to what lies behind the Truth … Possession makes one passive, indolent, vain.
McGilchrist invokes Lessing to argue that the living pursuit of truth is of greater human value than its possession, connecting this to the right hemisphere's ever-striving orientation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
there can be no truth without a conversion or transformation of the subject … 'Spirituality', he explains, 'postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right … [or] by a simple ac
Drawing on Foucault, the passage argues that ancient philosophy understood access to truth as requiring a prior subjective transformation — truth is conditioned by a spiritual practice, not a cognitive act alone.
Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
there can be no truth without a conversion or transformation of the subject … 'Spirituality', he explains, 'postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right … [or] by a simple ac
Parallel entry from Sharpe and Ure reinforcing the Foucauldian claim that spirituality as practiced in antiquity made the subject's self-transformation the necessary condition of access to truth.
Sharpe, Matthew and Ure, Michael, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Dimensions, Directions, 2021supporting
Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infinite diversity … The hard logical and intellectual notion of truth as a single idea which all must accept … is an illegitimate transference.
Aurobindo distinguishes spiritual truth as infinitely diverse and living from the intellectual model of truth as a single, exclusive, logically demonstrable proposition.
The only solution is for the truth itself to cross the gulf and become immanent in humankind. This can only take place if Truth is a person … He not only has the truth, He is Himself the Truth. In Him Being and Truth are one.
Louth relays St. Justin Popović's Orthodox theological claim that absolute Truth is personal and incarnate, bridging the gulf between transcendence and immanence in the Godman.
Louth, Andrew, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Presentsupporting
where words are concerned, what matters is never truth, never the full and adequate expression … The 'thing-in-itself' (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible for even the creator of language to grasp.
Nietzsche argues that language is incapable of capturing pure truth; designations reflect only relational human perspectives, making the thing-in-itself — truth without consequences — linguistically and cognitively inaccessible.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872supporting
my will to power 'walks with the feet of your will to truth! … The living creature values many things higher than life itself; yet out of this evaluation
Nietzsche subsumes the will to truth under the will to power, suggesting that the pursuit of truth is itself a form of self-overcoming and a life-valuing activity.
no such thing as a science of Nature, no exact truth to which our account of physical things can ever hope to approximate … Plato denies this … The becoming which makes physical things unknowable cannot be reduced.
Plato, as read in the Timaeus, denies that physical science can approximate exact truth, since the becoming intrinsic to physical things renders them inherently unknowable with precision.
Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside
a careful and intelligent analysis of The Masters of Tr[uth]
Detienne's methodological retrospective gestures toward his own scholarly project on archaic Greek truth-masters, signaling the socio-historical embedding of early Greek aletheia.
Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996aside