The Hairy Ball – Teeth Optional

The Truth You Feel

What would a purely external truth be? It can be recognised only when we participate in it and therefore appropriate it inwardly.

M. Eck, Lies and Truth

The Conundrum of the Secret City

Luckily, perhaps, I can recall almost nothing I learnt in the classroom when I was eight years old; but I remember the playground riddles. Most were silly. Why do elephants paint their toenails red? So that they can hide in cherry trees without being seen. What is the difference between a jeweller and a gaoler? One sells watches, the other watches cells. Occasionally, jokes drew on the tradition of logical puzzle and paradox. I remember an enthralling discussion, fierce and friendly, competitive and companionable, with boys I later lost track of. Their images are trapped in the web of memory, no longer separable from the substance of our talk, or from its dim surroundings in a schoolroom in winter, rimed with chill and chalk-dust.

One boy, who was tall and bony, with the thin, faded hair of premature middle age, could not find the answer and so affected disdain. He wanted to be a missionary and became an archaeologist. Another, who was fat and aggressive, pretended to have solved the problem and to be unwilling to share his findings. I never knew what became of him. The riddle was unravelled by the class swot – a short, slight boy with curly hair and dusty spectacles, whom I last saw when we were fellow-undergraduates and his old cleverness seemed to have vanished. For years the riddle lingered in my mind as a way of remembering the boys who surrounded it. Now it is taking on a life of its own as a cryptic clue to the problem before me: how to write the history of truth.

The subject of the riddle – which is traditional in many similar versions – was an explorer on his way to the secret city of Njug. As he struggled through jungles inhabited by two intermingled tribes – one of whom always lied, while the other always told the truth – he came to a fork in the road. There a native squatted. The explorer was minded to ask his advice but, as the locals all dressed identically, could not tell to which tribe he belonged. In a necessary refinement of the riddle, the tribes shared a further custom: they ate anyone who asked more than one question. How could the explorer formulate an enquiry so as to elicit a useful answer?

This riddle of the secret city exudes an odour of antiquity. The notion of a tribe of liars derives from one of the world's most venerable paradoxes, known to philosophers as the liar paradox. It was quoted by Callimachus – the self-tortured gay poet of Ptolemaic Alexandria's sybaritic court. In the opinion of a Cretan of the sixth century BC, he recalled, 'all Cretans are liars'. But how could it be true without inviting disbelief or false without self-confirmation? Nearly three hundred years later the same allusion was made in one of St Paul's pointed jokes: 'It was one of themselves, one of their own prophets, who said, "Cretans were never anything but liars" ... And that is a true statement. So be severe in correcting them.' Evidently, the Cretans' lies could not be relied on, even for falsehood, but on the road to Njug the liars lied without exception.

One possible answer the explorer might have tried to elicit from a liar was, 'If you were to ask me which is the way to Njug, I should say it was to the left.' The answer would be false, but it would point the explorer in the right direction, for the truth-teller's answer would be the same. Like the rest of us, when we risk decisions or grapple with doubt, the explorer could then proceed on his way, still unable to tell whether he had heard a truth or a falsehood but equipped with the practical information he needed. The human condition is like that. The nature of truth eludes us; we have no satisfactory definition at our disposal, no agreed or reliable truth-recognition technique; but we have some working assumptions about the reliability of our feelings, our senses, our powers of reason or the authority of our sources of counsel or of inspiration.

The Njug story involves other mythic features: an encounter with a sphinx-like creature, on a journey in search of enlightenment, through a world of contrasting but interpenetrated moieties. It summons up one of the starting points of the subject of this book: the quest for techniques for telling truth from falsehood. And it raises one of the preoccupations of modern western philosophy: the relationship of the truth of any formulation to the conditions specified or implied within it. The conundrum of the secret city, moreover, took the explorer where I want to take the reader: to an encounter with a tribesman squatting – lying, perhaps – in a road forked like a false tongue.

Journeyers call themselves explorers when they think they belong to a higher culture than that of the people among whom they are travelling. Yet they are dependent, like the searcher in the story, on local lore to guide them. In investigating the unrecorded past – in seeking, for instance, an inkling of people's earliest thoughts about truth – we have to look for our guides among peoples of slowly changing cultures who resemble their remotest ancestors. Historians who would like to start among documents in libraries and archives, or philosophers who might prefer a quiet club chair, have to be persuaded to join ethnographers on a walk in the woods. A history of truth must begin in the world of 'primitives' and will often have to return there; readers kind enough to persist with this book will make that return trip, because I hope to show that all primitive methods of truth-recognition abide throughout history and that techniques of all the kinds practised today are of very ancient origin, though some have prevailed over others at different times. The purpose of this chapter is to present people's earliest thinking about truth, in periods dominated by the most primitive known descriptions of the world. Truth was then detected chiefly, as I shall argue, by feelings, though other means, dominant at later periods, such as reason, sense-perception and authoritative exposition, were also known and practised.

First, however, the appeal to the evidence of surviving 'primitives' needs more justification now than ever before: some will reject it because they think primitive insight is a euphemism for savage delusion; others, who uphold cultural relativism, will say that no people's thought is more 'primitive' than any other's and will resent the condescension. Both sources of objection need an answer or at least a response before we can get much further ahead with the quest.

The Bite of the Wolf-Child: the search for early thoughts

In 1969 the Kadiweu, proud horseborne warriors of the Brazilian–Paraguayan borderland, could only be...