Truth as Its Counterpoint

Abstract

From A. H. Maslow’s remark that “science is the only way we have of shoving truth down the reluctant throat. Only science can overcome charactero-logical differences in seeing and believing. Only science can progress.”(in Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science, 1963), to Aldous Huxley’s “we now find ourselves from the very start in the midst of a dialogue between nature and man, a dialogue of which science is only one part, so much so that the conventional division of the world into subject and object, into inner world and outer world, into body and soul, is no longer applicable and raises difficulties.”(Literature and Science, 1963), one may realize that truth is to be found rather as a construct oscillating between conventional forms that the régimes of truth characterizing every societal arrangement build and personal interpretations of reality specific to any human creature. In brief, the present article explores the different ‘shades of grey’ that the birth of truth presupposes in a process of transactional interplay which appears most often under the form of contrapunctal exchange, with a reliance on Huxleyian texts read mainly through Foucauldian lenses.