Truth and Relativism - Why Aquinas Helps Against Fake News

Our Zeitgeist is characterized by the disregard or negation of absolute truths, values, and fundamental principles. It is an ideological attempt to justify everything that exists and happens purely from within the world and to interpret it only in a worldly manner. Human beings and the world are explained as an original self-creation of humans or as an evolutionary unfolding of matter. The question of a meaningful explanation beyond these worldly or cosmically immanent connections is suppressed or, as Karl Marx did in his "Critique of Religion," completely prohibited. This variant of an enlightenment movement is based on ideological concepts that proclaim the individual or the collective in the form of pure consciousness or mere matter as the origin of everything, without a "beyond" and transcendence. Above all, the existence of fundamental truths is perceived as a restriction of a freedom understood as fundamentally emancipatory. Because the basic tenor of all forms of relativism is that humans are fundamentally only capable of subjectively colored insights in social-historical contexts. Universally valid insights regarding an objectively given reality contradict social pluralism as well as the equivalence and validity of all worldviews and values. At the same time, in the same breath, there is outrage over fake news and so-called "alternative facts." Those who spread fake news and claim "alternative facts" are accused of distorting reality and asserting falsehoods. Those who tweet fake news are guilty of "lying." The denial that humans can recognize absolute and universally valid truths, and therefore that truth exists after all, is a main source of today's crisis of consciousness and, consequently, of communication and debate culture. The fact that truth exists at all is proven by a simple logical consideration. This primal knowledge of humanity was succinctly put by Thomas Aquinas: whoever denies the existence of truth admits that truth exists. For if truth does not exist, it would be true that truth does not exist. But if something is true, then truth must exist as such. Truth means the correspondence of reality and a perceiving mind. A distinction must be made between truth of being (ontological truth) and truth of knowledge (logical truth). Truth of being is the correspondence of reality with the ideas of the creator of this reality, whether that be a creative human who shapes things in art and technology, or even God. Truth of knowledge involves the agreement of a person's thoughts with an objectively existing reality. In this case, reality reveals itself to the intellectual grasp of the perceiving subject. The respective fact is therefore the measure for knowledge. True knowledge presupposes the openness and visibility of the known. This visibility or objective evidence applies to all beings, both the objective reality existing independently of human consciousness, as well as the perceiving mind. Because all finite (contingent) beings are "objectified spirit" of God, meaning that everything that exists has received an inner form from God's ideas. All reality (including all matter) is "spiritualized" and "enlightened." The perceiving mind possesses a second type of evidence, subjective evidence. It refers to the mind's orientation towards knowledge: the mind is designed to "grasp" the essence of all things and, in this sense, to "contain" it within itself. Due to his finitude, however, humans are not capable of actualizing complete (adequate) knowledge, that is, of fully and comprehensively understanding reality in all its connections. Humans only recognize in an inadequate manner and therefore grasp only partial truths, but not the "totality of all truths." However, truth demands nothing more than the alignment of the mind with a targeted object. Truths, including partial truths, are always absolute and universally valid. According to the highest principle of ontology and epistemology, the principle of contradiction, something cannot be true and not true in the same way with regard to the same fact, time, or place. Also, what is true for one perceiving mind cannot be untrue for another at the same time. The person who recognizes that things receive their measure from God as the "objectified spirit" of the creator, and that the created reality is the measure for true knowledge, also recognizes that it is a moral duty to serve the truth, that is, to act truthfully and in accordance with reality (so-called moral truth). Truth is a prerequisite for justice. Someone who deliberately presents facts incompletely does not serve the truth, but uses aspects of their own knowledge of truth, distorts them, or "enriches" them with consciously false ("alternative") but fundamentally false and fabricated facts ("facts") in order to create an inaccurate image of reality in another person. A person who manipulates truth and the perception of a communication partner in this way wants to deceive others and tempt them to act in a way that is advantageous for their own purposes. This is manipulation based on "lies" instead of convincing with knowledge of truth and its truthful communication.