I was reading A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes, a fragmented exploration of the thoughts, fears, and private language created by being in love and all its stages. Rather than examining love from a detached psychological distance, he writes from inside the consciousness of the lover. 

Early in the book, Barthes recounts a Buddhist koan. He says, “The master holds the disciple’s head underwater for a long, long time; gradually the bubbles become fewer; at the last moment, the master pulls the disciple out and revives him: when you have craved truth as you crave air, then you will know what truth is.” Barthes then turns the koan toward the absent lover. The personification of absence holds his head underwater, and through that asphyxia he says he reconstitutes his “truth.”

Maybe it’s romantic in that angsty teenage view of love, heaving and needy, but 40-something me feels ick. 

Also, that little possessive bothered me: his truth. Because the koan seems to promise Truth (the thing that remains true whether we like it or not) while Barthes turns it inward, toward the truth produced inside one consciousness. Are those the same thing?

Koans, by the way, are used to expose the limits of reasoning, habit, and language, asking us to sit inside uncertainty long enough that we might begin to see differently. And this koan made me think about how we view truth. 

When I was younger, I had a hard time understanding that what appeared to be two truths could exist at the same time. Let’s say a household has two children. The first recalls a certain night when the two parents were talking. The eldest recalls Mom crying during the talk, and the younger recalls Mom laughing. Perhaps Mom recalls neither because she was worried about the context of the conversation, which was too abstract for the children to understand at the time. Did Mom cry? Did Mom laugh? Did she do both? Was she worried? 

Perhaps the truth is that Mom laughed and cried at different moments. Perhaps one child remembered only the part that made sense to them. Perhaps the laugh was nervous and sounded like crying from the other room. Perhaps neither child’s memory is complete. Both children may be telling the truth about what they remember without either possessing the complete truth about what happened.

And this is where the word truth starts doing too much work (overworked, overqualified, underpaid… hey). There is the truth of the event ( as in what actually happened) and there is the truth of an experience (what it was like to be the person inside that experience). Those are not interchangeable. A sincere memory can tell me something true about the person remembering without giving me a complete or even accurate record of the event itself (insert mind-blown emoji here because honestly what I’m starting to feel is that there is no… truth).

It’s important to note that none of those experiences directly oppose the other. An actual contradiction, such as an event happening and not happening on Tuesday at the same time and in the same sense, cannot be true simultaneously, according to our friend Aristotle, who was sorting this stuff out more than 2,300 years ago through his principle of non-contradiction. But if we’re dealing with feelings? The feelings can all be real, even when they stem from different perceptions of the event. A feeling tells us something true about the person experiencing it, but it does not necessarily tell us the complete truth about the event.

So why can people emerge from the same event carrying such different versions of it? I call it the “me lens.” Thomas Nagel calls something like it the personal or subjective point of view: the view each of us has as one particular person standing in one particular place. We can try to step outside ourselves and see more objectively, but we can never completely stop being the person who is looking.

Through the “me lens,” everything I experience is boxed into the film of my life. I don’t ever get to see other people’s films unless they hop into my own film for a bit, and even then, I see what they give me. Maybe a few behind-the-scenes clips and bloopers, but most likely, for most interactions, it’s a curated version of their own reality. That is: what they are willing or able to share. Does that mean we have to escape our film to find the truth?

Nietzsche did not believe that escaping perspective was possible. Instead, he suggested that we approach greater objectivity by adding perspectives, by bringing more eyes to the same subject. Maybe we never obtain the complete film, but each additional camera angle can show us something our own position missed.

But what about the absolute truth then? Who gets to see the full version?

Absolute truth would require seeing:

• what happened
• what each person perceived
• what each person intended
• what each person misunderstood
• what was concealed
• what effects followed
• what no one present was capable of noticing.

Could any one individual consciousness hold all of that at once? Okay okay, even as I wrote this list, I realized that I was describing the mental load that I carry in my household. Still, even the superwoman who remembers every appointment, notices every mood, anticipates every problem, and knows exactly where everyone left their shoes cannot enter another person’s consciousness. She might come alarmingly close in a small environment. But community-wide? Citywide? Statewide? Worldwide? Only if you’re Pitbull, baby. 

So now, coming back to the koan, I suppose the question becomes: How can we tell when we have finally reached the truth, and when we have merely created an answer because we could no longer tolerate not having one?

Good old Barthes’ lover cannot discover the actual truth about his absent “other.” He cannot see the other’s film. He does not know exactly what the other’s absence means, what caused it, or what the other is thinking. But… he can know the truth of what the absence does to him. He knows that the absence of his love has deprived his own world of air.

To crave truth the way we crave air cannot mean grabbing the nearest explanation, calling it oxygen, and finally letting ourselves breathe. It means wanting what is real more than we need the relief of an answer, even when that answer would make everything feel easier. That is the measure of how badly we actually want the truth: whether we still want it when it refuses to be the answer we needed because truth doesn’t owe us comfort or usefulness. It simply is.