On Truth

I read Harry Frankfurt's On Truth today, and found it a charming little book. I do mean little. More a long essay than a book. But it dealt with a big subject eloquently.

He's the famous philosopher who wrote the bestseller On Bullshit.

I guess after an attack on indifference to the truth, he felt it necessary to explain why we should love the truth.

He takes over Spinoza's idea that each individual is trying to achieve his own essence, and takes joy in living up to his or her potential. Since it is truth that helps us do that, we must take joy in the truth.

I particularly liked these lines:

It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact, and truth that we come to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others and to articulate the specific natures of our own identities.

How, then, can we fail to take the importances of reality and factuality seriously? How can we fail to care about truth?

We bang our wills against the world's resistance,
And come to grasp both inner and outer existence.