Everyday Canvas

Concrete Truth versus Personalized Truth

Prompt: We all think we know what truth is; however, what if truth is really a collection of feelings and attitudes? Or do emotions and attitudes affect truth in some way? What are your thoughts on this?


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It is difficult to figure out the difference between what is exactly true and what seems to be true. Yet, truth itself is a concrete entity that we can only understand or interpret it through our conscious experiences.

I know my feet is my feet because I can feel my feet, and if a pin suddenly pricks a toe, I’ll feel the sting, but if the same pin pricked someone else’s foot, I would be totally clueless. This is because I consciously experienced the truth of my foot and the pin. Yet, a foot and a pin are concrete things. We experience the truths of concrete things with our five senses.

As to the truths of abstract things and thoughts, the way we experience the truths of the abstract things depends on our judgment of them because we humans think in terms of analogies. We think if something A is like something B; therefore, something A, in its true existence, has to equal something B in some way. This conclusion is the result of our knowing or, in other words, our consciousness.

For example, we cannot hold jealousy in our hands and neither can we smell, see, or hear it, but we know jealousy when we feel it in our psyche. Yet, if we were taught in our upbringing that jealousy is a bad thing, we would refuse to believe that the feeling of jealousy existed inside us; instead, our truth of the said jealousy would slide toward our learned attitudes. In this sense, the truth of jealousy depends on the result of our emotions and attitudes, which means, the truth of anything abstract is subject to the interpretation of each person’s feelings and attitudes.

Take the truth of the recent terrorist attack in Orlando. We in the USA are horrified by the evil truth of it. Yet, the person who perpetrated that attack felt and believed in a different kind of glorified truth concerning the same attack. Here was one truth, which was that the attack did take place, but the interpretation of it changed according to who judged it.

This goes to show that the judgment of the truth of most anything depends on the people’s attitudes and emotions. This personalization of truth has to do with each person or group’s consciousness and the way they feel, think, and know through their learned attitudes.

The question, then, is can and should we deal with the problems of personalized truths or act as if they didn’t exist? I would certainly go for the first option of doing something about any personalized truths that hurt other people.