Truth vs opinion

There are different levels of judgement about the world, related to different attitudes. On the syncretic level, one finds the opinion, which is intertwined with the people's everyday life, their personal experience. When people begin to reflect on their judgements, they enter the level of spirituality, with its own hierarchy. However, this level has its own hierarchy of qualitatively different sub-levels. Thus, opinions may be accepted as they are, in a syncretic manner, without making any further distinctions - that is, they are no more than beliefs; in the specific social environment, beliefs can form the core of a religious system. With a more developed spirituality, one becomes aware of the difference between people's judgement and the actual ways of the world - three levels can be distinguished here: aesthetic, logical and ethic judgement (currently instututionalised in art, science and philosophy).

Aesthetic judgement takes the form of a (personal) view; views are not as rigid as beliefs, and they may be arbitrarily altered, allowing to play with different possibilities. Despite this limited arbitrariness, views strongly depend on the current cultural environment, reflecting the fundamental trends in its development; however, since these trends are related to what is yet to come, the arts may serve to express apparently unexpected thoughts.

On the contrary, science tries to fix the rules of the game - and rely on standardized judgement seeking for truth. The ways of formal reasoning characteristic of this analytical level follow the development of the forms of people's activity - and there are no "absolute" or "eternal" truths (just like there is no eternal beauty, or universal moral). Still, science pretends that its abstract truths are independent of any opinions - and it is right in that no individual opinion matters; but scientific truth can be considered a kind of collective opinion, and hence the difficulties with paradigm change. In other words, scientific rigor is based on social acceptance (institutionalization) of certain modes of activity, which makes science much more conservative than art or philosophy.

On the next level of reflection, people become aware of the origin of their views and truths - and thus cultivate their convictions, which strongly demand realization, transformation into praxis. It is here that the people can relate any abstractions they may produce to the real world, and get the idea of the world itself. I call this level ethical in a wide sense, since it is concerned with the development of conscious behavior, including all kinds of regulators available: moral norms, logic, ideological position etc.

Either of these levels of judgement is necessary for spiritual development, and one cannot prefer a single level, showing contempt to the rest. Such a position would usually lead to spiritual degradation, so that scientific truths would become mere beliefs, or opinions - etc. Still, every single act of judgement has to be dominated by one or another attitude, thus unfolding the hierarchy in a specific turn.

In their communication, people often fail to perceive the hierarchy of the other's attitudes, substituting their own structure instead. With a little bit more learning, they could avoid formal argument or conceptual conflicts; the same topic can be treated differently by different people, but all these individual attitudes are complementary aspects of the whole.