A Forgotten Leap

Where Kierkegaard leapt toward God beyond reason, we leap toward reason beyond its reach.

It was not a philosophical treatise that reintroduced me to the question of Truth, but a novel. In the midst of reading The Brothers Karamazov, I felt what Dostoevsky’s characters always seem to feel at the edge of their confessions: that the ground beneath conviction is less stable than it seems. Beneath every moral or theological dispute I encountered, another question lingered, quietly but persistently. What are we appealing toward when we say that something is true?

The more I turned it over, the more I sensed how easily we mistake familiarity for understanding. We speak of truth as if it were self-evident, a simple matching between statement and fact, but that picture conceals its own assumptions about how we know, see, and name the world.

The more I followed the thread, the more that quiet doubt led me to reimagine, and reinterpret, what truth might be.

This essay unfolds in two movements. I’ll highlight them in advance for readers who desire a more formal account. The first offers a perspectival critique of the correspondence theory of truth, the idea that a statement is true when it “corresponds to the facts.” The second follows where that critique points: toward the realization that even our most refined conceptions of objectivity rest on an existential leap of faith. The frameworks that give us confidence in knowledge presuppose a trust that cannot justify itself. Modernity has forgotten that leap in a way I call metaphysical amnesia. Technical triumphs hide the act of trust, and stable practice is mistaken for metaphysical certainty.

The Mirror of Correspondence

To begin, we must return to the image that has quietly organized much of our thinking about truth. It seems harmless in its simplicity, yet it shapes the way we imagine knowledge itself. Here, I am of course referring to the familiar picture of truth as correspondence.

The correspondence theory, in its naïve form, seems obvious: a statement is true if it matches the world. But this simple picture hides several assumptions. It presumes three things: the world arrives fully articulated and independent of perspective; language maps that structure without distortion; observation delivers facts “as they are.”

The mind is a mirror; reality, a tableau to be reflected.

It’s an image that flatters us with clarity. If only we could hold the mirror still, the world would show itself as it truly is. But notice how much faith this picture requires: that the mirror does not bend, that our concepts do not color what they reflect, that the world offers itself up in ready-made pieces waiting to be named. The correspondence model invites trust precisely where trust should be questioned. It promises simplicity, and simplicity seduces when it masquerades as certainty.

Yet, certainty wavers once we attend to perspective. Not only the optical kind, but the deeper frameworks through which any being meets the world — the reach of its senses, the shape of its concepts, the theories that give those concepts order. A human eye gathers light differently than a bee’s ultraviolet vision; an Aristotelian world of “elements” differs from a Newtonian world of “mass,” and both from Einstein’s “spacetime.” Each way of seeing discloses certain patterns while concealing others.

Nietzsche once pressed this further than most, asking whether existence itself might be nothing other than interpretation:

How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without ‘sense’ does not become ‘nonsense’; whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect; for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these.… Rather has the world become ‘infinite’ for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.

― Friedrich Nietzsche¹

However distorting perspective may be for the naïve natural view we adopt, it is clear that the more carefully we look, the less self-evident the notion of a “fact” becomes. What counts as observation or description already depends on what a given perspective is equipped to notice. The mirror, it turns out, cannot help but carry the tint of the eye that holds it².

The Perspectival Challenge

Consider a simple statement: the ocean is blue.

If correspondence is right, its truth must be independent of who perceives it. But the moment we vary the perceiver, the statement begins to tremble. To a color-blind human, the same ocean may appear gray or green; to a bee, sensitive to ultraviolet, it gleams in a spectrum we cannot even imagine; to a fish beneath the surface, light breaks differently altogether. The scene remains, but what it is shifts with each vantage. What, then, does the claim correspond to?

The correspondence theorist has a few ways to steady the mirror.

The first is to privilege a single perspective — to call the ordinary human view the “correct” one and quietly dismiss the rest. We appeal to the “normal” eye as though its particular limits were nature’s own measure. But then correspondence collapses into convention: the truth of “the ocean is blue” becomes true only for us. The claim no longer mirrors an independent reality, but the habits of a species.

The second is to redefine the claim, translating “blue” into physics — light of roughly 475 nanometers. This preserves the appearance of objectivity, but only by changing the subject. “Blue” no longer names what is seen but what causes seeing. The correspondence is no longer between statement and world, but between theory and data. The world described is not the one experienced.

The third is to deny color to the world altogether — to say that it exists only in the perceiver’s mind. But then “the ocean is blue” no longer corresponds to anything outside the perceiver. The statement becomes a report of private sensation, not a claim about the world. What was supposed to be an objective truth dissolves into subjectivity.

Each option saves correspondence by undermining its intuitive meaning. By purifying it of perspective, each response erases the very relation that made truth meaningful. The first reduces it to anthropocentric convention, the second changes the subject from experience to theory, the third retreats into solipsism, rendering all our ordinary statements like “the ocean is blue” strictly false. In trying to save the mirror from distortion, we remove what it was meant to reflect.

Indexed Truth

The critique of correspondence leaves us with a dilemma. If truth cannot be purified of perspective, then it seems to lose the very independence that once gave it authority. Are we left with nothing but shifting appearances, each as valid as the next? Or can we still speak of objectivity within the bounds of perspective itself? To move forward, we must thus ask what kind of truth can survive once the mirror has cracked.

Perhaps the first step is to recognize that acknowledging perspective need not plunge us into relativism. It only reminds us that every claim to truth is uttered from somewhere — within a set of conditions that make it intelligible at all. Once those conditions are made explicit, truth reveals itself for the first time, as something always bound to the standpoint from which it arises. Truth is fundamentally indexed³ to the standpoint from which it arises.

When we, with our usual confidence and faintly comic assurance, proclaim “the ocean is blue,” what we really mean is that under daylight, for trichromatic human eyes, the ocean appears blue. Making those conditions visible refines objectivity rather than abolishing it, because it trades the illusion of neutrality for the clarity of awareness.

Let us remember, then, that henceforth what matters is not the fantasy of escaping perspective, but the insight that perspective itself opens the horizon of the truths we can meaningfully claim.

A Shared Horizon

Having clarified the structure of indexed truth in principle, we can now ask how it functions in practice, how truth holds among beings who share enough of a world to speak to one another about it. This requires a short diversion to what might be called our linguistic ecology: the shared capacities and conventions that make common understanding possible.

Our shared language arises from the overlap of our capacities. Most humans see blue, and that commonality stabilizes the word; it gives our descriptions enough uniformity to function. In this sense, language is a quiet pact of perception — a tacit accord among creatures who, by nature and nurture, inhabit the same slice of the visible. The agreement feels transparent; we speak as though the world itself were speaking through us. Yet this feeling, however persuasive, must not be mistaken for a metaphysical guarantee. The ease with which words seem to mirror the world conceals the very problem we have uncovered: that correspondence, taken as literal reflection, cannot hold. The stability we find here is practical, not absolute. It secures coordination, not truth.

This becomes clear when we consider what happens at the edges of that coordination. To call a color-blind observer “wrong” is to appeal to the norms of our own perceptual community. What counts as “error” here is a deviation from the majority’s mode of access, not from the world’s hidden essence. And still, that shared perception is no trivial thing: without it, no common world could appear at all. What we call “objectivity” at this level is the consensus of creatures who happen to see alike, a fragile but necessary alignment through which meaning becomes communicable.

Here, in the intersubjective clearing where words and perceptions just begin to cohere, truth seems to take form. Fragile, partial, yet luminous enough for the world to appear.

Still, a deeper and more essential pattern can, and indeed ought to, be discerned. If each perspective discloses only a fragment, it also tempts us to ask what would remain if every possible fragment were set side by side. What if we could see the world not only through human eyes but through every lens that life or thought has ever devised? The bee’s ultraviolet field, the bat’s echolocative space, the shark’s electrical sense, the alien sensorium we can scarcely imagine, each carves the same world along different lines of visibility.

Might the point where all these perceptions overlap, however faintly, mark something like truth? Perhaps objectivity lies there, at the intersection of all possible perspectives, a coherence that endures translation across every way of seeing.

Two Orders of Truth

Yet what kind of coherence is this? If we could somehow gather every vision—human, animal, mechanical, or alien—what exactly would we find to be stable across them? The question forces a distinction that has been forming quietly beneath the surface: between the truths that appear within a perspective, and the truths that hold through perspectives. It is one thing for the world to look blue to a creature like us, another for there to exist structures that make such an appearance possible at all.

Thus, from this vantage, two interwoven layers of truth finally come into view.

a) Appearance-truths Ordinary claims express how the world appears under specific capacities and conditions. Their truth is perspective-indexed. “Blue” means nothing apart from the kind of creature who can see blue, just as “solid” means little to one who perceives only atomic lattices.

b) Structural-truths Beneath those appearances lie patterns and regularities that constrain all perspectives: spectral distributions, molecular configurations, physical constants. These invariants explain why the ocean looks blue to us and ultraviolet-bright to the bee. They appear differently, yet they cohere within one shared order.

Once again, crucially, this distinction is of relational rather than hierarchical nature. Appearance-truths are how the structure shows itself; structural-truths are what remain stable through their differences. Einstein gave this insight its clearest form: the laws of motion are not true because everyone sees the same thing, but because they remain valid under transformation.

For a moment, the discovery of invariance feels like resolution. We have arrived at something that no longer depends on the peculiarities of our senses—a framework that holds across any perspective capable of grasping it. The constancy of physical law appears to promise a final anchor, a truth that transcends all particular standpoints. The play of perspectives yields to a single harmony, the laws of nature standing firm where perception shifts. It seems we have reached the level at which the world finally stays still. Sadly, the more we dwell on this constancy, the more it breaks apart. Invariance defines what we call objective, but why should invariance itself be taken as truth? Are we sure that stability within our representations guarantees contact with reality itself, rather than with the order our minds are capable of imposing upon it?

At this point, the question turns to the metaphysical.

The Temptation of Invariance

Borrowing from Einstein once more, we can use his thought experiment to explore both the brilliance and the peril that the ideal of invariance carries with it.

Imagine a train rushing past a platform. Two bolts of lightning strike the track — one at the front, one at the rear — at what seems to the person on the platform to be the same instant. But for a passenger inside the moving train, the flash at the front reaches her eyes slightly after the flash at the rear. Because light travels at a finite speed and the train moves toward one flash and away from the other, simultaneity itself depends on the observer’s frame of motion.

Einstein’s point was not that perception is unreliable but that space and time themselves are relative to perspective. What varies is not the accuracy of vision but the structure of measurement. And yet, despite these perspectival shifts, the laws of physics, the constancy of the speed of light, the equations governing motion, remain unchanged for both observers⁴.

But here lies the temptation. In treating invariance as the mark of truth, we risk confusing what is epistemically secure with what is metaphysically certain. Invariance tells us which structures resist distortion when our instruments or theories shift; it maps what remains stable within our systems of representation. We then take this stability as proof that reality itself must share that structure, though we can never know whether invariance reveals the world’s architecture or merely that of cognition⁵. To decide between those possibilities would require a view from nowhere, a position no being can occupy.

Thus, invariance deserves the highest epistemic authority we can grant, but not metaphysical certainty. Invariance marks the limit of what we can justifiably call objective, but not a guarantee that our objectivity reaches the world as it is. It secures empirical and conceptual coherence, not correspondence beyond it.

And this is where the first argument gives way to the second. For once we see that even our strongest criterion of objectivity rests on an unprovable trust that reason’s invariants mirror reality’s structure, the question of truth passes from epistemology into the existential: the domain of faith in reason itself.

From Limitation to Leap

To pursue knowledge at all is to act as though the world is intelligible and our concepts can reach it. That conviction guides every inquiry, though no argument can secure it. There is no standpoint outside reason from which to verify reason, no perception beyond perception that could test its link to the real. The very act of thinking presupposes a trust it cannot prove.

A Kierkegaardian leap in spirit, this time not of faith beyond reason, but of faith that reason reaches beyond itself. We trust that our understanding touches something real, even as every attempt to justify that trust already assumes it.

The Faith of Modernity

The Enlightenment carried faith forward by transforming its object. Where earlier ages trusted in divine order, modern thought placed that trust in human reason and the intelligibility of the world.

When theology lost its claim to final authority, modernity still needed a source of stability. Reason became that source. The human mind replaced the divine mind as the image of order. Inquiry and method became the new rituals through which the world was made comprehensible. This shift was not a rejection of faith but its redirection toward the structures of knowledge and the hope that they could reveal the world’s design.

Thinkers such as Hume and Kant still sensed the fragility of this confidence. Hume exposed the uncertainty of causality, and Kant shaped that uncertainty into a framework where knowledge could function within its limits. Later centuries forgot the tension they preserved. Positivism and scientific realism treated disciplined procedure as a path to certainty. What earlier had been faith in providence now became confidence in method and measurement, animated by the same longing for coherence that had once belonged to religion.

Each experiment renewed that confidence: the belief that nature would answer to calculation, that its laws would remain stable, that tomorrow would resemble today. Repeated success made this trust seem self-evident. Instruments worked, predictions held, and the assumption of intelligibility became embedded in the practices of science. What began as a wager turned into habit, diffused through institutions, laboratories, and education until the act of trust disappeared into routine.

Through that transformation, modernity achieved remarkable power but also lost awareness of its own foundation. The very success of method concealed the faith that sustained it: the quiet conviction that reality is structured so that reason can understand it. This condition is what I henceforth shall refer to as metaphysical amnesia — the forgetting of the trust that underlies every claim to knowledge, a trust performed daily but rarely remembered.

As this trajectory entered its later stage, analytic philosophy emerged as a parallel effort, pursuing the problem through a different strategy. Where modernity drifted into confidence without awareness, analytic philosophy attempted to eliminate the need for faith altogether. Logical empiricists tried to purify thought by removing metaphysical residue, reducing meaning to verification and truth to formal structure. The implicit trust that had carried the Enlightenment became a target for systematic refusal. Yet the aspiration remained shared: to allow reason to ground itself entirely through its own procedures, standing independent of the very reliance that made it possible in the first place.

The Realist Inheritance

Finally, we can now see how contemporary philosophical realism bears this grand inheritance. Its many forms differ in detail but share the same hope: that the success of science reveals the shape of reality itself. Whether it locates assurance in causal powers, structural relations, or the long arc of theoretical convergence, each transforms empirical reliability into metaphysical confidence. Behind these variations stands a single conviction, that explanation and truth are aligned, that the power of a theory to work is evidence that it discloses what is. The arguments only relocate the leap of trust, never remove it.

What endures, therefore, is faith: faith in the world’s intelligibility, in the kinship between thought and being. The gods have changed, but the devotion remains. We continue to believe that the world is ultimately intelligible, that even its chaos can be rendered coherent within thought, though we no longer remember that this is an act of faith rather than a fact.

On Standing Before the Unknown

What follows from this recognition is humility. The realization that all knowledge rests on an unprovable trust does not diminish reason; it restores its measure. Reason remains our highest instrument, yet it moves within a faith older than itself, the trust that the world can be known. Faith gives rise to reason, and reason, when conscious of its ground, gives faith a clearer voice.

Modernity’s tragedy is not disbelief but forgetfulness. It believes without knowing that it believes. Beneath our secular confidence lives a quiet devotion to order and coherence, a conviction that no experiment can prove but every experiment assumes. We have not left behind the sacred; we have translated it. Our new creed is intelligibility itself.

Kierkegaard’s leap is faith in God despite reason; Ours is faith in reason despite its limits.

To remember the leap beneath our certainty is to recover an older virtue, humility before the mystery that reason itself requires. We live as if the mirror of correspondence could finally reflect the world itself. Yet behind that mirror lies the same ungrounded trust that once knelt in cathedrals; faith transformed, secularized, and forgotten. To see it again is not to renounce enlightenment but to complete it: to recognize that even our clearest light is lit by an invisible flame.

Truth, then, is not a mirror held up to the world but a posture within it; a way of standing before what exceeds us with both confidence and reverence. The question that began as doubt thus finally rests easy, for its answer lies in the humility of understanding what certainty costs.

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1. Nietzsche, F. (1974) The gay science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Vintage. Page 336. ↩

2. Some confusion might arise if one reads this passage through Kantian metaphysics. At this stage, I’d rather keep those notions out of the discussion, as it reintroduces the intuitive “world” as a self-evident axiom. ↩

3. By indexed I mean that the truth of any statement is bound to the conditions that make it intelligible. That is, the perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic structures through which the world is disclosed. To call truth indexed is not to be mistaken as simply adopting a form of linguistic contextualism, which treats truth as varying with conversational or pragmatic setting, but to recognize an ontological dependency: there is no “view from nowhere” from which truths could be assessed independently of the forms of access that make them possible. ↩

4. This constancy, this invariance beneath transformation, became the modern expression of objectivity: what survives translation between vantage points is what most of us unconsciously, or otherwise, call true. ↩

5. Here, finally, enters the Kantian divide between the phenomenal and noumenal realms. ↩