Lecture XXXVIII (Nr. 0500)

[495] QN: My question is this: In your last lecture you distinguished three types of truths, or truths on three different levels, such as truth in the realm of subject-object experience, and truth in the realm of good and beautiful, and also existentalist truth. Now you said that these three types or levels of truths are interpenetrated, but they shouldn't interfere in each other's realm because then eternal conflict results--- PT: Yes. Yes. QN: But I think that if the third type of truth which is existentialist truth and claims to be the ultimate truth, I think that it should take into consideration the other type of truths and should bring under judgment, if it is, the ULTIMATE truth, as a criterion for the other type of truths. So I think that the third type of truth should interfere in the other realms. PT: Yes, now, "correlate" and "interfere" are two very different things. If you say "interfere," you

mean that the so-called ULTIMATE truth---I would say "truth about the ultimate," which is a little bit different in meaning---if the existential truth or the truth about our ultimate concern interferes with the first two levels, the experimental and the experiential truth, then you make, in the [name?] of your existential relationship to the ultimate meaning of your life, or to the ground of being, or to God (however you want to express it, in this moment), a judgment about the fact whether there was snow in the night or not! Now this cannot be done! --- this simply cannot be done! No "photographic" facts can be determined in the name of ULTIMATE truth. If this were the case, then the levels were not only mixed, and there [was] mutual interference, but then the ultimate wouldn't really be ultimate,

because then you could say it is an information about facts---of having snowed or not having snowed, or about the relationship of H2O, the chemical elements in the ocean, which are a matter of experiment and nothing else. And if, in the name of the third level of truth, you make a judgment about the first level (let us stick to the first, for the moment), then you do something