September 20
Not the truth that any person possesses, or believes he possesses, but the sincere effort he has made to get at the truth, is what makes a person's worth.
A Rejoinder
Listening mode
Not the truth that any person possesses, or believes he possesses, but the sincere effort he has made to get at the truth, is what makes a person's worth.
Sometimes you turn out to be right without having earned it. You claimed something because it suited your mood or because you didn't like the other side, and later it emerges that it was true. The satisfaction is brief and strangely thin. You know you could just as easily have been wrong.
Conversely, there are mistakes you hardly need to be ashamed of. You asked, you looked things up, you took an objection seriously, and still you ended up in the wrong place. From the outside, usually only the result counts. Whoever was right is remembered; whoever was carefully wrong is considered refuted. The effort itself leaves hardly any evidence.
What makes it harder is that you can't entirely trust your own effort either. Long deliberation can be a detour to exactly the answer you wanted from the start. Whether you were really searching shows most clearly where an answer doesn't please you and you still don't push it aside straight away.
The question of who was right back then was settled long ago. How you arrived at your opinion, no one knows but you.
