truth,

“another victim of the euphemism treadmill”: whatever “masturbates the understanding instinct without procreation” or, simply, an understanding after it goes stale and sour. Modernity’s appetite for truths dwarfed supply; in art, banal pronouncements propped up slack, made sense within a page to be forgotten by the next; transparently diluted (if only to be beyond-B-able) “fictional truths” — replacing maxims and morals of the old didactic genres — punctuated a protagonist’s journey; self-referentiality, cyclic structures, slicing and shuffling (flashbacks, flashforwards) feigned depth — made trivialities sound presaging.  ■    Originally the science, philosophy had begotten real sciences (persuasiveness evolved into verifiability) but, itself, fell far behind — when, amidst pallid generalities blooming in the shattered mental landscape, it found a new source of revelationry in deconstruction, aggressive relativism, acidic “bias bias”; the acid, however, poisoned philosophy itself, and the new strangening generations weren’t too sympathetic to its struggles. And yet it survives: “no matter how wrong, philosophy won’t stop talking about truth.”

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