Noise and Knowing
- Aanya Kapur
- Oct 24
- 3 min read
Sri City: Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “There are no facts, only interpretations,” a statement that feels strikingly relevant today as we navigate an era awash with information, yet where truth seems increasingly elusive. Stories and opinions barrage us from phones, laptops, and conversations, amplified by social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok. These channels convert complex issues into viral soundbites and hashtags, blurring the line between fact and fiction. The result is a general confusion about what constitutes “objective truth,” a term referring to universal facts independent of perspective. When such shared truths dissolve, communication and collaboration suffer, plunging us into a Crisis of Meaning, where language itself, distorted by misinformation and competing views, struggles to ground us in certainty.
This crisis becomes stark during conflicts, such as the recent India-Pakistan tensions, where social media overflowed with a mix of accurate reports and manipulated content, making it hard to distinguish fact from propaganda. While misinformation is not new, the ease of digital distortion magnifies its impact, highlights how language and information easily succumb to noise.
While these problems are not necessarily unique to today's era, they highlight a much larger issue, which is how easily information and language can get distorted under noise. This concern has been most famously explored in George Orwell’s novel, 1984. Set in a totalitarian state called Oceania, the novel depicts a society where the ruling party exercises absolute control over information, history, and even the private thoughts of people. Citizens are constantly deluged with propaganda, and even thinking independently, labelled as “thoughtcrime,” is faced with harsh punishment. The novel is a powerful reminder to us about what can happen when power remains unchecked and language becomes a tool for control. Additionally, this struggle over truth and meaning isn’t just a theme in fiction; rather, it brings to our attention a much older philosophical debate.
For centuries, philosophers have questioned and debated whether objective truth can even exist. Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, was one of the first to radically challenge the idea of objective truth. According to him, “Truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions”. His view on the topic was that it is just a matter of perspective and how every “truth” is influenced by the speaker. Additionally, he was also skeptical of whether language could truly capture reality. In his essay, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”, he argued that words are merely labels that flatten the richness and complexity of life into fixed concepts.
Being inspired by Nietzsche, another philosopher by the name of Jacques Derrida built on his concepts and further explored the instability of meaning in language. Like Nietzsche, he also viewed truth as an unstable and contested concept, not a singular, fixed entity. He is best known for developing the method of deconstruction, which is an approach that examines how texts undermine their own apparent meanings through ambiguities and contradictions. Through this, Derrida showed that any attempt to fix meaning is going to be challenged by the endless play of differences within language, making absolute truth unattainable.
Additionally, this philosophical skepticism about truth and language is also expressed in the literature of a 20th-century author, Jorge Luis Borges. Similar to the philosophers mentioned, Borges also viewed truth as complex and often unattainable. In one of his stories, The Library of the Babel, there exists a universe in the form of a vast library that contains an endless amount of books. While many of the books have gibberish written inside them, the underlying idea is that since every possible combination of letters exists, then every possible truth and interpretation can be found somewhere in the library. However, not only does this abundance make searching for a definitive truth overwhelming, but also futile as meaning is buried beneath infinite interpretations and possibilities.
This brings up another dilemma. If every possible interpretation exists, is truth itself even necessary? The theories put forth by both Nietzsche and Derrida, alongside the literary works of Borges, suggest that truth is shaped by one's perspective as well as language, thus making it subjective. However, despite this fact, there still exists a desire for objective truth. I believe that arriving at a single truth is impossible. This does not mean that we shouldn’t try to search for the truth, because it is this very journey that encourages us to listen to other people and also challenge our preconceptions. While certainty may be out of reach, striving for understanding and reaching a common ground is what gives our search value in the end. Overall, it is the journey that anchors us down in a world filled with endless voices.
