The word truth can have three meanings: truth as judgment (logical), truth as a concrete reality (ontological), and truth as conduct (moral).
According to Nietzsche’s philosophy, there is no single truth but a plurality of perspectives on things. For Descartes, truth is the certainty of something. Schopenhauer argued that “Every truth is initially denied, then ridiculed, and finally accepted”.
The truth is an affirmation of something that really is. Everything that is real is true. Not everything we say is true, because every judgment can be true or false. But is truth what seems to each one of us to make sense of something? Is it true merely because someone has stated it or because it has been recorded somewhere? Truth is what is true for us and what is good for us, because everyone forms, decides, and records their own truth.
We are prone to believe in relative truths as though they were absolute, unchangeable, and categorical, without questioning them; therefore, we do not transform our experiences and we continue with the usual skiing practices, even if they appear imperfect to us.
We can believe that our skiing is correct, but we also realize that we may be wrong. To acknowledge that we are wrong, and that we do not have the absolute skiing truth is to apply Socratic wisdom; this is, to admit that we do not know what we think we know. If such an event transpires, we shall be willing to acknowledge the potential of learning from others.
According to Kierkegaardian thought, the truth of skiing lies in ourselves, and the falsehood is what others expect us to ski. The dogmatic skier has a tendency to impose their skiing truth on that of others. He adopts an egotistical attitude when expressing himself in terms of “my skiing truth.” If his skiing truth serves him alone, there is no point in imposing it. There exists no absolute skiing truth, as everything is a conviction of something as ‘the’ true thing, including its imposition.
We can search for the skiing truth, but we will not get to know it because we will always introduce our own constructions. Therefore, we would not know its real order, but the schemes and order that we ourselves determine by studying it. Because of our subjective nature, we are unable to determine the truth. Therefore, we tend to believe that truth consists of what we think about skiing, and that different opinions seem to have similar weight and validity.
Someone who claims to have the truth about something is often labeled as unquestioning or blunt, making it difficult to reason with those who disagree. However, the authentic professional, the true scholar of skiing, is the one who is enlightened by passion to the skiing truth without making an invention but who, and to this he owes his great impulse towards the subject in question, continually rectifies himself.
Certain skiers in the same environment may not always agree on, for example, which is the best way to ski, which technique is the real one, or which actions are effective and which are efficient. If one of them is convinced that their way of looking at skiing is the true one, then he or she might impose that ‘truth’ on others. If the true benefits or drawbacks of a technique were to be independent of the individual or the institution that promotes it, they would be able to justify the implementation of what they deem to be the authentic technique.
Now, what is the reality for us? The truth is that it aligns with our present skiing reality. It is feasible to interpret the truth of skiing as two sides of the same coin, wherein the truth is on one side and our interpretation of what we deem to be true is on the other.
Does objective truth exist in this postmodern era; in which everything is subjective? Due to our exposure to a multitude of ideas and skiing concepts, we begin to believe that they are unquestionable truths. That is why we should not believe everything and should question everything with common sense. The objective truth is skiing biomechanics and physics. Our truth is subjective, and we can consider it to be the art of interpreting skiing. The interpretation of truth is both personal and contextual.
Concluding this introduction, it would be possible to affirm that the skiing truth is something relative, a process of adjustment that we build between our experience and skiing. For the moment, the only truth is that skiing is a sliding activity that takes place from the top of a hill to the bottom.
