Truth Requires Perspectives: A Reflection on Academic Freedom. By Leonardo Manna

Truth Requires Perspectives: A Reflection on Academic Freedom 
Leonardo Manna

Imagine wanting to describe a sunset: a physicist will speak of wavelengths and angles of refraction; a painter will mix cadmium red and Naples yellow on the canvas, chasing that particular shade of orange vibrating on the horizon; a poet will write, "against the stem that turns to silver / with its naked branches / while the Moon is close upon the threshold," as D'Annunzio does in his Alcyone; a biologist will explain how migratory birds read an invisible map within the colours of the twilight; while a believer might recite a Psalm, recognising in that beauty something that exceeds all measure. 

What is actually happening here? None of them is merely inventing a subjective truth. The sunset exists within the web of relationships it weaves with those who encounter it. Wavelengths are not the "real sunset", while the poet's emotion is somehow less true; they are all real, legitimate, and necessary ways of relating to the phenomenon. Each reveals layers that would otherwise remain submerged. 

This reflects a discovery central to contemporary physics and philosophy: reality is not made up of isolated objects, but of complex relationships. From quantum mechanics to the philosophy of information, we understand that velocity is not an absolute property; it is always measured in relation to a reference point. Likewise, space and time are not merely empty containers, but networks of relations between events. An object only exists in its entirety when it enters into a relationship with someone capable of questioning it. 

If this holds for physics, it applies even more to human knowledge, ethics, and the meaning of existence. A discipline is not simply another "point of view" on a pre-existing reality; it is a specific way of relating to the world, producing meanings that exist only within that particular connection. 

Take Carlo Emilio Gadda's "The Acquaintance with Grief". A literary critic analyses its linguistic experimentation; a psychoanalyst looks for Oedipal knots; a historian places it within the Fascist era; and a reader from Lombardy recognises landscapes transfigured by the prose. Who has the correct perspective? Everyone, though with a crucial caveat. 

Plurality is not just a value; it is an ontological necessity. Reality manifests only through multiple relationships, even if no single one can exhaust it. This does not mean every relationship is of equal value. Some are denser, more articulated, and better able to bear the weight of what they encounter. A historian working on converging sources does not "decide" the truth; they allow it to surface from a network of relations that possesses its own resistance. Knowledge is robust because it "holds"—it sustains comparison, resists interrogation, and opens up questions rather than closing them. 

This is where both relativism and the old absolutism fail, for symmetrical reasons. The theory of relativity did not prove Newton "wrong"; it showed that his laws work magnificently at certain scales but not at others. Quantum mechanics did not erase classical physics; it revealed that the world has layers of reality requiring different languages. Historical truth is rigorous without being absolute, and robust without being definitive. 

This leads to the most difficult issue: when we silence a student, a thinker, or a witness, we do not just lose an opinion—we break a constitutive relationship with reality. Certain aspects of the past literally cease to exist when the links that gave them life are severed. This is not a metaphor, but a precise statement. Censorship is wrong not just because it violates a right, but because it breaks the connections through which parts of the world made themselves visible. Those who have lived through conflict, persecution, or forced exile interrogate their disciplines with questions born of those wounds; they see connections that elude those in secure, stable academies. That knowledge is not "elsewhere" waiting to be found; it emerges in that specific relationship and nowhere else. 

It is worth defending this point against a predictable objection: that history is already written, and facts remain even without witnesses. This is weaker than it seems. History is not the raw event, but the web of questions that make it speak. When the inquirer changes, the horizon of possible questions shifts, and with it, what is revealed. Just as the observer in quantum mechanics is not a passive spectator but the very condition for a phenomenon to manifest, the witness is the condition for history to find its voice. 

When an authoritarian regime censors historians, it does more than impose an ideological narrative; it prevents certain memories from weaving into our collective understanding. The danger is not merely that "we will never know certain things," but how they are narrated to us; we risk specific dimensions of the past ceasing to manifest at all. 

The theme "Truth Matters" thus has a precise meaning: truth is a living network of relationships through which the world takes shape. It is dynamic, plural, and embodied in the concrete practices of those seeking to understand. Protecting academic freedom means protecting this multiplicity—not because "all opinions are valid," which would be an absurdity —but because some relationships with reality are deeper and better able to bear the weight of what they encounter. 

When USI welcomes a student at risk, it performs an epistemic act even before a humanitarian one. By hosting voices that bring the friction of their wounds into shared knowledge, our collective thought becomes more difficult, but truer. This is not just solidarity; it is a recognition that their knowledge, produced in those specific relationships, cannot be recovered elsewhere. In an age of algorithmic bubbles and shallow speed, preserving spaces for multiple ways of questioning is vital. The more relationships we break, the more pieces of reality will cease to manifest. 

Truth does not exist in the abstract. It exists when someone knows how to ask the right questions, and when multiple gazes allow it to surface in its richness. "Truth matters" is inseparable from constant relationality. The flip side is that this relationality has a cost: universities that protect only the voices that are already comfortable do not protect the truth; they impoverish it. 

Dr. Leonardo Manna is an Affiliate Researcher at the Faculty of Theology of Lugano (FTL) at USI. His research lies at the intersection of philosophy of religion, relational ontology, and the philosophy of information, with a focus on the metaphysics of divine relationality and the ethics of digital environments. His work has appeared in journals including Phenomenology and Mind, Nuova Secondaria, and Rivista Teologica di Lugano.

Note: The published version is a translation from the original Italian text.

*********************************

This essay is part of a series of contributions on academic freedom, explored from different perspectives and fields of study and research, highlighting its interdisciplinary nature. We welcome contributions and reflections from the entire USI academic community. Detailed information about the initiative is available here.