The sixth of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of the Sense of Truth. In his discussion of this law Strasberg highlights the distinction between acting that expresses feeling and acting that expresses truth. “Art and artists express what they feel,” he writes, “but in a deeper sense than just expressing emotion. They express … what they understand about life.” The focus can’t be a mechanical process or an expression of emotion for its own sake, but rather a truthful expression of a perception.
The perception, Strasberg notes, can be from the actor’s experience of life, or his/her imagination, or both – deeming the latter more likely. As modern neuroscience has confirmed, real and imagined sensations can have comparable effects on behavior. 1.
Sense Memory training, Strasberg writes, is “training one’s capacity to create imaginary reality.” In recent correspondence he emphasized that “sense memory is training of imagination.” If used without reference to the context of an imaginary world the actor is trying to create, however, the actor can tend to focus too much on his/her own feelings and emotions. This, Strasberg warns can result in a portrayal that is “parallel and unconnected” to the life of the character, and fail to involve the audience in the world of the play. But if used to create details of the world of the character and the play, the technique can be a key to conveying the sense of truth that for Strasberg is central to artistic expression.
The question of “What is truth?” of course, is one of the oldest in western philosophy. In his provocatively titled book Truth, the Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote “Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not.” Plato and Aristotle interpreted the statement to mean that knowledge is sensation. In his dialogue Theataetus Plato paraphrases Protagoras as follows: “Just as each thing appears to me, so too it is for me, and just as it appears to you, so too again for you.” So if I sense the weather to be warm, it’s warm to me, and if you sense it to be cold, it’s cold to you. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls this “an empiricist theory that bases knowledge on sensory data.”
Which brings us back to the sense of truth. If the actor can create details of the imaginary world of the character and the play for themselves, the process can bring that world alive for them and for the audience. “Just as each thing appears to me, so too it is for me, and just as it appears to you, so too again for you.” In an irrational world, it’s the sense of truth that grounds the work, Strasberg writes, because it “helps us perceive and clarify what is empirically real.”