A Farewell to Truth

A FAREWELL TO TRUTH: I have chosen this paradoxical title because it conveys something important about theoretical and philosophical aspects of our culture now, and also about everyday experience. As far as the latter goes, it is increasingly clear to all and sundry that “the media lie” and that everything is turning into a game of interpretations—not disinterested, not necessarily false, but (and this is the point) oriented toward projects, expectations, and value choices at odds with one another. The culture of countries in the West is becoming, as a matter of fact, though often not in law, more pluralistic all the time. The outcome of the war in Iraq has forced the leaders of the major governments who ordered the invasion of that country to admit that they lied to their publics, and whether they did so voluntarily or involuntarily is an unresolved problem on which no light will ever be shed by the supposedly independent inquiries that they themselves have set up. These admissions have highlighted once again the question of what truth might be in politics. Many of us have had to register the fact that the scandal attaching to Bush and Blair over their lies about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was not in the least pure and objective, which is how they tend to portray it. But let’s ask ourselves: if Bush and Blair had lied just as shamelessly for a noble cause, for example in order to reduce the cost of the drugs used to treat AIDS in the world’s poor countries, would we be just as scandalized? It is no secret that far worse violations (on the part of the intelligence services, for example) are accepted as necessary when it comes to national defense. As I found out when I was a member of the European Parliament committee studying the Echelon system, which indiscriminately intercepts electronic communications worldwide through a satellite network operated by the United States, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, we are under surveillance by a Big Brother who is not in the least imaginary and acts at the behest of the United States and its closest allies. This surveillance is illegal for the most part, but even the European Union can’t do anything about it, since questions of national security (but who decides what those are?) remain the preserve of the individual governments, who shrink from taking a stand against the American superpower. Naturally I am well aware that complex Western societies have a security problem, because their technological infrastructure leaves them vulnerable. But what looks less and less convincing is the way that the United States thinks that it can solve this problem for itself and for the rest of the world, which it doesn’t even bother to consult.

This example goes to show how politics and politicians today are allowed many ethical violations, including violations of the duty to tell the truth, without scandalizing anyone. And anyway, even the potentially “good” reasons for Bush and Blair to lie about Iraq ought to make us think. Tolerance of untruth has been present and accepted since the dawn of time in practical politics, but it was seen as a violation deserving censure in the realm of ethics: the whole story of modern political Machiavellianism is there in a nutshell. Today, though, it is paralleled in philosophy (or, rather, in a good many philosophies, not all) by the demise of the very idea of truth. This decline of the idea of objective truth in philosophy and epistemology doesn’t yet seem to have floated to the surface of public consciousness, which is still deeply attached, as the scandal clinging to the “liars” Bush and Blair shows, to the idea of the true as the objective description of the facts. It’s a bit like what happens with heliocentrism: all of us still say the sun is going down, even if it’s the Earth that is rotating. Or better, like what Nietzsche said about God: he has died, but plenty of people haven’t heard the news yet. Or Heidegger’s message that metaphysics is over but can’t be overcome, maybe only verwunden.

The decline of truth may be illustrated with a couple of examples from Adorno and Heidegger. The first is the significance of Adorno’s reprise and dissolution of the notion of dialectic. According to Adorno, dialectic has two essential meanings: totality and reappropriation. Hence we do not observe the truth because we cannot observe the total, and ideology is false consciousness, because partial. Alienation itself is partiality. Reappropriation, on the other hand, means grasping the whole, seeing how it hangs together, not letting oneself be fooled by appearance. But Adorno already recognizes, as does Heidegger to an even greater degree, that totality does not reappropriate precisely because it is, in principle and increasingly in fact, realized. “The whole is the untrue” (das Ganze ist das Umwahre) reads a famous sentence from Adorno’s Minima Moralia (1951). The (tendentially complete) attainment of instrumental rationality in mass society may realize totality, but it does so in a way that is the opposite of liberatory. Adorno runs into a theoretical impasse here, because the ideal of truth-liberation is supposed to be that of totality achieved.

Sartre encounters a similar impasse, but he makes further strides: in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) he advances the notion that alienation will end when the meaning of our actions, which we do not possess because we live in the society of the division of labor and class domination, will be the common possession of all actors. But this shared possession, which comes about in so-called groups in fusion, the revolutionary community in the heat of battle seizing the Winter Palace, doesn’t last. The “practical-inert,” as Sartre calls it, fastens its grip and reimposes divisions of the kind familiar from Soviet-style bureaucracy; common possession of truth quickly evaporates. Yet totality remains the overriding value.

What impelled Adorno to criticize massified totality? The same thing that drove Levinas or Benjamin: micrological pathos, pietas for the offense to life. Negative dialectic is a vindication of the irreducibility of this offended existence with respect to totality. From it the whole aesthetics of Adorno follows, including his theory of the avant-garde, with its silence, its incomprehensibility. Just a promesse de bonheur, never grasped for more than a fleeting moment. No “death of art,” either in Hegel or in Benjamin. A sequel to that is the attitude typical of revolutionary thought post-1968, which becomes tragic thought in many cases. In this dialectical perspective, which remains the one most expressive of modernity and which had already surpassed in many senses the more or less ingenuous idea of an objective mirroring of things in themselves (undermined since Kant and his transcendental philosophy but revived to some extent in Hegel), truth is the vision that escapes the partiality imposed by the conditions of social exploitation or even just by the limitations of individual and class interest. But this remains an objective vision, precisely because not partial. What is new in Adorno is that he realizes that this totality, which appears to be the sole possibility of access to truth, is the polar opposite of the liberty that ought to accompany truth.

In Heidegger too, however paradoxical it might seem, the motives for the dissolution of truth are the same—even if the philosopher from Messkirch goes beyond the straightforward reduction of the true to an utterly negative utopian ideal. Adorno kept faith with the objectivistic ideal of the true as totality dialectically unfolded, which was already the ideal of Hegel and Marx. But in becoming aware that such an ideal demanded a social transformation that could only end in totalitarianism, he in fact liquidated it, reducing it to the aesthetic momentariness that also characterizes Sartre’s discourse. Both Adorno and Sartre acknowledge, but only implicitly, that the ideal of truth-totality contains within itself depths of violence. And as far as that goes, think of the two extremes of the history of philosophy: Aristotle, whose Metaphysics begins with the affirmation that knowledge is knowing everything and that this goal can be reached by knowing the first causes (which enables us to dominate events, however), and Nietzsche, for whom “metaphysics is the claim to seize control by force of the most fertile territories” (the causes once again, which permit us to dominate things).

Certainly, in Heidegger’s attack on metaphysics (which commences in 1927 with Being and Time, although there he targets only the idea of truth as correspondence, as faithful description of the facts) the crucial motif is once again, albeit implicitly, the violence it entails. Heidegger shares the concerns of the early twentieth-century avant-garde as we find them expressed in Ernst Bloch, for example, or subsequently in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The fear was that objectivistic metaphysics grounded in the idea of truth as correspondence (culminating in positivism) was preparing for (or bringing about) the advent of a society of total organization. Only this avant-garde (and fundamentally existentialist) inspiration accounts for Heidegger’s polemic against truth as correspondence, for it would be absurd to think that what makes him deny this vision of truth, and of Being itself, is the drive to find a more objectively valid definition. It is interesting that Heidegger too, in a lecture from the 1960s published in Zur Sache des Denkens (1969), appears to be thinking not just the notion of truth but the task of thought in general in terms that refer back to totality. His summons not to rest content with the “ongoing presentation of that which is present as Vorhandenes” (“vorhandenen Gegenwärtigung des Anwesenden” [1969, 79]) recalls, and not just on the surface, the Marxist critique of ideology—the “school of suspicion.” The task of thought is to seize, not forget, that which remains concealed in the “ongoing presentation” of what eventuates, meaning, for Adorno, as for Marx (and Hegel), the dialectical concreteness of the links that ideology hides from us. For Heidegger, in contrast, it is truth as aletheia, as the opening of a horizon (or paradigm) that enables the truth of statements that conform to things, the truth of propositions verified or falsified. Heidegger would never believe, though, that to “think” the opening within which individual truths are given (the propositions that can be verified or falsified on the basis of it) amounted to gaining cognizance of an ulterior, more ample truth. One of the sayings for which he is known is that “science doesn’t think.” In Kantian terms, science recognizes (the phenomenon) but does not grasp the noumenon, and it is the noumenon that is “thought.” The model of totality, which appears to inspire his appeal not to forget that which lies beyond, and behind, the simply-present, the Vorhandenes, is not a strictly cognoscitive appeal. Obviously it isn’t that in Marx and Adorno either, at any rate in the sense that for them it is possible to appropriate the truth of the total only on the basis of a practical alteration of society. But this revolutionary transformation remains merely the premise for something that is, ultimately, objective cognizance. Here, in Marxism itself, lies the seed of the failure of communist society: on the premise that a tendentially scientific knowledge of the laws of society and economy has been attained, the division is reestablished between those who really know, the central committee, and the “empiric proletariat,” those without access to such knowledge. In Adorno, the cognoscitive model exerts less pressure, because he had the failure of communist society before his eyes: there remains only a negative horizon, which leads him to shift the end of alienation onto the plane of utopia, entrusting it solely to the promesse de bonheur of aesthetic experience.

Heidegger, who resists letting himself be overwhelmed by the longstanding domination of the model of objective truth, conducts a discourse that, in the end, seems to respond better to the demands of dialectical thought, in the sense that it takes fully on board that upending of philosophy into praxis which Marx envisioned but did not completely achieve, because of the persistence of a scientistic and objectivistic vision of truth. The practical transformation of the conditions of existence, to state a paradox, is taken more seriously by Heidegger than by Marx. The relation of thought to the truth of Being, to the original aperture of truth, to the milieu into which Dasein is thrown, is in no sense a cognizance, a theoretical acquisition. Rather, it is what Wittgenstein would call the sharing of a “form of life.” This does not mean something purely irrational, since, in Heidegger anyway, it means assuming the heritage of the tradition into which we are thrown as a horizon of possibility. This may seem circular, but if it is, it is a hermeneutic circle, not a vicious one. We may enter into a relation with the situation into which we are thrown in two ways: by conceiving it as a datum to be known objectively or as a message that we have to knowingly interpret and transform. The first attitude is no more than a scientistic, metaphysical illusion supposedly capable of articulation on the basis of the (objective, descriptive) truth of the datum, of the story that leads to me. It is the inauthentic assumption of the past as vergangen and not as gewesen (here I advert to the pages of Being and Time). But to assume the past as gewesen—as a having-been that still presents as the possibility of deciding freely—means accepting history as open to the future, as something incapable of being encapsulated in a true knowledge, even that of the revolutionary proletariat.

At this point, the meaning of the title Farewell to Truth comes into sharper focus. Leave is taken of truth as the objective mirroring of a datum that, to be adequately described, must be fixed and stable—must literally be “a given” (which is what the word datum means). That is feasible in the sciences that “don’t think,” because they do not query the horizon (the paradigm) that envelops them and because they ignore the totality of the dialectical relations that condition their objects. A problem like the one that I alluded to above, of lying in politics, clearly fits into this context. If I say that the lies of Bush and Blair don’t matter to me as long as they were justified by good intentions, meaning ones I share, I accept that the truth about the facts is a matter of interpretation, conditional upon a shared paradigm. That this sounds like Machiavellianism pure and simple I quite realize. But Machiavelli’s mistake (to put it in simple terms, since his thought is a lot more complex than that) perhaps lies merely in having left the faculty of lying, or of violating other moral imperatives, exclusively to the prince. Gramsci, I recall, said that in the modern world, the prince was the political party, and that in itself was a step in the direction of democracy, even if the party was not yet society in toto.

It is a perilous step, evidently, analogous to that of Lukács when he imagines that the “empiric” proletariat is not identical to the “transcendental,” authentic proletariat—the party and its leadership. These are all ways of widening the application of Machiavelli’s principle to cover more ground and so fundamentally constitute advances toward greater democracy. But they always retain the limitation of supposing ulterior truth to be the metaphysical object of an intuition available only to a subject—a subject qualified in some manner to receive it, in other words the prince, distinct from the collectivity in general, even when identified as a collective subject. Such a limitation signals to me that these authors have not yet fully acquiesced in a truly laic conception of the State. They are unable to see that the truth that matters in politics—and in every other field—is not objective correspondence but the paradigmatic horizon within which every correspondence is verifiable.

What we might call the epistemological precondition of social and intercultural dialogue is precisely this truth of horizon, which politics has the task of grasping and attempting to make explicit and to construct. From this there follow important consequences for how we conceive politics and its truth. One is a radical retreat from all claims to ground politics in some scientific discipline, even economics or technology. One recalls, in passing, that one of the major themes of Marx at his best was the negation of the thesis that political economy is a natural science. The same stricture applies to the claim to know the truth about human rights, and to base policies of just war and humanitarian intervention on this true cognizance of the truth, without taking into account the cultural paradigms of others. These factual, so to speak “objectual,” truths hold good in politics only if they are legitimate within the horizon of the paradigm. Philosophers and intellectuals, following a pattern that basically derives from figures like Socrates—and from the sophists too, however much the divine Plato scorns them—labor on the plane of these “horizontal” truths, in an attempt to render a form of life more comprehensible, more shared, more argued over, and more emotionally participative.

So today, much more clearly than in the past, the question of truth is recognized as a question of interpretation, of the application of paradigms that, in turn, are not objective (since no one verifies or falsifies them except on the basis of other paradigms) but that are a matter of social sharing. The exception that Machiavelli granted to the prince was basically only a correlate of the power, which also belonged to the prince, to establish the canons of the true and the false, to establish what it was more or less obligatory to accept as true (one thinks of what Nietzsche had to say in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 1873).

The conclusion toward which I am working is that the farewell to truth is the commencement, and the very basis, of democracy. If there were an objective truth to social and economic laws (economics is not a natural science), democracy would be an utterly irrational choice. It would be better to entrust the management of the State to experts, to Plato’s philosopher-kings or all the Nobel Prize winners in every category. A list of those who ultimately concur on these points would include Heidegger, Karl Popper (the foe of the closed Platonic society), Adorno himself, and Marx even earlier. Our pluralistic society continues to give credence to the metaphysical idea of truth as objective correspondence to the facts, as political debate proves day after day. It views interpretation as just interpretation and deludes itself that it can bring about agreement on the basis of factual data or even on the basis of the essential laws of nature. So we see the Italian Parliament passing laws on bioethics (embryos, assisted procreation, and so on) that impose on everyone a “natural” law that only the authority of the Roman Catholic Church deems such. The economy is managed in accordance with another supposedly natural law, that of the market and unlimited competition, and we see the result all around us in the current economic crisis. Truth faces a challenge in the world of postmodern pluralism—the challenge of coming to grips with the fact that consensus on individual questions is above all a problem of collective interpretation, of constructing paradigms shared or, at any rate, explicitly recognized. The parabola of the notion of truth in the twentieth century reveals a transition from truth to charity—a topic on which I shall expand. What Thomas Kuhn (1962) called paradigms are beliefs shared (ones tested by time, of course, and by experience gained within the framework they authorize) by entire societies or smaller communities, like those of physicists or theologians. It always comes down, in the end, to a question of belonging. Not “Plato a friend, but truth a greater friend” but rather “truth a friend, but (or: because) Plato a greater friend.” I repeat: this is not a profession of irrationalism along the lines of: let us think according to what, biologically and historically, we already are, period! Why not? Because the provenance on the basis of which we formulate our judgments is not a closed and immutable past (the stony weight that oppressed Zarathustra); it is not a cause. But to the extent that it summons us and offers itself up to interpretation, it is always already a motive, an ensemble of messages, a language that speaks to us (and about us) and that we speak.

We have not yet elaborated all the implications for social life and politics that this philosophical perspective on truth entails. For example, it certainly opens the way to a more adequate consideration of our current media-saturated society, stripping away the legitimacy of any pretense to furnish the true truth and focusing attention on the background, on the unsaid that underlies any claim to objectivity. It also strips away any possible legitimacy from all those policies that propose setting limits to the freedom and the interests of all on the basis of a consideration of what is objectively necessary to a society: the free market must be protected even if it damages some groups, individuals, or classes; a resolute government must know how to make unpopular choices like participation in the Iraqwar. Do I exaggerate the risk? We might not be facing the threat of a society like that depicted in Modern Times early in the twentieth century. But we are still oppressed by a fundamentalism of sorts, pretending to be defending us (our democracy, our way of life, our goods) regardless of what we the citizens either know or wish. In the end, it boils down to understanding that truth is not encountered but constructed with consensus and respect for the liberty of everyone, and the diverse communities that live together, without blending, in a free society.