A Farewell to Truth

Gianni Vattimo, William McCuaig

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231527552
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Decostruzione in filosofia

With Western cultures becoming more pluralistic, the question of "truth" in politics has become a game of interpretations. Today, we face the demise of the very idea of truth as an objective description of facts, though many have yet to acknowledge that this is changing.

Gianni Vattimo explicitly engages with the important consequences for democracy of our changing conception of politics and truth, such as a growing reluctance to ground politics in science, economics, and technology. Yet in Vattimo's conception, a farewell to truth can benefit democracy, exposing the unspoken issues that underlie all objective claims. The end of absolute truth challenges the legitimacy of policies based on perceived objective necessities—protecting the free market, for example, even if it devastates certain groups or classes. Vattimo calls for a truth that is constructed with consensus and a respect for the liberty of all. By taking into account the cultural paradigms of others, a more "truthful" society—freer and more democratic—becomes possible.

In this book, Vattimo continues his reinterpretation of Christianity as a religion of charity and hope, freeing society from authoritarian, metaphysical dogmatism. He also extends Nietzsche's "death of God" to the death of an authoritarian God, ushering in a new, postreligious Christianity. He connects the thought of Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Karl Popper with surprising results and accommodates modern science more than in his previous work, reconciling its validity with an insistence that knowledge is interpretive. Vattimo's philosophy justifies Western nihilism in its capacity to dispense with absolute truths. Ranging over politics, ethics, religion, and the history of philosophy, his reflections contribute deeply to a modern reconception of God, metaphysics, and the purpose of reality.

1 BEYOND THE MYTH OF OBJECTIVE TRUTH

POLITICS WITHOUT TRUTH

Karl Popper’s ideas about the open society and its enemies, first published in a famous book in 1945, have become commonplace. But their extreme consequences are not always thought through. According to Popper, the enemies of the open society are all those theorists, starting with the philosophers in Plato’s Republic who have emerged from the cave in which ordinary people dwell and have contemplated directly the eternal ideas of things (the truth of Being, not just its shadows). These Platonic philosophers have the right and the duty to go back down into the world and lead their fellows, or compel them if necessary, to recognize the truth. Counterintuitively, Popper puts modern philosophers like Hegel and Marx in Plato’s company as enemies of the open society, despite the distance that separates their philosophies from Platonic idealism, for they too claim to ground politics in some truth. In Hegel’s case, it is the truth of history that is realized providentially, apart from the intentions of the men and women who make it, by virtue of what he calls “the cunning of reason.” In Marx’s case, the truth is the revolution through which the proletariat (expropriated and alienated, and so enabled to see past the veils of interest that generate ideology to the truth) reconstitutes the totality, the profound truth, of the human essence and surpasses the social division of labor and the dominion of men over other men.

Popper’s critique has been widely accepted by the whole modern liberal-democratic mentality, but not all of its logical implications as regards the relation between politics and truth have been perceived. If Popper is acknowledged to be right—as it seems to me that he must be—the obligatory conclusion is that truth itself is the enemy of the open society, and specifically of any democratic politics. Clearly, if we think truth as Popper thinks it—meaning a continuous process of trial and error, a process that, through the pure and simple falsification of hypotheses that are revealed to be ephemeral and unsustainable, frees us from erroneous representations without attaining definitive truths—his thesis has nothing controversial about it. Indeed, the democratic mentality has adopted it, but that doesn’t seem to stop it from thinking that politics can still lay claim to some truth. The Anglo-American war against Iraq in the name of true democracy, which Westerners were meant to implant in that country by force, is an example of this ambiguity and this absence of radical critique. Neither Bush nor the neoconservatives who shaped White House policy rejected Popper’s theses; indeed, they regarded his theory of the open society as one of their own founding principles. Yet they felt themselves entitled, like the philosophers in Plato’s Republic, to steer the world, with force if necessary, toward the liberty that only the vision of truth can guarantee.

Such an ambiguity, which as the Iraq War example shows has very important practical consequences, is basically possible because Popper’s own doctrine has not gone beyond the conception of truth as objectivity, as what medieval philosophy called adaequatio intellectus et rei (adequation between intellect and object), as the correspondence or “adequation” of mental representations to a real order imposed on reason to which reason must conform. Even the falsification of erroneous hypotheses, which Popper sets against the idea of knowledge as induction and the formulation of laws of universal validity, actually appears to advance progressively toward a given truth, which continues to function as a norm for thought. As long as truth is conceived as adaequatio, as correspondence to a given (a datum) objectively present, the danger of political Platonism never goes away. Obviously Karl Popper is not responsible for the Iraq fiasco. But the contradictions of democracy exported by force and even by preventive war require a critical rethink of the relation between politics and truth. To accomplish that, we need a notion of truth going far beyond the persistent realism of Popper and a great deal of contemporary philosophy. There is only one place from which to begin such a rethink, and that is the teachings of Nietzsche and Heidegger. It was they who fundamentally critiqued the notion of truth as objectivity and who, appearances and their own intentions to the contrary, laid the basis for a radical new vision of democracy itself.¹

Nietzsche proposed an assessment of Western culture under the sign of nihilism. The result was schematically summarized in a famous section of Twilight of the Idols (1888) entitled “How the Real World at Last Became a Myth.” At the outset, with Plato, the truth of things is located in the ideas, in those transcendental essences that serve as immutable models of the various realities and that guarantee the very possibility of speaking reasonably. Then, with Christianity, the truth of things is located in the world that awaits us after death, and we will only know it when we contemplate God there. Kant subsequently locates the seat of truth in the mind, in the stable structures that reason employs to organize the world of phenomena, while remaining ignorant of how it is “in itself.” As the whole process draws to a close, Comte’s scientific positivism comes on the scene to declare that only the fact positively ascertained through the experimental method is truth, but this fact is, as the word “fact” literally says, “made,” produced by the human subject endlessly modifying and manipulating things. So truth comes to be identified, in Nietzsche’s telling, with that which mankind accomplishes in the world through technology; pure subjectivism triumphs, and there no longer exists any independent objectivity, no “real world.” Nietzsche, for his own part, thinks that what exists is the pure conflictual interplay of force and power, a conflict among interpretations with no mooring in any objective norm that could decide truth. From 1927 on, the year in which Being and Time appeared, Heidegger concurs in many respects with this Nietzschean point of view. But he takes Nietzsche to task for himself having remained a prisoner of the idea of truth as objectivity. When this truth turns out to be unattainable, Nietzsche is forced to fall back on a theory of the mere ebb and flow of power. We all know how such emphasis on the play of force was exploited by Nazism and fascism in the twentieth century, going far beyond Nietzsche’s original intention. What Heidegger thinks is that we have the nihilistic outcome of Western philosophy right before our eyes, in the disappearance of the “real world” and the onset in its place of the world of technological organization and industrial rationalization, in which man too becomes a pure object of manipulation. This outcome follows directly from the metaphysical error of having imagined truth as correspondence and Being as object. In other words, if one’s point of departure is the Platonic doctrine of the ideas, in which truth is a stable, given order, to which the subject must make his or her own representations conform, the necessary point of arrival will be positivism and the world of untrammeled technological domination.

If the nightmare of “total organization” to which Adorno later alluded is to be avoided, Heidegger says, awareness must dawn that true Being is not an object. To use an image, we could say that true Being is instead the luminous medium within which objects appear to us, or to put it another way, the ensemble of presuppositions that make experience possible for us. In order to prove that a proposition really does correspond to a state of things, we require methods, criteria, models, which we need to have in place prior to any assay. In that regard, Heidegger speaks of a circle of comprehension-interpretation. The truth of single descriptive propositions depends on a more primordial truth, for which he chooses the term “opening” or “aperture” and by which he means that ensemble of presuppositions (and prejudices, of course) upon which depends any possibility of establishing correspondences between statements and things. I have already mentioned that the reason Heidegger, and with him a large part of existentialist thought in the twentieth century, especially the philosophical current today labeled hermeneutics, rejected and rejects the idea of truth as objectivity is ethicopolitical:² if true Being were only that which is objective, quantifiable, and given once and for all like the Platonic Ideas (to simplify Platonism drastically), our existence as free subjects would have no meaning; we could not say of ourselves that “we are,” and on top of that, we would be exposed to the risk of totalitarianism. To really “be,” we would have to abandon all our uncertainties, hopes, affects, and projects and match in every respect what social rationality demands of us, be perfect cogs in the evenly humming machinery of production, consumption, and reproduction. One thinks of Comte actually discussing industrial ethics and fancying that moral behavior ought to be modeled on the assembly line, where each one performs exactly what the others expect of him and doesn’t hold up the production process.

So then, if there is no more real doubt that truth-as-object isn’t good for us, the question arises: how exactly does this Heideggerian notion of truth as aperture represent something better, strictly from the point of view of the concrete existence of each of us as a free being with a project?

To begin with: the view that truth is a matter of interpretation largely coincides with the overall modern critique of the social lie that has always propped up the power of the strong over the weak. Nietzsche (yes, him again) used to say that the voice of conscience that we feel inside us is only the voice of the herd, the pressure of a social discipline that each of us assimilates and turns into a personal daimon. Precisely of that which appears most evident, he adds, we ought to be most mistrustful—for the same reason. Marx’s critique of ideology is likewise grounded, in the last analysis, on the same constatation of the interpretive character of truth: ideology is an instance of interpretation (on the part not just of individuals but of social classes) unaware of itself, and for just that reason convinced that it is absolute truth. In general, the whole area covered by the term “school of suspicion” (another Nietzschean expression, taken up by Paul Ricoeur), which obviously includes Freudian psychoanalysis, is an array of variations on the theme of the interpretive character of every experience of truth. That’s not all. Clearly the hermeneutic stance has links to deconstructionist thought inspired by Derrida and also to a great deal of postanalytic philosophy influenced by the so-called second Wittgenstein. When the latter talks about “linguistic games,” within the bounds of which truth can arise only out of the observance of shared rules, never out of evidence of some correspondence with things, he is practicing hermeneutics without knowing it. As for Derridean deconstruction, it too is entirely inspired by the (highly Freudian) notion that the representation of the world in the mind is already a “second” scene springing from an earlier, more original one, and an even earlier one before that, and so on.

I take the liberty of bringing in these various currents of contemporary thought in order to situate my own discourse more firmly and to show that it is not as irrational as it might appear to be at first glance. For upon first being urged to accept that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” one may feel a sudden bewilderment, a sensation of vertigo, and react in a neurotic manner, as though struck with agoraphobia, fearful of the open and indeterminate space that suddenly yawns on every side. This fearfulness may grow still more acute if one leaves the field of pure philosophy (after all, philosophers have said everything and the opposite of everything without changing the world all that much) and ventures onto the terrain of politics. Many variants of authoritarianism are revealed for what they are—claims to impose behaviors on us whether we like it or not in the name of some law of nature, human essence, sacrosanct tradition, or divine revelation—once one comes round to the view that there are no absolute truths, only interpretations. Those who tell you to “be a man” generally want to make you do something you wouldn’t do willingly, like go to war or sacrifice your own interests and your legitimate (for the most part) hopes of happiness. As Wittgenstein said, philosophy frees us from idols; indeed, he was inclined to think that that was all it could do.

But liberation from metaphysically justified authoritarianism apart, dawning awareness of the interpretive character of all our experience may seem to leave one dangling in a void. Doesn’t it lead down a short road to the struggle of all against all, to the pure conflict of competing interests? Or again: how would we justify, from a hermeneutic perspective, our sincere disgust at (the surfeit of) lying politicians?

If we pose these questions and try to answer them honestly (the adverb itself is not unproblematic), we will have to recognize the validity of the discourse of truth as aperture as opposed to the discourse of truth as correspondence. The latter is really only important if it serves a different truth of a higher rank. We cannot swallow the lies of Bush and Blair because they were uttered for the purpose of waging a war that we feel unable to support, that has nothing to do with us, and that violates too many of the moral principles to which we adhere. Naturally these moral principles appear “true” to us, but not in the “metaphysical” sense of the term “true,” not because they correspond descriptively to some objective datum. What does it mean, for example, to oppose war because all men are brothers? Is human brotherhood really a datum to which we ought to conform because it is a fact? If you reflect on how much authority people assign, or claim to assign, to those in public life today who profess to follow scientific principles and rules, like the law of the marketplace in economics, you start to see how problematic it is to believe in an absolute duty to truth.

The whole set of relations needs to be rethought, and Machiavelli is as good a place as any to start. His error, from the vantage point of a nonmetaphysical and nonideological conception of truth at any rate, is not that he justifies lying but that he entrusts the prince alone with the right to decide when lying is justified. I daresay I would have no objection to a “democratic Machiavelli,” although the expression is a contradiction in terms. Let me elaborate. Since truth is always an interpretive fact, the supreme criterion that I propose is not the close correspondence of the statement to the thing but consensus on the presuppositions that dictate how we evaluate this correspondence. No one ever tells the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Every statement entails a choice of that which we take to be relevant, and this choice is never disinterested. Even scientists who aim in the lab to set aside private preferences, inclinations, and interests are striving for objectivity because that is the way to obtain results that can stand the test of replication and so be utilized in the future. Who knows: maybe they are only hoping to win the Nobel Prize, which is certainly a private interest.

The conclusion I wish to draw is that truth as absolute objective correspondence, as the ultimate instance and the fundamental value, is more of a danger than a blessing. It paves the way to the republic of the philosophers, the experts, the technicians, and at the limit the ethical State, which claims to be able to decide what the true good of the citizens is even in defiance of their own opinions and preferences. Wherever politics purports to seek truth, there cannot be democracy. But if truth is conceived in the hermeneutic terms proposed by many twentieth-century philosophers, truth in politics will be sought above all in the construction of consensus and civic friendship; it is these that make truth, in the descriptive sense of the term, possible. The ages when it was thought possible to ground politics in truth were ages of strong social cohesion and shared traditions but also quite often of authoritarian discipline imposed from above. An example, impressive in many respects, is the baroque age: on one hand, widespread conformism enforced by the divine right of monarchy, on the other the explicit theorization of Machiavellian reason of state. “Modern” politics, the kind handed down to us from the Europe of the Westphalian treaties, is fundamentally still like that. Even politicians involved in the swelling number of cases of official corruption, like the ones caught up in Italy’s Mani pulite investigations, have asserted before the courts their right to lie (and steal and bribe) in the name of the public interest. They didn’t steal for themselves: they did it for the party; they were making democracy work by finding innovative ways to fund it.

For a variety of reasons linked to the development of communications, the press, and the overall market for information, modern politics of that kind is no longer sustainable. The contradiction between the value of objective truth and the awareness that what we call reality is the play of interpretations in conflict has become impossible to ignore. It is impossible to win such a conflict by claiming to have found out how matters truly stand, because how they stand looks different to every player as long as there is no common horizon, no consensus about the implicit criteria on which the verification of individual propositions depends. I quite realize that this is not a solution to the problem, just a statement of it. Saint Paul uses the forceful Greek word aletheuontes (“truth-speaking”) in his Letter to the Ephesians (4:15–16), which is paraphrased in the Latin Vulgate as veritatem facientes in caritate, literally “making truth in lovingness.” At a single bound these words take us beyond the question of objectivity: what would it mean to “make truth” if truth were the correspondence of the statement to the datum? The allusion to lovingness or a loving attitude (which is what the word caritas, “charity,” really means) is not just tacked on here. Democracy cannot dispense with the conflict of interpretations unless it is prepared to mutate into something else—the authoritarian dictatorship of experts, philosophers, savants, and central committees. But this conflict is not resolvable simply by making explicit the interests that drive the various interpretations, as though it were possible to locate a deeper truth (primal scene, infantile trauma, true Being prior to disguise) on which all could agree. The explicitation of the conflict of interpretations, the pars destruens of the critique of claims to absolute truth, which is the finest legacy of the school of suspicion, requires a broad horizon of civic friendliness and communitarian sharing that does not depend on the truth or falsehood of statements. That the adjective “communitarian” is bound to raise hackles is something of which I am quite well aware.

Let me repeat: this is not a solution to the problem, only a way of putting it bluntly, which at least escapes the hypocrisy of modern politics, which has never questioned the notion of truth as correspondence, while always allowing that the statesman may lie “for the good of the State” (or the party, or the class, or the homeland). This hypocrisy is deplorable not because it allows lying and so violates the absolute value of truth as correspondence but because it violates the social bond with one’s fellow man. It goes, you could say, against equality and fellow feeling or against the liberty of all.

I might add that freedom is also, and primarily, the capacity to propose a truth that runs counter to common opinion. That is how Hannah Arendt takes it in her diary entries from the time of the Eichmann trial. “Truth,” writes Arendt (2002, 531), “is not ascertainable through a voting procedure. Factual truth, not just rational truth, concerns man in his singularity.” But in the same pages, we also find her insisting constantly that truth is always social and expressing mistrust of all who pretend to possess it in some precise and stable fashion. “Whoever, in a difference of opinion, claims to possess the truth, is attempting to establish domination” (619). This oscillation, which I think is a permanent feature of Arendt’s work, is perhaps explainable by the fact that even for her truth continues to be envisaged as the objective mirroring of factual data. Despite her familiarity with existentialism, Jaspers, and indeed Heidegger, the theme of interpretation remains substantially alien to her.³ My own preference goes to a text from the first edition of Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1918), where he says that the difference between a madman and a prophet lies entirely in the capacity of the latter to found a community. I read it as another outstanding example of the transition from truth to loving charity, from the claim, always loaded with authoritarian dogmatism, that a stable foundation has been reached to the evangelical ideal of respect for the other. Of course, one needs to be able to supply arguments when engaged in social dialogue, but for the most part, they are arguments ad homines, appeals to our common convictions, which everyday discourse and the dominance in the media of the prevailing ideology too often forget or conceal. I have in mind things like allusions to history and the experience we share with our fellows (our group, our society, humanity itself as we perceive it...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Beyond the Myth of Objective Truth
• 2. The Future of Religion
• 3. The End of Philosophy
• Notes
• Bibliography