[Discussion] Williams examines the merits of truth

[Paksoy, Hb]

Williams examines the merits of truth

Reviewed by Kenneth Baker, 
San Francisco Chronicle
 Sunday, September 22, 2002 
  

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Truth and Truthfulness 

An Essay in Genealogy 

By Bernard Williams 


PRINCETON UNIVERSITY; 328 PAGES; $27.95


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Every so-called truth finally expresses no more than the power of some
individual or group to impose its view of things on everyone else. So runs a
common strain of postmodernist thinking. 
In the more temperate version developed by Richard Rorty, "truth" implies no
special knowledge of reality but merely a belief around which consensus has
formed, for many kinds of reasons, including standards of evidence. Truth-
seeking is at base a social process, then, rather than a progress toward
perfect access to the real. 

In a culture awash in misrepresentations, such views can seem to strike with
blazing explanatory force. But when these views impugn the truth of all
historical and scientific fact, their force is merely blinding, argues the
eminent moral philosopher Bernard Williams in "Truth and Truthfulness." 

Williams is especially sharp with "deniers," as he calls the
deconstructionist skeptics, who "depend on the remarkable assumption that
the sociology of knowledge is in a better position to deliver truth about
science than science is to deliver truth about the world." 

He sees the humanities much more endangered by endless squabbles over truth
than the sciences, which have the momentous effectiveness of technology on
their side. 

Even postmodernist thought, Williams shows, gets its critical edge from "a
passion for truthfulness" incompatible with rejection of truth. The
distinctions between truth and truthfulness, their "genealogy" and necessary
connection are the subject of Williams' demanding but completely lucid book.


His would-be critics will be surprised to find Williams claiming an ally in
Nietzsche, who is generally supposed to have paved the way for postmodernist
cynicism. 

"When he discovered that the values of truth and truthfulness, such as
resistance to self-deception and to comforting mythologies were not simply
self-justifying," Williams writes of Nietzsche, "and not given simply with
the concept of truth. . . he did not settle for a demure civic conversation
in the style of Richard Rorty's ironist, or saunter off with the smug nod
that registers a deconstructive job well done. He was aware that his own
criticisms and exposures owed both their motivation and their effect to the
spirit of truthfulness. His aim was to see how far the values of truth could
be revalued, 

how they might be understood in a perspective quite different from the
Platonic and Christian metaphysics which had provided their principal source
in the West up to now." 

Improbably, for a moral philosopher trained in the British analytic mode,
Williams sees himself continuing Nietzsche's effort. In this he picks up a
thread of his fine earlier book, "Shame and Necessity" (1993). There he
places us moderns in "an ethical condition that lies not only beyond
Christianity, but beyond its Kantian and its Hegelian legacies. . . . We
know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our
history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the
world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our
activities. . . . In important ways, we are . . . more like human beings in
antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime." 

He looks to classical sources again in a fascinating effort to find the
point at which what we call "historical time" -- belief in a fixed
chronology of events -- replaced the "mythic time" of belief answerable to
no concept of evidence. 

Williams' address to his subject is necessarily abstract at points. But he
believes that high moral and political stakes ride on our getting clear
about truth and truthfulness. 

"Truthfulness emerges from this discussion . . . with the same kind of
political value that was given to it by the best hopes of the
Enlightenment." Williams writes. "In the twentieth century we were much
reminded of the destructive capacities that the Enlightenment has deployed,
with its aspiration to social management as applied scientific truth and its
fantasies of reconstructing human and social relations in a radically
rationalistic spirit. But those dangerous delusions do not impugn its
commitment to honesty and transparency and its rejection of power that
falsely presents itself as cognitive authority." 

Readers seeking a definition of truth will not find it in Williams' book
because, he writes, it "belongs to a ramifying set of connected notions,
such as meaning, reference, belief, and so on, and we are better employed in
exploring the relations between these notions than in trying to treat one or
some of them as the basis of the others." 

At another level, he moves through what he calls the "virtues of truth":
accuracy, sincerity and authenticity. 

The patient reader will enjoy the rare experience of watching philosophical
and historical scaffolding installed, or revealed, beneath everyday
expectations and practices of honesty, trust, doubt, deceit and wishful
thinking. 

Williams promises near the book's opening a "recall to the everyday (to the
kinds of everyday truths that everyone recognizes)," thus placing himself in
the line of Hume, Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell. 

Williams wants "Truth and Truthfulness" to be a disalienating exercise. Even
a reader unfamiliar at the start with the controversies to which he responds
will appreciate at the end how the "recall to the everyday," as he writes,
"is from a politicized state of denial which is not so much an alienation
from the shared world as a condition of sharing in an alienated world." 

E-mail Kenneth Baker at kennethbaker@sfchronicle.com. 
 
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