Do We Need Truth?
Jacques Bouveresse
1.What would we be and could we do without the
help of the false?
Peter Hacker, in Appearance and Reality, says of
truth that it generally has the dignity, but not the
charm. We are much more easily seduced by the
illusions of philosophy than by the humble truths
it is able to discover and communicate. That is, it
seems, true not only in the case of philosophy, but
quite generally. It could be said also of truth that it
usually has the respect and the praises, but not the
favour and the honours. It is not by truth that we are
the most spontaneously attracted and captivated,
and it is not truth that is most beloved and believed.
With falsity, the exact opposite seems to be the
case. It has in principle the disgrace, but that does
apparently not prevent it from having, nevertheless,
most of the time the success and the power.
Ofcially, it is depreciated and even discredited,
but it has the advantage of being generally much
more attracting than truth and to obtain more easily
acceptance.
There are, therefore, good reasons to think that, of
the two notions, the one that is rst and fundamental
ist probably not truth, but falsity. That seems to be
what Paul Valry wanted to suggest when he said:
It is a kind of absolute law that everywhere, in all
places, in every period of the civilisation, in every
belief, with the help of any discipline whatsoever
and in any respects - the false supports the true, the
true gives to itself the false as ancestor, as cause, as
author, as origin and as end, without exception nor
remedy - and the true begets the false by which it
C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
apenas a conferncia proferida citvel
demands to be itself begotten. Every antiquity, every
causality, every principle of the things, are fabulous
inventions and obey to the simple laws.
What would we be without the help of what
does not exist? Not much, and our minds, having
almost no work to do, would languish if fables,
msunderstandings, abstractions, beliefs and monsters,
hypotheses and so-called problems of metaphysics
were not there to populate with images devoid of
any object our natural depths and darkness1.
Falsity has, it seems, over truth, the same kind of
advantage as stupidity over intellligence. Musil,
in The Man without Qualities, asks the following
ironical question concerning stupidity: if it did
not manifest all the appearances of intelligence,
could it continue to exist? If stupidity, seen
from the inside, were not so hard to tell apart from
talent, if, seen from the outside, it did not have
all the appearances of progress, genius, hope and
improvement, nobody would like to be stupid and
there would be no stupidity. It would, at least, be easy
to ght it. Unfortunately, however, it has something
extraordinarily natural and convincing2. It is,
obviously, possible to ask the same sort of question
about falsity: if it did not, in most cases, resemble so
much truth and be so hard to tell apart from it, how
could it be so easily and stubbornly believed? It too
can have, like stupidity, something extraordinarily
natural and convincing which makes it particularly
difcult to ght.
The complicated and painful problem one has
to face here is that for being perceived and
acknowledged as true it is by no means necessary
to be such, and that the fact of being true may even,
on that point, constitute a serious drawback: the
best way to be accepted as true is not necessarily
the one consisting in being, in effect, true. It is a
thing which, for Nietzsche, tends to become still
more striking in times like the one we are now
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ? 1
 living in, which is the time of masses and theater.
Musil quotes a passage of Der Fall Wagner, where
it is said that: []In cultures of decline, [] in all
situations in which the decision falls into the hands
of the masses, authenticity becomes superuous,
disadvantageous, retrograde. Only the actor can still
raise the great enthousiasm. In consequence, the
heyday is coming now for the actor3. Nietzsche,
on that question, refers precisely to the saying of an
actor, Talma, which he takes as an exact symbol of
our epoch:
One is actor, by the fact that he has an insight
(Einsicht) in advance with respect to the rest of
mankind: what is supposed to act as true must not
be true. The sentence is stated by Talma: it contains
all the psychology of the actor. It contains - lets have
no doubts about that! - also his moral. Wagners
music is never true.
But it is taken to be such; and in that way things are
put in order4.
We had better, it seems to me, leave entirely to
Nietzsche the responsibility for the distinction he is
trying to make between a music which can be called
true and another one which has to be rejected
as false. But we can retain of what he says that
we might, in effect, have reached a stage where
everyone has more or less assimilated the actors
principle, which states that, if we want a certain
thing to make the impression of being true and be
accepted as such, it is not only not necessary for it
be true, but it can even be better not to be such.
At rst sight, science rests on a an exactly opposite
principle: the things it afrms are supposed to be
true and what speaks for them is essentially the fact
that, at least in an important number of cases, they
are true ; but it is far from being the case that they,
generally, give the impression to be such and they
even frequently contradict beliefs which belong
to the category of those to which we cling most
strongly and truths which apparently are of the most
unshakeable kind. Nietzsche, nevertheless, considers
as quite legitimate and even indispensable to ask
the question whether science itself could not be the
genuine daughter of an epoch in which, in questions
of truth and falsity as in everything else, what matters
is not what a thing is, but what it succeeds in being
2 C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
taken for. In other words, even if science is supposed
to represent the domain par excellence in which one
succeeds in arriving at propositions which deserve
to be called true, it is not impossible that, when
they are considered from a certain point of view,
the truths of science appear as being also nothing
more than errors which it succeeds in presenting and
getting accepted as true.
Nietzsche says that the truthful man (der
Wahrhaftige) [], such as he is presupposed by the
belief in science, afrms [] another world than
the one of life, nature and history; and in as far as
he afrms an other world, should he not, then,
precisely by the same token negate its counterpart,
this world, our world? (Die frhliche Wissenschaft,
344, p. 275) In other words, the will of truth,
which is at the foundation of science, leads to the
construction of a world which is supposed to be the
true one, the one which can be found behind the
appearances and constitutes the origin, the cause
and the explanation of these. But it could turn out,
precisely, that it is that world that has the least of truth
and reality, that it has anyway much less of them
than the world of phenomena, in other words that
it is a false one and that the lie it is has nonetheless
succeeded in imposing itself, like many others,
essentially because it proved to be very useful and
even, after a certain time, indispensable..
2. Can one want the true and why is it wanted?
Even if falsity and error are, as Valry says, ancestors
of truth and knowledge, they are ancestors which, for
evident reasons, they do not like much to admit and
that they have even, generally, a very strong propensity
to deny with a certain solemnity. Philosophers, on the
whole, have been rather inclined to suppose that truth
is a thing that can be wanted for itself and searched
for itself, and to speak of a passion for knowledge,
one of the most remarkable results of which has been
science, as we know it. That is a way of considering
the situation which has been radically contested
by Nietzsche, who maintains that science can very
well have grown up and become adult without that
supposed passion for knowledge: The good belief
in science, the prejudice which is favourable to it, by
which our States are now directed (earlier it was even
the Church that was), rests nally on the fact that that
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ?
propensity and that impulse have so rarely shown
themselves in it and that science is valuable not as
passion, but as condition and Ethos (Die frhliche
Wissenschaft, 123, p. 164). That knowledge wants
to be more than a means and to constitute itself as
the object of a passion is, according to Nietzsche,
a novelty: in the Antiquity, even in its most ardent
defenders, the most beautiful praise which could be
delivered to science was the one which consisted
in presenting it not as an end, and still less as the
supreme end, but as the best means to reach virtue.
Nietzsche claims that, in the human being, in contrast
with what happens in the animals, who have much
better weapons in the struggle for live, the art of hiding
and cunning, which is the most appropriate means of
conservation for the weakest beings, has reached the
heights. But it is precisely in hiding and cunning that
the intellect develops its main forces, so that: There
is almost nothing more incomprehensible than the
way an honest and pure impulse to truth (Trieb zur
Wahrheit) could appear in human beings. They are
deeply immersed in illusions and dream-like images,
there eye can only slip around them on the surface
of the things and they see forms, their sensation
leads nowhere to the truth, but satises itself with the
reception of excitations and the playing so to speak
of a groping game on the back of the things5. If
one is willing to consider the situation in that way,
he cannot fail to conclude that science, contrary
to what its defenders believe, does not constitute
the best and most reliable way leading to truth,
but rather a way of moving back at the sight of the
truth and shrinking from it, at least from the superior
kind of it, the one with respect to which the truth
that the scientists call objective is, at best, only a
subordinate form, in reality much closer to useful lie
tnan to genuine truth.
The irony of the situation consists precisely in the
fact that, in order to justify the primacy of truth
and kowledge over falsity and ignorance, the only
possible solution was, once more, to draw on
the false. Those who tried to justify the privilege
attributed to science have indeed, to that end, relied
on three typical mistakes:
In the last centuries, science has been favoured,
partly because of the hope, with it and through it,
to reach a better understanding of the goodness and
C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
wisdom of God - the principal motive in the soul of
the great english men (like Newton) -, partly because
of the belief in the absolute usefulness of knowledge,
particularly in the innermost link between moral,
science and happiness - the principal motive in the
soul of the great french men (like Voltaire) -, partly
because of the belief to have and to love in science
something disinterested, harmless, self-sufcient,
truly innocent, in which the bad impulses of man
have absolutely no part - the principal motive in the
soul of Spinoza, who, as a knowing being, felt divine
- therefore, with reasons which amounted to three
errors (Die frhliche Wissenschaft, 37, p. 83).
We might, to simplify and without worrying too
much about historical exactness, call the three
errors to which Nietzsche refers, the theological
conception, the conception of the Enlightenment,
and the spinozistic conception. Musil, who has
been inuenced to a considerable extent by
Nietzsche, rejected, as he did, the rst and the third
conceptions, but he maintained that the second
one should not be taken, even now, as a complete
mistake: contrary to a tendency that was, in his time,
very strong and has, it seems, become more and
more dominant, he did not see the ideas and the
ideals of the Enlightenment as being really outdated
and, in spite of Nietzsches radical criticism, he
was still less ready to accept the now so popular
postmodernist idea that perhaps we had now better
simply renounce using notions like truth or
objectivity at all and try to replace them by other
ones. What has happened, according to him, is not
that the european humanity has realized at a certain
moment that they rested on a fundamental mistake
or constituted themselves a mistake of that kind,
but that we have simply renounced too quickly and
lost, at the rst serious difculty and failure, heart,
determination and enthousiasm.
Musil accepts completely the idea that science is
not the product of disinterested contemplation, but
of a a will and an ethos or an habitus of a certain
kind. But he does not share the depreciation of the
theoretical man that results, for Nietzsche, from that
observation; and he maintains that the ethos that
gave birth to modern science has kept until today
an exemplary character, from which literature itself
could learn much more than it generally does. One
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ? 3
 could even say that it is an example from which
we have serious reasons to continue to draw our
inspiration, for none of the rivals that are usually
opposed to it is in the least bit convincing and can
seriously pretend to be a solution. Musil considers
that, generally, the substitues that have beeen
proposed until now to replace rationality and
science are very poor and completely insufcient.
I can understand, he says, that what they [those
who complain about the damages caused by
Enlightenment, rationality and science] like the
least is rst mathematics, then exactness, and
nally intelligence. But when they oppose to that
vitality, life, intuition, blood, race, instinct, myth,
as it is already since many years a literary fashion,
these are miserable surrogates. Because a feeling
that does not include in itself the reference to truth
and reality remains as thin as an undeveloped child
or becomes as thick as soap bubble (MoE 5, p.
1919-1920).
Musil says of his hero Anders, the future Ulrich of
The Man without Qualities that he does not accept
the nietzschean idea that science is only a kind
of subtle self-defence against truth, a way out,
and that the victory of the theoretical man has to
be understood as a typical sign of decline: There
A[nders] parts company with Nietzsche, because
he has a passion for the theoretical man. Otherwise
one comes indeed to a silly idolatry of life; but
Anders himself run aground in the sand with his
nal ataraxia of the theoretical man (MoE 5, p.
1778-1779).
Musils main target was the so-called philosophy
of life and the way it was used in literature and art.
That is, of course, no longer exactly our problem.
But that does not dispense us with the need of an
answer to the kind of questions he asked concerning
the substitutes that are currently proposed to replace
the notions we, supposedly, can now very well and
probably must get rid of. If we are sensitive to the
urge of some postmodernist thinkers concerning
the outmoded character of notions like truth or
objectivity, there will inevitably be the question
of what things such as an after-truth science or an
after-truth democracy will be like. And the kind of
answer which is given to that, when there is one,
is, to say the least, generally much too vague and
rhetorical to be quite reassuring and convincing.
4 C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
Musil did not accept the subordination of all things,
in particular of the interest for truth, to the interest
of truth itself for life. He rejected, in consequence,
the primacy of practical over theoretical truth, or
of a so-called truth of life over truth of any other
kind, which was supposed to be derivable from
Nietzsches philosophy; but he was quite conscious
of the impossibility to continue to ignore a very
important nietzschean question, namely: How can
theoretical truth, especially if we take seriously the
form which has been given to it by the sciences in
their present state, be made practical?
3. Science, evil and maliciousness
According to Nietzsche, truth has manifested
itself only very late, and as the least strong of the
forms of knowledge (Die frhliche Wissenschaft,
110, p. 152). The reason of that is that it seems
in contradiction with life, since the organism can
apparently subsist only on the basis of some useful
and even essential errors, that Nietzsche considers
as fundamental, particularly those of sensible
perception. The search for truth was, therefore,
seriously disabled by the fact that error seems,
generally, much more useful than truth, and that, as
Nietzsche says, the force of knowledges does not lie
in their degree of truth, but in their age, the way they
have been integraded to the body, their character of
conditions of life . (ibid., p. 153) Whenever life and
knowledge have given the impression to come into
conict with each other, there was never a serious
confrontation, it was always life, and consequently
natural error that won. But knowledge and striving
for truth did nevertheless become themselves also
a need that has been integrated to the system of
human needs in general, a situation that has created
nally a problem which Nietzsche considers as
absolutely decisive:
Knowledge has become [] itself a piece of life
and, as life, a power that grows without interruption;
until the time when nally the knowledges and the
very ancient basic errors of which we have spoken
have bumped into each other, both of them as life,
both of them as power, both of them in the same
man. The thinker, that is now the man in whom the
impulse to truth and those errors that conserve life
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ?
ght their rst battle, after truth has demonstrated
that it too was a power that conserves life. With
respect to the importance of that battle, all the rest
is indifferent: the ultimate question concerning the
condition of life is asked here, and the rst effort is
made to answer it by experiment. To what extent
does truth suffer embodiment (Einverleibung)? - That
is the very question, that is the very experiment
(ibid., p. 154-155).
It is certainly not necessary to insist on the degree
to which that nietzschean question: Is truth
compatible with life? Or is it intrinsically impossible
to live in accordance with truth, and should we not,
therefore, be prepared to admit that the passion for
truth and knowledge could, in the end, turn out
to be fatal to life? is also a musilian one. If the
passion for truth, as Nietzsche seems to be ready
to grant it, can also be integrated into life and has
even succeeded in giving the proof of its utility fort
it, we will, inevitably, have to answer the question
whether it could succeed without transforming
itself by the same token into an useful error and
an error that has perhaps only the advantage that it
appeared nally to be more useful that most others.
It is the whole problem of the very possibility of
objective knowledge that we have to face here; and
we can describe Musils position by saying that, in
spite of the difculties that have arisen and of what
has been said on this point by many epistemologists
and philosophers, including Nietzsche itself, he did
not see any convincing reason to consent to give up
the idea that the human mind is really able to know
the things in an objective way.
But that is clearly not the conclusion that was drawn
by the majority of Nietzsches disciples. And that is
true as well of his disciples of the right wing, like
Spengler, as of those of the leftist orientation, like,
for example, many french deconstructionists. What
Musil reproached some real or supposed heirs of
Nietzsche, like Spengler, for, was their tendency
to consider themselves as exempted from the
difcult task of examining seriously what he calls
that mixture of subjective and objective factors
of knowledge, whose distinction constitutes the
hard work of sorting out which has to be made by
epistemology6 . One could, it seems to me, say
something similar of many deconstructionist and
C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
postmodernist thinkers, who dispense themselves
much too quickly from the most difcult part of
the work and prefer to jump directly to the easiest
conclusion. It is quite true, Musil admitted, that we
suffer from an overabundance of facts and of the
painful absence of any satisfactory synthesis. But
the solution does certainly not consist in repeating,
after Nietzsche, that there are no facts, but only
interpretations.
There are now, Musil said ironically, people who
deny the facts, and call that thinking. The same
could certainly be said of our time and even,
unfortunately, to a higher degree than of his.
Poincar said once that the only thing which the
scientist creates in a fact is the language in which
he expresses it. But it is a belief and an assertion
that would nowadays be considered as very naive,
since after decades of deconstructionist and
postmodernist thinking, it seems more and more
difcult, not to say impossible, to understand how a
real distinction could be made between creating a
way of expressing an independent fact and creating
the fact itself.
In defending the idea that facts can have a reality
independent of language and of the activities
of the scientists, Poincar reacted to the claims
of people like Edouard Le Roy, a philosopher of
science (but also of moral and religion), who is now
forgotten and whom our postmodernist thinkers
generally do not know, in spite of the fact that
he could very well be considered as one of their
important predecessors. Le Roy maintained that the
scientic facts are well-named, since they are, in a
more a less literal sense, made (in French, faits)
or manufactured by the scientist. They are only
constructions wich have been articially extracted
from the given for the satisfaction of some of our
needs and interests. If I have evoked that episode
of the history of philosophy and epistemology in
France, that is because the question whether facts,
particularly scientic facts, are mainly created by
us or possess an autonomous reality and existence
is not only important for the philosophy of science.
It may appear to be also crucial and have decisive
consequences from the moral and political point of
view.
That is certainly the way it was considered by
thinkers like Bertrand Russell or George Orwell, who
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ? 5
 were both convinced that belief in the existence of
objective facts and a certain respect for them and
for objective truth is a necessary constituent of the
democratic attitude and mentality. They thought that
one of the most signicant characteristics of dictatures
is that they need falsity and lie in a way which has
probably no equivalent in other political systems,
and certainly none in the democtaric and liberal
ones. One of Orwells most fundamental convictions
was that there is an essential link between totalitarian
thinking and pratice, on the one hand, and lie, on the
other. It would be very naive to believe that the link
could be only accidental, temporary and motivated
by special historical circumstances. Orwell thought
that it would inevitably persist even after the
concentration camps have disappeared. In other
words, there is absolutely no hope that the real facts
will simply be kept secret for a moment and be later
disclosed in due time. Orwell said that in totalitarian
regimes history is created, and not learned. He
was frightened by the degree to which it has now
become, in effect, possible to create historical facts
and historical truths, and he saw in that process of
falsication of the historical reality a major danger
for our time and for humanity in general.
In 1938, he observed both that there is now a risk,
in our modern societies, to see the very notion of
objective truth fade away and nally disappear,
and that the conditioning of the masses, in the
last twenty years, has become a new science. The
two things were, naturally, in his mind essentially
connected to each other. It is, of course, quite clear
that we are now very far from the kind of situation
he was referring to and that, in the present state of
our contemporary democratic socities, the threat of
the advent of a dictature of any kind may appear
extremely remote, not to say purely non-existent.
We can therefore, it seems, very well allow some
of our most advanced and reputed intellectuals to
play quite freely with the idea that, even in our
democratic societies, the attachment to and the
respect for objective truth, at least for objective
truths of the most elementary kind, has ceased to
be really necessary and might even have become
an obstacle to freedom, creativity, and social and
political progress. But that does not free us with the
obligation to give a real answer to the perplexities
and anxieties of people who continue think, as
6 C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
Orwell did, that there can never be a long distance
from disparaging notions and values like objectivity
and truth to threatening political and intellectual
freedom itself.
4. What could be learned fom Nietzsche
Bernard Williams, in his last book, Truth and
Truthfulness, suggests that all the questions which
are now discussed in the deconstructionist and
postmodernist circles concerning the reality (or
unreality) of things like a will of truth, a need of
truth and a necessity of truth had already been asked
and thoroughly examined by Nietzsche. And that is
perfectly true. But it is also true that the lesson we
are supposed to have to draw from what Nietzsche
said is far from being perfectly clear. And that comes
certainly in part from the tension that Bernard
Williams describes between truth, on the one hand,
and truthfulness, on the other. We surely want truth,
but we also want to be truthful in our beliefs and
assertions, and be sure that what we have reached
is really the truth, and not an appearance or an
illusion of some kind that we have mistakenly taken
for the truth. To take for truth and to try to impose as
truth what in fact, is not truth and may even be the
contrary of it, can indeed have devastating and even
catastrophic consequences. False beliefs, doctrines
and systems can kill and have killed as surely and
massively as the most perfected weapons.
But together with the demand for truthfulness or
the reex against deceptiveness, there is almost
inevitably, as Williams says, an equally pervasive
suspicion about truth itself: whether there is such a
thing; if there is, whether it can be more than relative
or subjective or something of that kind; altogether,
whether we should bother about it, in carrying on
our activities or in giving an account of them7. The
need of truthfulness, in making us more and more
cautious and critical, can, therefore, easily lead to
a form of radical suspicion concerning the very
notion of truth and to the idea that there is, in the
end, no truth of any kind that can be known with
certainty and asserted without any reservation, or
that we should not bother about truth, since, after
all, we have no real means to distinguish it from an
advantageous falsity or illusion of some kind.
Is it not, in the end, precisely to that conclusion that
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ?
Nietzsche was led by his radical demand for honesty
and truthfulness, especially in moral matters,
but also in matters of knowledge and science in
general ? Bernard Williams does not agree with the
conclusion nor, incidentally, with the tendency to
attribute it to Nietzsche himself. And I think that he
is right on both points But it is certainly, to say the
least, not easy to determine exactly to what kind of
answer Nietzsche did nally arrive concerning the
question of the use humanity can still make and must
try to make of things like knowledge, truth, science,
rationality, and the heritage of the Enlightenment.
There has been, particularly in the Frankfurt School,
a tendency to insist on the way the Enlightenment
has contributed, directly or indirectly, to engenden
oppressive systems of an unprecendented kind,
mainly in consequence of their belief in an absolute
truth that can be reached by scientic means, not
only in the case of the natural world, but also in
that of the individuals and the societies to which
they belong. And for a long time it is an idea of that
sort that has dominated largely the reection on
the politics of the Enlightenment and the political
heritage it has left to us. But there is, for Bernard
Williams, a very different way to consider the
things, which is much more positive and at least as
legitimate as the rst.
In the view which has become more or less usual,
the Enlightenment is characterized by a kind of
tyranny of the theory, and theory, in its turn, as a
kind of completely external, panoptical vision
of everything, including ourselves. And a vision
of that sort, which aims apparently at knowledge,
but in reality mainly at control and power, seems
likely to lead and has in effect led to a negation
of political freedom. But Bernard Williams belongs
to the category of thinkers who, like Bertrand
Russell, Noam Chomsky and many others maintain
that there can also be positive links between
objective and particularly scientic truth, on the
one hand, and political freedom, on the other.
Moreover, independently of that aspect, there
is another current in the Enlightenment, which is
that of critique, a critique that has indeed been a
main expression of the spirit of political and social
truthfulness (op. cit., p. 4). But the Enlightenment
was not willing to break the association between
truthfulness and truth; and Bernard Williams thinks
C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
that it is a fundamental mistake to suppose, as
some have done, that the spirit of liberal criticism,
which implies truthfulness as one of its essential
components, can without serious damages be
separated from the concept of truth.
As I have said, I agree with him on that point
and, therefore, disagree with the philosophical
conceptions Rorty and his followers are now trying
to promote of the relative importance (or rather
unimportance) of truth and truthfulness themselves
for social and political liberalism and criticism. And
I am inclined to agree also with him in what he
says about the case of Nietzsche, when he remarks,
rst, that the postmodernist thinkers who maintain
that social and political criticism would improve
considerably its chances to contribute effectively to
the defence of freedom and justice if it decided to
abandon not only any claim to truth for itself, but
also any reference to the notion of truth, would be
well advised to read him or to do it more seriously,
and, secondly, that, in spite of what some of his
formulations could suggest, Nietzsche remained
persuaded of the fundamental importance of the
concept of truth and did not try to persuade us to get
rid of it ot to accomodate it as we want. Williams
conviction is that Nietzsche did not see truth as
a thing we can dispense with and was above all
asking how to make it sufferable. He had, in the
end, no real doubts on the fact, that, independently
of the philosophical interpretations, including those
he tried to construct himself, there are facts which
have to be respected.
I have, for myself, the impression that Nietzsches
position on that point remained until the end
probably more ambiguous und undecided than
Williams suggests. But it seems to me difcult to
envisage that a philosopher who insisted so much
on the necessity to be ready to accept difcult
sacrices for the service of truth and was of the
opinion that the value of a man could be measured
by the amount of truth he is able to suffer, could
have wanted at the same time to encourage his
readers to consider themselves as allowed to ignore
the facts or to make of them what they like.
Bernard Williams has headed his book with
two quotations, the one of Proust and the other
of Nietzsche. In Prousts novel, the baron de
Charlus, in a discussion of the position of the
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ? 7
 jusquauboutistes, those who want to see the war
continue until the complete destruction of Germany,
says: I have always honoured those who defend logic
or grammar. One realizes, fty years later, that they
have averted great dangers. Those who have tried,
in the context of contemporary french philosophy,
to defend logic, grammar and the respect for facts
have, to say the least, not exactly had a good and
easy life. But the rst reactions to the publication of
the french translation of Williams book suggest that
perhaps the situation has begun slightly to change
and that a kind of return of truth or return to
truth has ceased to be completely unthinkable
and could even very well be announced in the near
future almost as a scoop and as a great novelty by
our cultural newspapers. To quote or paraphrase
Proust again, il semble que quelque chose soit
nouveau en train de changer en France .
If that is true, it is not quite impossible that Nietzsche
will begin to be read in a signicantly different way
and also that a philosopher like Bertrand Russell,
who considered as evident that we would run the
risk of catastrophs of the worst kind if we tried to
rid ourselves of the notion of truth or to adapt it
to our convenience will be taken more seriously.
Russell and Orwell (who, not surprinsingly, was one
of his admirers) never failed to remind intellectuals
how dangerous can be the pretension and illusion
to be exempted from the obligation to respect the
facts, particularly the historical ones, and to feel
authorized to despise the kind of modest truths that
we can learn from science. For it is certainly not
a kind of positivistic respect for the facts, but an
alleged right to ignore them, in the name of some
superior insight and mission, that makes the dictator
and has made the worst and most criminal of them
in the twentieth century.
There is, therefore, simply no reason to believe
that those who keep to the idea that the search for
truth is an important task and that the way science
contributes to it cannot be ignored by philosophy
and in general, can only be people who dream of
something like the theory that would possess both
the absolute truth and the power without limits that
goes with it and represent, for that reason, from
the start a potential danger for some ot our most
fundamental liberties. But we must not, of course,
overestimate the results that could be obtained in
8 C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
that way. Certainly, no spectacular improvement
would be produced by the change of attitude
philosophers like Russell were ghting for. As the
baron de Charlus would have said, he thought that
we should honour the men and the solutions which,
as far as we can know, are most likely to avert the
greatest dangers and to render the worst, if not quite
impossible, at least a little less sure.
5. On the indispensability of truth
I have said almost nothing on the reasons why it
would probably be not only much more dangerous,
but also much more difcult, than it is generally
supposed to be, to try seriously to give up our
concern about truth and our tendency to search
for truth itself, rathet than for one of its apparently
more modest and manageable substitutes. Bernard
Williams has chosen to designate collectively as the
deniers the representatives of a style of thought that
extravagantly, challengingly, or as its opponents
would say irresponsibly denies the possibility
of truth altogether, waves its importance aside, or
claims that all truth is relative or subjective or
suffers from some other such disadvantage (op.
cit., p. 5). One of the common characteristics of
the deniers is that they have generally concentrated
their attention mainly on the philosophical, rather
than the ordinary, uses of the concept of truth, and
on the well-known difculties and insufciencies of
the philosophical theories of truth, rather than on
the concept of truth iself, as it is really used. But,
considered in that way, the task which consists in
trying to stop bothering about truth and maybe to
dispense with the concept of truth altogether does
certainly appear much easier than it is in reality.
The task of the philosopher, says Dummett, is neither
to belittle truth nor to exalt it, neither to deny it nor
to defend it, but to explain why we need the concept
and what it is to possess it8. Dummett thinks that
Williams is certainly entitled, as a justicationist, to
maintain, against Rorty, that truth, and not simply a
justication of some kind, is and remains the goal
of inquiry. But, he observes, since he [Rorty] gives
so little account of what, in his view, constitutes
linguistic meaning, and how it is related both to truth
and to evidence, he has done little to vindicate his
entitlement (ibid.). The fundamental mistake that
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ?
is committed by Williams and still more by Rorty
is to ignore the fact that it is impossible to explain
the concept of truth independently of the concept of
meaning: [] What Williams writes comes nowhere
near what is required to elucidate the concept of
truth an explanation of how we do or can acquire
the concept, and an account of that in which our
possession of that concept consists; still less does
what Rorty writes on the matter. Such an elucidation
is possible only when an explanation of the concept
of truth is embedded in an explanation of the concept
of meaning. Williams and Rorty both make the same
far-reaching mistake, to discuss the concept of truth
otherwise than in the context of a discussion of the
concept of meaning (ibid., p. 107).
I will, of course, not start discussing here the question
whether Dummetts complaint is really founded and
the extent to which it can be considered as decisive.
The important point, for us, is that he and Williams
agree on the fact that a kind of indispensability must
be attributed to the concept of truth. A chapter of his
book bears precisely the title The Indispensability
of truth. According to him, truth is indispensable
and inevitable both from the ordinary and from
the theoretical and explanatory point of view. It
is indispensable from the ordinary point of view,
since the user of a language necessarily has and
uses the concept of truth, even if he does not speak
of it and is not conscious to have and to exercise
it: [] The practice of using a language in which
we learn to engage does impart to us an implicit
grasp of the concept of truth (ibid., p. 30). And
it is indispensable from the explanatory point of
view, because no theory of meaning, even one of
the justicationist kind, can fail to use a concept
of truth: The concept of truth has its home within
a theory of meaning, within which it is an essential
theoretical notion (ibid., p. 39); and our theory
of truth is responsible to the theory of meaning
in accordance with which our language is to be
understood. We cannot explain truth by taking
meanings as given. But we cannot explain meaning
without referring to what we take the truth of the
statements of the language to consist in.
The solidarity between the two concepts of truth
and meaning, which have to be explained together,
without the one being considered as given in advance
of the other, does indeed seem to contribute to
C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
make the concept of truth really indispensable, but
only, of course, on the condition that the concept of
meaning itself has to be considered as indispensable.
The only conclusion that can be drawn, on that
point, from what Dummett says, is that the concepts
of truth and meaning must necessarily stand or fall
together. And it is difcult to forget that there has
also been, some decades ago, a philosophical
movement I mean french structuralism, as it was
called - that proposed seriously to try to make an
end of metaphysical and/or ideological concepts
like those of subject and meaning. As it could
easily be foreseen, the supposed decline and
disappearing of the subject was followed very
soon, in the end of the seventies and the beginning
of the eighties, by its triumphal return. So that it is
difcult to refrain from asking, as I did, the question
whether there are not serious chances that the same
will happen sooner or later with the supposedly
outdated concept of truth and, more generally,
whether feats like decreting, at a certain stage of
the cultural and intellectual evolution, the end of
notions which, from the ordinary, pretheoretical and
prephilosophical perspective, continue to appear
as absolutely fundamental and indispensable like,
for instance, those of subject, meaning or truth, are
really within the reach and belong to the possibilities
of philosophy. The answer to the second question
seems to me to be clearly a negative one.
But it could be objected that that is by no means
what is really at stake here, since it is quite possible
that, whatever the philosophers may want to afrm
ot deny, our modern culture has entered a stage
where there is no longer a real place and necessity
for the concept of truth. Bernard Williams would,
of course, consider that supposition as an absurdity,
since, for him, the concept of truth itself has no
history, and therefore could hardly have to suffer
some day a real historical decline and dead either.
There is, for him, no history of the concept of truth,
though there is of course a history of theories of
truth, of ways to nd out the truth, of ideas about
the true nature of the world, and so on. And there
is also a history [] of particular conceptions
associated with the virtues of true (op. cit., p. 271).
There is, thus, no need to deny that different and
even very different historical conceptions may have
existed concerning the virtues of truth and also of
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ? 9
 associated qualities like exactness or sincerity.
But even if we are not ready to grant to the concept
of truth the kind of universality and anhistoricity that
Williams vindicates for it, the fact remains that it is
not possible to afrm simultaneously that a culture
and language, for example those of archaic Greece,
has a concept of truth and that truth occupies in
it a different place and plays a different role from
those our system of thought attributes to them. For,
it should be clear that, if we correctly translate
some ancient word as true or vrai, and correctly
interpret some ancient Greek writings so that they
yield references to truth or la vrit, then the
terms in question must to a signicant extent play
the role that truth does in our thought (Truth
and Truthfulness, p. 272). In other words, there are,
it seems, only two possibilities: either the concept
of truth is nowhere to be found in the language and
culture in question or it has approximately the same
place that he does in our system of thought. And the
temptation to give both an absolutist answer to the
question of its presence or absence and a relativist
one to the question of its place and function, to
which so many contemporary philosophers and
historians have yielded, must be rejected as a
typical incoherence.
A language and culture could, of course, very well
include no word that is virtually equivalent to true
and has to be translated by that term. But, according
to Williams: That does not mean that the people
who use the language in question did not have the
concept of truth our concept of truth, if one insist
on putting it that way, though it is no more ours
than it is theirs. It is everyones concept of truth, a
concept which, though they may well not reect
on it, they exercise in doing the things that every
human group can and must do in using language
(ibid., p. 271). Consequently, it is not too difcult
to understand how some philosophers may have
come to think and to claim that the concept of truth
is probably no longer necessary or important, and
is about to lose its place and role in our language
and culture, while continuing themselves to use, as
everbody does, the ordinary concept of truth and
to manifest, already in their use of language, their
implicit adhesion to it and the indispensability they
are in practice forced to grant to it.
Nietzsches intention was probably not to suggest that
10 C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E
we no longer need truth, but he certainly thought that
we need not only truth, but also falsity, and falsity to
a much greater extent than philosophers would like
to believe and maybe even than truth itself. Granted
that we need both truth and falsity, the question he
asked is certainly a meaningful and important one.
Consider for example what Anatole France said on it
in the conclusion of La Vie en eur:
A question which has to be asked is to
determine whether the human language is
perfectly appropriate to the expression of
truth. It has come from the cry of the animals
and it keeps the characters of the latter ; it
expresses the feelings, the passions, the
needs, the joy and the pain, the hatred and
the love. It is not made to tell the truth. The
truth is not in the soul of wild beasts: it is not
in ours, and the metaphysicians who have
treated of it are lunatics.
The only thing I can say is that I have been a
man of good faith. I repeat, I like the truth. I
believe that humanity needs it; but she surely
has a still much greater need of the lie which
atters her, comfort her, give her innite
hopes. Without lie, she would perish from
despair or boredom9.
But to say that, one needs a notion of truth of some
kind, that is opposed to falsity and lie. To say that
we need the false more than the true does by no
means signify that we do not need the truth and
the distinction between it and the false. In other
words, the question Do we not have seriously
overestimated the virtues of truth and is not, in the
end, falsity more useful and necessary than truth?
is quite different from the question Do we need
truth?, as it is understood by some contemporary
philosophers, and must not be confused with it. The
latter, seemingly much deeper, question belongs in
fact to a different category and I am not quite sure
that it is possible to give it a real meaning.
V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ?
(Footnotes)
1 Paul Valry, Petite lettre sur les mythes (1928), in
uvres I, dition tablie et annote par Jean Hytier,
Bibliothque de la Pliade, Paris, 1957, p. 966.
2 Robert Musil, LHomme sans qualits, traduit de
lallemand par Philippe Jaccottet, Editions du Seuil,
1956, tome 1, p. 68-69 (abrg dornavant HSQ).
3 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, in Gesammelte
Werke in neun Bnden herausgegeben von Adolf
Fris, Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1978,
Bd. 5, p.1776 (abrg dornavant MoE).
4 Der Fall Wagner, in Werke, herausgegeben von
Karl Schlechta, Ullstein, Frankfurt/M.-Berlin-Wien,
1981, Bd. III, p. 366.
5 Uber Wahrheit und Lge im aussermoralischen
Sinn, Werke III, p. 1018.
6 Esprit et exprience. Remarques pour des lecteurs
rchapps du dclin de lOccident, in Essais, textes
choisis, traduits et prsents par Philippe Jaccottet,
Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1984, p. 101-102.
7 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness, An
Essay in Genealogy, Princeton University Press,
Princeton and Oxford, 2002, p. 1.
8 Michael Dummett, Truth and the Past, Columbia
University Press, 2004, p. 116.
9 Anatole France, La Vie en eur, cent cinquante-
cinquime dition, Calmann-Lvy, Editeurs, Paris,
1924, p. 348-349.

C O N F E R N C I A G U L B E N K I A N > Q U E V A L O R E S P A R A E S T E T E M P O ? 11