Introduction
John Maynard Keynes famously said, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”1 The ideas that give rise to the geist of the age are usually the work of an “academic scribbler” or many academic scribblers who have imprinted their ideas on the intellectual history of a culture. It is illuminating to know those thinkers who have imprinted their ideas on any particular time period. It would help to understand the actions of “practical men” who imagine that they are acting on their own designs yet are the “slaves of some defunct economist” or even more accurately some defunct philosopher or philosophy. Such an interrogation would help us understand our modern age, for example, and when one speaks of the “modern age”, one speaks also of what many have called “post-modernity” with the understanding that “post-modernity” is embedded in modernity as a worm at the core of it.
The essays in this collection of essays attempt to trace some of the important philosophers and philosophy that have shaped our intellectual history and impact on our understanding of the world with regard to the idea of truth and the importance of truth to society. The essays do have a continuity to them in that they look at the various skeptical attacks on the mainstream intellectual tradition of the West and ultimately try to trace the evolution of our post-truth society. What were the important intellectual events that brought about the post-truth society? These essays point out some of those important events along the way.
The first essay is called a “prologue” because it introduces the problem that we are looking at and analyses its earliest tendencies. In that essay, we meet the key personality, Socrates, around whom the question of truth becomes so important. In the prologue, two important “sophists” debate Socrates – Callicles and Thrasymachus. They articulate what can be called “the will to power” doctrine. Callicles’ “will to power” doctrine is remarkably similar to Nietzsche’s ideas. Socrates attempts to refute this doctrine by, in a sense, exposing what this doctrine implies. He uses the method of elenclus, questioning and subjecting what is being said to reason and logic. Observers to Socratic interrogation claim that Socrates seems to paralyze those who are subjected to his questioning. The boldness of his speech throws off his opponents. However it is more likely that it is the logic and the contradictions that arise from illogical statements that paralyzes.
What is justice? – That is the inquiry. The dialogue with Callicles comes from the Gorgias, a book that is supposed to deal with the issue of rhetoric, Gorgias being a renowned expert on rhetoric. Socrates makes a distinction between rhetoric and truth. Rhetoric flatters the listeners in order to win them over; truth lays out the facts as they are without any intention of pleasing the listener. Because of this difference, the rhetorician has to vacillate between conventional opinions, and what is ordained by nature, i.e. between nomos and physis. It is this vacillation that Socrates exploits in his debate with Geogias, Polus and eventually Callicles. This vacillation does not go down well with conventional opinion, with nomos, so that Callicles in spite of the fact that he is rhetorically clever has to express ideas that will not please his listeners. It is this strategy that enables Socrates to overcome Gorgias, Polus and eventually Callicles dialectically.
All pleasures are not equally good, some lead to painful consequences. Accepting this proposition leads Socrates to suggest an ordering of pleasures and of activities that lead to a happy life. It is the ordering of values that makes happiness possible. In The Republic when Socrates debates Thrasymachus, the issue becomes one of finding that right order. Socrates wields his dialectical logic with particular effectiveness against Thrasymachus. In the debate, Socrates gets Thrasymachus to admit that the “will to power” leader of the community, or the shepherd of the flock, has less interest in the welfare of the sheep than in the profits of the job. This exposure of his intentions does Thrasymachus no good, he seems to be on the defensive from that point. Socrates proposes to prove that the just man is happier than the unjust. When Socrates argues that the unjust competes with both with his like and with his opposite, and then later claims that “justice was the peculiar excellence of the mind and injustice its defect” 2, Thrasymachus falls strangely silent. He seems to have been charmed like a snake by a snake charmer remarks Glaucon. Whatever the reason, Socrates elenchus prevails.
The second essay, “From via antique to via moderna: The ontological revolution” looks at the medieval Augustinian/Aristotelian intellectual construct of “ordo” , what it meant in terms of the relationship between Church and State and the ontological revolution that swept away the concept of “ordo”. “Ordo” was a word used particularly by St. Augustine to describe the meta-physical, underlying order to the world. It was a system of “right-relations”, at the summit of which was God and which was maintained by all creatures knowing their place and submitting to this order. Man’s unchecked will and desires were the antithesis of this order. Rationality was the intellectual grasping of this order so that through reason we could fit into the order. The Church was the embodiment of this order. The state was the embodiment of unchecked will and desire. The priority of church over state represented the manifesting of “ordo”, the “right-relations” that represented the right order in the world.
To combat this intellectual system, it was necessary to challenge the idea of “ordo” and the metaphysics that sustained it. This was accomplished by Ockham’s “ontological revolution” – the championing of nominalism and the rejection of metaphysical entities, like the Platonic Good and the Augustinian “ordo”. By philosophically questioning the possibility of meta-physical entities, universals, etc., the Augustinian system of “ordo” was overthrown. Marsilio came along and applied the implications of that revolution to politics, if there was to be an order it could only be established and sustained by the State. It was not a matter of submitting to the metaphysical “ordo” as represented by the Church, order came about through the action of the State and it was maintained by the State. The State, therefore, took precedence over the Church in the new philosophical view of things. It, rather than the Church, was responsible for order and peace.
The next essay, “A Commentary on Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God” looks at Buber’s account of Nietzsche’s comment that God is dead. Buber claims that it is not that God is dead but rather he has become hidden from man. An eclipse has come between man and God. The philosophers seek “on the one hand, to preserve the idea of the divine as the true concern of religion, and on the other hand to destroy the reality of our relation to him.” It is the reality of our relation to God that is dead. But the death of God brings about a disquietetude in man and that disquietetude suggests that something is missing. It is that which is missing that Buber tries to articulate.
The relation between man and God is most starkly expressed in the relationship of the ethical to the absolute. Buber traces the history of the relationship of the ethical to the absolute. There were, according to Buber, two great attempts to relate the ethical to the absolute. The Oriental and Greek ancients had spoken about the moral order of the Gods, rita in India, it was a cosmic order to which man had to align himself. There was however in Ancient Greece a discordant note between the bios and the cosmos. Plato sought to reconcile this discordant note through the idea of the Good. Man should attempt to become what he is. This first great attempt to relate the ethical to the absolute, however, did not, according to Buber, succeed.
The second great attempt was accomplished by a group of “cattle breeders” united by their common faith in God. “For these Hebrews or Jews, it was not the cosmic order that was decisive, but its sovereign, the Lord of Heaven and Earth.” This second attempt came to grief, according to Buber, because of firstly the individualism brought about by the Christian attempt to relate to the individual rather than the people and secondly the emphasis placed on grace rather than works. Both weakened the relationship of the ethical to the absolute and made way for the secular envisioning of the relation between the ethical and the absolute.
Buber then analyzes why this weakening and eventual disappearance of the relation of the ethical to the absolute occurred. He traces it to philosophy’s part in objectifying the relationship through the process of reflection. “From reflection, to mastery, to conjuration, to annihilation, this is the sequence that results in the so-called death of God, or possible more accurately – the fall of man.” As Buber puts it the “I-Thou” relation became transformed to the “I-It” relation and this was because of philosophy’s tendency to reduce all things to an object of thought through reflection.
The following essay is entitled “A Defense of Philosophy: Martin Buber and the Prison of Umfassung”. Is philosophy guilty of this annihilation of the ethical to the absolute? Is it because of philosophy’s reduction of all things through reflection to objects of thought? This essay questions that assumption. It begins by examining the issues raised by Descartes’ resolution of the problem of doubt. By privileging the subjective as that which provides certainty, Descartes creates a chasm between the subjective and the objective. Buber takes up this problem. Initially he thinks that knowledge of the objective could be obtained through mysticism. The subject imbues the object. Buber however realizes that mysticism cannot work. Either the subject is dissolved in the object or the object is dissolved in the subject. We have either the extinction of the self or the subjectivization of the object.
Buber proposes that the subject-object chasm can be resolved by the I-Thou relation, the Umfassung or inclusion. In the I-Thou relation, the I is held fast by the Thou. There can be no reflection, since reflection can only come about when the I is freed from the Umfassung so that the “bending back” of consciousness can occur. It is when this “bending back” or re-flection of consciousness takes place that doubt can enter into the picture. Doubt enters in that moment of freedom. Buber puts forward the Umfassung as a relationship in which the I is held fast by the Thou. There is no separation, hence no possibility of re-flection, and as a consequence, no doubting. But in order to accomplish this, the Umfassung becomes a prison where separation and freedom are impossible.
Buber makes a distinction between two types of faith – emunah and pistis. Emunah is characteristic of the type of faith manifested in the I-Thou relation. It symbolizes a kind of trust. Pistis is the faith exemplified by a more reflective type of faith. Emunah is more characteristic of the Judaism, pistis is more characteristic of Christianity. Pistis thus leads to that sequence that Buber outlines – from reflection to mastery to conjuration to annihilation – that leads to the death of God. So it seems that for Buber it is Christianity’s alliance with philosophy, with re-flection, that results in the death of God.
In questioning this position, the author points to the example of Job in the Old Testament. The protective fence of God’s presence was taken away to test Job’s faith. But even when he was separated, Job kept his faith. The example of faith in separation, the author uses as that possibility of faith during re-flection. If anything, it demands a greater reserve of faith. So the enemy of belief is not re-flection, it is doubt. The Umfassung is a protective fence that prevents humankind from the test of faith that comes from separation and freedom. What man does when that protective fence is removed is what is important.
The next essay is entitled “Epistemological Skepticism”. It looks at the phenomenon of doubt with particular interest in the mechanics of doubt. In other words, how doubt operates to invalidate one’s idea of what is certain and true and how can this invalidation be itself repudiated. Three models of skepticism are looked at, Descartes, Hume and G.E Moore. Two of these are taken from one of my earlier books – The Righteous State. The purpose of epistemological skepticism and its resolution is to create an accepted discourse of things wherein particular truths are accepted as ‘true’ and other claims are considered discredited, or gauche and passé, out of favour and obsolescent. When a claim cannot be discredited in an absolute sense, it still may be rendered ineffectual and impotent by making it untimely or obsolete.
Epistemological skepticism paves the way for the post-truth society. It questions the possibility of all knowledge; in its most radical form it implies no knowledge is possible. If there can be no truths about reality, then all truths about reality are on the same level of certainty. One perspective about reality is as good as the next. So who determines what perspective or view about reality is accepted? And what mechanisms are operative in this determination? It may be that the ultimate consequence of epistemological skepticism is that a conventional reality of accepted truths is created. A conventional view of reality is propagated and rules the day.
In the case of Descartes, the paradigm of doubt is the evil genius or demon who doubts every assertion that is made. Descartes looks for an assertion, or truth, that cannot be doubted. He finds it in the assertion: “cogito ergo sum” – “I think therefore I am”. This is Descartes’ pivot of certainty. He attempts to move from this one, fundamental truth to validate all that he thinks is certain about the world. But to do so, Descartes needs to prove two things, firstly that there is a God and secondly that God does not deceive him. He accomplishes the first by proofs of God’s existence, most noticeable St. Alsem’s ‘existential’ proof, and having proved God’s existence, he easily counts as God’s perfection, his lack of deceptiveness.
The problem with this is that proofs of God’s existence are not as persuasive to other philosophers as to Descartes. Hume for example completely rejects proofs of God’s existence. Descartes is stuck therefore with privileged access to the subjective aspect of knowledge but debarred from knowledge of the external world. He cannot get out to the objective. As we saw in a previous essay, this was the problem that Buber attempted to resolve – to get out to the external world. Descartes’ philosophy, as Heidegger observed, results in a subjectivism.
Hume rejects Descartes’ rationalism and considers all knowledge as arising from sensations; he champions Lockean empiricism rather than Descartes’ rationalism. Hume puts forward a radical skepticism. There can be no connectivity between events in the subjective domain; any connectivity is just a matter of force of habit. What we perceive are sensations, mental events, and these cannot point necessarily to the existence of external objects; the continued existence of objects is again a matter of an extrapolation based on force of habit; cause and effect are nothing but habitual expectations. Hume attacks the basis of the proofs of God’s existence given by Descartes. Reason cannot prove the existence of anything. From his empiricism he postulates that we can only perceive sensations, mental events, and from these mental events we can say nothing about what is out there externally, we cannot deduce existence from events in our mind. In this way, he sought to undercut the basis of Descartes argument for God’s existence. These were some of the intellectual consequences of Hume’s radical skepticism. As Hume himself said about the effects of his radical skepticism “…I am ready to reject all belief and reasoning and can look upon no opinion even as more probable than another.” 3
There were three basic reactions to Kant’s encompassing philosophical reply to Hume’s skepticism. One came from Hegel and was taken over by the ‘Young Hegelians’ and Karl Marx who turned Hegel’s philosophy on its head and ended up with dialectical materialism. The other led through Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and post-Nietzscheans and led to the idea that truths are generated by the will to power. The third reaction came from Cambridge philosophers such as Russell, Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore and led in general to the idea that philosophy itself has gone off track because of its misunderstanding of how language works. To the radical, skepticism of David Hume, G.E. Moore suggested that we needed to get back to a ‘common sense’ idea of reality.
Moore gave his proof of an external world in this way: (1) Here’s one hand, and here’s another; (2) There are two objects that exist; (3) Therefore there is an external world. The point Moore is emphasizing is that we can know something and yet can’t prove it. However, in a sense, as this essay attempts to show, Moore’s proof is structurally similar to Descartes’ proof of the “cogito ergo sum”. The “cogito” is asserted the more it is doubted, in other words, doubt reinforces thinking, so that the more the “cogito” is doubted the more it asserts itself. How is Moore’s proof of an external world similar to this? The more the “common sense” perception of reality is denied, the more it asserts itself. This can be called the “sociological force” of common-sense reality.
Wittgenstein critiques Moore’s proof of an external reality. He speaks about “hinge propositions”. He considers “Here’s one hand, and here’s another” to be a hinge proposition. A hinge proposition is one which cannot be proved, but it provides a framework wherein discourse takes place. If one accepts the hinge proposition then discourse based upon it is logically coherent. It is a view that seems to be supported by Richard Rorty when he speaks about language as something which is not tied to representing reality but instead it is an autonomous region of coherent statements related to each other. Moore later on in life seems to admit that he cannot prove that the external world existed but his common-sense view of reality won the day in Anglo-American philosophy.
The common-sense view of reality appears to have become the default position of linguistic philosophy. If someone asks about the reality of the external world, then they are using language in a way that it was not meant to be used, linguistic therapy is the solution for this excursion outside the limits of language. Linguistic philosophy thus seems to draw boundaries within which we can speak properly, outside these boundaries we flounder linguistically. There must be clear criteria for determining the truth or falsity of statements. If these do not exist, then we are wandering outside the bounds of proper language. However, for those operating outside this idea of language, Continental philosophers for example, there can be no common discourse about what is true or certain.
In the “Post-Truth Society”, I look at the other stream of thought descended from initially the struggle between science and philosophy which led to an epistemological crisis addressed by Descartes. Hume’s radical skepticism followed and then Kant’s response to Hume’s skepticism enchanted and bewitched philosophy. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger followed and outlined what can be called the post-modern stream of thought. It is this stream of thought which is most closely associated with the “post-truth’ society. Nietzsche weaponized the skepticism and turned it against the tradition of Western philosophy initiated by Socrates and Plato. All truths are a product of the will to power. In this view of things, the weak can shortcut the circuit of the strong through an ideology that celebrates and glorifies weakness.
Schopenhauer is a key figure in the turn towards Indian philosophy as an alternative world view that explains and gives an answer to the ‘problem of life’. The noumenon to which Kant referred, Schopenhauer claimed to be the ‘will’. We could know the will because we had direct access to it. We are the will. The will, however, leads us to desire something and when that desire is quenched, we want something else. The will leads us to unceasing desire that led to a sense of continual wanting, an unquenching thirst that produced unhappiness and boredom. Schopenhauer found that Indian thought had recognized this ‘existential’ problem and has solved it through what he thought was the suppression and eventual annihilation of the will. There are problems associated with Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Indian thought in this way. We will say more of this later. Sufficed to say, Schopenhauer’s final solution to the frustrating demands of the will was – annihilation of the will, what Nietzsche later called ‘decadence’ or ‘nihilism’.
Nietzsche was very much influenced by Schopenhauer early on but later repudiated his teaching of salvation through the annihilation of the will. It was this decadence, as Nietzsche puts it – the will preferring to will its own annihilation than not to will – that causes Nietzsche to seek a new answer. It was as a response to this ‘decadence’ that Nietzsche proposed the will to power as fundamental. The will to power is life. Life is more important than truth. Truth should be subservient to life. Truth should be therefore subservient to the will to power. In other words, truth should be sacrificed to the will to power in order that the will to power be justified as being above all things.
Schopenhauer by reducing noumenon to the will opens the way for Nietzsche’s move to put the will to power, “life”, above the annihilation of the will and his move to put the will to power above truth. Schopenhauer utilizes Indian philosophy to confirm or consolidate his ideas, but is Schopenhauer using Indian philosophy as it is understood in the tradition? Swami Vivekananda was one of the first to question Schopenhauer’s understanding of Indian philosophy. There is some confusion in Schopenhauer’s idea of the will. Is the will maya i.e., a false reality, or is it Brahman? If we negate the will to find salvation, then Brahman can’t be the will. Ayon Maharaj asks: “First, does Schopenhauer simply equate the will with Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself? Second, to what extent is Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the will compatible with Vedāntic philosophy, according to which the holy Ātman/Brahman is the noumenal essence of ourselves and the universe?…Moreover, Vivekananda reproaches Schopenhauer for misinterpreting Vedānta, which conceives the noumenal reality not as the evil will but as the transcendental Ātman/Brahman beyond all willing and suffering.”4 Schopenhauer therefore ultimately proposes that the will itself is noumenal reality, a position that is neither Vedantic nor Buddhist.
Ultimately there is a confusion between maya and Brahman, between atman and jiva, between moksha and bondage, Schopenhauer by his ambiguity makes it possible for Nietzsche to seize upon the annihilation of the will as salvation in Schopenhauer and to act as the high priest for life as the will to power, glorifying the will and downplaying the transcendence of the will. As Strauss will later exclaim, Nietzsche champions the devil while denying God 5The will to power alone exists. In Nietzsche’s view according to Strauss, the Devil exists, God does not. It is a tragic mistake for man, and it creates a culture where truth is subservient to the will to power, and humankind is returned to the cave in darkness and despair.
The genealogy of the post-truth society can be traced from Schopenhauer’s interpretation of Kant’s noumenon as the will, his misinterpretation of Indian philosophy’s concept of liberation or moksha as the annihilation of the will, Nietzsche’s correcting of Schopenhauer’s annihilation of the will by equating life to the will to power, thereby valuing will to power more than truth since Nietzsche is choosing will to power as fundamental to life and since truth is a function of the will to power.
Nietzsche has arrived then at that position where he can defend and turn back Socrates’ rebuttal of the “evil doctrine” of Callicles and Thrasymachus. Socrates rebuttal depended on his analysis of the “doctrine” showing that the proponents of the doctrine were interested in the final analysis in wielding a selfish power over those whom they were put in charge of. They were using their position of authority to aggrandize themselves at the expense of those they were in charge. Socrates, in other words, exposed them; stripped them of their masks. Nietzsche turned the argument around. Socrates, in this narrative, was the one who should be exposed; it was he who was wearing the mask. Will to power is life; the “evil doctrine” is a life-giving philosophy. Socrates wants to rob those who are empowered with life, of the source of their life.
But the weapon that Socrates wields is the scalpel of truth, the method of elenchus. Socrates uses the dialectical analytics of truth-seeking to uncover what he claims is the truth of what his opponent is saying. To Nietzsche, however, there is no objective truth, all statements are products of the will to power, so Socrates’ truth-seeking is suspect. It is an inauthentic act because it does not profess openly its will to power goal. Socrates truth-seeking is an attempt to disempower those who are authentically expressing themselves. Socrates’ attempt to disempower stems from weakness. Nietzsche claims it stems from his ugliness and all that it sociologically entails. Nietzsche thus turns the narrative around. Socrates is being false because he does not admit the will to power that lies behind his words. His opponents propose the will to power, even though it is disguised, as that which is behind their claims. Socrates in his attempt to uncover the “evil doctrine” just authenticates his opponents. In denying the existence of God while allowing the existence of evil, Nietzsche validates the “evil doctrine”. The Good simply does not exist in this narrative.
But is Nietzsche himself mutilating and distorting the truth? The will to power doctrine is itself suspect. Because if all truths are expressions of the will to power, then the will to power doctrine is itself also an expression of the will to power. It is the will to power trying to justify itself. The will to power doctrine is the “father of all lies”, it generates all lies since at the core of its assertion lies a duplicity. In this view of things, the will to power doctrine is generated by the will to power. It is therefore not a truth about reality, but merely a perspective that attempts to empower philosophically those who proclaim the will to power doctrine. Nietzsche himself falls victim to this logic. Socratic logic outmaneuvers him, the Socratic elenchus remains unscathed. In the post-truth society, however, reason and logic are thrown out, Nietzsche has lambasted reason and logic as the cause of the nihilism of Greek culture; Socratic rationalism – is the cause of the death of Greek culture. Nietzsche has clearly seen what he needs to banish and exile – Socratic rationalism. Ignorance and darkness overcome everything. We are back in the cave.
Endnotes
- Keynes, John Maynard. (1964) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, New York ch. 24, p. 383
- Plato. (1985) The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, p. 100
- Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest. New York: Bantam Books, p 168.
- Maharaj, Ayon. (2017) “Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic critique of Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Will”.
Philosophy East & West Volume 67, Number 4 October 2017 1191–1221 © 2017 by University of Hawai‘i Press https://philarchive.org/archive/MAHSVV pp 1191-1192
- Strauss, Leo. (1996) Note on a Plan of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Bibliography
Descartes, Rene. (1972) Discourse on Method and the Meditations. Translated by F.E. Sutcliffe. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Hume, David. (1968) A Treatise of Human Nature. ed. E.C. Mossner (originally published 1739) reprinted 1968.
Keynes, John Maynard (1964) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, New York: A Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers.
Lavine, T.Z. (1984) From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest. New York: Bantam Books.
Maharaj, Ayon. (2017) “Swami Vivekananda’s Vedantic Critique of Schopenhauer’s Doctrine of the Will”.
Philosophy East & West Volume 67, Number 4 October 2017 1191-1221 © 2017 by University of Hawai’i Press https://philarchive.org/archive/MAHSVV
Plato, (1985) The Republic, translated by Desmond Lee, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.
Strauss, Leo. (1996) Note on a Plan on Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil in Laurence Lampert, Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
The philosophy of Darryl Naranjit 