Where the Truth Lies

With all the claims of lying, fake news, fraud and worse during the latest presidential election and its contentious aftermath, I was reminded of an argument visited many years ago to the effect that truth has been historically overrated and falsehood has had an unfair press. More particularly, lying is said not to be an “artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life”; on the contrary, deceitfulness is said to be a kind of ethic, small lies serving nature’s larger truth. The value of truth, according to no less an authority than Nietzsche, “must be measured by the extent to which it promotes the flourishing of life.” Consequently, “lying is more natural than truth.” Reaching even further, the theory goes that fibbing infiltrates even the heights of the human spirit (as in art), and necessarily so; for without art, “with its telling of beautiful, untrue things,” we could not bear to live.

The notion that there exists some knowable, objective or fundamental truth is completely dismissed, as the argument goes. And another idea — which I think I have rather naively embraced for some time, and still do today after more careful thought — that there is a fundamental attunement between the human mind and the intelligence inherent in the universe, or that there is a kind of reason or mindfulness in nature on the same wavelength as human thought and understanding, is likewise derided. Citations to, and quotations from, the likes of  Kant (for whom the true nature of things is hidden from the mind that can know only a universe of its own making), Freud and back to Nietzsche (for whom “all our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on a text which is unknown, perhaps unknowable”) added formidable strength to the theory that no such truth exists in the universe. Even science is said to be merely a set of discourses legitimized by institutional approval and, according to Richard Rorty (unknown to me, but probably someone important), no more in touch with the truth of nature than astrology or literary criticism.

I came away somewhat beaten down but nevertheless thinking that, if you demonstrate conclusively that the truth about truth is that it is not really true, then haven’t you disproved your own theory, since the critique of truth must itself be unreliable, if not simply false.