Truth and Truthfulness,
the final book by the late Bernard Williams, unsurprisingly houses a set of
arguments that explicitly and clear-headedly aim to defend the value of
truthfulness from what we could term (with apologies to Schliermacher) its
‘modern cultured despisers’ such as Richard Rorty and certain post-modernists
(Williams himself calls them ‘deniers’). In the process of doing so, the book,
it should immediately be mentioned, is impressively panoramic in its historical
scope: Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, Aquinas, Kant, Rousseau, and Diderot are
all engaged with during the involved course of the text. The first philosopher
to be cited by Williams, though, is Nietzsche, a detail that is actually
portentous inasmuch as the whole project of Truth and Truthfulness is
intentionally Nietzschean: ‘The problems that concern this book were
discovered, effectively, by Nietzsche.’ (p.12). It is telling in this regard that
the subtitle of Truth and Truthfulness — An Essay in Genealogy
— clearly and consciously alludes to what is arguably Nietzsche’s most
sustained and well organised text, 1887’s On the Genealogy of Morals.
Indeed, Williams very firmly states that he intends this ‘association to be
taken seriously.’ (p.13).

    Taking Williams at his word,
this is probably the right place to mention that his interpretive reading (and
subsequent absorption) of Nietzsche’s philosophical project with regard to
truth seemed to the present reviewer to be, for the most part, broadly correct.
Thus, Williams is right to point out that Nietzsche certainly isn’t a
pragmatist when it comes to truth (p.16). It also seems correct to say that the
Nietzschean method — ‘Genealogy’ — is thoroughly naturalistic in its method
and in its results (p.22: it may be remembered here that Nietzsche himself
referred to his project in the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals
as ‘a piece of animal psychology (Tierpsychologie), nothing more’). And
it is doubtless further the case that Nietzsche himself, as Williams puts it,
‘often calls on honesty and intellectual conscience.’ (p.13). This, however, is
where one intricate problem with Williams’s Nietzsche-interpretation that I
should now like to mention arises.

    Williams states that
Nietzsche’s aim, like that of Truth and Truthfulness itself, was ‘to see
how the values of truth could be revalued’ (p18). Williams thus enrols
Nietzsche as an ancestor of his own project and not that of postmodernism. Yet
a supposed attachment to truth on Nietzsche’s part seems to be contradicted by
certain notes and remarks by Nietzsche, such as this one: ‘reverence for truth
is already the consequence of an illusion’ [#602 in the collection, The Will
to Power. Many similar remarks are made in the works that he published
during his lifetime]. We must, however, acknowledge that this isn’t, by itself,
necessarily a contradiction of Williams’s account because one can adopt
procedures or practices (in this case, truthfulness) without necessarily
accommodating oneself to the particular goals those procedures normally take
themselves to be guided by (up to now: an uncritical attachment to Truth for
its own sake). Nietzsche, on Williams’s reading, sees only the traditional
way of ascribing value to truth to be an illusion and so revalues it in a new
way. Support for such a view as this can be located in the Untimely
Meditations, where Nietzsche wrote that: ‘We need history, certainly, yet
we need it for reasons different from those for which the loafer in the garden
of knowledge needs it’.

    So far, then, nothing seems
to contradict the precise letter of Williams’s account of Nietzsche on truth:
Nietzsche (like Williams) values truth, but he supposedly does so for different
and less uncritical reasons than others (such as Plato and Schopenhauer, his
main stalking-horses) have hitherto. Yet it should be recognized at this point
that in fact Nietzsche, contra the interpretation by Williams in Truth and
Truthfulness, was not always truthful in his published work This is
possibly most obviously the case in what purports to be Nietzsche’s
autobiography, Ecce Homo, a text which, Nietzsche scholars have often
noted, is full of quite deliberate falsehoods. (One thinks, for example, of
Nietzsche’s claim to be the descendent of Polish nobility.) But other texts by
Nietzsche are heavily misleading, too (not least the retrospective preface to
the Birth of Tragedy). Williams chides the ‘deconstructive’ interpreters
of Nietzsche for overlooking Nietzsche’s commitment to honesty, and Williams
himself confidently offers a timely corrective to this view. However, as a
truthful reading of Nietzsche on valuing truth, Williams’s interpretation is
one that, this reviewer suspects, will, in time, itself require substantial
correction. After all, lies on Nietzsche’s part would not seem to be the
logical outcome of a re-justification of truth, which is how Williams sees
Nietzsche’s project. And nor, in fact, do they seem consistent with the supposedly
scientifically-continuous naturalistic methods Nietzsche sometimes espoused.
Even our understanding of Nietzsche naturalism, then, needs to be nuanced.

    Turning away now from the
intricacies of his interpretation of Nietzsche on truth, Williams’s own
‘imaginary genealogy’ in Truth and Truthfulness tries to detail the
function of truth (p32; we are explicitly warned against expecting a definition
of truth on p.63). He very convincingly sees two basic virtues of truth:
accuracy (in telling the true from the false) and sincerity (in telling what we
believe to be true to other people) (p44.) Using the familiar and explicitly
fictional (p.30) philosophical conceit of a state of nature, Williams argues
that accuracy and sincerity would be essential to the pooling of information,
itself an activity important ‘to almost every human purpose’ (p.57). Thus truth
is arguably proved valuable by being necessary for various already valued human
activities: ‘The virtues of truth aren’t conventional fetishes of academic
theorizing.’ (p.11.) (Williams’ argument here might be fruitfully compared with
the argument in favor of the value of truth advanced by Simon May in Nietzsche’s
Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).) Later
chapters of Truth and Truthfulness then examine accuracy and sincerity,
the two basic virtues of truth, in more detail. A particular development of
accuracy is charted in a chapter which suggests that our modern way of thinking
about the past is radically different to a certain primitive way of conceiving
of past time, which has implications for what it means to tell the truth about
the past. A further chapter then notes and glosses a peculiarly modern
extension of sincerity: that of authenticity.

    This review has, of course,
only offered but a flavor of what awaits the reader of Truth and
Truthfulness: a well-written, concise, strongly historically informed work
written by one of the key thinkers of Twentieth century Anglophone philosophy.
Philosophically informed readers will perhaps have expected nothing less. It
also, I think, effectively explains the virtues of truth telling to a
non-specialist audience. Consequently, those at all interested in the issue of
defending truth in the humanities; in the wider value of truth in our culture;
in the strength or otherwise of the position of deconstructionists and
pragmatists (Williams’s ‘deniers’); in the way that ancient peoples understood
the past; in the way history can inform the discipline of philosophy; and those
simply interested in what a major British philosopher has recently had to say,
should all find this book to be of enormous value. It certainly couldn’t have
been written by anyone else.

© 2005
Matthew Ray

 Matthew
Ray, Bristol, UK

Categories: Philosophical