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First published 2013
This edition published 2016
Copyright © John D. Caputo, 2013
Cover photograph: Piccadilly Line by Wolfgang Tillmans
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-241-96088-2
Introduction: Truth on the Go
1. Modernity and the Eclipse of Truth
2. What Do We Do with Religious Truth?
3. Letting Truth Be: Augustine, Derrida and the Postmodern Turn
4. The Enlightenment and Its Critics: A Short History
5. Postmodern Prophets
6. Truth in the Postmodern Situation
7. The Future of Truth
Notes
Suggestions for Further Reading
Acknowledgements
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PENGUIN BOOKS
John D. Caputo is a specialist in contemporary hermeneutics and deconstruction with a special interest in religion in the postmodern condition. The Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus at Syracuse University and the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Villanova University, he has spearheaded an idea he calls ‘weak theology’.
My thanks to my editors at Penguin, Helen Conford and Ananda Pellerin, who invited me to be a part of this series and who have at every turn in the preparation of this manuscript taken great pains to save me from myself. In the past, I have mostly tried to take the starch out of a too-rigid idea of truth, but they have given me an opportunity to speak in the affirmative about truth, to say if not what it ‘is’, at least what it does, what is happening in this little word.
Riding to work in the morning has become pretty pedestrian. Well, not exactly pedestrian, because pedestrians are walkers and we don’t walk. But it has become commonplace. We ride everywhere. Doctors and public health officials plead with us to get out and walk, to get some exercise because of our increasingly sedentary lives. Sedentary, on the other hand, does not mean we stay in one place. On the contrary, sedentary means that even when we’re not sitting in front of a computer, even when we’re on the go we’re still seated – in cars, trains, planes – and with our laptops in tow. People used to live within walking distance of the fields in which they worked, or they worked in shops attached to their homes. Now we ride to work, and nearly everywhere else, and we’re always on the go. Which may seem an innocent enough point, and certainly not one on which we require instruction from the philosophers. But, truth be told, it has in fact precipitated a crisis in our understanding of truth.
In the past the philosophers, like everyone else, tended to stay close to home. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant (one of the names on everybody’s short list of great philosophers) was famous for having never left Königsberg. That made life simpler for him and gave him the idea that the way things were done in Königsberg was the way they were, or ought to be, done everywhere, and that where there were differences, the differences were variations on what male German philosophers thought was true. Kant read the travel literature of the day, journals kept by ships’ captains, but he never saw the inside of a ship. He was also a leader of the Enlightenment, which emphasized the Universal standards of Pure Reason. But the problem for Kant was that ‘universal’ had a way of collapsing into ‘European’, while ‘pure’ tended to mean never having met anyone else.
Nowadays we don’t need to live within walking distance of where we work, and we can go almost anywhere we want if we have the money for the trip. We can fly like birds and visit other countries, cross oceans, not to mention the extraordinary amount of travelling we do through the media and the internet which bring other people and other places to us even when we stay home. We can be almost anywhere at any time, and the faster the trip, the better. The Instant Message has become the ideal: getting where you want to go in the blink of an eye and at the speed of thought itself. That’s actually how the angels travel in heaven, or so we’re told by those who claim to know such things. The angels, we read in the Bible, ran a kind of instant messaging service for God in the days before the Most High could have used email or a smartphone. Instant messaging, instant travel, instant meals – where will it end? And where are we going, anyway? Does anybody know the name of the last stop, or the one right before the last one so we can have some warning? Does anybody even know how to get off the train?
None of this may seem to have anything to do with truth, but in truth, this non-stop travel has created a crisis in our most treasured verities. Contemporary life, which is marked by modern transportation systems in which we can travel almost anywhere, and modern information systems, through which almost anything can travel to us, is much more pluralistic than life in the past. We are more exposed to others and others to us. We have a robust sense that life is not confined to Königsberg – or Kansas – and that the world is a very diverse and pluriform place. This has resulted in ideas about open-ended rainbow cultures rather than monochromic pure ones. But it has also created trouble. On the one hand it has created social strife, arising from an influx of peoples into the wealthier nations in search of a better life, as well as the exploitation of the poorer countries by the wealthier ones on the global market. Kant, to his credit, saw some of this coming, and addressed it under the name of ‘cosmopolitanism’, treating visitors as citizens of the cosmos, of the world, which is an excellent point, especially coming from someone who didn’t get around much. On the other hand, contemporary life has created problems for philosophers, as all this pluralism threatens a veritable vertigo when it comes to truth, and that vertigo is called postmodernism.
Postmodern culture is the globalized, multicultural, high-tech world in which we live. We can travel almost anywhere, see just about anything on television or a laptop, and see and talk to people on the other side of the world without leaving our seat – and if it started in the western industrialized countries, it is gradually spreading around the globe today. This induces a rather different frame of mind than if we had spent our entire life in Königsberg (or Kansas). Given the unremitting exposure of life in a high-tech world to the tremendous variety of cultures and lifestyles which contemporary travellers see and visit, or which visit them, they have developed a heightened sense of ‘difference’. Difference is a buzz word for postmodernity just the way ‘universal’ was for modernity, a word that I will use throughout to signify the Enlightenment, the age of Reason that first emerged in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and which subsequently shaped the contemporary world of science, technology and civil liberties. Universal is a modern motif, difference is a postmodern one. Modernists tended to think the whole was a system unified by a central power (God, if you still went to church, nature, if you didn’t) where all the clocks and trains ran on time. Postmodernists tend to think things hang together laterally, linked up like a web, say, a world wide web, where it makes no sense to speak of who is in control or even of where it begins or ends. How do you get to the ‘end’ of the www? Modernists prefer the abstract lines of Google Map; postmodernists prefer the loosey-goosey terrains of Google Earth. Modernists think things are rule-bound and mathematical; postmodernists appreciate the irregular and ‘chaosmic’, to borrow a felicitous neologism from James Joyce, meaning a judicious mix of chaos and cosmos. The postmodern ideal would be ‘chaosmopolitanism’. This postmodern effect even showed up in physics, when the paradoxes of Relativity and Quantum Theory replaced the regularities of Newtonianism, and in mathematics, when Kurt Gödel unnerved classical mathematicians with his undecidability theorems in 1931.
What then, in brief, is the postmodern, not as a culture, but as a mode of thought? To begin with, the ‘post’ does not mean anything anti-modern or reactionary against the advances made in modernity, nor some attempt (always futile and nostalgic) to take flight to the premodern. The best way to think of postmodern thought is as a style, rather than as a body of doctrines; it is an inflection or alteration that continues the ‘project’ of modernity, but by other means. Where modernity thinks there are pure rules and a rigorous method – in ethics as well as in science – postmodernity advises flexibility and adaptability. Where modernity thinks that things divide into rigorously separate categories, like reason and emotion, postmodernity thinks that these borders are porous, and that each side bleeds into the other. Where modernists look for the one big story that covers all phenomena – like all of human history – postmodernists express what Jean-François Lyotard (1924–98) called ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’, which became the most familiar definition of postmodernism.1 This means a refusal to be taken in by big, overarching accounts, as if there was only one really big story to tell about human behaviour (sex, power, God, etc.). Where modernity favours the universal, postmodernists savour the singular and idiosyncratic. Modernists do not welcome exceptions to their rules; postmodernists think that the exception is the engine of creativity and the occasion on which the system can reinvent itself. Where modernists seek certitude, postmodernists see the salutary effects of a healthy scepticism. If we take the particular example of language, which is one of the places in which the postmodern critique of modernism broke out, the ‘structuralists’ (modernists) put their heart into designing a deep grammar of the universal laws governing any possible language while phenomena like metaphors and metonymies, which stretch and bend the rules in unexpected and non-programmable ways, stole the heart of the ‘poststructuralists’ (postmodernists).
So if you ask postmodernists, ‘What is truth?’ they are likely to squint and say, ‘It depends.’ Postmodernists tend to be a bit incredulous that there is just one thing called truth which is always and everywhere the same, and are more inclined to think there are a lot of different truths, depending on who and where you are; they are inclined to play it loose. Herein lies the problem. Playing it too loose with truth is called relativism – a point that we will want to keep in mind throughout. Relativism means there is no Truth, just a lot of competing truths, depending on your language, culture, gender, religion, needs, tastes, etc., and one is as good as another. Who can say what is true? Who has the authority to pronounce on that? So the critics of postmodernism fear the worst: relativism, scepticism, nihilism, flat out anarchy. And, truth to tell, a lot of postmodern philosophers have created this impression because they have spent their time trying to take the air out of Truth. In the late nineteenth century, Nietzsche (one of postmodernism’s patron saints) said Truth was an ensemble of fictions and metaphors that we had forgotten are fictions and metaphors. More recently, the highly influential philosopher Richard Rorty (1931–2007) said truth was merely a compliment we pay ourselves when things are going well with our beliefs. He was an American, and a pragmatist. But maybe you already guessed that. Classical philosophers, especially Germans, love to capitalize Truth (of course the Germans capitalize all their nouns), while postmodernists generally avoid the upper case.
All this because we ride to work! Thus our transportation technologies are not merely transient phenomena; they are the vehicle for an important metaphor about postmodernism. In fact, these vehicles are not merely metaphors for postmodernism; they are important parts of life in a postmodern world. In other words, contemporary transportation systems do not merely cause traffic jams, they also jam our idea of truth. The fact that we can go anywhere tempts us to think that anything goes. ‘Anything goes’, which is a way to condense the threat that postmodernist thinking poses, is a temptation brought on by postmodern transportation and information systems. The postmodern situation is to be de-situated, uprooted, on the go. Every time we take a ride on a train, or an aeroplane, or make a virtual visit to some far-off place on a computer, we set off a crisis in truth. Truths, as Jane Austen wisely pointed out, are supposed to be ‘universally acknowledged’. But today, the only universality we recognize is diversity. The only thing we seem to have in common is that we’re all different. If someone invokes the power of Reason nowadays, postmodernists wrinkle their brows and ask, ‘Whose reason? Which rationality?’ If someone says ‘we think’, postmodernists ask ‘we who?’ Well, it depends on who you are and where you’re going. So the problem we have on our hands – and it’s a good one to read about on a long journey – is what ‘universal’ means in a postmodern world, and what ‘truth’ means where our first thought is that everyone’s truth is entitled to its own fifteen minutes in the sun.2
Relativism is the main threat to truth that is posed by the postmodernists, just as absolutism is the main threat posed by modernism. In what follows I hope to dodge both these bullets, each of which I regard as dead ends. I will argue that absolutism is a kind of intellectual blackmail, while relativism, which is widely mistaken to be the postmodern theory of truth, is in fact a failure to come up with a theory. Relativism renders us unable to say that anything is wrong, but absolutism confuses us with God. Unbridled relativism means that anything at all could be taken to be true, and then we’re left standing at the station, holding the bag of ‘anything goes’. This isn’t chaosmic, it’s just chaos. If anything goes, how will you ever be able to say anything is false? Why not just say things are different? How about ‘2 + 2 = 5’? How would you be able to object to lying and cheating? How about people who swindle the elderly out of their life savings? The list goes on. So, fond as we are of travelling hither and yon, Anything Goes is one of those places we don’t want to go.
I am very fond of travel, but at the same time I want to see to it that we do not simply run off the tracks. I will defend the plurivocity, ambiguity and non-programmability of truth while also defending the right to say that some things are not just different, they’re wrong, and this without embracing the no less mistaken idea of absolutism. So let me go on record right at the start of the trip. I pledge my troth to the breakthrough made by the Enlightenment. It liberated us from the Church, superstition and royal lines of authority and replaced them with civil liberties, scientific research and technological advancements. I have no interest in simply opposing Enlightenment. But I do think the old Enlightenment has done all the good it is going to do and we now need a new one, not an anti-Enlightenment but a new Enlightenment. We have to board the train for the next station, to continue the Enlightenment by other means – to be enlightened about Enlightenment – to appreciate how much more non-programmable and inexact things really are. The idea is not to put out the light of the Enlightenment but to put out a new, revised edition by complicating its Pure Light with shadows, shades, greys, black holes and other unexpected nuances and complications. This even entails renouncing the title of my book, Truth, and breaking the bad news to readers that there is no such thing. Instead there are truths – many of them, in the plural and lower case. There is no such thing as Reason (as it was understood by the Enlightenment at least), but there are good reasons and bad ones. I want to defend all of this – and this is the challenge – while not ending us all up in the Relativist ditch of ‘anything goes’.
The problem is that, when it comes to truth, all this movement has produced a kind of motion sickness. The more mobile life is, the more likely we are to suspect what we previously considered true was provincial, what they think back where we grew up, part of the local colour of our original location, which gets ‘relativized’ the more we are on the move. You might say that over the course of time we have begun to appreciate the course of time, to appreciate that things are constantly in motion, and by ‘things’ I mean everything. Aristotle assumed everything was at rest unless something moved it. Newton assumed everything was in motion unless something stopped it. We have gradually come to realize that everything is going somewhere. Everything is on a trip – all of the time.
In the past, when everyone lived within walking distance of where they worked, people led very settled lives, staying relatively put, and thinking of the earth as terra firma, planted firmly at the centre of the universe. To be sure, there were trade routes and communication between distant places, but they were slow and immensely difficult. Nowadays we realize the earth is in motion, so that even when we stand very still, or lie flat on our backs, we are still riding on Spaceship Earth as it circulates around the sun and rotates on its axis. We have managed to travel to the moon, to land a rover called Curiosity on Mars, and to staff satellites that circle the planet, even as our science fiction writers routinely imagine travel to galaxies far, far away. And that’s just the beginning. The horizon keeps expanding in increasing orders of magnitude, not only in our imaginations but in our mathematical calculations. According to contemporary physics, as we sail through space on Spaceship Earth (which is but a tiny speck of cosmic dust), everything in the universe is speeding away from us at an ever-increasing velocity, which will eventually result in an infinitely expanded, utterly expended, cold, dark and dead universe. That’s the last stop.
In the end, we are all living in the midst of an explosion of unimaginable proportions. According to the physicists, the really big trip, the journey of all journeys, started fourteen billion years back at the Big Bang, when an unimaginably concentrated point of energy burst and began to expand explosively until, at some point in the future, the universe will reach the last station in entropic dissipation. That relativizes everything! It makes Kansas, Königsberg, our entire civilization, Spaceship Earth, our solar system purely local and transient phenomena. ‘Provincial’ on a cosmic scale. What good will fine words like Truth do us then? What we call Truth will be like a day lily; here today and gone tomorrow. We will all have spoken dead languages and all our lives will have turned out to be dead ends.
In the long run, the really long one, what difference will it make where you’re trying to get to this morning? This is a thoroughly paralysing thought if you let it get the better of you. If you dwell on it long enough, you’ll find it hard to get out of bed in the morning to go anywhere. So it’s clear I’m going to need all the help I can get if I want to stay on the move. To this end I will call upon Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81), one of the great figures in the Enlightenment, who didn’t know anything about our postmodern condition, but who said something enlightening for our times, something that will steer us around the choppy waters of absolutism and relativism. Lessing offers us some sage advice in terms of reducing our expectations and trimming our sails to the winds of space and time. He said that if God held out the truth in his right hand and the search for truth in his left hand and asked him to choose, he would select the left hand, on the grounds that the absolute truth itself was for God alone, while his own business was the search for truth.3 On the face of it this looks like a huge missed opportunity. After all, how many times do we get an offer like that? It sounds like asking someone, would you rather ride a train for ever, never reaching your destination, or would you prefer to get where you are going? It makes no sense. The sum of Lessing’s wisdom seems to be: spend your time running around and don’t worry about getting anywhere. The man was obviously not worried about getting to work in the morning.
But let’s get off the train and switch the analogy. Let’s suppose it’s the weekend and we have decided to follow our doctor’s advice and go out to do some jogging, when some friends in a passing car offer us a ride to wherever we are going. It is a very kind offer, to be sure, but accepting it would rather miss our purpose. We are not actually going anywhere. Or at least, it’s the going that matters, not the destination. Now we see a little better what’s on Lessing’s mind. Truth, our philosopher is saying, is more like jogging, maybe not for God, but for the rest of us, who have to negotiate the challenges posed by getting around in space and time.
You don’t have to actually believe in God to get Lessing’s point. You can simply treat God as an ideal limit point, whether or not you think there really is a Divinity up there overseeing all this traffic down below. Although the local theologian will consider this an odd way to put it, it will serve the present purpose if we say that by God we mean the one being who does not need to worry about transportation. That is because God – at least this is what we are told – is everywhere. That means that God knows things full blast, everything, everywhere, and all at once. We sublunary beings down below, on the other hand, have to take our truths one at a time, depending on the where and the when (the language, culture, gender, body, etc.) in which we find ourselves. We are always ‘situated’, and that situation imposes a limit on us; but that limit also gives us an angle of entry, an approach, a perspective, an interpretation. God doesn’t need an angle, but we do. Having an angle is the way truths open up for us mortals. The opposite of having an angle on things is a dumb look, just staring at things uncomprehendingly, like the look I’ve seen on the faces of students who cannot come up with an angle for their research papers. So Lessing is really saying that when it comes to truth, our job is to cultivate the art of interpretation, which is what philosophers nowadays call hermeneutics.
Originally, the word hermeneutics was a theological one, having to do with the interpretation of the Scriptures. But what we today mean by hermeneutics is a more general theory, that every truth is a function of interpretation, and the need for interpretation is a function of being situated in a particular time and place, and therefore of having certain inherited presuppositions. This is something of which we have been made acutely aware by modern transportation and information systems, by virtue of which we are constantly being barraged by a multiplicity of perspectives. Whatever truth means for us – in our postmodern situation – is a function of hermeneutics, of learning to adjudicate; of dealing with difference judiciously.
This brings out something else about what Lessing was saying. Hermeneutics is based on the idea that there are truths big and small, some crucially important, others not so much, truths of different kinds, levels and purposes, all depending on our hermeneutic situation. Lessing was, as is the wont of philosophers, talking about a kind of long-term truth. He was not thinking about getting to his office in time for an appointment. His point was that in the long run, when it comes to truth, it’s the seeking that matters, the earnestness of the search, the effort we put into it, the way we go about it, rather more than the conclusion. The journey is more important than the destination.
After all, as we have just seen, in the long run we’re all dead. Sometimes we do need to get where we’re going, and sometimes we’d rather not. Sometimes we need to get to our terminal and sometimes, as when the doctor pronounces this a terminal condition, we’d rather not. But then again, that was Lessing’s point. We are finite creatures and we have to try to see how these multiple and competing truths can peacefully cohabit without throwing us into chaos. That means we have to try not to act like God, which is good advice in other situations as well (and which for some of us is surprisingly difficult). That means we should not lay claim to One Big Truth and allow it to intimidate all the others. God might be able to pull that off, but we can’t.
Hermeneutics is the art of negotiating multiple finite, lower-case truths, coping with the shifting tides and circumstances of truth while not allowing any eight-hundred-pound gorillas into the room. In the past, before the Enlightenment, the overweight primate was theology. In the Middle Ages (and not just then), if someone said, ‘The Church teaches …’ that tended to reduce everyone in the room to silence. But if ever there were a candidate for a Big Truth nowadays, it is science. Science is our gorilla. Whenever anyone says, ‘Science says …’ we tend to think the conversation is over. So we postmodern hermeneuts must be as bold as brass and be willing to stand up both to bishops and to physicists, or, to be more precise, to the way that some religious people misuse God, and Enlightenment types misuse physics. Even what the physicists call the ‘Theory of Everything’, the famous TOE, is but one theory. It is ‘of’ everything, of course, but it itself is not everything, since there is more to life than physics, and we need all kinds of theories.
Nonetheless, the big TOE raises a big problem which pits it against religion as a pretender to the throne previously occupied by religion. It also reveals an interesting comparison between religion and science. They both hold that over and beyond the everyday world we live in, the buzzing, blooming, noisy multicoloured world we experience, there lies the ‘true’ world, and consequently they are inclined to take each other on about which true world is really true. For the one, the true world is delivered by mathematics; for the other, it is delivered by Revelation. The contribution hermeneutics makes to this debate is that, when it comes to truth, there are many ways to be, and we have to keep an eye out for One Hegemonic Discourse (a bully) in the crowd who claims to know it all and to be able to identify the True World. Whether confronted with theology or science, the trick is to remember Lessing’s advice about not confusing ourselves with God. Physicists could very well come up with something to say about everything, and theologians might even get something right about God, but that doesn’t make anyone God. It just gives them an angle, a slant, an interpretation, and we need all the angles we can take, as many ways to approach truth as possible, as many truths as possible without falling for the lure of something called Truth, capitalized and in the singular, or suffering the illusion that it is we who get to tell truth what to do.
As I will try to show in what follows, the task of a hermeneutic or postmodern theory of truth is to stay on track with the chaosmic play of multiple and competing interpretations of the world. ‘Truth claims’ come flying at us from all directions – science, ethics, politics, art and religion – and we need to be able to dodge speeding taxis and to deal with all the complexity and confusion of postmodern traffic. The art is to stay on the move with the moving, which is the peculiarly postmodern accent we put on what the ancients called wisdom (sophia), of which they professed to be lovers (philia) – and on this point we postmoderns also want to be as wise as the ancients, which (as I will show) demands an idea of truth that is nimble on its feet. If truth, as Nietzsche said, is a mobile army of metaphors, we hermeneuts march behind a flag that reads ‘Mutatis Mutandis’ (we need a Latin motto), ‘changing with the changed’. Hermeneutics is cut out to fit this high-tech world of instant messages flying and twittering all around the globe like little postmodern angels (angelos, messenger) and of postmodern travellers rushing hither and yon, in planes, trains and automobiles (eventually, perhaps, in space ships), with global positioning systems at the ready (eventually, perhaps, implanted in their brains). Whither we are going we cannot quite say, or why. But we postmodernists don’t treat this confusion with nostalgia for a more peaceful time when we worked our fields and looked up wistfully at the birds above, dreaming of being able to fly. We can fly, and we can send messages as swiftly as Gabriel could sweep across the skies.
Perhaps, as Lessing is suggesting, it’s not the destination that matters but the quality of the trip. Perhaps the trip is the destination.
So think of this book as a guided tour you have been enticed to sign up for, a pause from your busy postmodern life, where you are promised nothing less than truth. We will be visiting the three basic models of truth: the premodern idea that God is truth; the modern idea that Reason judges what is true; and the postmodern idea of truth as an event, where neither God nor Reason enjoy pride of place. But be forewarned: the tour closes with a question, not an answer, and there are no refunds on the price of your ticket.