From the 21st to the 30th of May 2018 we meet in Bern to discuss and formulate our conception of what we refer to as “truth”. The term is probably one of the most fundamental in philosophy and has seen a lot of dedication throughout the history of humanity. This said, it was not our aim to come to a fully convincing conclusion of that term, but rather narrow down a couple of question that we would like to pursue in our project.

In order to do so, we picked several sources on that matter and tried to elicit our core interest in them. Some of them will be discussed here. In this post we do not want to discuss all intricacies of the term “truth” but rather summarize our latest questions in regard to this topic.

Ferdinand de Saussure: Course in General Linguistics (1916, posthum)

If “truth” can be told, then truth is subject to language. Language can be separated into three different domains according to Ferdinand de Saussure, founder of what has later become Structuralism:

  • langage: the human capability of using language

  • langue: the system of language

  • parole: the usage of language

Saussure’s work mainly focuses on langue, and one fundamental question he asks is the following: What is the relationship between what we call something and the something itself? What is the relationship between a tree and “tree”? And why is the same thing called “Baum”, “arbre” etc. in other languages?

He first goes out to name the two parts, the thing that is to be named is called “signified”, and the thing that calls is the “signifier”. Together they form the linguistic sign. There is – and that is one of his fundamental understandings – no natural connection between the two. Their relation is what he calls arbitrary.

A second important point, which has later been famously reiterated in Jacques Derrida’s idea of differance (correct French would spell it difference), is that it is impossible to denominate the meaning of the signifier positively. As an example: Try to explain the colour yellow. To make things more complicated – where does yellow begin and end? In fact, the only way of defining what yellow is, is to say what it is not. Using a colour spectrum you can draw two lines, separating yellow from all that it is not.

On this basis, we argue that truth works in a similar fashion:

  1. What we perceive as truth has no natural connection to the world. It is dependant on the words we use to describe it. Truth is a matter of defining what we see and perceive in the world and its connection to what we say about it as true.

  2. It follows from the first point that the words we use to describe the world matter. What we perceive as truth is therefore a matter of words used to describe it. A battle over words is always a battle over truths.

This left us with the following questions:

What are the main defining words that denominate different perceptions of truth? Can we find relevant pairs of words that highlight those differences (i.e. “refugee crisis” vs. “humanity crisis”, the former putting the blame on the refugees, the latter highlighting the problematic reaction of Europe to cope with the situation).

Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization (1960)

After Saussure we shifted our attention to Michel Foucault, mainly to the foreword of Madness and Civilization. Foucault’s work later emphasized the power of the discourse, its power on organizing the perception of the world (see also the term epistemology), which is also – even though not explicit – present in his first publication.

What he is curious about here is a shift in how society related to the speech of those that it perceived as being mad. He argues that before the Enlightenment the speech of those who “were mad” was not dismissed but seen as an equivalent voice in the overall discourse. At some point, however, the mad were perceived as something sick, they were detained in medical institutions, and given special treatments. From this point on, society did not talk to the mad anymore, but about them. Whatever the mad would say was not relevant anymore, they became the object of a rational discourse.

This separation is important (and it also brings us back to Saussure). Only by differentiating between a discourse of the mad and a rational discourse, the idea of a rational truth could be created. The discourse needed to shut down some voices in order to highlight others, and the authority of what was regarded as a true statement lay solely within those that were part of the rational discourse. That is the power of the discourse: defining what can be seen as true and what not.

The question we formulated from this line of thinking was:

Do we need the untrue in order to formulate something as true?

Yuval Noah Harari: Homo Deus (2015)

Our attention was caught by the fourth chapter of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus. He first goes on to establish a category that differentiates human beings from animals (again, Saussure’s fundamentals are present here): intersubjectivity. He uses the term differently than it is commonly used (that it is a subjective truth that can be understood even though one doesn’t agree). He argues that human beings are capable of creating inter-subjective entities that do not exist in the material world but are still shared as common ground among a certain group of people: gods, enterprises, institutions, nation states. And we are even more than capable of creating them, we need them. Collective cooperation on a big scale, Harari claims, is only possible if we have these intersubjective entities.

Those intersubjective entities are important as they build narratives that enable cooperation of many human beings towards a shared goal. This makes sense if one thinks for example of the events that led to the first World War in which Europe was caught in the narrative of the national state. Many people believed in their home country and were eager to go to war in order to show its greatness to the rest of the world. Even though there had been an overall narrative for Europe (“the national state is great”), its particular interpretations were different (“Germany is the greatest”, “Britain is the greatest” etc.) – these small differences in interpreting the same narrative had, as we all know, devastating effects.

The question that arose here was:

If truth is only understandable through the narratives of intersubjective entities, what are the main narratives of today?