10.13135/2036-542X/7583
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Jeff Malpas
Trópos
Ethics and the Commitment to Truth
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Monografica
2023-05-21
2023-05-21
2009-04-01
2023-05-21
19-32
1
Jeff Malpas
2009
10.13135/2036-542X/7583
19
University of Tasmania
2036-542X
1
en
32
Ethics and the Commitment to Truth
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/7583/6408
2
                     Ethics
          and the Commitment to Trouth
                                    Jeff Malpas




ABSTRACT: Le società contemporanee hanno un carattere essenzialmente plurali-
  sta – esse sono fatte di una molteplicità di etnie, linguaggi e culture. Un tale plu-
  ralismo è senza dubbio uno dei fattori che hanno favorito la diffusa tendenza a
  ritenere i concetti di verità e di etica come irrilevanti o relativistici. Non possia-
  mo però abbandonare né l’impegno etico né l’idea che in tale impegno dobbia-
  mo guardare al di là delle nostre preferenze e convinzioni. L’impegno etico è es-
  so stesso legato all’impegno per la verità, poiché l’impegno per la verità compor-
  ta non solo un riconoscimento delle pretese che noi stessi avanziamo nei con-
  fronti del mondo, ma anche delle pretese che il mondo ha nei nostri confronti.
  La verità richiede lo stesso riconoscimento e la stessa responsabilità nei confron-
  ti dell’altro che è al cuore dell’etica. Più che essere in conflitto con la pluralità,
  l’impegno per la verità e per l’etica è fondamentale per una reale possibilità del-
  la pluralità, così come per la possibilità di ogni politica propriamente democrati-
  ca. Lavorare a un’appropriata considerazione della verità e dell’etica è dunque un
  compito significativo per la filosofia contemporanea: quel che qui si è cercato di
  fare è schizzarne le linee generali.
  KEY WORDS: truth, ethics, pluralism, dialogue.




1. Contemporary western societies, one might even say contemporary soci-
eties as such, are essentially pluralist in character – they are made up of a mul-
tiplicity of ethnicities, languages and cultures. Nowhere is this more evident
than in Australia, perhaps the most multi-cultural society in the world, but it
is also particularly apparent in many European countries including the Uni-
ted Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy, as well as the United States. Such
plurality and multiplicity is unlikely to be much diminished by moves over
recent years, in the United Kingdom and in Australia, to impose some basic
level of cultural uniformity through various forms of citizenship education or
examination.


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                                    Jeff Malpas

    The pluralistic character of modern societies is undoubtedly connected to,
although not wholly responsible for, a widespread tendency to view certain
key concepts, notably concepts of truth as well as of ethics, as lacking any uni-
versalist application. Ethical and evaluative commitment, for instance, is of-
ten seen as dependent on communal or societal convention, while what
counts as true is seen to vary with culture, discourse and language. Even many
liberal thinkers of a more traditionalist bent, while rejecting any explicit rela-
tivisation, have reacted to the fact of societal pluralism by arguing for the im-
portance of adopting a position of ethical and evaluative neutrality that effec-
tively excludes issues concerning the truth of ethical or evaluative statements
from the realm of the political. More radically, there are also some, including
the late Richard Rorty, but also Gianni Vattimo, who view the very concept
of truth as problematic and even dangerous, urging its abandonment in favour
of a more open concept of conversational engagement.
    Yet to what extent is any properly human engagement possible at all –
even the engagement that consists in the leaving open of a space for others –
without commitment, at some level and in some form, to an engagement
with respect to questions of ethics and of truth? Surely one of the challenges
of the contemporary world is indeed to articulate a sense of the ethical, and a
sense of truth, that can be seen to make demands on us independently of our
cultural or ethnic background, and yet which is nevertheless sensitive to the
inevitable plurality of the world. The force of this challenge is not derived
from some merely practical imperative, but instead comes from the absolute
centrality of notions of ethics and truth in the very possibility of collective
forms of life, and, more fundamentally, for the possibility of a human form of
life as such.
    Moreover, truth and the ethical turn out to be closely tied together. Ethics
involves commitments that can be formulated as claims about the appro-
priateness of actions and decisions, as well as about the values that govern
them and are expressed in them, and to make such claims is to assert the truth
of what is claimed. This is, after all, in the nature of what it is to make a claim,
irrespective of the sort of claim that it is. In addition, the making of such a
claim – the very act of speaking – immediately draws us into the realm of the
ethical through the role of the commitment to truth in such speaking. To
speak is immediately to be implicated in a network of ethical concepts that
themselves enable and support such speaking – including, at the most basic
level, concepts of honesty, responsibility, and even trust.
    The commitment to truth that comes with the very act of speaking thus
reflects the commitment we have to others, as well as to ourselves, that are
presupposed by our speaking (and are presupposed even when we seek to act

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                             Ethics and the Commitment to Truth

in ways that undercut our relations with others, or to act against them), and
this commitment is surely at the core of ethical life – as well, one might say,
as at the heart of the political. On this basis, the idea that, as Vattimo suggests
in the title of one of his recent books1, we can indeed say “farewell” to truth,
is deeply problematic, since we can no more farewell truth than we can
farewell ethics or politics2. Moreover, if there is indeed a danger here, it
comes, not from the continuing commitment to truth, but rather from our
failure to appreciate its proper nature and significance – not from valuing
truth too highly, so much as not valuing it highly enough. In the brief remarks
that follow, I want, first, to explore the connection between truth and speak-
ing in order to clarify certain key elements in the character of truth, includ-
ing the relation between truth and the possibility of plurality, and, second, to
explore the connection between truth and ethics in order to show the role
truth plays in the very ground of ethics, and so in any proper response to plu-
rality – including the plurality that is exhibited in the form of conflict or dis-
agreement, as well as the plurality that is manifest in the possibility of con-
versation.

2. Truth is a concept that is implicated in our very speaking, and it is this
general point that constitutes the essential first step in any examination
of the role or nature of truth – or, indeed, in the exploration of the con-
nection between truth and the ethical. To speak is already to take a stand
with respect to truth – either through the claim to truth made in the
speaking itself (a claim that may be true or false) or through the claim to
truth implied by such speaking (so that even to command, to promise, or
to plead is an act that takes place against an assumed background of things
held true)3. It is the essential relatedness of truth and speaking, more so
than the distinction between, for instance, truth and opinion (even justi-
fied opinion), that directs attention to what is most significant to any at-
tempt to inquire into the nature and significance of truth, since it directs
attention away from the impossible attempt to provide a definition of
truth, and onto the more important matter concerning the role of truth,



   1 G. Vattimo, Addio alla verità, Roma, Meltemi, 2009.
   2 That there may nevertheless be a significant degree of common ground that lies be-
tween the positions occupied by Vattimo and Rorty and my own is something I will touch on
towards the end of my discussion below.
   3 We can thus argue that every non-declarative utterance always stands in relation to some

declarative utterance – see D. Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford, Claren-
don Press, 2nd rev. edn., 2001, ‘Moods and Performance’, pp. 109-121.


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                                           Jeff Malpas

the way in which it connects with other concepts, and the human practices
with which it belongs4.
    The necessary tie between truth and speaking and truth underlies the ob-
vious difficulties that afflict certain attempts to speak about truth – a difficul-
ty most clearly evident in the so-called “truth paradoxes”. Such paradoxes
usually involve a self-referentiality that requires the same sentence to be ap-
parently both truth and false at the same time, and they include not only the
paradoxes such as that of the liar in its various forms (“All Cretans are Liars,
Epimenides the Cretan tells you this”), but also the paradoxes that arise on
the basis of attempts to assert the relativity or irrelevance of truth. The rela-
tivist, for instance, in asserting the relativity of the truth of a statement to some
social or conventional context thereby asserts both the truth and the poten-
tial falsity of that very claim, since, by its own account, the claim concerning
the relativity of truth will be true in some contexts, but false in others. Simi-
larly, if one attempts to assert the irrelevance or dispensability of truth, one
must at the same time assert the irrelevance or dispensability of the truth of
that claim. The significance of these paradoxes is not that they provide any
“knock-down” argument against opponents of truth (they do not), but rather
that they demonstrate the essential interconnection of truth with speaking.
The moral is that is if one wishes to relativise or to reject truth, one is best ad-
vised not to try and state it.
    The way truth is connected to speaking itself has major implications for
how truth must be understood – although they are implications that have of-
ten been neglected or ignored. At the most general level, it means that truth
is not some “metaphysical” concept that points us to an eternal realm beyond
human interests or out of reach of human abilities, but instead refers us back
to the very realm in which we speak and in which we act. There is, then, no
such thing as “the Truth” against which we measure ourselves or to which
we vainly aspire. While we can talk of truth, as Heidegger does, in terms of
the unconcealing of things that is also the opening up of world5, this is not a
usage that refers us to a “truth” that goes beyond human speech and action,
but is rather intimately connected to it. The Heideggerian account concerns,




   4 It was characteristic of Davidson’s approach to the question of truth to abjure precisely

the attempt to define truth – see his comments in, among other discussions, Id., Inquiries into
Truth and Interpretation, cit., ‘The Folly of Trying to Define Truth’, pp. 17-36.
   5 See M. Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge, Cambridge University

Press, 1998, ‘The Essence of Truth’, pp. 136-154 – the account of truth set out here is, of course,
developed in many other places in Heidegger’s work.


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                              Ethics and the Commitment to Truth

in fact, that which is the proper ground for the truth that is evident in speech
and action6.
    One way of putting the general point at issue here is to say that there is no
body of truths to which “truth” refers that are eternal and unchanging. Inas-
much as it is our speaking that is true and false (at least in the ordinary sense
of the term), so whether any particular instance of speaking is true or false is
a contingent matter – although it depends, as Davidson has emphasised, on
just two things, on what the words as spoken mean (which inevitably involves
what others take those words to mean, and not only what we might mean by
them), and on the way the world is arranged7. Thus, as language changes, and
as the world also changes, so too may the truth of what we say change along
with it. If one wishes to find some relativity in respect of truth, then this is all
the relativity one should expect to find – and it is a relativity of a quite in-
nocuous and (mostly) unremarkable sort. “Truth” does not name some mys-
terious and ineluctable property or entity, but instead refers to the particular
form of interconnectedness that obtains between instances of speaking – be-
tween particular sentences, utterances or statements (which themselves ex-
press particular attitudes or orientations while also standing in a relation to
particular instances of non-linguistic behaviour) as they are spoken by indi-
vidual speakers within a community of speakers, and between such speaking
and the world in which that speaking occurs.
    The form of interconnectedness at issue here is one that can be elaborat-
ed in terms of notions of consistency, coherence and correctness – although
these notions cannot themselves be given content independently of the no-
    6 In ‘The Essence of Truth’, Heidegger argues that it is a mistake to suppose that truth be-

longs in the first instance or solely to statements (see, ibid., p. 142). Such a claim is quite con-
sistent, however, with the idea that there is nevertheless a sense of truth that does attach to
statements. In fact, Heidegger’s argument in ‘The Essence of Truth’, and elsewhere, is pre-
cisely that the idea of truth as attaching to statements itself presupposes the idea of of truth as
unconcealment. Heidegger actually proposes two concepts of truth, one of which is a condi-
tion for the other, but in so doing cannot be said to eliminate the other. Moreover, while the
idea of truth as unconcealment opens up the space in which statements can be both true and
false (it opens up the space for the operation of truth as it applies to statement), this does not,
pace the claims of Ernst Tugendhat (see E. Tugendhat, Heidegger’s Idea of Truth, in C. McCann
[ed.], Critical Heidegger, New York, Routledge, 1996, pp. 227-240), invalidate the claim that it is
indeed truth that is at issue here – not only can Heidegger retain both the idea of truth as ‘un-
concealment’ alongside the idea that there is a distinction between true and false statements,
but one can also show how these two senses are connected, and why the first might indeed
be referred to as a form of ‘truth’. From a Davidsonian perspective, the latter point is evident,
although it requires further explication, in the idea that truth inheres in our ‘beliefs’ as a whole,
and that this is indeed presupposed by the possibility that any specific belief might be true or
false – see the final chapter of J.E. Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, Cam-
bridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 230 ff.
    7 See, D. Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001, ‘A

Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, p. 139.


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                                    trópoσ • numero 1 • 2009
                                         Jeff Malpas

tion of truth. This reflects the essentially holistic and “externalist” character
of content. Meaning thus depends upon truth – just as truth depends upon
meaning – in the sense that for some utterance (or any attitude, action or arte-
fact) to be meaningful is for it to be embedded within a larger context of
meaning (a larger body of utterances, attitudes, actions and artefacts belong-
ing to a community of speakers), as well as within the all-encompassing
framework of the world (meaning thus depends upon a level of both ration-
al and causal connectedness)8. The combination of holistic and externalist el-
ements in the formation of meaning is itself reflected in the dual character of
truth as encompassing both elements of coherence (the truth of a sentence
depends on the way the sentence connects to other sentences – on its mean-
ing) and of correspondence (the truth of a sentence depends on the way the
sentence connects to the world – on what it asserts of the world and the way
the world is)9.
    Much of the difficulty that attends discussions of truth derives from a ten-
dency to treat both truth and meaning as transcendent of the actual context
of communicative and interpretive practice. Yet truth and meaning arise on-
ly in that context – apart from it, neither truth nor meaning can even appear.
This is precisely the point behind Heidegger’s well-known claim that “before
Newton’s laws were discovered, they were not ‘true’”10: truth is dependent
on Dasein11, or, as Davidson puts it, “nothing in the world, no object or event,
would be true or false if there were not thinking creatures”12. To understand
truth in this way – which is neither to relativise it in the usual way nor to dis-
miss it – is to understand truth as emerging only in the space that is opened
up between interlocutors in their engagement with one another and with the
world around them. It is here, of course, that the Heideggerian notion of truth
comes back into play, for it is the opening up of this essentially plural space
that Heidegger calls the happening of the truth of being, aletheia, and that is
also the happening and gathering of world, Ereignis 13. The Heideggerian em-
phasis on this opening up of the place of truth as both plural and also unify-
ing reflects the character of truth (and so meaning or content), in its more
   8 There is a larger theory of meaning that is implicated here – see, for instance, J.E. Mal-

pas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, esp. chapter 2, pp. 28-43.
   9 See Id., Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, esp. pp. 260 ff.

  10 M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, New York,

Harper & Row, 1962, H. 226.
  11 Ibid.

  12 D. Davidson, Truth and Predication, Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press,

2005, p. 7.
  13 See my discussion of both these notions in J.E. Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge,

Mass., MIT Press, 2006, pp. 186-189, 213-219.


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                              Ethics and the Commitment to Truth

mundane sense as both holistic and externalist in character (that is, as en-
compassing both coherence and correspondence).
   At this point it becomes quite clear that far from being incompatible with
a commitment to truth, the idea of a pluralistic society actually depends up-
on such a commitment. Only within the sort of space that Heidegger de-
scribes, and to which Davidson’s work, in a rather different way, also draws
attention, can plurality appear as even a possibility. The point can be put quite
simply in terms of the idea that conversation, and the engagement that comes
with it, cannot occur in a situation in which there is no common space in
which to engage – whether because of the absence of such a space or our un-
willingness on inability to acknowledge or to participate in it14. Thus Paul Ri-
coeur, while emphasising both the unity and differentiation that occurs with-
in the concept of truth, also insists that “the spirit of truth is to respect the
complexity of the various orders of truth, it is the recognition of plurality”15.
   In seeking to relativise truth, then, or in seeking to dispense with the con-
cept, we effectively attempt to deny or to set ourselves apart from that open,
and yet common, space in which real engagement and conversation is possi-
ble, and in which alone can the fact of plurality appear. It is thus that both
Gadamer and Davidson have insisted that agreement precedes disagreement
– although the agreement at issue here has to be understood as precisely the
agreement that consists in our being already given over to the world, and our
involvement in it, and so also our being given over to a concern with, and
commitment to, truth16. Our very being in the world is thus a being in rela-
tion to truth at the same time as it is also a being in relation to others.

3. Is it possible to speak on the assumption that nothing that one says involves
a claim to truth, or in which the claim to truth is constantly effaced (whether
by relativization or simple denial)? The liar paradox shows that the idea of u-
niversally false speech is impossible since it undermines the grounds of its
own saying17. To speak is indeed to make a claim to truth, or to presuppose
   14 It is this space that Arendt also refers to as “the space of appearance” – see H. Arendt,

The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 19982, pp. 199 ff.
   15 P. Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley, Evanston, Northwestern Univer-

sity Press, 1965, ‘Truth and Falsehood’, p. 189.
   16 This means that the agreement at issue here, while typically formulated and articulated

in terms of certain sentences that are agreed to be true, does not reside in our agreement
about any particular set of such truths. It is, in fact, an agreement that consists in our common
engagement in and responsiveness to the world. On the nature and role of agreement as it
appears here, see my What is Common to All: Davidson on Agreement and Understanding, in Jeff
Malpas (ed.), Dialogues with Davidson: New Perspectives on his Philosophy, forthcoming.
   17 Interestingly, this is a point that applies not only to the universal liar, but also to the uni-

versal skeptic. Universal skepticism – the idea that all or most of our beliefs could be false – is


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                                          Jeff Malpas

such a claim, even though the truth that is claimed is always something finite,
limited, and contingent – a truth tied to the circumstances of our own situat-
edness in the world no less than it is tied to the act of speaking as such. More-
over, in the interconnectedness of truth with speaking, truth is also exhibited
as standing in an intimate relation to the ethical – and while this may already
be thought to be indicated through the connection between truth and plu-
rality, it is also something worthy of further examination.
    A key element in the way truth connects to speaking, at the most basic lev-
el, is through the idea of speaking as itself involving a claim to truth – a claim
that cannot, and does not, carry its own certainty with it. Truth is thus not
something over which we have final authority or control, but is rather that in
the sway of which we already stand. Truth refers us to the character of the
world as going beyond us, as involving more than we ourselves are, more than
we can know, more than we can determine. In making a claim to truth we
already move out into the world in a way that also opens us to the world, free-
ing ourselves up in a way that enables our engagement with the world, in a
way that makes us vulnerable to the demands of the world, and also, of course,
to the demands, to the claims, of others.
    What appears at this point – and so the domain into which the inquiry
into truth moves us – is nothing more nor less than the very ground of the
ethical as such. Indeed, the ethical could never take shape without this idea
of a relatedness between self and other – and not merely between the self
and the other person, the ‘face’, as in Levinas (although this is clearly an in-
eradicable element in any fully developed conception of the ethical), but al-
so the “other” that appears in the form of the world. Ethics is here exhibit-
ed as being tied to finitude, and to the recognition of finitude, as well as to
respect for, and understanding of, the proper role of truth as itself essential-
ly bound up with that recognition (even though this may not always be giv-
en explicit articulation). Indeed, the ethical failure that is evident in the re-
fusal to acknowledge or to respond to the claims of others is often itself ac-
companied by a refusal to acknowledge or to respond to the claims of the
world – a refusal to acknowledge or to respond to the possibility of error, of
failure, of limitation. In this respect, Heidegger’s insistence, throughout his
work, on the fundamental role of questioning, while not expressed in these
terms, can nevertheless be seen as articulating what is an essentially ethical
commitment – even if it is an ethical commitment that is so fundamental
that it is seldom recognized as such.
the epistemological counterpart to the liar paradox. Like the idea of the universal liar, skepti-
cism is itself paradoxical, refusing even the knowledge of its own speaking, leaving itself
nowhere but silence or an utterance whose intelligibility is always uncertain.


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                            Ethics and the Commitment to Truth

     The idea that there might be such a close and essential connection be-
tween truth and ethics is not without precedent, nor is it restricted to the
philosophical perspective that derives from a solely European sensibility. It is
central, for instance, to Gandhi’s idea of Satyagraha, the way of truth, as both
a mode of life, and of political practice, that provides the surest counter to so-
cial and political oppression18. Gandhi’s position might be construed, in fact,
as expressing what is actually a quite deep and widespread understanding of
the connection between truth and ethics, the widespread character of which
may itself be indicative of the fundamental nature of the connection between
truth and ethics in the possibility of any properly “human” form of life. The
understanding of truth at issue here is one that is evident in such everyday
ethical concepts as those of honesty and integrity, and it is also evident in the
idea, already alluded to in Heidegger, of truth as connected with the notion
of “real” or “genuine” appearance – that which is as it appears and appears as
it is, that which shows itself in itself. In Gandhi, this is manifest in the fact that
the term Satyagraha already contains within it a reference to what is19 – the way
of truth for Gandhi is thus also the way of being, we might even say, it is be-
ing, although we must be careful as to exactly how this is understood20.
     Gandhi provides a salutary instance of the role truth plays in ethical articu-
lation and conduct, and in underpinning resistance to illegitimate authority –
the concept of truth is, in fact, essential to being able to make sense of the very
notions of legitimacy or illegitimacy. Without a sense of truth, and a com-
mitment to truth, we cannot formulate any notion of resistance other than as
purely oppositional, as oppositional without foundation, as oppositional in a
way that is itself in danger of becoming authoritarian. Indeed, wherever we
find resistance to oppression, the refusal of subjugation, the enacting of dis-
sent, so we also find the claim to truth inevitably being called upon as the on-
ly weapon that can be deployed short of the resort to violence.
     This is not to say that truth will not also be called upon to give legitima-
tion to authority, even to tyranny, but this is because any authority requires
more than just the authority it gives itself – it must look beyond itself for its
own authorization. It is in the denial of this requirement or its obfuscation




  18 See Ghandi’s discussions of Satyagraha in The Essential Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, ed.

Raghavan Iyer, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 222-236, 301-346.
  19 Gandhi writes that “The word satya is derived from sat, which means that which is. Satya

means a state of being” – ibid., p. 231.
  20 Gandhi himself declares the truth is God – “Instead of saying that God is Truth, I say

that Truth is God”, ibid., p. 233.


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                                           Jeff Malpas

that authority becomes authoritarian21. There can be no doubt that the claim
to truth is itself the claim to or the assertion of a certain authority – thus
Arendt writes that “from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic char-
acter. It is therefore hated by tyrants”22 – but the authority possessed by truth
is not an authority that first resides in any individual or group. The claim to
authority is, indeed, always illegitimate when it attempts to exert power over
truth itself – in doing so the claim to authority attempts to determine that
which cannot be determined by it, since truth is not that over which author-
ity can be claimed, but rather that in which authority is founded. Truth al-
ways retains its autonomy and its authority with respect to the claims made
in relation to it – whether they be everyday claims of factual assertion or
claims regarding power and right.
    The Gandhian emphasis on ethical conduct, and especially the resistance
to oppression, as based in the commitment to truth is a notion that, in its gen-
eral form, appears in a wide range of contemporary contexts. The Quaker call
to “speak truth to power”, first formulated in this way in the 1950s23, is one
that has a continuing resonance in the face of many forms of contemporary
injustice, and has been so frequently repeated that its original source is often
forgotten. In 2005, the playwright Harold Pinter, made an impassioned call
for truth in politics, condemning the actions of the United States government
(and the United Kingdom) over Iraq as well as in other matters, and declar-
ing that “to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial ob-
ligation which devolves upon us all”24.
    Whether in Iraq or Guantanamo Bay, in Palestine, Burma or Tibet, the
appeal to truth remains a key element in the possibility of critique, of resist-
   21 This denial is one that George Orwell identified as lying at the heart of totalitarianism.

Thus, in the interrogation and torture of Winston by the Party functionary O’Brien that oc-
curs nears the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien asserts the absolute power of the Party to
determine even what is true and false – see G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1954, pp. 197-217. See also my discussion: J.E. Malpas, Lying, Deceit, and the Commit-
ment to Truth: On Ethics in Contemporary Public Life, «International Journal for Applied Philoso-
phy», 22 (2008), pp. 1-12 – this essay approaches many of the issues also addressed in the pres-
ent discussion, but from a different perspective.
   22 H. Arendt, Between Past and Future, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1993, ‘Truth and Politics’,

p. 241.
   23 American Friends Service Committee, Speak truth to power: a Quaker search for an alternative

to violence: a study of international conflict, Philadelphia, American Friends Service Committee,
1955. While the pamphlet itself suggests that the phrase has a much longer history (a claim
that has often been repeated since), there is no clear evidence of the existence of the phrase in
Quaker circles, or elsewhere, before its use by AFSC members in the 1950s.
   24 H. Pinter, Art, Truth and Politics: The Nobel Lecture, London, Faber and Faber, 2006, p. 23.

While Pinter’s address stands out, the sentiments it expresses are not exceptional – Pinter is
one of many who have spoken out against the “avoidance of truth” by supposedly democratic
governments over recent years.


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                              Ethics and the Commitment to Truth

ance, and also of restitution. Indeed, where the issue is one of responding to
past evils in a way that will re-enable communities and societies, the forma-
tion of “truth and reconciliation” commissions around the world, both at na-
tional and community levels, provides a striking instance of the indispensible
role truth plays here25. Restorative justice practices, of which truth and rec-
onciliation commissions are sometimes seen to be an example, also give a cen-
tral role to truth in addressing and redressing wrongdoing through their em-
phasis on the need for the acknowledgement of harm or conflict as a neces-
sary first step in the possibility of transformation and reconciliation26.
    Central to any properly ethical mode of life, as well as to a truly demo-
cratic politics, is the keeping open of a space for others. This is just what is at
issue in the idea of plurality – a plurality that obtains even within the collec-
tivity of a single community or society. It is such plurality, and with it the pos-
sibility of dissent, that is itself one of the main targets of the attacks on truth
that have been so common within modern political life. In this respect, while
contemporary societies do indeed seem to exhibit an essentially pluralist char-
acter, it is a plurality over which governments seem constantly to attempt to
exercise control and to restrict. Truth is itself dependent on the keeping open
of such a space of plurality, and on holding open the possibility of a multi-
plicity of voices. It is only within such a space that claims to truth are open to
challenge – only within such a space can alternative claims to truth be ad-
vanced, can the need for justification arise, can the lie and the falsehood be
shown for what they are27. In its own turn, however, plurality can itself be
protected only where there is respect for truth, since only when we take se-
riously the fact that our speaking is indeed a claim to truth, and yet not a claim
over truth – and so already invokes the possibility of other such claims as well
as demanding attentiveness to them – is there the open space, the “leeway”,

   25 Some twenty-four countries, including South Africa, Peru and Algeria, have employed

such commissions, while they have also been used to address more localized issues in the
United States and elsewhere (e.g., the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission
was formed in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 2005, to address issues relating to the 1979
killing of five marchers taking part in a rally against the Klu Klux Klan and the American
Nazi Party). The way truth and ethics operate in the practice of such commissions is not,
however, always straightforward – see, for instance, R.I. Rotberg – D. Thompson (eds.), Truth
v. Justice: the morality of truth commissions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.
   26 There is a burgeoning literature on restorative justice practice, but for a useful overview

of issues and approaches see Dennis Sullivan – Larry Tifft (eds.), Handbook of restorative justice: a
global perspective, London, Routledge, 2006.
   27 It is thus that within contemporary social epistemology, diversity and dissent are increas-

ingly seen as key elements in deliberation and the development of knowledge – see, for in-
stance, Alison Wylie’s introduction to the special issue of «Episteme: A Journal of Social Epis-
temology» on the topic of “Epistemic diversity and dissent” (A. Wylie, When Difference Makes a
Difference, «Episteme: A Journal of Social Epistemology», 3.1, 2006, pp. 1-7).


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that allows other voices to come forth, and in which they may even be said
to be brought forth28.
    To speak is to take a stand with respect to truth. To attempt to speak in a
way that would disregard this, or that would attempt to subvert it, is to act in
way that is destructive of the very preconditions that make the act itself pos-
sible, and so threaten to disrupt the entire domain of speaking, as well as of
human engagement. This is the basis for the ethical importance of truth-
telling (and the practices associated with it – including, for instance, promise-
keeping). It is an ethical importance that derives from the central role that
truth plays in the possibility of speaking, but also in underpinning human so-
ciability and collectivity. Even the lie or the falsehood is possible only to the
degree that it remains nested within a practice of honest assertion, and is lo-
cated with respect to a body of truths.
    There is thus, one might say, an ethics of speaking that centers precisely
on the concept of truth, and around which are clustered other key ethical con-
cepts such as those of honesty, trust, responsibility, loyalty and so on29. Yet
truth itself calls upon ethics, is entangled with it, such that rather than un-
derstand the commitment to truth as simply a matter of commitment to the
utterance of certain sorts of sentences, the commitment to truth should rather
be seen as itself the commitment to a certain practice – a certain comport-
ment, a certain mode of life – that both expresses and sustains our commit-
ment to ethics as such. The commitment to truth implies the commitment to
the ethical, but the commitment to the ethical is itself a commitment to truth.

    4. According to Richard Rorty “the meanings of normative terms like good,
just, and true have been problems only for philosophers. Everybody else
knows how to use them, and does not need an explanation of what they
mean.” Moreover, he adds that while he is “perfectly ready to admit that one
cannot identify the concept of truth with the concept of justification or any
other… that is not a sufficient reason to conclude that the nature of truth is

   28 It is worth noting that the dependence of plurality on the commitment to truth (which

is, in any case, a reciprocal dependence) does not imply any real limitation of the extent of
plurality. Insofar as truth can be said to operate as a limit, then it does so not by marking a line
between different kinds of speech (thereby setting a limit within the possibilities of speaking),
but rather by opening up the domain within which speaking occurs (establishing speaking in
its very possibility). The domain in question here has no “outside”, and there is nothing “be-
yond” it. It is this same sense of limit that Heidegger refers to in Building Dwelling Thinking, in
Id., Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 154.
   29 The values at issue in this ‘ethics of speaking’ – values that also underpin forms of col-

lectivity more generally – do not admit of variation, although they will inevitably be instanti-
ated in different forms according to differences in the social and cultural contexts in which
they are instantiated.


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                           Ethics and the Commitment to Truth

an important or interesting question30. These comments are significant, not
only for their conjoining of truth with two key terms of ethics, nor even for
their seeming acknowledgement of the sui generis character of truth, but also
because of the manner in which philosophy itself is drawn into what is at is-
sue here. On one reading, what Rorty objects to is not the idea that truth has
a significant role in human speaking and acting, but rather that the explana-
tions of truth offered by philosophers might have any significance of their
own. If the argument that I have set out in the pages above is in disagreement
with Rorty on this point, it is largely because it adopts a different conception
of what philosophy can or should be, of what it can and should do.
    It might be noted – for some it might even be a point of criticism – that
nowhere in the above discussion have I attempted to provide a definition of
truth. Indeed, I have explicitly asserted, following Davidson, the impossibili-
ty of such a task. This does not only reflect a view concerning the nature of
truth, but also about the nature of philosophical inquiry. Properly understood,
philosophy is not the attempt to give univocal definitions to contested terms;
it is not about the erecting of some metaphysical certainty that will finally
bring our questioning to a halt; and nor is it merely a continuation of scien-
tific practice by other means. Philosophy, or perhaps we should say, the fun-
damental thinking in which philosophy essentially consists, is nothing more
nor less than the constant turn to questioning itself, to its own grounds, and
therefore also to the questioning of ourselves. Such questioning itself lies, as
should already be evident, at the heart of both the ethical life as well as the
concern with truth. It does not aim at the simple uncovering of more truths,
but rather at enabling our own capacity to engage with truth, to engage with
the world, and to engage with ourselves, both individually and collectively.
To the extent that philosophy fails in this, then it also fails as philosophy.
    The exploration of the nature and role of truth that I have attempted here
is thus, I would contend, of a very different kind from that which Rorty la-
bels as lacking in importance or interest. If that is so, then it may also indicate
that the position I have set out here need not, after all, be seen as so far re-
moved from Rorty’s position, or even Vattimo’s, as may first appear. Where
we agree is in our rejection of the idea of truth – or of any normative concept
– as disconnected from communicative engagement and practice. Where I
differ, at least from Rorty, is in holding that in relation to such matters phi-
losophy can still occupy a significant role in contemporary discourse. That
role is one that consists in returning us to the central issues that must concern

  30 Richard Rorty in R. Rorty –P. Engel, What’s the Use of Truth?, New York, Columbia Uni-

versity Press, 2007, p. 45.


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                                    Jeff Malpas

us – issues that can only be addressed in the original context in which they a-
rise, in the midst of our real engagement with one another, in the midst of
the genuine concerns and problems that confront us, in the midst of our own
fragility and finitude. It is a role that Rorty’s own work continues to embody,
as does Vattimo’s, and as such, it continues to exemplify a certain commit-
ment to questionability, and so also to truth.
    Philosophy can only function as philosophy when it returns us to the ori-
ginal place out of which the impetus to questioning first arises, in which truth
first appears as an issue, in which we first encounter ourselves as well as oth-
ers. To find oneself situated in this way, which is to find oneself already in the
world, is both to be given over to making a claim upon the world – to be gi-
ven over to action, to decision, and to speech – and to be subject to the de-
mands that the world makes upon oneself. The space of the ethical, which is
a space opened up only in the world, is the space between self and other, be-
tween self and self, between self and world. It is this very space that is the
space of truth, not only in the Heideggerian sense that this is the space that
first enables the possibility of speaking – as well as of action and decision –
but also in the sense that it is that to which our speaking always returns us
through the character of such speaking as itself a claim to truth. Plurality and
conversation, far from being opposed to truth, thus already presuppose it, and
far from being a source of danger, truth turns out to be that which guards us
and protects the possibility of human sociability and collectivity. Without it,
there is no properly human mode of life, no properly responsive or ethical
mode of engagement; without it, there is only isolation, only silence.
                                                           Jeff.Malpas@utas.edu.au




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