Presenting truth as a hybrid concept
Surjit Hans

Truth and Truthfulness
by Bernard Williams. Princeton University Press.
`A3 19.95. Pages 270.

BERNARD Williams, who was a Fellow of All Souls at Oxford, died a few months ago. All Souls is a unique institution that has distinguished scholars on its roll, but no students. Dr Radhakrishnan was also there for some time. Bernard's wife, Shirley, was in the Cabinet of Harold Wilson.

According to Williams, our world is paradoxical. On one hand, there is an intense commitment to truthfulness, while on the other, truth itself is suspect. Cynicism in politics, alternative medicine, Postmodernism are some of the symptoms. Williams wants to stabilise the concept of truth and truthfulness. One could say the problem is the truth of our world.

Like progress, truth is a hybrid concept. Truth is fact plus value. Williams discusses truth and truthfulness in terms of accuracy and sincerity. Our senses serve the purpose of our survival. These are not for accuracy, despite popular belief to the contrary. It is usual to fail to distinguish a drop of perspiration on our back from a fly sitting there. Rain on my roof can give me no idea of the extent of precipitation in the town.

Williams says that truth necessarily requires organisation. Not all organisations are meant to advance accuracy. Professional organisations are supposed to ensure the standards of knowledge and conduct of their members. At times, they fail. The Soviet Academy of Sciences failed to control Lysenko and Michurin with their disastrous botany.

Forms of government have an indirect relation to accuracy and sincerity, which is truth. Aristotle observed that despotism produced turncoats; democracy, honourable men. Djilas in his Conversations with Stalin reports that Stalin ticked him off when he said the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg) were three, and the entire Politburo kept quiet.

Williams discusses the impact of ideology and cultural differences on truth. Freedom presupposes knowledge; groping in the dark is not freedom. It is not difficult to see that corporate ownership of the Press is inimical to both freedom and democracy. Moreover, a disjuncture between democracy and government in a number of countries helped the USA to invade Iraq.

All this is common sense. Williams' philosophical merit is that he warns against making a fetish of an assertion in relation to truth. St Augustine as well as Kant hold that lies are never justifiable. Aquinas wrote: "Since lies as such are out of order, these cannot be used to rescue others, whatever the peril; rather, the truth must be cleverly masked in some way."

St Athanasius was rowing on a river when the persecutors came rowing in the opposite direction. "Where is the traitor Athanasius?" they asked. "Not far away", the saint gaily replied, and rowed past them unsuspected. This led to the church doctrine of equivocation, i.e. using an ambiguous sentence which in one of its meanings expressed a true proposition. Williams points out that not everyone is resourceful enough to equivocate. It is far more honest to say that murders and violators of human rights do not deserve truth.

Williams also tilts on sociology of knowledge. Theories, explanations, outlooks are undoubtedly the product of their social background. While a man has nothing to do with the opinion he expresses (in the sense that a scoundrel can advocate a sound moral principle), social groups are as such incapable of exercising this option, simply because a group can not speak, someone has to speak for the group. Sociology of knowledge explores the relation between knowledge and its social ambience.

However, knowledge ipso facto is related to reality as such. Its degree of success, especially in natural sciences, is beyond the sociologists of knowledge. Indian philosophy traditionally advocates the way of knowledge to freedom-gyan marga of Vedanta. So does Platonism. Williams has nothing to do with it.

"There is subtler version of Platonism, which suggests that the reason why the more abstract kinds of natural science can offer a sense of purity and liberation is that their content and interest to us transcend human affairs altogether. Their content aims to be a representation of the nature which abstracts to the greatest possible degree from the perceptual and other peculiarities of human beings.

"Such an enquiry can give the sense that in abstracting from the epistemic condition, it also takes us away from the squalid and repressive limitations of our social and political life. If one has an absorbing interest in such a content, then that certainly will take one away from the confines of politics, but perhaps, it will take one too far away to express a sense of liberation that has anything to do with politics. In itself, it offers liberation from humanity. It gives no particular sense of powers that might be better used in everyday life by people who are not subject to a corrupt political order."

The inner world is equally problematic. "Know thyself" is less easy to follow. One can be a sincere, racialist or casteist, which is of no help. Williams says that the philosophers are divided on the moral status of self-deception. A person gets divided into the deceiver and the deceived, but moral responsibility is not divisible.

Rejecting Catholic confession before the priest that exonerated sins of the week, the Protestants lived permanently watched by God. A kind of ongoing self-examination led to the question of authenticity. One should live by being sincere to oneself. Rousseau skips the problem of clash between one person's sincerity and that of another.

In The Social Contract-"taking men as they are and laws as they might be"-he tries to find forms of political organisation that will allow the expression of general will which:- 1) is necessarily virtuous 2) transcends personal interest 3) and nevertheless allows every individual to be free... freedom will comprise living in according with one's real self so that laws (of new political organisation) which elicit that real self, allow the virtue to express itself... will, in the famous phrase, "force one to be free".

A democratic expression of general will by a government through the state can falsify all the three counts. Firstly, it can persecute an innocent man like Dreyfus; probably Kehar Singh as well in the Indira murder case. Secondly, it can work out communal massacre, say in Gujarat. Thirdly, it can finish off a social group (coal miners in Britain under Thatcher).

About the laws forcing men to be free, one can at once see that in Soviet Russia, it was not laws, but the party (rather its Great Helmsman) who forced people to be free. Authenticity has given rise to identity politics. Williams makes two points about it. Identity politics as such is not above the usual ills of politics. Sometimes, people are "terrorised" to realise their identity. Williams is a delightful writer like David Hume. David Hume used the model of State of Nature: A Treatise of Human Nature to explain the rise of virtue of justice. Williams borrows Hume's model for his philosophical elaboration of truth and truthfulness. A minor joy of the book is his drubbing of the Postmodernists. I started with that attraction, only to discover more important things.

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