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Note publique d'information : What does it mean to the truthful? What role does truth play in our lives? What do
we lose if we reject truthfulness? No philosopher is better suited to answer these
questions than Bernard Williams. Writing with his characteristic combination of passion
and elegant simplicity, he explores the value of truth and finds it to be both less
and more than we might imagine. Modern culture exhibits two attitudes toward truth:
suspicion of being deceived (no one wants to be fooled) and skepticism that objective
truth exists at all (no one wants to be naive). This tension between a demand for
truthfulness and the doubt that there is any truth to be found is not an abstract
paradox. It has political consequences and signals a danger that our intellectual
activities, particulary in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces. Williams's
approach, in the tradition of Nietzsche's genealogy, blends philosophy, history, and
a fictional account of how the human concern with truth might have arisen. Without
denying that we should worry about the contingency of much that we take for granted,
he defends truth as an intellectual objective and a cultural value. He identifies
two basic virtues of truth, Accuracy and Sincerity, the first of which aims at finding
out the truth and the second and telling it. He describes different psychological
and social forms that these virtues have taken and asks what ideas can make best sense
of them today. Truth & Ttruthfulness presents a powerful challenge to the fashionable
belief that truth has no value, but equally to the traditional faith that its value
guarantees itself. Bernard Williams shows us that when we lose a sense of the value
of truth, we lose a lot both politically and personally, and may well lose everything.
-4e de couv.
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