Customer Reviews

Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy

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Williams is a philosopher of extraordinary depth and insight, and this book is a splendid example of how members of glistening Ivory Towers can indeed address the concrete concerns of those who bustle among the popular hordes of relativism. Williams--a wise veteran philosopher--takes up the topic of truth. He approaches the notions of trust, authenticity, and sincerity, and by contrast, he engages the problems of lies, deception, and infelicity. There are numerous lessons to be learned in these pages, some of which the present reviewer notwithstanding most dutifully needs to assimilate into his own deliberative set.

I cannot stress enough how important this book is in our current social and academic milieu. It reaches into the thoracic cavity of philosophy and liberates its hardened, cold heart by messaging throbbing life into it.

Those persuaded by the respective New Age, Poststructuralism, Relativism bent are highly encouraged to read this book. If your nightstand reading is A Course on Miracles or anything pertaining to Ayn Rand, C. Castenada, S. Maclaine, Lacan, Adorno, Rorty, Derrida, K. Silverman, J. Butler, Krishnamurti, tantric sex, or the healing properties of desert rocks, you MUST read this book. If you believe sand fleas are space aliens and are responsible for the human population of Mother Gaia, order now. Hear Ye, Cultural Relativists and anthropology majors!

I also recommend: Nozick, Invariances; Searle, Social Construction; Krausz, Relativism; Nagel, Last Word; and the Williams corpus.

The fundamental point of discussion here is a tension between the pursuit of truthfulness and a certain skeptical doubt as to whether truth is to be had. This book embraces the nature and scope of philosophical inquiry with subtle, clear, and rigorous arguments.

Chapter One: Defines and spells out the philosophical problem. Chapter Two: A fictional account about how the problem of truth arises--its "genealogy." Chapter Three: Discusses language, plain truths, and values. Chapter Four (most important): On truth, assertion, and beliefs. Chapter Five: Sincerity, Lying, and Styles of Deceit. ETC.

This book deserves my highest recommendation.

Williams is one of the wisest and more learned of philosophers working in English, a man of capacious intelligence and brilliant insight, and a man gracious enough to have learned how to write lucid, enjoyable prose. I share Michael Colson's enthusiasm, although I share none of his worries or dislikes. His "Enemies List" is not mine. And I think it should not be Williams's. I remain unpersuaded that the account of what we mean by true discourse given by the bogeymen of postmodernity amounts to a denial that anything's true or that in matters of the mind "anything goes." Williams is on the right track but turns off a little too soon--in what amounts to a failure of attentiveness. But the second part of the book easily compensates for the occasional disappointments of the first part. One can feel he is not entirely fair to some of his philosophical contemporaries, and still feel a great deal of gratitude for the pleasure of his company.

Bernard Williams had the reputation of being an extraordinarily gifted writer; his prose style has always been admired by his peers. Reading this book is therefore a treat for anyone who loves carefully crafted prose. Beyond that, he was also witty and extremely perceptive, a very rare combination for an English philosopher. Having never read Williams before, I figured he might be a bit of a stuffy intellectual snob. That was definitely not the case; once I got beyond the first few pages, and began really getting into the text, I saw frequent flashes of wit and fine humor. There is also a sparkling intellect behind the written word that makes one continue reading, looking forward to the next insightful observation, of which there are very many.

The book presents a long, detailed look at the genealogy of truth and truthfulness. Williams proposes that the virtues of accuracy and sincerity are attributes of truthfulness. For the most part, he adopts Nietzsche's account of truth (unflinching, brutal honesty), and argues that Nietzsche should not be numbered among the so-called deniers -- postmodern and pragmatist thinkers who subscribe to the idea that truth is completely relative. As such, his reading of Nietzsche differs from the standard view. That is one of the more interesting aspects of the book: that a relatively conservative analytical English philosopher like Williams would validate the work of Nietzsche. Williams strongly maintains that Nietzsche was not a relativist with respect to truth, but that he, like Williams himself, subscribed to the idea that truth must be sought in complete honesty and with unflinching courage, laying aside all the comfortable cultural encrustations that it has come to possess. Like Nietzsche, he uses the genealogy model to analyze truth and truthfulness.

In developing his genealogy of truth and truthfulness, he uses a state of nature story in which a small group of individuals living in a simple primitive environment must interact with one another and depend upon one another being truthful in order to function as a group, and to secure the necessities for life. He comes to view accuracy and sincerity as virtues that relate to truthfulness in such a primitive context. Later in the book he takes a long, thoughtful look at what truthfulness means in terms of historical narrative. How can and does someone who chooses to write an historical account of a particular event prevent bias from entering into the narrative? Williams maintains that historical facts are not inherently biased, and that any historical account must select certain facts and ignore others, but that this need not imply bias, provided that the account successfully "makes sense of" what happened. In addition, there are presumably other versions of the same account that are available to place beside it, and there is an academic community of critics to hold the authors accountable for what they write.

Sometimes it appears that Williams seems to be writing with an eye to his professional philosophical colleagues, and this gives the text a somewhat self-conscious, defensive tone. However, I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history or philosophy. I gained many keen insights as a result of reading this book, and will come back to it repeatedly to revisit those insights in the future. The book is hard to put down once you have gotten into it; it just grabs hold of you and you want to keep reading. Part of that is due to the reader-friendly way in which the book was printed: the type is fairly large, there are few typos that I could find anywhere, and the writing is superbly crafted. If you love quality books, then this is a must for your library.

I found Williams' treatment of truth to be an important contribution. I thought well enough of it that I'm coming our of retirement to do a graduate course on the book in the Fall. Non-philosophers will find it tough going, but well worth the effort. I think this is an important book and everyone I've recommended it to has agreed with that judgment.

Published in 2002, this was to be Bernard Williams's last book. The concept of Truth has had a rough time since Rorty and company have done their best to bring it in discredit. The dominant trend has been to question the validity of any universal truth and to render everything relative. Your truth is as good as mine. Or alternatively, since truth is not obtainable one should rather seek what is workable. We speak of a giraffe "because it suits our purposes to do so," as Rorty says in Philosophy and Social Hope. We construct the world around us according to our needs and wishes. Knowledge and truth are no more than subjective features of our daily lives. Anything goes... This is, or rather was, the fashionable tenor in academia. Since the first decennium of this century, voices have been raised against this view and in defence of a more commonsensical understanding of truth and truthfulness. "How did so many contemporary scholars come to be convinced of a doctrine as radical and as counterintuitive as equal validity?" asks Paul Boghossian in his 2006 Fear of Knowledge. "The work of Richard Rorty provides striking examples of what in this respect might be described as running on empty," as Williams puts it (p. 59). Consequently, Williams doesn't believe there is such a thing as a history of the concept of truth. It has always and everywhere been the same. "The inquiry, then, is rather into human concerns with the truth" (p. 61).
Williams traces his genealogy with Nietzsche as guiding-star. Contrary to received knowledge, Nietzsche was no enemy of truth; "there are facts to be respected" and "there are such truths" (p. 16). Williams himself stresses the double-edged character of the Enlightenment's relation to truth. While he acknowledges the potentially destructive capacities of the Enlightenment, he nevertheless cherishes its concern for transparency and truthfulness (p. 231). Accuracy and sincerity are two key concepts in his pursuit of the virtues of truth.
Delving into history, psychology, and politics as well as philosophy, TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS is a triumph of erudition and eloquence. He takes into account thinkers ranging from Aquinas to Diderot, from Kant to MacIntyre and many others, including Herodotus, Thucydides and Hayden White. There is also a useful five-page bibliography. The only dissonance is indeed the presence of untranslated Greek quotations in the Endnote, leaving ordinary mortals out of the picture.
Sometimes sharp, funny, and witty, sometimes demanding - this is a brilliant book only a professional philosopher would venture to criticize. A penetrating inquiry, destined to exert a lasting impact.

William's book is a psychological, epistemological, and ethical inquiry into the meaning of "the true" and what it means, derivatively, to be "truthful." Center stage to the intellectual dispute belongs those that deny that anything is true: Literary deconstruction, social constructionists, scientific paradigms, etc. The thrust of his argument is based on a fictive genealogy of the State of Nature designed to bring out, in abstract form, the functional elements of truthfulness. The operative word here is "functional" and how we ordinarily apply truth-telling to the world we find ourselves in. Truth-telling is both normative and operative. Instead of philosophically dry truth values, Williams raises the question of "values of truth," like sincerity and accuracy. Most of the book resides in describing ancillary aspects of this fictive state, as a running commentary on relativism in general, the importance of true-statements, and Rorty's pragmatic relativism in particular. Except for myopic humanities programs, the prevailing academic winds are no longer blasting behind William's opponents, so many of his arguments are dated and under-inflated. It's a very poignant exercise, but one that seems more tangential to the central theme than head-on polemics like Ellis' "Against Deconstruction," Kripke's "Naming and Necessity," Searle's "Social Construction," and Hirsch's "Validity of Interpretation." Primarily for philosophy students and libraries.