We know from relationships that the truth sometimes hurts and is avoided. But what about the public discourse? Aren’t we dependent on truth here? Even if we are overwhelmed by the drastic and complex? In his essay, the philosopher Peter Trawny, who teaches in Bochum, explains that truth is more complicated Crisis of truth.
Trawny dedicates himself to this crisis in fields as diverse as science, art, poetry or the currently dominant discourse topic, identity politics. Trawny takes up the sometimes heated discussions about sexual identity and writes about the “truth of testosterone” – or rather about the fact that this truth is not too far off. With Judith Butler, Trawny shows that the “fact” of biological sex can very well be questioned and that dearly grown but deconstructed truths generate a great deal of resistance.
At the very beginning of his text, Trawny formulates a central insight: “There would be no crisis at all if truth were just one.” One learns that the truth in the singular is the real danger for thinking. Even philosophy can only provide limited orientation in the crisis, because “the crisis of truth is too deep, too ambiguous for that”. Here someone flirts with the unquestionably still existing authority of philosophy, which one would like to accuse of a certain remoteness, but which for precisely that reason might be able to formulate insights in this heated debate about truth and lies.
Depending on the filter bubble
We use terms frankly and claim that facts cannot be denied precisely because they are self-evident. It’s just strange that the truths differ so dramatically, depending on the filter bubble and fragmented reality. Trawny must therefore first dare to analyze the terms and sharpen these categories. In addition to Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Judith Butler also serve him. An epistemological winner, so to speak, if you wanted to play a quartet of philosophers. With them, Trawny destroys all those who still harbored the illusion of an absolute truth. “Hannah Arendt says that there cannot be an ‘absolute truth that would be the same for all people and to that extent has no relation to individuality’, ‘for us mortals’.” Because man is mortal, non-divine, he cannot Claim omniscience. “It cannot therefore be denied that truths can be formulated as if they exceeded time and space, as if they were valid always and everywhere – but it can be deduced from this that they have for me and my life as for any other life always and everywhere one meaning is wrong. “
The idea of an absolute truth, Trawny shows, can even lead directly to ideology and the will to destroy those who do not want to recognize these truths.
Trawny, that is the punch line, not only problematizes the concept of universal truth, he states that a policy that confronts us with the “truth” everywhere is not at all desirable. The utopian ideal of a state of philosophers who operate with common reason and access to higher knowledge could turn into a dystopia. “What does it mean that Robespierre as well as Hitler and Mao invoked the authority of truth?” But one might as well ask – on a less totalitarian level – whether an ecological dictatorship in the service of the absolute would not also be in the interests of saving the world Truth be thought.
We hear everywhere now that we live in a post-factual age, fake facts and “alternative truths” have taken the place of facts and their sober analysis. Facts like climate change should be recognized. But what are facts? Here, too, Trawny shows that the term is by no means trivial. “The word ‘fact’ – like other important words such as ‘consciousness’ or ‘meaning’ – only appeared in the second half of the 18th century.” The creation of the term thus refers to a spiritual environment in which the fact can only become significant . Oddly enough, it is difficult for us to define what a fact is. Examples are needed for this: Your own date of birth is a fact. The same goes for the existence of Mount Everest. Nevertheless, one must distinguish between two forms of facts: the historical facts, which are contingent because they could have happened differently, and the natural facts. There are orangutans, but no yetis (although …).
“What is a fact is not itself a fact. We cannot avoid determining and interpreting what it is. ”But who does the interpretation? Instances. On the one hand, there is science that formulates hypotheses along Popper’s falsificationism and, if necessary, refutes them. For Trawny, who also conducts an extensive interview with the astrophysicist René Reifarth, science appears as a positive authority on the interpretation of facts. Its subject area, experimental astrophysics, represents precisely that border area in which reality – such as enormous masses that bend space and even slow down time – fundamentally deviates from our felt and experienced reality. It thus represents an extreme case of scientific truth that can be verified experimentally and mathematically, but remains hidden from us non-scientists. Less extreme: We have known since the corona pandemic how completely different the assessment of epidemiologists, for example, can be and what distortions this leads to …
Opposite science is the media – or better: the world permeated by media; The media can not only be a means of obscuring facts, but also actively working towards the lie, at least according to Trawny’s general judgment. “The media themselves have long since become commercial enterprises that have to assess the merchandise and stimulus value of information.” But now the media have always been economically organized – this applies to early book printing, which had to pay off, as well as to flyers and diatribes. At no time have the media been mere carriers of news or “information”, especially since the question of what a message is has always arisen. An earthquake in Chile? The death of a dachshund?
Trawny also takes up the accusation of lying press: “Although there is no shameless lying, there is a gray area in which falsehoods float.” ? Trawny refers several times to the narcissism of media professionals. Journalists, too, are increasingly becoming entrepreneurial subjects who market themselves – that can be criticized. However, there are also philosophers who use the power of staging with a philosopher’s scarf and cigar for themselves. Is it evident that this staging harms the mandate to report truthfully?
Much more exciting at this point would be the question of what it means for the media when terms such as reality, fact and truth are always problematic, even illusory in Trawny’s sense. When facts require interpretation. What does that mean for journalists, politicians and the general public who, on the basis of these facts, inform, evaluate, make decisions and form opinions? Is it legitimate if you – in the sense of what appears morally necessary, such as a Covid 19 vaccination – nudge public opinion in the better direction? How objective can a journalist really be, and is he actually allowed to pursue a personal agenda?
Trawny’s book begins as an open philosophical journey that refutes numerous prejudices about what we recognize as truth. It is therefore inexplicable that in places he gets lost in simple truths and bold images of reality. After all, one has learned to reject claims to absoluteness of the so-called truth.
Crisis of truth Peter Trawny S. Fischer 2021, 256 pages, € 23
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