AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE RHETORIC

 

 

Monte Cassino

Introduction
 

Philippe-Joseph Salazar, in his numerous and remarkable investigations on the power of rhetoric in contemporary political discourses, has been cautious to distance his views from those of the postmodernists for whom rhetoric has nothing to do with truth. The art of speech for classical rhetoricians had three functions: to convince (docere) to please (delectare) and to move (movere). It was at the service of passion and desire, but also of reason. Reason can only be convinced by truth. The sophists and the postmodernists reduce eloquence only to the manipulation of opinion through emotion and desire. Discourse, for them is only, as they say, “performative”, at the service of action and power. How could Salazar have led such incisive and insightful analyses of the rhetoric of the Jihadists and of white supremacists, if he had accepted the postmodernist view that all discourses are equal with respect to their truth, and that we live in a “post-truth” era? Nevertheless, at some points, Salazar, in his work related to
the Committee Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa has asserted that South Africa is not only a springboard for the study of the rhetoric of political discourse during this period, but also that it exemplifies a number of postmodernist themes :
“South Africa offers a remarkable stage for a replay of the great themes of public deliberation
and the rise of a postmodern rhetorical democracy. South Africa indeed offers a unique
example of a democracy that has issued from a régime which both magnified and predated
European colonialism, a democracy that has broken that mold without a revolution and its
usual sequels and without an anarchic disintegration—the two models known so far in
analogous situations. This is why I believe South Africa fully qualifies for the adjective
postmodern.2
I agree with Salazar that there is something remarkable and unique among the situations
which have been described as forms “transitional justice” in the post-apartheid South Africa,
and that the deliberations which have led to the formation of a democracy have something in
common with the debates which shaped the Athenian democracy. But does that allow us to
talk of a post-modern rhetorical democracy, and if the analogy holds, is it a good thing? One
of the most well-known post- modernist themes is relativism, which was indeed the chief
doctrine of the Athenian sophists. They insisted on the necessity of rejecting the absolutist
conception of truth, and of accepting that truth is by essence plural. But one thing is to
observe that South Africa is an “African Athens” and that rhetoric is the proper tool to study
these developments, and another thing is to accept the relativism of the Sophists and praising
their post-modernism. I think that neither the promoters of the Truth and Reconciliation
committee nor Philippe-Joseph Salazar take this second line, although it is clear that some
contemporary disciples of Protagoras squarely accept truth relativism and its consequences. I
want to explain here that if they do accept this view they subscribe to a conception of rhetoric
which is not only absurd, but also incomprehensible and most dangerous.

2. Classical and Protagorean rhetoric
There are two views that one might take about the role of rhetoric in general and in public
discourse in particular, which I shall call respectively the classical one and the Protagorean
one. The classical one is Aristotle’s. Philippe Joseph Salazar takes his starting point from
Aristotle’s view of politics and of the role played by rhetoric within public life in classical
Athens. Following Plato, in particular in the Theaetetus and in the Protagoras, Aristotle
shows in his Metaphysics (book Gamma) that Protagoras’s doctrine about truth ( “Man is the
measure of all things”) is incoherent : if truth is relative to speakers they cannot disagree , for
if one says that one thing P, and the other denies it, according to relativism they are both right,
each from his point of view, hence we have to accept that P and not P, and to deny the
principle of contradiction. This holds for theoretical knowledge, for which truth is absolute,
and there is no exception to the principle of contradiction. But for practical knowledge, and
for political deliberation, these principles do not hold without exception: one can accept that
each party has “their “ truth, influenced by their interests and character, for the aim is not to
know truth, but to persuade in order to improve our actions and to reach certain results which
are deemed good to the city. Politics is not the realm of truth, but of deliberation for practical
purposes, and its rests on the art of practical judgment, which weights costs and benefits for
the sake of a better good. Politics, and especially democratic politics, is the realm of opinions,
not of knowledge. It might even be dangerous, or at least imprudent, to introduce in it
absolute principles and claims for truth. This Aristotelian lesson was also Hanna Arendt’s, in
her famous essay “Truth and politics”(1967) 3, where she says that politics has no room for
truth, and may well be sometimes the domain of untruth and of lies. Salazar agrees:
“Politics, rhetoric and truth have been linked ever since democracy took shape. Hannah
Arendt, reflecting upon the luminous Greek legacy under the long shadow cast by Nazi
devastation, forcefully made the point that the Ancient Greek belief in argued speech –
“logos”, what I would call “deliberate deliberation” – is fundamental to any definition of
humankind as political. To share in social life necessitates, at any level and in various grades
of expertise, to be able to articulate thoughts into words, and to impart these words a “logical”
strain, so as to make an impression upon those we address; sometimes we manage to
“persuade” them, sometimes we fail at doing so but, even then, we leave a trace of our speech
(“logos”) in them. Rhetoric lies, in Arendt’s vision, at the core of being citizens. The “logic”
invoked is however not that of logicians: citizens are not philosophers, they do not search for
universally proven Truth. In fact – and this is a fundamental “political fact” –, they should
not. They utter their beliefs, expecting their fellow citizens to do the same, and to listen to
each other’s expression of opinions which each speakers may hold to be true. But, and this is
the other side of Arendt’s argument on democracy, truths expressed by citizens must
3 Between Past and Future Viking Press, NY(1968)
3
somehow represent the diversity of the citizenry. This argument is profoundly Aristotelian: a
democracy is made of diverse individuals. That insight applies a fortiori to “multicultural”
societies like South Africa. In a democracy, in Ancient Greece no less than in South Africa
today, truth is transient, fragmented, often community-based, it belongs indeed to the domain
of prejudice, opinion, belief, perception (Aristotle, Politics, VII, 13). This is why argument
and deliberation – “rhetoric” – allow citizens, and their representatives, to articulate such
diversity. The anti-democratic peril of ideology consists, conversely, in the attempt to try and
impose one single truth onto the citizenry – as in the apartheid regime, that latter-day
offspring of fascism.4
In other words, the logic of the logicians, which regulates theoretical discourse, tells us
that there is only one truth, and that one cannot assert one thing and its negation, whereas the
“logic” of rhetoric, which regulates practical discourse and a political regime like that of
democracy, does not have to respect the classical principles of logic, and it actually had better
sometimes not respecting them. In the realm of science falsehood and contradictions kill you.
In real life, they can save you. When it comes to the expression of feelings and emotions,
when one has to persuade and attract the sympathy of hearers, and when one has to deliberate
and make political friends, contradictions may be tolerated, and may be welcome. If a lover
tells to his or her partner: “I love you, and I don’t”, he or she may cause suffering, but it
would be completely improper to answer: “You are illogical! Please respect the principle of
contradiction, and the principle of the excluded middle: either you love me, or not!”. Or if a
politician says “I am your friend. But I may also your enemy”, nobody will balk at that, since
we know that in politics the rule of the game is to make alliances, which may be broken. In
politics there is almost a duty of being ambiguous and of voicing a plurality of messages. The
Sophists were right on this point. This is also the voice of realism in psychology and in
anthropology, which Thomas Hobbes expressed firmly in a famous passage of the Leviathan
quoted by Arendt:
“ For I doubt not but, if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the
interest of men that have dominion, ‘that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two
angles of a square,’ that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all
books of geometry suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able .”5
In other words, it is not only desirable, but also reasonable to silence one’s logical instincts
when one deals with real political life. Aristotle’s view was that we should not mix up the
spheres of science and of politics. Although he disagreed with the Sophists about the value
and correctness of the logical uses of discourse, he accepted the Sophist’s lesson that in the
domain of public life we cannot hope for more than the plausible, based on the convergence
of opinions, which can be defeasible. There is, for this reasonable view, still the question of
how far can this shunning of truth concerns be pushed within politics. Let us just note here
4 P.J. Salazar, « Democratic Rhetoric » , QUEST An African Journal of Philosophy / Revue Africaine de
Philosophie Vol. XVI, No. 1-2, 2002, p. 13 – 14 see also Erik Doxtader and Philippe-Joseph Salazar, Truth and
Reconciliation in South Africa. The Fundamental Documents, Cape Town: New Africa Books/David Philip,
2008
5 Hobbes, Leviathan I, 11.
4
that classical rhetoricians, like Quintilian, defined it as the art of thinking well and of saying
well, hence did not separate the art of persuasion from the art of saying what is just and good.6
But besides this traditional line on the use of rhetoric in political deliberation, there is
another line, Protagorean, according to which the rules of rhetoric not only apply to the
specific sphere of politics and public human affairs, but across the board. In other words, this
radical line extends the ban on truth to all discourses, including those which have theoretical,
scientific or philosophical purposes7. To please and to move are the only aims. This was the
view of the Sophists, who intended to truth-talk and to defend relativism in all spheres. For
Protagoras truth absolutism is wrong, and the claims of philosophers to defend it is an
illusion. Rhetoric, conceived as a practice of persuasion through relativist truth, is universal.
Now this seems to be a self- defeat of relativism, since the sophist denies that anything applies
“universally”, including his own claims. But the claim that there is no privileged standpoint
from which one can assert the truth, and that one should doubt any truth talk, not only was the
message of the sophistic movement, but it has become the motto of postmodernist discourse:
one should only use the word “truth” with commas, since there is no literal, absolute truth, but
only a plurality of truths, all from their respective points of view. This radical lesson of what
we may call neo-sophistry, has been embraced by a number of philosophers, in particular by
Barbara Cassin, a stern defender of the universality of rhetoric, who has also reflected on the
work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TC), and defended the relevance of hard
line sophistry in all domains.
2. The attractions of neo-sophistry
Cassin, in her writings on the TRC argues that antagonism between the two objectives of
the Commission – restoring the truth and reconciling people – is only apparent and wants to
show that here is actually no conflict between the two, if we drop out truth and keep
reconciliation:
“The very order of the words, “Truth and Reconciliation”, is by itself already a strong
indication of a possible synthesis of opposing models. The finality is in effect not the truth,
but the reconciliation. We do not search truth – disclosure, alētheia – for truth, but with a
view to reconciliation – homonoia, koinon. The “true” here has no other definition and, in any
case, no other objectifiable status, than that of the “best for”. This “for”, in its turn, is
explicitly a “for us”, koinōnia or we-ness. The TRC is the political act which, like the
Athenian decree of 403 BCE, makes a cut (“a firm cut-off date”), and charges itself with
using evil, to transform the misfortunes, mistakes and suffering, to make something good out
of them, notably a past on which to construct the “we” of a “rainbow nation”.8 “
6 Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, II, xv , Harvard , Loeb Library, 1922.
7 I do not pretend that is the historical Protagoras’ actual view. I give it this name because it is a full-blown and
comprehensive relativism. Protagoras was famous for his supposed art of “making the wrong argument right”.
8 “Politics of memory” in QUEST, XVI, op. cit, p. 27 , see also her Sophistical practice, New York: Fordham
University Press 2004
5
How can this reconciliation be achieved? Through accepting that the search for truth is not a
search for truth itself, but is accomplished through a “narrative”, and a “story”, the objective
of which is to make people understand each other as fellow humans. Cassin quotes Arendt:
“Who says that which is (legei ta eonta) always recounts a story, and in this story the particular facts
lose their contingency and acquire a meaning that is humanly comprehensible” . Arendt is very
close, in a certain way, to tying Africa and Greece. She does not deal here with philosophical
truth, that of the epistēmē, the dialectics or science of being, but rather with the truth of
narrative. Again at work is the mimēsis which allows us to bring Aristotle’s Poetics and Karen
Blixen’s Out of Africa together. Think of the famous Aristotelian motto: “Poetry is more
philosophical than history”, meaning that poetry better facilitates the transition from the
singular to the plural, and its verification through the success of the katharsis. It is attuned to
what the novelist says: “Me, I am a storyteller and nothing but a storyteller”, and, “All travails
can be borne if we transform them into story, if we tell a story on them”. Under the novelist’s
pen, the term “reconciliation” comes naturally to whisk away, to suppress and overcome, a
statement about truth. To the extent where the one who tells the truth is also a story-teller, he
accomplishes that “reconciliation with reality” which Hegel, the philosopher of history par
excellence, understands as the ultimate goal of all philosophical thought and which, assuredly,
has been the secret engine of all historiography which transcends pure erudition. The key to
Protagoras’ paradox here (“everyone has justice, and those who do not have it must be
killed”) is the following: Everyone is just, even those who are not. They must pretend to be
just and that is all they need to be just “in a certain way”. In affirming that they are just, they
recognize justice as constitutive of the human community and by so doing justice itself is
integrated in the city – in a way, it is the praise of virtue by vice that universalizes virtue. The
background of the myth and of the whole dialogue between Protagoras and Socrates is the
question of knowing “whether virtue can be taught”. Protagoras maintains that everyone is
naturally virtuous and that virtue is taught according to the exact model of the mother-tongue.
Everyone has it, and yet we do not stop teaching it, from the nanny to the teacher. This is why
Athenian democracy is properly founded as it gives everyone isēgoria, equality of speech,
freedom for everyone to speak in front of the assembly. Everyone speaks, everyone is just,
everyone is a citizen. Public deliberation, parole publique at its best. But the fact is that some
are better at it than others – for Protagoras they are the Sophists or politicians, and one had
better place oneself under their tutoring, at least temporarily. Protagoras’ analysis goes
beyond being applicable to the TRC’s practice and to the TRC as a model for deliberation
within reconciliatory politics. It shows two things. Firstly, that repenting, the apology or the
request of pardon, is that much less necessary since “the one who does not infringe justice is a
fool”. The perpetrator who speaks in front of the TRC could well argue that his past acts, even
if barbaric, show justice, that consistency is still interpretable ad majorem communitatis
gloriam
as an indication that s/he did never cease to act as a member of the community, thus
attempting to further the transition from a worse to a better state. Secondly, what counts in
full disclosure is not that one declares one’s injustice, it is that one declares one’s injustice.
This is the condition for membership of a deliberative community. Shared language is the
6
minimum requirement for a “we” to appear. Such sharing even implies that one consents to
practices such as the TRC itself.” 9
I have allowed myself this long quote, because it is a kind of festival of postmodernist
themes: truth is but a fiction and a narrative, not the description of what is real, but a kind of
of performance, which has to be evaluated through its results. Cassin’s proposal is to
understand the work of the TRC not as the “disclosure” of truth, or as a report on what
actually happened during the Apartheid period in south Africa, but as a narrative which has a
performative character and which can be measured by its benefic effects –healing the wounds
of the past.
According to Cassin, the work of the TRC accomplishes this very Protagorean feat:
exchanging truth for freedom: («Freedom was granted in exchange of truth», ibid., § 29).
“Dealing with truth”, she suggests, in nothing other than making a deal with truth, and
transforming it. There are, according to Cassin four main elements in the transformation of
truth into freedom, which form the background of the work of the TCR. The first consists in
substituting truth as an origin by truth as a result: truth becomes a matter of achieving the best
result, and the most appropriately, in the given circumstances (seizing what the Sophists
called the kairos).. The second consists in taking truth not to be a given, but a social
construction, the object of a negociation between parties, rather than something which is
discovered. The third is that truth is the object of a narration and of a fiction. Cassin mentions
(like the TRC reports) that a fourth notion of truth is present, forensic truth, which she calls
factual. It obviously contrasts with the other kinds of truth, for the facts to be adduced in a
trivial are not supposed to be the object of a negociation, of a construction or of a narrative.
But she does not tell us how this fourth notion is, or is not, related to the others.
As one might expect, Cassin draws the main consequence of these transformations of truth:
truth is relative. Relativism about truth entails, she tells us, that there is no difference between
appearance and reality. But according to her this does not entail that truth is subjective,
relative to individuals only. It is defined pragmatically as what achieves good effects. And
this pragmatic impact of truth is objective: we can know, by objective criteria, what has good
effects or not. Nevertheless, these effects, and their objective character, can vary. Hence if
truth can be more or less useful, it is itself more or less truth. Truth has degrees: one claim can
be more true than another because it brings better effects. Truth only means “is better”.10
The conclusion to be drawn, Cassin tells us, is that it is dubious that truth still has a proper
place in politics. Not only it reduces to what is useful depending on the circumstances, but it
is what everyone agrees to consider as such on the basis of a consensus. Cassin quotes
Desmond Tutu: « We believe we have provided enough of the truth”. She proposes to
interpret this saying in the terms of Gilles Deleuze: “The notions of importance, necessity,
interest are a thousand times more determining than the notion of truth. Not at all because
9 Cassin 2003, op.cit , see also her Sophistical Practice, op cit., ch 14 , and her Vérité, réconciliation,
réparation, avec Barbara Cassin et Olivier Cayla, Le Genre Humain, 43, 2004
10 Sophistical practice, op cit p. 236
7
they replace it, but because they measure the truth of what I say”. To measure truth, Cassin
adds, is no doubt one of the best definitions of relativism.
Cassin calls her form of relativism “consequent”. It trades clearly on postmodernist and
pragmatist themes. She also makes clear that she does not intend to reduce the significance of
these sophistical themes to the circumstances of the TCR episode and to the South African
political context, but to use these as a test case for the defense of a philosophical doctrine, not
only about political discourse but about all kinds of discourses, including those which are, like
philosophy, traditionally aimed at truth. She takes her claims to be consistent with
Heidegger’s and Derrida’s views on truth and deconstruction. Her point is that one does not
need to follow the sophistical doctrines only within politics, but that one can to extend it to all
uses of language. She also takes Austin’s views on language to be grist for her mill. In other
words she defends what I have called above the radical line on rhetoric, or universal
rhetoricism.
On the face of it Salazar’s project is different. He does not want to promote sophistry as a
general philosophical standpoint. His aim is to show that South Africa lives a postmodernist
moment, and that the difficulties of the transitional period initiated by the end of Apartheid
and the TCR will largely be overcome I one adopted, instead of a “Platonic” approach to
truth, the deliberative style of “rhetorical democracy”11 In that he fully agrees with Cassin’s
approach :
“In a democracy, in Ancient Greece no less than in South Africa today, truth is transient,
fragmented, often community-based, it belongs indeed to the domain of prejudice, opinion,
belief, perception (Aristotle, Politics, VII, 13). This is why argument and deliberation –
“rhetoric” – allow citizens, and their representatives, to articulate such diversity. Politics in a
democracy is a contest of words about competing truths. No government ought ever to believe
that they have “the truth”. They are merely the sum total of what Aristotle describes as some
sort of picnic: at the democratic table we all bring our own food to make the party successful,
in spite of the variety of condiments and the diversity of foodstuffs. As the philosopher of
rhetoric Barbara Cassin, furthering this argument, points out, “harmony” in a democracy is
the sum total of disagreements – to agree on ends (to live in a democracy) while disagreeing
on means, and constantly, thanks to debate and deliberation and argument – from talk shows
to parliaments –, to enrich such diversity (Cassin 1995: II, 3). Aristotle called this multifarious
process of competing truths, “friendship”, politikē philia, “political love” (Aristotle, Nic.
Ethics, IX, 6). Incidentally, there is a parallel here with the French Revolution’s use of the
word citoyen (“citizen”). As a form of address this word replaced the old regime’s address
11 P. 53 « The African Renaissance remains remarkably Platonic as South Africa enters the
next phase of nation-building. The executive wishes, in a philosophical gesture of sorts, to
impart “truth” to public deliberation. The Presidency would retain its prudential value—as
clearly indicated in the earlier quote about the second President’s supposed lack of rhetoric.
Yet by wishing to impose a “truth” instead of allowing citizens to argue and debate and
differ and “make sense” of their civil activity, the claim to absence of rhetoric is in itself a
typical Platonic claim.” (Salazar 2004, op.cit : 53)
8
nomenclature that fixed each “subject’s” position in social intercourse (inferior/superior);
citoyen was a way to affirm such “political love” in a democracy – then aptly termed
“republic”, i.e. “that which belongs to all”. … The good citizen must then be a Sophist, who
can “truly” believe in policy X before election time, then vote for Y even if Y has a track
record that does not support policy X. It happens all the time. But why? Because a democracy
is not a theocracy. The ability to exchange viewpoints with others, and with oneself, is the
very stuff of democracy A citizen need not believe in truth, but merely in the value of “this”
truth, correlated with the belief in deliberation, rhetoric, argument – which relativizes all
truths and, as Arendt puts it, make you see the world (the political world) through someone
else’s words. Democracy is the art of conversation”.12
No one can dispute that in a democracy this kind of pluralism is not only a matter of fact,
but also a requirement. But does it allow to put, as the postmodernists are keen to do,
quotations marks around the word “truth”? I find this very dubious. The whole problem is:
when the rhetoricians claim that truth and reason have no place in politics, because it is realm
of passions and conflict, do they really mean that we can at all get rid of truth and reason at
all?
3. Sophistic rhetoric is incomprehensible
Cassin writes in the style of the hermeneutical commentary, mostly from Plato, Aristotle,
the Sophists, which are supposed to exemplify the various postmodernists themes. What we
get are more a series of slogans the purpose of which is to tie the contemporary political
situation to the history of these debates in Ancient philosophy, in the kind of deconstructive
style with which Derrida has made us familiar. Cassin’s view does not call for objections, if
only because her prose is completely devoid of arguments. If it did contain arguments, the
objections would be the familiar ones which have been raised since Plato against Protagoras
and relativism, which have been rehearsed ad nauseam. 13 Moreover, Cassin is well aware of
that relativism has been shown, in all of its versions, self-refuting. But this traditional
objection that relativism is logically incoherent, has never been accepted by relativists,
because they reject the idea that logic could regulate speech. I find it Cassin’s defense of
rhetoric simply incomprehensible. By “incomprehensible” I do not mean nonsensical, in the
way Sokal and Bricmont have denounced the “fashionable nonsense” of many French
philosophers to whom Cassin is sympathetic14. Indeed, Cassin’s inherits many of the features
of the Heideggerian jargon, supplemented by bits of Lacan. Heideggerese, Lacanese ,
Derridese, and other philosophical idiolects, although they have their own special rhetoric, are
not devised to convince or to argue, they consist mostly in a series of analogies by which
those who already agree with the Master are can recognize various patterns which they
12 Salazar, ,ibid. p.15
13 For recent discussions of relativism, see M.Bagrahmian, Relativism,London: Routledge, P. Boghossian, Fear
of Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, T.Williamson, Tetralogue: I'm Right, You're Wrong,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015
14 Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable nonsense,
9
approve15. These do not require giving reasons, or call for conviction, but only for what
Austin (one of Cassin’s favorite authors) call “phatic communion”. Although they very often
invoke the idea that, at the bottom of language lie the Unsayable, the Indicible, the
Incomprehensible, or the Untranslatable16, they are not incomprehensible if one masters the
vocabulary of the idiolects and accepts to play their game. Nevertheless it is undeniable that
certain claims are made, that certain analogies are drawn, on the basis of textual hermeneutics,
and that certain theses are asserted, about truth, meaning, interpretation and the power of
sophistry. These are these theses which I find incomprehensible, when one tries to understand
them in the flattest and most common sense terms.
When I say that the neo-sophist’s claims are incomprehensible, I do not intend to impose
by force the authority of common sense on philosophical claims. This authority was indeed
recognized by the Sophists, and Cassin follows them in her characterization of rhetoric as the
art of speech. The sophist intends to speak the voice of common sense against the
philosophers. Gorgias and Protagoras insist that the notion of truth defended by the
philosophers, either the Platonic notion of a purely intelligible truth world, situated out the
sensible world, makes no sense for the ordinary citizen. The sophists do not deny that we have
an ordinary notion of truth, but they take it to be interpreted according to relativist standards.
So let us assume that there is such an ordinary notion of truth, and that in such neo-sophist
claims that “truth is relative”, “truth has been replaced by freedom”, or “rhetoric must replace
truth-talk”, truth is to be understood in the most straightforward sense. If this is so, the notion
of truth does not make sense.
The ordinary notion of truth is central to our system of communication. According to
Bernard Williams’ useful image17, it is part of a triangle of intrinsically related notions: belief,
assertion and truth. In ordinary communication, we express our beliefs through sentences by
asserting these. In assertions we express our belief that the sentences that we utter or write are
true. We actually represent ourselves as saying something true, which we believe, and we
expect others to recognize this: communication would not function if they did not recognize
this intention. Now if “true” meant, as the relativist claims “true for me” or “true relative to a
parameter” (or a framework, or some social system, etc.), this would mean that in asserting
something we are merely expressing our opinions, or our beliefs, and simply communicate
that these are our beliefs, without implying that these are “simply” true, in the sense of
corresponding to some reality, or to some objective state of affairs, since the relativist denies
15 P.J. Salazar gives a wonderful illustration of this in his postface to the extraordinary document that he has
edited Heidegger’s discourse in 1945 before the Committee of denazification in Freiburg (Heidegger On the Art
of Teaching, edited and translated from the German by Valerie Allen and Ares D. Axiotis ; in M. A. Peters,
Heidegger, Education and Modernity (p. 24-45). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002, French translation
Klincksieck L’art d’enseigner de Heidegger2007). The document is extraordinary because Heidegger explains
his project and defends his action, in taking up the Rectorate, in most clear and intelligible terms, without using
the Heidegerese jargon, which shows that when the circumstances dictate clear speech, esoteric thinkers are
perfectly able to get rid of their antics.
16 See Cassin’s monumental Le vocabulaire européen des philosophies , Paris, Seuil 2004, English translation,
The Dictionary of the Untranslatable, ed. E. Apter, 2015 Princeton, Princeton University Press. I have analysed
this rhetoric of the untranslatable in “Le mythe de l’intraduisible”, En attendant Nadeau , july 2017, special
issue, “la traduction”, https://www.en-attendant-nadeau.fr/preprod/2017/07/18/mythe-intraduisible-cassin/
17 B. Williams, Truth an Truthfulness, Princeton University Press 2002
10
that “true” has this meaning. According to the relativist, when we assert something we are not
saying that what we believe is true, or that the sentence we use expresses a proposition which
is true, for we are just saying something, which we present as our opinion. But if this is the
case it is hard to understand how we can talk of something which could be further than our
opinion. We could not even, as Plato and Aristotle have remarked, disagree, for disagreement
in this case only means that one has a different opinion, not one that can be assessed as true or
false. Not a very good news for politics: if all agree, why debate, why negociate?
At this point, the neo-sophist could answer that asserting is a speech act the role of which
is not to describe things, but to do certain things. Cassin makes much of this performative
character of speech, and takes it to be a lesson of sophistic rhetoric that discourse is a kind of
action, made to impress and seduce. Rhetoric is a kid of performative discourse through and
through18. She also suggests that her claims should not be taken as assertions or affirmations,
in order to avoid the charge that she contradicts herself, a classical skeptical ploy. But she
completely overlooks the fact that illocutionary acts like assertions can transfer a
propositional content presented as true. “Performative”, in some postmodernist circles, seems
to function like a shibboleth. Sometimes they write as if all uses of words become
“performative”, which is absurd, for there are limits to the use of this concept. Austin held
that “I know” does not report a state of knowing, but a claim to know. But he was well aware
that it cannot be a performative in the usual sense, since someone who says “I know” does not
thereby know. Austin also defended the view that truth is not a property of what is said, but “a
dimension of assessment of sentences” 19. According to the so-called “performative” theory of
truth, when I say “It is true that P” I am actually approving of P, not describing any state of
affairs: “true” is a term of praise, by which I want to express my agreement of P to my
community. But this view is absurd if this is supposed to be all that “true” means, as anyone
who in a restaurant argues with the waiter over the price of the bill has experienced: to say
that the sum is wrong cannot merely express disapproval. So if this is what Cassin means
when she says that the TRC , by replacing truth by reconciliation, reconciliation as a
performance, this is meaningless.
Cassin also claims that relativism does not imply subjectivism because a “consequent”
relativism holds that truth is “measured” by its utility and efficiency. This claim is puzzling. If
it means that the criterion of truth is usefulness, this is right, for quite often (but not always)
what is true is useful. But this cannot be a definition of truth, for there are many things which
are true but useless or even produce bad consequences. Moreover how could the measure of
truth by utility be “objective”? Utility is, unlike truth, always relative to given aims. So it is
hard to understand how the resulting pragmatism can be “consequent”, unless, contrary to the
hypothesis of the Sophist, true is objective.
Equally baffling is the claim that truth could be replaced by freedom. One can understand it
as saying that the ideal of truth, which holds in justice trials, has to be replaced by another
18 Cassin, Quand dire c’est vraiment faire, Paris, Fayard, 2015, ch 2 : « An assertion does not belong to truth»,
« We have to get rid of the fetichism of truth and falsity », etc.
19 J.L. Austin, “Other Minds” (1946), “Truth” (1950) and “ in Philosophical Papers, Oxford 1, R. Rorty ,
Objectivity, relativism, and truth. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991
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ideal, that of trusting others, and making them free. This obviously was one of the aims of the
TRC commission. Trust is indeed a very important political factor, and one of the objectives
of politics is to secure trust. “Truthworthy” and “trustworthy” are among the old senses of
“true” in Indo-European languages, and Cassin often relies on etymology in order to advance
her claims. But to what extent does this etymology show that truth can be defined as trust, or,
for that matter as freedom? Now, replacing truth by freedom might mean something different:
that the project is to replace the value of truth by the value of freedom. But this is a very
different claim that the one which is advertised by Cassin (obviously inspired by Heidegger
gnomic saying that “the essence of truth is freedom”). The definition of truth (whether it can
be defined as correspondence, coherence, pragmatic or other) is one thing, the value of truth is
another.
The last, but not the least, confusion, which more or less pervades all these discussions, is
between the nature of truth and what people think of it or do with it. It is said that since
democracy rests on the plurality of opinions, truth has to be plural, and that only a theocracy
or a tyranny can pretend to have a unique and absolute truth. But truth – the mere distinction
between true and false – is neither plural nor unique, for it does not depend of what one thinks
of it. That it is true that snow is white is made true by the fact that snow is white, not by the
fact that a number of individuals, or a single individual, believe or claim that snow is white.
Truth is owned by nobody, and the fact that some people pretend that it is their property has
nothing to do with the nature or the definition of truth. It is only if one takes truth to be what
people believe to be true, that is their opinion about what is true, that truth can seem to be
plural or unique. Protagoreanism is indeed a form of idealism.
What sense can we make of this budget of confusions or sophisms? To borrow the terms of
La Mothe LeVayer, the sophistic conception of truth displays a strong lack of common sense.
The fact that it is deliberate sophistry does not make it more acceptable.
5 Truth and politics again
There is one notion of truth mentioned by the TRC which I have so far left out: forensic
truth, the truth with which judges and tribunals deal everyday. It is indeed the most, and in
many ways, the only kind of truth worth having. It is part of what the usual situations of
transitional justice deal with. Is it part of the project of exchanging truth for freedom to reject
the everyday notion of factual truth? Does the Arendtian view that truth has no place in
politics entail any such claim? Certainly not. Arendt , just after quoting the Hobbes passage
reported above, shows that although there a conflict between factual truth and politics, the
latter can never get rid of it. As it is often remarked, democratic deliberation could not
function if one could not rely on factual truths in the most ordinary sense. But if the neosophistic
program of removing the notion of truth from public and political discussion is
supposed to operate, how can we save the simple of notion of truth? Cassin defines, following
Heidegger, truth as “disclosure” (Unverborgenheit). If this is supposed to be the essence of
truth, it has the same revisionist purpose as the project to replace truth by freedom. But the
most common notion of truth is simply correspondence with facts, or with what exists, legein
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to onta. To a neo Protagorean thinker, this sounds too Platonic, and we are told that this is not
what politics requires. We are told that rhetoric is the basis of freedom of speech. But how can
freedom of speech be secured without truth? Cassin occasionally refers to Viktor Klemperer
for his study of the language of the Third Reich, but she does not seem to connect the power
of the nazi rhetoric with the need to respect simple truth against the lies carried by hat
rhetoric. I wonder what the Protagorean rhetorician has to answer to Orwell’s “freedom is the
freedom to say that two plus two equal four”.
Behind the Sophist’s move, there is a familiar thought: democracy is the realm of opinion,
and opinions can be true or false, so how can truth prevail at the cost of being tyrannical? I
shall not enter his classical discussion20, but as I noted above postmodernists typically confuse
the fact that there is a distinction between truth and falsity with the existence a “tyranny of
truth”, and conclude that if one intends to reject this tyranny one has to reject truth iself. To
be fair to Cassin, she does not explicitly reject the simple correspondence notion of truth, only
the Platonic philosophical view of which she believes that ordinary truth is loaded. But
ordinary truth has nothing Platonic. It is just that a statement is true if it fits the facts. The
Platonic notion is obviously not one which the promoters of “truth and reconciliation” had in
mind. In my view, they were wise to keep the notion of truth, even if their aim was not to
install a tribunal for the crimes of the Apartheid period, as it has been done in a number of
situations of transitional justice in the past . In his book on these issues, Jon Elster
distinguishes a hierarchy of motivations which may animate actors in such periods: a desire of
revenge, pursuit of self-interest, and the desire to promote the good of the polis.21 Revenge
and self-interest are passions which are often opposed to what James Madison called “the
mild voice of reason”. I concur with Cassin that the third motive, the good of the city, and the
necessity of reconciliation, often conflicts with the desire for truth in trials. But does it follow
that we have to reject the very notion of truth?
So we are left with the good old Aristotelian view: politics needs rhetoric, but rhetoric
does not need to reject truth and reason. Now, as Orwell, among many others, has shown, "
political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind". As Philippe-Joseph Salazar has shown brilliantly in
his work of the rhetoric of Jihadists and of Supremacists, we can use rhetoric to analyze and
describe these constructions of appearances and the blowing of these winds. But it does not
follow that we have to take their rhetoric at face value. We can be fascinated by their strength,
and by the postmodernist aspect that their fictions create, but the work of the rhetorician is not
to praise this kind of rhetoric, but to bury it.
Rhetoric takes in charge the emotions and the elements of irrationality in human nature. It
reminds us that this dark side is always present, and that truth and reason have only a very
small share. The masters of truth of today, the media, who are the main voice of politics,
ignore this irrational share, which leads to religious fanaticism, and which is present in the
story of injustice that whole countries suffer. When this fanaticism uses the tools of rhetoric to
20 I allow myself to refer to my book Manuel rationaliste de survie, Agone, Marseille 2020
21 See John Elster , Closing the books, transitional Justice in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2004; pp. 82-83
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serve their ends, the the role of the rhetorician is to remind us of this obscure side when it lies
in discourse, at the service of politics or terror or of slavery. Fist-order discourses, those
which concern politics at the basic level, where conflicts are in the open, does not trade on
truth. It trades on passion and violence. But it does not follow that rhetoric, when it is used, at
the meta-level of description, as a tool for the analysis of these conflicts within their
discursive expression, has to stop using the usual tools of reason and truth.