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4. Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Truth
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IV Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Truth While discussing the relationship between truth and rhetoric in the passage, cited in the previous section, from the first chapter of book III of the “Divinae insti tutiones,” Lactantius comments on the ‘natural’ nakedness of truth. This divinely sanctioned nakedness is tarted up with rhetorical frippery in a manner that is char acteristic precisely of the way in which lies manifest themselves: “But since God has willed this to be the nature of the case, that simple and undisguised truth should be more clear, because it has sufficient ornament of itself, and on this account it is cor rupted when embellished with adornings from without, but that falsehood should please by means of a splendor not its own, because being corrupt of itself it vanishes and melts away, unless it is set off and polished with decoration sought from an other source . . .”1 That brings us to a new field of metaphors in which a quite par ticular aspect of historical representations of truth comes to light. 1. Sed quoniam deus hanc voluit rei esse naturam, ut simplex et nuda veritas esset luculentior, quia satis ornata per se est, ideoque ornamentis extrinsecus additis fucata corrumpitur; mendacium vero specie placet aliena, quia per se corruptum vanescit ac diffluit, nisi aliunde ornatu quaesito circumlitum fuerit ac politum . . . (III 1, 3). [Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, trans. William Fletcher (Peabody, MA: Hendrikson Publishers, 2004), VII, 69.] Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Truth 41 The reader will surely agree that it is tautologous to speak of the ‘naked truth’, since we are always dealing with truth “when a thing lies naked before us.”2 But this metaphor does not mean to bring anything into the concept of truth; it projects conjectures and evaluations of a very complex kind over the top of the concept, as it were. The metaphor is intimately linked with the import and importance of clothing , considered as guise or disguise, in relation to which nakedness likewise splits into unmasking, into the uncovering of a deception, on the one hand, and shame less unveiling, the violation of a sacred mystery, on the other. Truth can have its ‘culture’ in its clothing, just as mankind’s cultural history is essentially identical to that of its apparel, since man is the creature that dresses itself and refuses to expose itself precisely in its ‘naturalness’. Is truth—insofar as it may be imagined, as truth for man, to show any consideration for him at all—even compatible, in its ‘natu ral’ openness and insistence, with a ‘clothed’ being? An aggressive aphorism from Franz Werfel’s “Theologumena” will perhaps make clearer what is intended here: “The naked truth, the ‘nuda veritas’, is the whorish bride of the barbarian. Culture begins at the exact moment when something is to be hidden, in other words, with an awareness of original sin (Adam’s fig leaf is the first document of culture). Re gression into barbarism, however, begins at the exact moment when what is hidden begins to be uncovered, that is to say, with psychology.” Kierkegaard expressed a similar thought in a far more subtle manner in a journal entry from 29 October 1838: “There is always a great tendency among ecstatic factions, expressed with a curious ironic consistency, to reveal themselves outwardly in the negligee in which their train of thought always emerges: the Adamites thought that in order to be perfectly free one had to go stark naked, and presumably regarded this as the spe cific difference between man’s state in paradise and his later condition. The sans culottes are well known—the attempt of barenecked persons to reestablish the Nordic spirit is just now in full swing.”3 In the long entry from 1 August 1835, to which we will have occasion to turn a little later in this section, the problematic of the ‘naked truth’ is grasped by Kierkegaard in an even more radical sense. Nakedness originally appears to be the sole mode in which creatures can submit themselves before God and be ‘suffered’ by him. “O Lord, the depths of man’s conscience lie bare before your eyes,”4 Augustine exclaims, in order that this na 2. Ortega y Gasset, “Über das Denken,” in Vergangenheit und Zukunft im heutigen Menschen (Stutt gart, 1955), 126. [“Notes on Thinking,” in Concord and Liberty, trans. Helene Weyl (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 59.] 3. [Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, trans...