Truthfulness

I take my title from the late Bernard Williams's last book, Truth and Truthfulness, but I shall begin with two striking quotations, one old, one new, from other sources. The old one is translated from William Harvey's De motu cordu of 1628, the work in which he first described the way in which blood is circulated by the pumping of the heart. I came across this passage not as a student of Harvey—which I am not—but as a visitor to the library of the McGill University department of social studies of medicine. I read it on a bronze plaque posted on the day the library was opened in 2003. The plaque reads:

But without ceasing I follow truth alone, and devote all my effort and time to being able to contribute something pleasing to good men, and suitable to learned ones, and of service to the world of letters.

I find this sentence moving, but not because it is true that Harvey followed truth alone. He followed fame, fortune, and the mighty. When he was young, he was physician to Francis Bacon, who was then lord chancellor of England. Good work, if you can get it. Harvey gave up teaching and experimentation at the request of Charles I, in order to accompany an equally powerful but far less interesting person around Europe. Every Harvey scholar knows that he was cantankerous, blessed with good prose style, and cursed by vanity. I find the quotation moving not as a statement of truth, but as a statement about the value of truth, and it was as such that the sentence was engraved in bronze and mounted at McGill. Which scholar or scientist, old or young, would not wish that this statement were true of her or him?

Many, perhaps. Writing in Common Knowledge two years ago, Miguel Tamen, the literary critic, made this knowing remark about "us":

we will as a rule add prudent scare quotes to words like true and false: those are not our words, nor do we take them seriously anymore.

Tamen was reviewing an au courant special issue of Critical Inquiry (the issue's title was "Things"), and his tone here is evidently tongue-in-cheek. Even so, the half sentence I have quoted seems to me more troubling than William Harvey's noble—or self-deceptive—lie. Tamen's remark presupposes that the advance guard of the humanities now consists of what Bernard Williams called deniers: that is, people who deny that in our enlightened times we may use the words true and false seriously. Scare quotes are part of the rhetorical arsenal of our enlightened times. In giving public talks, many speakers from the humanities are incessantly wiggling two fingers of each hand somewhere around their ears to indicate that the words they utter are "not ours."

Tamen's statement has the merit that the author refers to true and false as adjectives. Thus he is unlike Harvey, who refers to abstract truth. I frequently recall the opening paragraph of a paper delivered over fifty years ago by the greatest of the Oxford philosophers of ordinary language, J. L. Austin. His lecture began with the first sentence of Bacon's essay "Of Truth": "'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Austin continued: "Pilate was ahead of his time." Although the title of his paper was "Truth," Austin urged us to discuss not truth but the adjective true and its uses. "In vino, possibly,'veritas'," he charmingly wrote, "but in sober philosophical discussion, 'verum'."¹ Austin notwithstanding, we seem inescapably drawn back to that abstraction, Truth—especially when we have a value in mind, as did William Harvey. The pleasingly plain label "denier" comes, as I have said, from the late Bernard Williams, the outstanding British philosopher of his generation. The full title of his book was Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Let me note at once, to preempt misunderstanding, that whatever a genealogy is, this one is not a genealogy of truth; it is a genealogy of truthfulness. Truthfulness, Williams urges, has a history. Truth does not.^2...