Introduction to the English Institute Essays On "Truth-Telling"

When the question "What is truth?" was posed on a momentous occasion, recorded in the Gospel of John (3:18), Pontius Pilate famously, as J. L. Austin noted, did not stay for an answer. Pilate, Austin suggested at the outset of his essay on "Truth," was "ahead of his time," posing a question of great moment in "ordinary language philosophy," not often enough asked in the middle of the twentieth century, and still pertinent now for us.¹ But maybe Pilate was avant-garde in not waiting for answer? Did he not stay for an answer because he was a pragmatist? An anti-foundationalist avant la lettre?

Some people—earlier or later, more or less explicitly, from Aristotle and Confucius, Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna though David Hume and Ludwig Wittgenstein—did in fact tarry, proposing many and varied answers to the perhaps ultra-fundamental question, with the question and the thinkers sometimes in and sometimes out of philosophical fashion. One of the most provocative and unexpected answers, a little before Austin's time, was Nietzsche's. Truth, he posited, brushing against the grain, is a "mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation."² If this sounds, on the face of it, as if it's a reduction of everything to language—and not only language but tropes and figures—it still positions truth in relation to "human relations," and figural language is figured as strikingly polemical: a mobile army in a field of forces. Language is not remotely cut off from the world. Nietzsche's imperative calls for us to be aware of the disfiguring modes of reference and non-reference, which is roughly where post-structuralist inquiries have left us, with rumors of their abandonment of truth and reference having been wildly exaggerated. Nietzsche's essay proceeds, of its own momentum, to take up the question of fabulation, sometimes in the mode of fabulation. It's hard to get at truth without going via truth-telling. And this is one place scholars, historians, and critics of literature might usefully come in, even when not addressing literature.

A lot of thinking since the turn of the twentieth century has operated in the wake of some version of Nietzsche's insights, and not just among Continental figures in his train. A good many analytic philosophers too have questioned the status of truth and truth-telling in thoroughgoing fashion, their conditions of possibility and the actualities of reference, sometimes settling on something like the "inscrutability of reference" (as in the influential work of Willard V. Quine) or dislodging the paradigm of representation (as in Austin and the later Wittgenstein).³ Competing theories of truth (correspondence, coherence, deflationist and more) have left philosophers—and their readers and students—not exactly on the same page, even if in common intellectual parlance across the humanities some implicit version of the correspondence theory seems not to have been displaced or dethroned as the default mode. But there is truth and then there is truth-telling. And it may be that attention to literature and to modes of presentation and representation have something particular to contribute to our collective thinking on the matter.

The question of "truth-telling" is the organizing principle for the following dossier of essays, all of which have their origins in the English Institute conference held at Yale University in October 2018.⁴ Each English Institute meeting includes a group discussion of a text chosen as resonant for the organizing topic; for the Yale meeting, the text for general discussion was an excerpt from Michel Foucault's 1979-1980 Collège de France lectures On the Government of the Living.⁵ Much of the excerpt is devoted to a reading of Oedipus Rex that Foucault uses as a vehicle for thinking, as was newly his wont, about truth and government together.⁶ More particularly, in the opening lectures of that sequence, Foucault is concerned with the mode of...