Does the truth have a story?

Pascal Engel offers a criticism of the Foucauldian conception of truth, as well as of his uses by some of his successors. He is thus part of the footsteps of Jacques Bouveresse, to whom he dedicated his book, and which published in 2016 Nietzsche against Foucaultin which he intended to show that Foucault was less substantial than Nietzsche himself in his relationship to the notion of truth, and therefore less respectful of it. However, this criticism also presents itself as all the reasons why the author himself moved away from Foucault after being a fervent disciple. Thus, although this is not his displayed goal, his book can be read both as a retrospective look at his own philosophical journey, and as a testimony of the way in which he took shape according to his own conception of the correct relationship to the truth. If the criticisms are lively, the tone is measured and without acrimony, opening the space for a discussion exceeded.

P. Engel does not intend to lead an exegesis of Foucault’s work ; It is not a monograph aimed at exposing its structure or genesis, but a critical examination of the identifiable theses in Foucault as to the notion of truth. These theses seem inseparable from the criticism of the latter with regard to norms, insofar as, for Foucault, the study of normativity would be a necessary condition for individual emancipation. Engel, by raising (p. 25) The omnipresence of norms in contemporary thought, therefore intends, ultimately, to shed light on the debate on the relationship between freedom and criticism of normativity. To do this, it develops a conception of fundamental normativity of thought. The theory of knowledge standards must therefore be opposed to the confusion that, according to him, commits Foucault on the notion of truth, in order to serve as a basis for another conception of emancipation, in which the relationship to knowledge occupies an irreducible place. However, such an alternative conception does not imply that the work of Foucault must be considered as zero and not avenue, but rather that one must both clarify it and re -evaluate its philosophical scope, at least for some of its major proposals.

Truth or will of truth ?

According to Engel, Foucault is, in the best of cases, ambiguous as to the question of whether the object of his study is the truth itself or the will which it is the subject. Now if we can make a story of the desire for truth, can it go the same for the truth ? In addition, can we criticize the desire for truth in the name of a criterion or a norm radically foreign to the truth itself: can we criticize the desire for truth without criticizing the truth ? According to Engel, Foucault actually only manages to formulate a “ radical contextualism (P. 79), which seems to imply a purely conventionalist, and therefore untenable conception of truth. Impossible on the epistemic level, Foucault’s position would prove to be just as difficult on an ethical level: he would thus constantly pass “ From the desire for truth to the truth of desire (P. 80) ; In other words, in his investigations, he would never speak of the truth, but only of the desire for truth, as if one could, in doing so, ignore the truth itself.

But the truth, for Engel, cannot be forgotten so easily. He then proposed, based on the book of Bernard Williams Truth and veracityan alternative in good and due form to the Foucaldian genealogy of true speeches. For Engel reading Williams, telling the truth formally constitutes an assertion, that is to say an act of language in which the agent necessarily believes that what he says is true. However, in practice, one cannot do without assertions, that is to say the necessary involvement of belief and truth. Consequently, the attitudes with regard to the truth that Foucault describes do not fall under the assertion at all, but only of what one can call “ Virtues of truth »(P. 95-96)-Among which we can find the intention to say the true (sincerity) or the personalization of the relationship to the true (authenticity).

It is only on this condition, for Engel, that we can understand what Foucault does: not a story of truth, but virtues of truth. The ambition of Foucault’s work (a story of “ Shares of the real and the false ) Is diminished more. In addition, this leaves the whole problem, untreated by Foucault, of the ethical value of belief to the true as true.

The norms of the real as such

For Engel, the story tells Foucault is that of a forgetting of the spiritual dimension of our relationship to the true. Philosophical modernity, with Descartes and Locke, would inaugurate an era when truth would no longer have, as such, of practical involvement on the subject itself. As Foucault says in particular in the hermeneutics of the subject, the truth would be revealed only in a purely objective way, and the history of subjective relationships with the truth prior to the modern cut would precisely make it possible to assert today a spiritual dimension of truth. Engel challenges this thesis which is according to him another version of the Wéberian theme of the disenchantment of the world. He does so in the name of an absolute and anhistoric value of the norm of truth.

To show it, Engel develops what he calls another genealogy of the virtues of truth – a story of the values that we lend to the truth, which is not critical, but on the contrary elogious: a “ Positive genealogy ” SO. Concretely, it is a rereading of the history of modern philosophy, from Locke and Kant to contemporary pragmatism, passing by neo-Kantism. For him, the question of the relationship between cognitive standards, which guide the effort to know, and ethical standards, has indeed arisen “ in the form of a reflection on the constituent norms of thought (P. 142). Such a genealogy contrasts, in fact, quite strongly with the large Foucaldian stories, in which the history of philosophy was embedded in that of ideas and practices.

This allows Engel to challenge the foundations of several research in the social sciences which have developed on the basis of the hypotheses of Foucault, and which for him make the amalgamation between knowledge on the one hand, and their social or practical effects on the other (p. 147, 162). He made Foucault the first responsible for these amalgams, and the promoter of a real “ anti-epistemology ». Against these works, and against Foucault, Engel maintains that one cannot reduce the true to an effect of will which would be, or purely arbitrary, or linked to a badly elucidated social function (p. 176-178).

The ethical dimension of the real

What shows the irreducibility of the true to the ethical attitudes which it is the subject (that is to say to the relationships that one can have in it), is ultimately, for Engel, that the truth has itself an ethical dimension, and that this dimension is not dependent on the historical context. Admittedly, Foucault, in his last works, wanted to study the ethical dimension of the relationship with the true. This is the object, in particular, of its analyzes of the ancient concept of parrhêsiawhich he defines as the courage to tell the truth. But Engel reproaches him for not giving himself the trouble for defining the truth, that is to say for giving a criterion of truth which comes to certify the belief that the individual of saying true-a criterion which would therefore be external to his own belief.

What proves that it is a gap, and more deeply, of a defect in Foucault’s thought, is that this analysis leaves us destitute against practices, not of lie, but rather out of little and simple with regard to the truth which we are today flooded, and which come under the “ whip “(Term by which Engel translates the concept, borrowed from Harry Frankfurt, of” bullshit »). Now indifference to the true is not, as we can see, without generating massive domination effects. Foucault’s wrong is not only not to perceive the problem, but above all to refuse to use the truth as a resource to fight against such power effects, and concretely preventing its readers from taking essential ways towards freedom.

The distinction offered by Engel between knowledge (or true belief) and the desire for knowledge thus leads it to a devaluation of the work of Foucault, whose scope is restricted to the history of beliefs rather than to the history of knowledge as such. Paradoxically, however, by contenting oneself with safeguarding the anhistoric invariants of the norms of truth, Engel still leaves the field of the history of our relationships to the truth-the very one that Foucault intended to explore through the history of the relationships between knowledge and power. Engel tells us that these relationships cannot be considered as the history of knowledge itself. However, and as Engel not himself notes, Foucault, in some of his texts, do not discuss it: if there is a relationship between power and knowledge, it is because both are distinct, and obey different standards. Engel preserves the standards of knowledge and shows that we cannot forget them without serious consequences. But the evaluation of the relationships between knowledge and power can be made entirely on the basis of the standards of knowledge ?

Engel may answer that Foucault, a prisoner of contextualism and integral relativism, did not try to lead such a business. This does not prevent thinking that, as he himself knew how to make his place in the ethical dimension of epistemic norms, Foucault’s work should then be completed by the political evaluation of the history of power relations. If Foucault was anti-epistemologist, he was nonetheless anti-anthropologist, in the sense that he denied to know everything about man the possibility of justifying social relationships, which he called power relations. The company of Engel, as critical as it is, thus leaves no less, also the place for a philosophy, or an anthropology, of the historical forms of justice. But, with the exception of work directly inspired by Foucault, sociology and anthropology are paradoxically the great absent from this book on standards. Others “ Positive genealogies »Of our own values could thus be undertaken – as some have, to tell the truth, already tried.