The present time tends to blur the boundary between true and false. Democracy is compromised, which is based on the conflict of opinions and consequently on the horizon of a common truth. But the threat weighs just as much, according to Mr. Revault d’Allones, on imagination.
Within a protean work, Myriam Revault d’Allonnes’ reflection on the transformations of our democratic societies now takes a central place. With this latest opus, the philosopher analyzes the erasure of the division between true and false and, beyond that, the process of falsification of reality that this erasure authorizes. Her argumentation takes original paths since she proposes to pose anew the question of fiction and its relationship to reality, convinced that imagination maintains with action, the power to do, a decisive link that could be summarized as follows: no action without imagination.
In this discursive framework, post-truth fundamentally calls into question the possibility of building a common world, in other words, it represents a major danger for democracy. Accompanied in her reflection by Aristotle, Arendt, Ricœur, Foucault and Protagoras, the author, in 5 lively chapters, of great conceptual precision, seeks to convince us of the reasons to love democracy while the men of the present times nourish reasons, obviously bad ones, of not holding on to it sufficiently.
Political Truth: The Status of Opinion
Mr. Revault d’Allonnes first takes stock of the situation, that of the age of “post”. Because the era of post-truth, defined as that in which facts become a matter of opinion and, therefore, obstruct the possibility of argumentative debate, is only one element of a larger whole in which democracy is an empty shell. What awaits us, perhaps already here, is indifference to the truth and the abolition of its normative value. This blurring of the boundaries between truth and lies is expressed in the notion of “alternative facts”: it is now permissible to disagree with the facts (as Sean Spicer, a member of Trump’s presidential team, proclaimed). But we must not misunderstand the nature of the transformation. We have not entered an era of generalized lies, but that of “a division that has become inessential between true and false” (p. 34). We can now deny the reality of a fact in the presence of those who witness it. This phenomenon is, since the denial of the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, radically new.
How can we read these strange realities in the light of the tumultuous relations between truth and politics? Mr. Revault d’Allonnes makes a crucial demarcation between rational truth, which is a matter of science, and factual truth. It is the latter that is at the heart of his thinking because, when denied, it becomes a simple opinion disconnected from reality. To understand the scope of this disconnection, it is appropriate to start with Aristotle and his distinction between the true and the probable. What is at issue is paradigmatic of democratic functioning. Indeed, in this framework, deliberation aims to establish the truth of propositions which, although they cannot be based on any logical axiom, must be “decidable”. This is the very spirit of democracy, of what the Greeks calledisegoria (the equal right for everyone to express their opinion), than to allow any opinion to be expressed, simply because dialogue, consubstantial with the democratic exercise, implies the possibility of contradiction. Without conflict between opinions, “the life of the City would be empty.”
But once the adversarial debate has taken place, as happens during a trial, a truth is legitimately established. It could certainly have been other than it is, because, unlike epistemic truth, which is a matter of necessity, it is contingent. But what matters in a democracy is to arrive at a shared judgment which, as Mr. Revault d’Allonnes rightly notes, allows men to construct something in common. The author therefore borrows from Aristotle the value of plurality, a lineage in which Arendt also situates herself, the latter insisting “on the distinction between the search for absolute truth (that of the Platonic philosopher) and the conditions of political judgment which takes place in the common world, in and through the exercise of plurality” (p. 45).
What is perhaps less expected is the role that the author makes Machiavelli play. It can be explained by the fact that the Florentine thinker attacked a philosophical tradition that wanted to submit, like Plato, the political order to the canons of speculative reason. But this explanation remains partial. M. Revault d’Allonnes sees in Machiavelli a “great educator”, that is to say “one for whom the “effective truth” of politics resides in an interweaving, an interlacing or better still a mutual belonging that deconstructs de facto the binary vision of the all-powerful master in the face of the radical impotence of the subjects” (p. 70). His work, contrary to what Machiavellianism implies, which identifies politics with evil, reveals the truth of politics in the revaluation of the status of opinion. Machiavelli is thus part of the concern for the construction of a common world, profoundly called into question by the dissolution of the boundaries between true and false or, if you prefer, by the fact that truth no longer has any importance.
As we have emphasized, factual truths are vulnerable. All the more reason to protect them against the lies that betray them and the propaganda that distorts them. But the task is difficult because, ultimately, these truths, which “impose themselves and are beyond agreement and consent” (p. 78), are antipolitical, that is to say, they do not fall within the realm of opinion. The representative nature of political thought therefore comes “into tension with the compelling evidence of truth” (p. 79), whether it is epistemic or factual. However, the legitimacy of opinion is based on facts. The danger, therefore, is that factual truths are transformed into opinions. We are here in the presence of a perversion of democracy: the reign of equivalence and indistinction. But in a world where the division between true and false is fading, conflict no longer has any reason to exist and the absence of conflict takes democracy with it: “Since ideological thought is independent of existing reality, it considers everything that is factual as an artifact and, consequently, it no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”
Philosophically rehabilitating fiction
The last chapter, “Fiction and Power-to-Do,” extends a previous work, The Mirror and the Stage. What Political Representation Can Do (Seuil, 2016), in which was evoked, still in the lineage of Aristotle and Arendt, the possibility of moving away from the constraint of reality, that is to say of thinking of other worlds, those imagined by utopia in its function of contesting existing reality. This philosophical rehabilitation of fiction, this “heuristic force of literature” (p. 112), these imaginative practices authorize us to perceive, from an “elsewhere”, the riches of the societies in which we live: “It is, through the creative power of language and the power of fiction, to reach the lived world, the “world of life” which is like an original soil, like the primordial layer in which all donation of meaning is rooted” (p. 113). A world where imagination had disappeared would deprive man of the exercise of his capacities: “Far from this loss in the world that indifference to truth implies, imagination does not suffer the weakness of truth and accommodates itself even less to its abandonment” (p. 132). In this perspective, we understand the paradigmatic use of Orwell’s book, 1984in which the author does not limit himself to describing a totalitarian system. It is a nightmare world where imagination itself disappears, for want of being able to distinguish fact from fiction. The link between truth and imagination is therefore crucial: the weakness of truth dissipates the power of imagination.
To save our common world, it is therefore necessary that true and false remain operational categories. To renounce our ideals of truth and objectivity is to abandon our power to do in the hands of the powerful for whom these ideals are now useless.
On the use of Foucauldian thought
Was it appropriate, to support this remarkable dissection of democratic functioning, to seek the support of Foucauldian thought? Certainly Mr. Revault d’Allonnes retains the best of Foucault’s philosophy: “By introducing the idea of a “regime of truth”, Foucault rightly considered that truth was neither “outside” nor “without” power and that it was “of this world”, produced according to various constraints and possessing regulated effects of power” (p. 92). In the author’s argument, it is legitimate to be interested in the conditions of the appearance of a discourse. But the meaning given to the expression “regime of truth” nevertheless seems quite far from the relativist use (contested, it is true, by Mr. Revault d’Allonnes) that Foucault makes of it. Indeed, according to him, “the “truth” (the quotes are his) is circularly linked to systems of power that produce and support it, and to effects of power that it induces and that renew it. “Regime” of truth. This “regime” is constituted by an epistemic system (the rules of justification of statements) and by the power devices in which it is inscribed. From then on, it is not the facts that constrain us but the “regime of truth” of the society to which we belong.
Can M. Revault d’Allonnes, a resolute opponent of relativism, subscribe to an “epistemology” in which there is no room for the distinction between be true And to be held true ? Especially since the author addresses essential criticisms to Foucault on another level. They can be summarized as follows: while to understand the nature of democratic functioning, one must place oneself under the authority of Protagoras (this is also the opinion of Francis Wolff in the aforementioned article), Foucault joins the Platonic camp by considering as “a perversion or an alteration resulting from democratic practice what, for Protagoras, is its primary characteristic: the permanent risk of judgment, of the capacity to judge which is the property of all citizens” (p. 102). She also very pertinently underlines “the blind spot of Foucault’s thinking”, an author who has shown only “little interest in the truth regime of modern democracy, where the capacity to judge citizens is constantly exposed to the transformation of factual truths into opinions” (p. 106). In my eyes, this fair criticism makes the recourse to Foucault enigmatic.
This point of divergence should not conceal the essential: Mr. Revault d’Allonnes offers us a powerful, original and worrying analysis on the future of our democracies. We can only ardently hope that his force of conviction can alert us to the ethical and political effects of this deadly blurring of the boundaries between factual truth and opinion, a blurring which, by destroying the possibility of a common world, prepares the reign of barbarism.