This essay argues that there is no such thing as post-truth. We are by no means in the middle of an unprecedented epistemological crisis that keeps us from telling right from wrong. Rather, what we currently witness is a major breakdown of the institutions and mechanics of democratic society, triggered by an encompassing technological transformation that affects both our public and private lives. Even if the challenges for rational public discourse are real, they should not be countered by philosophy but by concerted, serious interventions in the political arena.
Second, since the notion of post-truth is often invoked to expose someone who fails to speak the truth rather than to demote the concept of truth altogether , it refers to the Greek tradition of parrhesia as discussed by the late Michel Foucault. And thirdly, this essay comment s on the alarming rise of anti-professionalism. Long before neoconservatives waged war on the university, the erosion of expertise has been fostered, according to Bruno Latour, by forces unleashed within the humanities itself.
Yet there is little evidence, this essays concludes, that humanist critical thinking is driving the current post-truth crisis and that postmodernist efforts to rethink and question modernist forms of critique should be undone altogether. For most readers, the question raised in the title of this collection conveys a sense of uneasiness about the current state of affairs—political, social, cultural—in that it juxtaposes two mutually exclusive world views: one based on facts and on largely reliable representations of these facts, and another that posits a post-factual world full of fake news and disinformation in which rivaling versions of reality are in ongoing competition.
It also asks us to choose between these two worlds, as if we still had a choice, and both the world of truth and the world of post-truth were equally available to us, either to be nurtured or rejected. What if, however, the collocation of these two possible worlds is but a false proposition, not unlike asking: modernism or postmodernism?
In other words, there is no going back to modernism or truth, for that matter if you believe that such a thing as postmodernism or post-truth really exists. You may prefer the former, but history will not let you choose between the two, modernism will always remain—even if preferred over its later, distorted twin—an option that is no longer an option. We would then have to explain how the new paradigm of post-truth has finally come to prevail and, perhaps more importantly, why we think that truth is a socially desirable good that should be embraced and—if now lost—somehow recuperated.
