Customer Reviews
You can handle the truth - By: Sphex, 26 Aug 2008 
Do you want to know who you are? Do you want to know the many ways in which you are limited, the many boundaries that separate you from the world out there, that define who you are? I thought not. The first question sounds like the opening impertinence of a self-help book; as for the second, no one likes to dwell on their limitations. One surprising & rewarding theme of this gem of a book, however, is the connection between facts & truth & identity: "If there were no such facts or truths, if the world invariably & unresistingly became whatever we might like or wish it to be, we would be unable to distinguish ourselves from what is other than ourselves & we would have no sense of what in particular we ourselves are. It is only through our recognition of a world of stubbornly independent reality, fact, & truth that we come both to recognize ourselves as beings distinct from others & to articulate the specific nature of our own identities."
Harry Frankfurt has written a little book about a big idea. His language is precise, as you would expect from a philosopher, & yet he's as suspicious of "fakers & phonies" as Holden Cauldfield. You can't help warming to a professor who worries over whether an "adequate discussion of bullshit" is possible in our culture. There is a twinkle in his style that sits well with his approach: these are more than dry reflections on an abstract concept. He cares about the truth, & he wants to explain why we should alll care about the truth, & not just pay it lip service. In one corner we have postmodernism in its many guises, which would have you believe that the distinctions "we make between what is true & what is false are ultimately guided by nothing more indisputably objective...than our individual points of view." (Thank goodness the planes we fly in are not built by postmodernist engineers.) In the other corner are those mired in more traditional faith positions. I recently heard a Catholic teacher claim that a "lot of young people are searching for the truth, whether they have faith or not." This may well be a true statement, but its concept of truth is confused. The truth is not "an entity of some mysterious sort that might be identified & examined in its own right", nor is it handed down from on high. It belongs to the innumerable individual propositions that we encounter during our lives, from which we derive the facts about the world & learn "the true nature of reality". Since the truth about a proposition is discovered by an appeal to reason & evidence, it's not clear what faith has got to do with it.
Frankfurt does not stint on seriousness nor does he lack ambition. A brief sketch of Spinoza's remarkable idea "that people cannot help loving truth" seems to undermine one of his own observations, that "we humans have a talent...for ignoring & evading the requirements of rationality". Frankfurt's own remarkable intellect resolves this apparent contradiction by elucidating Spinoza's idea of love as "the way we respond to what we recognize as causing us joy", by pointing out that people "invariably love what they believe helps them to continue in existence & to become more fully themselves." The flip side of this - that "false beliefs...do not effectively help us to cope" - reinforces the point, & should also make us suspicious of those who talk up the consolatory nature rather than the truth of their beliefs.
When it comes to normative judgments, Frankfurt acknowledges the perception that "such judgments only express personal feelings & attitudes that are, strictly speaking, neither true nor false." But he reminds us that we tell if someone is good or bad by means of "factual statements describing...concrete evidence of moral deficiency." And factual statements depend on our being able to tell truth from falsity. Once again, truth matters, & Frankfurt shows us why. What he cannot be expected to explore in this short book is why those who proclaim the loudest that they've found the truth are often those furthest removed from reality, but he gives us the confidence to challlenge their claims for ourselves.
