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Truth and Money | Ricoeur and Socrates

18/11/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Everything turns on the intersection of the two problems of different origin. That of what is 'without price' is posed in our culture by the relation between truth—or at least the search for truth—and money. We are eternally indebted to Socrates for having opened this discussion. Socrates, Plato tells us, taught without requiring any salary in return. It was the sophists who expected to be paid. But Socrates would only accept gifts that honored him at the same time that they honored the gods. Thus begins the history of a long enmity between the intellectual and the commercial spheres. This enmity finds an echo even in the definition of the Athenian citizen: merchants were excluded from the society of free men. The merchants bought and sold for others. He belonged to the useful, not to discourse or to the sumptuary. Yet despite Socrates, the boundary between the inspired thinker and the useful expert continued to be blurred in the field of intellectual transactions. For its part, commerce was recognized for better or worse to be a technique, a dangerous one, it is true, but a necessary one. It was willingly left in the hands of foreigners, often of freed slaves. The Aristotelian theory of money, whose function of being an exchange between equals places it in the field of justice in book 5 of the Nichomachean Ethics, does not redound to the benefit of the merchant's reputation. The medieval historian Jacques Le Goff has spoken of the competition during the Middle Ages between the negative judgments of clerics about the man devoted to gain and the esteem of the people for shopkeepers and artisans. As for the moneylender, he will remain indistinguishable from the usurer, who sells time that ought to belong to God. It is true that this battle was lost during the Renaissance and the Reformation, but the suspicion would remain about money that is used to purchase money and is transformed into merchandise. Flaubert and Baudelaire were no less indignant about such things than was Marx. Nevertheless, the victory of the the merchants, which is also that of the market, has not succeeded in blotting out Socrates' words and his behavior at the hour of his death, nor the question where there still exist noncommercial goods" (Ricoeur 2005:234-235).

Ricoeur, Paul
2005[2004] The Course of Recognition. David Pellauer, trans. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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The Consensus Theory of Truth and Dubious Contentions

17/07/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Since the publication of Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas has devoted considerable attention to the formulation of a theory of truth. In contrast to his earlier position, Habermas no longer specifies the meaning of truth in terms of the structure of interests, but rather in terms of the conditions which guarantee the discursive redemption of validity claims. For truth, according to Habermas, is itself a validity claim, and the justification of this claim is secured by the consensus of participants in a situation of idealised speech. In the course of formulating this account, Habermas compellingly criticises many traditional theories of truth, and rightly emphasises the link between truth and justification. Nevertheless, when the argument which underlies his 'consensus theory of truth' is analysed in detail, it becomes clear that this theory rests upon a number of dubious contentions. Moreover, the argument as a whole establishes a gulf between realms of discourse and contexts of action-related experience which is detrimental to the development of an adequate epistemology.

The consensus theory of truth rests upon an argument which may be summarised in the following four steps:

1. It is statements, and not sentences or utterances, which are true or false.
2. Truth is a validity claim which is connected with constative speech-acts: to say that a statement is true is to say that the assertion of the statement is justified.
3. The assertion of a statement is justified if and only if that statement would command a rational consensus among all who could enter into a discussion with the speaker.
4. A rational consensus is a consensus that is argumentatively attained under the conditions of an ideal speech situation.

The crucial point of the argument is expressed by step 2; and this point is at the same time the most problematic. For it is by no means obvious that to say that a statement is true is to say that the assertion of the statement is justified" (Thompson 1995:198-199).

Thompson, John B.
1995[1981] Critical Hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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Heidegger on Truth

08/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“To Heidegger the meaning of Being is Time: passing and happening. To him there is no Being’s ideal of permanency; indeed he holds that the task of thinking is to make man sensitive to the passage of time. Thinking opens up the time horizon wherever the daily tendency toward objectivization makes relationships and situations freeze in a false timelessness. Thinking should ‘liquefy,’ it should hand over that-which-is, above all Dasein, to the flow of time; it dissolves the metaphysical world of the beyond, of eternal ideas. Nothing is to have endurance in the ‘turbulence of questions.’

Heidegger has to read Plato against the grain if he is to gain anything from him. This applies to the Platonic Being at rest, in contrast to Heidegger’s time. It also applies to the aspect of ‘truth.’

In Plato there is truth that endures, which therefore has to wait to be discovered by us. The shadow images on the wall are copies of the originals, of the shadow-casting objects that are carried past, behind the watchers, in the light of the fire. A copy relates to an original, yet even the ‘original’ objects are, in relation to the next higher step, the ideas, no more than inadequate copies. True cognition reaches through these copies and discovers the original, that which authentically is. Truth is correctness, the appropriateness of a cognition in relation to the recognized. The perceptions of the cave dwellers are untrue because they comprehend only the appearance while missing the Being appearing to them. For Plate there is the absolute truth of ideas. This can be comprehended in an upsurge of the soul, by thinking between mathematics and mystic ecstasy. For Heidegger, however, there can be no such truth; for him there is only a ‘truth happening’ that takes place in man’s self-relationship and world relationship. Man discovers no truth existing independently of him; he conceives an interpretative horizon-a different one in each epoch-in which the real is given a certain meaning. This concept of truth had been in outline Heidegger in Being and Time and unfolded in his 1930 lecture, ‘On the Essence of Truth.’

Truth, he points out, exists neither on the side of the subject, in the sense of a truthful statement, nor on the side of the object, in the sense of a correct description, but it is a happening unfolding in a double movement-a movement from the world, which reveals itself, emerges, appears; and a movement from the individual, who takes possession of the world and opens it up. This double happening unrolls at the distance at which man is placed with regard to himself and to his world. He is aware of this distance and is therefore also aware of the existence of a world that reveals itself to him and evades him. He is aware of this because he experiences himself as a creature that can show itself and conceal itself. This ‘distanceness’ is the open region of freedom. ‘The essence of truth is freedom’. Freedom in this sense means having distance, open space. This distance, providing an open space, is also called ‘openedness’ by Heidegger. Only in this openedness is there a play of concealment and unconcealment. If this openedness did not exist, man could not distinguish himself from what surrounds him. He could not even distinguish himself from himself, and thus would not even know that he is there. Only because this openedness exists can man conceive the idea of measuring his statements about reality by what of reality reveals itself to him. Man does not possess any unassailable truths, but he stands-unassailably-in a truth relationship that produces the play of concealment and disclosure, emergence and disappearance, Being-there and Being-away. Heidegger finds the shortest expression for this understanding of truth in the Greek term aletheia, literally unconcealment. Truth has been wrested from concealment, either as a result of the revealing or emergence of something that exists, or as a result of its being brought out, unveiled. In either case it is a kind of struggle being waged” (Safranski 1998:217-219).

Safranski, Rüdiger
1998[1994] Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Ewald Osers, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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