Truth and Politics

TRUTH AND POLITICS by Hannah Arendt

Originally published in The New Yorker, February 25, 1967, and reprinted with minor changes in

Between Past and Future (1968) and The Portable Hannah Arendt edited by Peter Baier (2000)

and Truth:Engagements Across Philosophical Traditions edited by Medina and Wood (2005)

The subject of these reflections is a commonplace.

No one has ever doubted that truth and

politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted

truthfulness among the political virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary and

justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade.

Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm, on

one side, and for the nature and the dignity of truth and truthfulness, on the other? Is it of the

very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what

kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm, which more than any other

sphere of human life guarantees reality of existence to natal and mortal men – that is, to beings

who know they have appeared out of non-being and will, after a short while, again disappear into

it? Finally, is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth? These

are uncomfortable questions, but they arise necessarily out of our current convictions in this

matter.

What lends this commonplace its high plausibility can still be summed up in the old Latin adage

“Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus” (“Let justice be done though the world may perish”) [. . .] and if

we put truth in its place – “Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus” – the old saying sounds even more

plausible. [. . .] it will therefore come as something of a surprise that the sacrifice of truth for the

survival of the world would be more futile than the sacrifice of any other principle or virtue. For

while we may refuse even to ask ourselves whether life would still be worth living in a world

deprived of such notions as justice and freedom, the same, curiously, is not possible with respect

to the seemingly so much less political idea of truth. What is at stake is survival, the

perseverance in existence (in suo esse perseverare), and no human world destined to outlast the

short life span of mortals within it will ever be able to survive without men willing to do what

Herodotus was the first to undertake consciously – namely, λéγειν τα éoντα, to say what is. No

permanence, no perseverance in existence, can even be conceived of without men willing to

testify to what is and appears to them because it is.

The story of the conflict between truth and politics is an old and complicated one, and nothing

would be gained by simplification or moral denunciation. Throughout history, the truth-seekers

and truthtellers have been aware of the risks of their business; as long as they did not interfere

with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellow-

citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in

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danger of his life: “If they could lay hands on [such a] man . . . they would kill him,” Plato says

in the last sentence of the cave allegory. The Platonic conflict between truthteller and citizens

cannot be explained by the Latin adage, or any of the later theories that, implicitly or explicitly,

justify lying, among other transgressions, if the survival of the city is at stake. No enemy is

mentioned in Plato’s story; the many live peacefully in their cave among themselves, mere

spectators of images, involved in no action and hence threatened by nobody. The members of

this community have no reason whatever to regard truth and truthtellers as their worst enemies,

and Plato offers no explanation of their perverse love of deception and falsehood. If we could

confront him with one of his late colleagues in political philosophy – namely, with Hobbes, who

held that only “such truth, as opposeth no man’s profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome” (an

obvious statement, which, however, he thought important enough to end his Leviathan with) – he

might agree about profit and pleasure but not with the assertion that there existed any kind of

truth welcome to all men. Hobbes, but not Plato, consoled himself with the existence of

indifferent truth, with “subjects” about which “men care not” – e.g., with mathematical truth,

“the doctrine of lines and figures” that “crosses no man’s ambition, profit or lust.” For, Hobbes

wrote, “I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the

interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two

angles of a square; the doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books

of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

No doubt, there is a

decisive difference between Hobbes’ mathematical axiom and the true standard for human

conduct that Plato’s philosopher is supposed to bring back from his journey into the sky of ideas,

although Plato, who believed that mathematical truth opened the eyes of the mind to all truths,

was not aware of it. Hobbes’ example strikes us as relatively harmless; we are inclined to assume

that the human mind will always be able to reproduce such axiomatic statements as “the three

angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square,” and we conclude that “the

burning of all books of geometry” would not be radically effective.The danger would be

considerably greater with respect to scientific statements; had history taken a different turn, the

whole modern scientific development from Galileo to Einstein might not have come to pass. And

certainly the most vulnerable truth of this kind would be those highly differentiated and always

unique thought trains – of which Plato’s doctrine of ideas is an eminent example – whereby men,

since time immemorial, have tried to think rationally beyond the limits of human knowledge.

The modern age, which believes that truth is neither given to nor disclosed to but produced by

the human mind, has assigned, since Leibniz, mathematical, scientific, and philosophical truths

to the common species of rational truth as distinguished from factual truth. I shall use this

distinction for the sake of convenience without discussing its intrinsic legitimacy. Wanting to

find out what injury political power is capable of inflicting upon truth, we look into these matters

for political rather than philosophical reasons, and hence can afford to disregard the question of

what truth is, and be content to take the word in the sense in which men commonly understand it.

And if we now think of factual truths – of such modest verities as the role during the Russian

Revolution of a man by the name of Trotsky, who appears in none of the Soviet Russian history

books – we at once become aware of how much more vulnerable they are than all the kinds of

rational truth taken together. Moreover, since facts and events – the invariable outcome of men

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"Ch. 11. Hobbes, Leviathan, (eds. R. Tuck, R. Geuss, and Q. Skinner, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).)

living and acting together – constitute the very texture of the political realm, it is, of course,

factual truth that we are most concerned with here. Dominion (to speak Hobbes’ language) when

it attacks rational truth oversteps, as it were, its domain, while it gives battle on its own ground

when it falsifies or lies away facts. The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power

are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a

time but, potentially, forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms,

discoveries, theories – even the most wildly speculative ones – produced by the human mind;

they occur in the field of the ever-changing affairs of men, in whose flux there is nothing more

permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are

lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back. Perhaps the chances that Euclidean

mathematics or Einstein’s theory of relativity – let alone Plato’s philosophy – would have been

reproduced in time if their authors had been prevented from handing them down to posterity are

not very good either, yet they are infinitely better than the chances that a fact of importance,

forgotten or, more likely, lied away, will one day be rediscovered.

Although the politically most relevant truths are factual, the conflict between truth

and politics was first discovered and articulated with respect to rational truth. The

opposite of a rationally true statement is either error and ignorance, as in the sciences,

or illusion and opinion, as in philosophy. Deliberate falsehood, the plain lie,

plays its role only in the domain of factual statements, and it seems significant, and

rather odd, that in the long debate about this antagonism of truth and politics, from

Plato to Hobbes, no one, apparently, ever believed that organized lying, as we know

it today, could be an adequate weapon against truth. In Plato, the truthteller is in

TRUTH AND POLITICS 297

danger of his life, and in Hobbes, where he has become an author, he is threatened

with the burning of his books; mere mendacity is not an issue. It is the sophist and

the ignoramus rather than the liar who occupy Plato’s thought, and where he distinguishes

between error and lie – that is, between “involuntary and voluntary ψευ_δ_ς”

– he is, characteristically, much harsher on people “wallowing in swinish ignorance”

than on liars.2 Is this because organized lying, dominating the public realm, as distinguished

from the private liar who tries his luck on his own hook, was still

unknown? Or has this something to do with the striking fact that, except for Zoroastrianism,

none of the major religions included lying as such, as distinguished from

“bearing false witness,” in their catalogues of grave sins? Only with the rise of Puritan

morality, coinciding with the rise of organized science, whose progress had to be

assured on the firm ground of the absolute veracity and reliability of every scientist,

were lies considered serious offenses.

However that may be, historically the conflict between truth and politics arose out

of two diametrically opposed ways of life – the life of the philosopher, as interpreted

first by Parmenides and then by Plato, and the way of life of the citizen.To the citizens’

ever-changing opinions about human affairs, which themselves were in a state

of constant flux, the philosopher opposed the truth about those things which in their

very nature were everlasting and from which, therefore, principles could be derived

to stabilize human affairs. Hence the opposite to truth was mere opinion, which was

equated with illusion, and it was this degrading of opinion that gave the conflict its

political poignancy; for opinion, and not truth, belongs among the indispensable prerequisites

of all power. “All governments rest on opinion,” James Madison said, and

not even the most autocratic ruler or tyrant could ever rise to power, let alone keep

it, without the support of those who are like-minded. By the same token, every claim

in the sphere of human affairs to an absolute truth, whose validity needs no support

from the side of opinion, strikes at the very roots of all politics and all governments.

This antagonism between truth and opinion was further elaborated by Plato (especially

in the Gorgias) as the antagonism between communicating in the form of

“dialogue,” which is the adequate speech for philosophical truth, and in the form of

“rhetoric,” by which the demagogue, as we would say today, persuades the multitude.

Traces of this original conflict can still be found in the earlier stages of the modern

age, though hardly in the world we live in. In Hobbes, for instance, we still read of

an opposition of two “contrary faculties”: “solid reasoning” and “powerful eloquence,”

the former being “grounded upon principles of truth, the other upon opinions . . .

and the passions and interests of men, which are different and mutable.”3 More than

a century later, in the Age of Enlightenment, these traces have almost but not quite

disappeared, and where the ancient antagonism still survives, the emphasis has shifted.

In terms of pre-modern philosophy, Lessing’s magnificent “Sage jeder, was ihm Wahrheit

dünkt, und die Wahrheit selbst sei Gott empfohlen” (“Let each man say what he deems

truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God”) would have plainly signified,

Man is not capable of truth, all his truths, alas, are δ_αι, mere opinions, whereas for

Lessing it meant, on the contrary, Let us thank God that we don’t know the truth.

Even where the note of jubilation – the insight that for men, living in company, the

inexhaustible richness of human discourse is infinitely more significant and meaningful

than any One Truth could ever be – is absent, the awareness of the frailty of

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human reason has prevailed since the eighteenth century without giving rise to complaint

or lamentation.We can find it in Kant’s grandiose Critique of Pure Reason, in

which reason is led to recognize its own limitations, as we hear it in the words of

Madison, who more than once stressed that “the reason of man, like man himself, is

timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires firmness and confidence in proportion

to the number with which it is associated.”4 Considerations of this kind, much

more than notions about the individual’s right to self-expression, played a decisive

part in the finally more or less successful struggle to obtain freedom of thought for

the spoken and the printed word.

Thus Spinoza, who still believed in the infallibility of human reason and is often

wrongly praised as a champion of free thought and speech, held that “every man is

by indefeasible natural right the master of his own thoughts,” that “every man’s understanding

is his own, and that brains are as diverse as palates,” from which he concluded

that “it is best to grant what cannot be abolished” and that laws prohibiting

free thought can only result in “men thinking one thing and saying another,” hence

in “the corruption of good faith” and “the fostering of . . . perfidy.” However, Spinoza

nowhere demands freedom of speech, and the argument that human reason needs

communication with others and therefore publicity for its own sake is conspicuous

by its absence. He even counts man’s need for communication, his inability to hide

his thoughts and keep silent, among the “common failings” that the philosopher does

not share.5 Kant, on the contrary, stated that “the external power that deprives man

of the freedom to communicate his thoughts publicly, deprives him at the same time of

his freedom to think” (italics added), and that the only guarantee for “the correctness”

of our thinking lies in that “we think, as it were, in community with others to whom

we communicate our thoughts as they communicate theirs to us.” Man’s reason, being

fallible, can function only if he can make “public use” of it, and this is equally true

for those who, still in a state of “tutelage,” are unable to use their minds “without the

guidance of somebody else” and for the “scholar,” who needs “the entire reading

public” to examine and control his results.6

In this context, the question of numbers, mentioned by Madison, is of special

importance. The shift from rational truth to opinion implies a shift from man in the

singular to men in the plural, and this means a shift from a domain where, Madison

says, nothing counts except the “solid reasoning” of one mind to a realm where

“strength of opinion” is determined by the individual’s reliance upon “the number

which he supposes to have entertained the same opinions” – a number, incidentally,

that is not necessarily limited to one’s contemporaries. Madison still distinguishes this

life in the plural, which is the life of the citizen, from the life of the philosopher, by

whom such considerations “ought to be disregarded,” but this distinction has no practical

consequence, for “a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical

race of kings wished for by Plato.”7 We may note in passing that the very

notion of “a nation of philosophers” would have been a contradiction in terms for

Plato, whose whole political philosophy, including its outspoken tyrannical traits, rests

on the conviction that truth can be neither gained nor communicated among the

many.

In the world we live in, the last traces of this ancient antagonism between the

philosopher’s truth and the opinions in the market place have disappeared. Neither

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the truth of revealed religion, which the political thinkers of the seventeenth century

still treated as a major nuisance, nor the truth of the philosopher, disclosed to man

in solitude, interferes any longer with the affairs of the world. In respect to the former,

the separation of church and state has given us peace, and as to the latter, it ceased

long ago to claim dominion – unless one takes the modern ideologies seriously as

philosophies, which is difficult indeed since their adherents openly proclaim them to

be political weapons and consider the whole question of truth and truthfulness irrelevant.

Thinking in terms of the tradition, one may feel entitled to conclude from this

state of affairs that the old conflict has finally been settled, and especially that its original

cause, the clash of rational truth and opinion has disappeared.

Strangely, however, this is not the case, for the clash of factual truth and politics,

which we witness today on such a large scale, has – in some respects, at least – very

similar traits. While probably no former time tolerated so many diverse opinions on

religious or philosophical matters, factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s

profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before.To be sure,

state secrets have always existed; every government must classify certain information,

withhold it from public notice, and he who reveals authentic secrets has always been

treated as a traitor.With this I am not concerned here. The facts I have in mind are

publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often

spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what

they are not – namely, secrets. That their assertion then should prove as dangerous as,

for instance, preaching atheism or some other heresy proved in former times seems

a curious phenomenon, and its significance is enhanced when we find it also in countries

that are ruled tyrannically by an ideological government. (Even in Hitler’s

Germany and Stalin’s Russia it was more dangerous to talk about concentration and

extermination camps, whose existence was no secret, than to hold and to utter “heretical”

views on anti-Semitism, racism, and Communism.) What seems even more disturbing

is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free

countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions –

as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the

German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were

not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths

concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the

perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a

common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and

factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. And since

factual truth, though it is so much less open to argument than philosophical truth,

and so obviously within the grasp of everybody, seems often to suffer a similar fate

when it is exposed in the market place – namely, to be countered not by lies and

deliberate falsehoods but by opinion – it may be worth while to reopen the old and

apparently obsolete question of truth versus opinion.

For, seen from the viewpoint of the truthteller, the tendency to transform fact into

opinion, to blur the dividing line between them, is no less perplexing than the

truthteller’s older predicament, so vividly expressed in the cave allegory, in which the

philosopher, upon his return from his solitary journey to the sky of everlasting ideas,

tries to communicate his truth to the multitude, with the result that it disappears in

300 HANNAH ARENDT

the diversity of views, which to him are illusions, and is brought down to the uncertain

level of opinion, so that now, back in the cave, truth itself appears in the guise

of the δ_kει_ µ_ι (“it seems to me”) – the very δ_αι he had hoped to leave behind

once and for all. However, the reporter of factual truth is even worse off. He does

not return from any journey into regions beyond the realm of human affairs, and he

cannot console himself with the thought that he has become a stranger in this world.

Similarly, we have no right to console ourselves with the notion that his truth, if truth

it should be, is not of this world. If his simple factual statements are not accepted –

truths seen and witnessed with the eyes of the body, and not the eyes of the mind –

the suspicion arises that it may be in the nature of the political realm to deny or

pervert truth of every kind, as though men were unable to come to terms with its

unyielding, blatant, unpersuasive stubbornness. If this should be the case, things would

look even more desperate than Plato assumed, for Plato’s truth, found and actualized

in solitude, transcends, by definition, the realm of the many, the world of human

affairs. (One can understand that the philosopher, in his isolation, yields to the temptation

to use his truth as a standard to be imposed upon human affairs; that is, to

equate the transcendence inherent in philosophical truth with the altogether different

kind of “transcendence” by which yardsticks and other standards of measurement

are separated from the multitude of objects they are to measure, and one can equally

well understand that the multitude will resist this standard, since it is actually derived

from a sphere that is foreign to the realm of human affairs and whose connection

with it can be justified only by a confusion.) Philosophical truth, when it enters the

market place, changes its nature and becomes opinion, because a veritable µετ__ασις

ε_ς _λλ_ γ_ν_ς, a shifting not merely from one kind of reasoning to another but

from one way of human existence to another, has taken place.

Factual truth, on the contrary, is always related to other people: it concerns events

and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and

depends upon testimony; it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if

it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature. Facts and opinions, though

they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other; they belong to the same

realm. [. . .]

But do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all? Have not generations

of historians and philosophers of history demonstrated the impossibility of

ascertaining facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos

of sheer happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data) and then

be fitted into a story that can be told only in a certain perspective, which has nothing

to do with the original occurrence? No doubt these and a great many more perplexities

inherent in the historical sciences are real, but they are no argument against

the existence of factual matter, nor can they serve as a justification for blurring the

dividing lines between fact, opinion, and interpretation, or as an excuse for the historian

to manipulate facts as he pleases. Even if we admit that every generation has

the right to write its own history, we admit no more than that it has the right to

rearrange the facts in accordance with its own perspective; we don’t admit the right

to touch the factual matter itself. To illustrate this point, and as an excuse for not

pursuing this issue any further: During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau,

shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative

TRUTH AND POLITICS 301

of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First

World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians

think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied “This I don’t know.

But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”We are

concerned here with brutally elementary data of this kind, whose indestructibility has

been taken for granted even by the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in

historicism.

It is true, considerably more than the whims of historians would be needed to

eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops

crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over

the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable,

and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power

interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters. Which brings us back to

our suspicion that it may be in the nature of the political realm to be at war with

truth in all its forms, and hence to the question of why a commitment even to factual

truth is felt to be an anti-political attitude.

III

When I said that factual, as opposed to rational, truth is not antagonistic to opinion,

I stated a half-truth. All truths – not only the various kinds of rational truth but also

factual truth – are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity.Truth carries

within itself an element of coercion, and the frequently tyrannical tendencies so

deplorably obvious among professional truthtellers may be caused less by a failing of

character than by the strain of habitually living under a kind of compulsion. Statements

such as “The three angles of a triangle are equal to two angles of a square,”

“The earth moves around the sun,” “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,”

“In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium” are very different in the way they are

arrived at, but, once perceived as true and pronounced to be so, they have in common

that they are beyond agreement, dispute, opinion, or consent. For those who accept

them, they are not changed by the numbers or lack of numbers who entertain the

same proposition; persuasion or dissuasion is useless, for the content of the statement

is not of a persuasive nature but of a coercive one. (Thus Plato, in the Timaeus, draws

a line between men capable of perceiving the truth and those who happen to hold

right opinions. In the former, the organ for the perception of truth [ν_υ_ς] is awakened

through instruction, which of course implies inequality and can be said to be

a mild form of coercion, whereas the latter had merely been persuaded. The views

of the former, says Plato, are immovable, while the latter can always be persuaded to

change their minds.8) What Mercier de la Rivière once remarked about mathematical

truth applies to all kinds of truth: “Euclide est un véritable despote; et les vérités

géométriques qu’il nous a transmises, sont des lois véritablement despotiques.” In much the

same vein, Grotius, about a hundred years earlier, had insisted – when he wished to

limit the power of the absolute prince – that “even God cannot cause two times two

not to make four.” He was invoking the compelling force of truth against political

power; he was not interested in the implied limitation of divine omnipotence. These

302 HANNAH ARENDT

two remarks illustrate how truth looks in the purely political perspective, from the

viewpoint of power, and the question is whether power could and should be checked

not only by a constitution, a bill of rights, and by a multiplicity of powers, as in the

system of checks and balances, in which, in Montesquieu’s words, “le pouvoir arrête le

pouvoir” – that is, by factors that arise out of and belong to the political realm proper

– but by something that arises from without, has its source outside the political realm,

and is as independent of the wishes and desires of the citizens as is the will of the

worst tyrant.

Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is therefore

hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot

monopolize, and it enjoys a rather precarious status in the eyes of governments that

rest on consent and abhor coercion. Facts are beyond agreement and consent, and all

talk about them – all exchanges of opinion based on correct information – will contribute

nothing to their establishment. Unwelcome opinion can be argued with,

rejected, or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness

that nothing can move except plain lies. The trouble is that factual truth,

like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,

and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and

communication that deal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are necessarily

domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s opinions, and taking

these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.

Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by considering a given issue

from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those

who are absent; that is, I represent them. This process of representation does not

blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look

upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as

though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining

a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.

The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a

given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in

their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more

valid my final conclusions, my opinion. (It is this capacity for an “enlarged mentality”

that enables men to judge; as such, it was discovered by Kant in the first part of

his Critique of Judgment, though he did not recognize the political and moral implications

of his discovery.) The very process of opinion formation is determined by

those in whose places somebody thinks and uses his own mind, and the only condition

for this exertion of the imagination is disinterestedness, the liberation from one’s

own private interests. [. . .]

No opinion is self-evident. In matters of opinion, but not in matters of truth, our

thinking is truly discursive, running, as it were, from place to place, from one part of

the world to another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally ascends

from these particularities to some impartial generality. Compared to this process, in

which a particular issue is forced into the open that it may show itself from all sides,

in every possible perspective, until it is flooded and made transparent by the full light

of human comprehension, a statement of truth possesses a peculiar opaqueness. Rational

truth enlightens human understanding, and factual truth must inform opinions,

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but these truths, though they are never obscure, are not transparent either, and it is

in their very nature to withstand further elucidation, as it is in the nature of light to

withstand enlightenment.

Nowhere, moreover, is this opacity more patent and more irritating than where

we are confronted with facts and factual truth, for facts have no conclusive reason

whatever for being what they are; they could always have been otherwise, and this

annoying contingency is literally unlimited. It is because of the haphazardness of facts

that pre-modern philosophy refused to take seriously the realm of human affairs,

which is permeated by factuality, or to believe that any meaningful truth could ever

be discovered in the “melancholy haphazardness” (Kant) of a sequence of events which

constitutes the course of this world. Nor has any modern philosophy of history been

able to make its peace with the intractable, unreasonable stubbornness of sheer factuality;

modern philosophers have conjured up all kinds of necessity, from the dialectical

necessity of a world spirit or of material conditions to the necessities of an

allegedly unchangeable and known human nature, in order to cleanse the last vestiges

of that apparently arbitrary “it might have been otherwise” (which is the price of

freedom) from the only realm where men are truly free. It is true that in retrospect

– that is, in historical perspective – every sequence of events looks as though it could

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not have happened otherwise, but this is an optical, or, rather, an existential, illusion:

nothing could ever happen if reality did not kill, by definition, all the other potentialities

originally inherent in any given situation.

In other words, factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion, and this may

be among the reasons that opinion-holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual

truth as just another opinion. Factual evidence, moreover, is established through testimony

by eyewitnesses – notoriously unreliable – and by records, documents, and

monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries. In the event of a dispute, only

other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked, and settlement is

usually arrived at by way of a majority; that is, in the same way as the settlement of

opinion disputes – a wholly unsatisfactory procedure, since there is nothing to prevent

a majority of witnesses from being false witnesses. On the contrary, under certain circumstances

the feeling of belonging to a majority may even encourage false testimony.

In other words, to the extent that factual truth is exposed to the hostility of

opinion-holders, it is at least as vulnerable as rational philosophical truth.

I observed before that in some respects the teller of factual truth is worse off than

Plato’s philosopher – that his truth has no transcendent origin and possesses not even

the relatively transcendent qualities of such political principles as freedom, justice,

honor, and courage, all of which may inspire, and then become manifest in, human

action.We shall now see that this disadvantage has more serious consequences than

we had thought; namely, consequences that concern not only the person of the

truthteller but – more important – the chances for his truth to survive. Inspiration

of and manifestation in human action may not be able to compete with the compelling

evidence of truth, but they can compete, as we shall see, with the persuasiveness

inherent in opinion. I took the Socratic proposition “It is better to suffer wrong

than to do wrong” as an example of a philosophical statement that concerns human

conduct, and hence has political implications. My reason was partly that this sentence

has become the beginning of Western ethical thought, and partly that, as far as I know,

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it has remained the only ethical proposition that can be derived directly from the

specifically philosophical experience. (Kant’s categorical imperative, the only competitor

in the field, could be stripped of its Judaeo-Christian ingredients, which

account for its formulation as an imperative instead of a simple proposition. Its underlying

principle is the axiom of non-contradiction – the thief contradicts himself

because he wants to keep the stolen goods as his property – and this axiom owes its

validity to the conditions of thought that Socrates was the first to discover.)

The Platonic dialogues tell us time and again how paradoxical the Socratic statement

(a proposition, and not an imperative) sounded, how easily it stood refuted in

the market place where opinion stands against opinion, and how incapable Socrates

was of proving and demonstrating it to the satisfaction not of his adversaries alone

but also of his friends and disciples. [. . .]

To the philosopher – or, rather, to man insofar as he is a thinking being – this

ethical proposition about doing and suffering wrong is no less compelling than mathematical

truth. But to man insofar as he is a citizen, an acting being concerned with

the world and the public welfare rather than with his own well-being – including,

for instance, his “immortal soul” whose “health” should have precedence over the

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needs of a perishable body – the Socratic statement is not true at all. The disastrous

consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts

derived from man in the singular – be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian – have

been frequently pointed out. [. . .]

Since philosophical truth concerns man in his singularity, it is unpolitical by nature.

If the philosopher nevertheless wishes his truth to prevail over the opinions of the

multitude, he will suffer defeat, and he is likely to conclude from this defeat that truth

is impotent – a truism that is just as meaningful as if the mathematician, unable to

square the circle, should deplore the fact that a circle is not a square. He may then

be tempted, like Plato, to win the ear of some philosophically inclined tyrant, and in

the fortunately highly unlikely case of success he might erect one of those tyrannies

of “truth” which we know chiefly from the various political utopias, and which, of

course, politically speaking, are as tyrannical as other forms of despotism. In the slightly

less unlikely event that his truth should prevail without the help of violence, simply

because men happen to concur in it, he would have won a Pyrrhic victory. For truth

would then owe its prevalence not to its own compelling quality but to the agreement

of the many, who might change their minds tomorrow and agree on something

else; what had been philosophical truth would have become mere opinion.

Since, however, philosophical truth carries within itself an element of coercion, it

may tempt the statesman under certain conditions, no less than the power of opinion

may tempt the philosopher. Thus, in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson

declared certain “truths to be self-evident,” because he wished to put the basic consent

among the men of the Revolution beyond dispute and argument; like mathematical

axioms, they should express “beliefs of men” that “depend not on their own will, but

follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds.”9 Yet by saying “We hold

these truths to be self-evident,” he conceded, albeit without becoming aware of it,

that the statement “All men are created equal” is not self-evident but stands in need

of agreement and consent – that equality, if it is to be politically relevant, is a matter

of opinion, and not “the truth.” [. . .]

TRUTH AND POLITICS 305

The Socratic proposition “It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong” is not an

opinion but claims to be truth, and though one may doubt that it ever had a direct

political consequence, its impact upon practical conduct as an ethical precept is undeniable;

only religious commandments, which are absolutely binding for the community

of believers, can claim greater recognition. Does this fact not stand in clear

contradiction to the generally accepted impotence of philosophical truth? And since

we know from the Platonic dialogues how unpersuasive Socrates’ statement remained

for friend and foe alike whenever he tried to prove it, we must ask ourselves how it

could ever have obtained its high degree of validity. Obviously, this has been due to

a rather unusual kind of persuasion; Socrates decided to stake his life on this truth –

to set an example, not when he appeared before the Athenian tribunal but when he

refused to escape the death sentence. And this teaching by example is, indeed, the

only form of “persuasion” that philosophical truth is capable of without perversion

or distortion;10 by the same token, philosophical truth can become “practical” and

inspire action without violating the rules of the political realm only when it manages

to become manifest in the guise of an example. [. . .]

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This transformation of a theoretical or speculative statement into exemplary truth

– a transformation of which only moral philosophy is capable – is a borderline experience

for the philosopher: by setting an example and “persuading” the multitude in

the only way open to him, he has begun to act.Today, when hardly any philosophical

statement, no matter how daring, will be taken seriously enough to endanger the

philosopher’s life, even this rare chance of having a philosophical truth politically validated

has disappeared. In our context, however, it is important to notice that such a

possibility does exist for the teller of rational truth; for it does not exist under any

circumstances for the teller of factual truth, who in this respect, as in other respects,

is worse off. Not only do factual statements contain no principles upon which men

might act and which thus could become manifest in the world; their very content

defies this kind of verification. A teller of factual truth, in the unlikely event that he

wished to stake his life on a particular fact, would achieve a kind of miscarriage.What

would become manifest in his act would be his courage or, perhaps, his stubbornness

but neither the truth of what he had to say nor even his own truthfulness. For why

shouldn’t a liar stick to his lies with great courage, especially in politics, where he

might be motivated by patriotism or some other kind of legitimate group partiality?

The hallmark of factual truth is that its opposite is neither error nor illusion nor

opinion, no one of which reflects upon personal truthfulness, but the deliberate falsehood,

or lie. Error, of course, is possible, and even common, with respect to factual

truth, in which case this kind of truth is in no way different from scientific or rational

truth. But the point is that with respect to facts there exists another alternative,

and this alternative, the deliberate falsehood, does not belong to the same species as

propositions that, whether right or mistaken, intend no more than to say what is, or

how something that is appears to me.A factual statement – Germany invaded Belgium

in August 1914 – acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative

context. But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with

306 HANNAH ARENDT

the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance.

It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of

action. The same is true when the liar, lacking the power to make his falsehood stick,

does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his

“opinion,” to which he claims his constitutional right. This is frequently done by subversive

groups, and in a politically immature public the resulting confusion can be

considerable. The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion

belongs among the many forms that lying can assume, all of which are forms of

action. [. . .]

To be sure, as far as action is concerned, organized lying is a marginal phenomenon,

but the trouble is that its opposite, the mere telling of facts, leads to no action

whatever; it even tends, under normal circumstances, toward the acceptance of things

as they are. (This, of course, is not to deny that the disclosure of facts may be legitimately

used by political organizations or that, under certain circumstances, factual

matters brought to public attention will considerably encourage and strengthen the

claims of ethnic and social groups.) Truthfulness has never been counted among the

political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world

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and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities. Only

where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only

with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such, unsupported by the distorting

forces of power and interest, become a political factor of the first order.Where everybody

lies about everything of importance, the truthteller, whether he knows it or not,

has begun to act; he, too, has engaged himself in political business, for, in the unlikely

event that he survives, he has made a start toward changing the world.

In this situation, however, he will again soon find himself at an annoying disadvantage.

I mentioned earlier the contingent character of facts, which could always

have been otherwise, and which therefore possess by themselves no trace of selfevidence

or plausibility for the human mind. Since the liar is free to fashion his “facts”

to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the

chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truthteller. Indeed, he will usually

have plausibility on his side; his exposition will sound more logical, as it were, since

the element of unexpectedness – one of the outstanding characteristics of all events

– has mercifully disappeared. It is not only rational truth that, in the Hegelian phrase,

stands common sense on its head; reality quite frequently offends the soundness of

common-sense reasoning no less than it offends profit and pleasure.

We must now turn our attention to the relatively recent phenomenon of mass

manipulation of fact and opinion as it has become evident in the rewriting of history,

in image-making, and in actual government policy. The traditional political lie, so

prominent in the history of diplomacy and statecraft, used to concern either true

secrets – data that had never been made public – or intentions, which anyhow do

not possess the same degree of reliability as accomplished facts; like everything that

goes on merely inside ourselves, intentions are only potentialities, and what was

intended to be a lie can always turn out to be true in the end. In contrast, the modern

political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to

practically everybody. This is obvious in the case of rewriting contemporary history

under the eyes of those who witnessed it, but it is equally true in image-making of

all sorts, in which, again, every known and established fact can be denied or neglected

TRUTH AND POLITICS 307

if it is likely to hurt the image; for an image, unlike an old-fashioned portrait, is supposed

not to flatter reality but to offer a full-fledged substitute for it. And this substitute,

because of modern techniques and the mass media, is, of course, much more

in the public eye than the original ever was. [. . .]

Moreover, the traditional lie concerned only particulars and was never meant to

deceive literally everybody; it was directed at the enemy and was meant to deceive

only him. These two limitations restricted the injury inflicted upon truth to such an

extent that to us, in retrospect, it may appear almost harmless. Since facts always occur

in a context, a particular lie – that is, a falsehood that makes no attempt to change

the whole context – tears, as it were, a hole in the fabric of factuality. As every historian

knows, one can spot a lie by noticing incongruities, holes, or the junctures of

patched-up places. As long as the texture as a whole is kept intact, the lie will eventually

show up as if of its own accord. The second limitation concerns those who are

engaged in the business of deception. They used to belong to the restricted circle of

statesmen and diplomats, who among themselves still knew and could preserve the

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truth.They were not likely to fall victims to their own falsehoods; they could deceive

others without deceiving themselves. Both of these mitigating circumstances of the

old art of lying are noticeably absent from the manipulation of facts that confronts

us today.

What, then, is the significance of these limitations, and why are we justified in

calling them mitigating circumstances? Why has self-deception become an indispensable

tool in the trade of image-making, and why should it be worse, for the world

as well as for the liar himself, if he is deceived by his own lies than if he merely

deceives others? What better moral excuse could a liar offer than that his aversion to

lying was so great that he had to convince himself before he could lie to others, that,

like Antonio in The Tempest, he had to make “a sinner of his memory, To credit his

own lie”? And, finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, if the modern political lies are

so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture – the

making of another reality, as it were, into which they will fit without seam, crack, or

fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their own original context – what prevents these

new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality

and factuality?

[. . .]

Such completeness and potential finality, which were unknown to former times,

are the dangers that arise out of the modern manipulation of facts. Even in the free

world, where the government has not monopolized the power to decide and tell what

factually is or is not, gigantic interest organizations have generalized a kind of raison

d’état frame of mind such as was formerly restricted to the handling of foreign affairs

and, in its worst excesses, to situations of clear and present danger. And national propaganda

on the government level has learned more than a few tricks from business

practices and Madison Avenue methods. Images made for domestic consumption, as

distinguished from lies directed at a foreign adversary, can become a reality for everybody

and first of all for the image-makers themselves, who while still in the act of

preparing their “products” are overwhelmed by the mere thought of their victims’

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potential numbers. No doubt, the originators of the lying image who “inspire” the

hidden persuaders still know that they want to deceive an enemy on the social or

the national level, but the result is that a whole group of people, and even whole

nations, may take their bearings from a web of deceptions to which their leaders

wished to subject their opponents.

What then happens follows almost automatically. The main effort of both the

deceived group and the deceivers themselves is likely to be directed toward keeping

the propaganda image intact, and this image is threatened less by the enemy and by

real hostile interests than by those inside the group itself who have managed to escape

its spell and insist on talking about facts or events that do not fit the image. Contemporary

history is full of instances in which tellers of factual truth were felt to be

more dangerous and even more hostile, than the real opponents. These arguments

against self-deception must not be confused with the protests of “idealists,” whatever

their merit, against lying as bad in principle and against the age-old art of deceiving

the enemy. Politically, the point is that the modern art of self-deception is likely to

transform an outside matter into an inside issue, so that an international or intergroup

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conflict boomerangs onto the scene of domestic politics. The self-deceptions practiced

on both sides in the period of the Cold War are too many to enumerate, but

obviously they are a case in point. Conservative critics of mass democracy have frequently

outlined the dangers that this form of government brings to international

affairs – without, however, mentioning the dangers peculiar to monarchies or oligarchies.

The strength of their argument lies in the undeniable fact that under fully

democratic conditions deception without self-deception is well-nigh impossible.

Under our present system of world-wide communication, covering a large number

of independent nations, no existing power is anywhere near great enough to make

its “image” foolproof. Therefore, images have a relatively short life expectancy; they

are likely to explode not only when the chips are down and reality makes its reappearance

in public but even before this, for fragments of facts constantly disturb and

throw out of gear the propaganda war between conflicting images. However, this is

not the only way, or even the most significant way, in which reality takes its revenge

on those who dare defy it.The life expectancy of images could hardly be significantly

increased even under a world government or some other modern version of the Pax

Romana. This is best illustrated by the relatively closed systems of totalitarian governments

and one-party dictatorships, which are, of course, by far the most effective

agencies in shielding ideologies and images from the impact of reality and truth.

[. . .] It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing

is a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything,

no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of

a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now

be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which

we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is

among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.

And for this trouble there is no remedy. It is but the other side of the disturbing

contingency of all factual reality. Since everything that has actually happened in the

realm of human affairs could just as well have been otherwise, the possibilities for

lying are boundless, and this boundlessness makes for self-defeat. Only the occasional

TRUTH AND POLITICS 309

liar will find it possible to stick to a particular falsehood with unwavering consistency;

those who adjust images and stories to ever-changing circumstances will find

themselves floating on the wide-open horizon of potentiality, drifting from one possibility

to the next, unable to hold on to any one of their own fabrications. Far from

achieving an adequate substitute for reality and factuality they have transformed facts

and events back into the potentiality out of which they originally appeared. And the

surest sign of the factuality of facts and events is precisely this stubborn thereness,

whose inherent contingency ultimately defies all attempts at conclusive explanation.

The images, on the contrary, can always be explained and made plausible – this gives

them their momentary advantage over factual truth – but they can never compete in

stability with that which simply is because it happens to be thus and not otherwise.

This is the reason that consistent lying, metaphorically speaking, pulls the ground from

under our feet and provides no other ground on which to stand. (In the words of

Montaigne, “If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should know better where

we are, for we should then take for certain the opposite of what the liar tells us. But

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the reverse of truth has a thousand shapes and a boundless field.”) The experience of

a trembling wobbling motion of everything we rely on for our sense of direction and

reality is among the most common and most vivid experiences of men under

totalitarian rule. [. . .]

That facts are not secure in the hands of power is obvious, but the point here is

that power, by its very nature, can never produce a substitute for the secure stability

of factual reality, which, because it is past, has grown into a dimension beyond our

reach. Facts assent themselves by being stubborn, and their fragility is oddly combined

with great resiliency – the same irreversibility that is the hallmark of all human action.

In their stubbornness, facts are superior to power; they are less transitory than power

formations, which arise when men get together for a purpose but disappear as soon

as the purpose is either achieved or lost. This transitory character makes power a

highly unreliable instrument for achieving permanence of any kind, and, therefore,

not only truth and facts are insecure in its hands but untruth and non-facts as well.

The political attitude toward facts must, indeed, tread the very narrow path between

the danger of taking them as the results of some necessary development which men

could not prevent and about which they can therefore do nothing and the danger of

denying them, of trying no manipulate them out of the world.

In conclusion, I return to the questions I raised at the beginning of these reflections.

Truth, though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that

be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are

unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it. Persuasion and violence can

destroy truth, but they cannot replace it. And this applies to rational or religious truth

just as it applies, more obviously, to factual truth.To look upon politics from the perspective

of truth, as I have done here, means to take one’s stand outside the political

realm. This standpoint is the standpoint of the truthteller, who forfeits his position –

and, with it, the validity of what he has to say – if he tries to interfere directly

310 HANNAH ARENDT

in human affairs and to speak the language of persuasion or of violence. It is to

this position and its significance for the political realm that we must now turn our

attention.

The standpoint outside the political realm – outside the community to which we

belong and the company of our peers – is clearly characterized as one of the various

modes of being alone. Outstanding among the existential modes of truthtelling are

the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality

of the historian and the judge, and the independence of the fact-finder, the

witness, and the reporter. (This impartiality differs from that of the qualified, representative

opinion, mentioned earlier, in that it is not acquired inside the political realm

but is inherent in the position of the outsider required for such occupations.) These

modes of being alone differ in many respects, but they have in common that as long

as any one of them lasts, no political commitment, no adherence to a cause, is possible.

They are, of course, common to all men; they are modes of human existence as

such. Only when one of them is adopted as a way of life – and even then life is

never lived in complete solitude or isolation or independence – is it likely to conflict

with the demands of the political.

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It is quite natural that we become aware of the non-political and, potentially, even

anti-political nature of truth – Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus – only in the event of conflict,

and I have stressed up to now this side of the matter. But this cannot possibly

tell the whole story. It leaves out of account certain public institutions, established

and supported by the powers that be, in which, contrary to all political rules, truth

and truthfulness have always constituted the highest criterion of speech and endeavor.

Among these we find notably the judiciary, which either as a branch of government

or as direct administration of justice is carefully protected against social and political

power, as well as all institutions of higher learning, to which the state entrusts the

education of its future citizens.To the extent that the Academe remembers its ancient

origins, it must know that it was founded by the polis’s most determined and most

influential opponent.To be sure, Plato’s dream did not come true: the Academe never

became a counter-society, and nowhere do we hear of any attempt by the universities

at seizing power. But what Plato never dreamed of did come true: The political

realm recognized that it needed an institution outside the power struggle in

addition to the impartiality required in the administration of justice; for whether these

places of higher learning are in private or in public hands is of no great importance;

not only their integrity but their very existence depends upon the good will of the

government anyway. Very unwelcome truths have emerged from the universities, and

very unwelcome judgments have been handed down from the bench time and again;

and these institutions, like other refuges of truth, have remained exposed to all the

dangers arising from social and political power. Yet the chances for truth to prevail

in public are, of course, greatly improved by the mere existence of such places and

by the organization of independent, supposedly disinterested scholars associated with

them. And it can hardly be denied that, at least in constitutionally ruled countries,

the political realm has recognized, even in the event of conflict, that it has a stake in

the existence of men and institutions over which it has no power.

This authentically political significance of the Academe is today easily overlooked

because of the prominence of its professional schools and the evolution of its natural-

TRUTH AND POLITICS 311

science divisions, where, unexpectedly, pure research has yielded so many decisive

results that have proved vital to the country at large. No one can possibly gainsay the

social and technical usefulness of the universities, but this importance is not political.

The historical sciences and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand

guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents, are politically of greater

relevance. The telling of factual truth comprehends much more than the daily

information supplied by journalists, though without them we should never find our

bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, would never know

where we are. This is, of course, of the most immediate political importance; but if

the press should ever really becomes the “fourth branch of government,” it would

have to be protected against government power and social pressure even more carefully

than the judiciary is. For this very important political function of supplying

information is exercised from outside the political realm, strictly speaking; no action

and no decision are, or should be, involved.

Reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which,

anyhow, is unascertainable. Who says what is – λ_γει τ_ ντα – always tells a story,

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and in this story the particular facts lose their contingency and acquire some humanly

comprehensible meaning. It is perfectly true that “all sorrows can be borne if you put

them into a story or tell a story about them,” in the words of Isak Dinesen, who not

only was one of the great storytellers of our time but also – and she was almost

unique in this respect – knew what she was doing. She could have added that joy

and bliss, too, become bearable and meaningful for men only when they can talk

about them and tell them as a story. To the extent that the teller of factual truth is

also a storyteller, he brings about that “reconciliation with reality” which Hegel, the

philosopher of history par excellence, understood as the ultimate goal of all philosophical

thought, and which, indeed, has been the secret motor of all historiography that

transcends mere learnedness. The transformation of the given raw material of sheer

happenings which the historian, like the fiction writer (a good novel is by no means

a simple concoction or a figment of pure fantasy), must effect is closely akin to the

poet’s transfiguration of moods or movements of the heart – the transfiguration of

grief into lamentations or of jubilation into praise.We may see, with Aristotle, in the

poet’s political function the operation of a catharsis, a cleansing or purging of all

emotions that could prevent men from acting.The political function of the storyteller

– historian or novelist – is to teach acceptance of things as they are. Out of this

acceptance, which can also be called truthfulness, arises the faculty of judgment –

that, again in Isak Dinesen’s words, “at the end we shall be privileged to view, and

review, it – and that is what is named the day of judgment.”

There is no doubt that all these politically relevant functions are performed from

outside the political realm. They require non-commitment and impartiality, freedom

from self-interest in thought and judgment. The disinterested pursuit of truth has a

long history; its origin, characteristically, precedes all our theoretical and scientific traditions,

including our tradition of philosophical and political thought. I think it can

be traced to the moment when Homer chose to sing the deeds of the Trojans no

less than those of the Achaeans, and to praise the glory of Hector, the foe and the

defeated man, no less than the glory of Achilles, the hero of his kinfolk. This had

happened nowhere before; no other civilization, however splendid, had been able to

312 HANNAH ARENDT

look with equal eyes upon friend and foe, upon success and defeat – which since

Homer have not been recognized as ultimate standards of men’s judgment, even

though they are ultimates for the destinies of men’s lives. Homeric impartiality echoes

throughout Greek history, and it inspired the first great teller of factual truth, who

became the father of history: Herodotus tells us in the very first sentences of his

stories that he set out to prevent “the great and wondrous deeds of the Greeks and

the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.” This is the root of all so-called

objectivity – this curious passion, unknown outside Western civilization, for intellectual

integrity at any price.Without it no science would ever have come into being.

Since I have dealt here with politics from the perspective of truth, and hence from

a viewpoint outside the political realm, I have failed to mention even in passing the

greatness and the dignity of what goes on inside it. I have spoken as though the

political realm were no more than a battlefield of partial, conflicting interests, where

nothing counted but pleasure and profit, partisanship, and the lust for dominion. In

short, I have dealt with politics as though I, too, believed that all public affairs were

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ruled by interest and power, that there would be no political realm at all if we were

not bound to take care of life’s necessities. The reason for this deformation is that

factual truth clashes with the political only on this lowest level of human affairs, just

as Plato’s philosophical truth clashed with the political on the considerably higher

level of opinion and agreement. From this perspective, we remain unaware of the

actual content of political life – of the joy and the gratification that arise out of being

in company with our peers, out of acting together and appearing in public, out of

inserting ourselves into the world by word and deed, thus acquiring and sustaining

our personal identity and beginning something entirely new. However, what I meant

to show here is that this whole sphere, its greatness notwithstanding, is limited – that

it does not encompass the whole of man’s and the world s existence. It is limited by

those things which men cannot change at will. And it is only by respecting its own

borders that this realm, where we are free to act and to change, can remain intact,

preserving its integrity and keeping its promises. Conceptually, we may call truth what

we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky

that stretches above us.

Notes

2 I hope no one will tell me any more that Plato was the inventor of the “noble lie.” This

belief rested on a misreading of a crucial passage (414C) in The Republic, where Plato

speaks of one of his myths – a “Phoenician tale” – as a ψευ_δ_ς. Since the same Greek

word signifies “fiction,” “error,” and “lie” according to context – when Plato wants to distinguish

between error and lie, the Greek language forces him to speak of “involuntary”

and “voluntary” ψευ_δ_ς – the text can be rendered with Cornford as “bold flight of

invention” or be read with Eric Voegelin (Order and History: Plato and Aristotle, Louisiana

State University, 1957, vol. 3, p. 106) as satirical in intention; under no circumstances can

it be understood as a recommendation of lying as we understand it. Plato, of course, was

TRUTH AND POLITICS 313

permissive about occasional lies to deceive the enemy or insane people – The Republic,

382; they are “useful . . . in the way of medicine . . . to be handled by no one but a physician,”

and the physician of the polis is the ruler (388). But, contrary to the cave allegory,

no principle is involved in these passages.

3 Leviathan, Conclusion.

4 The Federalist, no. 49.

5 Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), ch. 20.

6 See “What Is Enlightenment?” and “Was heisst sich im Denken orientieren?”

7 The Federalist, no. 49.

8 Timaeus, 51D–52.

9 See Jefferson’s “Draft Preamble to the Virginia Bill Establishing Religious Freedom.”

10 This is the reason for Nietzsche’s remark in “Schopenhauer als Erzicher”: “Ich mache mir

aus einem Philosophen gerade so viel, als er imstande ist, ein Beispiel zu geben.”

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