In a Guardian article, Julian Baggini laments the denial of objectivity and truth. It appears to force people to be either out and out relativists, or in reaction, out and out dogmatists. He lists a couple of usual suspects as the key players in this collapse: Michel Foucault and Richard Rorty - though doesn’t propose any way out of the apparent bind these supposedly ‘postmodern’ figures have left us in.

‘Some philosophers, such as Bernard Williams and Simon Blackburn, have waded into the public debate in an attempt to put the relativist genie back into the bottle.’ - though without success. Which matters. For: ‘Unless we can make a convincing case that the choice is not between relativism or dogmatism, more and more people will reject the former and embrace the latter. When they do, those who helped create the impression that modern, secular rationality leaves everything up for grabs in the marketplace of belief will have to take their share of the blame.’

I'm with Julian on the postmodern predicament and the importance of the debate about truth. But what is wrong with Julian’s piece, and what is wrong about the approach to truth of those who’d agree with him, is their model of truth. Essentially, truth must be reducible to some kind of statement that, in principle, is accessible to all, verifiable, and so necessarily demands assent. In short, for truth read scientific truth.

But I’m not sure truth is like this. Nor should it be. For the truth that matters in terms of living is the truth that makes all the difference to individuals and communities. As Kierkegaard put it, ‘the truth that you are willing to live and die for’. This is a subjective, ethical matter, that whilst using objectivity as one tool in searching for and committing to truth, does not say it is the final arbiter. Rather that should be a moral question.

To put it another way, truth emerges and is embodied; it is established more by praxis than doxy, by narrative than logic, by dynamic living rather than static argument - again without denying the role that doxy and logic play. This is a model of truth that made sense in the pre-modern religious milieu but that was lost not with the arrival, but with the more recent dominance of science as the source of knowledge. It is also a religious understanding of truth that in the same timeframe has been lost to fundamentalists and, apparently, the Pope, who appears to believe that absolute truths can be held without any sense of provisionality by the Church - again, a pretty recent understanding of religious truth that only becomes possible after the scientific revolution.

Why is this understanding of truth not relativistic (i.e. as if it is truth as in ‘true for me’)? Partly because it demands discernment, so is not an anything goes approach; the tools for that discernment are partly those of objectivity but also come from a variety of sources such as tradition and intuition (hence Kierkegaard’s truth is something you would die for). But mostly because it holds that there is such a thing as truth - holding that by faith or intuition - and also accepts that whilst human beings should try to be orientated towards it, final truth will also always lie beyond their grasp: hence the need for a way of life not just a good argument.

I think Socrates is a good example of the search for this truth in practice. He certainly used the tools of objective argument, but what is forgotten these days is that those arguments always ended inconclusively. What then mattered was ethics; how you lived. The aporia at the end of debates with Socrates not only underline that the key to wisdom is not knowing all but understanding the limits of what one knows. However, as a dramatic device, also throw the argument onto the interlocutor’s life. They say, after that experience, how are you going to live now: decide - that is what is key.

Again, this was an essentially religious way of doing things, derived from an understanding of the divine that is nothing if not ultimate unknown and unknowable. So, as Augustine put it: ‘We are between beasts and angels’ - not ignorant like the beasts, but not wise like the angels either.

Incidentally, this is where the original, renaissance idea of toleration came from too. It was not an anything goes, laissez-faire attitude. Rather, if no one has final access to the divine, then everyone should be tolerated for the glimpses of the divine that their life and thought affords. Though, again, tolerated with discernment.

I believe this is something that Foucault understood, and understood that it is also a situation that does not readily obtain today (nor would he want it to). So, taking his work in the round, it is just wrong to say he was a truth denier. Rather, he accepted Nietzsche’s death of God, and the implications that had for an exclusively scientific, objective understanding of truth. But in response, he sought to develop a way of doing philosophy - partly historicised, partly by an analysis of power, partly by the attempt to think differently (which is valuable since it pushes the individual to their limits that might then be the threshold of new truth) - that aimed at the truth to be found in a way of life that emerged from this continual process.

It is this way of life that we lack in late capitalism, or at least we have a way of life but it is shaped almost wholly by the market. It is from the marketplace that relativism comes, when amoral market mechanisms are taken as epistemological insights. And I suspect, it is also from the effects of the market - insecurity, injustice and so on - that dogmatism comes too.