Defending the Western Tradition of Truth-Telling

• In Event: 28.066 - Viral Modernity in Education: Deconstructing Post-Truth

Abstract

‘Then verily, child I will tell you the truth’ is a formulaic ritual sentence that occurs five times in the Odyssey. Homer makes use of this stylistic device as part of a ready-made traditional inheritance of Aletheia. The word Aletheia also often appears in the phrase ‘the whole truth,’ meaning, as Corazzon (2016) says, to give an account or ‘to tell the whole story.’ It is the corner stone of our institutions in law, philosophy, and education. The Homeric notion of Aletheia is the very same and is the foundation of our Western ‘traditional oath or solemn affirmation required of a witness in court proceedings: to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ Whether Homer is to be seen as a single poetic genius or as a tradition, The Illiad and The Odyssey are thought to have been composed in the late eighth or early seventh centuries BCE. The poems, which were sung from memory, constituted a shared source of moral and practical understanding from the ancients. They also were a common reference point for the telling of what happened, of ‘giving an account’ (Peters et al, 2018). Aletheia is the counterpart of our ‘truth,’ including ‘alethes’ (true), ‘alethos’ (truly) and ‘alethein’ (to speak the truth). The notion of aletheia as truth has an historical lineage in the oral tradition that represents almost 3000 years of use, and originates in the time before the poetry of Homer (or the Homeric tradition) in ordinary life. There is here a stability of use, a traceable passage from the pre-philosophical to the philosophical stage. In contrast, ‘theories of truth,’ in the academic philosophical sense, are of a much later vintage, most of them first formulated in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. Additionally, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth not only in the social media but also in the court room, in the newsroom, and in the classroom (Foucault, 2000, 2014; Peters, 2003). Western culture from the later Middle Ages made confessional speech a vehicle of authenticity, signaling ‘inner truth.’ It is essentially a Christian overlay of Aletheia that reinforces first person narrative accounts of truth-telling that gave rise to the confessional genre and diverse set of practises that became a generalized condition of media, education and public life. In the Middle Ages, truth shifts from a subjective concept associated with my ‘troth’, meaning my word or oath, into a more objective one used in the political realm to refer to legal documents. Truth came to mean ‘being in accord with reality’ or in accord with the facts. This is the essence of empirical science where true means an accurate description of reality. Truth is a deep cultural practice in the West, yet we take it for granted and only question it when we are exposed to the consequences or effects of a lie (Peters, 2017).

Author

• Tina Besley, Beijing Normal University