Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 09:24:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: RE: National Socialism and Truth


On Wed, 19 Jul 2000, MRFanning wrote:

> I offer this only as an example of the kind of passage that I think may be
> fueling what "everyone 'knows'" about postmodernists:
> 
> "Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it
> was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of
> history." M.Foucault p.372 "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in _Aesthetics,
> Method, and Epistemology_.

I agree this sort of statement may be fueling what everyone "knows" about
postmodernism.  However, it is actually evidence of a great respect for
"Truth" on Foucault's part.  It should be clear enough from the passage
that he is refering to beliefs held to be unrevisable in the name of
truth-with-a-capital-T. 
 
> There's also a citation for the sentence: _Gay Science_ nos. 110, 265.
> 
> I don't want to put myself in the "no truth" camp, or to imply that this
> passage, or the Nietzsche that inspires it says that there's no truth, just
> that I've heard of it being read that way.

No question Foucault and Nietzsche get read that way.  And then when they
are read that way, the readings begin to substitute for the texts
themselves. We start getting refutations of Foucault and Nietzsche as
they get reconstructed in these readings.  You can get away with this for
a long time on some lists, or at conferences held by the NAS.  

And people just coming into such conversations, often with little reading
of primary texts or awareness of how they are read differently in
differing philosophical traditions, not surprisingly hear and repeat the
news that there are a bunch of academics who no longer believe in truth,
and the French are ultimately responsible for this corruption (along with
the Nazis and Nietzsche, in some versions). 

The situation is rather like that which followed the publication of Hume's
Enquiry (1748), with the modern day Reids and Beatties extracting some
statements or conclusions from Foucault, Derrida, et. al. and then showing
how absurd these are from the view point of Scotch common sense.

hh
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