Championing the Concept of Certainty in an Age of Relativity

To claim to be writing a history of truth might seem to suggest that truth is not an absolute, but something that has changed with circumstances or developed over the centuries. But Felipe Fernandez-Armesto’s professed aim in writing this book is to rescue the idea of truth from the debunking it has suffered over the last century. “The trashing of truth,” notes Fernandez-Armesto, “began as an academic vice, but the debris is now scattered all over society.”

A member of the modern-history faculty at Oxford University in England, Fernandez-Armesto addresses his book not only to his fellow academicians, but even more to a general public beset by an uneasy mixture of skepticism and credulity. “ 1/8W 3/8hen people stop believing in something,” he observes, “they do not believe in nothing; they believe in anything. Crackpot cults prosper . . . discredited superstitions revive. Trapped between fundamentalists, who believe they have found truth, and relativists, who refuse to pin it down, the bewildered majority in between continues to hope there is a truth worth looking for, without knowing how to go about it. . . .” Fernandez-Armesto is particularly keen to provide a kind of counter-history to French historian Michel Foucault’s contention that what any given era calls “truth” is merely the version of reality sanctioned by power-holding elites. “Truth,” Fernandez-Armesto maintains, “is fundamental to everything else.”

Although serious in his intentions, Fernandez-Armesto writes with a light touch, ranging widely over the fields of anthropology, history and philosophy, whisking the reader from ancient China, India and Greece to Africa, Brazil, Uzbekistan and New Guinea. Human societies, he argues, have always sought truth. The methods they have used to help them distinguish it from falsehood can be classified under four headings: the truth that you feel, which includes truth that is intuited; the truth you are told, which is mediated by some kind of authority, such as an oracle, a shaman or holy scriptures; the truth of reason, which you figure out by yourself; and the truth you perceive through your senses, which includes empirical truths discovered through science.

Although, certainly, the first two forms were prevalent in earlier cultures and the latter two gained great prestige with the Enlightenment, Fernandez-Armesto maintains that all four have coexisted throughout the centuries: Members of so-called “primitive” cultures (he rightly criticizes that term) are as capable of deductive and inductive reasoning as members of an “advanced” industrial society. (The navigational charts of South Sea islanders are just one of many possible examples. And we all know plenty of supposedly sophisticated Westerners who go by their gut feelings, consult astrology charts or place great reliance on dreams.) Each of the four categories is discussed in a long chapter explaining what it is and illustrating its uses with fascinating examples drawn from a genuinely multicultural worldwide pool.

Ironically, as Fernandez-Armesto contends, it may well have been the search for truth that led to the rise of radical doubt. When philosophers like Rene Descartes came to the realization that the only thing they knew for certain was the “fact” of their own consciousness, the gateway to subjectivism was opened. Subjectivism, in turn, led to the notion that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and voila, radical doubt. Examining the efforts of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and William James to find a way back to truth, Fernandez-Armesto is rather too glib in pointing out their weaknesses. We are led to expect that he will somehow pull a more irrefutable rabbit out of the hat in his last chapter. The defense he finally does offer, while persuasive, is hardly head and shoulders above those of his predecessors. This minor flaw does not, however, seriously detract from the merits of his very timely and eminently readable book.

No single way of seeking truth, Fernandez-Armesto concludes, is completely watertight in and of itself. Each has limitations. But simply because there is no foolproof way of ascertaining the absolute truth does not mean that the goal of truth does not exist or that it is not worth striving for.