The Spectacle of Unravelling Truth

Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and their anticipation of the absurdity we're all living through today

“A wonderous spectator was needed to do justice to the drama that then began, the end of which is not yet in sight - a spectacle too subtle, too marvellous, too paradoxical to be played out senselessly unnoticed on the stage of some ludicrous planet!” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Michel Foucault was the most referenced thinker of the twentieth century, being more widely cited in the humanities than even Karl Marx. Part of Foucault’s success is that his work speaks to both sides of the now largely defunct divide into left and right. It must be noted, however, that being able to speak to scholars who stand to the right of the now-fallen centre is irrelevant in contemporary academia, which has nearly ejected all such heretics now. Still, it is remarkable to think that in Foucault we have someone who on the one hand animated the philosophy of Judith Butler (one of the chief architects of our contemporary culture wars thanks to her project to ‘queer gender’), while also powering right-of-centre critiques against such passionate nonsense. (If this sounds implausible, please read some essays by that most excellent conservative thinker David McGrogan, for whom Foucault is his second favourite touchstone after Machiavelli).

When Foucault was appointed to the Collège de France in 1970, his inaugural lecture extolled his debt to Friedrich Nietzsche. Foucault conceded the legitimacy of the division into true and false, suggesting it is “neither arbitrary, nor modifiable, nor institutional, nor violent.” Yet following Nietzsche, he recognised that beyond and behind this regime of truth lay a attitude towards the very pursuit of truth - a ‘will to truth’, as Nietzsche memorably puts it - that echoes down from Plato, through the entirety of Christian doctrine, and from there into the contemporary sciences that these religions begat. This grounding in Plato’s philosophy, as Nietzsche brilliantly explores in The Gay Science, is significant. As Foucault explained in this first lecture, a radical split occurred between the old regime of the Greek city states and the newly emerging forms of philosophy. Truth ceased to be embedded in what discourse was doing, and adhered instead in the truth or falsehood of what was said. Today, it is impossible to appreciate just how radical this transformation was unless we have a very strong grounding in ancient history!

Foucault, ever hypnotised by the landscape of power (another of his inheritances from Nietzsche), pointed out that before this Platonic split, ‘true discourse’ referred to those who spoke with civil or divine authority - the seers, oracles, and upholders of civic ritual. Such speech could not be contrasted to ‘false discourse’ until Plato switched the focus into the content of what was spoken. This perspective still thrives today, and gave birth to information as its bastard child. The irony is, having liberated speaking from desire and power so completely, we then lost our capacity to perceive the will to truth that made it necessary to split the true from the false. This was in itself a desire, as well as a pathway to power, the very power that made it possible to demand that we ‘trust the science’ while undertaking strangely unjustified actions lacking any credible scientific basis. In the bizarreness of recent events (and perhaps also in the centuries building up to it), our few remaining heretics might clearly discern Foucault’s concern that our intense desire to align with the truth has ended up masking and concealing the will to truth that motivates it.

It is Nietzsche’s 1887 book On the Genealogy of Morals where he not only exposed this will to truth, but demanded that we critique it: “the value of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.” This gave Foucault his purpose. But in being the harbinger of the reigning academic practices of critique that Nietzsche founded and Foucault popularised, Nietzsche was also prophetic. He closed this book with the prescient prediction that “morality will gradually perish now”, calling it “the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe”. Not only morality, but the truth as well has struggled to survive this immense unravelling. To Nietzsche, and to Foucault, there was still great hope in this possibility, even while forewarning that it would be a terrible disaster. But can we who are trapped inside this theatre of the absurd at the intermission a century later still share any of this optimism...?