Research project
Artistic Truth
What makes a truth true? Throughout the history of philosophy, numerous theories have been proposed to define what it means for something to be ‘true’. Despite their wide variety, most accounts presuppose that a truth is expressed through linguistic assertations or propositional statements. But can truth also be conveyed in a non-discursive form—through, for instance, the interplay of visual shapes, a musical composition, or the suggestive power of metaphor? After all, we do suppose that the arts can enhance our understanding of the world. What kind of truth, then, is at work in such non-discursive modes of understanding? This research project aims to systematically develop and compare two possible accounts artistic truth – one through phenomenological hermeneutics, the other through critical dialectics.
- Duration
- 2024 - 2028
- Contact
- Errol Boon
- Funding
- DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service)
- Partners
- Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie
- Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule
- Cluster of Excellence: Temporal Communities – Doing Literature in a Global Perspective
In recent years, the value of truth has become increasingly contested. Within academia, both poststructuralist and ‘deflationary’ epistemologies have sought to sidestep any substantial idea of truth altogether. Meanwhile, in politics, journalism, education and society at large, the emergence of virtual reality, generative artificial intelligence and various so-called 'post-truth' phenomena have further put traditional notions of truth under pressure. Despite this pervasive scepticism, concepts such as knowledge, understanding and cognition have largely escaped such fundamental critique, whereas it remains difficult to deny that some notion of truth is a necessary precondition for these seemingly more innocent concepts. Additionally, all scepticism of truth inevitably falls into an old paradox – any critique of truth implicitly involves a truth claim of its own. In short, then, the concept of truth appears to be both problematic and unavoidable. We might speak of a ‘crisis’ regarding the value of truth.
In the context of this crisis, this research project reassesses a seemingly self-evident presupposition that leads most of our thinking about truth. For in epistemology, problems with truth have been examined almost exclusively in the context of discursive truth – that is, as the correctness of explicit or explicable assertations. In an attempt to break through the current crisis of truth, this research project aims to develop a notion of non-discursive truth. If almost all the difficulties pertaining to the crisis of truth play out within the confines of this paradigm of discursive correctness, it might be illuminating to explore whether and how the notion of truth can apply to something that is not a verbal statement.
The multitude of visual and non-argumentative manifestations of the crisis of truth – deep fakes, conspiracy theories, fake news, ‘alternative facts’ etc. – urges us to re-evaluate our discourse-centred understanding of truth. For instance, since the advent of artificial intelligence, we increasingly speak of images as being true, false or fake. However, it is not immediately clear what one could mean by the truth value of images, sounds or other non-discursive media. As our understanding of truth is predominantly discursive, we often reduce the meaning of an image to a literal statement in order to evaluate whether the represented statement within the picture correctly represents reality. This revolves within a judgement about the discursive truth in a picture but not necessarily of the pictorial truth. If the semantic operations of images, sounds and poetry are different from the logical structure of discursive language, the question arises of how these non-propositional media can bear a distinctively non-discursive truth.
A conceptual engagement with non-discursive truth is, of course, not new. One can find traces and leads for a theory of non-discursive truth, especially within the history of aesthetics and philosophy of art – for instance, the kind of truth that Plato denies of poetry; Aristotle’s notion of aesthetic plausibility in Poetics and Rhetoric; the dialectical and critical notions of artistic truth in Hegel and Adorno; the idea of truth as ‘unconcealedness’ developed in the aesthetics of Heidegger and Gadamer. However, these notions of artistic truth have not yet been studied systematically as instances of a focused study of non-discursive truth. This research project aims to provide a systematic study of artistic truth conceptions in aesthetics that deviate from the paradigm of truth as discursive correctness – in particular, it develops and compares theories from phenomenological hermeneutics and critical theory. Such non-discursive truth conceptions might be better equipped to accommodate and critically evaluate the subjective, aesthetic, and pluralistic claims to truth pertaining to today’s world.
This research enfolds in four steps. Firstly, the question of aesthetic truth will be articulated based on a re-reading of the historical debate on truth in poetry between Plato and Aristotle. This influential debate provides us with a point of reference, through which a comparative methodology can be developed for articulating the question. This methodology ultimately distinguishes three truth modalities (epistemic correctness, aesthetic plausibility and metaphysical truth). Secondly, it will be demonstrated that in particular one of these truth modalities (i.e. metaphysical truth) is not systematically addressed in contemporary aesthetics. It is argued that precisely this truth modality is needed especially in order to understand cognitive value of contemporary artistic practices. The third and fourth section will re-articulate, compare and evaluate two accounts of non-discursive truth – first with the critical theory of Adorno and subsequently with the phenomenological hermeneutics of Heidegger. Thus, this project aims to provide contemporary aesthetics with a truth conception that could account for the cognitive value of non-discursive artistic practices in a world dominated by discursive knowledge production.
