Bernard Williams on Truth and Truthfulness

Genealogy: its power and limits as productive philosophy

Williams died in 2003, and Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy was published in 2002 - the last one in his lifetime. He is best known for his witty and insightful - if often perplexing, frustrating, and slippery - essays on practical reason, relativism, blame, utilitarianism, and other diverse topics. He is not exactly known as a systematic philosopher. Indeed, the idea of a "system" tends to appear as a target of excoriation - consider his acerbic criticism of "the morality system" (a very Nietzschean rebuke). Nonetheless, in Truth and Truthfulness he gets close as he ever does to articulating a "system" of moral philosophy - albeit a system only in the loosest sense of the term. My interpretation, here, is strongly influenced by my NYU colleague Miranda Fricker's recent excellent pair of 2024 Harvard Whitehead lectures on "Bernard Williams’ Historical Self-Consciousness" (available on YouTube). Her lectures, together with my own reading of this book, have convinced me of the value in reading (late) Williams as a coherent and semi-systemic thinker.

The plan for the book - that Willliams dutifully executes - is summarized in the following passage: "The subject of this book is truthfulness: various virtues and practices, and ideas that go with them, that express the concern to tell the truth—in the sense both of telling the truth to other people and, in the first place, telling the true from the false. My aim is to explain the basis of truthfulness as a value, and to suggest ways in which we can think about the forms that it has taken, and elaborations that it has received, in different historical circumstances." He subdivides truthfulness into two subsidiary virtues - Accuracy and Sincerity - that stand for the punctilious commitment to truth-seeking and the pro-social commitment to truth-telling. This is a marvelous construction that manages to systematize his thinking without forgoing its subjectivism. As behooves a thinker who sees history as continuous with philosophy, Williams derives his system - or at least systematic insights - from his erudite reading of past and present thinkers. He sees the emergence of ethical concepts, reasons, and motivations, but also the rise and fall of objectifying moral systems, as products of historical, cultural, and anthropological causes. His indebtedness to Hume in philosophy and Thucydides in history is obvious (and remember that Hume was no less a historian). But it is Nietzsche who takes centerstage. The subtitle "An Essay in Genealogy" is a nod to Nietzsche (and perhaps also to Foucault). Indeed, the very idea of Truthfulness as an ethical problem owes its origins to Nietzsche, as he emphasizes. "Mellow, Oxbridge Nietzscheanism" is a slightly unfair but eminently useful characterization of Williams's genealogical, perspectival approach. This constitutes a powerful epistemic lens and conceptual framework.

There are several reasons why this book feels so systematic. First, it is the result of a lifetime of learning and reflection. It shows that Williams had a relatively stable set of powerful philosophical commitments - an internal view on practical reason, ethical subjectivism, a genealogical approach to morality and culture, opposition to moral systems and moralizing attitudes, celebration of ethical individualism, moderate relativism (of distance), etc. - that are carried over from his early essays, like "Internal and External Reasons" (1980), up to this magnum opus. This kind of implicit systematicity was, in fact, always there, if one knew where to look. But secondly, specific to this work, the concept of Truthfulness provides a solid backbone to the book, both thematically and methodologically. All this increases the systematizing power of its argumentation. Since Williams does not always spell out his argument in a step-by-step, logical form, it is incumbent upon the reader to engage in a bit of imaginative reflection and guesswork to piece it all together.

For the most part, Williams straddles the line between perspectival illumination (which is always partial and incomplete) and systematic analysis (which can at least aspire for more) in an admirable way. But the method screeches to a halt when Williams applies his perspectival, semi-systematic method to some of traditional "Big Topics" in moral and political philosophy, such as "state of nature" theorizing and liberal pluralism. Although what he says about the topic is interesting enough, it feels dreadfully barebones and undercooked. Although his analysis opens to door to thinking about truthfulness, accuracy, and sincerity as pro-social virtues conducive to human survival and basic sociability - a familiar topic to natural law theorists, utilitarians, and contractarians - he shies away from the normative implications of this analysis because it points away from relativism. Perhaps Williams hesitates because he does not dare to embrace his own discoveries at the risk of becoming dogmatic? A half-hearted commitment is the best he can do - for perfectly understandable internal reasons. But this means that his analysis of the [preconditions of human sociability predictably fails to impress anyone who has read Grotius, Hobbes, Hume, Rawls, or Gaus. A half-hearted, semi-detached commitment to state of nature theorizing and reflective analysis will not do as a basis for approaching a real alternative to, say, the Rawlsian construction of the original position. The relativistic failure to stabilize the preconditions of the reflective equilibrium conducive to state of nature theorizing undermines and defeats the whole enterprise. (If I cannot know what the state of nature allows, nothing follows from it.)

Much like the postmodern and neo-pragmatist irony that Williams disparages, his own genealogical method prematurely diffuses the force of his argument before it reaches its productive climax. At the same time, the simple but powerful concept of truthfulness allows Williams to shed new light on the past, present, and future ethical imagination, the possibilities of ethical convergence, and the tragic inevitability of conflict and pluralism. The book perfects his philosophical project and illuminates many important questions. Each chapter is a real treasure trove of ethical, epistemic, and genealogical insight. His argument culminates in a powerful plea for the enduring value of liberalism, the importance of perspectival humility, and a prescient warning against the neo-primitivist danger posed by new digital communication technologies to the virtues of truth and truthfulness. Although Williams's style remains flawed and frustrating, and he never quite manages to escape the critical-negative mode of analysis, Truth and Truthfulness combines some of the most powerful dogma-solvents and anti-moralist prophylactics of contemporary analytical philosophy with a systematic vision of a free, ethical, post-absolutist culture committed to truth, accuracy, and sincerity. Impressive, Sir Bernard!