Pictured are the offices of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. Roger Berkowitz is the Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center, and I am reprinting below, in its entirety, Berkowitz' relatively recent reflections on Arendt's thoughts about "Truth." What Berkowitz has written is worth reading, which is why I am providing you with his entire essay. Berkowitz' essay originally appeared in my email inbox on August 31, 2025.
Back in February of this year (on February 6, 2025, to be precise), I provided some of my own thoughts about how "Truth" relates to politics right here in one of my blog postings. Click that link if you'd like to see what I say, and compare it to what Berkowitz (and Arendt) are saying. I think we're not so far apart, though I would never formulate my ideas by making the claim that, "Truth Is A Lie." That phrase comes from Nietzsche.
It is my belief that we can best navigate our human situation by admitting that we live, simultaneously, in "Two Worlds." That way of thinking about "where we are" affects how I think about "Truth." Ultimately, we live in the "World of Nature," or in "The World That God Made," to use another set of words to describe it. (Arendt calls it the "common world.") That world, upon which we ultimately depend, is the world in which there is "Truth." However, the "Truth" that exists within "The World That God Created" is not accessible to us in our "Human World," our "Political World," which is where we most immediately reside.
None of us can or should claim that we have any personal access to the ultimate "Truth." We have "ideas." We have "opinions," and and lots of times we don't agree about those. My discussion of Pontius Pilate, and his question, "What is Truth?" is relevant to any inquiry about the nature of "Truth." Pilate asked, and Jesus did not respond. We're all going to have to wait to find out. Any claim to know the ultimate "Truth" - "Truth" with a capital "T" - is a claim that is being made beyond the competence of the person making it.
In our own world, our "Political World," the world we create by our own actions (and inactions), we should admit that we need to settle for "opinions," and we had better be tolerant and understanding when we discover that our own opinions and insights may be quite different from those of our friends, family, and neighbors. That's the situation that is of immediate and practical importance to us.
That's what Berkowitz and Arendt are dealing with. And me, too. We're not so far apart in our understanding!
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Truth and the Necessity of Lying
by Roger Berkowitz
Labor Day is meant to honor laboring, but for me it marks a new beginning. This year, I return from a sabbatical having finished a new book, A World We Share: The Power of Friendship in a Time Without Truth. At the same time, I am preparing to teach my seminar on “Truth and Politics.” Few questions feel more urgent today: what is truth, and can we live without it?
The last time I taught the course was 2023, and it was one of the most exciting courses I’ve taught. Structured around a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s short but brilliant “How The True World Became a Fable,” the course pushes students to understand what Nietzsche means when he says that “truth is a lie,” or “truth is a woman,” or “truth is a fable.”
In his short parable, Nietzsche tells the history of how truth becomes a lie in six brief epigrammatic paragraphs. In stage one, Plato invented truth because of a distrust of opinion. Confronted with the trial and death of Socrates, Plato was convinced that political opinion in a democracy was dangerous, unstable, and irrational. What was needed was training of the best, those able to see beyond the shadows and deceptions of the human world, those who could step out of the cave of human affairs and focus their attention on the supersensible truths of the ideas. These philosophers claimed to know the rational truth, and from this they claimed the right to rule as philosopher kings.
In Stage Two, Nietzsche traces the progress of truth from Plato, through the Christians for whom truth shifted from the philosopher to God. Truth remains unattainable to mortals but known to the pious and wise and the holy. Truth becomes divine revelation.
In Stage Three, Kant finds that this absolute truth is unknowable, the ding an sich, the thing in itself. We cannot know the truth, but it still commands us with moral force, a truth we must respect even if we cannot possess it. In the Enlightenment, truth still possesses a compelling and authoritative claim of imperative.
Stage Four brings us to the positivists like Auguste Comte and, Stage Five, to the utilitarians like John Stuart Mill, who no longer believe in a knowable rational truth. If truth is unattained, it is no longer obligatory — “an idea that has become useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us dispense with it.” Truth is now seen as simply what those with power are able to persuade others to be true.
In the Final Stage, we confront the problem that once truth is refuted and useless, a weapon to wield, we are confronted with a paradox. We think that without truth we are left with the world of opinions, the apparent world, a world we can use and make in our image. “But no! With the true world we have also dispensed with the apparent one!” It turns out that we need truth and the true world to even have a world at all.
Nietzsche’s own approach to truth is paradoxical as it is profound. Truth is a lie, a deception, an expression of power by those whose interests it serves. But the lie that truth is cannot be dispensed with; that lie — the lie that there is truth — is also necessary. Truth is a needed lie in the service of life.
We need the true world that is lied into existence because man as a social being needs truths that unite him with others and keep the peace. Just as Plato understood that the plural and conflicting opinions of the masses needed to be trained by a philosopher king, so Nietzsche saw that any collective life requires a “peace treaty” — something like an agreement on basic truths, the foundations of our common world.
Second, truth is necessary because it is an expression of the power of those with the power to assert their truth. Since life is will to power, and since life needs to exert power, the achievement of transforming a lie into a truth serves the progressive force of power in life.
The question of my course on “Truth and Politics” is simply: If truth is a lie, is it a lie we should cherish and protect, or should we — in the name of truthfulness — call out the lie and reject all claims to truth? In other words, if truth is simply what the powerful have accomplished, should we reject truth as simply an instantiation of power? Or should we recognize, paradoxically with Nietzsche, that while truth may be a lie in the service of power, we humans cannot live without truth?
This last point is at the heart of Arendt’s powerful reflections on truth in her two essays “Lying and Politics” and “Truth and Politics” — essays that bookend the course. We can live without justice, Arendt writes, but we cannot live without truth. Like Nietzsche, Arendt sees truth as fragile, contested, and never beyond human influence. But she insists that we cannot live without truth.
Truth, as she puts it at the end of “Truth and Politics,” is the ground we walk on and the sky above us. It is the common world. Without truth, there is simply nothing that holds our world together. But truth, for Arendt, is hardly Platonic or even Kantian — something supersensible and beyond human influence. She recognizes that truth may be a lie and a fable. But it is a lie we need, which is why it is better, she writes, to be wrong with our friends than to pursue a truth with our enemies. We need to believe in truths that ensure the trust and meaning of our common worlds.
To understand the importance of truth even when truth is a lie, and to commit oneself to upholding truths while knowing that those truths are manifestations of power, is the paradoxical situation we find ourselves struggling with today. To think about this challenge, we read in the seminar a number of contemporary books, including The January 6th Report from the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Steven Shapin’s The Social History of Truth, Linda Zerilli’s A Democratic Theory of Truth, Michel Foucault’s Fearless Speech, and Jonathan Rauch’s The Constitution of Truth.
These books help us see that truth is something we build through institutions that are built on trust. We know, for example, that elections are never perfectly neutral — they are distorted by gerrymandering, campaign finance, and partisan primaries, with trust further undermined by claims of fraud, real or imagined. The January 6th Report makes clear how fragile our electoral system can be when that trust breaks down.
The same is true of our social, cultural, and scientific institutions. As Steven Shapin reminds us, they grew out of the seventeenth-century gentleman’s code of honor, but those norms have evolved. Today, people of every race, gender, or class can be scientists, provided they follow norms of impartiality, curiosity, and openness to scientific falsification. None of these institutions are free of history or power. But if we abandon the fragile norms of trust that sustain them, we don’t simply expose their biases — we risk losing the very ground on which a common world depends.
So many today want to tear these institutions down, to sacrifice what Rauch calls The Constitution of Truth. Many of my students will begin the class believing that if one side lies and cheats to get what they want, it is foolish to hold oneself to norms of truth. We see this view in a political sense around the battle over gerrymandering. If one side cheats, the other side should cheat as well: we have to admit that playing fair is a fool’s game.
Some will hold to that view throughout the course. If the right-wing press embraces “alternative facts,” the left-wing press should respond in kind as part of the resistance. It is of course true that the Supreme Court is not only a legal but also a political body, but if we treat it fully as a political body and pack the court to serve our interests, we lose the very idea of legal authority that lends our politics authority and stability. And it is true that the liberal rules-based world order does serve the interests of America and its allies, but to abandon that order to regional power bases would end the decades of peace and global integration many of us are used to.
What the course aims to help them to see is that they are right in their critiques of journalistic standards, legal neutrality, and international law as lies that inform and protect certain interests. Truth is a lie, one usually told and wielded in the interest of the powerful. At the same time, I want them to understand that it may be deeply dangerous to simply tear down the institutional constitutions of truth that our liberal institutions embody.
The nihilistic tendencies of those on the right and the left today lead many to embrace the critique of truth as power without understanding Nietzsche and Arendt’s response — that even if truth is a lie, it is a humanly necessary lie. If truth is a lie, it is a lie that makes a common world possible. The real task is not to abandon truth, but to defend and renew the fragile institutions that give us a world we can share.
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