Abstract
This paper explores the notion of truth in relation to literature. It opens with a critical exposition of some dominant tendencies in contemporary aesthetics, in which narrow views of truth and reference guide the aesthetic investigations in harmful ways. One of the problems with such as view is not merely that it becomes difficult to talk about truth in art, but that it also makes the idea that we can learn something from literature problematic. The effort of this paper is thus to open up for a variety of notions of truth, that are not immediately tied to the notion of representation or correspondence. We need a way of talking about truth in art. The effort to explore a notion of truth in art that is not tied to narrow views about reference, and which broadens our sense of “aboutness” goes, in this paper, via a reading of Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture from 2005, together with some reflections inspired by some of Stanely Cavell’s reflections about the relevance of reflecting upon ordinary language. It is argued that literature engages in a form of conceptual reflection, by means of making the sense of our concepts clear and by challenging philosophical preconceptions about what our concepts must mean. What we can learn from art is thus not necessarily toed to either representation or authorial intent, but comes into view by means of the literary exercises that often (but certainly not always) require a conceptual sensitivity; that is, by means of careful attention to what words mean and what follows from them in specific contexts of use.
Keywords
I want to speak about truth
I want to speak about truth. The notion of truth is often in a peculiar way absent in discussions about the relationship between philosophy and literature; and when it is there, I find the discussion of it to be off beam. Only rarely (as far as I know), is the notion of truth fruitfully elucidated in discussions pertaining to the relationship between philosophy and literature.
One reason why this is so is that philosophers, more often than not, and especially within aesthetics of a mainstream analytic kind, tend to rely on rather limited ways of understanding the notion of truth. The most common simplification is of course to tie the notion of truth to correspondence or reference. Words refer to things, or a particular kind of thing they call “belief” (probably without realizing that that notion of “belief” is a technical term that does not cover the manifold ways in which we believe in real life), and “truth” is a matter of correspondence between proposition or belief, and subject matter or thing. In the light of that guiding assumption, literature starts to appear as an anomaly, and is approached as such (as a bug in the system). “How can we possibly learn anything important about our world, the real world, by reading fictional narratives that do not refer to anything real at all – if indeed they can be said to refer in any sensible sense in the first place?” 1 It may sound as a joke, but I have heard philosophers say that we will not be able to say what the Sherlock Holmes stories mean until we have solved the problem that “at the time when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his stories, Baker Street did not go as high as 221, where Holmes was said to live.” This may appear ridiculous. But this was an established scholar, who was very serious about this, and in that conference room I was the one feeling lonely. Everyone else seemed to think this was really central and important.
Now, whenever one instinctively feels that a philosophical idea is nothing but ridiculous, I think the best move to make is to suspect oneself for having failed to see something (Cf. Collingwood, 1970: Ch. V; Collingwood, 2005: 218). Why would anyone say such a thing? What is it really that matters? Where is the seriousness in this? What have I failed to see?
Of course, the seriousness that this problem took for this scholar is not as ridiculous as it first appeared to me. The non-existent Baker Street 221 was (of course) merely an example of a general phenomenon: if the fictional world does not latch on to a real counterpart, the whole notion of reference collapses, and, thus, it may seem as if the idea of truth in fiction will have to go too.
But do we not, one might want to ask, treat this question quite often, for example, when we discuss literature with children? “Dad, are there zombies? No dear, they are made up.” So, there is a sense in which “fictionality” is a problem we solve at the age of 3 (and that’s why it looks ridiculous when grownups claim not to be on top of things here).
However, that does not solve the technical problem of reference and “fictionality.” That problem (about reference and its relation to truth) has generated quite an extensive discussion in contemporary analytic aesthetics, in which one tries to save the relevance of literature by developing new ways for it to “mean” and be a possible truth candidate, even though it does not refer in (what they think of as) the proper way. Some talk about “fictional worlds” and stress that fiction does refer after all, albeit only within its own world. And we may learn something about the real world by reading fiction, only by analogy (Cf. Currie, 1990: 53) (it’s not a real whale, but it looks like one, behaves like one, and therefore, we may learn something about whales by analogy …). Others say that fiction is merely meant to evoke particular feelings, and we can learn to match these imagined, fictional feelings with our own, very real, feelings. This does not yield truth about the world, but may help us to become aware of how to match events in our real world that resemble the generic events in the fictional one with the appropriate feeling (see e.g., Brock, 2007; Konrad et al., 2018; Walton, 1978).
These are just two examples of how the problem of truth tends to be treated, when approached through the lens of very narrow views about the guiding concepts here (truth, reference, representation, real, and fictional).
I do not want to quarrel with these strands of theorizing, but I do want to point out that starting to think about truth and meaning in art, in terms of representation or correspondence is (often) not a very helpful beginning. However, I do not mean to suggest that this means that we can just get rid of notions such as truth and meaning. We need them; and they quite often do some necessary work for us. One may, for example, ask if the image of male sexuality and xenophobia that Michel Houellebecq presents to us in some of his novels is an adequate representation, unveils the unattractive truth about aspects of our reality – meaning, the things he describes are real, and we need to deal with that. But, if one clings on to too narrow views about what it means to represent, or picture, or portray complex things (such as sexuality and xenophobia) one would still have to say that the novels themselves can at best be a second-rate representation, and that we would have gotten so much closer to the truth if we would have piled up massive amounts of empirical evidence instead. Of what use would the experience of reading then be?
Again, I think one is lacking a required sensitivity here, namely that of being able to sound out the many various sensible ways we have of talking about truth, representation, portrayal and aboutness, for example. Philosophers, it seems, reason like this: “Truth is one word, so it has to mean one thing, be one thing.” Therefore, it is precisely because it makes perfect sense to speak about truth as correspondence between, say, a thought or a name and its object, that one becomes tempted to say that all truth candidates (itself a much too limited way of thinking about utterances) must follow this same pattern. This is, so it seems to me, a completely unwarranted and peculiar assumption.
And it is destructive. It actually and literally and very forcefully blocks all forms of curiosity about the artwork one claims to take an interest in. It is no accident, for example, that “The Baker Street Professor” I mentioned earlier showed absolutely no interest at all in what it might mean to think about, and even more certainly not along with, Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels about Sherlock Holmes. 2 And this is no exception. I have been to so many conferences and workshops now where analytic philosophers claim to be interested in literature, where it is obvious that they could not care less about the novels written by the usual suspects that they round up (Dostoevsky, Henry James, Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and so on). What they do worry about (and this may of course be a perfectly legitimate enterprise) is how their central theoretical concepts (truth, reference, name, and rationality) seem to be threatened by the fact of literature. And so, they struggle to save those.
A peculiar feature of this way of thinking about literature, is that these ideas about truth and reference lead to a view where the true point of a work of art, say a narrative novel, must lie outside of itself. The sense and truth of a work of art, is not to be found in what it says, or does, but in what it refers to. As a consequence, one is also assuming that a literary author is really, at bottom and at heart, wanting to say something else than what he or she writes (and it thereby becomes the task of the literary critic, the art critic, or the philosopher to say what the author wanted to say, but did not; or what the work “wanted” to say, but did not). We seem to get things wrong from the start if we let a narrow view of language and representation shepherd our thinking as we struggle to say something about truth in art.
Another thing I think we need to pay attention to here is that people often treat the word “literature” and the word “philosophy” as if these were homogeneous things, like two boxes, that we now seek to relate to each other. And one allows oneself to speak about how literature, in general, refers, or how it relates to philosophy.
At this point, I need to emphasize this: I do not have a theory of literature, for I do not even know what it would mean to theoretically frame such a diverse thing. Neither do I have a theory about what philosophy is. Of course, I have some rather determinate and sometimes strong views about the kinds of questions and difficulties that interest me, as well as of how one may go about in addressing them. But if you ask me “What is literature?” or “How does literature relate to philosophy?” I will have nothing to say. I would not even know where to begin. The way people talk about literature (especially in relation to philosophy) has always struck me as very strange. I do not understand, for example, why the question “What is the relationship between philosophy and literature?” seems to make enough sense to get people going; whereas a question such as “What is the relation between philosophy and religion?” immediately would be met with reservation and hesitation, since everyone knows that these phenomena are way too complex, come in many different forms that are very different, and have complex histories that need to be taken into account. And so, I think one should ask: Why would anyone think that these qualifications are not relevant to the concept of literature? And just try to ask some of the questions that philosophers pose about literature, to philosophy. “Can philosophy yield knowledge?”; “How does philosophy refer to reality?”; “Is the reading of philosophy, morally edifying?” These questions are indeed truly strange, I and have not seen any philosopher asking these questions seriously. I guess the most sensible response one can give to these questions is: “It depends …” and then ask for qualifications. Now, I do not see what the fundamental difference is that allows philosophers to ask the one question, while they find the second one obviously peculiar.
So where does all of this lead us?
This is where we are: I began by the observation that the question of truth in art often is absent in philosophy. I also said that some of the ways in which it is approached start off from the wrong angle. Guided by very narrow ideas about truth and representation, literature: (a) appears to be an anomaly, and is treated as such; and (b) the idea of truth as reference leads people to think that the value of the work needs to be outside it.
These two points have the peculiar side effect that people that claim to be interested in literature, turn out to be, in a peculiar way, wrong about themselves. Either they are really occupied by defending their inflections of concepts such as truth, reference, representation and rationality, so that literature merely comes in as a bug in the system that needs to be fixed, and they are not really, honestly, worried about truth in art; or, these conceptions about truth, reference, representation and rationality are so ingrained that starting to look for truth in a novel appears like an obvious non-starter. On top of that, it is often assumed that we can talk about philosophy and literature, just like that, as if it was obvious that there are As and there are Bs, and our only job now is to see if we can make them match.
Truths (in plural)
We need more nuanced ways of speaking about truth and “aboutness” that allow us to see how these questions are in play, and what is at stake, when we read literature too. Furthermore, I think that we need to admit to ourselves that philosophy and literature are not two distinct and well-defined entities that we can simply relate to one another (to say that they are not distinct entities, is not the same thing as saying that the two are one). As a consequence, the question “Is literature philosophically relevant” needs to be addressed in a much more piecemeal way than it often is. I do not merely mean that we need to read particular works of literature, and point out in each case, what it is that we find relevant. Over and above that, I also think we need to address the topics of truth and of “aboutness” in an equally piecemeal way.
Truth is not a single thing in any other respect than this: it is one of those things that matters (or should I say “should matter”?) to us the most. Let me put it bluntly: what truth is, varies. I do not mean that “a truth” can vary or come in different forms. What I mean is that truth comes in many forms, that it is attained in many different ways, and that it is not “a thing,” which means that having a theory about “it” will be a peculiar enterprise, always running the risk of overgeneralization. An acknowledgement of these facts may enable us to talk about some of the ways in which works of literature can be philosophical – do philosophy, by themselves – without being, as it were, “philosophy’s little helper.”
This latter point is something I have tried to argue for some time now. And one of the more difficult formulations I have made about that idea is that literature tends to be more philosophical when it does not portray, exemplify, or illustrate “a philosophy,” and more profoundly philosophical when it does not give a damn about “philosophy” (and what “philosophers” think about it). One way in which I tried to make that point is by saying, following Iris Murdoch, that I find literature to be “accidentally philosophical:” literature is (…) accidentally philosophical in the sense that it challenges our philosophical conceptions and presuppositions the most when it shows us something about ourselves, our language, our culture, that we had not considered, seen or pondered. Literature tends to be less powerful, philosophically speaking, when it is intentionally philosophical or when a philosopher turns to literature in order to illustrate an already attained philosophical point. (Forsberg, 2013: 12)
What I did not say then, though I think I thought it at the time, was that when “literature does this” it reveals something true. This work is related to what it means, for me at least, to talk about truth in art. Of course, this is a way of speaking about “truth” that is rather remote from the model in which literature is said to have a propositional content that matches, or corresponds, to the real world. But what, then, does “truth” mean here?
One of the more powerful discourses on truth I know of begins like this: In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’ I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? (Pinter, 2005 1) Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost. (Pinter, 2005: 1)
This seems to go well with the claim that there is no hard distinction between true and false (which is not to say that there is no distinction between them), that Pinter''s earlier selfadvocated. But what about the difference between the author as writer and the author as citizen in relation to the question of truth? This is, I think, a complicated question that we need to push ahead of ourselves for a while. Before we can see the difference between truth in relation to the author and to the citizen, we need to flesh out what the elusiveness of truth in drama may consist of.
Here is how Pinter continues: I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say. Nor can I ever sum up my plays, except to say that this is what happened. That is what they said. That is what they did. (Pinter, 2005: 1)
“All that ‘ordinary’ in ‘ordinary language philosophy’ means”
This is how Cavell leads up to that formulation: My purpose here is not to urge that in reading Shakespeare’s plays one put words back into the characters speaking them, and replace characters from our possession back into their words. The point is rather to learn something about what prevents these commendable activities from taking place. It is a matter of learning what it is one uses as data for one’s assertions about such works, what kinds of appeal one in fact finds convincing. (Cavell, 1976: 270)
“That is what they said. That is what they did.” The effort to measure these words and deeds comes about, follows from that. To explore them. Who would say that? Under what conditions? What would follow from these words? And, equally important and unfortunately almost equally frequent: What follows if these words are not heard? Or, not listened to? Or, not taken seriously? Or, not taken at the right level of seriousness? Or, heard, but not listened to? As Pinter describes what writing means to him, he says that “Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image” (Pinter, 2005: 1). He had nothing more to go on. But he needed to find out what follows: It’s a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author’s position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can’t dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man’s buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort. So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time. But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot. (Pinter, 2005: 2)
And this work is exactly what ordinary language philosophy is about – seeking the many and particular senses of our words out, without dictating them, and learning to see what follows from them. And this is a quest for truth. Here, in Cavell’s words, picking up exactly where we left him: I should like to add that identical problems arise in considering the phenomenon of ordinary language philosophy: there the problem is also raised of determining the data from which philosophy proceeds and to which it appeals, and specifically the issue is one of placing the words and experiences with which philosophers have always begun in alignment with human beings in particular circumstances who can be imagined to be having those experiences and saying and meaning those words. This is all that “ordinary” in the phrase “ordinary language philosophy” means, or ought to mean. (Cavell, 1976: 270)
Another thing that needs to be stressed is that these ways of philosophizing are very often negatively motivated. It is something that comes about, and is called for, by the fact that the ordinary language philosopher’s opponent stubbornly claims to already be in full command of language, and thereby feels free to theorize about a concept while obviously zeroing in on some minor aspect of it, thinking that this inflection has to be the definitive sense of it (Cf. Forsberg, 2016). In a similar vein, philosophers tend to think that just because it sometimes makes sense to think about truth as “correspondence between a belief and the subject matter of that belief” (or something to that effect), then they quite commonly move on to say that this is not only the core of the idea of truth, but all there is to it! Of course, the “truth and about truth” is not revealed by a theory of truth. For example, the claim that “truth is a matter of correspondence between a belief and the subject matter of that belief,” is not a statement of the sort that it has its own counterpart somewhere out there in the world, with which we can check if it matches, or corresponds. That, I think, is true of all theories of truth. All we have to go on is the ways that the notion of truth comes into our lives. I am here to argue that that is enough.
Ordinary language philosophy necessarily comes in to complicate things, to destabilize our confidence in our own language, to remind us that our words and concepts are far more complex than one would be prone to think (Cf. Austin, 1962: 3). It is precisely the effort to return us to the “real” (Austin, 1979a: 182). Complications become truth-seeking tools, in a world of simplifications.
Cavell: It [the reference to what we say when] does not refer to particular words of wide use, nor to particular sorts of men. It reminds us that whatever words are said and meant are said and meant by particular men, and that to understand what they (the words) mean you must understand what they (whoever is using them) mean, and that sometimes men do not see what they mean, that usually they cannot say what they mean, that for various reasons they may not know what they mean, and that when they are forced to recognize this they feel they do not, and perhaps cannot, mean anything, and they are struck dumb. (Cavell, 1976: 270)
Ordinary language philosophy, rightly construed, seeks to complicate things, in opposition to, and in rebellion against, the typically philosophical striving to simplify and generalize. But it shares one ideal with most philosophies that it is rebellion against: the quest for truth. Thus, its most pertinent criticism of other forms of philosophy, is that they are not true to their own ideal.
At this point, I want to bring a connection that I have hinted at into view. Paying attention to ordinary language in philosophy, as the effort to return us to the ordinary, is the effort to complicate things by seeking precision in how words actually are used, and about what follows from them being used in this very particular way. This is the effort to combat false images and unwarranted generalizations. This is something that literature does too; and it does that quite regardless of, and quite often precisely because it does not, aim to “be philosophical.” In order to be as non-committal as possible here (since I am not in the business of formulating a theory of literature), I would like to make this point negatively, in the form of a short series of questions:
Can we imagine a literary work that does not seek precision in wordings (meaning, not seeking to find the right expression for this character, in this situation, speaking to this person, in this state, and so on…)?
Can we imagine a work of literature that describes, or imagines, or invents a love relationship, for example, where the intimate connections between words and persons in relation to this love relation are not explored?
If you find it hard to answer both these questions positively and with confidence, are we not now ready to say that literature does some of the things that ordinary language philosophy also aspires to do?
If you want to call ordinary language philosophy a form of conceptual investigation – of the form where one exhorts one’s curiosity about the complexities of our lives together, in a shared language, with words and meanings that are so easily lost in the muddle – then do not you now think, that literature can be seen as forms of conceptual investigations too?
Obviously, since “literature” is not a name for a uniform entity, not all texts called literature do this, and most of those which do, do so unintentionally. But they all are excursions into our language, and no matter how technical one wants to get about literature, no matter how much of the (often very useful) arsenal of theoretical recourses developed by critics and literary theorists one puts to work in one’s effort to elucidate it, and no matter how remote and fantastic literature may be, literature does not have a language of its own at its disposal – literature is a work with and on our language. It is free to play with it, mess around, aim for nothing but enjoyment, or to mystify and play tricks, and we should not judge most forms of literature by the scientistic ideal and limited notions about truth as correspondence. But in the midst of all these varying discourses gathered under the umbrella of “literature” our concepts, and our own (sometimes idiosyncratic) ways of inflecting them are brought into view. We can use that. It helps us see. Literary artists may or may not be okay with that. But it can be extremely rewarding to do so (which is not to say, of course, that it always, or even most of the time, is so).
The artist and the citizen/the poet and the philosopher
I have struggled to make a mess of our notion of truth in order to be true to it. I think it is necessary that we do so, for the words we live by, and the deeds that from them follow, as well as the deeds and events that sprung from them being misunderstood or not heard, are far too important to be neglected. We need to see that truth is a word that comes in many inflections, just as most, if not all, other words and concepts we live by do. If we do not, the kind of “attunement” that we should seek as philosophers – as a response to the vulnerabilities that our philosophical sense of being at odds with, or in collision with, or simply not at home in, our ways of wording the world – will not be reached.
But we are not done. We need to go back to the collision within Pinter that we have not touched upon yet, namely this: in 1958, Pinter said that there is no “hard distinction between what is real and what is unreal,” and claimed that “A thing is not necessarily true or false, it can be both true and false” (Pinter, 2005: 1). In 2005, Pinter says that he can stand by these words as a writer, but not as a citizen. “As a citizen, I must ask: What is true? What is false?” Now, how are we to understand this difference between the writer’s and the citizen’s relationship to truth?
One thing that we should keep in mind, and that I hope to have made clear in this article, is that we are mistaken if we think that the notion of “truth” always is one, and always functions in the same way. Another thing we need to think about, is that being a citizen means being a political being in a specific sense. That is, as citizen, you belong to (or partake in, or governed by) a governmental order/structuring. One thing that means, is that your reality is being exposed to political language; and that kind of language does not necessarily seek the precision and truthfulness that one seeks as a writer, and that one may expect as a reader of literature. Pinter’s view of political language is indeed rather grim, and the bulk of his Nobel Lecture is a very political and angry speech about political deceit and lack of legitimacy. There is no quest for nuance and truth in that kind of “political” us (as used here, by Pinter) language: Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed. (Pinter, 2005: 3)
The textual/logical structure of Pinter’s Nobel Lecture is seemingly simple. He begins by talking about what truth in art means, and relates that to his own practice of writing drama. That takes him two pages. Then follows nearly ten pages where he vehemently discusses United States and United Kingdom foreign policies during the second half of the 20th century, accusing them of war crimes, injustice and lie piled upon injustice and lie, and he even raises the question about when, or at what point, killing becomes mass murder (Pinter, 2005: 8). These ten pages contain the words of a very angry and disappointed man.
Towards the very end of his Nobel Lecture, he returns to literature and truth, by making a peculiar bridge in two curt sentences: I have referred to death quite a few times this evening. I shall now quote a poem of my own called ‘Death’. (Pinter, 2005: 11) Where was the dead body found? Who found the dead body? Was the dead body dead when found? How was the dead body found? Who was the dead body? Who was the father or daughter or brother Or uncle or sister or mother or son Of the dead and abandoned body? Was the body dead when abandoned? Was the body abandoned? By whom had it been abandoned? Was the dead body naked or dressed for a journey? What made you declare the dead body dead? Did you declare the dead body dead? How well did you know the dead body? How did you know the dead body was dead? Did you wash the dead body Did you close both its eyes Did you bury the body Did you leave it abandoned Did you kiss the dead body. (Pinter, 2005: 11)
I think that the best way to understand this rather strange shift is as a way to make clear that even though the truth-seeking activity of art is different from the truth-seeking activities of responsible citizens, and even though truth in art is different from truth in politics, they are nevertheless intimately connected. Here is one way in which they are so: in the poem, Pinter explores the concept of death. By means of a series of questions, the reader is led to think about what a dead person is, how such a person may or may not be treated with dignity, what that kind of dignity consist of. The truth about death is concretized. Detailed descriptions come about in what looks like a series of questions of conscience. Is this a way to treat a dead person? And, if you treat a dead person like this, as I here describe, what does that say about you? What does it say about us? We are thereby invited to see connections that we do make, even though we scarcely think about them – connections between death and the concept of a person, and what we think a person is, about the role of clothes and family and intimacy. There is a quest for truth here. Pinter struggles to say something very true about death and the personal character of it. This is real. But the fact that these connections are pointed out by means of a series of questions means that all of this can be neglected, denied or removed (meaning, people invited to reflect upon these questions may acknowledge them, and the conscientious reply they call for, or not). 3 The way that we treat the dead says so very, very much about who we are and, indeed, about what our society is, or has become. The struggle for truth in art is the effort to bring our concepts’ connotative logic into view, and make the logic of our language clear, if you wish. It is the effort to make reality real, to be true to it. If successful, it “portrays” the truth “about” us, mirrors it, casts a reflection of us (without necessarily calling for an established link between a singular fact and a linguistic representation of, or a name for, that fact).
The political notion of truth however, is not hereby settled, but grows out in relation to the truth in art. Art mirrors reality. Tries to hold it up in front of us; mirrored (which is not to say “represented, or copied”). At that point, the responsibility of the citizen commences. Now we need to ask our politicians, and ourselves, and our neighbours, if we are true to our concepts; true to ourselves: When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror – for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. (Pinter, 2005: 12)
It denies us the comfort of hiding from reality in abstractions.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/orpublication of this article: This publication was supported within the project of Operational Programme Research, Development and Education (OP VVV/OP RDE), “Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value”, registration No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000425, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the state budget of the Czech Republic.
