The Fight for Truth — Between Post-Truth and Awakening

We live in a strange simultaneity. One side declares the age of the post-factual — an era in which truth has become a matter of negotiation, where only the loudest meme wins and facts are merely interpretations anyway. The other side speaks of the great awakening, of a humanity finally opening its eyes, seeing through the lies, finding its way to truth. Both sides claim to hold the correct diagnosis. And neither notices that they are caught in the same trap.

Perhaps you feel it too — an unease that trusts neither narrative. Not because you lack orientation, but because you sense that the question of truth runs deeper than the quarrel between factions. That feeling has a reason. It shows you something essential: the fight for truth begins where the individual stops outsourcing their thinking to others.

#Why is the question of truth a question of survival?

Without a concept of truth and reality, you become existentially disoriented. This page reads the so-called post-truth era not as a philosophical insight but as a label for a situation in which only the loudest meme wins. Where the standard by which something can be measured as important or not is missing, a drifting sets in that robs you of your capacity for judgement. A society without a concept of truth cannot distinguish, cannot object, cannot judge.

Confucius put it 2,500 years ago with a sharpness that has lost none of its relevance: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things” (Confucius, Analects XIII, 3, trans. Legge). In Confucius the chain goes on: if language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments are not properly awarded, and in the end “the people do not know how to move hand or foot” (ibid.). This page reads in it: a crisis of truth is also a crisis of language and of thinking. When words no longer hold, when they no longer hit the phenomena they name, the entire framework of orientation collapses.

Gwendolin Kirchhoff speaks of a crisis of the word: word and deed do not go together, and this is a normalised state to which everyone has grown accustomed (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Des Kaisers neue Kleider und die Krise des Wortes, 02:44–03:19). As one way of addressing the crisis of the word she names not repeating hypnotic language that is repeated over and over anyway, but breaking through it with something that hits the matter more accurately (ibid., 40:30–41:09). The contextual disclosure of such language patterns is a philosophical task.

In Schiller, Cassandra speaks the paradoxical line: “Only error is life, / And knowledge is death” (transl.; Schiller, 1802, Kassandra). What sounds at first like capitulation this page reads as an observation: the living human being errs — that belongs to our nature. But error that presents itself as truth, that secures itself institutionally and punishes contradiction, is something else entirely. It is the opposite of living inquiry. It is rigidity. And rigidity is, as this page reads it, what the rectification of names in Confucius is meant to prevent: not honest ignorance, but the conflation of words and reality.

#How does philosophical truth-seeking differ from ideological truth-claims?

The decisive difference lies in one’s relation to one’s own logic. Whoever thinks ideologically already knows the answer before the question is asked. Whoever searches philosophically lets themselves be seized by the question without knowing in advance where it leads. It is the difference between a verdict handed down and an insight that breaks open within you.

In her conversation with Jochen Kirchhoff, Gwendolin Kirchhoff presents two primal images of how illusion comes into the world (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 08:55–10:53). The one image comes from the Eastern religions and wisdom traditions: the human being lies asleep in a dream in which everything is manifest but not recognised, until the moment of waking, in meditation or simply spontaneously. In the West, since the Greeks, the image of Plato’s cave has prevailed (Plato, Republic, 514a–520a): people are locked up by an unknown jailer until one of them is carried out by an equally unknown power, sees the light of the sun and with it of truth, and returns to wake the others, who do not believe him. She calls this figure the myth of Enlightenment. Jochen Kirchhoff agrees: truth is not so evident that everyone could see it at once, and whoever has broken through the illusory images finds that the others do not want to listen (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 10:54).

Both models carry a deep insight. But both can harden into ideology when they stop being questions and start being answers. The truther movement shows how the Enlightenment model turns into paranoia when it only searches for jailers. The rhetoric of awakening shows how the Eastern model turns into complacency when it no longer considers its own sleep. Philosophical truth-seeking differs from both in that it keeps the question open — even against itself.

#Truth as encounter with reality

In the conversation a sentence of Giordano Bruno comes up, which Jochen Kirchhoff interprets this way: truth is alive only in the soul itself, not in the senses and not in reason either (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 28:34–29:30). Whoever has read certain books and believes they hold truth between two covers does not, in his words, hold it in their hands unless it breaks open in their own soul (ibid., 55:35–55:53). This page finds a related thought in Schopenhauer: “from without” one can “never get at the inner nature of things”, and so one gains “nothing but images and names” (transl.; Schopenhauer, 1819, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, § 17); he finds the way in through one’s own body, which is given to the knower at once as representation and as “that which is immediately known to everyone and is denoted by the word will” (transl.; ibid., § 18). Gandhi called the struggle of the Indians in South Africa Satyagraha; the word goes back to “Sadagraha”, Sat for truth, Agraha for firmness (Gandhi, 1927, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Part IV, ch. 26).

Truth, then, is not something you have but something you approach; conversations, writing and speech are for Jochen Kirchhoff always approaches to reality and to truth (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 58:23–59:00). The tireless, day-by-day pursuit of truth is for him itself already a criterion (ibid., 46:23–47:54). Truth does not fall from the sky, and even a revelation has a prehistory, says Jochen Kirchhoff (ibid., 46:23–47:54). A revelation is for him a “trans-personal irruption” into a person’s own spirituality, and truth can only be beheld once one “has come to partake of it” (transl.; ibid., 44:19–44:57). Something, in his words, must have happened within a person for them to reach that level at all; they must already have been inside the truth to some degree before they recognise it (ibid., 46:23–47:54). Jochen Kirchhoff draws here on a saying of Empedocles: one can only know what one is (ibid., 45:15–45:27). In Heraclitus we read: “This world-order, the same for all beings, no god and no human made; it always was and is and will be ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures” (transl.; Heraclitus, Fragment B30, after Diels). This page reads in it: truth is no invention; it is the order itself, waiting to be discovered.

And what does it take? As a precondition Jochen Kirchhoff names a fundamental question, such as the primal human question: who am I? (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 49:24–49:35). In the conversation Gwendolin Kirchhoff distinguishes two ways of asking: one can simply ask a question, or, in the moment of asking, not-knowing and knowing become conscious in equal measure. That, for her, is a question one undergoes: one suddenly enters into it; it is not a verbally posed question but an opening within oneself (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 49:35–50:07). Jochen Kirchhoff agrees: this, he says, could break open in a person (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 50:08–50:13).

#The ethical core of the question of truth

Truth cannot be a compulsory event (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 51:35). Gwendolin Kirchhoff takes this further in the conversation: that truth cannot be forced is, she says, already the recognition of a deep basic quality of truth; it is an effect of truth to know that insight can arise individually from the I of the single person and cannot be forced from outside, and whoever understands this does not try to force people into truth (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 51:38–51:58). Jochen Kirchhoff agrees: truth, he says, can arise and establish itself, but not by force (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 52:39–52:46). The golden rule — not to do to another what one would not want done to oneself — Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls, in the conversation, a cognitive effect that arises in people who strive for truth (Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 54:20–54:45). Judgement and ethics cannot be separated from one another.

Nietzsche saw the instincts of decline ruling over the instincts of ascent in his era (Nietzsche, 1888, The Case of Wagner). The diagnosis has lost nothing of its relevance. But the answer is not a new ideology, not a new system, not a new meme that shouts louder than the old one. The answer lies in the patient, clarifying work on one’s own thinking. In Heraclitus we read: “To all human beings it is given to know themselves and to be wise” (transl.; Heraclitus, Fragment B116, after Diels). This page reads in it: the capacity for truth is no special gift. Jochen Kirchhoff says that in principle truth is accessible to every living, fully valid human being (Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 50:24–50:37). What matters is the clarification of concepts that tests whether words correspond to the phenomena they name. In the philosophical accompaniment of a thinking process that does not seek to repair but to make clarity possible.

#What does “The Emperor’s New Clothes” mean?

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of 1837 about a cloth that nobody sees and everybody praises, because no one wants to be taken for stupid or unfit for his office, until a little child says: “But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” (Andersen, 1837, Project Gutenberg eBook #1597). In a symposium lecture Gwendolin Kirchhoff reads it as a tale that “says a great deal about language and about the crisis of the word” (transl.; Kirchhoff, G., 2024, Des Kaisers neue Kleider und die Krise des Wortes, 05:28). Among the things she counts as the crisis of the word: “word and deed do not go together” (transl.; ibid., 03:19), and word and reality, word and truth, or word and understanding do not always go together either (ibid., 03:36–04:16).

Gwendolin Kirchhoff understands the Emperor as “something like the personality, or also the faculty of judgement” (transl.; ibid., 14:36; on the concept: judgement). His focus is turned outward, onto self-presentation, and he has “no hold within himself” (transl.; ibid., 14:53–15:08). The two swindlers, in her words, attack “his social status and his cognitive competence” (transl.; ibid., 15:59). Such an attack on self-worth, meant to persuade although one does not have the better arguments (ibid., 16:49), she names this way: “this propagandistic trick is called dark rhetoric” (transl.; ibid., 17:00). An honest philosopher, by contrast, “always argues from the matter itself” (transl.; ibid., 17:20).

The whole game, according to Gwendolin Kirchhoff, is interrupted by a child, “that is, by an original, unconditioned perception” (transl.; ibid., 20:32–20:49): by a child who knows nothing of the world and in that sense has “no social status to lose yet” (transl.; ibid., 21:21–21:27). Andersen tells how it then seems to the Emperor himself that the people are right, and how he carries the procession through all the same. This ruler, who sees it too but cannot admit it, Gwendolin Kirchhoff calls a further element of the crisis of the word (ibid., 22:30).

For the individual she names, among other lessons from the tale, “trust in one’s own immediate experience” (transl.; ibid., 34:23–34:30), noticing attacks on one’s self-worth (ibid., 35:02), and closely observing “what do I know, what do I not know”, together with practising to admit it (transl.; ibid., 36:55–37:13). On self-worth in Gwendolin Kirchhoff’s work see also the lexicon entry self-respect; on language, the essay Language as Incantation.

#What remains

Truth is reality (cf. Kirchhoff, J., 2024, Der Kampf um die Wahrheit, 58:01). For Jochen Kirchhoff there is not reality over here and truth over there; it is the same, and whoever lives in untruth also lives in a pseudo-reality (ibid., 58:01–58:22). Speaking of music, he recalls the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who is said to have put it this way: when he succeeds, then it is true. In great music, for Jochen Kirchhoff, a measure of truth is contained that one can feel but cannot pin down dogmatically or as doctrine; reality is very complex, finely built and manifold, and dogmatic pronouncements achieve nothing (ibid., 59:01–60:51).

If you sense that neither the post-factual resignation nor the rhetoric of the great awakening captures your unease, that is not a lack of information. It is the beginning of a thinking that refuses to settle. Perhaps it is the start of a question worth carrying through. Philosophical consultation offers a space for that — not as an answer, but as accompaniment on a path that forms under your feet as you walk.

#Sources

• Andersen, H. C. (1837). The Emperor’s New Clothes (Danish Keiserens nye Klæder, in: Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, third booklet). Cited after: Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Project Gutenberg eBook #1597; German: Andersens Märchen, trans. Pauline Klaiber, 2nd ed. 1909, Esslingen: Paul Neff Verlag.
• Confucius (c. 500 BCE). Confucian Analects. Trans. James Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 1 (Project Gutenberg eBook #4094). Cited after XIII, 3.
• Gandhi, M. K. (1927). An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Trans. Mahadev Desai. Ahmedabad: Navajivan (first English edition in two volumes: vol. I 1927, vol. II 1929; cited after the one-volume Navajivan edition, mkgandhi.org). Part IV, ch. 26.
• Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE). Fragments. In: Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Griechisch und Deutsch, vol. 1, 4th ed., Berlin 1922, pp. 77–102 (zeno.org). Fragments B30 and B116, translated from Diels’s German.
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). Der Kampf um die Wahrheit. Conversation with Jochen Kirchhoff. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff – In Memoriam [9FjbfGsDsBg]. Cited after timestamps 08:55–10:53, 49:35–50:07, 51:38–51:58, 54:20–54:45.
• Kirchhoff, G. (2024). Des Kaisers neue Kleider und die Krise des Wortes – SYMPOSIUM. YouTube: Gwendolin Kirchhoff [kaZA_mI4kDs]. Cited after timestamps 03:19–05:28, 14:36–22:30, 34:23–37:13.
• Kirchhoff, J. (2024). Der Kampf um die Wahrheit. Conversation with Gwendolin Kirchhoff. YouTube: Jochen Kirchhoff – In Memoriam [9FjbfGsDsBg]. Cited after timestamps 10:54, 28:34–29:30, 44:19–47:54, 49:24–49:35, 50:08–50:37, 51:35, 52:39–52:46, 55:35–55:53, 58:01–60:51.
• Nietzsche, F. (1888). Der Fall Wagner. Leipzig: Naumann.
• Plato (c. 375 BCE). Republic (Politeia). Cited after 514a–520a.
• Schiller, F. (1802). Kassandra. In: Gedichte (Projekt Gutenberg, ch. 62).
• Schopenhauer, A. (1819). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Cited after: Zürcher Ausgabe, Werke in zehn Bänden, vol. 1, Zürich 1977, Book Two, § 17 and § 18 (zeno.org); English renderings are translations of that text.