Maurizio Ferraris

"In news programmes and political programmes, we have seen Nietzsche's principle of “there are no facts, only interpretations” reign supreme. A few years earlier, philosophers had proposed this as the path to emancipation, and in fact it presented itself as a justification for saying and doing whatever one wanted. Thus, the true meaning of Nietzsche's saying was revealed: “The strongest reason is always the best”. It is also for this reason, I believe, that claims of philosophical realism have come to the fore since the end of the last century."

"Ontology simply means: the world has its laws, and it enforces them. The mistake of the postmoderns was based on a simple confusion between ontology and epistemology, between what is and what we know about what is. It is clear that in order to know that water is H2O, I need language, schemata and categories. But water wets and fire burns whether I know it or not, regardless of languages and categories. At a certain point, there is something that resists us. This is what I call “unamendability”, the salient characteristic of the real. This may certainly be a limitation, but at the same time it provides us with the very foothold that allows us to distinguish dreams from reality and science from magic."

"Humanity must save itself, and certainly never ever can a God do so. We need knowledge, truth and reality. Not accepting them, as postmodern philosophy and political populism have done, means following the alternative, always possible, proposed by the Grand Inquisitor: following the path of miracles, mystery and authority."

"Postmodernism has found full political and social realisation. Recent years have taught us a bitter truth – namely, that the primacy of interpretations over facts, the overcoming of the myth of objectivity, has been achieved, but it has not had the emancipatory results prophesied by professors. [...] The real world has certainly become a fairy tale, or rather [...] it has become a “reality”, but the result has been media populism, a system in which (provided you have the power) you can claim to make people believe anything. In television news and talk shows, we have witnessed the reign of “There are no facts, only interpretations”, which – with what is unfortunately a fact and not an interpretation – has shown its true meaning: “The strongest argument is always the best”. (pp. 5-6)"

"The area in which scepticism and the abandonment of truth have shown their most aggressive face has been politics. Here, post-modern de-objectification has been, exemplarily, the philosophy of the Bush administration, which theorised that reality was simply the belief of “reality-based communities”, i.e. of naive people who do not know how the world works. We found the most concise expression of this practice in the response of a Bush adviser to journalist Ron Suskind."

"R. Susskind, “”Faith, certainty and the presidency of George W. Bush“”, “'nytimes.com”', 17 October 2004."

"We are now an empire, and when we act, we create our own reality. A reality that you observers study, and on which we then create other realities that you will study again." An arrogant absurdity, of course: but eight years earlier, the philosopher and sociologist Jean Baudrillard had argued that the Gulf War was nothing more than television fiction. (p. 23)"

"Instead of recognising reality and imagining another world to be realised in place of the first, [postmodernism] posits reality as a fairy tale and assumes that this is the only possible liberation: so that there is nothing to be realised, and after all, there is nothing to be imagined either: on the contrary, it is a matter of believing that reality is like a dream that cannot hurt and that satisfies. (p. 24)"

"Realism is the premise of criticism, while irrealism is characterised by acquiescence, the fairy tale told to children to help them fall asleep. (p. 30)"

"In constructionism, we observe [...] a strategy [...] that exalts the role of the professor in the construction of reality: its fundamental text is Foucault“s ”'The Order of Things, which states that man is constructed by the human sciences and could disappear with them. (pp. 43-44)"

"To assert that everything is socially constructed and that there are no facts, only interpretations, is not to deconstruct but, on the contrary, to formulate a thesis – all the more accommodating in reality the more critical it is in the imagination – that leaves everything as it was before. (p. 70)"

"Far from being fluid, modernity is the era in which words are stones, and in which the nightmare of “'verba manent”' is realised. (p. 78)"

"Just as in “there are no facts, only interpretations”, one can always turn the argument against weak thought by saying that if the explanation of the link between violence and truth is a truth, then weak thought is responsible for the very violence it condemns. (p. 91)"

"Even at a superficial level, the objections that weak thought raises to truth as violence are objections to violence, not to truth, and are therefore based on a misunderstanding. Omitting these circumstances leads us to situations with no way out: power is always right; or, conversely, counter-power is always wrong; and even, in a rather perverse form, counter-power and counter-knowledge – even if it belongs to a mafioso or a witch – are always right. (p. 91)"

"In its “prima facie” manifestation, the idea of truth as pure power is a very resigned, almost desperate statement: “the strongest argument is always the best”. But, in fact, there is reason to be more hopeful: reality itself, for example the fact that it is true that the wolf is upstream and the lamb is downstream, and therefore cannot muddy its water, is the basis for restoring justice. For, contrary to what many postmodernists believe, there are good reasons to believe, based above all on the teachings of history, that reality and truth have always been the protection of the weak against the bullying of the strong. If, on the other hand, a philosopher says that “so-called ‘truth’ is a question of power”, why is he a philosopher instead of a magician?"

"Hence the “impasse”: if knowledge is power, the instance that must produce emancipation, i.e. knowledge, is at the same time the instance that produces subordination and domination. And that is why, with yet another somersault, radical emancipation can only be achieved through non-knowledge, through a return to myth and fairy tales. Emancipation, thus, goes round in circles. For the sake of truth and reality, truth and reality are renounced: this is the meaning of the “crisis of the grand narratives” of the legitimisation of knowledge. (p. 101)"

"Living in certainty, for what we have said so far, is not living in truth. And precisely in the name of truth, we must observe that the promise of certainty [...] gives peace. But it is also true that peace, as Kafka said, is what one wishes for ashes. (p. 106)"

"By making mistakes we learn, or others learn. Saying goodbye to truth is not only a gift without return to ‘Power’, but above all the revocation of the only ‘chance’ of emancipation given to humanity, realism, against illusion and enchantment. (p. 112)"