Truth and Truthfulness by Bernard Williams

Author:Bernard Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2008-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

4. The Past and the Truth

Near the beginning of his own history, Thucydides also considers the question of Minos and his fleet. He briskly says, “Minos was the earliest among those of whom we know by hearsay . . . who ruled over most of what is now the Hellenic sea” (1.4). “Of whom we know by hearsay” (hôn akoêi ismen) is a Herodotean phrase, and Herodotus’s editors say that Thucydides is probably “by implication correcting Herodotus.” They add: “Herodotus for once is more truly critical than Thucydides.”27 But this misses the point. It may be that Thucydides should not have unqualifiedly asserted the existence of Minos’s sea power. But Herodotus did not assert it qualifiedly, or decline to assert it, either: as we have seen, he did not count it, for reasons which, in our perspective, are inherently unclear. Our perspective is already Thucydides’ perspective. For him, as for us, there is a fact of the matter whether some given years ago there were or were not ships controlling a certain area of sea, 28 and similarly that there was or was not a real person at that time corresponding to the Minos of whom the tales were told—someone possibly, though not necessarily, called “Minos.” If it is said that Minos was a legendary or mythical figure, then Thucydides will say that you may of course tell a story about him, but you cannot tell that story in just the way you assert what happened yesterday; the story is a myth or legend, and if you assert it in just that way—where it remains to be seen what “just that way” involves—you assert something untrue. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, understood this perfectly well, and unless someone earlier than either of them had the same thoughts, which is unlikely,29 we can say that in coming to understand it Thucydides invented historical time.

Historical time provides a rigid and determinate structure for the past. Of any two real events in the past, it must be the case either that one of them happened before the other or that they happened at the same time.30 This does not hold for the mythical, or, more generally, for the fictional or the imagined. Just as there is no answer to the question of how many children Lady Macbeth had (and yet it is not correct, either, to say that she is a Shakespearian character with a vicious temperament and an indeterminate number of children), so, of many events in myth or legend, there is nothing to be said about when they are supposed to have happened. For this reason, there is an intimate relation between historical time and the idea of historical truth. To say that a statement about an event is historically true is to imply that it is determinately located in the temporal structure; if it is not, historical time leaves it nowhere to go, except out of history altogether, into myth, or into mere error.

When someone—I think it was Thucydides—for the first time

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