Strange Fascination

The Future of Truth by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann. Penguin Press, 128 pages. 2025.

Francis Bacon begins his 1625 essay “Of Truth” with a reference to John, 18:38: “What is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” He doesn’t stay either because he already knows the answer, or knows there is no answer, or suspects that it doesn’t much matter either way. Bacon’s “jesting” makes Pilate’s query flippant, cynical, or both, and he then proceeds to autopsy the matter, tagging truth “the sovereign good of human nature.” Bacon’s conception is threefold: “The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it.” You inquire, you know, you enjoy—but the inquiry is everything.

What Bacon doesn’t spend any time on is whether or not a fact constitutes truth or truth constitutes a fact. You might say that facts are reserved for what we can measure and prove, while truth (or, if you insist, Truth) is reserved for the lofty abstractions we live with, or try to. You might say it, sure, but there will probably be an importunate chorus of dissenters waiting to shout you down. Maybe you’ve heard a nonsense vulgarism in polluted circulation recently, my truth, uttered by persons who aren’t full-on narcissists, only full-on relativists, which might be better but not by much. Across the literate eons so much ink has been spent perusing truth it could fill Loch Ness, regardless of whether or not your truth says that a plesiosaur splashes around inside it.

Enter filmmaker Werner Herzog, who, it happens, once participated in a film about that monster in the loch. One goes grasping for the serviceable adjective to precede filmmaker. Visionary, incomparable, intrepid, peerless, iconic, iconoclastic: each somehow fails to reach le mot juste. Perhaps the truth is that an adjective that nails the special essence of Herzog has yet to be invented. Shakespeare could do it if he weren’t tied up in an eternal agon with Harold Bloom. So the indescribable filmmaker has now shown up with a personal treatise on truth, The Future of Truth, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann, and unlike Bacon, Herzog is interested chiefly in the difference between fact and truth. And for this artist who knows the fertile primacy of imagination, the facts finish limping and bruised.

Herzog has no patience for what he derisively calls “accountant’s truth”: the concrete facts, the crunched numbers which reveal nothing but their own barren selves. (And point to an occupation more soul-killing than accountant—pharmacist maybe.) Herzog quests for a truth much grander, an “ecstatic truth” that mystics in the Middle Ages enjoyed after a hard day on the job chanting and fasting. And indeed, he everywhere in this book speaks of truth as we others speak of God:

I don’t think truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving. A movement, an uncertain journey, a seeking full of futile endeavor. But it is this journey into the unknown, into a vast twilit forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose.

I’d wager that Herzog’s assertion there has been breathed on by Gotthold Lessing, who in his Anti-Goeze of 1778 wrote of a person: “It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found.” The paragraph which hosts that sentence is an unimprovable description of Herzog the artist and will reward your looking it up.

Accountant’s truth and ecstatic truth: Herzog has been employing those phrases, and referring to those mystics, for a while now. In a 2007 essay on Herzog, Ian Buruma addressed Herzog’s mulish refusal to differentiate between his fiction films and his documentaries, and his well-known penchant for spicing his documentaries with fiction where and when he knows it will serve the narrative and character. (Bacon: “A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.”) Herzog, Buruma contends, “not only expresses no interest in literal truth; he despises it.” At an event at the New York Public Library that same year, Herzog said: “I’m after something much deeper, some sort of an ecstasy of truth, something where we step beyond ourselves, something that happens in religion sometimes, like medieval mystics.” And again, in his foreword to Herzog by Ebert (2017), he writes:

I was the one who postulated a form of cinema where facts did not necessarily constitute truth. Of course, no one can ignore facts—they have normative power—but in cinema we can experience a form of illumination, of “ecstatic” truth, that has been experienced by, among others, late medieval mystics.

The book’s opening sentence is a blast of modesty from an artist who has more than once been hit with the dart megalomaniac: “No one knows what it is, truth. Least of all the author.” This assertion about truth is not, of course, true, and one need only summon Blake, who in his marginalia of a book stubbornly wed to rationalism, has this to impart: “He who does not know Truth at sight is unworthy of Her Notice.” In his Keatsian way, Blake refers here to the pas de deux between beauty and truth, which doesn’t actually put him at odds with Herzog, whose grasp of the beautiful, even in the terrible, is fiercely evident in his films. “The question of truth,” he writes, “has accompanied me throughout my whole career,” though swap truth for beauty in that line and it would be equally accurate. The beauty is filthy and raw but in Herzog’s lens somehow all the more beautiful for that.

Although the very fabric of the question is philosophical and thus debatable, and although Herzog himself does his own idiosyncratic philosophizing here, he nevertheless insists: “I will not and cannot engage in the philosophical debate about truth.” That’s another assertion that isn’t true, or not entirely, since the book by virtue of its very existence has no choice but to engage in the debate, to be added to the swollen annals of thinking about truth. But in what then does he believe he is engaging if not the debate? “My thoughts,” he writes, “will reflect my own observations made in the course of practical work and, hence, if you will, my artist’s perspective on the world.” So then: the practical truth gleaned from his mud-and-blood struggles through the trenches of art. And no filmmaker, ever, has gotten dirtier or risked more than Herzog.

As for Herzog’s vociferous contempt for the literal and factual that so animate the accountant: “In all the attempts to grasp the quality of truth, one notion keeps recurring, that of factuality, as if what characterized truth was its way of sticking to fact, to reality.” The facts in themselves, he knows, “have no power, they are inert, they shed no light, they give us no deeper understanding.” Blake, who apotheosized imagination and sought the numinous behind appearances every bit as intensely as Herzog does, has something to say about this too: “God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!”

About his unsuccessful bid to be included on a Japanese expedition around the moon—and leave it to Herzog to want to be included on a Japanese expedition around the moon—he admits: “I am irked that to date only technical people have been allowed to go as astronauts. No poet was ever shot up into space.” Which will no doubt put you in mind of the row that went down in the early 1960s between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis, the “Two Cultures” debate, in which Snow groaned about the ever-widening breach between science and art and blamed British emphasis on literature, and Leavis replied with assaults on Snow’s literary merit and his penchant for being reductive.

What makes The Future of Truth hard to cubicle is that when you’re dealing with Herzog you’re dealing with an artist with boundless curiosity for the exigent, almost the curiosity of a child, and who nicely fits Susan Sontag’s definition of the polymath’s program: “to be interested in everything—and in nothing else.” In that way Herzog is correct when he says he’s not willing to enter into the philosophical debate about truth: he’s neither Kant nor Nietzsche and doesn’t want to be. He soon spends five pages ruthlessly dashing our huge hopes of colonizing Mars—a “delusion,” an “obscenity” that is “completely idiotic and unfeasible”—and takes a gentlemanly swipe at Elon while he’s at it: “The truth of the visionary Musk is a mosaic of half-truths.”

Then, in a short span, Herzog’s tentacled mind moves from the Robert Falcon Scott polar expedition of 1911 and 1912, to Princess Diana and Verdi’s opera La Forza del Destino, to the Battle of Kadesh in 1275 BC, to Emperors Nero and Constantine, to Elvis Presley and Mike Tyson, to the Crimean Peninsula and North Korea, to The Truman Show and Enron. As those examples show, and as his films prove again and again, and as the filming of his films proves, Herzog is, and always has been, a devotee of extremes, as if life, true life, were clarified and defined chiefly by the extremes it foists upon us. In a 1979 conversation with Herzog in Chicago, Roger Ebert suggested the same thing about extremity, and Herzog denied it as too simple a characterization. He preferred the terms pure and pressure before finally getting round to contradicting himself with the admission that it is only “under extreme conditions” that “people reveal their various natures to us.”

Herzog likens the revelation or intimation of truth to—what else?—the developing of photographic negatives. First he gives us the Greek term for truth, aletheia, “the revealed, the not-concealed, the thing brought to light.” What happens with a roll of film?

A light-sensitive layer is exposed, but that doesn’t make a picture, only a latent image. In the darkroom it is treated with chemicals, and then gradually a picture emerges. It exerts a strange fascination, the way an image takes shape in the bath of developer, how it darkens and acquires detail. Leave aside for now the question of whether it’s real or not. What I find so stirring is the process, the approximation, the emergence. The quest itself, bringing us nearer to the unrevealed truth, allows us to participate in something inherently unattainable, which is truth.

He knows he must ask the pertinent question: “Is there such a thing in human nature as readiness to accept lies?” (Bacon answered five centuries ago when he charged humankind with having “a natural though corrupt love of the lie itself.”) If you are fluent in Herzog’s films, books, and interviews, you might suspect that even on a spring stroll in the park he would detect death’s sovereignty, and here he traces humankind’s love of the lie to our insurmountable fear of the final defeat:

Knowledge of our mortality has caused us to devise various consolations to take away our fear of what happens after. We comfort ourselves with a prospect of everlasting life in paradise. A willingness to deceive ourselves seems to be an essential part of our makeup. The unending darkness of the time before we were born doesn’t interest us that much, but we are haunted by the darkness after our death.

That’s not too distant from Freud, though Herzogians know that he has always had an abiding disgust for Freudian hocus-pocus and the industry that sprouted from it. In his chapter on alien abduction, Herzog first acknowledges that even though claims of abduction might sound fantastical, that doesn’t always mean the beamed-up burgher is lying. And then: “All this belongs in the world of illusion, of pathology, of psychology, which is loathsome to me. Subjecting . . . everything to psychological interpretation only serves to light up obscure corners of our psyches which were better left dark.” He likens it to a house overly illuminated: “The house becomes uninhabitable.” Again he turns to the preeminence of poetry and the imagination:

All my life, my work has been involved with the central issue of truth. I have always vigorously opposed the foolish belief that equates truth with facts. . . . I have always insisted that you need stylization, invention, poetry, and imagination to locate a deeper layer of truth, one that can access a distant echo of something that can illuminate us, far beyond the reach of fact.

You can hear in that “a distant echo” of Hannah Arendt, from her essay “Lying in Politics,” included in her 1972 book, Crises of the Republic, in which she writes: “Factual truths are never compellingly true.” Herzog himself marshals a line by André Gide: “I alter the facts so that they resemble truth more than reality.”

Anyone now ruminating upon the essentials of truth will have to consider a different alteration of facts and reality from what Gide means, will have to crash forehead-first into the unbreakable wall of AI. “We are going to experience a reinterpretation of our role in reality, and of the understanding of this reality,” Herzog writes, though the verb tense is wrong: not we are going to but we are—right now.

So what is to be done? Are we really living in a post-truth era? How can we learn to tell fake news from the real thing? . . . We are absolutely in a position to identify lies. The internet is both a trap and a resource, it just depends on how we use it. We need to reinvigorate critical thinking.

There is a disconnect there, nearly a non sequitur. Herzog can’t possibly believe that the web in any way has the capacity to reinvigorate critical thinking when the demolition of critical thinking is what the web does best. And he fails to add that, when it comes to fakery on the web, a goodly portion of the populace wants just that: they want their dispositions and prejudices confirmed not reformed. His wise suggestion for arming ourselves against such rampant and pernicious inauthenticity, for those who know better and want to, is that when it comes to the web, the entire web, we must “assume guilt, be suspicious, expect manipulation, propaganda, lies.” And there’s something else he adds, something bibliophiles will loudly applaud:

So what is to be done? Are we really living in a post-truth era? How can we learn to tell fake news from the real thing? . . . We are absolutely in a position to identify lies. The internet is both a trap and a resource, it just depends on how we use it. We need to reinvigorate critical thinking.

In case it’s not glaringly obvious, I’ll add that Herzog’s insistence on the centrality of books for a director’s greatness does not apply only to directors: there is no art that can’t be enhanced by quality reading, and you don’t have to be a bibliophile to digest the good sense of that. The only way to boost and ensure critical thinking, to hardwire the brain to detect complexities and subtleties in the micro and macro, and to distinguish between what is valid and what is crap, is by a devotion to great books. The scurvy toughs in autocracies know this better than anyone: intellectuals and artists are among the first they lock up or liquidate, and nothing makes them merrier than a good bonfire in the town square.

But the outlook is bleak and getting bleaker:

Of course, no one listens when you say it: Read. . . . People have been turning away from books for decades, and today, even in classes on ancient Greek literature, you find that hardly any of those present reads, and only a minority can frame a simple thought in a couple of sentences.

Herzog doesn’t cite any data for that assertion, but does anyone doubt its accuracy? Ask any high school or college writing teacher how dire things are, and prepare to be demoralized. Prepare to fear the future—the future that has already arrived.

The “g” word is now tossed about so blithely it has become a sibling to the blurbist’s go-to cliché: brilliant. If there is any living artist who overwhelmingly deserves to be dubbed a genius, that living artist is Werner Herzog, and The Future of Truth is yet more proof. The title of his final chapter is the title of the book, and it’s two sentences long: “Truth has no future, but truth has no past either. But we will not, must not, cannot, give up the search for it.” The recognition of truth has never been optional, even when it was not entirely possible. But in this menacing decade, when sinister politicos can straight-facedly babble about “alternative facts” and “truthful hyperbole,” the issue has assumed a fresher urgency. In the final quarter of his “Satire III,” John Donne gives us this:

 On a huge hill,

Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will

Reach her, about must and about must go;

And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.

Donne, being Donne, intends here a vision of the religious seeker’s roundabout hardship in attaining the spiritual verity required for the soul to rise and commune with God—to be steadfast and dauntless is your only hope of having it. But you need not be questing for religious truth to understand that the quest for other truths can be just as trying. The tagline for The X-Files was “The truth is out there.” But sometimes? Sometimes it’s closer. Sometimes the truth is in here. All you need to do is pay attention.