Truth and the Roosting Place of Public Intellectuals

If Donald Trump were asked whether he knew Hannah Arendt, he would most likely dodge the question with a wisecrack like, “Was she good at golf?” In contrast, we know that Joe Biden—the U.S. President preceding Trump—was familiar with Arendt, as evidenced by a letter he wrote to her on May 28, 1975, while serving as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In that letter, Biden stated that Tom Wicker, who had published an article titled “The Lie and the Image” in The New York Times on May 25, 1975, had mentioned a paper Biden himself had presented at the Boston Bicentennial Forum. As a committee member, he expressed a strong desire to obtain a copy of Arendt’s article.

We do not know whether Arendt ever sent him the article, but we do know that she published it under the title “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address” in the June 1975 issue of The New York Review of Books. It was one of the last pieces she published before her death in November 1975. The same article was later included in the posthumously compiled volume Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn. Given Biden’s long-standing role in U.S. governance, and despite any liberal or globalist objections, we can presume that had he read Arendt’s piece, his reaction would likely have resembled Trump’s evasive quip. After all, Biden was a master at manufacturing political imagery—managing to sway even many in Türkiye, a trend that continues to this day.

The “bicentennial” in the title of Arendt’s article refers to the two-hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution. What makes the title particularly striking, however, is its direct allusion to Malcolm X’s remarks at a Nation of Islam gathering in 1963, in which he commented on President Kennedy’s assassination. At that meeting, Malcolm X accused Kennedy of having done nothing in response to the assassinations of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngô Dinh Nhu, and remarked that he “never expected the chickens to come home to roost so soon.” This metaphor of chickens returning home to roost is akin to the Arabic proverb used in Turkish in its original form: men dakka dukka.

Arendt’s aforementioned article is essentially a reiteration of her earlier essays, “Truth and Politics” and “Lying in Politics,” now accompanied by a pointed emphasis on how the very qualities that had once defined post-revolutionary America had long since been lost. Still, if we set aside the chronological order of these writings and instead group them according to the conceptual frameworks they employ: “Truth and Politics” addresses the relationship between politics and truth; “Lying in Politics” examines the relationship between politics and lies; and “Home to Roost” analyzes how the evolving nature of this relationship affects regimes at a foundational level—whether republican or not. The main actor in all these pieces is, as one would expect, the concept of the lie. However, what we encounter is not a singular notion of the lie, but one shaped respectively in relation to truth, politics, and regimes.

Arendt holds that the relationship between politics and truth is axiomatically antagonistic, and she encapsulates this view with a sweeping statement: “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.” (As a side note: in the Turkish translation of Arendt’s essay, the term “truthfulness” is rendered simply as doğruluk—a term that doesn’t fully capture the English nuance. In fact, the structure of the word, formed by adding the suffix “-fulness” to a noun, poses a translation challenge in Turkish. Take “mindfulness,” for example: while “mind” is commonly translated as zihin, “mindfulness” becomes farkındalık or düşünceli olma—losing the original root word in the process. Similarly, if “truth” is hakikat, then “truthfulness” ought to preserve its link to hakikat—possibly rendered as hakikatlilik, a term that doesn’t actually exist in Turkish. Turkish does have hakikatli, meaning “faithful,” which evokes friendship—a notion Arendt discusses in her essay on Lessing as a distinct political relation, born from renunciation of the world and requiring more profound dialogue than the revolutionary slogan of “brotherhood.” It is a form of political relation unlike either the public or private enemy posited by Carl Schmitt. Interestingly, Derrida—who was not a close reader of Arendt—does not highlight this elevation of “friendship” over “brotherhood” in Politics of Friendship or, to my knowledge, elsewhere. Moreover, Arendt opens “Truth and Politics” with an extended discussion on the sentiment “let truth prevail though the world may perish,” suggesting a deep, perhaps unsettling, devotion to truth—one that merits serious philosophical inquiry.)

If politics and truth are fundamentally at odds, then where should we seek truth, and where should we seek politics? Drawing upon the ancient Greeks, Arendt offers a classification: truth is the domain of the philosopher, while politics resides in the reality of the marketplace. When the philosopher descends into the agora—among the citizens (or more precisely, city-dwellers, since the term “citizens” is commonly used but should be corrected)—there is a significant risk that the philosopher’s truth may be reduced to mere opinion or belief. The philosopher may himself be a city-dweller (as in the case of Plato from Attica or Kant from Königsberg), but his truth is not suited to the structure of the public realm; for unlike the solitary space of philosophical contemplation, the public realm is based on action and dominated by views, beliefs, or judgments. “Philosophical truth pertains to the individual and is thus by its very nature apolitical,” and in the marketplace, it is not the philosopher’s truth but the city-dweller’s opinion that circulates as currency. What prevails in the agora are not philosophical truths but opinions, viewpoints, facts, judgments, negotiations, and interests.

In this dichotomy, expressed by Arendt through oppositions like vita contemplativa versus vita activa; “demagogy” and “rhetoric” as opposed to “dialogue” suited to philosophical truth; and the faculties of thinking, willing, and judging versus sensus communis (which at the time does not correspond to the concept of “society” or socius, and once it does from the 19th century onward, fundamentally alters the entire structure), there remains—at least in principle—a sense of reality inherent to the political realm. Especially with the rise of scientific knowledge and its increasing dominance as a determining force, Arendt (likely grounding this in the ancient Greek distinction and further conceptualized through something akin to the necessity/contingency duality in Leibniz) draws a line between rational truth and factual truth. She invokes Hobbes’s statement (roughly paraphrased) that even if an authority driven by madness were to burn all geometry books, the axiom regarding the interior angles of a triangle would remain intact—yet contingent facts could be manipulated. Arendt thus articulates her own distinctions for the political domain: “The truths most intimately connected with politics are factual truths; but the conflict between truth and politics first emerged and was clarified in the context of rational truth. The opposite of a rationally correct proposition is either error or ignorance, as in science, or illusion or opinion, as in philosophy. A deliberate falsehood—what we call a lie—can occur solely within the realm of factual statements.”

(As a side note: The belief that Euclidean axioms remain valid even if no one remembers or acknowledges them is a persistent obsession of Western thought, and continues to be so despite various ruptures. Arendt momentarily entertains the idea that this might be an obsession—particularly in her work The Life of the Mind—but then curiously undermines her own distinction between truth and fact by tying mathematical truth to the brain. Yet the belief that axioms would remain valid even if unknown not only reproduces a visible/invisible dichotomy—whose roots can be traced, via Merleau-Ponty, back to the beginnings of Greek philosophy, to Kant, and beyond—but also imposes a notion of necessity without a subject to uphold it. Traces of this conception of necessity can be found in Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude, particularly in his archi-fossil hypothesis, wherein contingency is explained through necessity. From this perspective, Arendt’s quotation that “Euclid is a genuine despot” or her citation of the notion that “not even God can prevent two plus two from equaling four,” suggest that the central issue lies not with necessity itself but with the attempt to appropriate the concept of the unknown—whether it appears under the guise of theism or atheism.)

What’s interesting is how Arendt introduces the concept of lying while trying to uphold both rational truth and factual truth (or if you prefer, reality) within their own oppositional domains. Deception—or even self-deception—inevitably enters the picture. Let’s reiterate: the opposite of truth is not a lie, but rather opinion or illusion; for rational truth, it is either error or ignorance. A lie, by contrast, is the outright denial of a fact. Since politics is based on factual reality, lies can be told only in politics—not in philosophy or science: “The hallmark of factual truth [truth; though in this case ‘correctness’ might be more appropriate—so, factual correctness] is that its opposite is neither error, nor illusion, nor opinion, none of which would harm personal truthfulness. Its opposite is intentional falsehood or deliberate lying.” Arendt’s essay “Truth and Politics” is fundamentally an exploration of this relationship.

The most compelling contribution of the essay is Arendt’s conceptual definition of a lie: a lie (unlike in Derrida’s view) is not something one utters without realizing it’s false; a lie is necessarily deliberate. However, Arendt also identifies another “option” that arises in the realm of factuality, and this option leads to a deeper inquiry into the nature of the modern lie. This consists of severing a factual proposition from its proper factual context. For example, consider the proposition: “Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914.” If one chooses to assert the opposite, it becomes a conscious attempt to rewrite or erase factual or historical records—an act of factual destruction that transforms a statement into an action. It is like someone who insists on the authenticity of a document merely by personal claim, in direct contradiction to all factual evidence. Moreover, such a claim cannot be dismissed as mere “opinion.” If it were to be called an opinion, it would resemble someone saying, “I don’t insist on the truth of a proposition about the Gospels; this is just my ‘opinion’ and I have a constitutional right to express it.” (In this sense, it would resemble a kind of puritanism. Arendt had previously noted that lying—initially viewed as a form of concealment in matters of church or state, based on the belief that not all truths should be told to everyone—became a public offense only with the emergence of Puritan ethics: “Lying was only considered a serious offense with the advent of Puritan morality.”)

The obliteration of a historical or recorded fact leads Arendt to a further question: what makes such destruction possible? If there is a public and political environment in which either historical or recorded context can be denied—and worse, such denial is presented as a legitimate “opinion” or an exercise of free thought—then we face a public and political problem. It is public because “factual truth is always relational—it exists in connection with others.” It is political because “without factual information, and when facts become matters of dispute, freedom of opinion turns into farce.” This is exactly why “factual truth informs political thinking, just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.” (A note in passing: in the Turkish translation of Arendt’s essay, “speculation” was translated as “fictional thought.” While not entirely inaccurate, we have retained “speculation” here to highlight Arendt’s view of philosophy as inherently speculative. As for the verb we translated as “inform,” it was rendered in Turkish as “to serve as an epistemic foundation” or “epistemic grounding.” The second is less acceptable, as Arendt uses “inform,” which does not imply any notion of foundation or grounding. In fact, Arendt is distinctly uninterested in foundationalist thinking.)

In short, the political sphere is founded upon factual realities. In a way, it is a continuation of the Greek polis’ marketplace. However, the marketplace is no longer what it once was—and more importantly, the relationship between factual reality and opinion is not antagonistic in the way truth and politics are. In this respect, Arendt—like Koyré—believes that truth is despotic. Yet she differs most significantly from Koyré in her belief that factual reality, too, has a domineering character: it demands acknowledgment and is closed to debate. “Factual truth, like all truths, insists on being recognized definitively and excludes debate.” However, this stands in contradiction to the very essence of the political realm, which concerns everyone. For “debate is the very essence of political life.” What, then, resolves this contradiction?

In On Revolution, Arendt argues that the American Revolution was successful because it was representative in nature—even though it was later bureaucratized and lost this feature—while the French Revolution failed from the very outset due to its voluntarist character (aligned with the notion of the “general will”). In doing so, she underscores the importance she places on representation. However, when establishing the antagonistic relationship between politics and truth, she is not as clear or assertive as she is when discussing revolutions or political beginnings. Through empathy—and through what she sees as a very political reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, especially the expansion of the faculty of judgment—she seems to drift toward a form of “enlarged mentality,” which closely resembles the very idea of a “general will” that she otherwise rejects. Political debate becomes genuinely political only when it is considered essential for the preservation of this “enlarged mentality.” Otherwise, freedom becomes exaggerated and degenerates into denial, propaganda, or manipulation. The reason Arendt wrote “Truth and Politics” was not only to respond to the controversy sparked by Eichmann in Jerusalem within its own context but also to understand the very transformation that politics was undergoing. The relationship between debate and fact either tends toward this “enlarged mentality” or toward “organized lying” and manipulation; the former opens up political space, while the latter distorts it.

So first, it is worth considering why Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked such intense reactions: In an “Epilogue” added to the end of the book, Arendt laments that even before the book was published, a process of “image production and opinion manipulation” had already begun—and that this proved more captivating than any discussion of the book’s core theses. The book, in fact, had a clear thesis: To what extent did the trial of Adolf Eichmann—who, during the Nazi regime, was responsible for transporting Jews to ghettos and concentration camps, and who, after fleeing to Argentina, was captured and brought to trial by the newly established State of Israel—fulfill the requirements of justice? Arendt based her book on the trial transcripts and their verification against factual reality, and she argued that everything with which the defendant had “no connection or by which he was not influenced” should be “excluded from the courtroom transcripts and, accordingly, from the trial report.” As a result, she painted a portrait that proved uncomfortable for multiple audiences: both for those who could not rest until someone proclaimed, “There’s an Eichmann inside all of us,” and for those who wanted to see in Eichmann a scapegoat that embodied everything from “original sin” to antisemitism and the essence of totalitarian regimes. Eichmann described himself as loyal to Kantian ethics, claimed he had merely followed the orders given to him, and asserted that he had acted in accordance with the laws that were valid at the time. In truth, he embodied the kind of evil to which an “ordinary” person might succumb. In Nazi Germany, this ordinariness was so widespread that “evil had lost the very trait that made people immediately recognize it as evil—its seductive allure.” In its place, a “plane tightly bound to facts” had taken over. That plane rendered Eichmann’s ordinariness into someone who “never even realized what he was doing.” He had lost the capacity for judgment. Of course, he was guilty—but he was too banal to be labeled a “monster.” Eichmann acted thoughtlessly, without being driven by anything in particular—perhaps with the exception of career ambition.

In addition to this assessment of Eichmann, Arendt’s account of how the Nazi regime became established—read alongside Eichmann’s life—and her claim that, through his “good” (!) relations with the Jewish Councils, Eichmann also participated in deciding which Jews would be deported, where, and how, likely provoked further criticism. She also offered assessments of how Jews behaved in Germany and in other territories under Nazi occupation, which likewise drew reactions. Furthermore, when she argued that Eichmann’s profound detachment from reality, combined with his lack of judgment and thought, “might have caused more destruction than all the demonic instincts supposedly embedded in human nature,” she introduced a different mode of explanation. Evil is ordinary—it may arise from someone who can innocently say, “But what did I do wrong?” Turning Eichmann into a symbol, and the trial into a pretext for more sensational matters, harms justice most of all.

Yet even before the book’s publication, Arendt faced backlash—including from people who openly admitted they hadn’t even read it—accusations that she hated herself, in other words, that she hated her own Jewishness. She regarded such reactions as manipulations by those with “clearly defined interests” and as the “worldly concerns of certain interest groups seeking to distort the facts.” She also stressed that the way Israel’s Prime Minister at the time, Ben-Gurion, managed the entire trial bore the same qualities, and that the trial had been turned into a near spectacle. Even the broadcasting of the prosecutor’s press conferences became part of “an American-made program sponsored by the Glickman Corporation,” interrupted every so often by real-estate commercials.

All this led Arendt to ask what happens to politics when image takes the place of truth and fact. This is where her observation emerges that, while classical lies conceal, modern lies destroy: “The result of replacing factual reality with lies completely and consistently is not that lies are now accepted as truth and truth defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we orient ourselves in the real world is being destroyed.” These are the mechanisms that render everyone ordinary. Thus, Truth and Politics reflects on how the production of images, usurping the place of representation, became dominant—and how this dominance led even the producers of lies to believe in them. Moreover, such fabrications, produced for the sake of image-making, are made for “domestic consumption”—whether for the American public, or (in the case of Eichmann) for all of Israel, diaspora Jews, and a world public opinion made uneasy by what had occurred. Unlike the classical lie, which was directed at an “enemy,” the modern lie is directed at one’s own people.

The consequences are graver still: such images and manipulations “may become a reality not only for everyone else but also for the image-makers themselves while they are still producing them.” This is the lie that Arendt calls self-deception, whereas Derrida argues that such lies require a logic other than the logic of the lie itself—a logic of fantasy, ideology, or symptom. One might say that Derrida seeks to shift Arendt’s logic elsewhere, overlooking the fact that for Arendt, image-making entails a conscious and deliberate act, with direct political consequences. For Arendt, this kind of lie is one that transforms facts that could otherwise be witnessed—and may deceive even those who tell it. This is “organized lying.”

Her essay Lying in Politics analyzes one particular lie. It presents a content analysis of the Pentagon Papers, obtained by The New York Times, on U.S. actions in Vietnam after 1945. The theses of Truth and Politics are in fact repeated here. But what the essay shows is how American policymakers drew on “extraordinary intellectual resources” in order to avoid admitting defeat in Vietnam and to sustain the image of “the most magnificent power in the world.” In these intellectual resources, there was no need for facts or truth—only for “theory”; all facts or data that contradicted that theory were rejected. Arendt calls this “defactualization”: “Defactualization and problem-solving were welcomed, because ignoring reality was intrinsic not only to politics but also to the very aims pursued.” Although Arendt did not embrace a sharp distinction like Koyré’s between totalitarian anthropology and liberal-democratic anthropology, she did suggest that while the lies of totalitarian regimes like the Nazi and Soviet systems were rooted in ideological manipulation, the lies of America, though lethal abroad, produced at home an “estrangement from reality” or “defactualization.” This, of course—though open to debate in terms of how far it applies to America—marks the end of republicanism.

Home to Roost revolves precisely around this last point and offers little that is new. Although Arendt held that, in the face of the loss of factual reality, there was a need for those brave enough to bear witness to facts and to remember them, she was not as brave as Malcolm X. In fact, the struggles of Black people or others like them in a “republic” such as America—as she herself calls it—entered Arendt’s intellectual purview only through abstract considerations. Of course, her concern was not merely living under lies; what disturbed her more was seeing the destruction of the founding principles in which she believed. Those principles were the principles of the founding moment, and anything not part of those principles (for example, Malcolm X) rarely appeared on her radar; and when it did, it was silenced or obscured—for instance, when she used one of his phrases without citing him. Yet she did not limit herself to U.S. foreign policy, a hallmark of public intellectuals; she also emphasized how this policy struck inward, how “the chickens came home to roost,” and how organized lies were employed both to appear magnificent abroad and at home. In doing so, she tried to show what the “roosting place” actually was. Her choice of the general expression “All the chickens come home to roost” was to evoke what earlier generations of imperialist politicians feared most—the boomerang effect, the unexpectedly destructive blowback against the perpetrator. Whether this ultimately amounted to self-deception is another matter; but there is no doubt that Arendt was more of a classical intellectual than a public one. Kant’s writings include aliens, tattooed natives of New Zealand, and American Indians who would prefer Paris’s restaurants over its civilized grandeur. But there is hardly any trace of Königsberg’s Russian occupation between 1758 and 1762, or of the Cossacks who roamed its streets at the time.

One more point must be added: this “roosting place” is like when Trump, first in Alaska and then at the White House with European leaders lined up before him, boasted of being a peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, while at the same time sending in the National Guard to clear Washington’s homeless from the streets, relocating them far away, and thereby trying to make the capital “safer and more beautiful than ever.”

However—as will be addressed in the next essay—despite all claims to the contrary, there is no direct link between the post-truth attributed to the Trump era and Arendt’s analyses of lying. The ease with which political representatives in Türkiye have recently begun to lie points instead to the necessity of examining post-truth itself.