ABSTRACT
Having spent much of my professional career in an attempt to understand and make the thought of Nietzsche and others available, what am I to do with the apparent arguments of post-modernists and even more with the claims to “alternate facts,” “post-truth,” the denial of climate warming and so forth? I approach this through a rereading of Thomas Kuhn and Ludwig Wittgenstein and seek to argue against a kind of Habermasian Einverstand and for the claim that we should not be first concerned with lies (which will always be a losing game) but with the quality of the person making an assertion (we used to call this his or her “soul”). Our problem is not knowledge but allowing oneself to be acknowledged by another, and in turn acknowledge him or her.
