From filmmaker and author Werner Herzog, an exploration of art, philosophy, and history that unravels one of our most elusive and contested questions: What is truth—and how to find it in our 'post-truth' era?
Werner Herzog might be the perfect guide, although not the most reassuring one ... The reader who perseveres to his final pages is rewarded with the deflating conclusion 'The truth has no future' ... His croc in a cave made me think of Plato’s conundrum about shadows dancing on a cave wall, how hard they are to interpret, and whether we’ve made much progress at all in separating reality from illusion.
Pretty cool ... A hyperlinked hodgepodge of fixations, vivid memoir, and Wikipedia-esque snapshots ... With an all-consuming grandiosity befitting an Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo, he reckons with a world in which accepted truths are no longer sacrosanct ... Moments like this, told with an absurd, Germanic detachment and inscrutability, are a regular feature in Herzog’s writing ... Yet his prescriptions to save us from a potential post-truth world fall a bit flat.
The beauty is filthy and raw but in Herzog’s lens somehow all the more beautiful for that ... 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 ... 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.
