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.
Unfortunately, The Future of Truth has little of interest to say about the future, and almost nothing intelligible to say about the nature of truth. More importantly, it’s not very much fun, at least not relative to the best of Herzog’s literary (let alone cinematic) works, which amuse and surprise even when their general mood is somber or disturbing ... The main lesson from the book, though, is that even great artists tend to fail spectacularly when they overstretch. To give Herzog his due, it must be added that he has taught us this lesson several times already.
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.
