TABLE RONDE/ROUND TABLE

VENDREDI 16 JUIN 2017/FRIDAY THE 16TH OF JUNE 2017
BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE L'ACADÉMIE ROUMAINE DE CLUJ-NAPOCA/
LIBRARY OF THE ROMANIAN ACADEMY CLUJ-NAPOCA

LES SOURCES DU SAVOIR :
DE LA CULTURE DE L'ÉCRIT À LA CULTURE « POST-VÉRITÉ »

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THE SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE:
FROM WRITTEN CULTURE TO THE POST-TRUTH CULTURE

MODÉRATEURS/MODERATORS:

SORIN CRIȘAN, PHD

Library of the Romanian Academy Cluj-Napoca

VIRGIL CIOMOȘ, PHD

“Babeș-Bolyai” University

The Institute of History “George Barițiu” of Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca
Sorin Crișan: Before starting the dialogue itself and asking Professor Ciomoș to conduct this dialogue, just as only he is best suited, I would like to suggest a few points for you, because this round table turns in a way around the issue of the book, the issue of the library, the written word, the letter, and from this perspective I would like to start the discussion and our dialogue. As is well known, probably by all of us, the post-truth era, or otherwise called the post-factual era, relates, first of all, to a world in which there is a melange between the world of politics and today's mass-media, one that is more invasive, intrusive, and often inexplicably seductive. The arguments being bracketed by this assertion of post-truth, we end up with a language in which the emotion seems to supplant the verb. As we can see for example in the Oxford Dictionary, the post-truth era is the one that refers to circumstances in which objective facts have less influence in shaping public opinion, while emotions or personal opinions take the foreground. From this perspective, the question I would like to ask, the question that I think we should ask is whether this post-truth, this concept and this denomination is nothing more than a rest, or rather a consequence, of the post-human. Nowadays there are almost obsessive discussions about the *post*. We started with post-postmodernism, we talked about post-industrialization, about post-everything we want. There has even been a post-postmodernism. Nowadays, relatively recently, a widespread debate has taken place in all areas of culture, and not only, regarding the post-human. I recently attended a conference on post-human theater in Paris. Well, if we have this post-human, it is more an intuition, and it is a question I would like to ask you, if this post-truth is not a queue, a rest, a consequence or a plunge from the post-human towards the post-truth, because the post-truth era does stop somehow, if you want, this dispute between truth and non-truth. Well, when braces are put between truth and non-truth, then what remains? And, in the end, we are looking for new paths to define the condition that the statement itself assumes. Is it an empowerment of a sentence in which the predicate is excavated or barely visible in a footnote? The factual is missing, the proposition is emptied of the major act, truth and non-truth are given away, and then persists this pure emotion that the ideology and the media assimilate and process. What's behind it? What perspectives do we have with them? Let us not forget that within this issue we have the book, we have the written letter and the question about the meaning of this letter and how we can manage the book in this context of a truth that is not even dubitative, but is a truth that seems to be put in brackets. It is a decline of truth also as a consequence of the non-truth, both seeming to lose their purpose. From here, if you want, we could multiply the questions and I would like to ask Professor Ciomoș to take up the issue from where I really think it should be taken over and start our dialogue. Please, Professor!
**Virgil Ciomoș:** Thank you! I will not make an intervention but will resume the preamble our colleague proposed to us and insist on this confusion that the *post* or the *post-post* and so on prefix can create, in the context in which the importance of redefining our age, which from a historical point of view is called the contemporary era, to distinguish between different rather ideological and manipulative orientations than with reference to a deep and disinterested research, so to speak. So there are problems in all the disciplines that need to be discussed again, but I think all in relation with what has already been called post-human, post-modern, an era whose privilege seems to be just that we are all alive and we are contemporaries with ourselves, which, as many times as I said, was also the privilege of Aristotle, who was contemporaneous with Plato, and also Thomas with Albertus, and so on. So this is not an explanation, that the lived era is the contemporary one. I think that from everybody's point of view we may have to resume this issue, let us see what humanism meant for post-humanism, what meant truth versus post-truth, and I would try to bring some data that goes beyond social and human sciences only contextually because if there is a spirit of the age and there is a spirit of the contemporary age, we have to say that things have radically changed in science, also because they happened there for the first time, because science has followed a certain path, and here it may not hurt to remember the great change that a few people are talking about today, at the end of the nineteenth century, which was perhaps more important than the Renaissance, because the whole modern project began to stand under question, that is, mathematical problems have arisen in relation to the foundations of set theory for Cantor, which proposes some rather strange axioms among which the choice axiom, without which some formalizing modalities do not work, a choice which means that we must assume a totally inconsistent "set", but yet that can be conceived, in which no element has anything in common with another element, that is, a pure heterogeneity that we can conceive of, and which starting with Kant defines ourselves as human subjects, that is, those who can compare apples with pears, and who are neither apples nor pears. So what are we? If we were anything, we could only count ourselves.

**Sorin Crișan:** We are singularities.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Yes, singularities which can still exist together.

**Diana Covaci:** They complete each other.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** If they completed each other, then it means there is a whole, and then we should define it. So an indeterminate whole. This really questions the
social connection of such a society. What kind of society is the post-human society that no longer falls into the trap of ideologies and group criteria, because always when there will be groups there will also be alternative groups and therefore a dispute and to what extent here, once again, it is a matter of principle, if the individual reduced to sensations, affects is the same with the person. There are two different things. The individual has even a pejorative significance. Being an “individual” is not really a quality. Then comes the collapse of the whole cosmological system through the physics of relativity. There had already been infirmation of the infinite speed of light, so there are no infinities, there is no absolute space and time, so there are quite serious things that have happened. We then come to Gödel’s theorems of incompleteness, so they are generically called, which demonstrate that there is no coherent, comprehensive and decidable logical-deductive system. These things are not assumed by those who claim to practice a science applied to the social, the biological or the psychological. Although they should be mentioned because in general the scientific extraction of these orientations is rather prekantian, so it is a regression and we can determine this level as one of the prekantian sensual Scottish philosophy. And then we should be cutting off between these regressive phenomena, including cultural ones, and what is the promise of the contemporary epoch, a promise that must first be assumed, understood, and which has as a consequence a rather disturbing question: how many of us truly live in the virtue of this definition of what contemporary means? Because if we travel 30 kilometers from Cluj it is the Middle Ages or it’s debauchery or whatever else. So these are issues that are being raised, and then I think it is important to bring from the perspective of each discipline, of each practice, a vision, even from a certain angle, to complement the others. So I will already pass the word to those who have prepared a little for this, and I will support them and have a real dialogue.

**Cristian Bodea:** Without claiming that I have prepared ... the idea of a link between post-human and post-truth seems to me interesting and I could accept it, but not necessarily in the sense that post-truth would be a consequence. It would be one, but in the sense of response, resistance, to what the post-human would imply. Starting from the definition you mentioned and which I might even try to put in simpler words. The definition of post-truth in the Cambridge dictionary refers to a situation where people tend to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs rather than facts.

**Sorin Crișan:** Almost the same definition.

**Cristian Bodea:** Yes. It is a very similar definition. Why do I say it would be a reaction against the post-human? By this, somehow, the human subject
tries to assert its subjectivity. I think it would be a somewhat valid idea that I
am not able to develop now.

**Sorin Crișan:** A subjectivity that reconsiders its own objectivity or disregards it? Because here is the broad problem of the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity within the person.

**Cristian Bodea:** It does not disregard it. It is precisely those who react by virtue of this attitude in what constitutes post-truth who are not necessarily persons who do not acknowledge the facts and do not understand what the facts are, but what they say is something like this: despite the facts, I act like this. And this is especially true in politics, because post-truth is usually less tied to science, because there still remains the fundamental research, functioning according to the same old principles, and we still do not have post-truth researches. There are still students doing research like this ... but researchers generally do not. But this is seen in politics and we have the concrete situations, we have Trump winning ... and there it has been invoked many times. In fact, I believe that this issue has returned quite strong after the election campaign.

**Sorin Crișan:** The post-truth was in fashion at certain times. It was the beginning of the year 2000 ... 2002, 2004 and came back strongly to attention with Trump.

**Cristian Bodea:** Yes. In connection with a political situation, where people voted the same, despite the rational, cool arguments, despite the economic calculations, they reacted, in a sense, by asserting their subjectivity. And this was somehow the discourse, that is, the political discourse, which promised to give voice to the silent, to those left off. I would very much want to highlight some differences from a “superficial” research ... but not necessarily a post-truth one. Often the post-truth is confused, it is put in the same pot with what is called fake news. Technically, post-truth and fake news are totally different. For the post-truth we have seen what the definition would be, and yes, it goes related to the post-human, and somehow the discussion can be carried on at a higher level, it may even become philosophical. Instead, fake news or false news are news deliberately built to mislead.

**Sorin Crișan:** There we have the problem of non-truth and not of post-truth.

**Cristian Bodea:** Yes. News deliberately built in order to mislead. Here, right away, we should differentiate them from satire, because satire is the same. I could give you an example of a satire website. It's called *The Onion*, it makes
false news which are very convincing, and people often believe them and dis-
tribute them to Facebook ... they get indignant and so on.

Diana Covaci: Times New Roman.

Cristian Bodea: Exactly! Or Times New Roman in Romania. The intention of those who produce them is satire and not manipulation.

Sorin Crișan: Differences from satire are very subtle.

Cristian Bodea: And if we talk about the book, a good example of fake news that made history is the *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*. There, related to the idea of manipulation, it is known that the Russian secret police were involved, some serious stuff. Today, fake news is closer to the clickbait phenomenon. If in satire the aim is humor and a sort of self-irony, if in fake news the intent is rather brutal, for clickbait the intention is, to say, the primary one, and it has no relation to the truth. There is no political intent for this phenomenon, the only purpose being a purely commercial one operating on the basis of something specially designed to exploit the *curiosity gap*, exploiting the curiosity of those who look. Of course, it is a phenomenon that is related to the Internet, it is not related to the book at all, it would not be possible to write a clickbait book. Although some have quite some covers ...

Diana Covaci: Erich von Däniken still sells his books about extraterrestrials and is frequently taught in the Faculty of History...

Cristian Bodea: But I wonder if it would not go into the fake news category together *with The Protocols* ...

Diana Covaci: Possibly, but he still has supporters. And even among historians.

Cristian Bodea: In *clickbait*, coming back to it, there is a quite clear mechanism, because the purpose, I understand, is a purely commercial one. First of all it's a trap to click. Why? Because that click is converted into money, that is, in the rating for that website.

Diana Covaci: An it appeals to the basic emotions of the human being.

Cristian Bodea: Exact. It appeals to the curiosity of those who browse the net and at the same time exploits it. To get more you have to click. It's so built that you get the partial text and then, somehow, you automatically click.
**Diana Covaci:** Accompanied by a word: extraordinary, breaking news...

**Cristian Bodea:** This is also the idea of a trap, a trap for the one who looks. I just wanted somehow to bring up these differences, maybe we can ...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** You wish to continue? What are the historians doing...

**Diana Covaci:** Yes, historians are doing everything, we have come to concern ourselves a little with both sociology and psychology, because if we want to understand the way in which ...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** You become philosophers little by little ...

**Diana Covaci:** We slowly conquer everything. It was rather an intervention for completing what the colleague had said about how people choose their information sources when they build an informed opinion. And I had read a book once and the author made a study about the elections in the United States and the way people form and base their political opinions. Very thick book, many figures, many tables, but the basic conclusion was that the group, the society, the family, in principle, support your idea and reinforce it. When you are exposed to a contrary opinion you suffer from what is called cognitive dissonance. And the tendency of someone suffering from cognitive dissonance when the idea for which he lives or an idea he believes very hard as a part of his being is contradicted has been already studied. When the idea is criticized, there are two natural tendencies to solve that cognitive dissonance: either adopt the new point of view, and then become a hater of the old idea, or on the contrary completely reject the existence of the new idea and say it is not true, all of my people think so, all my data ... And here are the studies in Romania concerning Antena3 TV station: it has a *captive audience*.

**Sorin Crișan:** There cannot be only these two perspectives ...

**Diana Covaci:** No, there are also others, but these are the basic principles which they try to....

**Sorin Crișan:** I do not really believe in the dichotomous solutions. There is always a gray area.

**Cristian Bodea:** Yes, but it seems that the general public is increasingly adopting a “solution” of this kind.
**Diana Covaci:** There are a lot of grey tones. I agree totally. Just that the grey tones are not so many here.

**Virgil Ciomoş:** This from a psychoanalytic point of view, I am sorry to say, means a regression to the stage of autism. This is defined precisely through the absence of a gray area, that is why you can see the autistic people closing and opening a door, closing it and opening it up until the evening. Or make a gesture, back and forth, back and forth. It is to say a dual attitude because a third one cannot manifest itself. The issue is also to what extent there is a disjunction between what research and culture meant, the elite culture, the major culture of Western civilization, and its detachment from what meant the possibility of transmitting it to the voters, because that was a major issue, for example, for the nineteenth century Germany, which has not lived such a quiet Enlightenment because it was not a national state. The German Lights did not, therefore, penetrate to the farmer, the German peasant, as has happened largely in Italy and France, which in terms of the average level of culture are far better than Germany. This is known, everyone recognizes, including the French, that the Italians are the first, the real ones. What did that mean? That at some point, this rupture being produced, those who take it on their own are in danger of resuming, in fact, some stages consumed by what major culture means. That is why I reminded that subjectivity and affectivity are problems posed by the pre-Kantian Scottish sensualism. So what does subjectivity mean? Well, let's just take Husserl to see what it means. And also take Kant and Hegel. We get through the *Phenomenology of the Mind*, we get to Husserl, we arrive at the problem of intersubjectivity, to the problem of spiritual experience and then we see where these things are. Because it's not about new experiences. These are experiences that have long been lived by those who have made a certain journey and who have passed on some themes to the others. Because at the same time, of course, everyone has her/his subjectivity, but compared to, let's say 10 years or 20 years ago, the changes in the street are extraordinarily visible. I have not heard of car horns 10 years ago in Paris. When I told Andrei Pleşu that I was shocked, he said calmly that in Berlin it's the same situation. That is, everyone uses the horn, makes his own rule, is his own subjectivity. It's not sure that all this is anything more than a post-post-post to something that actually rewrites itself into a human history that if transmitted as it should at the level of school, of education...

**Sorin Crișan:** The big problem is that it is becoming more and more difficult to notice and grasp that something. We become a post-post-post to something unknown.
**Virgil Ciomoș:** Exactly! That is why I was saying, if we were to take the definition of contemporary time and what it meant. There is some research that Schelling has done, among others, in a famous book he has not finished and in which he says that in times of rupture, of passage from one society to another, there are certain moments of recapitulation. The savage man appears in the avant-garde, it appears in Rimbaud, not to mention Junger. There are times of destructuring before the restructuring, and I think that in the contemporary age it is no longer a matter of structure, when certain phenomena are a sort of reiteration of the history of humanity, as Schelling describes these moments of crisis. And this one sees: a revolution is coming, it is a moment of state of exception, the first forms of aggregation are those of the type: I know this person or that one. The first forms are simply gentilical: I know him, he is my relative or my friend. But beyond that, the director of the Library of the Romanian Academy talked about two major falls that occurred, the fall to the level of facts and the fall to the level of their interpretation. This is part of a very important chapter in the *Critique of Pure Reason* that speaks of how we can reach a third. We come to that precisely because we are raising questions about the *quid facti*, the facts and the *quid iuris*, the predicament, that is, their interpretation. And because there is this variation, this equivocal, *nota bene*, the transcendental deduction of the categories for Kant has a legal value, and he mentions that. So what is it? The incapacity of a judge to decide without having a declination of the facts between yes and no, and a declination of interpretations between defense and accusation. So this thing has been working for a long time, it does not work in all societies, it's true, and then Kant says, good, since we have a declination of an act between the facts that prosecutors bring and the interpretations that the lawyers come up with, what's left in the end? In whose name does the judge judge? And he says very clearly that the judge can only have a claim of legitimacy, he can never have full legitimacy, because legitimacy is not legality.

**Sorin Crișan:** But in the name of this claim he decides...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** He decides and to some extent at the same time it is somehow insinuated and at some point the condition of not sentencing to the death penalty is imposed. The idea of the appeal, the fact that any decision must have an appeal and the fact of abrogating the death penalty, because a juridical decision cannot be absolute. What does it mean, moreover, this modern epoch that has assumed the limits from within, and which cannot be reduced to Descartes and to the philosophy that gives the absolute truth and the absolute science. It also means kantian criticism. It means something else, that between what happened, that is what prosecutors show us, and what will happen, what the
lawyers show us, it may happen for an experience to occur in which a third instance manifests itself as such, not to fall into the temptation to be reduced to a fact or its interpretation. Contemporary literature begins with Proust and Joyce who are talking about this possibility. That is to say, a different type of experience will occur between the facts and their interpretations. Proust speaks of some fragments of time in which eternity manifests itself. That is, it means that we are contemporaries not because the prosecutors and lawyers are contemporary, but because there is a playing space between the two categories, where eternity as such could reveal itself. Proust writes about the real grandmother, not the one felt emotionally, not the one that binds the boots when one was a baby, but the eternal grandmother. So to be contemporary in this context means to be contemporary with this third instance.

**Sorin Crișan:** And this third, as I now translate it, is indifferent to space and time, it inevitably leads to an area that is probably more familiar to you and my colleagues, that of the unconscious.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Proust says that everything that will follow is a problem of the unconscious. And here I wanted to get to this problem. Many things, such as psychosis or creativity, the sublime, the sublimation Freud speaks about, could come from the unconscious. So when we talk about the post-truth age, everyone has the right to her/his own subjectivity, to her/his affections, everyone has the right, but some take the machine guns and shoot the others, doing justice without facts, without interpretation, without trial. So here's the problem, it's a sort of unraveling of the unconscious that can bring the worst or the best. And without taking this into consideration, the liberation, which means the release of desire, which in fact is a release of the unconscious, because desire always passes through language, runs the risk of bringing street violence from a large group of people, which for example, if you stop, you take the right by car and there is a crossing of pedestrians and you stop, the one behind you horns, because he wants to go forward. Drivers pass on the red light to the greatest freedom or pass other cars in suicidal circumstances. There are people between 30 and 35 years of age, who say none of their aquaintances or friends is not taking drugs, that they do not know anyone around them who does not do that. So from the unconscious could also appear the addiction, the violence or the passage to the act, the latter not being reflected at all because it does not go through interpretation. Here we could mention, returning to what the director says, the first moment of great rupture, there are some very interesting texts by Father Scrima about the transition from papyrus to codex, to the book. The papyrus that runs vertically, in other words, some writings go up and not down, and start from the right and not from
the left, these are some things which require some humility. The word comes from above and it unfolds, and when we want to recover it, we start from the bottom towards the top, resulting in a catabatic movement where we should have an anabatic one. After that comes the codex, which is horizontal, so it is a purely horizontal link, it goes from one page to another in its pure horizontality, ignoring this dimension of the source or of the origin.

**Sorin Crișan:** It is the same parallel we can make between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. One that develops horizontally, and orthodoxy is this vertical perspective.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** In Catholicism, however, there is the world of monks, and this is an international one. Catholics close the cross on the shoulder of the will, and the Orthodox on the shoulder of affection, so to speak, so there is some kind of interiority.

**Sorin Crișan:** The Orthodox climbs to heaven, for the Catholic God descends to the earth. This is the difference between the two.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** They are indeed historical accents. For Catholics there is the crucifixion, that is the fundamental picture, while for the Orthodox is Pentecost. A spiritual father is a father who has a spirit, so that he benefits from a spiritual transmission. We also find this in Catholicism, but it is only the accents that have been put, socially so to speak. That's how things stand and when we say subjectivity, we refer to which subjectivity? Now Horațiu can say, Cristian alike, there is a child's subjectivity, which although she/he cannot speak still responds to the mother's call. It's a subjectivity, but what do we do with it? There is a subjectivity of the moment the child starts to say no, no to doing this, no to doing that. Mothers are scared, but I'm glad, because that means narcissism is being built. It's the time the child discovers that her/his mother does not read her/his thoughts and begins to lie, and you have to be happy for this. So what do we do with all that? When we get to Kandinsky, to Malevitsch ... after a long period of time. So with subjectivity, we need to be more careful and see where to position it once again facing this human experience that has not been unfortunately disseminated, but which still belongs, let us say, to the best in world culture. Other interventions?

**Cristian Bodea:** Because you mentioned two ways to present the text ... I would try to bring to discussion a third one, namely the hypertext. Also, the relationship with the text mediated by the computer monitor. Quickly navigating on the web from one text to another, especially where textlinks make us we "get in" the text and suddenly enter into another text, and then in another
text, and then in another text, so that the author often does not matter, is
lost sight of. It results a text without author.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It is also done at the lectern. It's a circular desk and the sources are changing. This began with the Old and New Testament and the overcoming of Marcion's heresy which constituted the birth of the West, when it was decided that the Spirit reveals both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. And that's why you have correspondences: we read the New Testament and have the Old Testament correspondences and vice versa. It is already a hypertext. Here was a "political" revolution in the Arabs who chose a variant of the book, the Qur'an, a unique, purely "political" choice by a caliph who destroyed all the other variants and killed those who knew different oral variants. So here is the source of the difficulties we have with this kind of univocal political civilization that would not accept the institution of the process, as other civilizations, such as the Far Oriental, the Chinese, who formally accept the institution of the process ...

**Sorin Crișan:** And also the problem of a third party ...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** There is the judge who already has the party's decision, and there are countless cases where Chinese prosecutors bring evidence that is in disaccordance with the *pre-judgment*, and they are arrested. So that's what's happening in China.

**Horațiu Crișan:** Somehow always the truth has not belonged to politics, to the political domain, this already since Plato and, more recently, iterated in the theory of Hannah Arendt. She says there is no room for truth in politics. It is an area of power and violence, and truth has no place. And outside politics there are some seekers of truth, and she gives some examples: the philosopher is one of them, the scientist, the reporter in the sense of an investigative journalist, and the artist. They are out of the politics and can somehow reach the truth.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Civil society should be formed only by them.

**Horațiu Crișan:** The only place of truth and impartiality in the political, social-political field, let's say, is the judicial power. It needs to be protected by politics and political interference, which we have long seen, at least in our country, to be problematic ...

**Sorin Crișan:** It is created by the political...
**Horațiu Crișan:** It is somehow created, but it is somehow the only place of impartiality and the search for truth in the social-political domain. And we see how difficult it is to be protected, how difficult it is for a society to protect it from the interference of politics. We see it here, but we also see it in the United States. It is the last shield of democracy, the functioning of the judiciary as a separate power. The post-truth era is not really new, because Plato already condemns the political field as a domain of illusion, in which everybody can believe in what he wants and the only one able to lead, or the only possible solution to this dereliction within the political was the philosopher, was for the one who knows to lead, who must eventually be a politician or king, to overcome somehow the error, the confusion. Contemporary philosophy has raised this issue of epistemic rights, which concern my rights to have certain beliefs. And of course I do not have a right to have any conviction I want. But I must not, at least for some conviction, have evidence that would undermine that conviction. To have a certain belief, there must be no evidence to undermine belief. And this is the way to establish epistemic rights, which takes into account the fact that I have to have evidence for my beliefs.

**Cristian Bodea:** Then you have to have beliefs...

**Sorin Crișan:** It throws you inevitably into skepticism...

**Horațiu Crișan:** No, it's far from skepticism. In order to have grounded beliefs, at least this condition of the existence of relevant evidence must be met.

**Sorin Crișan:** I was always scared by those who had inalterable beliefs. Having this kind of beliefs is almost chirping for me.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It's the definition of psychosis for Lacan. Certainty is specific to the psychotic. Belief in something ... And there, he says, there are two formulas in French, le croire, I believe that - psychosis, and y croire, I believe in ... the truth, the good ... Now what does truth and good mean, I like to give this example: until after the Second World War, French women were not entitled to a bank account. Because they worked in the arms factories and had to be paid because their husbands were in the German camps.

**Cristian Bodea:** Is this a good or a truth?

**Virgil Ciomoș:** I can believe it, but I do not know what it means, because for example fifty years ago it was normal for a woman to have no bank account.
We can make progresses, but we can progress only by virtue of transcendental values, because if they do not exist, the differences between us do not make any sense. Differences among us are differences in the search interest on this way.

**Sorin Crișan:** And here's how all this problems, both of truth and of post-truth, of good and evil, inevitably brings about an ethical issue: to what extent does our sliding, plunging into an era of post-truth, of the post-factual, does it subscribe to an ethical conduct? To what extent does this ethics, as much as it exists, if it still exists, still preserves morality, with the difference that we have to make between these two concepts of morality and ethics.

**Codruța Cuceu:** Regarding this issue, I could intervene here. I have read, not long ago, an article about certain experiments that have been made about our beliefs and how we justify them as true or rational. In 2014, as I remember, such an experiment was made at an American university where a certain group of people was asked to express their views on the US intervention in Ukraine immediately after Crimea's annexation to Russia. What was very interesting in the experiment and the results was that among those participating in the experiment, those who did not even know the location of Ukraine on the world map were vehemently in support of the US intervention in the area. Moreover, the more confused they were in knowing the socio-political situation, the greater their eagerness in supporting the intervention. The experiment was only one of the many attempts to prove that weak information and a vague knowledge of a social, political, economic, religious, or other phenomenon increases the chances of the emergence of irrational beliefs or, more seriously, of fundamentalist positions.

**Mihaela Frunză:** That's why you do not necessarily need to go to America. It is enough to consult the collection of the opinion barometer from The Open Society Foundation. These questionnaires contain questions about the availability of the subjects to be neighbors with people of different ethnicity, for example with Hungarians or Roma. The more the respondents lived in areas where such people, Hungarian or Roma, did not live in their neighborhood, the stronger they disapproved the idea of having such neighbours. This happens especially in Oltenia, in Moldova, so in areas where such communities are rare. These prejudices rely heavily on ignorance. They were more reduced in Transylvania, where the probability of living in the neighbourhood of people of different ethnicity is much higher.

**Sorin Crișan:** As a proof of the fact that less knowledge means more details.
**Mihaela Frunză:** The devil is found in the details.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It's also the reverse. Those who do not have to do with other minorities, for example, but are raised in a culture of political correctness, are very favorable, and those who really live with the minorities are against. So this is France. It is typical. We can find in the whole eastern part of France extreme right wing convictions.

**Diana Covaci:** I think also in the United States, which explains Trump's tide.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It depends on what is in the head of man. If you put in Paris side by side a bourgeois from the seventeenth century with someone who puts the cutlet on grill...

**Mihaela Frunză:** But there is a difference between the ethnic minorities that are already established historically for a long time and the recent minorities coming from immigrants. I have referred to minorities that are already here.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** And I was saying that basically it must always be contextualized, because in principle you can find other situations where it is just the other way around.

**Sorin Crișan:** Reactions are often of intolerance, and it also occurs at the border between these multiple population categories. You talked about immigrants, immigrants, minorities. So recently I had a little emotional shock. The Hungarian community in Transylvania calls for minorities to make a sort of international forum for the protection of minorities in the European Union states in which they stipulate very clearly and precisely, with subject and predicate, that they are altogether and entirely different from immigrants. Do not put us in the same pot with them. Here is how, in their turn, there is a reaction of dissonance towards a minority of minorities.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** With Roma tribes is the same thing. We are not căldărari, gabori ...

**Sorin Crișan:** And not to forget. The surprise that was the biggest in the 90's, when in Cluj, I do not know if that foundation or organization still exists, then the term handicapped was still used, there was an organization of Hungarian handicapped persons. Let's not get confused somehow ...
**Virgil Ciomoș:** In 2000, the distribution of firefighter services according to Flames and Walloons in Brussels was discussed ...

**Diana Covaci:** The idea of delimiting the minority when a certain minority obtains a certain recognition is already considered as another formula for a majority. And this was demonstrated by how the majority of minority representatives in parliament voted for the initiative of the coalition for the traditional family, shadowing all the other minorities' attempts. Okay, they are also minorities, but differently. We are minorities, but we are different. And that works even in historical science, where it is demonstrated how different movements for national rights, movements not necessarily assumed in themselves, have collaborated with one another or not. Also the feminist movement, it took a long time until it gained support from the other sides.

**Sorin Crișan:** Let us not forget that in the eighteenth century, historians know this much better than me, Orthodox Romanians were much more fraternal to Russian Orthodox than to Greek-Catholics living opposite on the same street.

**Diana Covaci:** And these were intensely speculated and those strong movements took place when the Orthodox believers finding out that the country on paper passed to Greek Catholicism in integrum revolted at the instigation of some monks coming from Serbia, but with Russian support and they burned churches, killed priests, killed other people ...

**Sorin Crișan:** And viceversa.

**Diana Covaci:** And viceversa. And viceversa.

**Horațiu Crișan:** That's because they did not ground their beliefs on facts or epistemic reasons, that is, they believed what they were told and did not take into account this minimal condition, which refers to no other reasons or facts that contradicted those beliefs. And that is why we have the right to have beliefs, to have any beliefs, but this right is unfortunately limited.

**Cristian Bodea:** But not certitudes.

**Horațiu Crișan:** I did not mention certitudes, but only beliefs.

**Cristian Bodea:** Maybe we should consider the difference.
**Horațiu Crișan:** It is harder to get to certitudes.

**Codruța Cuceu:** There is, to my knowledge, both anthropological and psychological explanations of how people relate to truth and rationality. There is an entire anthropological bibliography meant to describe research conducted to elucidate the relationship between emotion/affection and rationality, just as there is a list of psychological experiments described together with their results. The work written by Dan Sperber with Hugo Mercier entitled "The Enigma of Reason" tries, for example, to show to what extent the ability to think rationally, as a trait that distinguishes human beings from other species, has developed as an effect of the need for cooperation. In other words, the capacity of rational thinking would have been the effect of the need to solve the problems of living in collaborative groups or, more specifically, to resolve the conflicts arising from the need to win the dominant position within the various controversies. In other words, reason would be a survival tool, adjusting some aggressive/violent forms of "primitive" interaction. The evolutionary task of (the development of) reason was to prevent the humanoids from being deceived or exposed to the intrigues of the other members of the group. Reason would have developed, according to some of the anthropological theories, as a result of previous stages on the scale of humanity's evolution, when some members of their groups risked their lives by hunting, as long as others remained sheltered and safe - a first form of exploitation if we were to translate today in political terms this type of "community" or at least group-wide experience. But what is valued today by striving for a modern intellectual/scientific perspective that tends to establish a perfect correspondence between rationality and reality/facticity seems to be still marginalized or at least obnubilated by/in the diversity of the current society. Here, on the contrary, it seems to triumph a kind of cunning "interactionism," which seems to be much closer to the initial structure of the web of human relationships in the early humanity. If we were to accept this hypothesis, this anthropological perspective, I do not think we were too wrong to say that post-truth is, almost paradoxically, closer to a form of primary, rudimentary, rough human experience. Thus, it remains to be discussed to what extent post-modernism with its absolute diversity generated by assuming the slogan "anything goes" was or not the main cause of the prevalence of post-truth.

**Sorin Crișan:** But what happens to these controversies, what happens to these certainties or, better said beliefs, in an era we call post-truth, where we have a dissolution, a very difficult possibility and capacity to put things in their places of origin, we have a very poor possibility of seeing the origin of things, in which everything seems to be suspended in a phrase, in a sentence from which the verb is missing, in which something happens, but everything happens in the
domain of emotional and affective states. This is the question of the post-truth and I wanted to go back to the issue of what happens to the book.

**Codruța Cuceu:** I would say that one of the possible solutions to this problem would be the recourse to scientificity, that is to say to the attempt of trying to “correct” somehow, through the intervention of rationality, through scientific evidence, let us say, these basic inclinations of individuals.

**Sorin Crișan:** Isn't precisely this excess of science and rationality and mathematics which brought us here?

**Iulia Grad:** The British researchers...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** But you see, once again, when we say rationality and scientificity, it does not mean Kantian rationality, it does not mean the science of quantum mechanics, of Gödel and so on, but a regression. Because if we take all this seriously, no one could say that he has a certainty, since Heisenberg, the Nobel Prize winner, establishes the principle of uncertainty, that is, it seems incredible to me ... So where are we situated in relation to the conquests of mature science, in fact maturity means we do not know what the reality of the thing in itself is, what Kant already said. Once again, we need to see to what extent this cumulative human experience has disseminated or not at the level of the voter, who manifests himself purely affectionately, emotionally, as you say, as long as the whole history of philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and others, demonstrates that there is no human evolution outside a collectivity, so intersubjectivity is the foundation of any subjectivity. And in the absence of which and of language as such, which is a form of intersubjectivity, there is no humanization. So the only alternative is dehumanization, not post-humanization. And when it comes to political space, the European Community is in a very special situation, when the states that have passed, as they passed, over minorities, over all sorts of other things that happened. When you go to Lourdes, and you go to the grotto and there says what the little Bernadette heard: Qué soï era immaculado cuncepcio. French language of the 19th century. But that's not French, it's clear that is not French. About 19 languages were spoken in the 19th century in France. France, like Germany, meant radio, the united state, possibly the war, which unified. It is a moment when the states, say, have come to terms with Westphalia, with what happened afterwards, in terms of some kind of European strategic stability, which ultimately led to the formation of a community, we had to experience several wars to come to this conclusion. And now we face an alternative: either we are going forward, by way of a sort of intermediary path - minority rights, regionalism, Europe's
regionalization and so on, but that is not the end, because the end is not to live in a community of minorities. The finality is what all modernity advocated, the human rights, that is, the rights of the person and not of the communities. A community like the Roma, where the woman is exploited, the child is exploited, and so on. So we cannot say that. What is happening now is that the only legal institution that takes the person as the foundation of the European Community is the European Court of Human Rights, which is being attacked from all sides. In most trials, this person won against the Romanian state, against the French state, against the German state. We go forward toward the idea of the person, or we regress to minorities and then to mere individuals who take the rifle and make their own justice. It's a turning point and as long as this range of human experience is not taken as such we will not know what Europe truly means.

**Sorin Crișan:** This distinction that you introduce here between person and individual inevitably brings to my memory Buber's text, in which he talked about the I and the you, about that relationship between me and the Other, in which I become a person only as far as I take into account the Other.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Etymologically, for phenomenology and psychoanalysis, *die Spaltung* means division, and the human person, the authentic human subject means a divided subject. In-dividual means undivided, it is clear as the light of the day. Undivided means unsculptured. That is, a block in which there is no hole for an inner forum or for making room for the other. That is, your act is purely transitive. It does not first consider whether the act could have an effect on the other because it could be redoubled. There is no such thing. A double coupling.

**Sorin Crișan:** And this possibility is assured only by the moment of the relationship, and when I speak of relationship I speak of an act, when I speak of an act I speak of a verb, that is, the predicate is preserved. What happens, however, in a time of post-truth in which this very possibility, if we go step by step, precisely this relationship seems to be annihilated?

**Virgil Ciomoș:** The predicate is maintained in order to preserve a space of play between the predicate and the subject. Because this playing space, this discussion space is the one in which the origin is inscribed, as well as the subject and the predicate. The origin of our discourse is the unconscious, because if we thought of the way we speak we could not speak at all. Speech comes to us and for some it's easier than for others. How easy it is for Andrei Pleșu to talk, for example, you can directly write what he speaks. The advance of
our discourse and our predication does not come from the fact that we add a predicate to the already existing one. The predicates come from the origin. A new predicate throws another light on the subject. When you say the rose is red, you see it red, when you say it smells, you see it as smelly. And the subject changes. Because in a way we can say that predicates are summed up in the subject or, on the contrary, the subject is under a predicate. Because we have the red color and we have roses, and we have ...

**Sorin Crișan:** In other words, as for Lacan, the subject is generated by the word.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** The subject is generated by a word we do not know what it is. Look in the dictionary, there is a word and it has a hundred meanings and it's not over yet.

**Sorin Crișan:** And then it is the first book that can bring us an answer? The first book, I refer to the book of books, to the Bible. Which says in the first sentence, at first there was the word. Or, to continue with what the author I just mentioned, Martin Buber, at first there is the word. That is to say, a word is made present, it brings in a continuous presence the verb. Action and verb, action and word are in a continuous present.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** That means we do not have two words. A pronounced word is identical to the act of creation. Because otherwise we take the Psalms of David where it says who is ... In this posture there are only psychotics. Schizophrenic patients say: I'm not saying this word because it might happen, it might become real. That is the advantage of divinity. When it says light, it is light, it does not make light and it does not predicate about light.

**Sorin Crișan:** Then the creator or artist is, in one way or another, a pseudo-psychotic.

**Diana Covaci:** A pseudo-god...

**Sorin Crișan:** At the creative level, at the level of art, of the work of art, the spoken word exists, the touch of color exists, the actor's gesture on the stage relates to a story, to something imaginary, it is because it really happens there.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It is said that there are psychotic crises, after which there is a come back, the applauses begin... So that's what I meant, if we were in such situations, we would be psychotic. Otherwise, unable to resist to this face to face
encounter, this is Lacan's theory, and also Lacan's practice, which is based on a
spiritual experience and all psychoanalysis is based on that. Being unable to receive
a word with ontological value, that is to say, to create reality by pronouncing it,
we run away from the word. We should say rose, when you say rose, you can make
a rose, you do not say it is red or yellow. But because we are not able to bear
the face to face relation to the unique, life-giving Word, so it is said, the Word
is pantocrator. Then we introduce a predicate, that is, we turn it into a subject and
start predicating. What is space? It has different meaning for Euclid, for Newton,
for Einstein, and we keep predicating. It's called escape, chain of signifiers. In
David this is said, God spoke once, and I heard twice. That's it. We have to
take on that and look for it through words. Not in the predicate. Not in the
position of a preacher. And the artist saves himself from psychosis because he
knows that what he has produced is not real. And he's making another paint-
ing and then another. Why? To keep the state, the state in-between. He should
not need money. The state itself is sufficient to create satisfaction.

**Cristian Bodea:** And then, in a way, perhaps the truth is somewhere among the
words.

**Sorin Crișan:** Because we were talking about the silence in-between the words,
we cannot find it with the post-truth ...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** If it was something authentic. A silent speech, not an idiot
silence ...

**Cristian Bodea:** Hence the reaction of the masses that come out “in-between”
words, and “in-between” arguments. In a way, the unconscious comes out, or
those who are rejected, they say they have something to say, which, yes, is
irrational, illogical, and despite all the arguments ... but they are also present
...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** They are present, but in the form of a symptom. They do not
get into the system, they're anti-system.

**Horațiu Crișan:** That's why skepticism is not even an inappropriate position
because the skeptic will have a distance from any “truth” or “post-truth”.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It's the only rational position. And also atheism. It's the only
rational position within reason. That means that theology should not exist.
Because there is no science of God. This is a pure illusion. There might be only
an experience. Only those who had the experience have a right to do theories, otherwise what are we talking about? We do art theory, but we are not artists. You do art theory if you are an artist. The latter has the artistic experience, the creative experience, then perhaps he can pass it on to the one who also had it, as Wittgenstein says. The other will not understand anything. So we share, in other words, what we eventually experienced together.

**Sorin Crișan:** And who can do philosophy?

**Virgil Ciomoș:** The practitioner, only the practitioner.

**Sorin Crișan:** The one who created a system?

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Less a system. The one who has found *something* in-between words.

**Diana Covaci:** But then maybe a closure will occur?

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It is the opposite, one arrives at an opening, because in-between the words is the opening, it's the free space.

**Diana Covaci:** I was thinking about closure in the sense that if only the one who has this experience, can then share and create based on it, what if he fails to communicate outside his own group? And then we ask ourselves why others are rejecting sciences and rational facts? A group closure. Only philosophers understand philosophy and then the others outside cannot understand it, only artists understand art...

**Virgil Ciomoș:** It is basically and this is known for a long time, it is a betrayal of them, it is simply their betrayal, which yielded in modernity to statistics. They said: we accept to be chosen by the others. Or if we put up for voting to the people the principles of relativistic mechanics, who will vote that space and time are contracting and expanding? No one will vote to such a thing.

**Mihaela Frunză:** What do we do then about interdisciplinarity? Because in the end a round table like this one is by definition interdisciplinary. We are not only philosophers here, we are philosophers and also other things. Each of us. This closure about which we are speaking can break in many ways.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** I'm talking about how we got to this point and it happened through treason. When the statistical criterion was accepted as the criterion
of choice, it was over. Then you either take care of the enlightenment of the
electorate and make it a zero priority, so that the one who votes makes an
informed choice, benefits from education and reaches the level of *mi-dire*,
that is to what is said in-between the words. Everyone has the right to say what
he finds in-between words, but he has to get there as a requirement. If you
put him in a preacher position, he will be a terrorist, a totalitarian. If he did not
get to that level. That means you have to help each voter to be a creator, to help
him be available for political, historical creativity ...

**Sorin Crișan:** Here I see things from the perspective of delivering to the crowd a well-preserved secret at one point. It is an initiatory step, even a prometheic step that the political man makes to open himself to the crowd. The political man, the philosopher who spreads knowledge, science and goes outside. He gives away, he reveals his little secret.

**Mihaela Frunză:** In political communication, the political man is the equivalent of a detergent, who is sold the same way detergent is sold. The story with the politicians-philosophers is from another century. Today, now, these politicians, such as Trump, have their image constructed in political advertising in the same way as detergents, so you should think about that, at some commodities that are sold to the electorate as commodities. That's all.

**Diana Covaci:** Then there should be more courses about how marketing is done.

**Mihaela Frunză:** We are all in the buyers stage as long as we are addressed as buyers and with the methods specific to sales. We are now discussing in vain scholarly things when we talk about real politics, about the way politicians are sold in advertising communication.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** There is no secret. The secret is that every person is capable of creativity. This must be supported in an educational system which should bring the citizen to maturity and information. If he does not get there, then he does not have the right, according to Plato or Aristotle, to participate in the public space because he has no internal space. If you do not have internal space, you can not go into the public space. In the public space, parties and professional organizations have no place, because it is only for those who have freed themselves. This is Paul's definition of the Christian. The one who has no distance from being married, rich or poor, happy or unhappy, is not really a Christian. So this is the definition of the first reduction of the aperceptive
ego, already to be found in Paul. In this way you become a citizen of Heavenly Jerusalem, and not of the earthly Jerusalem, where they all fight for a piece of land. This means deliverance by virtue of openness to what is the source of creativity, political or otherwise. If there is nothing in the public space except that everyone is fighting with the others and then everybody takes a vote, that's not really public space. It is a space of manipulation. The public space is the space of creativity. Someone says something, someone says something else and a new idea appears. Then it is public space, it is not until then. This event creates the public space.

**Sorin Crișan:** And that's why we do not have to take ourselves as voters from the perspective of victims, who are forced to digest a detergent, no matter if they disagree. It's a personal choice for everyone to decide.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** As you said, an ethical option.

**Mihaela Frunză:** The ethical option is present as long as we speak of people who have this reflexive dimension, or who are willing to spend time studying political campaigns. I was referring to the way politicians are perceived by people who do not have this reflexive dimension, or who do not have the time to analyze a political message.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** We know this is a tragedy and everything is at the imaginary level.

**Mihaela Frunză:** Just that they outnumber us.

**Iulia Grad:** The way in which advertising has evolved over the last period is very relevant to this post-truth discussion. Advertising has a very difficult relationship with the truth. If you look at the definition of post-truth that you mentioned at the beginning, regarding those circumstances in which the objective facts have less influence in forming public opinion than the appeal to personal emotions or convictions. These are the coordinates for advertising. And what is very interesting is that today advertising enters areas that are precisely the sphere of authentic experiences. Ethics, politics, spirituality. That's where it works very efficiently and acts on the principles of a post-truth culture.

**Cristian Bodea:** Do not study them because there is no question of truth in advertising.
**Iulia Grad:** It might not be the case. This question is raised in a way. For example, Ogilvy says it nicely, and that's actually the ideal situation in which advertising acts, that is, *tell the truth, but make it fascinating*.

**Cristian Bodea:** This quote is already publicity, a slogan and a non-truth.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Psychoanalytically speaking, that means, and you cannot contradict me, we live an era of perversion. I have to promote the detergent with capital D, das Auto with capital A, religion with capital R, all as a merchandise. That means perversion, the definition of the fetish. To be fascinating, that is seductive.

**Iulia Grad:** Exactly! Authenticity has become an imperative in advertising now. You have to be authentic, and I think especially about brand activism. In the sense that this is the requirement, especially in the context of social media development. The idea is what authenticity means in a post-modern era, and this is actually the question.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** Only the pervert can be authentic, because he is the only one who really reacts to stockings ...

**Codruța Cuceu:** Regarding the way we react to advertising and to the marketing campaigns for various products, I will make a small parenthesis - anecdotal but relevant, I think, for our discussion. In 2004 I saw a Czech film entitled *Ceský sen* or, in English, the *Czech Dream*. I think we've already talked with Cristi about this film, which had the structure of a documentary film meant to be presented as a bachelor thesis by two young Czech directors. It was a film that practically documented a research into the way in which advertising in Eastern Europe began to function - freshly separated from communism and its limits and problems. At the same time, the film wanted to be an experiment to take into account the new socio-economic structure of the Czech transition and to take the measure of the consumerism configuration in this space. What was the movie doing? It was practically built around an end-to-end documented advertising campaign with all its stages. What did the two directors do? They decided to launch through all accessible channels a very aggressive advertising campaign for a fictional hypermarket to open in Prague and to deconspire, through the film, not only the intention of the advertising campaign, but also all the mechanisms of deceit used in/for advertising. The film was a sort of attempt to deconstruct the advertising myths used in the first post-communist decade. Thus, it was made clear not only the advertising cam-
paign itself, which - very interesting and relevant - was built on an authentic slogan: “Do not come! Do not buy! Do not consume!”, because it was showed everywhere, but it was shot live also the reaction of potential buyers to the discovery of the farse, with the moment of staging the “official”, but fake opening of the fictional hypermarket.

Cristian Bodea: They were told the truth.

Codruța Cuceu: During the campaign they were told the truth, but the effect was perverse.

Cristian Bodea: In this case, the truth becomes a simulacrum, even when you say it.

Diana Covaci: It may also be the other way around. If you do not come and buy, then you do not consume.

Codruța Cuceu: And after a campaign of several months, quite aggressive, with countless billboards, with television spots, came the day announced to open the hypermarket. What happened was that during the first hours of that day, in the location announced and despite the “true” message sent by the ad campaign, there were several thousands people who came there not only to be part of the opening event, but also to participate in the “hunt” of discounts. The anticipation of their impatience and enthusiasm made it necessary to confine their space with protective fences, so that the crowd, also confined by the police, could only catch a glimpse, from a considerable distance, of the huge panel on which it was engraved the name of the shop, Ceský Sen, a panel that basical- ly replaced the facade and the whole building of the hypermarket. Behind the panel was just an open field. The film culminates in the apoteotic scene of the shop’s “opening”, the access of consumers to the enormous advertising panel, their anger when confronted with the evidence of the scam to which they themselves, somewhat involuntarily, took part. The scene was shocking by its very simplicity, by the proof of that reactivity/aggression that only translates the frustration of individuals confronted with the triviality of a mystification of the exceptionalness of a consumerist act. Of course, the story was subse- quently the subject of a wide public debate, including the Prime Minister’s office at that time. The debate was about the concept of authenticity in advertising, the idea of manipulating public opinion, reaching critical assessments of the limits of the capitalist system and its potentiality of perversity. It might be nec- essary to present this film in schools. I am convinced that there are universi- ties that have taken the documentary for educational purposes.
**Ionuț Isac:** I wanted to add something related to your example, namely that politicians are in close association with detergents because they systematically bleach their reputation. Not with Dero or Persil, but with more subtle detergents to which ordinary people do not have access to. Thinking a little bit more about the issue in question, I do not know if all this culture of post-truth, as some people perceive it and how we perceive it, does not rely largely on a great deal of ignorance. Ignorance in terms of words and what is beyond words. I have to give one example, twenty years have passed since the publication of the first electronic book in the Romanian academic culture, *L'univers ontologique de l'information*, written by Mihai Drăgănescu, member of the Romanian Academy. How many have read it, how many have understood it, how many know that this book has existed and exists? My impression and not only mine, as a result of research activity, involving not only conferences, sessions, but also publications, books, articles in magazines, projects, and so on, is that we are facing a tendency to a transition, ever stronger and more pronounced, and not only in our city or in our country, but also in wider areas, from the cognitive content of the scientific works, from the information received and processed, with lower or higher doses of creativity, according to the possibilities of each, to statistical indexing in databases, to global statistical evaluations, often with impressionistic-emotivist effects, especially when writing research reports and presenting them in public. I think that the impression is not only mine and I would say that in this way we are very effective in paving the way for a full and complete ignorance among us, both in the publications and in the natural communication among us as professionals, researchers, maybe even as people in everyday life. On the other hand, I believe that a very dangerous illusion at the level of the institutions, both academic and non-academic, is created and amplified, in the sense of the imagined healthy person who thinks things are going well, or in any case going normal, while the disease evolves unhindered. Maybe my position will make you wonder through its firmness, but it is, I assure you, motivated by a nearly thirty-year experience in research and education, in which I was fully aware of both the sweet and the bitter, both the certainty, as far as possible, and the uncertainty and relativity of everyday life in this field. I think it gives it a certain charm, I cannot contest it, but I would rather like to conclude, surely, and following what I do with my modest powers, that these areas of ignorance, often maintained, were better to diminish than augment and try, as Professor Ciomoș said, to create and further develop this inner availability, for our understanding and the understanding of others, for communication, in order to come back and restore, to bring back to its natural dimensions, the research, the book and the culture, and absolutely everything related to our existence as professionals and as humans. Perhaps in this way we may see less formalism and bureaucracy, perhaps more effectiveness and more pragmatism in the good sense
of the word, both in what we write and in what we do. It is a desideratum, maybe
I will see it realized in the fortunate case.

**Mihaela Frunză:** I agree with you totally, you are perfectly right, we live in a world obsessed with quantity, rather than quality, at least as far as the evaluation of publications and institutions is concerned. My only reserve for the total embrace of quality is that of the existence, in this publishing world, in the world of journals, of books, of what in the West is called predatory publishing, meaning the predatory publications, as a kind of sharks, publications made with the exclusive purpose of enriching those who own it. Journals which mimic impact factors, mimic all these objective, scientific criteria, and which publish everything, maculature, essays written by children in the seventh grade, absolutely everything. In this pseudo-science, post-truth is at home, here in this area. Because there are no criteria. Everything is published in these magazines.

**Sorin Crișan:** If we lend such a perspective, we also credit a pejorative note of the post-truth concept. Is it so, is it not so is a question that I cannot avoid to ask.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** I would like to return to what has been said. It is sometimes said that we start with the senses, we go to the imaginary and get to the intellect and eventually from there to the person who holds all three faculties, we are not only intellectuals, we are ultimately persons. At best, up to now it was about being stuck at imaginary level. Or the imaginary is dual, myself and my image. In other terms, I do not live, but my image does, you can give me a slap, but do not destroy my public image. That's sacred, I'm not that important. And what the director first said, regarding the importance of the third instance. We cannot get out of the imaginary without the third one. Meaning, without quality. Quantity yes, demultiplication yes, advertising yes, which is also a form of imaginary, but of something that must be authentic, because besides that we do not have an intermediary. In a dual, imaginary relationship, the most powerful always has the final victory. There is no other relationship. That means the political left and right, it always wins the most powerful. There is no country project, there is no... There is now a possibility of regression from this imaginary stage to what sensitivity is. I feel like this, I think this way, my heart tells me to do something. Which is even worse. That is why we can reach the level of the individual and the fact that it is subdivided, that is, undivided. At the mirror stage, you can at least be Narcissus, that is, believe that the one in the mirror is another, at least you are in love with another and not with yourself. Or again we get to the same problem. Not even the philosophical and human themes of intersubjectivity, in general, are enough. Because we still get to statistics. But the question of what could be
common for two persons, for two subjectivities, remains. If there is no language as a third instance, then there is no question of subjectivity, that means there are only two individuals. So always the third at this level must be sought for and imposed. Not me, not you, but a principle that surpasses us and is anonymous. We can say the person of all persons, why not. Without that, once again, we either regress at the imaginary level, me and you, which means power relations, or, worse, to atomism. Why this society only gathers for events that look good? A society should function spontaneously, authentically, when a problem appears, then we go out into the street, and we do not need approval. Approval by whom? You see, public space, this is less known and less understood, it is the space of change, the public square is the space of change. That's why the power in office always says circulate, circulate when people gather and stand in the public space. Because it's the place of circulation of the powers and of the laws ... We occupy the square in order to bring changes. And as long as change is not accepted, and that is the change of one part towards the other, or to the detriment of the other, and not by virtue of a third instance, there will be violence and we will not be able to escape it.

**Cristian Bodea:** Returning to the idea expressed several times, concerning violence, the answer, namely post-truth, is a somewhat violent response. Post-truth is a violent response of those who feel ignored.

**Mihaela Frunză:** I think that this dispute between the truth-seekers and the post-truth has deep roots and that one of its first forms was Socrates's process. Am I wrong? The sophists were the ones who were in a rather antagonistic relationship with the truth, they were kind of avant la lettre representatives of post-truth, because they could convince anyone of anything without having their own convictions. While Socrates was a seeker of truth and indeed, regarding himself, the end was very violent.

**Cristian Bodea:** An end assumed by Socrates.

**Mihaela Frunză:** Indeed assumed. The question now is whether we can still do the same thing today.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** To be the devil's advocate, it is important to make the difference between two meanings, the primary and the third, of what is to be a sofist. Because one of Plato's old-age dialogues is the Sophist. But he has nothing to do with the sophist, whom Mihaela mentioned, who can demonstrate everything. What should I advertise to you? That's exactly the kind of movement that, especially for adolescents and according to psychoanalysis, especially for
those teenagers and young people who have had problems with their father, called anarchism or anti-system movement. There is a basic, purely individualistic sense of what anarchism means, and there is also a spiritual sense of anarchism, meaning that nobody really has the ultimate ground, the latter being the abyss. That is, we are sitting on an abyss, the one who accepts that he is sitting on an abyss is the one who is in the right position, says Paul, and the one who thinks he is sitting on something firm, that one should expect to fall. So there is post-law anarchism and pre-law anarchism. The pre-law version is without a Law. Let it be clear! There are violent movements, there are movements that lead to assassinations. Which does not mean that something in it should not concern us. What to worry about? That beyond the system there is freedom, a possible freedom for creativity to which we must bring all young people. What you want is possible, but after you study. Not before. This is related to a certain Christian and Judeo-Christian tradition, in the rabbinical tradition we say we overcome the law by studying it, seeing how we can improve it, and in this space of change we could somehow release this man's ability to see himself in the other. Or to reach a principle that no longer needs the law, which has been formulated for almost two millennia. Love your enemy as yourself, because then you will not harm him. Augustine said *Love and do what you want!* In this sense we can be anarchists, but only if we love. There are contradictions which must always be deciphered, what is with this, what about the other, what is with the individual, maybe the individualistic movements actually appear in the absence of a personalization, a passage beyond the subject, say the structured subject to the one released by any structure, the one who can love. Because only love is unconditional, when you say I love you because ... it's already a problem, you are exposed to all catastrophes.

**Florența Lozinski:** We started from the written to the post-truth culture. I wonder if post-truth can be perceived as a social game, because it is technology-mediated. Speaking of a game, implicitly I think of the younger generation. Illustrative of the question is a discussion with my niece who was at a birthday party and who tells me they spoke all the time on the phone. Being at the same table they did not talk to each other, but only on the phone. They do not speak face to face, but the whole class was talking on the phone. Due to the fact that the discussion space becomes a virtual one, then the constructed world becomes a world of its each personal truth, without the intervention of anything from the outside. It's a world of impulse.

**Codruța Cuceu:** If the problem of technological mediation of truth was mentioned, I just wanted to add a few words about the relationship between tech-
nology and post-truth. I think in the sphere of technology may function at its best a kind of illusion concerning the depth of explanations. By this I define the illusion that we have about the easy use of technology, the feeling that we humans have, that we know much more than we know, in fact, about how the technology we are using works. In the technological field, unlike the political one, for progress to become possible, I believe that this illusion of knowledge, or more precisely, this illusion of the depth of mastering the detailed explanations of the functioning of technology is rather beneficial. Otherwise, if each inventor/creator of technology would try to restore the whole process of putting into operation a technological object, giving up, because of a zeal of knowledge, to rely on the expertise of others or questioning the expertise of its predecessors, technological development would stagnate, always reinventing the same technology or technological tools as those already in place. On the other hand, on the contrary, the field in which I believe that this illusion of (our) depths of understanding or knowledge must be overcome with necessity is the political domain. Here, as you have said, I think it is rather the place of spontaneity, of truth as a result of reflection and debate, of a posterior truth, rather than of a post-truth, a space of (public) criticism, change, the place in which may occur a changing event or a (political) act that generates new principles that could be established as the foundations of another type of society.

**Diana Covaci:** I think it has a connection with the way the brain works, the need for instant reply, for instant reward, for the immediate reward. Everything about social media goes a long way on the idea of instant reward, automatic reply, do not filter it, just answer. The moment you get used to it, you're starting to ask for the information in the same way, as fast and as schematized as possible. At the moment I attend some courses and I have colleagues from 19-20 to 26 years old. Those 19-20 years are staying nonstop on the phone. They cannot turn it off, be it playing, browsing or watching pictures. But even when I send them already processed information it is the same situation. When transmitting coherent information, processed in the form of a five-ten minutes video, their answer is that they do not have that much time.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** This is called hyperactivity. The inability to focus.

**Diana Covaci:** So ten minutes of a movie in which the essential information is communicated to you is already too much. And it may also be related to how the transmission of information through advertising has gradually built up the human mind.

**Iulia Grad:** 30 seconds of *attention span*.
**Virgil Ciomos:** Coming back to philosophy and to psychoanalysis, this happens when there is no transcendental instance for the child or the younger, that is, we have to deal only with artificial objects that have no mystery, even though they also have a mystery because we do not know their how they function. When a child does not dismantle an object to see what is beyond, that means there is nothing but appearances. It is an extraordinarily important thing to assume that our attention focuses not on what is apparent, but on the place the apparent comes from. This is what a child waits for, he waits for new appearances, in order to reveal something of what is beyond. If there is only attention to appearances, they change, and then he is always attentive to something else. That means hyperactivity. An undivided child, who is in the closeness of psychosis, does not have this ability to concentrate her/himself not on the appearance, because that's not the focus, but on what is not seen. Then she/he passes from one appearance to another, giving the appearance she/he is hyperactive. Ultimately, he has no depth at all.

**Codruța Cuceu:** This shift from one appearance to another is stimulated by technological development, just as the rapid shift from one information to another within today's social networks is stimulated. And with regard to children's attempts to disassemble the toys or devices they are in touch with, I remembered another psychological experiment that tried to describe and explain how people are used to using certain household appliances. In the experiment, a group of students from quite prestigious universities was provoked to explain/describe how various such everyday household appliances work. The results of that experiment showed that despite the daily use of these objects, very few of the participants in the experiment could explain how these objects function, they were not even able to describe the "interstices", so to speak of those objects. Of course, as a matter of urgency, being asked if they could answer some questions about the functioning of those household items, most have proven themselves to be very confident about the high level of their knowledge. The experiment has revealed the limits of their knowledge and, by extension, the boundaries of our knowledge of the everyday use of household appliances. That is why we could say that the expertise of others, of the designers of everyday objects, for example, seems to maintain the illusion of our knowledge. However, even if, to a certain extent, this "continuity" effect between our knowledge and the other people whose expertise we use without additional questioning seems to be crucial to our progress as a species, it can also be one of the main causes of the emergence of a real era of the manifestation and preeminence of post-truth.
**Virgil Ciomoș:** This was the end of communism, which was based on the industrial execution worker. The intellectual was a non-worker, and when the information revolution began, it was over. They realized they made a mistake by considering linguistics and mathematics as bourgeois sciences. They missed what the third revolution means, based on creativity and knowledge.

**Ionuț Isac:** It is very interesting and relevant what professor Ciomoș said by interpreting the situation of pupils and students who are relentlessly using their smartphones. Unfortunately, it is also a very familiar hypostasis for me, because my daughter is doing the same thing, with a lot of woe, like all her colleagues, both at home and at school and on the street. I told her, if you click too much, you will not see anywhere you go and fall into a pit, but unlike Tales, you may not see the stars or have no motivation that you looked at the stars and this way you fell into the pit. Indeed, your interpretation is very subtle and very accurate, because they are trying somehow, by multiplying their phenomenal appearances, the signals, to somehow try to decrypt something that is beyond them. The more they fail, the more they continue and practically deepen into the symptom, into their habit. Very interesting, a phrase came to my mind, a condensed principle if you want, from the post-Kantian philosophy, that said so, in order to give an interpretation of the Kantian system: *So Viel Schein, so viel Hindeutung auf Sein.* On how many appearances or presence there are, so many clues about essence. It is very interesting here that we are witnessing an empirical approach and, of course, absolutely ignorant of Kantian or post-Kantian philosophy, but centered on this practical aspect of multiplication, of phenomenalization, of the immanent, in an attempt even more condemned to the failure to accede to transcendence. If you want an irony, perhaps with a sarcastic tone, here is what the current technology can do with the Kantian system or with a great philosophical idea, passing through these vibrations or shakes of the personality of our teenagers or youngsters, themselves not even conscious of what awaits them.

**Virgil Ciomoș:** I would also like to add to what you said, a very important thing which belongs to the psychoanalytic clinic. That is, you should not imagine that the human being can function normally in this way. This is the great discovery of psychoanalysis that any reduction or refusal of what the other dimension means leads to a psychic affection. I only want to say here about the tons of anti-depressants that are consumed today in the world. Depression may conceal many other disorders, it can be minor-neurotic, but also major-psychotic, which relate to two different structures. The idea that we have the freedom and the right to do whatever we want is not, as we think, only an implicit option, but it has psychic effects. This is demonstrated by the clinicians and
by those working in the psychiatric hospitals. Not by chance certain things that mean that there is no transcendent instance above us, be it God or a principle, return under the form of a hallucination in psychiatric hospitals. There are psychotics who see God, who talk with him, who have found the key of the universe, who have certitudes. So this movement of post-truth from the psychiatric point of view is not irrelevant. And we can argue about the way in which all sorts of social symptoms such as crimes, crimes at a younger age, mass murders, and so on, come to Europe.

Sorin Crișan: Thank you all for your participation!

(Translated in english by Horațiu T. Crișan)