The Future of Truth
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of 2025 by Bloomberg
From legendary filmmaker and author Werner Herzog, a compact, effervescent, and deeply personal 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?
For over half a century, Werner Herzog has challenged, enriched, and expanded our understanding of the truth. His films and books have mixed fiction and nonfiction, documentary and drama, reality and imagination. Invariably, Herzog goes beyond the appearance of what is true in search of a higher truth, or what he has often referred to as the “ecstatic truth.” In The Future of Truth, a great artist ventures an answer to one of humanity’s deepest, most eternal questions. At a moment when deepfake AI videos are proliferating, and most people have simply thrown up their hands in despair at the ubiquity of what we now know as fake news—not to mention the constant lying and propagandizing from certain public figures—Herzog seeks a remedy. Mixing memoir, history, politics, poetry, science, and fierce opinion, he writes with dazzling originality and panache, urging readers to be unflagging and imaginative in the pursuit of truth, endless though the quest may be:
I don’t think truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving. A movement, an uncertain journey, a seeking full of futile endeavor. But it is this journey into the unknown, into a vast twilit forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose; it is what distinguishes us from the beasts in the fields.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The fine line between truth and fiction is further blurred in this scattershot rumination from film director Herzog (Conquest of the Useless). According to the author, beyond mere factual accuracy lies the deeper "ecstatic truth" of art and culture. Michelangelo's Pieta sculpture, for example, departs from reality by depicting a mature, mid-30s Jesus and a teenage Mary, but resonantly conveys the idea of a Man of Sorrows mourned by a virgin mother. Herzog also explains how his own documentaries employ nonfactual inventions to give them added weight (Lessons of Darkness, which captures the apocalyptic aftermath of the first Gulf War in Kuwait, attributes Herzog's own epigram to French thinker Blaise Pascal to lend it gravitas). On the other hand, Herzog is perturbed by AI's growing capacity to concoct convincing disinformation and urges readers to remain vigilant by taking such steps as critically consulting a wide variety of online sources, especially during moments of political unrest. Herzog's musings on these points amount to a familiar and somewhat fuzzy defense of poetic license, though fans will relish his evocative prose and riffs on instances of confusion between reality and fantasy (including UFO abduction stories, Potemkin villages, and a Japanese company that supplies clients with actors who impersonate their friends and family members). It's a mixed bag.
