The pursuit of truth, says Felipe Fernández-Armesto, is "the quest for language that can match reality." He believes that the nature of that quest has never quite been fully understood; Truth aims to fill the void. He identifies four key methods of determining the truth--what we feel, what we are told, what we figure out, and what we observe--which are given poetic names such as "the hairy ball--teeth optional" and "the cage of wild birds." These four methods always exist together in every culture, although each one may be differently valued in different places at different times.

But Western philosophy after Descartes, in Fernández-Armesto's assessment, has been largely hostile to these ways of knowledge, and has steadily come to question the very existence of truth. His summation of post-Cartesian philosophy is a largely negative one, which veers dangerously close to ad hominem assaults. Nietzsche, for example, who "was praised too much in his youth for his superior powers of mind and never achieved prowess or position to match," is dismissed as "a sexually inexperienced invalid" whose philosophy was "warped and mangled out of his own lonely, sickly self-hatred." Pragmatism and existentialism, two of the 20th century's most important philosophical movements, are found inadequate; the former is "the philosophy of lovers of technology," while the latter "represents the retreat of Luddites and pessimists into the security of self-contemplation." But even though "philosophical subjectivisms, scientific uncertainties, and dumbing, numbing linguistics" have served to undermine the notion of truth, Fernández-Armesto believes, they cannot destroy it thoroughly. It seems that even in the face of relativism, truth will win out.


Excerpts from 'The Conundrum of the Secret City'

Luckily, perhaps, I can recall almost nothing I learnt in the classroom when I was eight years old; but I remember the playground riddles. Most were silly. Why do elephants paint their toenails red? So that they can hide in cherry trees without being seen. What is the difference between a jeweller and a gaoler? One sells watches, the other watches cells. Occasionally, jokes drew on the tradition of logical puzzle and paradox. I remember an enthralling discussion, fierce and friendly, competitive and companionable, with boys I later lost track of. Their images are trapped in the web of memory, no longer separable from the substance of our talk, or from its dim surroundings in a schoolroom in winter, rimed with chill and chalk-dust.

One boy, who was tall and bony, with the thin, faded hair of premature middle age, could not find the answer and so affected disdain. He wanted to be a missionary and became an archaeologist. Another, who was fat and aggressive, pretended to have solved the problem and to be unwilling to share his findings. I never knew what became of him. The riddle was unravelled by the class swot - a short, slight boy with curly hair and dusty spectacles, whom I last saw when we were fellow-undergraduates and his old cleverness seemed to have vanished. For years the riddle lingered in my mind as a way of remembering the boys who surrounded it. Now it is taking on a life of its own as a cryptic clue to the problem before me: how to write the history of truth.

The subject of the riddle - which is traditional in many similar versions - was an explorer on his way to the secret city of Njug. As he struggled through jungles inhabited by two intermingled tribes - one of whom always lied, while the other always told the truth - he came to a fork in the road. There a native squatted. The explorer was minded to ask his advice but, as the locals all dressed identically, could not tell to which tribe he belonged. In a necessary refinement of the riddle, the tribes shared a further custom: they ate anyone who asked more than one question. How could the explorer formulate an enquiry so as to elicit a useful answer?

This riddle of the secret city exudes an odour of antiquity. The notion of a tribe of liars derives from one of the world's most venerable paradoxes, known to philosophers as the liar paradox. It was quoted by Callimachus - the self-tortured gay poet of Ptolemaic Alexandria's sybaritic court. In the opinion of a Cretan of the sixth century BC, he recalled, `all Cretans are liars'. But how could it be true without inviting disbelief or false without self-confirmation? Nearly three hundred years later the same allusion was made in one of St Paul's pointed jokes: `It was one of themselves, one of their own prophets, who said, "Cretans were never anything but liars" ... And that is a true statement. So be severe in correcting them.' Evidently, the Cretans' lies could not be relied on, even for falsehood, but on the road to Njug the liars lied without exception.

One possible answer the explorer might have tried to elicit from a liar was, `If you were to ask me which is the way to Njug, I should say it was to the left.' The answer would be false, but it would point the explorer in the right direction, for the truth-teller's answer would be the same. Like the rest of us, when we risk decisions or grapple with doubt, the explorer could then proceed on his way, still unable to tell whether he had heard a truth or a falsehood but equipped with the practical information he needed. The human condition is like that. The nature of truth eludes us; we have no satisfactory definition at our disposal, no agreed or reliable truth-recognition technique; but we have some working assumptions about the reliability of our feelings, our senses, our powers of reason or the authority of our sources of counsel or of inspiration.

The Njug story involves other mythic features: an encounter with a sphinx-like creature, on a journey in search of enlightenment, through a world of contrasting but interpenetrated moieties. It summons up one of the starting points of the subject of this book: the quest for techniques for telling truth from falsehood. And it raises one of the preoccupations of modern western philosophy: the relationship of the truth of any formulation to the conditions specified or implied within it. The conundrum of the secret city, moreover, took the explorer where I want to take the reader: to an encounter with a tribesman squatting - lying, perhaps - in a road forked like a false tongue.

Journeyers call themselves explorers when they think they belong to a higher culture than that of the people among whom they are travelling. Yet they are dependent, like the searcher in the story, on local lore to guide them. In investigating the unrecorded past - in seeking, for instance, an inkling of people's earliest thoughts about truth - we have to look for our guides among peoples of slowly changing cultures who resemble their remotest ancestors. Historians who would like to start among documents in libraries and archives, or philosophers who might prefer a quiet club chair, have to be persuaded to join ethnographers on a walk in the woods. A history of truth must begin in the world of `primitives' and will often have to return there; readers kind enough to persist with this book will make that return trip, because I hope to show that all primitive methods of truth-recognition abide throughout history and that techniques of all the kinds practised today are of very ancient origin, though some have prevailed over others at different times. The purpose of this chapter is to present people's earliest thinking about truth, in periods dominated by the most primitive known descriptions of the world. Truth was then detected chiefly, as I shall argue, by feelings, though other means, dominant at later periods, such as reason, sense-perception and authoritative exposition, were also known and practised.

Can one trace the semantics of the feminist movement through dance history? Yes, if one were to believe Sally Banes. Fairy godmothers, witches, tyrannical witches, avenging spirits - are all given a new hue through an analytical interpretation of the various women's images - both positive and negative - as they existed then and as it continues to do even today. We have come across these women in all the stories that have been enacted through ballet/dance on stage, but not often tried to look beyond the tale as reflective of the spirit of our times.

Exploring the colours of class, status and role of women in society as reflected on stage, Banes re-weaves an interpretative analysis through La Sylphide, Giselle and Coppelia. While La Sylphide tries to work out the choice a woman should make in terms of marriage, Giselle explores a "gendered narrative of doomed love across class lines."

As Banes writes: The large numbers of single women, both working class and middle class, who were beginning to cause a number of social anxieties, including those about prostitution, but also about population decline. Feminist historian Clairse Goldberg Moses points out that the spinster brought shame on the bourgeois family, that there were extremely limited professional options available to her (partly because she was usually inadequately educated), and that these few opportunities were so competitive and poorly paid they often brought her to the edge of poverty,. According to the historian Adeline Daumard, "The old maid was a burden, useless and disdained. In truth, the older spinster woman, almost always with very limited resources, lived so completely on the edge of society that she hardly even belonged to the bourgeoisie." For the working class woman, who was even less likely to marry, there were fewer options: back-breaking factory work, domestic service, work convents, and prostitution. Even going to prison was a way for these women to get food and shelter.

Giselle also pints a finger through 'Wilis' - "who spirit away girls who love dancing... that threatening mob of spiteful women..." to the large numbers of single women. Banes continues: Anxieties about marriage and about women's sexuality were widespread in France in the 1830s and 40s. the utopian feminist movement that emerged in the 1830s, in particular the Saint-Simonians, called for sexual equality and love outside of the marriage institution, which - despite the rhetoric of bourgeois domesticity - was often simply an economic arrangement between families and which, although seen as woman's only natural fate, deprived her of all legal rights. Feminists advocated civil rights for women and called for the reform of marriage laws, including divorce. Giselle assuages those anxieties. Its heroine deserts the ranks of angry celibates in order to become a protective caregiving figure, and her soul is saved by the consummation that takes place on her other-worldly wedding night. But still, she is dead; female self-sacrifice makes male survival possible. (However, it should be noted here that to many contemporary spectators, death ends existence, but to a large proportion of nineteenth-century viewers, of course, death was a doorway - albeit hedged about with dangers - to a greater spiritual life.) Evan Alderson observes, "the erotic is given and yet simultaneously denied... Ideality... both captures and subverts [erotic stimulus] in the interests of sentiment and power." Exogamy raises its ugly head, but is conveniently avoided. The ballet is pro-marriage, asserting that one must have a partner - but at the same time, it reminds us that not just any partner will do. Giselle presents an individualistic rebellion against the conventions of marriage, only to soften that message with centrist compromise.

And as Banes moves on to early modern dance, modern ballet and the Russian Imperial Ballet, it is the story of womanhood all through - in chains or unshackling them in their multifaceted roles. And as the back cover rightly says, unique in its vision, Dancing Women does set the stage for a continuing conversation on the many-faceted roles of women in dance. It is destined to become the classic book on feminist dance history.