Josef Pieper introduced his 1974 essay, “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power,” as an examination of “Plato’s lifelong battle with the sophists, those highly paid and popularly applauded experts in the art of twisting words, who were able to sweet-talk something bad into something good and to turn white into black. They are those people whom Plato, in his Dialogues, puts in confrontation with Socrates.” He believed Plato’s concerns to be “directly relevant for us and our own situation today. The case can be made that Plato recognized, identified, and battled in the sophistry of his time a danger and a threat besetting the pursuits of the human mind and the life of society in any era.”

Plato’s concern — and Pieper’s — is that the use of “language, disconnected from the roots of truth, in fact pursues some ulterior motives, that it invariably turns into an instrument of power.”

“Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralized with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes. Public discourse itself, separated from the standard of truth, creates on its part, the more it prevails, an atmosphere of epidemic proneness and vulnerability to the reign of the tyrant. . . .

“I spoke of public discourse becoming ‘detached from the notions of truth and reality’. This brief characterization may still be too mild; it does not yet express the full measure of devastation breeding within the sophistic corruption of the word. It is entirely possible that the true and authentic reality is being drowned out by the countless superficial information bits noisily and breathlessly presented in propaganda fashion. Consequently, one may be entirely knowledgeable about a thousand details and nevertheless, because of ignorance regarding the core of the matter, remain without basic insight. This is a phenomenon in itself already quite astonishing and disturbing. Arnold Gehlen labeled it ‘a fundamental ignorance, created by technology and nourished by information’. But, I wanted to say, something far more discouraging is readily conceivable as well: the place of authentic reality is taken over by a fictitious reality; my perception is indeed still directed toward an object, but now it is a pseudoreality, deceptively appearing as being real, so much so that it becomes almost impossible any more to discern the truth. . . .

“[T]he general public is being reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find out about the truth but also become unable even to search for the truth because they are satisfied with deception and trickery that have determined their convictions, satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of language. This, says Plato, is the worst thing that the sophists are capable of wreaking upon mankind by their corruption of the word. . . .

“[O]pposition is required . . . against every partisan simplification, every ideological agitation, every blind emotionality; against seduction through well-turned yet empty slogans, against autocratic terminology with no room for dialogue, against personal insult as an element of style (all the more despicable the more sophisticated it is), against the language of evasive appeasement and false assurance (which Karl Jaspers considered a form of modern sophistry), and not least against the jargon of the revolution, against categorical conformism, and categorical nonconformism.”

— from Josef Pieper, Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power (Ignatius Press, 1992) 

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