"The Prison Notebooks" and "Truth and Power"

Andrea Montano
ASA 4
April 14, 2017

While reading "The Prision Notebooks," I found it quite interesting when the author made the statement that you cannot separate philiosophy from the history of philosophy and that you cannot separate culture from the history of culture. This reminds me of  the article "DJing as a Filipino Thing," where many of the Filipino(a) DJs knew the history and origin of Hip-Hop and Djing. The article makes the distinction between philosophy, religion, and common sense in that "Philsophy is an intellectual order that neither religion and common sense can be" (The Prison Notebooks, page 61). Philosophy is used to criticize religion and common sense.

In the readings "Truth and Power," power and knowledge, or truth, go hand in hand. However, in the article, truth is "produced and sustained" (Truth and Power, page 43) by those who are in positions of power. For example, at the start of the Trump era on President Trump's inauguration, the fact was that  Ex-President Obama's inauguration had a much larger audience than Trumps. However, the Trump office released the "alternative fact" that the inauguration of Trump had a larger audience than Obama, even though there is picture evidence and live footage of that not being the case. Truth is shaped by many circumstances and many societies have their own versions of what is true. Reading this article made me remember that in dialectical thinking, if both statements A and B contradict each other, the reality is that both statements are true even thought they are contradictory.