The Habit of Lying

Duke University Press

Contents

Chapter One

He who does not have the good intention to tell a lie is hopelessly lost. -ROBERT WALSER

Kant, an important guide to the broadest issues in this study, provides us with a brilliant model of what I have called the theoretical scape-goating of the liar-one that is particularly exemplary inasmuch as it occurs at the threshold of "enlightened" modernity. By indicating that it is ultimately not deception as such that is at issue in his condemnation of lying (one might mislead the potential murderer as to the whereabouts of his victim, to take Kant's example, as much by concealment or other means as by outright mendacity), but rather irrationality or arbitrariness, Kant also provides us with a framework generalized enough for a systematic study of the relation between lying and fiction. In brief, Kant's extraordinarily analytic stress on the arbitrariness of mendacity will prepare us for the analytic arbitrariness of fiction explored later.

Since Kant's position on lying may now seem eccentric to say the least, it is equally important to my argument to show in some detail that much saner and more plausible philosophers on the subject do not escape the basic Kantian problem that leads to what I have called the "sacrifice" of the liar. Hence Sissela Bok, whose Lying has been called a "seminal book" in modern theory, is almost as important as Kant to the present considerations. I have taken her as a friendly scapegoat, so to speak, precisely because her work is so useful, especially on the subject of lying and violence.

I have also chosen these two authors because they represent putatively rational philosophies of mendacity which appear to some degree orthodox, normative, or representative of ordinary opinion in their periods and local contexts. Admittedly, Kant's position that mendacity is never justified could hardly have been accepted quite literally even by most of his own contemporaries, except perhaps insofar as it was grafted onto a Christian conception of inevitable or original sin. However, while Kant's view may now appear to us frankly lunatic, I shall argue that it nevertheless-or for this very reason-gets to the theoretical heart of the matter. This is the relation so stressed by Kant between rationality and unanimity, and between the rule and the exception.

Whereas Kant takes exception to lying in an almost fanatical way, Sissela Bok, by contrast, seems eminently reasonable in arguing that we should lie only in exceptional circumstances and for good reason. If one desires a practical moral guide to mendacity, Bok is doubtless much to be preferred to Kant. But for theoretical clarity-however tragicomic in its practical upshot-Kant remains exemplary, and Bok's central arguments remain open to Kantian objections. Her very good sense in rejecting Kant, one might say, partially blinds her to what she shares with Kant and his most important insights. But as an erudite and intelligent exponent of what is a morally normative and common-sensical point of view, she teaches us a great deal about lying, and especially, as I have said, about its relation to violence.

Though Bok's Lying contains little about fiction as such, it does represent the commonsensical view that the problem, at least in this context, is easily disposed of by "the fact that fiction does not intend to mislead, that it calls for what Coleridge called 'a willing suspension of disbelief,' which is precisely what is absent in ordinary deception." In conclusion I evoke a tradition which puts this view in doubt. But the general problem of fiction must be postponed until chapter 2.

Lying

Kant and Bok strive in contrasting but comparable ways to justify the common view (perhaps more preached than practiced) that lying should "in general" be proscribed and avoided. What "in general" means is the crucial issue. For Kant, this prohibition meant a rule without exceptions, like a scientific law, a paradigm of the categorical imperative (which he defined as a synthetic a priori law). For Bok, it means a "general" rule punctuated by exceptions: "a presumption against lies," on the grounds that "trust in some degree of veracity functions as the foundation of relations among human beings." Though this "foundation" is presumed rather than demonstrated-and the claim to "some degree of veracity" is in any case a very weak one-Bok nevertheless shares with Kant the positing of a supposedly general or fundamental rule against mendacity.

My aim here is not to justify mendacity "in general"-though I am resigned (if I can escape a lynching) to the likelihood of being suspected of such a project. Instead, I maintain it is the very concept of generality and unanimity that is problematic in this context, and that neither the practical nor theoretical problems associated with lying can be grasped adequately in isolation from conventions surrounding concealment and fiction-conventions, such as modesty of dress and the "suspension of disbelief," that also characteristically claim and depend on quasi-unanimous acceptance. The distinction between lying and concealment, in particular, is one dear and indeed indispensable to self-proclaimed truth-tellers and their theoretical champions. It allows them to get away with theoretical murder-and sometimes murder, as we shall see, that is more than a mere figure of speech. Typically, lying is violently proscribed in almost the same breath (as we shall see in Defoe, for example) that concealment is violently prescribed. The absolute Kantian proscription merely crystallizes the issue by making lying into the unambiguously poisonous side of the pharmakon of concealment generally, considered alternately as poison and remedy.

Concealment of course differs formally from lying, regarded as an attempt to deceive by the actual articulation of falsehood, but all lying in this sense is a form of concealment (of the truth). Conversely, even the values of privacy and discretion, forms of concealment usually praised, typically encourage deception: "No man can be secret, except he give himself a little scope for dissimulation; which is, as it were, but the skirts or train of secrecy." If Francis Bacon is correct here about the necessary relation of concealment and dissimulation, no moral condemnation of dissimulation or deception can justify a general condemnation of mendacity unless it goes for concealment too (including, of course, "lies of omission"). No general rule can state in advance which mode of concealment (mere concealment or actual mendacity) might lead to greater deception in given circumstances-though it has been claimed that habitual liars and impostors seem often to engage in self-defeating behavior, making them bad deceivers, whereas concealers may often be more successful. Kant's tragicomic prohibition of lying under any circumstances is illuminating because it elevates to transcendental purity a more commonplace scapegoating of the liar, who now plays the role of intellectual pharmakos at the hands of reason itself.

Bok's Lying, though in almost every conceivable way distant from the sacrificial terrain we have borrowed from Girard, de Man, and Derrida, nonetheless makes the initial point needed for my argument when she repeatedly draws attention to the striking "parallel between deception and violence" in Western thought: "Both violence and deception are means not only to unjust coercion, but also to self-defense and survival." Her claim that "deceit and violence ... are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings" illustrates how lying is considered not only as a kind of mental or symbolic violence, but as the very model of such violence. This is economically summed up by the clown in Othello: "for one to say a soldier lies, is stabbing." Shakespeare's triple pun suggests a direct relation between violence and mendacity (to accuse a soldier of lying is like stabbing him), as well as forms of symbolic violence (the "stabbings" and "lyings" associated with intercourse), and also a witty pharmakon-ambivalence: to accuse a soldier of lying is like stabbing him, but so is revealing where he lies concealed from potential stabbers. This, as we shall see, is the very same kind of example used by Kant.

Bok aligns herself with what she presents as the moderate view of Aristotle, taking "as an initial premise Aristotle's view that lying is 'mean and culpable' and that truthful statements are preferable to lies in the absence of special considerations." The generalization that lying is mean and culpable admittedly hardly approaches the generalized violence we can find elsewhere directed against lying. Take Martin Buber, for example: "The lie is the specific evil which man introduced into nature. All our deeds of violence and our misdeeds are only as it were a highly-bred development of what this or that creature of nature is able to achieve in its own way. But the lie is our very own invention." Though nature regularly exhibits pretty spectacular displays of deception, not to speak of deceptive behavior that has all the appearance of intentionality, Buber insisted on lying as the human sin. By implication, lying is worse than mere violence, which is shared with the animal world; it is the distinctively human violence. Similarly, though his view was supposedly deduced from reason not religion, Kant could not resist pointing out that Satan had to lie before Cain was able to kill. Even Montaigne, usually so moderate and urbane, made a show of violence against the liar: "If we recognized the horror and gravity of lying, we should persecute it with fire more justly than other crimes." Montaigne also notes the properly sacrificial character of religious responses to lying: "Certain nations of the new Indies offered to their gods human blood, but only such as was drawn from their tongue and ears, in expiation of the sin of falsehood, heard as well as uttered." The apogee of this scapegoating tendency is perhaps represented by Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (discussed in chapter 3), who condemns lying more harshly even than murder.

The idea that mendacity is, so to speak, the deepest source of human violence, more violent than violence itself-and should thus be countered by maximum "good" violence-leads in a seamless manner to the classic Enlightenment question of whether one should lie to murderers. Kant's categorical "no" to this question, as I have said, elevates the problem to the level of tragicomedy. But, as Bok recounts, the murderer example was notorious and merely inherited by Kant. A conspicuously sane Dr. Johnson, for example, adduced it as an exception to what he called the "general rule" against lying. Cardinal Newman, on the other hand, later argued that Johnson would probably not have followed his own theory, preferring rather to fight the murderer than lie to him! In Kant, unjust violence is seemingly preferred (permit murder rather than lie); in Newman, just violence.

These manly sacrifices to the gods of truth find a more amiable parallel in St. Augustine's account of a man who lies for others' benefit. While Augustine admits that such a man is probably unusually good, he nevertheless feels compelled to define his lies as sins, thus reversing the model of mendacity Bok associates with Machiavelli, where lies do good to the deceiver and evil to the deceived. One feels in St. Augustine something akin to Robinson Crusoe's position on clothing, which might be described as the paradox of original sin: perfect human beings would not need the "good evils" of dress-concealment or benevolent lies. Augustine's recommendation that such lies be simultaneously condemned and pardoned has all the ambivalence of the pharmakon.

Bok's keen eye for the violent aura of the lie is consistent with her laudable philosophical aim to desacralize and defetishize the morality of mendacity. On the other hand, her claim that lying and violence are the "two forms of deliberate assault on human beings" may be accused of exaggerating the analogy in a manner that resembles the irrational and sacrificial perspectives she criticizes. Judith Shklar's Ordinary Vices, by contrast, emphasizes the distinction and even opposition between violence and mendacity in its plea for a reversal of the conventional tendency to rank the prohibition of lying and hypocrisy over the prohibition of cruelty. Doubtless avoiding cruelty would rank high, too, among the more protean "special considerations" invoked by Bok as justification for lying-though I shall later point out a significant moment in her account where the values of force and truth seem ominously dependent. The connection between lying and violence is so deep, as we shall see, in part because truth and force are both modalities of law.

Another disappointing aspect of Bok's excellent emphasis on the "striking parallel between deception and violence" is her tendency to define this relation in terms of the opposition between two basic attitudes: one, "seen from the perspective of those affected by lies and by assaults," which attempts to prohibit or at least limit violence and deception by law and other means; the other a "celebration" of violence and lies associated by her with Machiavelli, for example, and Nietzsche. That affirmations of cruelty and lies are frequently linked in Nietzsche cannot be denied. It is accordingly tempting to regard Kant and Nietzsche as neatly summarizing pharmakon violence on each side of the truth/lie polarity in post-Enlightenment philosophy-whether in terms of the malingering sacralization implicit in Kant's "sacred decree of reason" to tell the truth, or of the openly Dionysiac and sacrificial appeals of the self-styled Anti-Christ. But the trouble with Bok's emphasis is that, when push comes to shove, she associates "celebration" of the liar generally with oppression and the victors' point of view, and the celebration of truthfulness generally with the victims' point of view ("those affected by lies and assaults"). Far from being a "universal principle" (as we saw in Kafka), lying is universally "presumed against" by Bok on the grounds, as we have seen, that "trust in some degree of veracity functions as the foundation of relations among human beings." But doesn't it follow that "trust in some degree of mendacity" must also function as the foundation of such relations? ("According to Marie Vasek [1986], a psychologist who has studied the development of lying in children, 'The skills required in deception are also used in being compassionate and co-ordinating our actions with those of others, and without them human society might not exist.'") But Bok provides no "presumption" against truthfulness on this account-perhaps because she somehow assumes the "degree of veracity" to be greater than 50 percent?

In contrast to Kant's universally valid categorical imperative, which claims unanimous consent of all rational beings, Bok's general rule is punctuated by "special considerations"; but no convincing argument is given why these exceptions are not quite as general in their application, whether quantitatively or qualitatively, as the rule itself. Bok appeals to Aristotle, and why not? But then why not equally cite Plato's appeal to noble lies as the foundation of the republic? I shall argue that Bok's appeal to a spurious "foundational" generality, like Kant's to a spurious unanimity, is really only a pseudorational counterpart of the sacrificial identification of mendacity with violence (and its symbolic equivalent, moral and intellectual chaos). It does not even guide us out of the classical opposition represented by Plato and Aristotle.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Habit of Lyingby JOHN VIGNAUX SMYTH Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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