The Truth about Lying Read online

  So, is sincerity the opposite of bad faith? Sincerity seems to be the antithesis of bad faith. In sincerity, a man is for himself only what he is. If man is what he is, bad faith becomes impossible and ‘candour ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being’. But is man what he is? Well, for Sartre, we must make ourselves what we are. But then what are we if we have to keep making ourselves what we are? He gives an example of a waiter in a café.

  The waiter is in his café and his movements are quick but they are a little too rapid; he walks to his customers a little too quickly, bends forward a little too eagerly and his eyes express interest a little too solicitously. He walks imitating in his upright stiffness an automaton as he carries his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker. His behaviour is like a game. He is playing but playing (at) what? He is playing at being a waiter in a café, according to Sartre. It is a ceremony, a ritual, a lie. And this is what the public demands. There is the dance of the grocer, the tailor, the auctioneer, ‘by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer.’ There are many precautions we take to imprison a person in what he is. We live in perpetual fear he just might escape from it, break away and elude his condition, Sartre contends. But the waiter in the café cannot be a café waiter in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell or a glass is a glass. Sincerity, so, is really a task that is impossible to achieve. The waiter is always more than a waiter. The very meaning of sincerity is a contradiction. To be sincere is to be what one is and that presupposes I am not (originally) what I am. I can become sincere but not being what one is renders being what one is impossible. The attentive student is attempting to be attentive. Sincerity is, thus, impossible. How can we even attempt to be sincere in conversation or confession? The effort is ‘doomed to failure’. I try to be what I am, decide or resolve to be my ‘true self’; this means setting about and searching for ways to change myself, to not be me. If I am now the person I am, then in the past I wasn’t. And that won’t do at all. We are upset, says Sartre, when the penalties of the court ‘affect a man who in his new freedom is no longer the guilty person he was. But at the same time we require of the man that he recognize himself as being this guilty one’. Sartre concludes: sincerity itself is a phenomenon of bad faith. Another example is given.

  A homosexual has intolerable guilt and his whole existence is determined in relation to it. He is in bad faith. He has a certain conception of the beautiful that women will not satisfy. His friend, who is his critic too, is irritated with his ‘duplicity’, with is inability and refusal to consider himself ‘a homosexual’ even though he recognises his inclination and engages in homosexual acts. The critic wants him to declare himself. Who, Sartre asks, is in bad faith? ‘The homosexual or the champion of sincerity?’

  The homosexual recognises himself but doesn’t want to be considered as a thing. He has the impression that a homosexual is not a homosexual as the table is a table or as the red-haired man is red-haired. He must put himself beyond, must escape to live, to avoid judgement. Yes, he is not what he is. Human reality can’t be completely or finally defined by patterns of conduct. Fine, but he lays claim to not being homosexual in the sense in which the table is not an inkwell and to that extent he is in bad faith. The champion of sincerity requires that he acknowledge himself in the name of freedom and sincerity, as a homosexual. Such a ‘confession’ will win indulgence, he says to him. This means, though, that the man who will acknowledge himself as a homosexual will no longer be the same as the homosexual whom he acknowledges being. The critic demands of him to be what he is in no longer being what he is. The critic demands that he constitute himself as a thing in order no longer to treat him as a thing. This ‘contradiction is constitutive of the demand of sincerity’. We now see how offensive to the Other and how reassuring for me is the statement – ‘he is just a homosexual’; this constitutes all the acts of the Other as consequences following on from his essence. The critic (a false friend) ‘is demanding of his victim – that he constitute himself as a thing, that he should entrust his freedom to his friend as a fief’. The champion of sincerity is in bad faith. The constant effort to adhere to oneself and be sincere is actually to dissociate oneself from oneself. It is to escape from oneself and the person who seeks to escape from himself commits bad faith. So the goal of sincerity and of bad faith isn’t so different. I try to be sincere and don’t succeed, therefore. Sincerity always misses its mark. In order not to be cowardly I must be a little cowardly. It means being and not being a coward. Bad faith involves denying qualities that I possess but that’s not all. It is not seeing the being I am but it also involves me in attempting to constitute myself as being what I am not. ‘Thus in order for bad faith to be possible, sincerity itself must be in bad faith.’ We are what we are not and not what we are. That is the paradox at the heart of contradictory and confused humanity.

  Sartre says that his friend Pierre feels friendship for him and he believes this in good faith. He believes and trusts (in) it. He conducts himself as if he were certain of it. Such a faith is simple. To believe is to know one believes but to know one believes is no longer to believe. Believing is destructive of belief. ‘To believe is not-to-believe.’ Belief becomes non-belief. Just as the absolute becomes relative and the relative absolute. ‘Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes …. If every belief in good faith is an impossible belief, then there is a place for every impossible belief.’ I believe I believe.

  Bad faith is the basis of all and every faith. ‘At the moment when I wish to believe myself courageous I know that I am a coward.’ It is the acceptance of not believing what it believes that it is bad faith. Good faith flees this ‘not-believing-what-one-believes’. ‘In bad faith there is no cynical lie nor knowing preparation for deceitful concepts. But the very first act of bad faith is to flee what it can not flee, to flee what it is.’ Bad faith denies itself as bad faith. Bad faith is a threat – permanent and possible – to every project of the human being. And the origin of this risk, according to Sartre, is the fact that it is the nature of consciousness to be what it is not and not to be what it is – a case, then, of being and nothingness. Authenticity would be self-recovery.

  Just as I try to flee and free myself from the Other, he is trying to flee and free himself from me. While I seek to enslave him, the Other seeks to enslave me. There is no escape from this Other, from any and every Other. We live with Others in the world and this produces conflict, a Master-Slave struggle to the death. ‘Conflict,’ Sartre says, ‘is the original meaning of being-for-others.’ Therefore, ‘love is a conflict’ too. Conflict everywhere, so, in love and lies, of a love that lies. Speaking of love and lying lovers, let’s consider this subject next, as we take leave of Sartre (‘phew’, I hear you say). Adieu Jean-Paul.

  Love, Lies and Letters

  The lies written in love letters: ‘I will never leave you’; ‘I will kill myself if you leave me’. If a woman writes a love letter she is usually addressing herself; that’s ‘why women write more letters than they post’, to coin a phrase. If the first of April is a day when we officially sanction the lie, Valentine’s Day is when we unofficially lie – it’s a day for liars as much as lovers (the two tend to go hand in hand). It provides us with the greatest opportunity to lie in the calendar; it formalises and ritualises the art of lying. ‘I love you. I can’t exist without you’, but in love, deeds speak louder than words. Who, dear reader, is your secret Valentine? ‘Please don’t lie to me, unless you’re absolutely sure I’ll never find out the truth’ (Ashleigh Brilliant, English author) or ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant’ (Emily Dickinson, American poet).

  We wear masks all the time, especially in love. A mask is not a total lie. But the mask may slip over too much wine: in vino v
eritas. Conscience is, after all, soluble in alcohol.

  ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.’ – Oscar Wilde

  But behind the mask (the persona, hence our word ‘personality’) lies the character.

  Doesn’t love only really work when we desire a second person to the one we love? Isn’t it that desire that keeps our love alive? Can one really be in love with and desire the same person? It is desire that keeps a relationship alive not (just) love. And of course we can distinguish between sex (bodily/physical), eroticism (mental/psychological) and love (spiritual), though they can become muddied and muddled, as we know only too well. As for married life, well, didn’t Oscar Wilde, the Irish wit, tell us that in married life three is company, two is none?! Lies keep marriages alive.

  ‘Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second nature in a married man.’ – Helen Rowland

  ‘The charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.’ – Oscar Wilde

  ‘One can always recognise women who trust their husbands. They look so thoroughly unhappy.’ – Oscar Wilde

  The secret wedding vow: ‘for better or forget it!’ A tale is told about three truthful husbands. Žižek gives this example of the simultaneous telling and sharing of truth and lies in the marital home:

  Three friends are having a drink at a bar; the first one says, ‘A terrible thing happened to me. At a travel agency I wanted to say “A ticket to Pittsburgh” and I said, “A picket to Tittsburgh!” The second man replied, ‘That’s nothing. At breakfast I wanted to say to my wife, “Could you pass the sugar please, honey” and what I said was, “You stupid fucking bitch, you’ve ruined my life!”’ The third one concludes: ‘Wait till you hear what happened to me. After gathering up my courage all night, I decided to say to my wife exactly what you said to yours, and I ended up saying, “Could you pass the sugar, honey?”’

  Lying Eyes

  The eyes can lie. Such desire in those lying eyes. Those who continue to believe with their eyes are the most in error. A paedophile who happens to be a priest and who preaches virtue is a hypocrite, but his words may prompt his parishioners to do good deeds. We must believe with our ears not with our eyes. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear! Shakespeare got it right again: ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind and therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.’ Love is mental. Love shoots arrows, as well as blanks.

  The other person’s eyes act as mirrors; they mirror us back to ourselves. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’ All mirrors (and mirroring eyes) lie; they play tricks on us. They distort the truth just as much as caricature paintings do. They reveal to us our distorted double. We never see ourselves as others see us. We have only seen mirror images of ourselves (that’s not you in the mirror – it’s an image of you which may or may not be a spitting image). But in love-relationships when women lie they have more to lose than men. Women are at risk of losing their partner whereas men are at risk of losing only themselves.

  Wilde Lies

  Speaking of mirrors, it is said that artists hold up a mirror to reality; yes, and they receive back its distorted truth. We know art is a lie (artful lies?); we pay to be lied to (just as others pray to be lied to) when we go to the cinema or theatre or when we read books of fiction. All men are liars, the Scottish philosopher David Hume opined, but poets are liars by profession; that is why Plato expelled them from his ideal state (polis). ‘We have art in order not to die of the truth’ (Nietzsche).

  According to Pablo Picasso:

  ‘We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.’

  Indeed, art is possible only as a lie. And some people make an art-form out of lying. Oscar Wilde was one such man.

  Wilde wanted to reveal art and conceal himself as artist but the truth came out in the end and he suffered for it. He promised to tell the truth at his trial when he swore on a Bible and then lied about the exact nature of his involvement with all those boys, and he did it beautifully in that fine and famous speech from the dock; he forged a fabulous tissue of lies. He realised this from prison: ‘A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a Member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it.’

  He was shallow; becoming deeper is the privilege of suffering. But when one is alone, with no audience, one has to ‘take the mask off for breathing purposes’. The mask makes lying easy. ‘Truth … is a thing which is most painful to listen to and most painful to utter’. A man’s highest moment is when he kneels in the dust and meets, not the mask, but himself face to face and this too is what happened to Mr. Oscar Fingal O’ Flahertie Wills Wilde. It is true that great passions are for the great of soul but every pleasure is paid for in the end. Wilde’s life was broken in pieces by a lie but in prison he had to sit quietly in the silence of his cell and consider it to the full – his life, his loves, the death of his beloved mother whose funeral he was not permitted to attend, Lord Alfred Douglas’ betrayal, his bankruptcy, divorce and the loss of his two lovely boys but ‘to love all things are easy’ and there ‘is no prison in any world into which love cannot force an entrance’.

  Bosie (as Lord Alfred was nicknamed), a British lord, came to this Irish playwright to learn about pleasure. In the concluding sentence to De Profundis, Wilde says to him that perhaps he is chosen to teach him now another lesson, something much more wonderful – ‘the meaning of sorrow and its beauty’ – the play of pain.

  I was saying that Wilde played a terrible game with masks and attempted to conceal the truth about himself. To lie was easier. In fact, he wrote an essay entitled ‘The Truth of Masks: A Note on Illusion’ but that was before truth and prison caught up with him. The essay is an apologia of masks and lies. It is really an article on Shakespeare’s plays, just as Wilde’s ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’ is an article on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare toyed with masks too, for dramatic effect. Wilde tells us: ‘Posthumus hides his passion under a peasant’s garb, and Edgar his pride beneath an idiot’s rags; Portia wears the apparel of a lawyer…. Jessica felles from her father’s house in boy’s dress; …. Henry the Eighth woos his lady as a shepherd.’

  Macbeth appears in a nightgown as if aroused from sleep. Dress here is used as dissimulation, disguise, deceit. Apparel and adornment are used for the purposes of camouflage and concealment. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago drops hints the whole time and messes with Othello’s jealous mind. A well-placed handkerchief leads to strangulation. There are Iagos all around us and more trickery than truth in the universe of man.

  In this essay Wilde asserts: ‘Truth is independent of facts always’ and concludes thus:

  ‘For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. And just as it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can apprehend the Platonic theory of ideas, so it is only in art-criticism, and through it, that we can realise Hegel’s system of contraries. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.’

  But it was in his ‘The Decay of Lying: An Observation’ that he sets out, in dialogue form, a conversation on the subject between Cyril and Vivian (the names of Wilde’s two sons). The scene is the library of a country-house in Nottinghamshire.

  Cyril admonishes Vivian for cooping himself up all day in the library and says: ‘Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature.’ So the essay begins with a pun: Cyril wants to lie on the grass but Vivian feels that Nature is too uncomfortable, too hard, lumpy and damp and opines that Nature hates thought just as England do
es, where ‘thought is not catching’. Vivian is writing an article and presently correcting the proofs. He is intending to call it, ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’, to which Cyril exclaims: ‘Lying! I should have thought that our politicians kept up that habit.’ Vivian disagrees, making the point that politicians never rise above mere misrepresentation:

  ‘How different from the temper of the true liar, with his frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind! After all, what is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence. If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once’.

  If the politicians don’t really lie, barristers do better. Members of the Bar are prone to being sophistic (the subject on which we began this book). The mantle of the sophist, as Vivian (Wilde himself) says, has fallen on its members. ‘Their feigned ardours and unreal rhetoric are delightful.’ But the ‘truth will out’. Even newspapers can now be relied upon. So there is not much going, in terms for lying, in relation to the lawyer or the journalist. Besides, what Vivian is pleading for is lying in art and it is intended for ‘The Tired Hedonists’, a club to which he belongs. He proceeds to read his article to the attentive Cyril. It begins by bemoaning the decay of lying as an art, science and social pleasure. Whereas the ancient historians gave us fiction in the form of fact, the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction and hasn’t the courage even of other people’s ideas. Vivian holds that there is no such person as a ‘born liar’ or a ‘born poet’. Both poetry and lying are arts that can be learned (Wittgenstein makes this point too); moreover, they are arts ‘as Plato saw, not unconcerned with each other – and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion’. Painting and sculpture possess their subtle and secret forms of craft and colour. The poet is known by his fine music just as the liar is recognised by ‘his rich rhythmic utterance’. He bemoans the fact that the fashion of lying has almost entirely fallen into disrepute. Exaggeration is surely preferable to accuracy in conversation? Being in the company of the aged and the well informed is fatal to man’s imagination, and in a short time he develops ‘a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling’. It is the modern vice. Indeed, moralists have dreary vices and drearier virtues. Realism is a failure. Wilde prefers those persons who have the wit to exaggerate and the genius to romance. Speaking through his character Vivian, he says that he is ‘tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present. Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar’.