The Truth about Lying Read online

  TWL: Truth would not lie about Wisdom’s position

  TLW: Truth would not lie about Lie’s position

  LTW: Lie would lie about Truth’s position

  LWT: Truth would not lie about Wisdom’s position

  WTL: Truth would not lie about her own position.

  So, it must be: WLT: Wisdom, Lie, Truth, in that order. To put it another way, Truth is neither the one on the left nor the middle since she won’t lie about who is beside her or who she is. Therefore, she is on the right side and she was telling the truth that Lie was sitting beside her in the middle, which leaves Wisdom on the left.

  Above, Wisdom sometimes lies, we are told. So does this mean that wisdom dictates that we sometimes lie and sometimes tell the truth? It would seem logical that this is true but four thinkers stand out in the history of Western thought for their strict condemnations of all forms of lying. They are St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Michel de Montaigne and Immanuel Kant. Despite their different philosophies, they had that in common – their detestation of all forms of lying. They held that there are no circumstances whatsoever in which one may lie. One must be murdered or tortured rather than lie. Lying, they thought, is a perversion, one that undermines trust in society. (Some might say that their twisted logic, on this subject at any rate, is a perversion.) Anyway, let’s see what they have to say on the subject.

  Against Lying

  St. Augustine

  St. Augustine, who condemned all lying (even the ‘well meant lie’) except jocose lies (not a real lie since there is lack of intention to deceive), outlined a taxonomy of lies in two books: De Mendacio (On Lying) and Contra Mendacio (Against Lying). In Chapter Fourteen of the former work he divides lies into eight categories:

  1. Lies told in religious teaching (these are deadly lies and must be shunned)

  2. Lies that harm or injure others unjustly

  3. Lies that are beneficial to one person but harm another

  4. Lies told solely for the pleasure of lying (the ‘real lie’)

  5 Lies told from a desire to ‘please others in smooth discourse’

  6. Lies that harm no one but benefit some person

  7. Lies that harm no one and that save someone’s life

  8. Lies that harm no one and that save someone’s ‘purity’.

  According to Augustine, it is better to err by an excessive regard for the truth and by an equally emphatic rejection of falsehood. A lie is pernicious since it has as its objective the deliberate desire to deceive. It’s a kind of false faith. Some people tell what is false without the intention of deceiving, while others tell what is true in order to deceive. A lie is a false statement and Augustine does not condone or sanction any form of lying, even if it secures the salvation of another, for ‘the good never lie’. He goes so far as to say that one’s ‘eternal life is lost by lying’. Telling lies harms those who tell them. So, we should not only not lie but not even want to lie. Lying is never morally justified is the verdict of this stern Bishop of Hippo. Lying is a sin and the motive of the liar determines the gravity of the lie (it makes a difference, he contends, for what reason, to what end and with what intention lying is performed). However, all lies are to be detested ‘uniformly’. To those who say that some lies are just or justifiable, Augustine replies then we would have to say that there are some just sins and that, consequently, some things that are unjust are just. Ultimately, lies should be either avoided altogether or be confessed in penitence.

  St. Thomas Aquinas

  Following Saints Augustine and Aquinas, Catholic moral theologians tend to distinguish between 1) injurious (hurtful) lies, 2) officious lies, and 3) jocose lies. Jocose lies are told for the purpose of amusement – they are said merely in joke and so cannot be considered lies. An officious lie is a white lie, such that it does nobody any injury – it’s a lie of excuse. An injurious lies does harm. Two schools of thought on this vexed moral question have arisen as regards ethical considerations: Aristotle (and following him Augustine, Aquinas and Kant) in his Ethics seems to hold that it is never permissible to tell a lie, while Plato, in his Republic, is more lenient about lying – he allows doctors and statesmen to lie for the good of their patients and citizens. Thus, the lawfulness of the lie of necessity. But some Catholic theologians would insist that white lies are apt to prepare the way for others of a darker hue: white leading to scarlet, so. Church Fathers such as Origen, St. John Chrysostom and Cassian followed Plato’s lead on lies. The Western Church has, in the main, adopted the Augustinian position that it is never lawful to lie. Innocent III interpreted Scripture as forbidding us to lie even to save a person’s life.

  For Thomas Aquinas, lying is opposed to the virtue of veracity. Truth consists in a correspondence between the thing signified and the signification of it. The essence of a lie is the want of right moral order (hence the employment of the word ‘disorder’). According to Aquinas, the lie has harmful consequences for society. They can affect the rights and reputations of others; friendship can even suffer from jocose lying. Promiscuous lying leads to mistrust, suspicion and loss of confidence. Moreover, when a habit for telling lies has been formed it is practically impossible to undo. For Thomas, we are never justified in telling a lie because the end never justifies the means (we may not do evil so that good may come). So (to take an example from Augustine) if silence would be equivalent to giving a sick man unwelcome news that would kill him, it is better that the body of the sick man should perish rather than the soul of the liar. Or, to take another example, if a man is hiding in your house and his life is sought by murderers and they come and ask you if he is in the house, you may say you know where he is but will not tell; you may not deny that he is there (Kant cites a similar example as we shall see). The lie possesses intrinsic malice. Later, some Schoolmen would endorse ‘mental reservations’ and ‘equivocations’ in speech. So the Thomistic answer to the classification of lies is as follows: hurtful lies are mortal sins; officious and jocose lies are venial sins. Are you a mortal or venial sinner, dear reader?

  Michel de Montaigne

  In 1572, Michel de Montaigne penned his ‘assays’ and he has some strict things to say on lying, especially in his essay entitled ‘On Giving the Lie’. ‘The first sign of corrupt morals is the banishing of truth,’ he writes in his famous Essays. Lying corrupts morals. Montaigne would concur with Pindar’s view that being truthful is the beginning of any great virtue. And Plato required this of the Governor in his Republic. Montaigne, himself French, opines that lying has become, not just a vice for the French but a figure of speech. For Montaigne, the lie is the most accursed vice: ‘the ultimate verbal insult to accuse us of lying’. Montaigne feels it is cowardly to deny one’s word, that is to say, to lie. He talks about the horror and vileness and disorderliness of lies and labels it a ‘villein’s vice’. If we lie, society cannot be held together and nor can we. Montaigne opines:

  ‘When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.’

  To lie is mentiri in Latin. To tell an untruth is to say something false, which one thinks to be true. This is different, so, from lying. Many people have recognised the intimate connection between memory and lying, in that one has to have a good memory to lie. This was first recognised by Quintilian. And according to Montaigne, one can catch out liars by making them tell the same story several times over. Lies so easily slip out of memory. In a section in his Essays entitled ‘On liars’, Montaigne writes:

  ‘It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should rigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with
the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying, and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up.’

  In this respect Montaigne is similar to Augustine who likewise emphasises the damaging and detrimental effects of lying in discourse, as we saw. In his City of God, Augustine says that a dog we do know is better company than a man whose language we don’t know and that the language of lies is less comprehensible than silence even.

  Immanuel Kant

  In ‘On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives’, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant laid it down as a moral principle the duty to speak the truth no matter what. Truth in utterances is the formal duty of everyone even if great disadvantage arises from it. Kant defines a lie as ‘an intentionally false declaration towards another man’; it will always cause injury to another since it vitiates the source of justice. What comes next is Kant’s famous example: if you have, by a lie, stopped a man from planning a murder, you are legally responsible for all the consequences. If, however, you strictly adhered to the truth, public justice will find no fault in you. There will always be, contends Kant, unforeseen consequences. It is possible, he says, that while you honestly answered ‘yes’ to the murderer’s question as to whether his intended victim is in his house, the victim may have gone out unobserved and so not have come into the way of the murderer and the dastardly deed would not have been done; whereas if you lied and said he was not in the house and that he had really gone out (though unknown to you) so that the murderer met him as he went and ‘executed his purpose’ on him, then you might with justice be accused as the cause of his death. Kant says if you had spoken the truth as you knew it, perhaps the murderer while searching for his enemy in the house might have been caught by some neighbours arriving on the scene and the deed would have been prevented. Kant is adamant:

  ‘Whoever then tells a lie, however good his intentions may be, must answer for the consequences of it, even before the civil tribunal, and must pay the penalty for them, however unforeseen they may have been; because truthfulness is a duty that must be regarded as the basis of all duties founded on contract, the laws of which would be rendered uncertain and useless if even the least exception to them were admitted. To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred unconditional command of reason, and not to be limited by any expediency.’

  So, for this stringent German philosopher (is there any other type?), truth-telling is an unconditional duty. There you have it. So act in accordance with your duty, not your desire.

  Thomas Jefferson, like Kant, felt that lying was always wrong:

  ‘He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.’

  The falsehood of the tongue leads to the falsehood of the heart.

  ‘Lying is hateful and accursed vice. We have no other tie upon one another, but our word.’ – Immanuel Kant

  ‘A single lie destroys a whole reputation for integrity’ (Balthasar Gracian, Spanish Jesuit), unless of course the lie is motivated by integrity in the first place. As Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch philosopher, tells us: men govern nothing with greater difficulty than their tongues, as we bear false witness. That said, we moderate our desires quicker than our words.

  The Truth in the Lie

  But those of us who are not saints, German philosophers, or American presidents tend both to lie and tell the truth as the situation dictates, distinguishing between little and big lies, noble and ignoble ones. Isn’t wisdom precisely the capacity to do so? Only the ‘pervert’ (understood not as a stigma but as a clinical category) separates Truth from Lies. What, though, does he miss in thus separating the two? The truth of the lie itself – the truth that is contained and delivered in the very act of lying. The truth resonates in the lie. Shakespeare’s play, All’s Well that Ends Well, is all about the entanglements of truth and lies. The lie can reveal the truth about the person.

  In his book, The Doctor and the Soul, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist, concentration camp survivor and founder of logotherapy, opines that honesty is paradoxical, that ‘one can lie with truth and, on the other hand, tell the truth with a lie – even make something true by a lie’. He gives the example of a doctor who takes the patient’s blood pressure and finds it high. The patient asks him to tell him the reading. But if the doctor does so the patient will be so alarmed and agitated that his blood pressure will rise even higher than it already is. If the doctor does not tell him the truth but gives him a false reading in order to reassure him his blood pressure may drop so that in the end the sham lie will be an exact statement.

  Knowledge is factual; it is objective. Truth, though, is subjective. One can lie in the guise of truth. This is what men are doing when, in statements that are factually entirely accurate they conceal or deny their real desire. One can also tell the truth in the guise of a lie. This is what women do; their slips of the tongue betray their true desire. We need to spell this out in some detail. But before we do, let me ask the question: is there such a thing as the ‘Right to Lie’?

  The Right to Lie?

  Rights at their core are ‘Rights to Violate’, … just as law is the cause of crime (I’m being a bit facetious). Freedom of religious belief is the right to worship false gods. The right to possess private property is the right to steal. And Freedom of the Press and the Free Expression of Opinion is the right to lie. So it would seem that men and women possess the right to lie; the question is, who does so more successfully? Much will depend on whether we want to get caught out, consciously or unconsciously.

  The Successful Lie

  To lie successfully one needs to insert some truth into the lie. ‘If you wish to strengthen a lie, mix a little truth in with it,’ The Zohar (the rabbinic work on Jewish mysticism) tells us. Similarly, Iris Murdoch, the Irish philosopher, observes: ‘We have to mix a little falsehood into truth to make it plausible.’ It’s a surer way of not getting found out – if that’s what you really want.

  Benjamin Disraeli famously said that there were three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. We can manipulate the truth so that it becomes a lie, so that the line between lies and truth-telling becomes blurred, eclipsed, as politicians and propagandists know only too well. With regards to lawyers, isn’t it interesting to note that there is a homophony between ‘lawyer’ and ‘liar’?

  The distinction between lies and truth is not at all clear-cut, despite the protestations of Augustine, Aquinas and Kant to the contrary. Most of us mix fact with fiction, fantasy and falsehood with lies and truth, as Walter Mitty meets Pinocchio. At times, all our noses grow. And there are some people who have a nose for lies; they can sniff it out and smell a lie a mile away. As Dr. Lecter (Hannibal the cannibal) says to Clarice: ‘Don’t lie or I’ll know.’ He was psychotic of course, wasn’t he? Mad or bad?

  ‘Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult…. Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.’ ― George Eliot, Adam Bede

  Needing Lies

  T.S. Eliot, the American-British poet, once said that man can’t bear too much reality; Freud said it too. Well, we can’t bear too much truth either. Look what happens in the film Liar Liar when Jim Carey tells the truth: chaos and social anarchy ensue. Roger Scruton, the British philosopher, expressed it well:

  ‘The human world flourishes best when refreshed by falsehood.’

  Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction but we need some fictions to live by, as the philosopher David Hume recognised. We need lies in order to live with the awful, painful, hurtful, truthful reality that is life. Some people, though, desperately hold on to a belief system, to take an example, even when they know it’s false; it gives them a sense of comfort and security. We recall Nietzsche’s quip that convict
ions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. Be wary of the person who seems so sure.

  Nietzsche, for whom all morality is based on lies, had warned us to beware of the good and their ‘noble lies’, but Plato endorsed the ‘noble lie’ (lying for good reason). And I do too, against the above thinkers. We saw how Kant (with whom I ‘can’t’ agree – sorry, couldn’t resist) forbade lying even in the case of a murderer asking us where we buried the axe-knife. It just shows you that incredibly intelligent people can be really rather stupid. There can be integrity in lying surely, depending on one’s motivations? Moral lying, so. Whatever about integrity in lying, there can also be an enjoyment, a jouissance (painful pleasure), in lying.

  Enjoying Lying

  We enjoy exaggerating stories, embellishing events, as we engage in hysterical hyperbole. ‘A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure’ (Montaigne). Too true. Remember the last time you exaggerated a story for the pleasure of your friends? ‘You should have been there! There were ten of them and I got the biggest one down and the rest ran away’ or ‘It was the largest spider I have ever seen in the shower’. The story grows wings. There is a thin line between exaggeration and lying, between lying to ourselves and being deluded.

  Henry James, the novelist brother of the philosopher William James, in a short story, ‘The Liar’, written after meeting a man who told tall tales at a dinner party recounts a story about compulsive but well-intentioned social liars. The narrator becomes aware that his dinner companion is caught in a compulsion to lie; referring to this lying Colonel Capadose, Sir David Ashmore, the master of the house, says: ‘He’ll lie about the time of day, about the name of his hatter.’ There is no harm in the hapless Colonel, however. ‘He doesn’t steal or cheat nor gamble nor drink; he’s very kind – he sticks to his wife, is fond of his children. He simply can’t give you a straight answer.’