by Umberto Eco
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Only the shallow know themselves.
But the extent to which he considered these real teachings is unclear; when some of them were challenged at his trial, he responded: “I rarely think that anything I write is true.” It is right not to require of Wilde a strict distinction between (true) paradoxes, (obvious) aphorisms, and aphorisms that are interchangeable (false, or devoid of any truth value). What he exhibits is furor sententialis (which is an agreeable rhetorical incontinence) rather than a passion for philosophy.
If this is the case, then we might as well invent a new form of false paradox, and false aphorism, which would serve only to have us recognize the existence of commonplaces in which we ourselves become embroiled every day.
Not so long ago, I came across a delightful little book: Scusa l’anticipo ma ho trovato tutti verdi (Sorry I’m Early, But All the Lights Were Green). It contains five hundred reversed commonplaces, of which here are just a few:
Sometimes fiction is stranger than truth.
I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the Church.
First he killed himself, then he killed his wife and children with the same gun.
Thank you for being so far from me at this time.
My great regret is never having broken off my studies.
It’s time Santa Claus realized that children don’t exist.
I may be senile, but I’m not old.
They stole my wallet, but it’s not about the documents and the keys, it’s the money.
Don’t sleep, because afterwards you won’t drink your Coca-Cola.
It’s not the humidity, it’s the heat.
Potassium is rich in bananas.
I don’t understand ancient art.
After all, Mussolini did some bad things too.
The organizers estimated ten thousand, the police one hundred thousand.
Venice is the Amsterdam of the South.
Albinos have music in their blood.
It used to be all houses round here.
The Chinese are all different.
It seems it’s better to sleep with a pillow.
I’d use Linux, but it’s too easy.
Now here is a series of famous paradoxes by the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus. I will not try to reverse these; if you think about them, you will see it is not possible. They contain unconventional truths that run counter to popular opinion, and they cannot be twisted to express an opposing truth.
Scandal begins when the police put a stop to it.
To be perfect all one needs is a defect.
The ideal of virginity is the ideal of those who want to deflower.
Penalties serve to deter those who are not inclined to commit any crimes.
There is an obscure region of the Earth that sends explorers throughout the world.
Children play at soldiers. But why do soldiers play at being children?
Of course, Kraus also commits the sin of the interchangeable aphorism, so some of his maxims can easily be contradicted, and hence reversed:
Nothing is more unfathomable than a woman’s superficiality.
Nothing is more superficial than a woman’s unfathomability.
I would rather forgive an ugly foot than an ugly stocking.
I would rather forgive an ugly stocking than an ugly foot.
There are women who are not beautiful but only look that way.
There are women who are beautiful but don’t look that way.
The superman is a premature ideal that presupposes a man.
Man is a premature ideal that presupposes the superman.
The only paradoxes that almost never seem interchangeable are those of the Polish aphorist Stanislaw J. Lec. Here is a brief selection of his Unkempt Thoughts (1984):
If only one could pay the death penalty by sleeping through it in installments.
I dreamed of reality. What a relief to wake up!
Open Sesame—I want to get out!
Who knows what Columbus might have discovered if America hadn’t blocked his way!
Horrible is the gag smeared with honey.
The prawn goes red after death. What exemplary refinement in a victim!
If you knock down monuments, spare the pedestals. They can always be used again.
He possessed knowledge, but was unable to make her pregnant.
In his modesty he considered himself a scribbler. But he was merely an informer.
Burning pyres do not light up the darkness.
You can die on Saint Helena without being Napoleon.
They hugged each other so tightly there was no room for feelings.
He covered his head with the ashes of his victims.
I dreamed of Freud. What does that mean?
Frequenting dwarfs is bad for your backbone.
He had a clear conscience. Never used it.
Even in his silence there were grammatical; errors.
I admit that I have a weakness for Lec, but I would like to end with a paradox of his that has always served as a guide for me, even though I have not always followed it, and I hope it will do the same for you:
Reflect, before you think.
[La Milanesiana, 2010]
8. Untruths, Lies, Falsifications
The topic of lying is one of the most controversial matters in the history of logic and the philosophy of language, not to mention ethics and political science, and if you wish to have a rough idea of this huge debate I can recommend a slender volume as essential: Maria Bettetini’s Breve storia della bugia (Brief History of the Lie). For those who feel like tackling a few hundred pages more, there is Andrea Tagliapietra’s Filosofia della bugia (Philosophy of the Lie). If I have agreed to stick my nose into this subject (and the allusion to Pinocchio is purely coincidental) it is because, not only have I written novels and essays on falsehood and falsification, many people still cite a passage of mine on the topic. In A Theory of Semiotics (1975) I wrote that we must consider anything that can be used to lie as a sign. The smoke that rises from a flame in front of us is not a sign, because it tells us nothing that we do not know already; but the smoke rising from a hilltop is not only a sign of a fire, which we cannot see, it might be used by Indians to signal something. Or someone might be producing it chemically to make us believe in a nonexistent fire, or to convince us that there are Indians on that hilltop when in fact that is not true.
Nonetheless, that definition of mine was too restrictive: I should have said that a sign is anything that can be used to tell not a lie, but, better still, something that is not the case in the real world. Because, just as fiction tells us what is the case in a possible world different from our own, the lie is only one of the many ways to say something that is not the case in the real world.
Let me explain. When Ptolemy claimed that the Sun travels around the Earth he certainly stated something that was not the case, but he said it because he was mistaken; he did not tell a lie. To lie is to say the opposite of what one believes to be the case, whereas Ptolemy believed in perfect good faith that the Sun moved. But now let’s imagine that Ptolemy had wanted to infiltrate a secret sect of followers of Aristarchus of Samos, who claimed that it was the Earth that revolved around the Sun, and that in order to be accepted by the conspirators he told them all that the Earth definitely revolves around the Sun. Well, by doing so, Ptolemy would certainly have spoken the truth as we know it—a
nd yet, by stating the opposite of what he believed to be true, he would have been lying. So, saying something false is an aletic problem, meaning a problem related to the notion of aletheia—that is, truth—but lying is more than that, being an ethical or moral problem. You can be a liar regardless of whether you are telling the truth or not. Iago, who accuses the innocent Desdemona, is certainly a liar, but let’s assume that, unbeknownst to Iago, Desdemona really has slept with Cassio. Even as he tells Othello the truth, Iago is a liar all the same.
There are some dolts who, if you deal too much with lies or better still with various cases of falsification, as happened to me in my novel The Prague Cemetery, immediately challenge you. They say that, if you portray the world as being full of falsifiers and the story itself as the realm of lies, then you are arguing that truth does not exist—and hence you are a relativist. This is complete nonsense, not to be permitted even to those who have never studied philosophy in high school or the seminary.
To say that something is mistaken or false or that it is the result of falsification, you need to have a notion of what is correct or true or authentic. Of course, there are different levels of truth and various ways to verify whether something is actually the case. If I say, “it’s raining outside,” the truth of my statement can be verified on the basis of personal experience. You need only go outside and hold out your hand. If I say that sulfuric acid is H2SO4, you assume that it is true on the basis of notions that we might call textbook, but if you really insist, you can also ask to be admitted to a laboratory where sulfuric acid will be produced before your eyes (even though this does not strike me as a great satisfaction). If someone tells you, “Napoleon died on Saint Helena on May 5, 1821,” you are faced with a historical truth that you will believe because your encyclopedia reports that somewhere, let’s say in the British admiralty, there is documentation of this event. But there is always a chance that Saint Helena’s governor, Hudson Lowe, filed documents that were incorrect (perhaps having misread the calendar) or mendacious (perhaps to conceal the fact that he had let Napoleon escape to Argentina) or that someone in London later forged Hudson Lowe’s original report by changing, for reasons we will not be investigating here, the day and the month.
And so we have justified the title of my speech: there are differences among telling untruths, lying, and falsifying, even though this triad actually covers a much wider field of phenomena. For example, is it true or false to say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son (filioque)? It is true for the Pope, who therefore does not lie when he says so, but it is false for the Patriarch of Constantinople, who accuses the Pope of—at the very least—making a mistake, without which the Great Schism would not have happened. In what sense is it true that Our Lady appeared at Lourdes, since we only have the testimony of Bernadette Soubirous? And if this is so, why does the Roman Catholic Church question whether Our Lady appears in Medjugorje despite the testimony of six visionaries? For truth of this type, the criteria of verification are very different from those used for sulfuric acid.
The Ethics of the Lie
But since any examination of what is true and what is false is a titanic undertaking, let’s restrict ourselves to the ethical problems of lying. Lying is prohibited by one of the Commandments, but we know that most of them fall into the category of what the church describes as “less serious matter,” which is moreover what makes the difference between mortal sin and venial sin. For example, given Honor thy father and mother, there is a difference between telling your mum not to be a bloody nuisance and killing her with a hammer, whereas (so I was taught in my day) less serious matter cannot apply to the commission of impure acts (covered generally by the sixth commandment). In other words, those who rape their grandmothers will go to hell as surely as any adolescent who gets mildly excited by a photo of Monica Bellucci. What happens with Thou shalt not bear false witness?
There have been political laxists, like Plato, who admitted that, to educate young people in the path of virtue, it was permissible to tell them (clearly fantastical) myths, all the way down to Machiavelli:
Everyone admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith.… Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account, and have known how to circumvent the intellect of men by craft, and in the end have overcome those who have relied on their word.… Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him.… If men were entirely good this precept would not hold, but because they are bad, and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them.… Therefore it is necessary for him to have a mind ready to turn itself accordingly as the winds and variations of fortune force it, yet, as I have said above, not to diverge from the good if he can avoid doing so, but, if compelled, then to know how to set about it.
Francis Bacon (Essays, 6) pointed out that “dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy, or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit, and a strong heart, to know when to tell truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politics, that are the great dissemblers.” And Baltasar Gracián noted that “knowing how to dissemble is a great gift for he who rules.” Anyone, even today, would think that a general who—under questioning—revealed his plan of attack to an enemy, would be mad—and, from Caesar to Trithemius down to the Enigma code, armies have used various forms of cryptography to communicate through dissimulation.
All the more reason why telling the truth is dangerous and inadvisable in diplomacy. And we make extensive use of diplomatic lies ourselves in our little games of everyday diplomacy, when we say we are pleased to make the acquaintance of someone we would have gladly avoided meeting, or when we turn down an invitation to dinner citing illness to avoid saying that the host’s food is notoriously awful.
But rigorists have always maintained that we should never lie for any reason, not even to save a human life. St. Augustine proposed the extreme example of those who have hidden in their own home someone that a vicious murderer is seeking to kill; when the killer asks us if the victim is in our house, good heart if not common sense would require us to lie, yet we must not tell a merciful lie even in that case. The topic was taken up by Immanuel Kant (On ethical duty toward others, On a supposed right to lie from benevolent motives, On lies). Benjamin Constant (Political Reactions) maintained that, while telling the truth is a duty, nevertheless “no one has the right to a truth that harms others.” What we know is like an inheritance we can pass on to others or not, depending on our will. For Kant, instead, veracity was an unconditional duty. “If a man bears false witness he does no wrong to any man in particular but he wrongs humanity, because if his conduct were generalized the natural human desire to know would be thwarted.”
As for the murderer who asks you the whereabouts of the victim you are hiding, Kant’s argument reveals that the great man was capable of talking nonsense every now and then (as when he claimed that music is an inferior art because even those who do not want to hear it are obliged to listen to it, whereas with a painting you can always look elsewhere). He says: if you lie and say that the victim is not in your house and the killer goes to look for him elsewhere, and it might be that the victim had left your house without your knowledge, then the murderer might come across him nearby and kill him. Whereas if you admit that the victim is in your house and the killer enters, a neighbor might come in and catch the killer before he commits the crime. That it was his duty to capture the murderer never seems to have crossed Kant’s mind. The meek professor was waiting for his neighbor.
A more balanced view of lying was held by Thomas Aquinas, who in his Summa theologiae (II-II, 110) forgave as a venial fault both the jocose lie told for fun, and the officious lie, told to serve some useful purpose (for example, one that does not harm anyone but helps save someone’s life or chastity). Instead he condemned as a mortal sin the malicious lie, which “does not help anyone and harms someone,” which
“benefits one person by harming another,” or “is told solely for the sake of lying and deceiving.” And it should be noted, according to almost all authors, that contributing factors in the definition of the lie include not only the awareness that one is saying what is considered to be false, but also the intention to do harm.
Instead, with regard to “white” lies, the Jesuits were later to talk about peccatum philosophicum or peccatillum, which gave us (Kant suggested) the word bagatelle.
But this is no bagatelle. Even today we ask ourselves whether concealing the severity of an illness from a dear one is an act of compassion or an example of deception. And if what Aquinas (II-II, 112, 1 co.) called boastfulness, or getting above oneself, is blameworthy, what about the fact that Kant also condemned false modesty affected to avoid offending the less gifted? And is agreeing with Socrates and saying “I know nothing” in order to get the better of someone who knows less than us the same as telling the taxman “I possess nothing”?
Baroque Simulation
The century that thought about these problems with the greatest subtlety was the age of the Baroque, the century of the birth of absolutism and reasons of state, the century of Mazarin who passed the time not only scanning the faces of others in search of lies but also concealing what he was reading or writing at that time and throwing elaborate little parties where the meat had to look like fish, the fish look like meat, and the fruit look like vegetables because deceitful appearances aroused wonder. This was the century of theatrical liars Iago, Don Giovanni, and Tartuffe, but also the century in which architects like Borromini lied with deceptive and ambiguous perspectives, the century in which appearance was more important than the heart of things because it was the century in which the eye and sight became instruments for the exploration of the universe, the century in which one Giuseppe Battista proposed an Apologia della menzogna (Apology for Deception, 1673), a work containing emblematic representations of fraud and simulation.