Can You Live For a Year Without Lying?

Duncan Campbell writes in the Guardian about one man’s attempt to live for a year without lying:

The philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that telling lies was always morally wrong. But is it possible to live without telling a single lie for a whole year? That is the task that Cathal Morrow has set himself and he will let us know next year if it is possible, when he has finished his book on the experiment, to be called The Complete Kant….

If you go to Morrow’s website, The Complete Kant, you can read the first chapter of his book, which is well worth reading.

Update (I was called away from the computer but now I’m back):

Morrow’s predicament echoes a deep concern of mine which I find threaded through some of my short stories. Namely: is it actually possible for human beings to not lie? We all know that lies can harm people, but we also know that telling the truth can harm people as well. So whilst some lies are clearly wrong, some lies are necessary. (“Yes, that cake was delicious, Auntie”). We can find ourselves compelled to lie, not for personal gain, but simply to keep people happy.

Stepping back from the world as a whole, and looking at the millions of human conversations that take place each day, does this therefore mean that a lot of human happiness is often founded on illusions?

Similarly, some of my short stories deal with the question, “Is it actually possible for human beings to tell the truth?” After all, what is the truth, anyway? I know what it is to lie – I can understand how through emotional need, the truth can be deliberately distorted; but I also know that language, despite best intentions, often fails to capture the truth of something, or a situation.

If I steel myself to tell the truth, and nothing but the truth, I feel a sensation similar to that of someone grappling after a balloon being blown around in a fog. Not because I’m an obsessive liar who doesn’t care about the truth, but simply because in some philosophical sense, truth as an objective entity, a fact outside human perception, cannot be reached by the subjectivity of human thought, or expressed in the subjectivity of human emotion and language.

For example, suppose I look out of the window now and I see a blue sky. And I want to convey what I’m seeing into a statement. I could type on this computer, “the sky is green”, which is clearly a lie.

However, if I want to tell the truth – to convey in language the fact of something outside of myself, without any distortions – then I can type, “the sky is blue”.

But look at what I’ve just written – can the phrase “the sky” hold the truth of what I’m seeing? Can it hold the size of it, the scale of it, the substance of it, the fact of it? And how can I convey an object separate from my emotional response to it? At best, it’s just a phrase, the sound of words that refer to something outside, but the phrase can never hold in itself the thing it refers to. So when I type, all I can do is use signposts, pointers to something.

And when you read the words, “the sky”, you may have an image of a sky in your head that is based on a memory of a sky you’ve seen in the past, or an imagined construct of what a sky is, and in that micro-second of human thought you may innocently assume it is the same sight as what I’m seeing, but it is not – different skies, different days.

In other words, when I say “the sky is blue”, do I mean I can see just a wide expanse of blue with no clouds whatsoever, or are there patches of clouds here and there in a wide expanse of blue, or is most of what I’m looking at an expanse of clouds with just tiny patches of blue sky poking inbetween? Similarly, when I say “is blue”, you could well imagine a shade of blue in your mind, but that is not the same shade as the shade I can see. Are we talking light blue, dark blue, – what particular shade of blue are we dealing with?

Now this may all seem pedantic, but in everyday life, a simple statement like “the sky is blue” will be met with a nod of recognition, and people will feel that they understand the topic in question and will move on to the next topic – yet when we stop to think about it, very little information has been conveyed. Instead, the receiver has unknowingly imagined, albeit in a small way, what exactly the speaker is trying to say.

So what I’m driving at is the uncomfortable feeling I have that there is almost something wrong with the fabric of reality, in that human beings are not meant to know the truth, or express it; either we express outright lies about things, if we want to deceive people, or, if we genuinely don’t want to deceive people and try to be honest, what we claim to be the truth is really only an approximation – half-truths and incomplete statements about things.

It’s as though the human condition is based in some strange fog, where we think we can know the truth, but we ultimately can’t because objective truth is something very hard to convey.

~ by Paul Badger on 6 October, 2008.