IAS Lies: Bacon’s Truth - How the path of modernity was paved by lying

By Steve Fuller

Image: The Naples Bible moralisée, BnF, fr. 9561, f. 54v: demonic writing (on the scroll) and divine writing (in the book). 

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) gave lying its due. He is a Janus-faced figure in Western intellectual history because his life straddled two centuries. He is normally seen as facing the seventeenth century, in which he appears as a fellow-traveller of Galileo, a pioneer of the scientific method. But he equally faced the sixteenth century, in which he figured as a Renaissance essayist who rivalled his older contemporary Montaigne’s capacity to interweave seamlessly sacred and pagan sources, which provided the stylistic basis for modern prose. It is through Bacon’s encounter with Montaigne that Adam’s lying came to pave the way to secular modernity.

Bacon’s famous essay ‘Of Truth’ alludes to Montaigne’s brief discussion of Adam’s Fall in the latter’s ‘Of Giving the Lie’. One point on which they agreed was that Adam offended God less by eating the forbidden fruit than by denying the deed after the fact: that is, by lying. It is this interpretation of Adam’s transgression that had led Augustine to formulate the doctrine of Original Sin early in the history of Christianity.

The part of the doctrine that people remember is that every subsequent human generation is tainted with Adam’s transgression. It amounts to a permanent debt that humanity must carry until further notice, as reflected in the drudgery and mortality of our everyday lives. However, it is often forgotten that our free will — the feature that makes us most like God and least like animals —remains intact even after Original Sin. In effect, God continues to allow us to transgress if we so choose: we retain the right to be wrong and the freedom to make our own mistakes — and to lie.

For a long time, Original Sin was regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as a curious and rather extreme doctrine. It would seem to exaggerate both the heights from which Adam had fallen and the depths to which he had sunk. Yet by the early modern period, under the influence of Protestantism, Original Sin had become one of the main grounds on which Christianity was distinguished from Judaism and Islam — perhaps second only to the divine personality of Jesus, and in fact related to it.

These other Abrahamic religions accept that Adam disobeyed God, but do not accord any special moral significance to his prevarication about it. Because Jews and Muslims do not recognise the divinity of Jesus, they are not compelled to commit to the idea that humanity partakes of specifically divine qualities such as absolute truthfulness, even if God privileges us above all the other animals. As we shall see, the crucial point here is that Judaism and Islam do not confer on human language the sort of godlike creativity that could make lies metaphysically dangerous.

On the contrary, Jews and Muslims regard God’s relative indifference to human lies as indicative of the deity’s supreme magnanimity in the face of inherent human weakness. After all, our lies do not prevent God from knowing what we seek to conceal. To be sure, such a relaxed attitude to lying has played into modern orientalising stereotypes of Judaism and Islam as somehow ‘loose’ or ‘decadent’ because their deity would seem in the end to forgive virtually anything that humans might say or do.

So, what exactly is the Christian problem with lying — and what is its legacy for our secular times? It’s interesting to think about this question in light of Bacon and Montaigne, neither of whom can be regarded as conventional Christians. Bacon developed the scientific method out of his sympathy for the magicians whose practices had been banned by most Christian churches, while Montaigne’s preoccupation with humanity’s various animal-based weaknesses have led many readers to wonder whether he really believed in an immortal soul. Nevertheless, both clearly resonated to Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin. They were not drawn to the popular Catholic idea that Adam lied to God out of shame for his transgression, which implies a sense of recognition and perhaps even remorse for his error. (This is the figure of Adam holding a fig leaf over his private parts.)

In contrast, Montaigne regarded Adam’s lying as demonstrating ‘contempt’ for God, while Bacon more euphemistically described it as ‘brave’. It would seem that God was compelled to humble Adam because Adam refused to humble himself. Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden was, therefore, the outcome of a battle of wills.

This general sense of defiance would soon be found in Milton’s portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost, which in turn contributed to the revival of the Greek legend of Prometheus, himself the product of divine and human heritage who steals fire from the gods to give to humans. (Here ‘fire’ stands for a general principle of change, the capacity to turn one thing into something else.) In the Romantic period, Goethe’s Faust and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein popularized this image of humans as beings who would arrogate to themselves a sort of knowledge that is normally only God’s, albeit with little understanding of all the relevant consequences.

A subtle yet enduring legacy is the inversion of the meaning of ‘innovation’ in the nineteenth century. At the start, it referred to the monstrous corruption of ancient wisdom, but by the end it had come to mean the marvellous creation of a new truth. The shift amounted to an admission of humanity’s godlike capacity for original creativity. The inventions that were the basis for these innovations — typically machines — came to be seen not as better or worse forgeries of nature but as creatures in their own right that are entitled to their own form of protection, to which we nowadays often attach the phrase ‘intellectual property’.

Writing at the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche could easily see in this line of thought what he called a ‘transvaluation of all values’. But such a transvaluation had been already presaged in Montaigne’s famous saying that the true is one but the false are many. The difference is that Nietzsche was placing a clear positive interpretation on Montaigne. Lying is effectively transvalued from signifying the absence or deprivation of truth to being the generative source of alternative and even competing truths. There is a logical and a genealogical way to understand this transvaluation.

In logical terms, the non-identity between the one truth and the many falsehoods is only partial: the multiple contradictions do not amount to a single contrary. In the end, Satan is not the Anti-God. He is a delinquent creature of God. In the end, Adam defied God only on one point, but that nevertheless turned out to be one point too many. Because in most respects we may remain loyal to the truth, lies can easily pass as truth. In genealogical terms, the many falsehoods owe their existence to a progenitor truth from which they deviate. This insight lay behind Nietzsche’s claim that modernity consists in humans transitioning from being without God to becoming godlike: we shall occupy the space of God, as the first-born occupies the parental estate — uncomfortably yet necessarily.

This is Nietzsche’s theory of the Űbermensch in a nutshell. And so, our lies become the new truth, and our artifices — the innovations — become the new furniture of the world, replacing that of God’s nature. Indeed, in this brave new world, God is put at a distinct disadvantage, which is revealed by the sort of public relations that is increasingly done on his behalf in the modern era. God is presented less as the fecund source of all being than as the judge who finally stops the fecundity of the human liars and artificers who normally plague the world.

It is worth observing that classical pagan culture and those early moderns who drew on it for their inspiration — from Plato to Machiavelli — were never forced into this drastic faceoff between God and humanity. They approached lying differently. For them ‘knowledge’ and ‘power’ are correlative concepts concerned with control over the truth. Indeed, in this way of thinking, absolute knowledge and the monopoly of power are the two complementary faces of truth. However, if the dominant party needs to engage in excessive force or even excessive arguments, then its implied control over truth is potentially weakened, enabling a false pretender to claim a kind of legitimacy vis-à-vis the truth. This helps to explain Plato’s policy of pre-publication censorship instead of public criticism in his ideal republic, and why Machiavelli believed that the best prince keeps the peace by creating a climate of fear self-imposed by subjects who imagine the consequences of disobedience.

In both cases, the goal is to maintain the true by preventing the false from ever surfacing. The strategy is to ensure that force rarely — ideally never — needs to be openly applied. In this respect, political competence operates in perpetual deterrence mode, displaying a calm but fierce exterior. Thus, Machiavelli likened the guardians of knowledge and power to lions. Yet in the end he shared Plato’s fundamental pessimism about their long-term success. And interestingly, just like Plato, Machiavelli diagnosed the problem mainly in terms of the inherent corruptibility of those who would assume the lion’s mantle. Even those on top are ultimately floored by the baseness of human nature.

This is strikingly different from the Augustinian framing of the situation, which Montaigne and Bacon shared. For them the problem is not — as it would seem to Plato, Machiavelli, and perhaps Nietzsche’s Űbermensch — that God might turn out to be some classical leonine autocrat who fails to respond adequately to human defiance. Rather, the confrontation between God and humanity  might unleash what is most godlike in humans, resulting in an endless proliferation of alternative truths and the associated confusion of judgement and action across the entirety of Creation.

This is certainly the spectre conjured up by Milton’s Satan, as well as the argument that Milton himself pursued in his landmark tract against pre-publication censorship, Areopagitica. What we now valorize as Milton’s defence of free expression was envisaged even by its author as capable of licensing open intellectual warfare that could result in violence and even death, as everyone exercised their godlike capacity to create through the word. In Milton’s ‘free’ world, one person’s logos may well turn out to be another’s lie. When people nowadays fear the worst of our ‘post-truth condition’, it is a secular version of this scenario that they have in mind. The fear is not that people can’t tell the true from the false, but that they cannot agree on the standards by which to tell the difference.

This idea of lying as the wilful defiance of established truth has left an indelible mark on the character of modern art. Its most obvious and articulate presence may be Oscar Wilde’s dialogue, ‘The Decay of Lying’, which argues that the aesthetic quality of a work should be judged by the extent to which its own sense of ‘realism’ deters audiences from asking whether the art measures up to some other ‘real world’ standard. If so, the false is effectively indistinguishable from the true, rendering art self-validating — or ‘art for art’s sake’, as Wilde himself memorably put it.

Wilde’s line of argument recalls that used by Christian natural theologians to establish at once the existence of God and our knowledge of God. It amounts to saying that nature works as well as it does because it has been designed to work that way, and that any further questions we might have — say, about why certain aspects of nature don’t seem to work so well — should involve understanding the designer rather than doubting that the design is really there. Wilde’s blasphemy, of course, is that he would allow the artist to occupy the position that the theologians had reserved for God alone.­

To understand lying as a sort of ‘alt-truth’ process was scandalous in Bacon’s day and remains so in our own. Nevertheless, the sixteenth-century reappraisal of Adam’s defiance of God’s authority sowed the sense of human empowerment that came to characterise modern art, science, and politics. In an ironic twist to Plato, this development shows that indeed knowledge and power are correlative concepts, but we have so far really only come to terms with the democratization of power, not of knowledge. And on this latter point, lying may provide a useful guide.