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—and 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.
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”?
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.
Torquato Accetto, in his Dissimulazione onesta (Honest Dissimulation, 1641), does not praise simulation, which shows something to be what it is not, but dissimulation, which is not showing something for what it is—and practices the false modesty that Kant was to condemn. For Accetto (in a century of plots, deceit, threats, and ambushes):
prudent living comes with purity of spirit … on a path strewn with obstacles it is necessary to proceed with slow and sure steps … the Gospels invite us to be shrewd as snakes and innocent as doves … he who cannot feign cannot live … and dissimulation is none other than an industry, that of not letting things be seen as they are, a veil made of honest shadows … from which men do not fashion falsehood but give the truth a little rest … If someone were to wear a mask every day he would be better known than any other … but of the excellent dissimulators of the past and the present we know nothing at all.
Indeed, Accetto, who confesses at a certain point that he published his book in a bloodless sort of way “because writing about dissimulation obliged me to dissimulate,” was so successful in this that no one paid any attention to him, and we had to wait until Benedetto Croce rediscovered his book, lying forgotten on a dusty bookshelf.
On the other hand, although Descartes did not shun fame, after Galileo’s conviction he decided not to publish the book Le monde ou traité de la lumière, which he had been working on since 1630, and so he respected the motto bene qui latuit, bene vixit, or one who lives well, lives unnoticed.
It would be easy to say that, while Accetto praises dissimulation, Baltasar Gracián in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1647) praises simulation. But things are not that simple, especially for a baroque Jesuit. Gracián never ceases to assert that politics must not be confused with deception, that “only truth can give true reputation”; he accuses Machiavelli of being a valiente embustero—that is to say, a valiant liar—who “seems to have candor on his lips and purity on his tongue but spits out hellfire that sets customs and republics ablaze.” At first sight it seems that what he preaches in order to survive in his day is prudence, discretion, and reserve—because one needs “judicious caution in telling the truth that even without lying should not be told all at once” and “nothing requires caution more than the truth; telling it is like having blood drawn from your own heart. As much skill is required to tell the truth, as is required to keep silent about it.”
But there is only a short step between extreme discretion and timid simulation. Gracián knew (as Machiavelli had already counselled) that you have to be both a fox and a lion, that practical wisdom consists in knowing how to dissimulate, that cunning is more valuable than strength, that “things are held in consideration not for what they are, but for what they appear to be” and that “to be worthy and to be able to show that worth is to be worth double,” that “what cannot be seen is as if it did not exist” and “showing your cards is neither useful nor pleasant,” that “there is no perfection that does not risk being seen as barbarous if the splendor of artifice does not assist it,” that “we should not always act openly because otherwise others will notice this uniformity and will forestall and perhaps frustrate our actions,” that we must support others to obtain what we want, not reveal our weaknesses, shift the blame for our mistakes on to others, and never keep the company of those who can belittle us, and that “a good toothpaste perfumes the mouth and knowing how to sell hot air is a great subtlety of life, because most things can be paid for with words …”
Finally, “Man’s life is a war against the malice of men. Sagacity fights with strategic changes of intention: it never does what it threatens, it aims only at escaping notice. It aims in the air with dexterity and strikes home in an unexpected direction, always seeking to conceal its game. It lets a purpose appear … but then turns round and conquers by the unexpected.”
Come now, Gracián is not Accetto, and this is why his maxims were so well received in the centuries after him.
Certain phenomenological texts on lying cite narrative fiction as a secondary and admissible case. But narrative fiction is not lying. In saying that on Lake Como a curate was threatened by two bravoes, Manzoni does not intend to lie: he pretends that the story he is recounting really happened and he asks us to take part in his fiction, suspending—as Coleridge wished—our disbelief, just like a little boy who pretends that his stick is a rifle and asks us to play along with him by pretending to be the lion he has shot dead.
In narrative fiction we do not say something untrue in order to deceive anyone, or to do them harm: we construct a possible world and ask the complicit reader or spectator to inhabit it as if it were a real world and to accept the rules that apply to it as credible (talking animals, magic, humanly impossible deeds).
Naturally, narrative fiction requires the presence of signals of fictionality. Sometimes these signals are given by the “paratext,” from the title to the denomination on the cover that says “novel,” to the information given in the cover flaps. Within the text itself, the most obvious fictional signal is the introductory formula “once upon a time …,” but there are other signals of fictionality such as beginning the narrative in medias res, starting off with dialogue, persisting with an individual rather than a general story, and so on. But there are no incontrovertible signals of fictionality.
Narrative fiction often begins with a false signal of veracity. One example may serve for all:
The author of these Travels, Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, is my ancient and intimate friend; there is likewise some relation between us on the mother’s side. About three years ago, Mr. Gulliver growing weary of the concourse of curious people coming to him at his house in Redriff, made a small purchase of land, with a convenient house, near Newark, in Nottinghamshire, his native country; where he now lives retired, yet in good esteem among his neighbors.… Before he quitted Redriff, he left the custody of the following papers in my hands.… I have carefully perused them three times.… There is an air of truth apparent through the whole; and indeed the author was so distinguished for his veracity, that it became a sort of proverb among his neighbors at Redriff, when any one affirmed a thing, to say, it was as true as if Mr. Gulliver had spoken it.
If you look at the frontispiece and first page of the first edition of Gulliver’s Travels (1726): the name Lemuel Gulliver is given as the author of a truthful autobiography whereas there is no mention of Jonathan Swift as the author of the work of fiction it is. This is a bizarre but not infrequent case: if, given the signals of fictionality, everything appearing in the narrative goes under the heading of pretense, the cover, which excludes and denies fictionality, would in fact be mendacious. We could say that in those days the public was ready to recognize the fictionality of the “utopian voyage” genre, and that, from the True History by Lucian of Samosata (second century) onwards, exaggerated assertions of truthfulness sounded like a signal of fictionality, but often narrative fiction contains such a tightly bound assortment of precise references to the real world that, after spending a little time in a novel, and having become confused by its fantastic elements and references to reality, readers no longer know exactly where they are.
Hence the phenomenon of readers who take novels seriously as if they dealt with things that really happened and who attribute the opinions of the characters to the author. And as a writer of fiction I can assure you that beyond, say, ten thousand copies there is a shift from a public accustomed to reading novels to an unsophisticated public who see novels as a series of true statements; just as in the old Sicilian puppet theatre where, at the end of the show, the spectators would try to lynch the perfidious Gano di Maganza.
Thus far the lie has seemed to be a dyadic relationship between the deceiver and the deceived. But there is a lie based on a monadic relationship and one based on a triadic relationship.
Bad faith is a monadic relationship, through which someone, who nevertheless knows the truth, lies to himself—and usually ends up believing it. In cases of bad faith the person who is lied to and the person who lies are one and the same, which means that, as a deceiver, I ought to know the truth that I am concealing from myself, the deceived. Perhaps the most beautiful pages on bad faith were penned by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943), where he tells us the story of a lady who agrees to go and visit a man who she knows desires her, and who should understand that, from the moment she enters that apartment, her fate is sealed. But she denies this to herself, takes her host’s words at face value when he says he admires her, and understands this admiration in a spiritual and not in a carnal sense. She refuses to perceive her host’s desire for what it is and recognizes it only insofar as it transcends itself toward admiration. But then at a certain point her host takes her hand. If she leaves it there it means that she has accepted that the relationship has taken a new turn. If she withdraws it, she will break the “troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm.”
The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what happens next; the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all intellect.… And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.
The page in question is perhaps a little male-chauvinistic, but if we think of Sartre’s physical appearance, it is rather pathetic. Who knows what the lady was like.
Irony may instead be a triadic relationship, though not necessarily. With irony we say the opposite of the truth (“That’s very clever of you,” “But Brutus is an honorable man”), and irony works if the interlocutor knows what the truth is. To help him, signals of irony are used (see Harald Weinrich, The Linguistics of Lying) such as winking, clearing the throat, using a particular tone of voice and, in writing, the use of quotation marks, italics, or even (the shame of it) suspension points. And at this point irony becomes fiction. But if your interlocutor is stupid, no signal of irony is enough, and so you might as well make fun of him. And this is where irony presupposes a triadic relationship. The victim does not understand the liar’s irony (and therefore gives credence to the lie) and only a third witness to the exchange understands what the ironist meant to say—so that the ironist and the witness make fun of the victim.
Is there another case of the triadically structured lie? Yes, in line with the principle of falsification or counterfeiting.
The counterfeiting of a pseudo-double lends itself to false identification that occurs when A (legitimate Author), in historical circumstances t1, produces O (Original Object) while C (Counterfeiter) in historical circumstances t2 produces CO (Counterfeit Object). But CO is not necessarily a forgery because C could have produced CO as an exercise or for fun. It is likely that the Donation of Constantine was initially produced as a mere rhetorical exercise and only in the following centuries was it considered (in good or bad faith) authentic. But we are interested in the intentions of the false identifier (Identifier I) who asserts that CO is indiscernibly identical to O. Only then does CO become a Fake, and that is why false identification brings a triadic relationship into play (in which, of course, Counterfeiter and Identifier may coincide, in which case we are looking at a manifest lie, while if the Identifier is not the Counterfeiter he might make his judgment of identity in good faith, and therefore would not be lying even though he would still be saying something untrue).
For a forgery to be successful, there must be a notion of identity between two objects or individuals. And in order not to lose ourselves in Leibniz’s notion of the identity of the indiscernible, let us content ourselves with that of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (V, 9, 1018a): two things that are supposed to be different are recognized as the same if they occupy the same portion of space at the same time.
The difficulty, in the case of counterfeits, is that normally something present is put on display as if it were the original whereas the presumed original (if it exists) is somewhere else. It is therefore not possible to prove that there are two different objects that occupy two different spaces at the same time.
The counterfeit, obviously, is a success if the copy is in some way similar to the original, or to the community’s idea of the original. Otherwise, given Raphael’s widely discussed Vision of Ezekiel, no one would believe its counterfeit was similar and the problem would not exist. But certainly, with the exception of the experts, people are puzzled by the two works: which of these two paintings is a fake?
In our everyday experience, the commonest case of error owing to similarity is the one where we have difficulty in distinguishing between two tokens of the same type, as when during a party we put our drink down next to another, and then we do not know which one is ours. But in that case we are dealing with confusion between doubles.
A double is a physical token that possesses all the properties of another physical token, insofar as both have all the pertinent features prescribed by an abstract type. In this sense two chairs of the same model or two sheets of A4 printing paper are both doubles of each other. Doubles do not lend themselves to purposes of falsification and deception because, even though they are not indiscernible, they are interchangeable. It is true that a microscopic analysis could prove that two sheets of A4 paper have quite significant differences, but we usually consider that, for our purposes, one is worth the other.
Instead, we are dealing with pseudo-doubles when only one of the tokens of the type assumes, for one or more users, a particular value. In the case of collecting, particular value is attributed to a token when only one or a very few copies of a certain stamp survive, or the copy of an antique book bears the signature of the author. At this point it becomes interesting to forge a double and this is what happens with rare stamps. For the purpose of everyday trading, two banknotes of the same value should be considered doubles, and therefore interchangeable. But from a legal point of view they are different because they carry a different serial number—even though this difference becomes relevant only when a certain banknote has been used to pay a ransom or is the result of a bank robbery.
Nonetheless, interesting questions such as this one have been posed. Can we consider authentic a banknote printed (with fraudulent intent) on genuine watermarked paper, with the machinery of the issuing authority, by the director of the issuing authority, which is assigned the same number as another banknote, printed legally a few minutes before? If ever it was possible to establish which was printed first, only the first banknote would be authentic—as in the case of the birth of two royal twins, but there, however, it has been insinuated that the twin conceived first is the second to be born. Or should it be decided to destroy one of the two notes at random and consider the remaining one to be the original, which was perhaps the system used for the Man in the Iron Mask?
If the one we have examined is a case of false strong identification, we have false weak identification or presumption of interchangeability when we know perfectly well that CO cannot be identified with O, but it is held that the two objects are equivalent in terms of value and function and, since there is no precise notion of authorial originality, one is used as the equivalent of the other. This was the case for the Roman patricians who considered themselves aesthetically satisfied with a copy of a Greek statue, and perhaps had it signed “Phidias” or “Praxiteles.” And it is the same with tourists who admire a copy of Michelangelo’s David outside Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, unconcerned by the fact that the original is kept in the Galleria dell’Accademia. Perhaps the Californian visiting public admire the reproduction of the David in Forest Lawn cemetery as an original, which means that they do not have a precise idea of what an original is. Again in California I visited a wax museum in Buena Park, where the public probably enjoyed the version of David present there as an original.
Sometimes C transforms the authentic object into a counterfeit version of itself. For example, unfaithful restorations are carried out on paintings or statues that transform the work, censor parts of the body, and break up a polyptych. Strictly speaking, those ancient works of art that we consider originals have instead been transformed by the action of time or men—and have undergone amputations, restorations, alteration or loss of color. We need only think of the neoclassical ideal of a “white” Hellenism, whereas the original temples and statues were multicolored.
But, given that any material is subject to physical and chemical alterations from the very moment of creation, then every object should be seen as a permanent counterfeit of itself. To avoid this paranoid attitude, our culture has developed flexible criteria for deciding on the physical integrity of an object. For example, from an aesthetic point of view, it is usually said that a work of art lives on its own organic integrity, which is lost if it is deprived of one of its parts. But from an archaeological point of view it is thought that, even if the same work of art has lost some parts, it is still authentically original. It so happens that the Parthenon in Athens has lost its colors, a large quantity of its original architectural features, and some of its stones. But those that remain are presumably the same ones laid down by the original builders. The Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, was built in accordance with the Greek model as it appeared at the time of its splendor; it is formally complete, so much so that it is the Greek Parthenon that should be considered an alteration or a counterfeit of the one in Nashville. However, the half-temple located on the Acropolis is considered to be both more “authentic” and more “beautiful” than its American facsimile, not least because it stands in its context. In fact, the fundamental flaw in the Nashville Parthenon is that it stands on a plain and not at the top of an Acropolis.
What happens if the authentic object either no longer exists, or has never existed—in any case, if it has never been seen by anyone? This is the case of apocrypha or pseudepigraphs. It is maintained that an object CO coincides with an authentic object that has never actually existed. This is the case of the great forger Han van Meegeren, whose Supper in Emmaus, attributed to Vermeer but actually painted in 1937, was sold (at current values) for two and a half million dollars. When van Meegeren, who was accused of selling Flemish and Dutch works of art to Goering, confessed in the postwar period that these had all been fakes made by his own hand, nobody believed him. To be acquitted of all charges he had to paint another fake in prison to demonstrate his ability.
It is still an open question as to whether such counterfeits are always caused by fraudulent intentions. In theory, a block of marble subjected to the action of water for centuries could be seen as a work by Brancusi, without anyone intending to deceive anyone. Perhaps this was initially the case regarding the fake Modiglianis, if it is true that the persons who made them only did so for fun and then threw them away. But we find an explicit case of pseudepigraphs in the fake Hitler diaries, where the counterfeit is claimed to be an authentic object that never existed.
There are cases in which the counterfeiter knows very well that the original object does not exist, yet believes in good faith that the fake has all the functions that the original object would have had, and presents it as such in its place. This is the typical case of the diplomatic forgery. The medieval monks who produced false documents to backdate or expand the possessions of their abbeys believed, on the basis of the tradition, they had really obtained the privileges in question, and sought only to demonstrate this fact publicly. Paradoxically—at least for a mind dominated by unshakeable prejudice—the Protocols of the Elders of Zion also belong to this type, in the sense that their authors were aware that the book was a fake but held it to be a sacrosanct one because it formulated what they believed were the real plans of the Jews. This is what the well-known anti-Semite Nesta Webster had to say about it in 1924:
The only opinion to which I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols do represent the program of world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies in the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret societies who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
It is known that there is a set of different objects, all produced by an author A whose fame has been handed down over the centuries (let’s say, all the known works of Picasso). From the whole set A we can derive an abstract type, which does not take into account all the features of the individual members of that set, but rather presents a sort of generative rule (such as the style, or the type of materials used). A fake is produced and it is claimed to be the work of author A. This is the case of the false Picasso sold in 2010 for two million dollars by an antiquarian dealer from Los Angeles, who had paid the counterfeiter a thousand dollars for it. Honestly, on closer inspection, it was worth even less than that, and the victims of the fraud deserve no sympathy. But when, instead, the imitative nature of the object is openly admitted, then we have a work produced in the manner of the artist (either as a tribute or as a parody).
The only case of false attribution in which we can know with certainty that two objects are not identical is the one where someone shows us, for example, a reproduction of the Mona Lisa while standing in front of the original on show in the Louvre, claiming that the two objects are indiscernibly the same one. This is an admittedly unlikely event, yet even in that case the doubt would remain that the alleged fake is really the authentic Mona Lisa, while the one in the Louvre is a fake which has been maliciously (or erroneously) hung on the wall for goodness knows how long—as in, when the painting was found again after the famous theft of 1911.
To prove that a fake is a fake, it is necessary to provide proof of authenticity for the presumptive original.
Obviously, modern science has many criteria for establishing the authenticity of an original. However, all of these tests seem to aim more at proving that something is fake rather than determining whether it is authentic. A document is false if its material support, such as parchment, does not date from the time of its presumed origins, and today we are able to date finds with considerable accuracy. But while the proof that the Shroud of Turin material dated from the Middle Ages would certainly make it unlikely that the body of Jesus was ever wrapped in it, even if the fabric dated back to the first century of our era, that still would not prove it was used to wrap his body. Modern philologists have shown that the hermetic Asclepius was not translated, as was previously assumed, by Mario Vittorino, because in his texts Vittorino always put the word etenim at the beginning of the sentence, whereas in the Asclepius that word appears second in a sentence in twenty-one cases out of twenty-five. Still, if another text is discovered to have etenim always appearing first in the sentence, this does not prove that it was produced by Mario Vittorino.
Sometimes scholars decide to determine whether the conceptual categories, the line of reasoning, the iconological models, and so on, are consistent with the cultural milieu of the presumptive authors. But while it is reasonable to suppose that a text attributed to, let’s say, Plato is false if it contains references to the Gospel of St. John, there is no way to show that a text was written before Christ only because it does not contain any references to the Gospels.
A document is a forgery if the external events it cites could not have been known at the time of its production. Lorenzo Valla denies the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine because, for example, the Donation speaks of Constantinople as a patriarchate when, at the presumed time of its composition, Constantinople went by another name and was not yet a patriarchate. Recent studies on an alleged exchange of letters between Churchill and Mussolini have shown that, despite the genuineness of the paper used, the correspondence must be considered false because, for example, one letter appears to have been written from a house in which by that time Churchill had no longer lived for years; another one deals with events that occurred after the date on the letter.
But if the Donation of Constantine had not mentioned Constantinople, would this prove its authenticity? A text is certainly not by Plato if it mentions the Thirty Years War, but is a text that mentions the Thirty Years War therefore by Descartes?
The prevailing notion of falsification presupposes a “true” original with which the fake should be compared. But we have seen how weak our criteria for determining authenticity are. Moreover, all the aforementioned criteria seem useful only when dealing with “imperfect” fakes. Is there a “perfect fake” that resists any given philological criterion? If today an art forger of the genius of van Meegeren managed to get hold of a poplar board datable to 1500 or thereabouts, if he could get hold of oils and paint identical to those used by Leonardo, and if he replaced the Mona Lisa with a copy that was absolutely perfect in terms of style and execution and capable of reacting positively to all the chemical tests required, would we be able to discover the forgery? And who can say that this has not already happened?
Despite this, even though no single criterion is one hundred percent satisfactory, we usually rely on reasonable conjecture based on some balanced assessment of various methods of verification. It is like a trial, where one witness can seem unreliable, but three witnesses who agree are taken seriously; one clue can appear to be weak, but three clues form a system. In all these cases we rely on criteria of interpretative economy. Judgments of authenticity are the result of persuasive arguments, based on proofs that are likely, albeit not entirely irrefutable, and we accept these proofs because it is more reasonably economical to accept them than to spend time casting doubt upon them.
We question the socially accepted authenticity of an object or a document only when some proof to the contrary unsettles our established beliefs. Otherwise, we would have to examine the Mona Lisa every time we go to the Louvre, because we have no proof that the Mona Lisa seen today is the one seen the day before that has perhaps been replaced overnight.
But such verification would be necessary for every judgment of identity. In fact, there is no guarantee that the friend Tom I meet today is the same one as I met yesterday, because Tom undergoes far more physical (biological) changes than a painting or a statue. In addition, the person I believe to be Tom could be Dick who has mischievously disguised himself as Tom (think of master criminal Diabolik’s rubber masks). Tom is not more difficult to counterfeit than the Mona Lisa; on the contrary, it is easier to successfully disguise a person than it is to successfully copy a picture—except that it is usually economically more advantageous to forge a banknote or make a fake statue.
In order to recognize Tom every day (or in order to decide that the Cathedral I see today is the same one I visited last year), our parents, husbands, wives, and children must rely on certain instinctive procedures based mainly on the social contract. Such procedures are shown to be reliable because, by using them, our species has managed to survive for millions of years. And this proof, based on adaptation to the environment, is enough for us.
On the other hand, not only is it true that we manage to move around the world with some certainty, asserting that something is true even though we are often wrong, but it is also true that those who lie or falsify are almost always found out. It is possible that there are many unrecognized fakes in our museums, or that Julius Caesar lied to us about how the battle of Alesia unfolded, and to this day we do not know whether Nero really was crazy and set Rome on fire or whether he was the victim of malicious historians. But we do know for sure—and on the strength of philological science—that Constantine made no donation. And it is also true that, if a politician announced a tax cut and then the cut was not made, the massive presence of the facts would tell us that the politician had lied. Hannah Arendt takes a pragmatic view in her 1971 “Lying in Politics”:
secrecy—what diplomatically is called discretion as well as the arcana imperii, the mysteries of government—and deception, the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie used as legitimate means to achieve political ends, have been with us since the beginning of recorded history. Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
But in the end, when faced with the notorious Pentagon Papers documenting how the American government has lied about various aspects of the conduct of the Vietnam War, she judges the lie to be untenable. Noting that the official line does not stand up in light of the facts, she classifies that form of systematic lying as an offense against factuality that, when it becomes so generalized, engenders a pathological politics. And comparison with the unvarnished facts has led to the recognition that the CIA’s allegation that Saddam Hussein was preparing nuclear weapons was a lie.
Along with disavowal as a result of the facts, there is disavowal resulting from the contradictions that the compulsive liar is liable to fall into, and this is why it is said that the truth will out.
Referring to his own time (and not ours) Jonathan Swift (or someone else in his circle, since the attribution remains doubtful) published a pamphlet on the art of political lies in which he wrote:
There is one essential point wherein a political liar differs from others of the faculty, that he ought to have but a short memory, which is necessary, according to the various occasions he meets with every hour of differing from himself, and swearing to both sides of a contradiction, as he finds the persons disposed with whom he hath to deal. In describing the virtues and vices of mankind, it is convenient, upon every article, to have some eminent person in our eye, from whom we copy our description. I have strictly observed this rule, and my imagination this minute represents before me a certain great man famous for this talent, to the constant practice of which he owes his twenty years’ reputation of the most skillful head in England, for the management of nice affairs. The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour. He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think fit to refine upon him, by interpreting everything he says, as we do dreams, by the contrary, you are still to seek, and will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all; and besides, that will take off the horror you might be apt to conceive at the oaths, wherewith he perpetually tags both ends of every proposition; although, at the same time, I think he cannot with any justice be taxed with perjury when he invokes God and Christ, because he hath often fairly given public notice to the world that he believes in neither.
Well, on that occasion, through Swift, the truth spoke out.
[La Milanesiana, 2011]