The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment

by Dallas G. Denery II

  103. Madeleine de Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations sur divers sujets, 2 tom. (Paris: Thomas Amaulry, 1680), tom. 1, 2–3. On Scudéry and her place in seventeenth-century French society, Elisa Biancardi, “Madeleine de Scudéry et son cercle: spécificité socioculterelle et créativité littéraire,” Papers on French Seventeenth-Century Literature 22:43 (1995): 415–29.

  104. Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 1. For an overview of seventeenth-century accounts of what constitutes good conversation, see Alain Montandon, “Les bienséances de la conversation,” in Art de la lettre, Art de la conversation, ed. Bernard Bray and Christophe Strosetzki (Paris : Klincksieck, 1995), 61–79.

  105. Christine de Pizan, The Treasure, 45–46, already recognizes this when she notes that one of the noble woman’s chief goals is the maintenance of harmony and peace at the court. On this topic, see Antoine Lilti, “The Kingdom of Politesse: Salons and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Republic of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics and the Arts 1:1 (2009): 1–11. On the continuity of the salon from the early sixteenth century forward, Steven D. Kale, “Women, the Public Sphere, and the Persistence of Salons,” French Historical Studies 25:1 (Winter 2002): 115–148, here 147, writes: “Modern noble attitudes towards women reflected the courtly traditions of the Renaissance and the codes of gallantry elaborated before and during the decline of feudal institutions, in which ‘polite, civilized attention to the ladies’ required magnanimity between both sexes by ascribing to women the role of teaching men how to act toward ‘the fairer sex.’ Pleasing women, therefore, became not only the font of mondain civility but an ethical cornerstone that complemented the importance of patrimony and lineage in noble society. The counterpart of la galanterie was the notion of women as civilizers.”

  106. Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 3–6.

  107. Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 10–12.

  108. Scudéry, “De parler trop, ou trop peu,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 94.

  109. Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 30.

  110. Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 31.

  111. Madeleine Scudéry, Les Femmes Illustrés ou Les Harangues Heroïques (Paris: Antoine de Sommaville & Augustin Courbe, 1642), unpaginated prefatory material. The nature of seventeenth-century female rhetorical education was designed to facilitate this concealed rhetorical prowess, Stina Hansson, “Rhetoric for Seventeenth-Century Salons: Beata Rosenhane’s Exercise Books and Classical Rhetoric,” Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric 12:1 (Winter 1994): 43–65. Describing the ideal of naturalness in seventeenth-century French conversation, Marc Fumaroli, “De l’Age de l’éloquence à l’Age de la conversation: la conversion de la rhétorique humaniste dans la France du XVIIe siècle,” in Art de la lettre, 25–45, here 42–43, writes, “Le loisir et le naturel de la conversation française sont les degrés supérieurs d’un ordre harmonique qui, loin de dissocier ou opposer nature et culture aspirent à les restituer l’une à l’autre, à les revéler l’une a l’autre.”

  112. Scudéry, “De la Conversation,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 1–2.

  113. Jane Donawerth, “As Becomes a Rational Woman to Speak,” in Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women, ed. Molly Meijer Wertheimer (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), 305–19, makes this point while discussing these same texts by Scudéry, here 309. Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2005), 155–58, stresses that aristocratic claims to social equality in the salon need be taken with more than a grain of salt. For a contrasting interpretation, see Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 47–48.

  114. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 275.

  115. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 279.

  116. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 267. Later in the same conversation, 278–79, Plotina suggests that Amilcar does not hide his own complaisance so well: “I am persuaded that when he seems most complaisant towards others, that is when he is most interested in himself.”

  117. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 262–63.

  118. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 71.

  119. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 72.

  120. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 104.

  121. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 105.

  122. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 76.

  123. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 133–34.

  124. Scudéry, “De la connoissance d’autruy et de soy-mesme,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 84.

  125. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 264.

  126. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 272–73.

  127. Scudéry, “De la complaisance,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 267–68. Stanton, The Aristocrat as Art, 134: “[H]onnête complaisance demands deft, unceasing negotiation between ever changing alternatives that manages life as it were the stuff of art.”

  128. Scudéry, “De la difference du flateur et du complaisant,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 296.

  129. Scudéry, “De la difference du flateur et du complaisant,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 294.

  130. Scudéry, “De la dissimulation et de la sincerité,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 303–4.

  131. Scudéry, “De la dissimulation et de la sincerité,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 305–6.

  132. Scudéry, “De la dissimulation et de la sincerité,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 321.

  133. Scudéry, “De la dissimulation et de la sincerité,” in Conversations, tom. 1, 311.

  CONCLUSION: THE LIE BECOMES MODERN

  1. Jean–Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 3, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terrence Marshall (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), pt. 2, 50. On the Discourse on Inequality as a secularization of Genesis, see Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 290.

  2. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pt. 2, 51.

  3. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (Second Discourse), in Collected Writings, vol. 2, pt. 1, 6.

  4. Rousseau, Letter to Beaumont, in Letter to Beaumont, Letters Written from the Mountain, and Related Writings, in Collected Writings, vol. 9, 30.

  5. Rousseau, Letter to Beaumont, 31: “The cause of evil, according to you, is corrupted nature, and this corruption itself is an evil whose cause has to be sought. Man was created good. We both agree on that, I believe. But you say he is wicked because he was wicked. And I show how he was wicked. Which of us, in your opinion, better ascends to the principle?” See Jeremiah L. Alberg’s perceptive essay, “Rousseau and the Original Sin,” in Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 57:4 (October–December 2001): 773–90, and, on transformations in the understanding of original sin in the centuries leading up to Rousseau, Die verlorene Einheit: Die Suche nach einer philosophischen Alternative zu der Erbsündenlehre von Rousseau bis Schelling (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996), 31–43.

  6. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pt. 2, 47.

  7. Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, pt. 1, p. 6.

  8. Quoted in Grant,
Hypocrisy and Integrity, 87, and, more generally, 75–88.

  9. Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières, in Collected Writings, vol. 8, “Fourth Walk,” 29. On the motto’s background, see 283–84, ft. 2.

  10. Jean Starobinski, “The Motto Vitam impendere vero and the Question of Lying,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 365–96, at 381–85, traces this definition to Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf.

  11. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fourth Walk,” 29. Lester Gilbert Crocker, “The Problem of Truth and Falsehood in the Age of the Enlightenment,” Journal of the History of Ideas 14:4 (October 1953): 573–603, surveys the attitudes of Enlightenment writers about lying.

  12. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fourth Walk,” 30.

  13. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fourth Walk,” 39.

  14. Augustine, City of God, bk. XIV, ch. 3, 586.

  15. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fourth Walk,” 39. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 361, makes this point: “For [with Rousseau] the distinction of vice and virtue, of good and depraved will, has been aligned with the distinction between dependence on self and dependence on others. Goodness is identified with freedom, with finding the motives for one’s actions within oneself. Although drawing on ancient sources, Rousseau is actually pushing this subjectivism of modern moral understanding a stage further.” Although his literary sources may well have been ancient, the culture of the salon clearly animates his critique.

  16. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fourth Walk,” 39.

  17. Rousseau, Reveries, “Fourth Walk,” 34.

  18. Following Victor Gourevitch, “Rousseau on Lying: A Provisional Reading of the Fourth Rêverie, Berkshire Review 15 (1980): 93–107, here, 100–103. Compare with Starobinski, “Vitam impendere vero,” 386–90.

  19. Arthur M. Melzer, “Rousseau and the Modern Cult of Sincerity,” Harvard Review of Philosophy (Spring 1995): 4–21, writes, 14: “In Shakespeare and Molière we find much emphasis on the falseness of men’s claims to virtue and nobility, but the opposite of hypocritical nobility is still taken to be genuine nobility—not sincerity as such. Thus, Rousseau (and we after him) is doing something fundamentally new when he makes the seemingly obvious move from blaming hypocrisy to praising sincerity—that is, not praising sincere piety, or sincere righteousness, but sincerity itself and by itself. In other words, Rousseau is the first to define the good as being oneself regardless of what one may be. And that is a radically new position—a position which is at the core of his and our unique obsession with sincerity.”

  20. Karl Barth, Protestant Thought from Rousseau to Ritschl (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 105–8: “In common with the whole of the eighteenth century Rousseau was a confirmed Pelagian, a declared opponent of the Church doctrine of original sin … [but] … Rousseau was so energetic in pursuing this idea, so naïve in taking it as his constant premise even in his own Pelagian century, [he] became a kind of martyr to Pelagianism…. Be that as it may, the church doctrine of original sin has seldom, I believe, been denied with such disconcerting candour and in so directly personal a way.” This is partially cited and the general argument reaffirmed in Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 18.

  21. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals: Part II, Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 552–53. Useful starting points into the literature on Kant’s analysis of lies are James Mahon, “The Truth about Lies in Kant,” in The Philosophy of Deception, ed. Clancy Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 201–24, Alasdaire Mac-Intyre, Truthfulness, Lies and Moral Philosophers: What Can We Learn from Mill and Kant, in The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, vol. 15 (Salt Lakes City: University of Utah Press, 1994), 309–69, and Christine M. Korsgaard, “The Right to Lie: Kant on Dealing with Evil,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 15:4 (Autumn 1986): 325–49.

  22. Immanuel Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” in Practical Philosophy, 613.

  23. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 554.

  24. Immanuel Kant, Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 221–34, here, 221.

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