Customer Reviews

The Liar's Tale: A History of Falsehood

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This is a very enjoyable read. Jeremy Campbell gives us a light, but well-informed, history of western philosophy. He chronicles the search for truth that has persevered throughout the ages, while demonstrating that the human animal has been employing deception (both intentionally and unintentionally) for just as long.

The story begins with the early Greek sophists, who correctly intuited that truth in language can be highly malleable. Plato's subsequent Idealism, and much of the western philosophic tradition, was a vain effort to ground and locate absolute truth within the context of language. Campbell's story comes full circle with Wittgenstein's description of the language-game, in which it is recognized that "absolute truth" cannot be located within the imperfect convention of language.

Campbell's story is filled with entertaining anecdotes, such as the elderly Kant's "white lie", in apparent conflict with his categorical imperative. Campbell eventually arrives at the modern deconstructionists (Derrida, Foucault, and followers), who take Wittgenstein's insight (no "objective", or "absolute" truth within language) and try to disingenuously derive from it the conclusion that all standards of veracity (rules of the language game) are chimera, and, therefore, anything goes, and each individual's interpretation of a single narrative is singularly valid and cannot be evaluated against another's.

Campbell exposes the intellectual bankruptcy of these modern Liars, and even makes reference to Alan Sokal's ploy in the journal Social Text, in which it was demonstrated that, although the journal's editors were, themselves, habitual Liars, they were incapable of discerning Mr. Sokal's blatant, but brilliant, Lies. (I highly recommend Sokal's book, Fashionable Nonsense. No one could possibly undress and expose intellectual charlatanism in a more entertaining or satisfying fashion than Sokal did, through his first essay (the hoax), the second essay (exposure of the hoax), and the book. Stanley Fish- are you out there?)

Anyway, Mr. Campbell gives an excellent tour of the western philosophic tradition, with a unique emphasis on the role of deception throughout human history and culture.

I loved this book. Thankfully it's also quite serious and clearly written. If you think telling the truth is simple, reconsider. Campbell's book takes us through 2,500 years of analysis of a seemingly simple problem, beginning of course with the ancient Greeks and ending on today's scientist's bench. Much of the identification of the human concept of truth doesn't necessarily begin with Free Will but lies both in the natural structure of language and evolution. I was surprised to find how near 19th Century German philosophers came to identifying present day evolutionary psychology.

First off, the title of this book, THE LIAR'S TALE, is a lie!

Maybe this "cover lie" was intentional on Jeremy Campbell's part (more likely it was the marketing director at Norton publishing who realized that a book entitled THE LIAR'S TALE would move more copies than a book called THE HUMAN HUNT FOR TRUTHFUL MEANING). If it was a purposeful lie, it is consistent with Campbell's core thesis: we human beings are far more concerned with finding and creating meaning for ourselves than we are in discovering factual truth.

This book WILL challenge your thinking and stretch your vocabulary. But know this--it's actually a book about philosophy and philosophers. That's a good thing. That's a rare thing these days. Richard Tarnas does it bigger and better in his book PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND. Tarnas attempts more and achieves more with his work.

Campbell, though less ambitious, succeeds too. He focuses on language as much as ideas. If you are wanting to read a meaningful book about meaning, you'll mean to read this book. I'm not trying to be mean to you. I just know what this book could mean for you. Know what I mean?

This is a great exposure of a simple premise -- that honesty and the truth are what people want and they should be encouraged. This premise underlies popular folklore as well as religious teachings. Yet the author leads us into the thick of how full human nature is of lieing, even for a while contemplating the idea that the ability to lie is what actually makes us human. It is that fundamental (except for autistic children who do not have the ability to lie, often until they are teenagers).

We all "slant" the facts, speak "diplomatically" to others, utter only "appropriate" comments. We have a whole vocabulary of names of types of lies that offer explanations of our motives for lieing, so pervasive are untruths.

So much of our social activity is aimed at influencing the group, by putting ourselves in the other person's shoes, we spin our tales to nudge others into behaving as we wish them to. This is a primary purpose of human social interaction. Once we are able to predict how others will react to what we say, we begin to change our utterances in order to influence them. We "lie".

The book is full of examples of great thinkers' struggles with these dilemas. A great eye opener. Fascinating.

Perched at the climax of the Gospel of John is a scene in which Pilate interrogates Jesus with the question: "What is truth?"

The moment gains added power in the biblical text because while Pilate meant the question rhetorically, the gospel tacitly takes the position that the answer to that question would have been obvious to someone who had actually been paying attention. In this way, the gospel makes a point, among others to be sure, that truth is in the eye of the beholder.

And just how reliable are our eyes anyway? It is an ironic coincidence that the eye has been a much debated battleground in the evolution debate. Far from being a stream lined organ that unerringly serves its purpose, Darwin among others noted the ad hoc nature of the eye, bearing the imprint of its many evolutionary twists and turns to make it the organ it is today.

However, even being the organ it is today, we still can only observe but a small section of the spectrum of available light. We can only see what we can see and by extension perhaps we can only see the truth we can see.

I think this book is important reading because it compares deceit in human interactions to deceit occuring in nature. Despite millenia of moral codes extolling the virtues of honesty and candor, the fact remains that deceit plays an important role in human interactions.

What is the difference between a dangerous predator feigning death to draw its prey closer and an office rival feigning friendship to draw incriminating confidences from an opponent? That the sole distinction seems to lie in the spoken nature of the activity may indicate the only part of the transaction that is uniquely human.

Written like a textbook and a bit of a difficult start. However, it is well worth the exercise. I read a chapter every few days. It's like swallow and taste. It provides history and context. It carries the reader from Socrates to today. A good exercise for someone interested in the history of philosophy.

"The Liar's Tale," by Jeremy Campbell, is an engaging, lush survey of philosophy from its origins by Thales to the present time, all organized around the topics of truth, "Truth", and lying. At times it can challenge your views, as, for instance, when it shows common threads of belief between intellectual good guys (Occam, Francis Bacon, and the medieval Nominalists) and villains (the Sophists, Jacques Derrida).

There are also many insightful gems. For example, a seemingly revolutionary belief that "facts" are the product of the ruling elite and tools of oppression can actually be an impediment to addressing factual social inequities, and hence serve to prop up the status quo.

If you are at all uneasy by claims that a made-up lie can reveal a greater truth (e.g., Rigoberta Menchu's "autobiography", which earned her a Nobel Peace Prize), then this is the read for you. My only regret from reading it is to learn that some species of firefly spoof the mating signals of other firefly species so that they can eat the duped victims; somehow that takes a little fun out of watching the pretty lights.

The Liar's Tale purports to be a history of falsehood, but the author spends much more time on the philosophical foundations of truth. The most infamous episodes of lying, in particular Hitler's Big Lie, along with modern theories of propaganda are not even mentioned. This mislabeling would hardly be a fatal flaw, but Campbell badly misreads the record of modern philosophy on the issue of truth. Descartes, a thoroughgoing nominalist and a liar by necessity (as he wrote at the time of the Inquisition) comes across as a champion of God, Ideas, and absolute Truth. Hobbes is hardly mentioned while much ink is spilled on minor linguists like Derrida, and having spilled it, Campbell fails to mention the Heidegger affair, Paul de Man, and other notorious instances of postmodern mendacity. Campbell has written a bad history just good enough that an important historical subject will have to wait for the next generation of scholars.

Alas, the lovely cover of this book obscures the fact that it is little more than a sophomoric rehash of highlights in the history of Western philosophy. Interminable and boring. You know, feller, there is a difference between deceit and the philosophical practice of wondering whether the world is real. What I wanted when I picked this up was a nitty gritty encounter with human falsehood ... conscious or otherwise. I sher didn't git it. BTW, I'm a multi-billionaire who lavishes vast riches upon fetching men with complex, arcane philosophical projects purely because of my love of learning ... see, it's easy to lie. Pity Campbell didn't start there.

After so many books on politics and lies this season, this book seems to stage front the topic du jour, and the nice cover adds value to the book with what I guess is the Owl of Minerva swooping at dusk on Pinoccio in a dark alley near some shady characters. As to the main argument, it is interesting enough,caveat lector, but what struck me is that there is a problem with the author's treatment of Darwinism. Beside some precipice of disillusion the author proceeds, as one presumes, to tell the truth about lying,usefully brisk, but one fears that judgments here reflect the later history of those in the cul de sac--going, going, gone to the dogs. We live in strange philosophic times, if the status of truth is at such low ebb. Here, modern culture is at risk of being worthless, because it blocks development, contrary to the author's associations with evolution. We used to live in villages as yokels, but now the endless environment of deception is unavoidable and the resulsts are abnormal. With the rise of modern communications and the spectacle of endless politicians clawing for the mike live and on television for the right to fib we see couch potato totalitarianism in action as the brains of whole populations turn into mush. It's not a normal situation, folks, and however lost a lost cause it remains to point it out the fact remains Machiavelli didn't get it right. Turn off the television, you are on your own.
But the main problem is the treatment of Darwin. The author of 'Grammatical Man' which was anti-Darwinian is now plying sociobiology and the relationship of evolution to deception. Surely this is a complete red herring for the plain fact of the matter is that there is a problem with this theory and it persists, we suspect, because too many of its proponents promote it as a deception, if not an outright lie. This is a good example of the damage done by Darwinism: it deceived the author, assuming he is being truthful. The author was right the first time, and in any case science, at least, has to be about truth, otherwise it is not science.