Sincerity

If social shame is only nomos, to keep it quiet is to become complicit in the collective lie on which conventions rest. Hence two bound demands. Parrhēsia (frank speech) requires telling the truth without circumlocution or flattery, even to the faces of the powerful: asked what is the finest thing among men, Diogenes answered, frank speech. Anaideia (deliberate shamelessness) is its proof by deed: to perform in public, without blushing, what accepted modesty forbids is to demonstrate experimentally that this modesty had no natural ground. Cynic frankness is thus no gratuitous coarseness but a method of refutation that takes the body and the scandal as its arguments.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 69

If social shame is only nomos, then to keep it quiet or humour it is to become complicit in the collective lie on which conventions rest. Hence two bound demands. Parrhēsia (frank speech) requires telling the truth without circumlocution or flattery, even to the faces of the powerful, for whom deference has become an entitlement: it is, Diogenes answered, the finest thing men possess. Anaideia (deliberate shamelessness) is its proof by deed: to perform in public, without blushing, what accepted modesty forbids is to demonstrate experimentally that this modesty had no natural ground. Cynic frankness is thus no gratuitous coarseness but a method of refutation, which takes the body and the scandal as its arguments.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 69

Against Benjamin Constant, Kant maintains that truthfulness is an unconditional duty, even toward the murderer asking where one's friend is hiding: lying would destroy the foundation of all right. This is the textbook case of truth-telling rigorism.

On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy

When Marie asks whether he loves her, Meursault simply answers that he probably does not, rather than saying what she hopes to hear; he plays no grief at his mother's funeral and admits he would rather not have seen her dead. He can no more cheat to save himself than to please: to say what he feels, and nothing else, is for him a necessity stronger than his own interest.

Part I, chapter 4: to Marie asking whether he loves her, he answers that it means nothing, but probably not · Part I, chapters 1-2: the absence of any feigned grief at his mother's funeral

Beauvoir takes up the existentialist critique of bad faith: lying to oneself to flee one's freedom and responsibility. Authenticity consists in lucidly assuming the ambiguity of the human condition, without taking refuge in a fixed role, in the seriousness of ready-made values, or in the image one presents to others. Truthfulness toward oneself is a strong moral requirement.

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), figures of evasion (the serious man, the sub-man)

Bad faith poses a puzzle: to lie one must know the truth one hides, yet here deceiver and deceived are one and the same. Sartre resolves it through the non-coincidence of the for-itself: not being a thing, I can flee myself by playing at being one, like the café waiter who makes himself wholly a « café waiter ». To fail authenticity in this way is to refuse one's own freedom.

Being and Nothingness, Part 1, ch. 2 (bad faith, the café waiter)

Since men are wicked and will not keep faith with you, you are not bound to keep yours when it harms you and the reasons that made you promise are spent. The prince must fight as a man by the laws and as a beast by force, and among beasts be a fox to scent snares as much as a lion to frighten off wolves. What then remains is the essential thing: not what he is but what he seems, for few touch the truth while the many stop at appearances.

The Prince, ch. XVIII (in what mode faith should be kept by princes)

Odysseus is the epic's great liar, and the poem does not blame him for it: he forges "Cretan tales" in which he gives himself a false identity, disguises himself as a beggar to get home, deceives the Cyclops as he does his hosts. When Athena unmasks him, she does not reproach him but smiles and loves him for this virtuosity of dolos, guile: the goddess shares his taste for the skilled lie. His speech serves the end he pursues more than it tells the truth; yet this cunning has its counterpart, when pride betrays him and, naming himself in triumph, he taunts the Cyclops at the risk of losing everything.

Odyssey, XIII, 256-286; XIV, 191-359; XIX (the Cretan tales) · Odyssey, XIII, 287-302 (Athena admires and praises his cunning)