Truthful rigorism

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

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

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

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)

The argument starts from a function of language: a name ("father", "ruler", "friend") does not merely label, it prescribes a duty bound to the role. A word misused, or belied by deeds, therefore unsettles the very order it was meant to uphold, and zhengming (the rectification of names) becomes the condition of a working society. Truthfulness ceases to be a private matter of conscience: trustworthiness of speech (xin) and sincerity (cheng) are demanded because lying and the gap between word and deed dissolve the social fabric. Hence a rigorism of truthfulness, in which the junzi 君子 (person of noble character) is ashamed when his words outrun his deeds.

Analects, XIII, 3 (the rectification of names) · Analects, XIV, 27 (the junzi is ashamed when his words exceed his deeds)

Lying is for Montaigne the vice he most detests: "we are men, and hold together, only by our word", and whoever lies betrays the social bond at its heart. The whole enterprise of the Essays is itself a wager of frankness, to show himself "wholly and entirely naked", without disguise. This demand for truthfulness remains, however, that of a tolerant sage, not of an inflexible rigorism: it aims at good faith more than at the avowal of every truth in every circumstance.

Essays, I, 9, "Of Liars" and II, 18, "Of Giving the Lie"

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

Antigone refuses all concealment: she orders Ismene to proclaim her deed to the whole city rather than keep it silent, performs the second rite in broad daylight, and confesses without evasion before Creon. The prudent lie, even a protective one, is hateful to her.

Prologue: she demands that Ismene shout the deed to all instead of hiding it · First and second episodes: caught in the act in daylight, she confesses at once