Jeremy Campbell

The Liar's Tale

A bold new exploration of ethics and philosophy, The Liar's Tale extols the benefits of falsehood.

Lies are often so subtle, so deftly woven into easily acceptable truths that we often fail to recognize them. Fireflies find mates by duping rivals with patterns of deceptive flashes; politicians win elections by distorting statistics and spouting half-truths; artists often prize imagination and beauty over simple realism. We accept these events as conventional occurrences and rarely question how they came to pass nor do we debate their merit. In The Liar's Tale, Jeremy Campbell rigorously explores the provocative notion that deception is not only an ineradicable aspect of human nature but a necessary and useful part of human success and enlightenment.

In lucid, engaging prose, Campbell shows that, throughout history, the devices of falsehood—whether simple exaggeration, pretense, or barefaced lies—have always been hard to resist and easy to employ. In tracing the natural history of falsehood, The Liar's Tale turns Sisella Bok's defense of truth, as demonstrated in her book Lying, on its head as Campbell compellingly proves that deception can no longer be seen as an artificial, deviant, or even dispensable feature of life; instead, it is a natural, inevitable, and relentlessly necessary part of our world. As art and fiction have increasingly come to dominate our culture, we have obtained a dissatisfaction with the thinness, the inadequacy of literal truth—a sense that it fails to do justice to the rich possibilities of language and experience.

Beginning with a discussion of evolutionary biology and the necessity (and ultimate value) of deceit in the animal kingdom, Campbell asks the unsettling question of whether falsehood might, in fact, be instinctual, or at least natural. From there, Campbell describes the classical philosophical foundation of truth as the ultimate category of knowledge and organization, focusing on Aristotle and his battles with the Sophists, early philosophers who claimed that truth was unstable and illusory. This division within classical thought has reappeared throughout history, even in the European enlightenment, which centered on the possibility of individual knowledge and liberty. Campbell's seamless integration of art, literature, and philosophy shows how the nineteenth century's focus on individuality, imagination, and irony eventually began to privilege artifice and fraud over nature and simplicity. Ultimately, this laid the foundation for the twentieth century's philosophical and cultural apotheosis of lying, exemplified by figures such as Freud, Wittgenstein, and Derrida—all of whom made deception and ambiguity a main thematic component of their thought.

In its vast scope and fluid integration of a multitude of disciplines and ideas, The Liar's Tale is a daring inquiry into the nature of deception and its place in our cultural heritage. Unsettling and highly original, The Liar's Tale promises to provoke renewed interest and debate about truth and ethics.