The Maker of Lies: Simmel,Mendacity and the Economy of Faith

The Economy of Faith and the Possibility of Deception

It is fairly well known that Georg Simmel sought, through a microscopic examination of the details of everyday life, to reveal the conditions for the possibility of society as such – that, just as Kant asked ‘How is nature possible?’, and proceeded to outline the forms of human cognition, Simmel asked ‘How is society possible?’, and outlined the ‘forms of sociation’ (Simmel, 1971 [1908], 2009 [1908]). It is not nearly as well known that, for Simmel, one of those conditions or forms of sociation was faith, belief, or what he sometimes called ‘religiosity [Religiosität]’ (Simmel, 1997 [1912/1906]: 150). While, in the secondary literature, interest in this aspect of his work has generally been confined to sociologists of religion, for Simmel himself, things like faith and belief are not particularly well understood if we locate them entirely within that realm. Rather, it would be more accurate to say that they are operative in every social relation, and every interaction between two or more individuals (Cipriani, 2000; Helle, 1997). For Simmel, in other words, faith and belief are components of our most mundane, quotidian experiences. And every social relation is, in some sense, a sacred one as well.

Simmel explains this principle in, among other texts, The Philosophy of Money. All money, Simmel argues there, and not only credit, relies on a kind of trust. For money to work, we must, without an especially good reason, believe that bits of metal or paper represent value. But, Simmel continues, this economic trust is an extension of a more general trust. ‘Without the general trust that people have in each other’, he writes:

society itself would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon what is known with certainty about another person, and very few relationships would endure if trust were not as strong as, or stronger than, rational proof or personal observation. (Simmel, 2004 [1900]: 178–9)

A few sentences later, Simmel amplifies this claim considerably. ‘In the case of credit’, he explains, ‘or trust in someone, there is an additional element which is hard to describe’, but which ‘is most clearly embodied in religious faith’:

When someone says that he believes in God, this does not merely express an imperfect stage of knowledge about God, but a state of mind which has nothing to do with knowledge, which is both less and more than knowledge. To ‘believe in someone’, without adding or even conceiving what it is that one believes about him, is to employ a very subtle and profound idiom. It expresses the feeling that there exists between our idea of a being and the being itself a definite connection and unity, a certain consistency in our conception of it, an assurance and a lack of resistance in the surrender of the Ego to this conception, which may rest upon particular reasons, but is not explained by them. Economic credit does contain an element of this supra-theoretical belief, and so does the confidence that the community will assure the validity of the tokens for which we have exchanged the products of our labour in an exchange against material goods. This is largely, as I have said, a simple induction, but it contains a further element of social-psychological quasi-religious faith. (2004 [1900]: 179)

Around the same time that he was working on The Philosophy of Money, or the turn of the century, Simmel further explored this ‘subtle and profound idiom’ of trust, faith, or belief in his ‘Contribution to the Sociology of Religion’. ‘The faith that has come to be regarded as the essence and substance of religion’, he states there, ‘is first of all a relationship between human beings’ (Simmel, 1997 [1898]: 108). By this Simmel meant, not that faith is an ideological expression of ‘material interests’, and not that it is an external projection of a ‘social fact’, as the familiar Marxian and Durkheimian models propose, but that it is a component of any human relationship whatsoever – that it is not, as it were, added on to a pre-existing social arrangement, or invented at some moment in the past so as to compensate for a lack of genuine knowledge (and thus something that an expansion of knowledge will eventually diminish, or render obsolete), but more like a formal condition of what we mean by society, or the complex of experiences that we call ‘society’. Put crudely, on Simmel’s account, to have faith is part of what it means to be human, or to live in a community of human beings.

Now, if this were all that Simmel wanted to say on the subject of trust, faith and the belief that accompanies social interaction (the, as mentioned above, sacred condition of social relations), he would already have said a great deal, and opened up any number of questions that would have to be examined in more detail (McCole, 2005; Vandenberghe, 2010). But, as Simmel clearly understood, this line of thought implies a corollary that is not quite so sanguine, that cannot really be avoided, and that I would like to take up in this article. Specifically, if it is the case that, not just religious experience in the conventional sense, but any encounter between two humans entails ‘a quasi-religious faith’ or a belief that is ‘both less and more than knowledge’, this is so, in part at least, because any such encounter also entails the possibility of faithlessness, mendacity or deceit. In other words, and as Simmel explains in a series of texts that I will examine in detail below, individuals must believe in one another because individuals have the capacity to betray one another, or betray that belief – to keep secrets, to lie and to hide the content of their thoughts behind the veil of their expressions.

If Simmel’s writings on religion and religiosity have tended to remain the purview of sociologists of religion, his comments on mendacity and deception have attracted even less attention. Indeed, while there has been some discussion of his essay ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies’, most aimed at a study of particular secret societies and not at the sense in which something like the secret is at work in any social relation (Hazelrigg, 1969; Marx and Muschert, 2009), to the best of my knowledge, there is only one article – in English at any rate – on Simmel’s approach to lying (Welty, 1996). As I hope to show here, the oversight is considerable, as what Simmel has to say about the lie has a real impact on the way we understand, not only his treatment of faith and belief, but a great many of his more familiar concepts and claims – including, for example, his theories of interaction and sociation, or the relationship between the self and society, his understanding of modernity, or the fate of culture and the subject in the modern world, and his appreciation of the spatial and aesthetic dimensions of social life (Frisby, 1992).

The principal aim of this article, then, is to fill a gap in the established literature on Simmel – to bring to the fore what he has to say about the lie and how that relates to other aspects of his thought. But in doing so, I also want to develop two other, closely connected lines of though. First, I want to suggest that, even though it is fragmentary, piecemeal and hardly among his central concerns, Simmel’s treatment of the lie nevertheless contributes in an interesting way to a much larger history of philosophical debates and conversations on the subject – one that extends from Plato and Saint Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida. In particular, Simmel provides unique insight into the very old problem of self-deception, or whether or not I can lie to myself. For many philosophers, including Derrida, the notion that I might lie to myself is absurd. It would amount to concealing something from the very agent of that concealment, as though I could hide an object from myself by holding it behind my own back (Derrida, 2002). For Simmel, on the other hand, it is certainly possible for me to lie to myself. But the fact that I can do so tells us something crucial – and rather unusual – about what it means to be a self – namely that the self is a border or boundary phenomenon, or something that takes shape in between humans, rather than entirely inside or entirely outside of them.

Second, and a little more complexly, I would like to suggest that what Simmel says about the lie has a bearing, not only on the way we study or understand social interaction, but also on the way we study and understand his texts – and, arguably, all texts of social theory, perhaps texts in general. For if Simmel is proposing that every social interaction involves an element of belief and the possibility of deception, then this must also apply to our interaction with Simmel, or with his writings, including the ones in which he make this very point. There is, then, in any reading of Simmel, and in any reading whatsoever, a limit to what knowledge can accomplish, or what can be known through the application of reason and observation. This does not mean, of course, that every reading is of equal validity, or that every interpretation has the same measure of truth, any more than it means that any piece of metal or any piece of paper can operate as legal tender. But it does mean that, as in the case of monetary exchange, and as in the case of exchange as such, there is in every reading or interpretation ‘an additional element which is hard to describe’, or an element of ‘quasi-religious faith’. It does mean that, as with all social relations, the relation that takes place when we read and write is marked, in some sense, by the sacred.

Cauernosis Anfractibus, or the Canonical Definition of the Lie

Lying forms part of the geometry of everyday life – so much so that it would be hard to imagine anyone without considerable experience of it. But at the same time, exactly what it means to lie, and what sets the lie apart from other kinds of error and concealment, is an extremely difficult thing to say. The problem of deception is, in this sense, a deceptive problem. It appears obvious at first, but it quickly opens onto a bewildering array of puzzles and conundrums. As Augustine puts it in the opening paragraphs of ‘De Mendacio’ (‘On Lying’), a seminal treatise on the subject, the problem of the lie is ‘full of dark corners, with many cavern-like windings [cauernosis anfractibus] … so that at one moment what was found seems to slip out of one’s hands, and anon comes to light again, and then is once more lost to sight’ (Augustine, 2007: 457). Or, as Derrida says centuries later, here echoing Augustine’s imagery of the cavern or the maze, the lie is ‘overdetermined to infinity’ and ‘a labyrinth where one can take a wrong step at every turn’ (Derrida, 2002: 32). Prudence would therefore suggest that we begin with a simple definition. But, as we shall see, there really is no such thing.

What we might call the canonical definition of the lie is set out by Augustine in the aforementioned treatise ‘On Lying’, which begins with a crucial distinction between falsehood and lying, or the fallacious and the mendacious. ‘Not everyone who says a false thing lies’, Augustine explains, so long as they ‘believe’ or ‘opine’ that what they say is true. In order to lie, in other words, it is not enough to say something that is objectively false. Indeed, it is entirely possible to lie while saying something objectively true. Rather, I must say something that I do not ‘believe’ or ‘opine’ to be true. And in this sense, the liar is possessed of what Augustine calls a ‘double thought’ or a ‘double heart’. He or she ‘has one thing in mind [animo] and utters another in words [urbis], or by signs of any kind’. For the same reason, Augustine maintains, the ‘fault [culpa]’ of the lie consists, not so much in the content of what the liar says, or even in the effects of their deception on others, but in the ‘desire of deceiving [fallendi cupiditas]’ or the ‘will to deceive [voluntate fallendi]’ (Augustine, 2007 [395]: 457).

That Simmel was familiar with the Augustinian definition of the lie is undeniable. Indeed, in the opening pages of ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies’ – a work that was first published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1906, translated into English by Albion Small, and that Simmel later expanded and republished in 1908 in the original German as ‘Das Geheimnis und die geheime Gesellschaft’, the fifth chapter of his monumental Soziologie – he provides what amounts to a paraphrase of it. Here is the key passage in Small’s translation:

Every lie, whatever its content, is in its essential nature a promotion of error with reference to the mendacious subject; for the lie consists in the fact that the liar conceals from the person to whom the lie is conveyed the true conception which he possesses. The specific nature of the lie is not exhausted in the fact that the person to whom the lie is told has a false conception of the fact. This is a detail in common with simple error. The additional trait is that the person deceived is held in misconception about the true intention of the person who tells the lie. (Simmel, 1906: 445)

One way to understand this definition would be to say that, while falsehood points outwards, or points towards some fact that might be shown to be false, the lie points inward, towards an aspect of the self that cannot be shown to be false, or submitted to the test of proof – the inner world of the individual, which remains entirely the purview of that individual, and cannot be intuited or seen by anyone else. In other words, the liar conceals something that is essentially concealed, or that cannot really be revealed to another. However, while matters are already fairly complex, and the winding cave or labyrinth of the lie is already rather confusing, qualifications and ambiguities are about to multiply exponentially. Because, even as it points inward, as it were, and involves an aspect of the self that cannot really relate with others, the lie also points outward, or places the individual in relation with someone else. That is to say, there is no lie without a ‘lying to’ someone – an effort to make someone else believe that I believe something other than what I genuinely believe. Or, alternatively, there is no lie per se, only the act, the practice or the performance of lying.

In order to pursue the matter further, and thus go even deeper into the maze, it is worth comparing Albion Small’s translation of the passage from ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies’ quoted above with the recent translation by Anthony Blasi, Anton Jacobs and Matthew Kanjirathinkal of what is presumably the same text that Small would have had access to in ‘Das Geheimnis und die geheime Gesellschaft’ or ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’ chapter of Sociology. Here, then, interspersed with some of the original German, is their version of the same text:

Every lie, even if its object [Gegenstand] were of a factual nature [sachlicher Natur], is by its inner essence [inneren Wesen] a generation of error [Irrtumserregung] outside the lying subject [über das lügende Subjekt], for it consists in the liar hiding from the other the true conception [Vorstellung] that is treated. That the one lied to has a false ideal [falsche Vorstellung] about the matter [die Sache] does not exhaust the specific essence of the lie – it shares that with simple error – but rather what one will accept about the inner opinion [innere Meinung] of the lying person [lügenden Person] is a deception [Täuschung]. (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 311)

At the crucial moment, then, Small has Simmel claim that a lie is ‘a promotion of error with reference to [über] the mendacious subject’. Blasi, Jacobs and Kanjirathinkal, on the other hand, have him say ‘a generation of error outside [über] the lying subject’. Apparently tiny, even infinitesimal, this difference actually changes quite a bit. For in the first instance, it would seem that a lie is something that takes shape inside of the lying or mendacious subject, while in the second, it would seem to take shape outside of that subject. Where, then, is the lie located? Is it inside of the liar, or the one who, as Augustine says, desires or wants to deceive (fallendi cupiditas, voluntate fallendi)? Or would it be more accurate to say that it first appears outside of the liar – at the moment when someone actually is deceived? Is it enough for me to want someone to believe something false about what I genuinely believe? Or must I also in some measure succeed in making them believe something false?

There is, of course, no simple answer to these sorts of questions, just as there is no simple translation of the word über in the passage above. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say that, in both the case of whether the lie is located inside or outside of the lying subject and whether über means ‘with reference to’ or ‘outside’, the answer is both. When we lie, in other words, we both separate ourselves from others and relate ourselves to others at the same time. Or, more accurately, we separate ourselves from others, or hold some aspect of what we believe to ourselves (preserve our real beliefs in an interiority or inner world that is so private or singular that, properly speaking, it can never be known by another) as the defining feature of our relationship with another. To lie, then, is to approach or engage with another through a kind of disengaged retreat. It is a connection with others that is accomplished through disconnection – an unsociable sociability, or a way of being singular and plural simultaneously.

The Inner World and the Topography of Deception

It would undoubtedly be a mistake to try to reduce Simmel’s thought to a single notion or claim. But if one had to summarize what is at stake in his work, and what sets it apart from that of other classical social theorists, one could do worse than to point to his concept of ‘interaction’, or his suggestion that humans are held together by being held apart, or related at the very moment they are separated (Nedelmann, 2001). Simmel defines this concept in a frequently cited passage from ‘How is Society Possible?’: ‘The fact that in certain respects the individual is not an element of society constitutes the positive condition for the possibility that in other respects he is: the way in which he is sociated is determined or co-determined by the way in which he is not’ (Simmel, 1971 [1908]: 18). Or, as the more recent, more accurate, if slightly less eloquent translation has it: ‘What kind a person’s socialized being [Vergesellschaft-Seins] is, is determined or co-determined by the kind of one’s unsocialized being [Nicht-Vergesellschaft-Seins]’ (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 45). We relate to others, in other words, precisely inasmuch as we keep something from them. We extend ourselves into a social world precisely inasmuch as we withdraw from that world, or keep some part of ourselves in abeyance.

While Simmel points to any number of phenomena as examples of this paradoxical separation and relation – from bridges and doors to money and the table settings at a dinner party (Kemple, 2007) – it would be hard to image one that captures it quite as well as the phenomenon of lying. The lie, we might say, is a paradigmatic example of interaction in Simmel’s sense. Indeed, the lie operates as a paradigm for a great deal of what Simmel has to say about society, or the relationship between the individual and the other. In order to develop this claim, this section will draw attention to two relatively familiar aspects of Simmel’s work on which his treatment of the lie sheds important light – his concern with the, as he sometimes puts it, ‘inner world’ or the psychological interiority of the individual, and his suggestion that social relations are best understood, or at least fruitfully comparable to, spatial relations. Once I have established the significance of Simmel’s treatment of the lie for his approach to those two more general theoretical problems, I will use the next section to show how Simmel contributes to a larger history of the lie, or history of efforts to understand what we mean by the lie – and especially, as noted above, his contribution to the question of self-deception or the self-lie.

Simmel’s understanding of interaction, and of the way that every social relation involves both an exchange between two or more individuals and a psychological inner world that remains private or is not exchanged, is explained rather well in the opening paragraphs of ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’. As Simmel puts it, all of our relations with other beings involve both blindness and insight, or something that we can intuit and something that we cannot. But our relationships with other human beings, or other subjects, involve something else as well. ‘Our knowledge of the whole of being [Gesamtdasein] on which our actions are grounded is marked by characteristic limitations and diversions’, Simmel writes. We ‘preserve only so much truth’ and ‘so much ignorance’ or ‘error as is useful for our practical actions’ (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 309). At the same time, he continues, while all beings might be hidden from us in various ways and to varying degrees, only the human being hides itself intentionally or deliberately. More accurately, only the human being possesses an interior or inner world that it can actively – and indefinitely – conceal. Simmel explains:

[T]here is inside the sphere of the objects for truth and illusion [Objektkreis für Wahrheit und Täuschung] a certain portion in which both can take on a character that occurs nowhere else: the interior [das Innere] of the person before us [gegenüberstehenden Menschen], who can either intentionally [mit Willen] reveal to us the truth about oneself or deceive us with a lie or concealment [Lüge und Verheimlichung] about it. No other object can explain itself to us or hide itself from us in this way as a person can, because no other modifies its behaviour through consideration of its becoming known. (2009 [1908]: 310)

Simmel elaborates on this notion a few sentences later, in a digression that, intriguingly, is not found in ‘The Sociology of Secrecy and the Secret Society’, or the version of the text published in 1906 in the American Journal of Sociology, but that appears to have been lifted from an earlier, almost completely ignored text called ‘Zur Psychologie und Soziologie der Lüge’, which was originally published in 1899 (Simmel, 1992 [1899]). ‘[A]ll’ of what ‘we share with another in words or perhaps some other way, even the most subjective, the most impulsive, the most intimate [Vertrausteste], is a selection from the actual mental totality’, Simmel says. We only ever disclose ‘fragments [Bruchstücke] of our actual inner life’, and keep the vast majority of it to our self:

With an instinct that automatically [automatisch] excludes its opposite, we show nobody the purely causally real course of our mental processes, wholly incoherent and irrational from the standpoint of logic, factuality, and meaningfulness, but always only extract from them stylized by selection and arrangement; and there is no other interaction [Verkehr] and no other society [Gesellschaft] at all thinkable than that resting on this teleologically determined ignorance of one for the other. (2009 [1908]: 311)

For Simmel, then, we cannot account for the lie in particular, and interaction in general, by distinguishing in a straightforward manner between the inside and the outside, or the internal world of the subject under the command of a will and the external world of objects or objective relations that might be studied and explained. Instead, in order to understand lying and interaction, it is necessary to develop a significantly more complex topography of human relations – which is, not surprisingly, exactly what Simmel does (Allen, 2000; Lechner, 1991). The most important instance of Simmel interpreting society in spatial terms is probably the ninth chapter of Sociology, entitled ‘Space and the Spatial Ordering of Society’. This chapter includes a section that Simmel calls an ‘Excursus on the Social Boundary’ – a section that operates, in a sense, as a boundary or a border within and between chapters. And, significantly I think, that excursus begins by referring us back to the chapter on ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’, or what Simmel calls ‘a case [einen], immeasurably meaningful [unermesslich bedeutungsvollen] for all human social existence, which the chapter on secrecy dealt with in detail’ (Simmel, 2009 [1908]: 551). Thus, while to the best of my knowledge this point has heretofore gone unnoticed by commentators and critics, Simmel posits a direct textual and conceptual connection – a kind of cavernous link – between what he says about secrets and lies, on the one hand, and what he says about space and boundaries, on the other.

The ‘case’ that Simmel proceeds to examine is less a case than a general condition of interaction. ‘All close coexistence [engere Zusammenleben]’, he maintains, ‘continually depends on each person knowing more about the other through psychological hypotheses than the other person directly and consciously [mit bewusstem Willen] indicates’. Because, in our actual experience of other people, we encounter only ‘fragments [Bruchstücke]’, and not a composite whole, we must always ‘supplement’ what we know, or what they are willing to reveal, with ‘conclusions, interpretations, and interpolations’ as to what they are hiding (Simmel, 1997b [1903]: 143). But, in the very act of conjecturing as to what others hide from us, we also establish the first of many boundaries between us and them – namely the ‘boundary … between the permitted, and indeed necessary, reconstruction of another mind’ and what Simmel calls ‘psychological indiscretion’, or seeking to ‘penetrate into someone’s intimacies and unexposed secrets’ (1997b [1903]: 143). All other social boundaries, and all other structures of interaction, are founded on, or organized around, this initial distinction between the necessity of experiencing the other as a relatively complete person and the prohibition on prying into, or simply inventing, their properly secret inner world.

If that were all Simmel wanted to say about the relationship between space and secrecy, he would already have said a great deal, for he would have already associated the spaces between us with our mutual capacity to conceal the true content of our minds, or our capacity to deceive. But in an immediately subsequent move, Simmel pushes his claims further still, and suggests that, while we cannot help but imagine what other people might be thinking, we can be certain about none of it. The other, or some aspect of the other, is, in other words, absolutely other – a singularity that remains beyond our grasp. Thus the ‘precarious objective boundary [sachliche Grenze]’ between any two individuals or subjects reaches its limit in ‘the boundary between the two personality spheres [Persönlichkeitssphären]’. It reaches its limit, that is, in an absolute difference, or the absolute alterity of the other. ‘[T]he consciousness of the one can only coincide with that of another to a limited degree’, Simmel writes. ‘[B]eyond that boundary, the domain of the other inviolably commences [hier die unverletzliche Sphäre dieses Andern beginnt] and that other person alone can decide on revealing it [über deren Offenbarung nur er ganz allein zu verfügen hat]’ (1997b [1903]: 143–4). Beyond that boundary, in other words, we can know no more.

Lying to Oneself and ‘the Fluid Element of the Soul’

In recent Simmel scholarship, a debate has sprung up around the correct interpretation of the following passage, which is from Simmel’s as yet untranslated essay on ‘Rodin’:

The essence of modernity is psychologism, the experiencing and interpretation of the world in terms of the reaction of our inner life and indeed as an inner world [das Erleben und Deuten der Welt gemäß den Reaktionen unsres Inneren und eigentlich als einer Innenwelt], the dissolution of fixed contents in the fluid element of the soul [die Auflösung der festen Inhalte in das flüssige Element der Seele], from which all that is substantive is filtered [aus der alle Substanz herausgeläutert ist], and whose forms are merely forms of motion [und deren Formen nur Formen von Bewegungen sind]. (Simmel, 1919 [1911]: 184)

But while both are compelling in their own right, neither reading seems to capture the basic or simplest meaning of Simmel’s words. For, in this passage at least, Simmel’s point is neither that modernity consists of an overwhelming surfeit of unrelated images and representations, nor that the psyche or the soul is able to stand apart from and arrange those images. Rather, Simmel is clearly suggesting that ‘the essence of modernity’ is the fluidity of the soul itself, or an ‘element of the soul’ in which everything fixed gets dissolved, everything substantial gets filtered away, and all ‘forms’ become ‘forms of motion’ – not predetermined boxes into which experience must fit, but dynamic structures that alter with the contents that happen to fill them, like a game in which each move changes the rules. The essence of modernity, in other words, is the relentless transformation of the inner world. It is the relentless transformation of the self.

In their now – oddly – classic study of Simmel and postmodernism, Deena and Michael Weinstein capture something of this notion when they assert that, in his later work at least, ‘Simmel defined human beings as boundaries of boundaries, never able to be just one thing: elusive’ (Weinstein and Weinstein, 1993: 219). For Weinstein and Weinstein, Simmel offers three possibilities for subjective existence in modernity, roughly corresponding to three stages in his career: the ‘blasé attitude’ (Simmel, 1997a [1903]: 178) of ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, where the individual defends against the proliferation of external cultural forms by retreating into the self; the ‘formless life’ (Simmel, 1976 [1918]: 241) of ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’, where they feign to express themselves directly in opposition to all external forms; and the bricoleur of the ‘Lebensanchauung’ (Simmel, 1971 [1918]), who actively and joyfully constructs a self out of the fragments of culture strewn about it. The latter is, as Weinstein and Weinstein put it, a ‘hypothetical subject’, who engages in the ‘affirmation of life-experience as a plentitude of forms that has no meaningful unity’ and ‘uses self-image as an instrument of self-activity’ (Weinstein and Weinstein, 1993: 219–21; see also Nedelmann, 1991).

In a certain sense, however, and despite its considerable strength, this approach offers with one hand what it retracts with the other. For, in endeavouring to construct a subject that is capable of navigating postmodernity, it effectively dissolves the subject altogether, rendering it the effect of the social forms, or the assemblage of social performances, in which it happens to be immersed. Something similar, if not identical, is at stake in Scott Lash’s more recent, and more politicized, efforts to locate Simmel in a tradition of vitalist philosophy, and to understand him as a thinker of what Lash calls ‘intersubjective flux’ (Lash, 2010: 40) – the ‘flux’ that occurs between different subjects, as opposed to the ‘flow’ made possible when subjects are thought to be formally the same. But in order to understand Simmel’s approach to subjectivity, or to the subject of modernity, we need to attend to this notion of ‘the fluid element of the soul’ itself. For, against what Featherstone implies and Weinstein and Weinstein propose, Simmel remains committed to at least some notion of an inner world, or an internal life that is irreducible to external relations and exchanges. At the same time, and against what Cronin suggests, he also ultimately refuses to treat that inner life in terms of a Kantian ‘I think’, or as a transcendental unity of apperception. Rather, and as the passage from ‘Rodin’ quite explicitly states, what is unique about modernity, or what constitutes its ‘essence’, is a shifting, dynamic and perhaps multiple or multiplied inner world.

This aspect of Simmel’s thought is displayed in all of its complication in a curious, two-paragraph fable or fairy tale that he published in 1901 called ‘Der Lügenmacher’ or ‘The Maker of Lies’. ‘The Maker of Lies’ is one of several short pieces that Simmel published pseudonymously between 1899 and 1903 in the cultural journal Die Jugend under the heading ‘Momentbilder’ or ‘Snapshots sub specie aeternitatis’ (Kemple 2007; Rammstedt, 1991). The ‘Momentbilder’ are, in a certain sense, examples of the principles Simmel set out in his 1896 article ‘Sociological Aesthetics’, where he maintains, in short, that every fragment of social life can be said to reflect, or at least cast new light on, the whole – ‘[w]hat is unique emphasizes what is typical’, as Simmel puts it, ‘what is accidental appears as normal, and the superficial and fleeting stands in for what is essential and basic’ (Simmel, 1968 [1896]: 69). So, in the ‘Momentbilder’, almost random snapshots become complex allegories for social life, or some aspect of social life, in general. Or, alternatively, one incidental moment is treated, as Simmel’s subtitle (borrowed from Spinoza) implies, ‘under the species of eternity’.

‘The Maker of Lies’ is typical of the ‘Momentbilder’ in its peculiar combination of simplicity and uniqueness. It tells the story of a man to whom a magician gives the power to make others lie – not, that is to say, the power to make others believe what he says, but to make them say something other than what they believe. The man uses this strange ability with what the story calls ‘the wantonness of a torturer [der Wollust eines Folterknechts]’, forcing people to say things they know are not true, even if they genuinely desire to tell the truth, thus leaving them racked with guilt, or ‘the scars of shame [den Narben der Schmach]’, over having lied. Eventually this man falls in love with a woman who neither loves nor hates him, but is indifferent towards him. He uses his power on her, and forces her to lie, and the two become lovers. But he soon realizes that, in compelling the woman to deceive him, he has also ‘deceived himself [sich doch getäuscht]’, or fooled himself into thinking he might be happy with someone who does not genuinely love him. And so, he turns his ‘lie-making power [Kraft des Lügenmachens]’ back on himself, and thus deceives himself into believing they are both happy. This plan, the story concludes, ‘worked admirably’, and ‘everything was as good as it could be – or at least almost so’. Only then did the man ‘realize what good intentions the magician had towards him’ (Simmel, 2005 [1901]: 409–10).

Despite its adoption of the fairy tale genre, the central conceit of ‘The Maker of Lies’ – a man who has the power to make others lie turns this power back on himself – clearly poses a number of difficult philosophical questions and sociological conundrums. What would it mean, for instance, to make someone else lie? If, as Augustine taught, a lie requires a deliberate and conscious intention to lie, then can someone really be compelled to lie? Is there such a thing as a forced-lie – by torture, for example, or some kind of emotional extortion? Similarly, what would it mean to lie to oneself, or to force oneself to lie to oneself? If the self is the source of the lie, then how can it also be the victim or the target of the lie? At the same time, and on the other hand, is it also not the case that, with very few exceptions, every lie is, if not exactly forced, at least conditional – that no lie is purely malicious, and that every liar has an external rationalization for why they do so? And, for the same reason perhaps, is it also not the case that every lie involves, in some measure and on some level, lying to oneself as well, or convincing oneself that the lie is somehow necessary and good? It is as though in this tiny fable or vignette, with its invocation of the forced-lie and the self-lie, Simmel goes straight to the heart of the problem of the lie, and reveals its essential aporia.

If it is the case that every lie is in some measure forced, and that every lie entails, in some sense, lying to oneself, then the problem of locating the lie becomes that much more intense. Clearly we cannot rely on simple distinctions between the self and the other, the inner and the outer, or even ‘socialized being’ and ‘unsocialized being’, but will require – to repeat – a significantly more complex topography. Interestingly, that is precisely what the narrator of ‘The Maker of Lies’ provides, or gestures towards. Thus, upon describing the man’s power to compel others to lie, the narrator quickly adds that ‘[s]uch a lie hardly belongs to the person himself [Die gehört kaum dem Menschen selbst zu], but only emerges [entsteht] at the border between [der Grenze zwischen] him and the external world [Außenwelt]’. In this manner, the forced-lie is not a ‘genuine lie [eigentliche Lüge]’, which ‘occurs when the word corresponds to the thought, and yet the thought itself contradicts the deeper sense of truth in us’. Rather, in such a case ‘the soul itself is inwardly divided [in sich selbst gebrochen ist] and believes that it does not believe what it nevertheless knows [und glaubt, wovon sie doch weiß, daß sie es nicht glaubt]’. Similarly, the narrator informs us that the lie that the man forces the young woman to tell – namely that she loves him – is told ‘not just with her lips but also with some piece [Stück] of her self which lay above her heart [oberhalb ihres Herzens lag]’ or ‘some layer [Schicht] which she could not deny [verleugnen] and yet where the soul continuously betrayed [strafte] itself with lies’ (2005 [1901]: 409).

Whatever else it might mean for a lie not to belong to the liar, or for it to emerge on the border between the liar and what is external, whatever else it might mean for a soul to be inwardly divided, or not to believe what it nevertheless knows, and whatever else it might mean to lie, not only with one’s lips, but with some piece of oneself that is situated above the heart, it is clear that, in these passages, we are quite a distance from Augustine’s notion of a ‘double thought’ or a ‘double heart’, or the idea that a liar has one thing in ‘mind’ but articulates another in ‘words’ or by ‘signs of any kind’. It is quite clear that we are considering a subject that, while certainly not reducible to external relations or exchanges, and certainly in possession of something like an inner world, is nevertheless not organized around a unified and commanding will, or a Kantian ‘I think’, but fragmented and segmented in any number of different ways – a boundary of boundaries, as Weinstein and Weinstein say, or something divided and torn from the outset. And this is the subject that Simmel refers to in the ‘Rodin’ essay when he defines modernity in terms of ‘the fluid element of the soul’, and when he insists that, in the inner world of the modern human, all forms have become ‘forms of motion’. This is the subject that Simmel’s various treatments of the lie, including ‘The Maker of Lies’, allow us to contemplate or perceive.

Reading Mendacity, or How is Society Impossible

One of the things that might be said to characterize Georg Simmel’s work, and set it apart from other texts of social theory, is its performative dimension, or the extent to which it is designed as an example of what it states. Thus, and to pick just a few examples, Simmel not only describes or writes about interaction; his writing is also a kind of interaction. Similarly, he not only describes the aesthetic condition of social relations; his texts also are aesthetic objects or creations. And just as, on his account, every fragment of social life might be said to contain or configure the whole, so too does every fragment of his work seem to point towards the rest, or open it up in unexpected ways. Now, when we apply this level of reflexivity to Simmel’s considerations of the lie, we obviously run into a number of logical or methodological difficulties. To what extent are Simmel’s texts on the lie, or on anything else for that matter, conditioned or haunted by the lie (and here we should recall, very briefly, that, like all of the Momentbilder, ‘The Maker of Lies’ was published pseudonymously, or by someone who is lying about their own identity)? To what extent can we, as readers, imagine that we understand Simmel, or that we have access to his genuine intentions? In what sense are we compelled to apply what Simmel says about the lie to Simmel’s own discourse and rhetoric?

To introduce these kinds of questions is not to undermine the possibility of reading altogether, or to adopt a cynical stance with respect to Simmel scholarship. Rather, just as Simmel’s treatment of the lie reveals the sense in which any social bond relies on faith, belief or a ‘credit economy’ of reciprocal trust, so too do these issues remind us of the extent to which every reading, in some measure or another, is organized around an act of faith – an unfounded and finally unfoundable commitment to the notion that Simmel is being sincere, and that we can understand him in his sincerity. Or, to put the matter a little differently, what renders reading (in the sense of a transparent access to the intentions of another) impossible is also what renders it possible – and open, in an essential way, to contestation, alteration and debate. If it were not impossible to know for certain what an author means to say, or to intuit the content of their ‘inner world’, there would be no need to provide any reading whatsoever. And if it were not impossible to know what any other person thinks or believes, if it were not impossible to know if the other is lying, there would be no need for society.