Liars, of the non-pathological sort, almost always give themselves away with little details or aside comments that betray their main narrative. I like to think that their unconscious is surfacing this incongruent information as a way of fighting back against a runaway ego. Montaigne assigns the same phenomenon to conscience:
So wondrous is the power of conscience! It makes us betray, accuse and fight against ourselves. In default of an outside testimony it leads us to witness against ourselves: “Lashing us with invisible whips, our soul torments us.” (Juvenal)
There’s a self torment brought on by our consciences that Montaigne described this way:
The Spanish blister-fly secretes an antidote to its poison, by some mutual antipathy within nature. So too, just when we take pleasure in vice, there is born in our conscience an opposite displeasure, which tortures us, sleeping and waking, with many painful thoughts.
Montaigne brings up something about conscience that’s often overlooked—that it has just as much power to give us courage as it does to strike fear. If we know we acted justly, with the best of intentions, we can accept bad fortune and understand that we didn’t deserve what happened to us.
Conscience can fill us with fear, but she can also fill us with assurance and confidence. And I can say that I have walked more firmly through some dangers by reflecting on the secret knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my designs. “A mind conscious of what we have done conceives within our breast either hope or fear, according to our deeds.” (Ovid)
The essay closes out by taking a left turn onto the matter of torture. And I think Montaigne is against it, but it’s unclear—he finds it inhumane and perhaps ineffective, but he’s unwilling to flat out say that it cannot uncover the truth. I think modern ethics have finally reached the point where we can condemn torture without these mental gymnastics. At least I hope so.
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