13 - The Motto Vitam impendere vero and the Question of Lying

Summary

TRUE CAUSES

In a lengthy note to the Letter to d'Alembert (1758), Rousseau declares that he has taken as his motto Vitam. impendere vero. The announcement is solemnly accompanied by an address to the reader and by an invocation to truth:

Readers, I may deceive myself, but not willingly deceive you; fear my mistakes and not my bad faith. Love of the public good is the only passion that makes me speak to an audience, so I am able to forget myself [...] Holy and pure truth to whom I have devoted my life, never shall my passions sully my sincere love for you, neither self-interest not fear will be able to change the homage it pleases me to pay you and never shall my pen refuse you anything but what it fears to grant to vengeance!

These are the words of an oath. Rousseau takes comfort in an allegiance to truth alone at the time of his break with Diderot and at which he becomes convinced that he must live without friends. At this time, Rousseau wants to serve that truth that contributes to the “public good,” that is to say, to all individuals. After the publication of Emile and the Social Contract, in 1762, and without Rousseau's renouncing the goal of usefulness animating his “system,” his profession of truth will increasingly take the self as its object. His insistence at the beginning of the Confessions is well known: “Here is the only portrait of man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth [...] I want to show my peers a man in the full truth of nature; and that man shall be myself.”