When reproached for explicitly identifying as Jewish in front of the Republican Jewish Coalition, at a campaign event in Florida, and on his campaign website, former U.S. congressman and pathological liar George Santos explained: “I said I was Jew-ish.” When I heard about this episode in 2022, I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I wanted to figure out why. Upon reflection, my preoccupation didn’t seem to arise from the fact that it was a lie, as Santos had lied to the public about plenty of outrageous things, including that his mother died in 9/11, that he started an animal rights charity, and that he’d previously worked at Goldman Sachs, among others—a fact that also enables Santos’ lies to function as bullshit, à la Harry Frankfurt. My preoccupation also didn’t seem to arise from any indignation about Santos claiming a Jewish identity, even though doing so is bizarre in general, and morally wrong in the context of deceiving potential voters. Admittedly, though my preoccupation definitelyhad something to do with the fact that Santos’ lie is a pun, I contend that this lie is more than the sum of its parts: that is, more complicated than simply a joke, a lie, or bullshit. Ultimately, I have concluded that the “Jew-ish” proclamation is especially attention-grabbing since it expresses something “true-ish” about contemporary politics–a feature that can only be illuminated using different conceptual resources than those philosophers commonly employ to characterize the proclamation of false statements.

Specifically, in a paper that I was supposed to present at a poster session at the 2025 Eastern APA conference (but didn’t, due to a bout of norovirus), I argue that, as opposed to a lie or bullshit,  Santos’ “Jew-ish” proclamation is better understood as an expression of cunning, a dialectical concept developed in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century European philosophy, that:

1. operates on both subjective and objective levels, and concerns the continuity and discontinuity between subjective intention and objective effect, and;
2. involves the discursive ambiguation of truth and falsity.

Viewed through the lens of cunning, Santos’ proclamation is false two times over: Santos isn’t Jewish, nor did Santos originally claim to be “Jew-ish” judging by the context clues. That said, Santos could have Jewish heritage, as he claimed, or, for all I know, he could express tendencies aligned with popular portrayals of American Jewish culture: as a Jewish American myself, I could (reluctantly) accept this statement if Santos used Yiddish vernacular or carried around Lactaid pills. More interestingly, though, the “Jew-ish” proclamation expresses–loudly and clearly–the absurdity of Santos’ shameless opportunism and the fact that contemporary politicians care more about self-interest than they do about truth or the collective interest.

While cunning is often used to describe an action or person characterized by trickery or guile, cunning has also been used as a noun, denoting a progressive force that propels the movement of history and society forward. Infamously, cunning is associated with Hegel’s concept of the cunning or ruse of reason (List der Vernunft). Inspired by Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Hegel’s conception of the cunning of reason broadly expresses the idea that individual actions generate large-scale effects that exceed those intended or predicted by the individual actor. However, Hegel’s evaluation of these effects–whether these reverberating “objective” consequences of “subjective” choices are beneficial, neutral, or harmful to society writ large–shifts throughout his corpus. In his 1821 Philosophy of Right, for example, Hegel’s idea of cunning is implied in his description of the reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs in civil society: inspired by Smith’s concept of the “invisible hand,” Hegel claims that individuals producing and enjoying for themselves in the division of labor contribute to the economic advancement of society overall. In this instance, Hegel sees this syllogism between modern individuals’ self-interested investments and their larger economic effects as producing positive outcomes for the collective. Elsewhere, Hegel’s portrayal of cunning is more value-neutral. In his 1817 Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel explains that subjective intentions produce effects beyond the agent’s predictions, but that, nevertheless, universal reason is nothing but the endless macro-processes of rational micro-individuals thinking and acting for themselves. Overall, though cunning deceives us about what we do, Hegel’s conception of cunning generally expresses a cautious optimism that aligns him with Smith and Mandeville’s economic conceptions of cunning: the unforeseen consequences will pay off in the long run.

However, if we take Hegel’s value-neutral formulation of cunning seriously, the idea that history doesn’t always proceed according to our plans, it’s impossible to assert that individual actions necessarily produce positive unexpected consequences. In 1944-47’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno retrieve Hegel’s idea of cunning, but they leave behind both Hegel’s optimism about the trajectory of cunning on the stage of history and Hegel’s macro-level focus. While Hegel’s cunning concerns the interplay between the individual subject and universal reason, society, and history, Horkheimer and Adorno’s use of cunning focuses on the effects of cunning on rational subjects. They examine how cunning functions both intersubjectively, in discursive interactions between a subject and their interlocutors, and intra-subjectively: for Horkheimer and Adorno, individual acts of cunning, in the colloquial sense, not only produce effects beyond the agent’s control, in the Hegelian sense but cunning also “flows back” and affect those very agents in ways they couldn’t have calculated in advance. 

Horkheimer and Adorno demonstrate this via an allegory, using Odysseus as an example of a proto-modern subject whose use of cunning as a self-serving tool begets intended and unintended consequences. To escape the cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus introduces himself to Polyphemus as “Outis,” which is both a version of his own name as well as a word that means “no man” or “nobody.” After Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, the Cyclops cries to his fellow monsters: “Help! It is No-man that is slain me by guile and not by force!” Odysseus’ statement is half true – he both is and is not “Outis” – and his cunning wordplay enables him to escape and ultimately survive. Yet, in Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, Odysseus, in his belittling of Polyphemus and denial of his own humanity, identifying as “no one,” Odysseus demonstrates that he has internalized the cruelty of mythical nature, rather than transcended it: Odyssean cunning is the manipulation of mythical nature via adaptation to its inhumanity. In other words, in the attempt to avoid becoming casualties of cunning forces beyond ourselves, rational subjects internalize the mercilessness of these larger forces and attempt to exercise them via self-serving techniques like cunning subterfuge: every man for himself, interlocutors and the collective be damned. 

To apply these analyses to Santos’ “Jew-ish” proclamation, as cunning, the statement cannot be reduced to simply lying or bullshitting, as these categories fail to capture its real consequences in the broader socio-historical register; just as Odysseus survived, Santos took office (for a little while, at least). Yet, beyond Santos’ immediate self-interested aims, his cunning use of language reveals to us, the listeners, the ideological futility of positioning truth as metaphysically independent of self-interest and historical contingency. The “Jew-ish” proclamation inadvertently and comically expresses the truth of contemporary political speech as unconcerned with the accurate or straightforward representation of reality, a fact that forecloses the possibility of genuine democratic participation. As Horkheimer and Adorno’s reframing of Hegelian cunning demonstrates, rather than generate collective benefits, the pursuit of individual self-interest through the use of cunning as a discursive tool can beget more cunning and deceit, rather than inadvertently strengthen the dialectical relation between the individual and the collective social whole.  In hindsight, the farce of Santos’ “Jew-ish” proclamation has crystallized into the tragedy of our current political situation, in which the spread of misinformation by politicians has become more acceptable and insidious: Santos’ mostly bloodless brand of deception has given way to the overtly harmful proliferation of conspiracy theories and outright lies by political leaders to stoke public fear, hatred, and consolidate political power. While identifying misinformation and calling out politicians for lying is important for the sake of maintaining a functioning democracy, this tactic has not proven to be politically efficacious. While Santos’ wordplay, viewed through the lens of cunning, represents a unique instance of political speech that effectively illuminated the “deeper” truth of post-truth politics, the two-dimensionality of Santos’ statement packs less of a punch now, in the harsh light of day, where nothing is hidden anymore. As cunning reveals, yet again, the joke’s on us.

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