This essay was first posted September 19, 2011 at 3:05 P.M. The address for the new Google sign-in sheet, allegedly, is as follows: http://account.google.com/ServiceLogin?Service=blogger&passive=1209600&continue=... (9/16/11)
Simon Blackburn, Philosophy: The Big Questions (New York: Metro Books, 2011).
Simon Blackburn's recent book examining several familiar philosophical questions is a great success. The author's enviable literary gifts -- his learning and charm -- are enlisted in the effort to seduce readers into philosophical pleasures leading to contented sleep. One is uneasy at the thought of being, as it were, "had" by this accomplished seducer of philosophical "virgins" or neophytes such as myself. Irony?
For a comparison to the ideas of Professor Blackburn see Owen Flanagan's, "Multiple Identity, Character Transformation," in G. Graham & G.L. Stevens, eds., Philosophical Psychopathology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 135-166 and Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 258-267.
The word "seduce" is apt because Professor Blackburn has also written a work entitled "Lust." There is indeed an "eros," according to Plato, in all philosophical dialectics. Dialectics is likened to coitus by the Athenians of the Periclean Age.
All of this seems distant from the quiet and highly civilized pleasures of Cambridge University where Professor Blackburn is happily tucked away like the March Hare in its burrow. It has been suggested (falsely) that sex is anti-British. The delicious sex scandals in British politics make this charge ludicrous. ("Oh, to be in India" and "There will always be an England.")
Among the topics examined in Blackburn's popular book is the question: "Can you lie to yourself?"
This was the formulation of the issue in the French high school examination in philosophy a few years ago. I prefer this "second-person" and, possibly, self-deceptive version to Blackburn's articulation of the question in the first person: "Can I lie to myself?" because the invitational aspect of the issue is heightened.
The question should draw you in by living inside your mind and forcing you to ponder the authenticity of your works and days.
Philosophical mysteries are about you and me despite our "ordinary" or "average" qualities.
I will comment on this old chestnut in philosophy. The metaphysical and psychological puzzle at the center of this discussion provides the inspiration for a great deal of literature. British intellectuals and artists are especially suited for this discussion being the inheritors of the world's greatest literature and living in a society burdened with a class system that imposes on everyone a task of performance or the need to create masks.
Brits are always in hiding. The establishment of an identity by any British person is, partly or importantly, a matter of performance, acting, more than in any other nation that I know of or can imagine. Men and women from the British isles -- together with more than a few of their American cousins -- are necessarily actors on the stage of self-invention, as distinct from from self-deception, but sometimes the performances wear thin.
English liberty and eccentricity is all about the process of self-creation. It may be that someone like Richard Nixon or the aptly-named, Mr. Weiner, engaged in a self-deceptive episode resulting in "decline" in their lives, but it is no less a matter of creative self-invention or "fictionalizing" for Churchill to inspire the masses with talk of "fighting them on the beaches and in the streets" and "blood, sweat, and tears."
For a book-length treatment of the phenomenon of self-deception in its most evil form, see Patrick McGrath's novel about a sadistic psychoanalyst, Asylum and then see Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit, 1985) and Adam Phillips, "Superiorities," in Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), pp. 3-32.
I begin with a clear statement of this issue. I then turn to some examples of the phenomenon of individual self-deception in order to analyze the even more dangerous and bizarre experience of social or collective self-deception, as in Nazism, or Fascist totalitarianism, or Stalinism, depending on your preferences and politics. I offer suggestions for a resolution of this mystery of self-delusion which may only amount to further evidence of my own self-deception or "mystification."
The greatest example of self-deception to which philosophers are prone is the alleged delusion that philosophy still matters in a scientific age.
I am among those sadly deluded persons who holds such an opinion.
This paradox concerning self-deception is a classic philosophical issue that can only be discussed intelligently, I believe, from a philosophically aware perspective. Science or scientists can not and will not answer this question for us. ("Has Science Made Philosophy Obsolete?")
"Dictionaries define the term unilluminatingly as the act of deceiving oneself or the true state of being deceived by oneself. Since deception involves intentional misleading, such a definition invites the question precisely how one can both intend to be misled by oneself and succeed in such an endeavor. ... Can the self perhaps be divided into a deceiving and a deceived part, as in Freud's view of the unconscious keeping information from the conscious self? Or must one adopt Sartre's paradoxical view, in Being and Nothingness, that 'I must know, as deceiver, the truth that is masked from me as deceived'? ..."
Ted Hondereich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 818-819.
Professor Blackburn says:
"The problem is that if the words are taken literally then it seems that the person who deceives himself or herself is at the same time both culprit and victim." Philosophy, at p. 57.
In Blackburn's Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 344-345, he further explains the paradox:
" ... Within a single agent the state appears to be impossible, since the agent must know [emphasis added] the truth to begin a process of deceiving him or herself about it."
The crucial question from an analytical and therapeutic perspective has to do with the various levels of the self, conscious and unconscious, that are allowed by the super-ego different degrees of knowledge and variable understandings of the challenges faced by the psyche -- this is especially true in extreme states -- because they, these aspects of the psyche, are assigned distinct tasks in order for the total person to meet the challenge of survival -- or even transcendence.
It may well be that the ego is not permitted to "know" what it does not yet "understand" by the entirety of the psychic system. ("Out of the Past" and "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
It may also be that one part of the mind knows something that all of the self -- in particular, the ego, or clear and conscious parts of the mind -- cannot know. These words, "know" and "understand," do not describe the same phenomena. Knowledge of one's inner motivations may be slight even where there is profound understanding of one's "reasons for actions." These distinctions will prove essential to our discussion later in this essay. I direct the reader to the works of Stuart Hampshire and P.F. Strawson as well as Colin McGinn and Jennifer Hornsby. ("William Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Mr. Bush may "know" that torture is illegal under core principles of international law -- certainly his lawyers must have known this! -- but he and they must find a way not to know it in order to convince themselves and others that there is some plausible basis for concluding that monstrous crimes against humanity, like torture and murder, may be described as "legal" (when the U.S. commits the crimes) under provisions of international human rights laws after 9/11. ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" then "America's Drone Murders" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" and "American Doctors and Torture.")
Shakespeare's lesson is that ALL of us are engaged in elaborate efforts of self-deception that are often necessary to survival. Selfhood is a performance, artifice, theater. The Bard is also clear on the message that each of us is made up of a stage company of players or selves, some of these "players" (selves) cannot know or speak to the others until his or her crucial entrance and "action" is called for. John Fowles speaks of "The John Fowles Club":
"'The J.R. Fowles' is the name of the club to which I belong, for my sins. A number, indeed most, of its numerous other members consider that they barely do. Indeed, we're generally treated as sheer deadwood -- mere ciphers on some wretched mailing list, recipients of abuse for charity, badly written annual bulletins (mostly about people we can't even remember), invitations to nauseating reunion dinners (for which we have to pay ourselves, natch) ... I'm sure you'll all be only too familiar with this sort of horror and its ghastly varieties. As for the wretched president, Sir John Eye, and the never-available secretary, Mr. Mee, [sic.] honestly -- how the damn thing staggers on at all defeats reality. ... "
John Fowles, "The J.R. Fowles Club," in Wormholes (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1998), p. 62 (emphasis added). ("Master and Commander" and "David Hume's Philosophical Romance.")
"Defeating reality" (motive?) may well be the point to the business of fashioning an identity (reason for action).
We tell ourselves "stories" about our lives and those of others -- our national histories and religious myths are social versions of this necessary narrative task -- because we need our stories to make sense of events and lives. The distance between stories we tell to ourselves and then to one another, between our self-images and how others see us, is the source of much comedy and, sometimes, tragedies. ("What is Memory?" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
A number of philosophers have seen this literary task of assigning meaning to life as the essence of philosophy: Compare Richard Rorty, Contigency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 122-141 with Robert Brandom, "Reason, Expression, and the Philosophic Enterprise," in C.P. Ragland & S. Heidt, eds., What is philosophy? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 74-95.
This hermeneutic theme is shared by novelists as diverse as John Banville and John Fowles, Ian McEwan and Gore Vidal. The greatest delusion and self-deception, for me -- I suspect also for Shakespeare -- is found in the person claiming a monopoly on truth and a single, monolithic understanding of reality (i.e., "it's all relative!") to which others must conform on penalty of being prevented from writing on-line while being deemed "delusional" and subject to "out-of-control fantasies" -- like Christopher Christie according to Ms. Oliver.
"Dellusion" and "delusion" are equally acceptable options, alternative realities for a single word, so that a hermeneutics of freedom permits you to choose the spelling that you prefer.
My latest experiences of computer crime suggest that my days writing at these blogs may be numbered. I will have to create another site for my texts. Truth cannot be suppressed as easily as many of us are denied Internet access Mr. Menendez.
The character of Mrs. Givings in Revolutionary Road -- a self-appointed guardian of normality and virtue especially in sexual matters -- is the essential example of self-deception on movie screens and in recent American literature. ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
There are, of course, always different levels of the psyche or self actively engaged in the effort to adjust the individual to a "reality" that is as fictional and unfinished as personal identity must be in any living person. No identity is finished until one is dead. What is a crime is also a matter of construction or interpretation as opposed to an objective fact in the world. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
Similarly, there is no single "reality" existing independently of the meanings and interpretations of persons, even if there is truth in a pretty objective sense of the word.
Given the epistemological and metaphysical distinctions involved in these statements many readers will feel puzzled at this point. ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
In Continental philosophy -- which is not discussed by Professor Blackburn -- self-deception or narrativity is often the healthy product of imagination which is the source of selfhood. Carl Jung and the Jungians agree.
Phenomenological-hermeneutics is concerned precisely with these mysteries stripped of the condescension and contempt given them by the good Viennese doctor, Sigmund Freud, M.D. ("Studies in Hysteria"), who denied women's claims of violation as "hysterical" and absurd because they did not comport with Freud's myths of normality.
The origins of the word "hysteria" (meaning "from the womb") are instructive in this regard. Nonsense is what comes "from the womb" or women's minds, for Dr. Freud. Freud's militancy for adjustment to Victorian hypocritical middle-class morality as something called "the reality principle" is rightly dismissed by Jean-Paul Sartre and many feminists as the "epitome of bad faith." Those interested in researching this issue should examine the writings of Frederick Crews and Juliet Mitchell, a Freudian revisionist who is mistaken about R.D. Laing, but right about much else. For the etymology of the word "hysteria," consult The Oxford English Dictionary.
Reality is not something existing independently of human constructs as I never tire of insisting. Yes, there is objective truth nonetheless. After all, among those human constructs or systems of meaning is science. Nothing is as absurd, for many of us, as the notion that there is a single "reality" to which we must adjust in order to be as boringly ordinary, dull, ignorant and stupid as those who insist on "adjustment" in the first place.
Must we live in a nation filled with the likes of Mr. Perry or Mr. Boehner? Must we all become "Richie Cunningham" on Happy Days? Worse, must we go through life as Sarah Palin?
We can do better than that.
"Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves for taking their own lies for truth."
The OAE in New Jersey? Ethics? ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")
"By such mystification, we achieve and sustain our adjustment, adaptation, socialization. But the result of such adjustment to our society is that, having been tricked and having tricked ourselves out of our minds, that is to say, out of our personal worlds of experience, out of that unique meaning with which potentially we may endow the external world. Simultaneously, we have been conned into the illusion that we are 'skin-encapsulated' egos. ... "
R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. 72-73 and R.D. Laing, "The False Self System," in The Divided Self (London: Tavistock, 1961), p. 99.
R.D. Laing and other psychoanalysts have studied the pathological extremes to which the psyche may be subjected in crisis states that often result in "splitting" the mind in order to allow for deception and distancing. One such method is the process of "mystification," to which I referred earlier, by which consciousness can be persuaded by the subconscious to believe soothing falsehoods -- falsehoods that permit the sanitizing of illicit secret desires such as the desire for power over others (which may explain continuing censorship efforts against me) -- delight in cruelty, for example, oppression and control of others that is deemed "therapy" for the victim's "own good." ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" then "How censorship works in America.")
I found myself redirected to a bogus location aimed at denying me access to these blogs when I tried to write this morning. After I signed out of my blog, I was able to return to the site and write having been mysteriously signed-in, again, without my knowing it. Vandalism of this text is always expected. The goal is to discourage writing efforts and maximize psychological harm done to the victim. I am energized by each alteration of this text.
There is a so-called "positive" role of inspiration performed by the myths (or lies) we tell ourselves, individually and collectively, to achieve important personal and social goals.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche -- before Freud and Jung -- spoke of the "truths of memory" that are aimed at performing necessary and usually emergency surgery on the wounded psyche through reconfigurations of social truths, i.e., the truths of others. No, that's not me. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review.")
Memory is the great diplomat, healer and advocate of the mind because it is devoted to adjusting the individual to a threatening environment -- or to the enigma of evil -- while finding a way to preserve the inner life as a refuge from the non-comprehending gaze of the Other. Yes, that's me.
I do not know how else one survives in a torture chamber. ("What is it like to be tortured?")
Evil defies rational understanding.
The person seeking to destroy these texts in order to prevent me from speaking/communicating (with the hope that I will collapse into psychosis or commit suicide) may be one example of the evil that I describe. Irrational powers of the mind are needed and are always connected, I believe, to human aesthetic faculties as well as the religious impulse in humanity.
When faced with the disgusting "reality" of sadism one sane response is to attempt to understand the evil through "narrative" rationality and logical analysis. ("'Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
We need stories even as we need eyes with which to orient ourselves in the empirical world. Stories (lies?) are means to guide us in the world of meanings in which we must live as persons. Lies are always found in the speeches of politicians, judicial opinions, advertising and all of the mass media. We live within a network of lies, every day, especially when we deny this obvious fact in America. ("Is truth dead?" and "On Bullshit.")
We proclaim ourselves defenders of human rights and are still operating torture camps to torment human beings who are often murdered -- murdered to provide cover for their murderers -- after our "soft" power and sanctions regimes, drones, have produced death and suffering for millions of persons in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere. A little censorship is nothing by comparison. I may find myself at Guantanamo next week. http://www.criticalvision.blogspot.com/2007/03/us-courts-must-not-condone-torture.html and Joy Gordon, Invisible War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), entirety.
Our robot bombs are "peacekeepers" or "smart bombs" that only kill militants in Pakistan. I call those terms "lies." I call it a "lie" for the U.S. to proclaim a commitment to freedom of speech on-line while engaging in sanctioned cybercrime and censorship efforts against powerless dissidents.
You will not get away with these tactics emanating from New Jersey. ("What is it like to be censored in America?" and "How censorship works in America.")
I call it hypocrisy to see ourselves as being entirely good while our enemies are all "evil."
I also call it hypocrisy to criticize China or Cuba for human rights failures because they suppress the speech of some dissidents, even as persons enjoying U.S. or N.J. government protection are busy trying to prevent me from writing freely on-line, or as Mumia Abu-Jamal continues to languish in prison, after a Circuit Court has acknowledged that his initial conviction was the finding of a racist jury panel and that the entire process to which Mr. Abu-Jamal has been subjected was and is contaminated by racism. ("Mr. Putin's Advice to America" and "Justice For Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
These are American society's lies that we cannot permit ourselves to see if we are to succeed, as a nation, in our efforts at self-deception or to be financially rewarded, professionally, as individuals by the powerful political bosses whom some of us serve.
Mr. Perry's myth of himself as a Gary Cooper-like sheriff riding into Washington, D.C. to clean-up the town and get rid of the bad guys is mild by comparison with Bush/Cheney fabrications. No government "shut-down" this week? ("Weapons of Mass Deception" and "America's Banana Republicans.")
I cannot be certain whether I will be able to write at these blogs from one day to the next. I do not know whether the harassment efforts and obstructions of my access to the Internet and these texts will finally silence my voice. I doubt it.
I will say this much about the universal effort of self-deception and the question to which this essay is devoted: Everyone must lie to him- or herself in order to construct an identity. There is no such thing as not lying to create a self-narrative complying with some mythical objective "reality" concerning our meanings. ("Metaphor is Mystery.")
Every human identity is a product of art and, hence, a work of fiction or literature -- lying, if you like. The question is not whether you will lie to yourself in creating your identity (you can be sure that you will do exactly that), but whether the fictions which we must create, individually and socially, are life-affirming or the opposite. Are your lies "true lies"? ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
There is no bedrock of reality in the realm of meanings. There are only (sometimes truthful) interpretations of what has mattered to us during our brief span of time on earth. The struggle against injustice is one collective narrative in which we may participate that has great meaning for many persons. ("What is Memory?")
Equally important is the effort to end censorship and hunger in the world, to allow for human creativity to find expression, even if the persons seeking self-expression have not attended Yale University and happen to be Africans, Latin-Americans, Asians or residents of Washington Heights or Harlem in New York and, thus, unlikely to be published in their own names in The New York Review of Books or The New Yorker. Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), entirety. ("Barack Obama and "The New Yorker.'")
Truths emerge from our fictions or not at all.
In answer to the question posed in this essay I suggest that we all lie to ourselves. However, sometimes our fictions inspire us to make stories "real" in the only way that we can do such a thing -- by living our adventures in the so-called "real" world that is shared with others. By becoming the persons we are for others who need us in order to achieve their best selves we make our lies into truths. ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
"Every person and every social group is to a greater or lesser extent blind to many of the injustices of its time, because its own culture and education, supporting a particular way of life, represents embedded and distinctive features of this way of life as unavoidable features of human life in general. So absolute monarchy, harsh conditions of labor in mines and factories, slavery, the subordination of women; so in our time the accumulation of vast fortunes in industrial countries, which can be used for political purposes and to consolidate the power and influence of wealth. No doubt our grandchildren will ask, 'How can they have failed to see the injustice of allowing billionaires to multiply while the very same economy allowed abject poverty to persist uncorrected [self-deception?] next door to preposterous luxury?' ... "
Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 59. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch on Freedom of Mind.")
