Self-Deception

Piecing Together a Puzzle

One of my personal aphorisms is: "The easiest thing in the world is self-deception."

Although self-deception is easy to fall into, it's not easy to understand. How is it that I can hide things from myself? At some level, mustn't I be aware of what I'm hiding? It’s quite a puzzle!

Last year I read a fine book on the topic by philosopher Herbert Fingarette, who connects self-deception with an unwillingness to spell out what one is doing. His notion of spelling out is similar to the Aristotelian concept of ἀπόδειξις (typically rendered as "explanation") and connected to the Socratic insistence on giving an account for how one lives, as set out in Plato's dialogue Laches. Aristotle extended the Socratic insight with his formulation that one needs to act not only in accordance with reason (κατὰ λόγον) but in a way that is "suffused with reason" / "with an account" (μετὰ λόγου). All of these ideas could prove helpful in approaching the puzzle of self-deception.

As with wonder and so many other phenomena, I suspect that several interconnected factors are at play here. One line of thought I've been pursuing is the progression from occasional self-indulgence (ἀκρασία or "weakness of the will") to a more thoroughgoing corruption (μοχθηρία) of character, such as the sort of dissipation (ἀκολασία) in which one's settled policy is to pursue immediate pleasure no matter what the source. Aristotle seems to imply that self-indulgence can be triggered by an immediate impression (φαντασία) - to use a slightly old-fashioned example, an impression, say, that smoking cigarettes looks pretty cool. The person who once in a while succumbs to a weakness for smoking cigarettes hasn't yet sunk to the level of the chain smoker who over time has formed the false opinion that cigarettes are perfectly safe. Thus the question occurs to me: is it a consistent practice (ἔθος) of, say, smoking that solidifies deception (ἀπάτη) about its dangers and an avoidance of spelling out what one is doing and becoming?

At the end of his Posterior Analytics, Aristotle provides a beautiful metaphor about the growth of understanding in the mind: it is like a pitched battle in which one soldier and then another and another stand their ground so that eventually an incipient rout is turned into a solid phalanx of fighters. Reversing the metaphor, perhaps the growth of false opinion and self-deception is like a solid phalanx that disintegrates into a rout, where an escalating practice such as smoking more and more cigarettes each week eventually destroys (διαστρέφει) the order and integrity of one's soul.

Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes that greed for pleasure has a distorting effect on your perceptions, resulting in the stance that what merely seems good actually is good. Without an underlying limit grounded in a naturally good and beneficial activity, the pursuit of pleasure leads you astray and causes you to miss the target in life. The best preventive medicine against such foolishness consists in a deliberate commitment to succeeding as a human being, the cultivation of excellent character traits, a deep understanding of human fulfillment, and the kind of insights that only a love for wisdom can bring to life.

Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash