made quite an interesting point. I suggested humans would be better off without the ability to self-decieve, and she made the point that yes, life would certainly be easier, but it would also be more dull.
I wanted to open this point to discussion. What do you think?
I’ll start with my view in hopes that it sparks conversation :).
I find this line of thought really compelling. It is actually much more clear when we think about something like our ability to experience conflict. It is a fact of being humans that now and again, we will be pulled in different directions about what to do. Yet, I want to make an Arathy style point here—yes, the experience of conflict sucks, but if we weren’t able to be conflicted? It seems we would be without something quite important.
I enjoy posts that make me really think. This is one of those. Although I could answer with several thoughts, let me just say this: "Life" requires a giver of life - one who might be thought of as life itself. Deceiving one's self is the idea that life is self-created or self-sustained. In regard to conflict, would it not be fair to say trust in something greater allows for learning even through conflict?
I'm so glad you feel you got something out of this post. Let me try to respond to this.
"In regard to conflict, would it not be fair to say trust in something greater allows for learning even through conflict?"
Really well said. This sounds very right to me. I love your invocation of trust, specifically. After all, when one trusts, he opens oneself up to the possibility of betrayal or failure. It's almost as if by wishing we were without conflict, we are refusing to trust because we are scared of that betrayal and failure. But to refuse to trust anyone, to think you can 'go about it all on your own without any help' is (I think as you anticipated with the discussion of deception) to fail in its own way.
I share your intuition on this! Here's the question that's been troubling me. What does it *do*? Why exactly is it that life would be boring without conflict?
Here's one answer I've been playing with. Conflict is really something like an ability. Yes, it sucks to experience and all that, but it is an ability that only we as humans have. Animals can not be conflicted in the meaningful sense we can. (Is this right? I don't know. But let's at least pretend it is for now).
Crucially, this ability does not exist in a vaccum. Rather, we have it as a side effect. Because, for, for instance, we are self-reflective beings, we can be conflicted about what to do. In this way, if we were without conflict, we would also be without the thing that makes us different from lower animals. We would not be self-reflective or self-consciousness.
Is the 'Well, if we weren't conflicted, life would be boring,' idea supposed to express that if we *really* lacked conflict, we would also be missing something else, something maybe even more important?
But you sir have summed it up perfectly. Unlike animals, humans face struggles, get into conflicts, and learn from them, evolving in the process. Without those experiences, we wouldn’t be the self-aware, reflective beings we are.
I wish I could say they were all my words! I am very inspired by the philosopher 'Harry Frankfurt' on this. He has a wonderful book, 'The Importance of What We Care About,' that I think touches on this very topic. I can't recommend it more, especially if you're interested in these sorts of questions.
Self deception definitely makes life difficult for us collectively and as individuals. Timothy Snider has a new book out On Freedom. In it he describes and interrogates five overlapping “FORMS” of freedom, the fifth of which is something like “factuality” which involves the ethics of not only truth telling and avoiding deliberate manipulative deceptions, but also the ethical requirement that we increase and refine our understanding of ourselves, our worlds, and how they participate in each other. Right there is one indication of why and how “life” (consciousness, existence, survival etc) is inherently challenging.
The other forms of freedom he discusses are “Sovereignty” (roughly self control and self definition), “Mobility” (the ability to grow and change which of course includes the ability to switch locations), “Unpredictability” (involving the necessity of novelty and surprise as well as avoiding being controlled by “factual”, historic, cultural, economic, organic, or kinetic forces) and “Solidarity” (based on the understanding that our individual freedoms and abilities cannot be maintained, never mind expanded, without a collective commitment to protecting and advancing everyone’s freedoms and abilities. (By way of avoiding and excusing more deception, I’ll just admit that I’ve already blithely oversimplified and surely distorted some of Snider’s intentions in the interests of brevity, laxness, and obtusity—and I’ll continue to do so below.)
All of those (Sovereignty, Mobility, Unpredictability, Solidarity, and Factuality) are incredibly challenging, full of pitfalls, open to misunderstandings, and are potential sources of bitterness, frustration, fury, and even despair. All of them make us vulnerable to betrayal - including self betrayal. And each of those can generate even more problems and challenges — in part from its own contradictions.
“Sovereignty” (as I understand it) involves self definition and boundaries. It involves the problems of “identity” whether it be of an individual, a tribe, a faith community, a nation, a race etc. Every definition (and therefore every identity) might be said to inherently involve separations if not exclusions. We can look at the intellectual and bloodstained history of “the West” (it once upon a time called itself “Christendom”) as including struggles over the definition (inclusions and exclusions) of the identity of “personhood”. That struggle rages on in controversies about animal rights, abortion, immigrants, environmental protections, gender expressions, etc. which seem to be on today’s “cutting edge” though we should take great care to consider them in the context of the multiplex of “facts” that might allow us to realize that the personhood of female human beings and people of “color” (victims of colonization, slavery, genocide etc) still lacked much official recognition in US law until well into the lifespans of many people who have something of a reasonable expectation of surviving another two score or so years (barring some Apocalypse or Armageddon).
We can also look at the agonies and epiphanies involved in the developmental process of “individuation” or the gradual achievement of competencies and self direction in infants, toddlers, school children, adolescents, and young adults. These developmental processes are biological AND social with each stage containing its own bundles of risks and opportunities. And each stage makes us vulnerable to being misguided by the imperfect knowledge and incomplete wisdom our family and our broader culture have managed to codify into habits, expectations, mores, and laws. One of the biggest pitfalls here arises from a failure to integrate our need for self sovereignty with our need for collective solidarity. I’ll note here there are many of us who (still today) brutally deride broader notions of “collectivity” and “solidarity” as fictional. These include those who agree with Margaret Thatcher’s bald declaration that only “individual” people are real and “society” is fiction. But if the concepts of “fiction” (or “myth”) are interrogated carefully, they need not thought of as derisive, dismissive, or as casting aspersions of mendacity or self deception. Instead the concepts “fiction” and “myth” are inextricably entwined with processes (not just notions) of generativity and creation. In this light, the concepts of “self” and “individual” are no less or more “fictional” and certainly not more “deceptive” than human values (whether they are unique to the human experience or have roots in dimensions of reality largely unintelligible to our senses and cognitive process). Snider insists that values (not just freedom) are as real as germs, volcanoes, earthquakes, heatwaves, tempests, money, and The Beatles. One of the reasons I’m gonna shell out for his book (as soon as I publish this) is gonna be to see if he tries to distinguish between these various types of “realities” and, especially whether or not he resorts to the term ‘Pataphysical - which indeed may not be either as quizzical or whimsical as some might expect.
Thanks so much for your comment! The idea that values are as real as germs seems quite odd to me. The only way it could be reasonable, as I see it, is if he used a strategy like the one you suggest: that values exist in a different reality (or, perhaps, they exist in a different *way*). But then it seems the comparison to germs is misguided, as values only exist in the same way germs do if they exist in the same reality, but they do not: they exist in a different one.
You'll have to let me know if you like the book!
Re: the rest of your comment,
I really like the idea of 'factuality' being a key piece of freedom. Though, I worry it misses the mark somewhat. The issue is not only that we are wrong when we have decieved ourselves, but that we have *decieved* ourselves. It is an added level of moral baggage. I am skeptical whether 'factuality' gives credit to that. I'm more favorable to Williams: how about truthfulness?
I think the discussion of development and sovereignty brings this out. Yes, we are certainly vulnerable to being incorrect as we grow up, but I take this to be a different *kind* of vulnerability than our vulnerability to self-deception. Self-deception seems to hit closer to home: I knew, if I read the skeptics at least, that I would have trouble knowing the world. But now it seems that I am liable to be unable to know myself, too.
I dunno much about “reasonable” but since that doesn’t stop a lot of people from venting what’s on their minds, I why should it stump me or you? Germs are not exactly on the same reality plane as earthquakes, gravity, and gamma rays, but they don’t seem to be in the same category with money, gods, or chariot racing in the Constantinople of Justinian’s time either. Which category is (was) more likely to percolate to mass murder?
I’d call one category ‘pataphysical because it sounds stupider than calling it ‘imaginary’, ‘fictional’ or ‘mythological’ even though such “smartypants’ words get so dumbed down that they sound like they’re maliciously dismissive or contemptuous of what they are applied to. People kill or die for their values. But it’s a trope of fascism to say that values aren’t real which is what it might sound like if I used the swords “imaginary”, “fictional” or “mythological” which I would *NOT* like to believe are antonyms to “real”, “pragmatic”, “serious”, or “important”.
Sometimes I like to think there are as many dimensions of reality as there are varieties of consciousness. But I don’t like to think that different modes of consciousness always correspond to their own dimensions of reality, partly because I think any mode of consciousness is ITSELF a dimension of reality (consciousness is real even though it can’t comprehend itself) and that all the various dimensions of reality do not necessarily participate with each other in ways that any mode of consciousness can grasp. Remember what poor doomed Hamlet reminded poor dumb Horatio on the ramparts of Kronburg in Elsinore…
There’s just so much more than what can ever be intelligible to even the broadest of us.
I like the word “dimension” to refer to various forms of reality (some of which we can grasp, graph, picture, diagram, model, or describe). Cuz then I can imagine imaginary numbers which make zero sense. There is no logical or rational way to understand the square root of a negative number. Negative numbers are kinda ABSTRACT, but IMAGINARY numbers can’t even REALLY be imagined. But we CAN bracketishly symbolize them and then manipulate those symbols in crazy calculations that (if we do them right) end up cancelling all the imaginary and complex numbers to yield results that are astonishingly close to measurements we imagine we are able to make about photons, protons, electrons, and their ilk which like Schrödinger's cat blink in and out of what we imagine to be a “void”.
By the way, Timothy Snider didn’t use the analogy of germs. That was stoopid me. I just agree with him that values are real and that to deny their reality is a fascist tactic (or a trap that might lead to more fascist thinking and actions).
The book hasn’t come yet, but it should have shipped.
Also, when Snider talks about factuality, he spends a lot of time talking about the generation of facts by academics, historians, journalists, and especially LOCAL journalists. He is trying to reclaim the word/concept/value of “freedom” from those on the fascist fringe of “right wing” politics who often misuse it in dangerous ways. There once was a time when political and cultural conservatives talked as much or more about “the rule of law” as they did about freedom and when they did talk about freedom, they tried to differentiate it it from “license”, just as they might still TRY to distinguish liberty from libertines.
I enjoy posts that make me really think. This is one of those. Although I could answer with several thoughts, let me just say this: "Life" requires a giver of life - one who might be thought of as life itself. Deceiving one's self is the idea that life is self-created or self-sustained. In regard to conflict, would it not be fair to say trust in something greater allows for learning even through conflict?
Mike,
I'm so glad you feel you got something out of this post. Let me try to respond to this.
"In regard to conflict, would it not be fair to say trust in something greater allows for learning even through conflict?"
Really well said. This sounds very right to me. I love your invocation of trust, specifically. After all, when one trusts, he opens oneself up to the possibility of betrayal or failure. It's almost as if by wishing we were without conflict, we are refusing to trust because we are scared of that betrayal and failure. But to refuse to trust anyone, to think you can 'go about it all on your own without any help' is (I think as you anticipated with the discussion of deception) to fail in its own way.
Conflict is an inherent part of the human experience, the archetype of the tortured writer exists for a reason :)
I share your intuition on this! Here's the question that's been troubling me. What does it *do*? Why exactly is it that life would be boring without conflict?
Here's one answer I've been playing with. Conflict is really something like an ability. Yes, it sucks to experience and all that, but it is an ability that only we as humans have. Animals can not be conflicted in the meaningful sense we can. (Is this right? I don't know. But let's at least pretend it is for now).
Crucially, this ability does not exist in a vaccum. Rather, we have it as a side effect. Because, for, for instance, we are self-reflective beings, we can be conflicted about what to do. In this way, if we were without conflict, we would also be without the thing that makes us different from lower animals. We would not be self-reflective or self-consciousness.
Is the 'Well, if we weren't conflicted, life would be boring,' idea supposed to express that if we *really* lacked conflict, we would also be missing something else, something maybe even more important?
Wish I had all the answers!
But you sir have summed it up perfectly. Unlike animals, humans face struggles, get into conflicts, and learn from them, evolving in the process. Without those experiences, we wouldn’t be the self-aware, reflective beings we are.
I wish I could say they were all my words! I am very inspired by the philosopher 'Harry Frankfurt' on this. He has a wonderful book, 'The Importance of What We Care About,' that I think touches on this very topic. I can't recommend it more, especially if you're interested in these sorts of questions.
Thank you for sparking my thinking on this!
Thanks for the recommendation 😁
I can’t wait to read more of your analysis as well!
Self deception definitely makes life difficult for us collectively and as individuals. Timothy Snider has a new book out On Freedom. In it he describes and interrogates five overlapping “FORMS” of freedom, the fifth of which is something like “factuality” which involves the ethics of not only truth telling and avoiding deliberate manipulative deceptions, but also the ethical requirement that we increase and refine our understanding of ourselves, our worlds, and how they participate in each other. Right there is one indication of why and how “life” (consciousness, existence, survival etc) is inherently challenging.
The other forms of freedom he discusses are “Sovereignty” (roughly self control and self definition), “Mobility” (the ability to grow and change which of course includes the ability to switch locations), “Unpredictability” (involving the necessity of novelty and surprise as well as avoiding being controlled by “factual”, historic, cultural, economic, organic, or kinetic forces) and “Solidarity” (based on the understanding that our individual freedoms and abilities cannot be maintained, never mind expanded, without a collective commitment to protecting and advancing everyone’s freedoms and abilities. (By way of avoiding and excusing more deception, I’ll just admit that I’ve already blithely oversimplified and surely distorted some of Snider’s intentions in the interests of brevity, laxness, and obtusity—and I’ll continue to do so below.)
All of those (Sovereignty, Mobility, Unpredictability, Solidarity, and Factuality) are incredibly challenging, full of pitfalls, open to misunderstandings, and are potential sources of bitterness, frustration, fury, and even despair. All of them make us vulnerable to betrayal - including self betrayal. And each of those can generate even more problems and challenges — in part from its own contradictions.
“Sovereignty” (as I understand it) involves self definition and boundaries. It involves the problems of “identity” whether it be of an individual, a tribe, a faith community, a nation, a race etc. Every definition (and therefore every identity) might be said to inherently involve separations if not exclusions. We can look at the intellectual and bloodstained history of “the West” (it once upon a time called itself “Christendom”) as including struggles over the definition (inclusions and exclusions) of the identity of “personhood”. That struggle rages on in controversies about animal rights, abortion, immigrants, environmental protections, gender expressions, etc. which seem to be on today’s “cutting edge” though we should take great care to consider them in the context of the multiplex of “facts” that might allow us to realize that the personhood of female human beings and people of “color” (victims of colonization, slavery, genocide etc) still lacked much official recognition in US law until well into the lifespans of many people who have something of a reasonable expectation of surviving another two score or so years (barring some Apocalypse or Armageddon).
We can also look at the agonies and epiphanies involved in the developmental process of “individuation” or the gradual achievement of competencies and self direction in infants, toddlers, school children, adolescents, and young adults. These developmental processes are biological AND social with each stage containing its own bundles of risks and opportunities. And each stage makes us vulnerable to being misguided by the imperfect knowledge and incomplete wisdom our family and our broader culture have managed to codify into habits, expectations, mores, and laws. One of the biggest pitfalls here arises from a failure to integrate our need for self sovereignty with our need for collective solidarity. I’ll note here there are many of us who (still today) brutally deride broader notions of “collectivity” and “solidarity” as fictional. These include those who agree with Margaret Thatcher’s bald declaration that only “individual” people are real and “society” is fiction. But if the concepts of “fiction” (or “myth”) are interrogated carefully, they need not thought of as derisive, dismissive, or as casting aspersions of mendacity or self deception. Instead the concepts “fiction” and “myth” are inextricably entwined with processes (not just notions) of generativity and creation. In this light, the concepts of “self” and “individual” are no less or more “fictional” and certainly not more “deceptive” than human values (whether they are unique to the human experience or have roots in dimensions of reality largely unintelligible to our senses and cognitive process). Snider insists that values (not just freedom) are as real as germs, volcanoes, earthquakes, heatwaves, tempests, money, and The Beatles. One of the reasons I’m gonna shell out for his book (as soon as I publish this) is gonna be to see if he tries to distinguish between these various types of “realities” and, especially whether or not he resorts to the term ‘Pataphysical - which indeed may not be either as quizzical or whimsical as some might expect.
Joe,
Thanks so much for your comment! The idea that values are as real as germs seems quite odd to me. The only way it could be reasonable, as I see it, is if he used a strategy like the one you suggest: that values exist in a different reality (or, perhaps, they exist in a different *way*). But then it seems the comparison to germs is misguided, as values only exist in the same way germs do if they exist in the same reality, but they do not: they exist in a different one.
You'll have to let me know if you like the book!
Re: the rest of your comment,
I really like the idea of 'factuality' being a key piece of freedom. Though, I worry it misses the mark somewhat. The issue is not only that we are wrong when we have decieved ourselves, but that we have *decieved* ourselves. It is an added level of moral baggage. I am skeptical whether 'factuality' gives credit to that. I'm more favorable to Williams: how about truthfulness?
I think the discussion of development and sovereignty brings this out. Yes, we are certainly vulnerable to being incorrect as we grow up, but I take this to be a different *kind* of vulnerability than our vulnerability to self-deception. Self-deception seems to hit closer to home: I knew, if I read the skeptics at least, that I would have trouble knowing the world. But now it seems that I am liable to be unable to know myself, too.
I dunno much about “reasonable” but since that doesn’t stop a lot of people from venting what’s on their minds, I why should it stump me or you? Germs are not exactly on the same reality plane as earthquakes, gravity, and gamma rays, but they don’t seem to be in the same category with money, gods, or chariot racing in the Constantinople of Justinian’s time either. Which category is (was) more likely to percolate to mass murder?
I’d call one category ‘pataphysical because it sounds stupider than calling it ‘imaginary’, ‘fictional’ or ‘mythological’ even though such “smartypants’ words get so dumbed down that they sound like they’re maliciously dismissive or contemptuous of what they are applied to. People kill or die for their values. But it’s a trope of fascism to say that values aren’t real which is what it might sound like if I used the swords “imaginary”, “fictional” or “mythological” which I would *NOT* like to believe are antonyms to “real”, “pragmatic”, “serious”, or “important”.
Sometimes I like to think there are as many dimensions of reality as there are varieties of consciousness. But I don’t like to think that different modes of consciousness always correspond to their own dimensions of reality, partly because I think any mode of consciousness is ITSELF a dimension of reality (consciousness is real even though it can’t comprehend itself) and that all the various dimensions of reality do not necessarily participate with each other in ways that any mode of consciousness can grasp. Remember what poor doomed Hamlet reminded poor dumb Horatio on the ramparts of Kronburg in Elsinore…
There’s just so much more than what can ever be intelligible to even the broadest of us.
I like the word “dimension” to refer to various forms of reality (some of which we can grasp, graph, picture, diagram, model, or describe). Cuz then I can imagine imaginary numbers which make zero sense. There is no logical or rational way to understand the square root of a negative number. Negative numbers are kinda ABSTRACT, but IMAGINARY numbers can’t even REALLY be imagined. But we CAN bracketishly symbolize them and then manipulate those symbols in crazy calculations that (if we do them right) end up cancelling all the imaginary and complex numbers to yield results that are astonishingly close to measurements we imagine we are able to make about photons, protons, electrons, and their ilk which like Schrödinger's cat blink in and out of what we imagine to be a “void”.
By the way, Timothy Snider didn’t use the analogy of germs. That was stoopid me. I just agree with him that values are real and that to deny their reality is a fascist tactic (or a trap that might lead to more fascist thinking and actions).
The book hasn’t come yet, but it should have shipped.
Also, when Snider talks about factuality, he spends a lot of time talking about the generation of facts by academics, historians, journalists, and especially LOCAL journalists. He is trying to reclaim the word/concept/value of “freedom” from those on the fascist fringe of “right wing” politics who often misuse it in dangerous ways. There once was a time when political and cultural conservatives talked as much or more about “the rule of law” as they did about freedom and when they did talk about freedom, they tried to differentiate it it from “license”, just as they might still TRY to distinguish liberty from libertines.