Self-Deception: Harder than it sounds
A paradox for self-deception and self-knowledge.
“But I, Phaedrus, think such explanations are very pretty in general, but are the inventions of a very clever and laborious and not altogether enviable man, for no other reason than because after this he must explain the forms of the Centaurs, and then that of the Chimaera, and there presses in upon him a whole crowd of such creatures, Gorgons and Pegas, and multitudes of strange, inconceivable, portentous natures. If anyone disbelieves in these, and with a rustic sort of wisdom, undertakes to explain each in accordance with probability, he will need a great deal of leisure. But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things. And so I dismiss these matters and accepting the customary belief about them, as I was saying just now, I investigate not these things, but myself, to know whether I am a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature”
Excerpted from Plato’s Phaedrus, 229d-230a.
Socrates is faced with perhaps the most important task of them all: know thyself. And I do not think I am being too particular when I point out that for all its importance, this is no easy task. Of course, it is hard partially because he is biased. The stakes are high, after all. It could turn out that he is a monster. Who would want that? So, there is the possibility for self-deception, for blindness to the truth.
But in some other, hard to wrap one’s head around, way, these questions are just plain challenging. This is surprising. It is not only that we are prone to self-deception, that we jump to hide from the extent of our depravity, but that these are just plain complicated questions. There is room for disagreement about our nature whether — for example, to stay within the realm of Phaedrus — our capacity for intense love is a good or bad part of us. A smart or wise person could spend a lifetime thinking about it.
It is this fact that I want to explore today. Self-Knowledge is under attack from at least two fronts. We lie to ourselves to hide from it, and it is, apart from that, hard to obtain. It better be, after all, if it is worth dedicating one’s life to it.
I want to start by thinking a bit about self deception, then discuss the value of self-knowledge, and then, finally, close by returning to Socrates. Hopefully you all have gotten used to my making more problems than I offer solutions for. That’s why there’s a comment section!
Self-Deception refers to our ability to lie to ourselves. Now, philosophers have been quite puzzled recently over how this could be possible. How could it be that we play the roles of both liars and the ones lied to? What does this say about the structure of our soul? Perhaps, psychoanalysts recommend, this is a great moment to bring in notions of the unconscious and conscious, ego and id. If this interests you, get reading here.
Our discussion today will largely ignore these questions. I want to focus on a specific piece of self-deception, one anyone who has experienced it will be quite familiar with.
Namely, as with every lie, eventually: the game ends. The house of cards topples down and you are faced with the truth about yourself. You really did love her, you had only been lying to yourself. You really did want to move to the big city — if only you had been honest to yourself about your desires. No, this wasn’t the job you’ve always wanted — you were just playing into antiquated ideals of prestige and elitism.
When we become aware of our self-deception, it is according to this structure. Not only are we ashamed for having lied to ourselves, disappointed in our cowardice, but we are baffled. Baffled that we could have gone without knowing. It is almost essential to an experience of self deception that it ends with an experience of obviousness. A feeling that, now that the curtains are down and the play is over, we should have realized from the beginning that we were engaging in nothing but fiction.
I am not speaking metaphorically when I call this experience ‘essential’ to self-deception. It seems to me that it is in part because it seems so obvious after we see the truth—after we see we really do love her, want to go to the city, or hate that job—that it looks to us as we have been deceiving ourselves. Our only explanation for our obliviousness to the truth is that we actually weren’t oblivious, that we knew all along, but that we simply could not face it.
This feature of the phenomena really cannot be minimized. It is striking that after we have labelled some mistake of ours self-deception, we often do not even imagine or entertain the possibility that we truly did not realize or see the truth. If, by a miracle, we bring ourselves to raise the possibility, we are often quick to label the very raising of such a possibility, our bringing into question whether this was really a case of self-deception, as itself self-deception.
Ok. I don’t want to belabor this point too much, but I really do think it is important. What I’ve taken myself to show so far is that it is important to us that the truth we’ve been lying to ourselves about is an obvious one. Were this not the case, were the falsity of the lie we told ourselves not obvious, then it would not be a case of self-deception, because we really wouldn’t be sure what was right or wrong.
I want to now say a few quick things about self-knowledge. Now, I don’t hope to do any justice at all to this field of philosophy. I just want to linger on one thing.
Some philosophers emphasize that self-knowledge is an achievement. What do I mean by this? Well, here are two pieces of self-knowledge someone might have.
One type of self-knowledge might be knowledge of what I’m doing. Right now, I am writing a substack blog post about self-knowledge or self-deception.
Great! I have self-knowledge! At least that form, any way. This does not seem to be worth all that much, and won’t be the topic of this post. Here’s the other type:
This type of self-knowledge has more to do with the inscription on Delphi. “Know thyself.” Having this might mean being able to answer questions like: “What is your purpose in life?” or “Are you happy?” Or “What do you care about?”
To completely fail to do this type of knowledge justice, it is, we might say, a ‘deeper’ version of the first. Its form is the same: it is about the same person — but it is also special.
Namely, it is hard. It is much easier to answer the question “What are you doing right now,” than it is to answer the question “What do you care about?” Some philosophers think, even, that as long as things are working properly and I answer sincerely, I could not get the first type of question wrong.
As we all know, this is sadly not the case for the second type of self-knowledge. These questions are hard, they are questions we might fail to answer over the course of our entire lifetimes. Yet, it is because they are so difficult that they are so special. Similar to how, for a college student, adding 1+1 in isn’t much of an achievement, but solving the Riemann Hypothesis would be — when it comes to knowing oneself, knowing ‘what you’re doing’ is nothing. What is really special is being able to answer these deeper sorts of questions.
That’s what it is to ‘Know Thyself.’
But if the Self-Knowledge worth anything is the challenging stuff: the big, deep questions, then it seems — if you buy everything I’ve said so far — we don’t gain any worthwhile Self-Knowledge when we realize we’ve been engaging self-deception and come to the truth.
Remember. We ended the section on self-deception with the following conclusion:
It is important to us that the truth we’ve been lying to ourselves about is an obvious one.
After all, whenever we leave self-deception, we have the familiar feeling that the truth has been staring us in the eyes the whole time.
If we didn’t have that feeling, it is unclear we would have even began applying the label ‘self-deception’ to our actions at all! Without that, there would no longer be any experienced difference between lying to ourselves and realizing it, and simply getting it wrong and realizing it.
Yet, at the same time, it seems that the important self-knowledge is the stuff that isn’t obvious. The questions that we try, and try, and try to think through — but, at least for most of our lives, are unable to answer.
So, we’re at an odd point. It seems that coming to know that we’ve been lying to ourselves — that we really hate our job, for example — cannot be a moment in which we gain important self-knowledge.
To state the problem clearly: If it were important, then it wouldn’t be obvious. If it wasn’t obvious, then it wouldn’t be self-deception. But if it’s obvious, which it needs to be for it to be self deception, then it can’t be important — and if it can’t be important, it can’t be the important sort of self-knowledge.
I said at the beginning of this essay that self-knowledge is on attack from two fronts: It is difficult to obtain, and we lie to ourselves. But, it seems, these two sides are perhaps not allies. There may be more infighting than it seems.
I will be honest. It cannot be right that coming to realize we have been lying to ourselves does not constitute self-knowledge. Yes, the special sort of self-knowledge should be hard, but escaping self-deception is hard. I don’t know however, how to make the two work together.
It seems we will have to abandon either the idea that what we lie to ourselves about must feel obvious for it to be self-deception or the idea that the special sort of self-knowledge, the stuff that Socrates dies in search of, is not always hard to obtain.
Humans are story telling creatures. A big part of what it means to be reflectively (mimetically) self conscious involves our capacity to imagine other realities and to generate explanations (often in story form) for our sense impressions of the world (our curated “reality”). Plato, an inveterate story teller himself, is famous for his distrust of story tellers and dramatists. And… before systemic prose philosophers like Plato, stories were curated, controlled, and fostered by societies where what we now call governance, tradition, and religion were not strictly delineated from each other.
Plato represents a milestone in a long transition involving separating mythos and nomos from logos (myth and law from reasoned logic — or from various versions of “reasoned logic”). While I wouldn’t argue that mythological thinking (story telling that follows grammars and transitions more related to power and emotion than to “cool reason”) is always self deceptive or even totally irrational, I would argue that it arises more spontaneously in humans than does “logos” (which often requires certain levels of literacy, training, study, and discipline in bodies of knowledge and tradition.) Illiberal pponents of logos and the Enlightenment are also far from ENTIRELY wrong when the point out that formal logic and dispassionate reasoning are not simply often inadequate to understanding and dealing with our physical and cultural environments, they (logic and reason) can also be sources of both fallacy and deception.
So, in udder words, I beg to differ!
Simpliticus: We are not the stories we tell ourselves we are!
Sagiaccio: Yeah, but what good do dat do me?
This is such an interesting topic, and you write so well! It’s amazing how often humans lie to themselves, almost like we’re trying to avoid facing certain truths!