‘Who are you trying to kid?By Paul Davis
Self-deception is a common human enterprise. Our capacity for it seems no more exotic a part of our nature than our capacity to spell. We attribute the state freely to others (”you’re kidding yourself”), and come to realise we were in the state ourselves (”I was kidding myself when I said that”). However, when we step back from those confident judgements and try making sense of self-deception, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to do so.
Why is there a philosophical problem about self-deception? It lies in the apparent paradox that deceiver and deceived are the same. Deception seems logically to require that deceiver and deceived are distinct. If I deceive you, then I am deceiver and you deceived; I the doer, you the victim. The deceiver is one agent, and the deceived another. But in self-deception there are, it seems, not two agents but only one. The self-deceiver is both deceiver and deceived, both doer and victim. As deceived, he believes what is false. But since he knows the truth, he knows to be false what the deceived believes. But he is the deceived. So he believes what he knows to be false. How can this be so?
Any feasible account must recognise the quality of deception. Some accounts have failed to do this. Demos has characterised self-deception in terms of inconsistency of belief, in other words, the self-deceiver believes p and not-p simultaneously.
Here, self-deception becomes possible because the self-deceiver fails to “notice” one of the beliefs, and therefore has no opportunity to compare the two and appreciate the incompatibility. The problem with this account is that the definitive component of self-deception seems absent. Inconsistency of belief is unremarkable and does not amount to self-deception. There is no paradox. We all have inconsistent beliefs because we are not always aware of everything our beliefs entail. But we are not therefore in self-deception. This is because the purposeful element of deception is missing.
Popular explanations of self-deception posit a divided self, one part of which does the deceiving and another part of which suffers the deception. It is often thought that the knowing, deceiving part is an unconscious mental domain, which deceives a different, conscious part.
But considerable difficulties attach to this account. Where is the decision to deceive made? If at the conscious level, then it becomes difficult to see how consciousness can be deceived at all. It seems that consciousness must possess the truth, or the knowledge that attempts to deceive it are taking place (since it has issued the decision to deceive). It is therefore difficult to see how consciousness is deceived at all.
There might be a reply to this objection. It might be suggested that consciousness initially sends an instruction to the unconscious mind to later return messages devoid of the salient knowledge, and subsequently forgets having sent the instruction. This forgetting allows the subsequent, deceptive messages of the unconscious to be entertained by consciousness, providing consciousness with resistance against the uncomfortable truth, which becomes restricted to the unconscious.
But difficulties attach to this formulation too. Does consciousness remain hands-on in the workings of the unconscious, to guarantee the desired, deceptive returns? If so, it is again very difficult to make sense of the idea that consciousness is deceived. Or is it akin, instead, to consciousness “turning the key” and leaving the engine of the unconscious reliably ticking over, assured that the noise, smoke, and fumes returned will be appropriately deceptive, all the while forgetting the initial ignition? If so, then consciousness is faced with the onerous task of purposefully forgetting that the unconscious has been manipulated by it to return only desired messages.
If the decision to deceive is taken, on the other hand, at the unconscious level, then the unconscious must (1) be the repository of truth; (2) will the decision to deceive consciousness; and (3) implement the decision to deceive.
This surely introduces difficulties as big as those before. First, it would give the unconscious an enormous burden of psychological labour, leaving consciousness nothing but a passive, unwitting screen for the output of a knowing and furiously active unconscious. Second, it seems untenable to deny consciousness any active role whatever in self-deception. Self-deception is sometimes expedient only because of what first appears to consciousness. (”Intentionalists” believe that the self-deceiver acts intentionally to bring it about that she acquire a certain belief, without being motivated by a conviction of the truth of that belief. To conceive all self-deception like this might be - as we will see - simplistic, but the flavour of intentionalism shows recognition of the integral role robust awareness can play.) This requires that the policy to self-deceive is sometimes made at the conscious level, and embroils us once again in the difficulties outlined above.
Third, on what grounds could the unconscious adjudicate? How does it know what consciousness would want to have blocked? If consciousness is never aware of the relevant truths, then the unconscious has to assume the role of “psychopaternalist”, censoring in the interests of consciousness the transmission of images from backstage. But its workings, in the imagined scenario, would seem unclear. It wouldn’t do to say that the unconscious witholds truths which it thinks would not appeal to consciousness. This is because lots of unappealing truths reach consciousness, and truths which can, moreover, be easily known before the event to be unpleasant for consciousness. Why doesn’t the unconscious withold the lot of them? Why are some of these truths “forwarded”, accepted, and acknowledged, with no hint of self-deception, and others the object of self-deception (indeed, some of the former might be more traumatising than many of the latter)?
It is likely that the paradigm framing much discussion of self-deception is crude and should be jettisoned. It might seem natural to imagine self-deception as one, homogeneous affair, that is essentially a matter of belief and knowledge (as above), abherrant, solitary, morally retrograde, and undergone by a thing-like ‘self’. Each of these characterisations is, however, dubious.
The self has featured in a previous issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine (see issue 12). For many modern contributors, most famously Dennett, the unity of self, and the accompanying baggage of an omniscient boss who thinks and acts from a psychical Oval Office, is a stubborn hangover from a Cartesian heritage most now claim to have rejected. Maybe the self is a much more complex, fluid, and ersatz affair than this maddeningly seductive picture allows. Perhaps it is an emergent artifice of multifarious, haphazardly connected subsystems, with no boss and no Cartesian Theatre “where it all happens”. If this, spaghetti-like notion of the self is correct, then it is too simple, also, to dichotomise the self into conscious and unconscious, far less to give executive primacy to either part (perhaps the inclination to do so is a stubborn hangover from our Freudian heritage). Perhaps the executors and beneficiaries of self-deception are sometimes subsystems of the self, whose activities are motivated, organically, by preservation of the system as a whole. If a subsystem is vital to a person’s identity, then it is liable to attempt deception of the other subsystems when threatened.
Whether these deceptive workings ever come near the brightest lights of conscious awareness will depend, again, upon the functional value of such exposure to the system as a whole.
An overlapping suggestion is that self-deception is not one singular psychobehavioural phenomenon, reducing to issues of belief and knowledge. Self-deception is perhaps quite eclectic, and is not always easily distinguishable from germane phenomena such as compartmentalisation, repressed conflicts, submerged aggressions, false consciousness, and wishful thinking. It is arguable that its basic elements are sometimes performance and stratagem (mimetic and tactical), and not knowledge and belief (cognitive and epistemic). For instance, we purposefully deflect our gaze from features that would normally matter to us. As Oksenberg Rorty has noted, this can be the self-deception itself, as well as a means to achieving it. (Neglect of this point is perhaps one way in which intentionalists go wrong.) Such selectivity of attention can reveal the functional role of a belief or disposition: its (aforementioned) importance to the system as a whole. Similarly, we adopt behaviour designed to indicate attitudes - such as confidence, commitment, seriousness, or gaiety - that we do not possess. It might seem that whilst we know unambiguously that we don’t have such attitudes, then we are not self-deceived; and if we eventually succeed in achieving them, then we cannot be self-deceived either. However, what usually turns the latter into self-deception is that traces of the old, disowned attitude tend to remain, betrayed in, say, the sarcastic remark, the over-dramatic commitment, or the slip when angry, tired, or drunk.
Our self-deceptions regularly require social confirmation also. Our suspiciously strident declarations of intention and character are made more convincing to us in the presence of a trusty listener, who might tactfully collude in what she knows to be a fragile self-manipulative agenda. In fact, the agent of self-deception might itself be a social grouping, such as a happy-clappy religious cult.
Indeed, it might well be fair to conclude that socially induced self-deception is vital to individual sanity and social cohesion. It is natural and reasonable to be ambivalent about all that matters in most human lives, for example, work, family, and friendships (Adam sings, for instance, in As You Like It, “Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly”). The disguise and submergence of this ambivalence is required for us to play our social roles (employee, friend, parent, etc.), and to allow individual projects and interpersonal engagements to flourish. Far from being a solitary, abherrant, and morally retrograde enterprise, self-deception might sometimes be a psychologically, socially, and morally required extension of the natural operations of the imagination.
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