Edited by
Sam Dresser
Self-deception seems inescapably paradoxical. For the self to be both
the subject and the object of deceit, one and the same individual must
devise the deceptive strategy by which they are hoodwinked. This seems
impossible. For a trick to work effectively as a trick, one cannot know
how it works. Equally, it is hard to see how someone can believe and
disbelieve the same proposition. Holding p and not-p together is, straightforwardly, to contradict oneself.
Despite
its seemingly paradoxical qualities, many people claim to know
first-hand what it is to be self-deceived. In fact, philosophers joke
that only prolific self-deceivers would deny that they experience it.
Nevertheless, there are skeptics who argue that self-deception is a
conceptual impossibility so there can be no genuine cases, just as there
can be no square-circles.
Yet self-deception seems undeniable in
spite of its alleged incoherence. For the fact is, we are not always
entirely rational. Certain situations, such as falling in love or being
in the frenzied grips of grief, heighten susceptibility to
self-deception. Betrayed lovers everywhere, anxious to discard the
damning evidence of infidelity, know precisely Shakespeare’s meaning at
sonnet 138:
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies
Self-deception
is so curious a thing that it is a source of intrigue in the arts and
sciences alike. Biologists such as Robert Trivers, for example, have
begun to investigate self-deception’s evolutionary origins, probing its
function and potential value.
Existing debates face the challenge of connecting the philosophical and the practical aspects of the problem. Either self-deception is ruled out as incoherent, or it is accepted as a brute fact. If the former, the skeptic must justify the countless cases where it appears to occur. If the latter, some serious revisions to our conception of self are required.
Ideally, we should seek a single solution to both dimensions of the problem so that our explanation of self-deception also points the way to its prevention. For, while deceiving ourselves might occasionally seem to our advantage, in the long term it is self-alienating. And as we shall see, Buddhist approaches to self-deception achieve the synthesis of practical and philosophical resolutions more fully than do the dominant Western theories.
However, this
contradicts psychoanalytic theories on the conscious and unconscious
mind. It also goes against experience. We don’t always know ourselves as
well as we think, and sometimes we convince ourselves of that which is
evidently false or overwhelmingly improbable. The fine line between
ambition and self-deception is often manifest around New Year, when many
of us are forced to concede that our goals have crumbled from the heady
heights of self-improvement plans into delusional wishful thinking.
If
self-deception is paradoxical, the experience itself is even more
perplexing. Unlike the immediacy of other experiences, how it feels to be self-deceived is knowable only retrospectively, after the spell has been broken.
Take
Oedipus. Anxious that the prophecy of patricide and incest will be
fulfilled, he leaves his home and family. Though he is genuinely shocked
and sickened at the discovery of his true identity, there are
indicators throughout the play to suggest his wilful ignorance.
Given his fear of patricide, why does Oedipus continue blithely on his
way after killing a man? Given his fear of committing incest, why does
he marry a widow without first piecing the puzzle together? Such neglect
leads the audience to suspect that, somehow, Oedipus was dimly aware of
his identity before its full disclosure, and that he either repressed
this awareness or deceived himself to avoid the painful truth.
Thankfully,
for most of us, our small acts of repression, denial and self-deception
are more mundane. For instance, data gathered through self-reporting on
consumption often delivers distorted results, reflecting the
respondents’ preferred self-image rather than any objective facts. It
would be foolish to read self-deception into every omitted glass of wine
or unrecorded biscuit – embarrassment and forgetfulness are equally
plausible explanations. Even if self-deception is the root cause, this
behavior seems fairly harmless.
Strategies of postponement and misrepresentation allow us to conceal our true nature even from ourselves.
Somewhere
on the scale between extremely damaging and totally insignificant
self-deception we find examples that resonate. If ancient wisdom
traditions are right and the quest for self-knowledge is a fundamental
part of human flourishing – as in the Socratic maxim
‘know thyself’ – then self-deception undermines the central aims of the
good life. Convincing ourselves of what is manifestly false or
impossible is both existentially crippling and socially harmful. This
propensity is sometimes referred to as the mal du siècle: a general malaise triggered by unsettling awareness of our potential and identity.
In Being and Nothingness (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre invokes the concept of mauvaise foi,
or bad faith, to explicate self-deception. He argues that many people
are afraid to confront themselves, preferring to follow prescribed norms
and fulfill pre-assigned roles rather than to strive for
self-realization. He illustrates bad faith with a few examples: a
woman’s hesitant reaction to a man’s advances, a waiter’s
self-identification as ‘nothing more’ than a waiter, a homosexual’s
unwillingness to acknowledge his sexuality. These strategies of
postponement and misrepresentation allow the person to conceal their
true nature even from themselves. Sartre deplores this mode of life,
for, while such strategies might serve as effective coping mechanisms in
the short term, in the long run they are existentially paralyzing.
This
kind of self-deception, the sort backed up by conformity to norms or
stereotypes, is extremely difficult to detect. And, naturally, the most
pervasive forms of self-deceit are the hardest to root out. This is
especially clear in cases of discrepancy between what a person
professes, and how they feel or behave.
Of course, the presence of
a bias does not automatically imply self-deception. People can
discriminate unknowingly, even against their will, and there is a world
of difference between ignorance, and wilful ignorance of one’s own
biases and prejudices. As the US civil rights advocate Jesse Jackson put
it in 1993: ‘There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my
life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps … then look around
and see somebody white and feel relieved.’ Still, discrepancy between
belief and behavior can sometimes signal self-deception, as can the
language we use.
It is a mistake
to treat the philosophical and the practical aspects of the problem of
self-deception as entirely distinct. For what use is an explanation of
this phenomenon unaccompanied by a strategy for its alleviation?
Prominent Western theories on self-deception tend to leave the practical
problem unresolved. But there is an alternative, Buddhist approach. The
artful combination of three Buddhist theories provides a
philosophically therapeutic perspective on self-deception. Before
turning to this response, however, let’s delve deeper into the concept
of self on which the paradox depends.
Skeptics about self-deception claim that any genuine examples would need to satisfy impossible conditions, such as the knowing-dupe or the contradictory belief
conditions. They claim that satisfying the first condition means being
duped by one’s own duplicitous scheme while satisfying the second is
tantamount to abandoning reason. Such skepticism represents the minority
view, since so many examples of this supposedly impossible phenomenon
are clear. Yet it remains a theoretical option.
For the skeptic’s
defeat we must show either: (1) that the fact of somebody holding
inconsistent beliefs is reconcilable with the idea of a unified center
of conscious beliefs; or (2) that the skeptic misconstrues the
conditions under which self-deception occurs. Arguably, the skeptic’s
account of self-deception reduces the complexities of human psychology
to what is possible at one single moment in time, under the assumption
that no sane, cognitively competent person simultaneously believes p and not-p.
But
if this is an argument against self-deception, it is time to revise our
model of selfhood. Indeed, far from precluding the possibility of
self-deception, the multifaceted nature of consciousness might actually
help to explain it.
Western philosophy has produced several responses to the paradox of self-deception, the most recurrent of which are the temporal partitioning and the psychological partitioning
approaches. Both challenge the (still dominant) conception of the self
as completely internally unified and fully self-aware. They are designed
to show that self-deception is paradoxical only if the Cartesian model
of the self as a non-composite, immaterial substance – whose purity we
imagine we partake of – is accepted. Without this idea of the self,
self-deception is a puzzle, but it is not a paradox.
Deceiving oneself is just a more unusual case of lying
Some
leading philosophers in consciousness studies and the nature of mind
reject the Cartesian concept of self. Aside from the lack of empirical
evidence for such a self, it would surely be too abstract and impersonal
to bear a connection with the individual of lived experience, who
engages and interacts in the temporal world. But the influence of the
Cartesian model has historically been so significant that it continues
to shape the debate. Although both temporal partitioning and
psychological partitioning proposals challenge this model of the self,
they do not resolve the practical problem of eliminating self-deception.
Advocates of temporal partitioning might invoke the appointment case
to explain how self-deception works. The philosopher Brian McLaughlin
at Rutgers University in New Jersey summarizes it as follows:
In order to miss an unpleasant meeting three months ahead, Mary deliberately writes the wrong date for the meeting in her appointment book, a date later than the actual date of the meeting. She does this so that three months later when she consults the book, she will come mistakenly to believe the meeting is on that date and, as a result, miss the meeting.
This is supposed to show that self-deception does not require simultaneous belief in p and not-p. Instead, all that is required is an intention to induce the belief not-p at the time of believing p.
In this case, there is no time when Mary believes both that her
appointment is on Thursday and that it is on Friday. Rather, she relies
on her faulty memory so that, when she eventually consults her diary,
she will have forgotten her act of deception.
We can contest the
likelihood of Mary’s forgetting. Indeed, if the prospective appointment
(let’s say, with the dentist) elicits such a reaction, she will surely
struggle to put it out of her mind. What matters though is that temporal
partitioning challenges the idea that the act of deception and the
experience of deceit must coincide. Deceiving oneself therefore largely
resembles deceiving somebody else, and is just a more unusual case of
lying.
For the skeptic, this account won’t cut it. The obvious
objection is that temporal partitioning seems not so much to explain
self-deception as to explain it away. After all, if after three months
Mary has forgotten the true date of her appointment, doesn’t this show
that the Mary who deceived is, in some sense, a different person from
the Mary who is deceived? If we distinguish cases of self-deception from cases of self-induced deception,
we might protest that the appointment case is an example only of the
latter. And even if we are satisfied that temporal partitioning explains
how self-deception occurs, it cannot tell us how to overcome it.
Another
common explanation of self-deception appeals to psychological
partitioning between the different facets of the self. On this view,
self-deception does involve simultaneous assent to p and not-p but this is not
paradoxical because of the multifaceted nature of the self. Rather than
treat the self as fully integrated, we should see it as a process, the
product of a complex structure composed of various elements. One part of
the self can conceal its beliefs from another part, making
self-deception possible.
It is only in moments of introspection
that the illusion of a unified self is cast into doubt. An advantage of
this theory is that it accommodates different levels of self-awareness
within one individual, explaining discrepancies between the conscious
and unconscious mind.
The philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty at Harvard Medical School illustrates how this might work with the example of Dr Laetitia Androvna:
A specialist in the diagnosis of cancer, whose fascination for the obscure does not usually blind her to the obvious, she has begun to mis-describe and ignore symptoms that the most junior premedical student would recognize as the unmistakable symptoms of the late stages of a currently incurable form of cancer.
Androvna deflects the
questions of her concerned colleagues away from her condition, though
she does put her affairs in order (eg, by making a will). The mismatch
between her behavior and her consciously held beliefs suggests that, at
some level, she recognizes her illness but is finding ways to keep her
conflicting acknowledgements apart.
Again, the skeptic argues that
psychological partitioning is incompatible with genuine instances of
self-deception because this approach likewise undermines the identity of
deceiver and deceived. From this perspective, if the self is divisible
then, to be sure, one part might deceive another, but is this self-deception? If we challenge the unity of the self, must we also challenge the idea of self-deception?
According to Buddhism, the answer is no.
Early
Buddhists did not explicitly discuss the problem of self-deception, at
least not as it’s understood in Western philosophy. What they did do,
however, was provide detailed accounts of three theories that,
collectively, provide a response to both the philosophical and practical
aspects of the problem. These are (1) the theory of no-self (anātman); (2) the theory of wilful ignorance (avidyā); and (3) the theory of two truths (satyadvaya).
These
teachings are variously interpreted within Buddhism, but all schools
agree that they can provide transformative insights into our own nature,
banishing our tendency for self-deception. While we’re inclined to
treat self-deception as the exception rather than the rule, Buddhists
see it as our default position. They claim that most people repress and
deny uncomfortable truths, deceiving themselves on an almost
unimaginable scale about all manner of things. From the Buddhist point
of view, the skeptic’s only success lies in the extent of their
self-deceit: by defining the self in ways that make it impervious to
change, they also strip it of potential.
Specifically, Buddhists
claim that we routinely convince ourselves that what is perishable and
impermanent can be a lasting source of satisfaction. This illusion only
reinforces our existential situation, which is one of profound
suffering. From this perspective, even when false beliefs offer
temporary relief from painful truths, self-deception merely prolongs the
inevitable. Since none of us can stave off our demise forever, each of
us is eventually forced to confront the reality of our own transience.
The
remedy to all this is a fearless acceptance of our own impermanence and
insubstantiality. By abandoning our self-image as fixed centers of
agency, Buddhists argue that we eliminate the stultifying effects of
greed and hatred borne from egoism. This process eventually leads to
liberation through self-awareness, consisting of awareness of the
fundamental lack of any self at all.
No-self (anātman)
is Buddhism’s most famous, but also most frequently misunderstood,
theory. Buddhists supply several arguments against the existence of an
eternal, changeless, transcendental and metaphysical self. To understand
these arguments, we must contextualize them against the backdrop of the
Vedic view of the self, dominant in classical India. In the Vedic
worldview, the innermost kernel of a person, the ātman, corresponds to the fundamental source and ground of reality, the Brahman, which is essentially unchanging.
Buddhists
reject this on two fronts. First, if the self existed in this way, it
could not engage in worldly experience but would instead stand inertly
outside of time and space. It would thus bear no relation to the human
person who lives and changes through time. Moreover, since experience
confirms that everything is causally conditioned, hence subject to
change and degradation, an immutable self could never be empirically
observed. Second, Buddhists argue that obsession with a fixed self is
morally problematic, and that this belief perpetuates selfishness.
Belief in the self is therefore seen as both the symptom and the cause
of deluded attachment.
The human person is a process, not a thing.
Ironically,
then, Buddhists are inclined to see belief in a single substantial self
as the severest, most dangerous instance of self-deception. This
immediately raises the question: if there is no-self, who can be the
subject of self-deceit? To answer, we must invoke the theory of two
truths (satyadvaya), which stipulates a distinction between ultimate and conventional truth.
In
his study of self-deception in different traditions, the philosopher
Eliot Deutsch of the University of Hawaii demonstrates one of the ways
in which the no-self theory is often misconstrued. He argues that
Buddhists can ‘have little to say’ about self-deception because they do
not accept the ultimate reality of the metaphysical self. If this
disqualifies Buddhists from debates on self-deception, it must also
disqualify many Western philosophers who do not approach the paradox of
self-deception with a unitary self in mind (including advocates of
temporal and psychological partitioning).
On the contrary,
although Buddhists reject the ultimate existence of the self, they
accept the conventional (we might say, practical or functional) reality
of conceptually constructed persons. And crucially, as we have seen, it
is the conventional person – not an ultimate self – who expresses the full range of human emotions and deploys the tactics of self-manipulation, including self-deception.
Buddhists conceive of conventional reality in terms of conceptualization. Hence, the concept of a person reflects nothing more than the imposition of this idea on to ephemeral elements of which we are composed, called the skandhas. The skandhas
include: the physical body, sensory experiences, cognitive awareness of
perceptions, intentional acts of will and consciousness. None of these
remain stable over time but there is a causal connection between the
past, present and future skandhas. This is sufficient for personal identity even though there is no such thing as a numerically identical self.
In other words, the human person is a process,
not a thing. Our language typically fails to communicate this fact, and
my repeated use of the word ‘I’ sustains the illusion of the self as an
underlying, constant feature of reality.
To
explain how self-deception occurs, Buddhists can distinguish ultimate
from conventional truth. Like the temporal and psychological
partitioning approaches, epistemic partitioning challenges the
identity of deceiver and deceived. At the level of ultimate truth, there
simply is no-self who could be self-deceived. At the level of
conventional truth, we encounter the person (who is an illusion, better
thought of as a sequence of person-stages). Unlike temporal and
psychological partitioning, however, epistemic partitioning goes a step
further. It not only explains the mechanism of self-deception but also
contains the seeds of its elimination.
The Buddha’s teachings are
renowned for their therapeutic orientation, and self-deception seems the
antithesis of an authentic life of human flourishing. Buddhism stresses
the link between discerning truth (with ‘right view’ as the first step
on the noble eightfold path) and moral fulfillment. The distinction
between ultimate and conventional truth not only explains the origins of
our illusions but helps us to overcome, or see through, their deceptive
character.
The final goal of this process is the complete
alleviation of suffering, including the suffering borne out of
self-deception. Epistemic partitioning of ultimate and conventional
knowledge results in two modes of knowing, which we might call
the cognitive/intellectual and the affective/practical. We might know
ultimately that everything is impermanent and insubstantial yet remain
attached to merely conventional things. Ourselves, for instance.
We display wilful ignorance of perishability as we cannot bear to lose the things we hold most dear
Once
we internalize this truth, however, Buddhists suppose that delusional
compulsions for transient things will be gradually undermined. Just as
there is no ultimately real self, neither are there any ultimately real
tables, chairs and so forth. The identity we assign to composite things
made up of parts is just the product of mental construction, reflecting
our ingrained tendency to impose structure, stability and substance.
Though
we know that things change and degrade, we act as though they are
permanent. Such a discrepancy between conscious cognitive belief and
innate affective attitude signals self-deceit. Put simply, we display
wilful ignorance (avidyā) of perishability because we cannot bear to lose the things we hold most dear.
Why, then, do Buddhists treat conventional truths as truths
at all? Indeed, if they are nothing but convenient fictions, isn’t this
a distortion of truth’s meaning? Again, Buddhists see the therapeutic
dimension of their philosophy as justifying this manoeuvre: belief in
the self would be both inaccurate and unhelpful, whereas belief in the
person is key to accomplishing the goals of Buddhism. Mindfulness forces
us first to confront the wide chasm between our self-image and the
ultimate truth of our nature; and second, helps us to bridge that chasm
by becoming increasingly aware of the workings of the mind and its
deceptive strategies so that we no longer repress and deny our true
feelings.
It might strike the modern reader as patently wrongheaded to suggest that any religious
tradition contains the seeds of a solution more satisfying than secular
proposals. For, understandably, many see religious belief as
coterminous with wishful thinking and incompatible with reason. However,
the Buddhist response sketched here depends exclusively on arguments
about human nature that are equally open to dispute and defense. There
is no recourse to mystical or non-empirical claims. And because the
problem of self-deception is more personal than many of philosophy’s
other problems, viable solutions must work both in theory and in
practice. Though the many forms of self-deception make the effectiveness
of a universally applicable remedy unlikely, Buddhists would concur
with Macbeth’s doctor that ‘Therein the patient must minister to
himself.’
