I wonder if Taylor is claiming too much in her description of self-deception. Perhaps it is her constant assessment of extremes that leads me to feel this way, but I find that her discussion of self-deception at the end of the chapter digs too deep into the psyche of the self-deceiver. She claims that the self-deceiver needs to protect himself from people that would challenge his deception. Also the self-deceiver must protect himself from self discovery. Thus the self-deceiver "devotes much effort to ever greater protection of a false self". She also notes other active mental games of the like.
I wonder though if this is fair to argue. Perhaps if one believes in a subconsious or unconscious level, this is what is going on. However, I find that in the case of self-deception one is not actively doing these things. If one is truly deceiving oneself, he will not noticeably protect himself from others or himself. He will simply live his life without realizing what he is doing. If one is actively attempting to protect himself from other's discovery, I feel one cannot truly be deceiving himself. He must know the deception in order to actively protect the false self. Thus, he is not deceiving himself at all. The knowledge of the false self negates any self-deception.
I feel that the truly self-deceived may inadvertently do the things Taylor argues happens. However, it cannot happen in the active way that Taylor seems to argue for. Furthermore, it is hard to assess her arguments given the extremes she refers to. No one seems to be so deluded as to face the amount of self-deception she describes. As has been as issue in every aspect of the book thus far, how helpful is it to talk about such extremes that basically do not exist? Furthermore, perhaps it is more important to show how one could get out of self-deception. I feel that the way Taylor explains self-deception leaves the agent somewhat knowing that he has a false self which would allow him to get out of his deception. However, I feel that she does not mean to leave it open as such, which makes me wonder how one could get out of these extreme cases she describes.
I apologize for the randomness of this blog, but I couldn't get a good grasp of what the chapter was trying to accomplish.
3 comments:
Taylor also talks about suppression and exaggeration on page 55. It is in this here that she explains in making decisions about how to live our life we place a certain amount of weight upon pervious experiences to determine the decisions we make. Thus, certain experiences which should play a larger role in making a decision are not given enough weight, or is ignored completely in the making of such a decision. This is what leads to the creation of a false self. And I believe this is the basis of deceiving the self. He is not actively working to deceive himself. It is that he is “confused about his values and wants” (66). Confusion happens to be a great way in deceiving yourself. If you don’t understand exactly what it is that you are working towards, or even have a general idea of that goal. It is easy to be deceived into believing the wrong things.
I do agree with you that in showing the extreme of the situation it is hard to understand how to truly assess them for the average person. But I also think it was important to see those extremes to have a better understanding of them, she simply needs to supplement them with the average person explanations of how to become a more worthwhile self. But that is for later chapters, I believe Taylor is laying the ground work for further chapters, and hopefully then she will explain how to escape some of these extreme vices.
I also think that one needs to mind the possibility of a false self developing before the act of deceiving others comes into play. A self may be nurtured and cultivated by one's stimuli and learning experiences to think and act in ways that would be considered vices. That particular self is probably confused on what is a worthy life to lead and upon gaining that knowledge through some means, that particular self continues to act in vice because that is what the self is most familiar with and knows most about. It is here that a false self begins to develop in order to deceive those who surrounding the agent/self in order to hide from oneself that they are acting in vice while knowing that there is another way to lead one's life, or at least perhaps another way is worth a try. Thus, they are leading a false life.
Taylor is able to retain her position of tying her hand behind her back with her arguments. She is able to do this because the false life that a particular self is leading is being carried out through confusion and ignorance towards what would truly be beneficial to oneself. The self would be confused when holding the knowledge that one needs to elevate one's life, and commonly is fearful, hesitant, and unsure, which will undoubtedly cloud one's mind and strengthen the sense of a false self.
I agree with Christa in that the aim of this chapter was hard to grasp, due to (at least for me) its lofty concepts and difficult material. Particularly regarding self-deception, Taylor's explanations could get tricky. Personally, unlike Christa, I accepted Taylor's stipulations for self-deception, in that one must know the true self in order to decieve oneself. Though this might seem a contradictory statement, it seems that someone completely unaware of his or her true self is not self-deceptive, but simply ignorant. In order to deceive, one must hide or conceal something, even if it is from themself: the truth. If the truth, in this case the true self, is not known, then there can be no deception over it. However, this only seems to be true if the person is actively (consciously) hiding something. Regarding unconciously hiding something (and thus being deceptive) is a question that requires further exploration, as Taylor attempts to do.
I agree the degree to which Taylor makes her posits about the self and self-deception are somewhat excessive. I do not, however, beleive that the extremity of these cases invalidates their value when considering topics like the self and self-conscious. It is in fact very unlikely that cases as extreme as Taylor states them would ever occur; however this does not mean they are impossible. Taylor's aim in discussing such intense case might have been to study the vices (and self-deception, in this chapter) in their purest possible forms; to present cases in which the vice is so extreme in the individual that one can study it without interference from other factors that might be found in the everyday person. If (and that's a big "if") this is Taylor's aim, then the results are two-fold: the reader gets to study the vice (or self-deception) as it actually is (at least from Taylor's view), but loses the opportunity to study that vice as applied to the everyday world, and the everyday person. Perhaps an analogy would be fitting here: We can take a brain, a heart, a kidney, anything from the human body, and study it in an isolated setting. We can learn all about that organ, down to its cellular level. This knowledge is quite useful. But by studying the heart or kidney or brain in this isolated sense, we do not learn how that organ functions as part of a whole in the individual, how the workings of that organ are applied in the grand sceme of a person, where its influence is joined by that of many other organs. This does not invalidate the knowledge gained by studying solely the organ in question, but requires that that knowledge be built upon. (And in Taylor's defense, knowledge of thing isolated could greatly aid learning about the thing as part of a whole.)
Though I would have appreciated Taylor writing this chapter in more basic terms, I find that I agree with at least some of what she states (provided I actually understood it correctly) and her methods of analyzing the vices. I beleive Christa is right in stipulating that Taylor should use everyday cases, though I also believe these should be provided in addition to the extreme scenarios Taylor provides, not instead of them.
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