Reflexive paradoxes 0415000831

Citation preview

REFLEXIVE PARADOXES T.S. CHAMPI.IN

ROUTLEDGE London and New York

First published in 1988 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Published in the USA by Routledge in association with Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York NY 10001 © 1988 T.S. Champlin

Printed in Great Britain All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Champlin, T.S. Reflexive paradoxes. 1. Self-knowledge, Theory of I. Title 160 DB161 ISBN 0-415-00083-1 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

ISBN 0-415-00083-1

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Billing 8c Sons Ltd, Worcester.

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

1. Introduction

1

2. Self-deception

10

3. Anatomy of a Reflexive Paradox

24

4. Self-contradiction

46

5. For Its Own Sake

60

6. Self-movers

79

7. Self-generation of Life

95

8. Reflexives and Solo Performances

113

9. Self-reference

120

10. Suicide and Self-killing

143

11. Self-membership

1*>6

12. Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

187

13. Self-knowledge

208

14. Conclusion

225

Index

230

Acknowledgements The paradox of self-deception was the first reflexive paradox to arouse my interest. I am therefore grateful to the editors and publishers of Mind and Philosophy for permission to make use of some of my own material on self-deception which has appeared in articles published in these journals (‘Double deception’, Mind, 85 (1976), pp. 100-2; ‘Self-deception — a reflexive dilemma', Philosophy, 52 (1977), pp. 281-99; ‘Self-deception in second-rate English’, Philosophy, 59 (1984), pp. 259-61). A good deal of Section 3 of Chapter 3 of this book has appeared in The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 53 (1979), pp. 77-94, as part of my contribution to a symposium with Tony Palmer given at the Joint Session in Sheffield in 1979 on self-deception and autobiography. Chapter 5 of this book is closely based on my ‘Doing something for its own sake’ which was published originally in Philosophy, 62 (1987), pp. 31-47. I am indebted to Mr A.D.M. Walker for providing me with painstakingly detailed translations of passages in Aristotle’s Physics, Book VIII, dealing with motion and the self-mover, which is the topic of Chapter 6. Whilst I was writing this book, Hull University granted me study leave for the autumn term of 1985. I have benefited greatly from discussion of papers on various reflexive paradoxes which I have read to the staff and students in my own department and in the Departments of Philosophy in the Universities of Durham, Leeds, Southampton and Warwick. Regular meetings of the North Eastern Philosophy Group, attended by philosophers from the Universities of Durham, Leeds, Newcastle, York and Hull, have provided me with a stimulating forum in which to present and discuss earlier versions of several chapters. Above all, I wish to express my indebtedness to those philosophy students at Hull University who have attended my lectures and tutorials on the various philosophical paradoxes examined in this book. Not a few of the examples in these pages began life as counter-examples, put to me by my students, to pet theories of my own before suffering the fate of being incorporated into them. I .S. Champlin University of Hull Vll

On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go; And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so. Yet strive so, that before age, death’s twilight, Thy soul rest, for none can work in that night. (John Donne, Satire III)

In every serious philosophical problem uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem. We must always be prepared to learn something totally new. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on colour, /, 15)

1 Introduction

At some point in your life you will have told a lie and have been believed. You will have deceived the person to whom you lied. Could it be that, on other occasions, you have also deceived yourself by telling yourself a lie? If so, how did you practise deceit on yourself? In trying to answer this question, you are likely to find yourself pulled in opposite directions by equally strong arguments. How can the self-deceiver’s knowledge of what he is up to fail to frustrate any attempt he might make to deceive him­ self? On the other hand, have the poets, novelists, psychiatrists and millions of ordinary men and women been talking nonsense when they have spoken of self-deception as a familiar, everyday occurrence? He who seeks the truth in this matter ‘about must and about must go’. These words come from some lines of John Donne which I have chosen as part of the motto for my book; they serve to remind us that, just as steep mountains are best crossed by a series of zigzag paths which never point directly towards the summit, so the challenging questions in philosophy are best answered by tackling smaller problems which look to the philo­ sopher’s companion (and, let me admit it, to the philosopher too at times) as though they arc leading him in the wrong direction away from the main point. That is why, in trying to understand, say, self-deception, my invitation in Chapter 2 to consider how we invite ourselves to other people’s parties, teach ourselves French or show ourselves out of someone’s house, is not an irrelevant digression but a step that brings us closer to being able to find a solution to our original problem concerning self-deception by allowing us to see it in a new light. The other part of my motto is a remark of Wittgenstein’s about the need to be ready to learn 1

Introduction

something totally new in order to make progress with a philosophical problem. For it is characteristic of a problem in philosophy that the question one keeps putting to oneself is the unrecognised expression of the confusion from which one will have to escape before one can see clearly where one’s misunder­ standing lies. Perhaps the reader will not have noticed that this chapter began by asking ‘Can you practise deceit on yourself?’ as though this was the same as asking ‘Can you deceive yourself?’ But is it? If, as I shall argue in Chapter 2, these are different questions, we shall have had to learn something new and sur­ prising about the difference between deceit and deception which has a direct bearing on what makes self-deception so puzzling. The philosophical puzzle about the nature of self-deception with which I opened this chapter is the first reflexive paradox to be discussed in this book (in Chapter 2). I call it a reflexive paradox because ‘to deceive oneself is, grammatically, a reflexive form o f ‘to deceive’.1 ‘Reflexive paradox’ is thus a handy label; but I want to make it clear at the outset that what I propose to call reflexive paradoxes do not have to be expressed using grammatically reflexive forms of verbs, nor does every reflexive form of a verb generate a reflexive paradox. One might have asked, ‘How is self-deception possible?’ where ‘self-deception’ is not a grammatically reflexive part of speech, though it is obviously related to one. Or one might have asked, ‘How can someone be his own deceiver?’ where, again, ‘his own deceiver’ does not contain a reflexive part of speech.2 By the reflexive form of a finite, transitive verb I mean a verb whose object is a reflexive pronoun which agrees with the subject of the verb in person, gender and number. Thus, the sentence ‘She has deceived herself contains a reflexive verb-form because the subject ‘she’ of the transitive verb ‘deceive’ and its object, the reflexive pronoun ‘herself, agree in person, gender and number. Similarly, ‘We are deceiving ourselves’ also contains a reflexive form, regardless of whether this sentence is being used to mean ‘Each of us is deceiving himself or ‘Each of us is deceiving someone from amongst us other than himself.’ Some grammarians try to restrict the definition of a reflexive verb-form so that only on the first interpretation, where there is genuine self-deception, that is, deception of oneself by oneself, would ‘We are deceiving ourselves’ count as reflexive. A reflexive verb-form, say these grammarians, reports the action of the subject as being carried back upon itself. This appeal to reflexive meaning is, I think, 2

Introduction

inconvenient for both logic and grammar. It is like saying that the verb in ‘He sleeps’ cannot be in the active voice because sleeping is such a passive state; or that ‘I’ in ‘I was the object of much criticism’ cannot be the subject of the sentence because I was the object, not the agent, of the censure; or that ‘its’ in ‘its reader’ (referring to a letter) cannot be a personal possessive adjective because a letter is not a person and is not necessarily either possessed by or the possessor of its reader. Very commonly, a reflexive verb in one language is translated by an intransitive verb in another. Thus, s'éternuer in French, which is reflexive in form, means ‘to sneeze’. How is the appeal to reflexive meaning to be applied in such a case? If those who speak English cannot see sneezing as something being done by oneself to oneself, are we to tell the French grammarian that s'éternuer is not a true reflexive? And if it is easier to think of blowing one’s nose (se moucher in French, which is a reflexive by my, and the dictionarymakers’, standards) as doing something to oneself, does that make the English ‘He blew his nose’ reflexive too? I take it that neither of these alternatives has anything to recommend it in logic or grammar. The reflexive meaning test suffers from the further defect of being unusable in certain examples. Four children who are goodhumouredly playing with razor-blades are warned, ‘If you carry on like that, you will injure yourselves.’ Suppose they do injure themselves. A injures himself and B injures himself (so A and B injure themselves — a reflexive on the reflexive meaning test); C injures D and D injures C (so C and D injure themselves, that is, each other — not a reflexive on the reflexive meaning test). In the previous sentence but one, is ‘they do injure themselves’, where ‘they’ refers to all four children, A, B, C and D, reflexive in form or not? On the reflexive meaning test the answer seems to be ‘Partly yes and partly no.’ In order to present difficulties for the reflexive meaning test, the example need not contain more than two people. Two children take a bath and find only one towel on which to get dried. First, each rubs himself with the towel, then each rubs the other with the towel. They rubbed themselves dry on the towel. Is ‘rub’ used reflexively in ‘They rubbed themselves dry’? Grammar and logic are, I suggest, best kept apart. Grammatical reflexivity and doing something to oneself are no more essentially linked than time and tense, sex and gender, substance and substantive, or verb and action. Where a reflexive pronoun is the object of a finite verb and agrees in number, 3

Introduction

gender and person with the subject of that verb, I shall say that the verb is being used reflexively. Though ‘to deceive oneself is grammatically reflexive, decep­ tion is clearly not what logicians call a reflexive relation. Logic textbooks often define a reflexive relation by saying that it is of the form (x)xRx. A reflexive relation, that is to say, is such that anything capable of having that relation cannot but have it to itself. Clearly, ‘. . . deceives . . is not such a relation since not all deception is self-deception. Could it be that self-deception is a reflexive relation? Frankly, I am suspicious of the whole idea of so-called ‘reflexive relations’ as defined by logicians and do not intend to rely on their notion in my work. One logic textbook states that ‘. . . is no richer than . . . is equal in height to . . .’ and ‘. . . is as old as . . .’, said of people, are all reflexive relations on the grounds that each of us is no richer than he is, is as old as he is, and is equal in height to himself/* I have even seen it suggested that ‘. . . drives the same car as . . .’ can be used to express a reflexive relation. Such claims misconstrue the logic of our language in the same way that a small child does who, on being asked how tall he is, stretches up on tip-toe and, placing his hand on the top of his head, says, ‘I’m as big as thatV In my search for an explanation of what I mean by a reflexive paradox I have rejected the grammarian’s reflexive meaning test and the logician’s idea of a reflexive relation. A simple solution to my search for a satisfactory account of a reflexive paradox might be thought to lie in taking as basic the idea of a ‘reflexive activity’, of doing something to oneself. Reflexive paradoxes would then be those paradoxes which turned on problems arising from trying to understand such ‘reflexive activities’. But what is to count as doing something to oneself? Shall we include blowing and wiping one’s nose, combing one’s hair, etc.? These things are, surely, the clearest possible instances of doing something to oneself, quite as good as deceiving oneself or contradicting oneself. Yet the words in which we express them are not reflexive in grammatical form and they do not generate paradox. Indeed, it sounds very queer to me to speak of such activities as shaving oneself or deceiving oneself, etc., as reflexive at all. I am reluctant to speak of ‘reflexive shaving’, ‘reflexive deceiving’, etc. in the same breath as other genuine types of activity, say, communal activities like communal bathing in a public swimming pool. ‘Rupturing yourself is a reflexive activity’ sounds like nonsense to me. I do recognise, however, that the reflexive form of a verb performs a 4

Introduction

great variety of functions, too varied to allow grammatical reflexivity alone to be used as anything other than a rough guide to the subject matter of this book. For whilst it might be plausible to say of someone who has deceived himself (reflexive) that he has done something to himself, this cannot be said of someone who has acquitted himself (reflexive) bravely in battle, misbehaved himself (reflexive) or found himself (reflexive) in a fix. There is no need, however, to abandon altogether either the traditional notion of reflexive grammatical form or the idea of doing something to oneself, as against doing it to others (though the latter must be extended to include doing something for, by, on behalf of, etc., oneself, itself, etc.); what is needed in the definition is a combination of both form and content. A reflexive paradox is about doing something to, for, by, etc., oneself, itself, etc., where this is expressed in a grammatically reflexive or reflexive-related way. How, then, does paradox emerge? Perhaps the best way to explain is by means of some examples. I suggest that the paradoxes I shall call reflexive paradoxes can best be thought of as arising in the following way. The claim ‘Cain killed Abel’ invites us to reckon Cain amongst the killers and Abel amongst the killed. We might happily proceed to draw up lists of the names of those killed and of their killers until we meet the sentence ‘Judas killed himself.’ On which of our two lists should Judas’s name appear? It is tempting to enter Judas’s name on each list. Judas did, after all, kill in the sense that he took life; equally, he was killed in the sense that he did not die a natural death. If a logician were to suggest jK j as a suitable symbolic notation for ‘J udas killed himself, he would, in effect, be endorsing this suggestion. The trouble with this classification is that, in lumping Judas with both Cain and Abel, with both the killers and their victims, important differences between Judas on the one hand and either Cain or Abel on the other, are obscured. Cain killed and was a murderer; Abel was a murderer’s victim; but Judas was neither a murderer nor a murderer’s victim. Judas was his own killer and his own victim all rolled into one. W'ith this point in mind, a more perspicuous way to display the relationships between the subjects and the objects of the non­ reflexive ‘kill’ and reflexive forms of the same verb would be to produce not two but three lists by tightening up on the entry requirements for the original two lists and by adding a third. This gives us: (1) those who kill others; (2) those who are killed by others; (3) those who kill themselves, that is, self-killers, or those 5

Introduction

who are their own killers. ‘Self-killers’ and ‘their own killers’ are not grammatically reflexive but they are reflexive-related in the sense that they occur logically in the explanation of the meaning of the reflexive ‘to kill oneself when it is applied to Judas. We can now begin to investigate this third category. Has everyone who kills himself, we may wonder, committed suicide as Christ’s disciple Judas is said to have done? If you do something knowingly which results in your death, does it follow that you will have killed yourself? Do we not need a fourth list on which to place those who have killed themselves but who have not com­ mitted suicide (drunken car drivers, for example, accidentally killed in car crashes caused by their own recklessness), and who are not their own deliberate killers? Is committing suicide the same as taking one’s own life? How is this now more narrowly defined third category, namely, that of suicides, related to the other three, and how are each of the four lists related to the others? In order to commit suicide, we might further want to know, is it necessary to die by one’s own hand? Is not this tantamount to asking whether it is possible to be killed by someone or something other than oneself and yet to have killed oneself? Is that a contradiction in terms or a genuine, if paradoxical, possibility? 1 do not mean to suggest that the original threefold division was superior to the twofold, or the fourfold to the threefold division. After all, placing Judas in a different category from Abel fails to bring out something common to them both, namely, that they both have killed, which is captured by the twofold division. For different purposes we might prefer different classifications. With many verbs it proves to be disconcertingly difficult, yet intellectually fascinating, to explain how these various categories are related to each other; in some cases it is not even clear whether the reflexive, or reflexiverelated, grammatical form creates a genuinely separate category to which something could possibly belong. Hence the appearance in the history of philosophy of such questions as ‘Can anything be its own cause?’, ‘Strictly speaking, can anything destroy itself?’, or ‘Is literal self-deception logically impossible?’ Nor should we assume that there must be no more than one single category answering to a given reflexive form. Killing oneself comes to different things, depending on whether we are describing a successful suicide bid or the fate of the drunken driver who misjudged the bend and died at the wheel in the resulting fatal accident. 6

Introduction

‘Killing oneself generates a reflexive paradox in the following way. A desperate man has deliberately placed his head on the rails in front of an oncoming train and has been killed outright. Has he killed himself? Or was he killed, not by his own agency, but by the wheels of the train? To count as a genuine suicide, would he have had to take his own life with his own bare hands? Fresh paradox arises when we note that the recipient of a letter bomb, which goes off as he opens it and kills him, has not killed himself or blown himself up whereas someone who plays with what he mistakenly believes to be an unloaded revolver, which goes off as he pulls the trigger and kills him, has killed himself. Even when neither of them has committed suicide, we appear to be able to recognise that there is more to killing oneself than being causally instrumental in one’s own death. And yet, if the maker of the letter bomb cannot resist fiddling with it and dies as a result of triggering it off by mistake, he will have killed himself. When the receiver and sender of the bomb have done the same thing, namely, opened the letter and set off the bomb, why is it that the sender, but not the receiver, has blown himself up? Moving to a different example, we speak of one thing as the cause of another, as in ‘The dog was the cause of the car accident.’ Is it possible for something to be the cause of itself? Is God, as Christians and others have traditionally conceived him, the cause of the existence of everything, including himself? Or is that incoherent? Are self-actuating mechanisms, for example, the self-opening and self-closing doors at the entrances to large department stores, a more down-to-earth instance of self­ causation? Do such doors really open and close themselves? Isn’t that done by separate servo-mechanisms attached to the doors? Reflexive paradoxes arise when several possible schemes of classification (for example, the first scheme for self-killing, discussed earlier, had two divisions, the second had three, the third four) are noticed and the logical relationships between them prove problematic. The presence of an explicit reflexive form is often what triggers off the conceptual difficulty but a reflexiverelated expression will do quite as well. For example, we often do something for the sake of something else, as when we go on a diet for the sake of our health. 'This seems clear enough but what does the slogan ‘Art for art’s sake’ mean? Dieting is usually a means to a further end beyond itself, such as improved appearance. But how can something, whether it be art or dieting, or whatever, be recommended as a means to itself? What is it to pursue an end for 7

Introduction

its own sake? How, if at all, does this differ from pursuing an end simpliciter? ‘Art for art’s sake’ is not reflexive but it is reflexive-

related, as is ‘art for its own sake’ or ‘art as an end in itself or ‘art as self-justifying’. 'These phrases are reflexive-related because they are related to the idea of something justifying itself (a true reflexive). A twofold division would distinguish between means and ends; a threefold division between means to other ends, ends served by other means, and — our special object of interest as a source of reflexive paradox — ends in themselves, things pursued for their own sakes. The example of injuring oneself, which has been mentioned in passing already, affords a particularly neat illustration of one kind of reflexively derived puzzle case which I think deserves attention. A little old lady slips and falls on the icy pavement and injures herself. In a cry-for-hclp suicide bid, someone slashes her wrists and injures herself. Kach has done something to herself. Because each can be described as having injured herself you might be forgiven for thinking that each has done the same thing to herself and can therefore be placed in the same category. But imagine how indignant the little old lady would be if she found the phrase ‘self-inflicted injury?’, which would be unremarkable if applied to the suicide bid who injured herself, scrawled in her doctor’s case-notes. To injure oneself is not always to inflict an injury upon oneself* and ‘doing something to oneself does not discriminate between the two cases because it fits both (which is why the idea of a ‘reflexive activity’ suggested earlier is unhelpful). Then what lies behind the use of the reflexive ‘hurt herself to describe what happened to the little old lady? In an accidental fall from a horse the rider might injure himself. But if the riderless horse bolts and charges into a rambler, knocking him down and injuring him, no one would treat this as a case of the rambler’s injuring himself*. Yet both rider and rambler might well be viewed as innocent victims of circumstances beyond their control — indeed, of the selfsame circumstances, namely, a bolting horse. Where, then, does the différence between them lie? This is an illustration of* a type of puzzling question about the logic of reflexives which we shall encounter frequently in the course of this work and which I hope to answer. 'The major topics covered in this book are self-deception, selfcontradiction, doing something for its own sake, the self-mover in Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas (how is it that things can happen ‘on their own’, ‘automatically’, ‘of their own accord’ or ‘spontantt

Introduction

eously?), self-evidence and self-explanatoriness, suicide and selfkilling, the self-generation of lift* (taking the* nineteenth-century debate about the* possibility of spontaneous generation, that is, of life’s generating itself, as an example of something’s happening ‘of its own accord’), Russell’s Paradox about the self-membership of (lasses, self-knowledge and sell-referential statements (the Liar). Many other less famous, but equally interesting, reflexives will also be discussed. Kach of the above topics is important in the history of philosophy and is worth thinking about in its own right. I believe, however, that there is also an advantage to be gained from studying these topics together. I have found that, in spite of the obvious differences in subject matter, there are lessons to be learned in the one case which can profitably be applied to another. This book is a comparative study of a number of reflexive paradoxes and it stands or falls by the truth or falsity of the claim that there are philosophically illuminating comparisons to be drawn between such seemingly unrelated matters as, say, Aristotle on the question of whether an object can move itself, John Locke on what makes a proposition self-evident, Bertrand Russell on whether a class can be a member of itself, and Sartre on whether it is possible for one man to deceive himself.

Notes 1. 'To deceive oneself is reflexive in form because the verb ‘deceive’ is used here reflexively but it would he incorrect to call ‘to deceive oneself a reflexive verb. Strictly speaking, a reflexive verb is one which can only he used reflexively. A French/Fnglish dictionary will list French se mouvoir as a reflexive verb. Fnglish ‘to pride oneself is likewise a reflexive verb; hut ‘misbehave’ in ‘to misbehave oneself', although its object here is a reflexive pronoun, can also he used intransitively, and therefore ‘to misbehave oneself' does not count as a reflexive verb; *lo misbehave oneself' is merely a reflexive form o f ‘to misbehave’. 2. In some languages, when *his, her, its’, etc., ‘own . . refers hack to the subject of the sentence, it is translated by a spec ial reflexive part ol speech. Latin and Russian, for example, use suus and \roi respectively (the latter, unlike the former, which is restricted to the third person singular and plural, can he used with all persons, first, second and third, singular and plural) as reflexive possessive adjectives. The grammar of Fnglish is different and we should beware ol reading the grammar ol one language into another. T Ian Hacking, .1 concise introduction to logic (Random House, New York, 1972), p. XU.

9

2 Self-deception

A passage in Charles Dickens’ Great expectations nicely illustrates the paradox of self-deception. Pip, now something of a gentle­ man, is about to set out from London on a visit to Miss Havisham in the hope of meeting Estella. It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first flow of my repentance it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe’s. But, when I had secured my box-place by tomorrow’s coach and been down to Mr. Pocket’s and back, I was not by any means convinced on the last point, and began to invent reasons and to make excuses for putting up at the Blue Boar. I should be an inconvenience at Joe’s; I was not expected and my bed would not be ready; I should be too far from Miss Havisham’s, and she was exacting and mightn’t like it. All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else’s manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes! (Charles Dickens, Great expectations, Chapter 28) Self-swindlers are, as Dickens points out, curious creatures. They tell themselves lies which they somehow manage to believe. 10

Self-deception

How is this possible? I may lie to you about the number of ‘O ’ levels I possess, and you may believe me, but how can I lie to myself about my own ‘O ’ levels? Don’t I need to know how many ‘O’ levels I possess in order to lie about the actual number? How then, asks Sartre, after making this very point about the self­ deceiver’s lie, can the self-deceiver’s lie subsist if the duality which conditions it is suppressed?1 The problem arises because we find our deceiving of ourselves by ourselves puzzling in a way which is not shared by our deceiving of others. Still, we would do well to take a closer look at what we mean by ‘deceiving others’ before entering upon an analysis of self-deception. ‘Deceiving another person’ can, I suggest, be meant in two quite different ways. The difference I have in mind is brought out in the difference in meaning between the two adjectives ‘deceitful’ and ‘deceptive’. A deceptive dropshot in squash is played so as to deceive the opponent into thinking you are going to hit the ball hard when, instead, you hit it softly and so wrongfoot him. Your behaviour is deceptive but it is not deceitful. One way of behaving deceitfully on the squash court is to pretend your own shot was in play when you, but not your unsighted opponent, saw that it went out of court. To deceive someone, in the purely ‘deceptive’ sense, is to get him to mistake appearance for reality. But deceit is deception practised in circumstances where the victim is entitled not to expect deception from you. It is because the wife is entitled not to expect such behaviour from her husband that he can deceive her with another woman on the far side of town. Not all deception is deceit, however, as is shown by the example of the deceptive drop-shot in squash. In any comparison of self-deception with other-deception we shall have to be careful to distinguish between two different questions: ( 1) can one practise deceit upon, that is, behave deceitfully towards, oneself? (2) can one behave in a deceptive manner towards oneself? It may be felt that because there is some kind of moral element in self-deception — an intuition, which I share, that selfdeception is always a morally bad thing — the natural way to understand self-deception is to see it as deceit practised upon oneself. For, as I have just agreed, deceit seems to carry essentially moral overtones in a way that deception does not. There is thus a strong temptation to favour a deceit-based interpretation of self-deception. I believe this approach to be a blind alley. Deceit directed at oneself by oneself is not possible for 11

Self-deception

the same reason that you cannot murder yourself. A mass murderer overcome by remorse can kill himself but his suicide will not count as his last murder. Modern sceptics about the possibility of self-deception are usually making the, to my mind, perfectly sound point that the answer to question ( 1) at the end of the previous paragraph is no. But that still leaves us with question (2). Here, once more, it is worth while to distinguish between two very different sorts of circumstances in which someone might be described as having deceived himself. Suppose a military camouflage expert has disguised a gun to look like a tree so skilfully that later, back in the observation post, both he and the recruits under his instruction are deceived into taking the gun for a clump of trees. The expert meant to deceive the others in his charge but, inadvertently, he has deceived himself as well. It would not, I think, be right to describe the camouflage expert’s plight as one of self-deception. By contrast, if a vain, conceited chess player playing a relative beginner were to mistake his own losing position for a winning one because his vanity makes him see weaknesses in his own position as strengths, it would be much more natural to call this a case of self-deception. The idea that not all cases of deceiving oneself are automatically cases of selfdeception sounds, I know, far-fetched. Yet, other reflexives show this kind of linguistic sensitivity as between the reflexive form of the verb and the related noun phrase. Not every time you do not know something about yourself do you display lack of selfknowledge. At the time of Jomo Kenyatta’s death it was widely reported that he had not known his date of birth but that implied no lack of self-knowledge on Kenyatta’s part. Parkinson’s disease may be characterised by an inability to control one’s own bodily movements but hardly by loss of self-control. Raphael Demos was, I think, already on to this point in his article ‘Lying to oneself when he wrote: . . . I will proceed to a discussion of ‘lying to oneself or ‘deceiving oneself. Here, too, I would like to restrict the meaning of these phrases to a special (their strongest) case. A man deceives himself into thinking he is an excellent scientist because his standards of excellence in science are low. Having had no competition, he is simply ignorant of what good scientific work is. This is not what I am calling self-deception.2 12

Self-deception

Notice that Demos admits that the man deceives himself but denies that this is self-deception. The reason, I suggest (though from here on I part company with Demos, who embraces the grossly paradoxical position that in genuine self-deception the self-deceiver persuades himself to believe what he knows is not so), is that it was not through any fault of his own that Demos’s scientist had the wrong standards of scientific excellence. The extra ingredient which converts a case of deceiving oneself into full-blooded self-deception is, I suggest, dishonesty with oneself. The moral element that many have felt to be an essential part of self-deception enters in a roundabout way via the notion of dishonesty with oneself, not directly via the notion o f‘self-deceit’, understood as deceitfulness aimed at oneself, which is, I agree with the sceptics, unintelligible.3 The presence of dishonesty with oneself in self-deception proper accounts for our inability to deceive ourselves about certain matters in certain circumstances. Given that I know how many ‘O ’ levels I have, I cannot be honest or dishonest with myself when I ask myself how many ‘O ’ levels I have. For dishonesty with oneself to gain a foothold, there has to be a certain ‘distance’ between the person asking the question and the answer. If, for example, I ask myself whether I enjoyed my time at university as a student, I may well not have the answer at my fingertips. I shall need to weigh up competing considerations and decide how much importance to attach to them. My reaction to my own question can be as hesitant and as circumspect as it might have been had the question ‘Did you enjoy university?’ been put to me by a stranger. I am not always an insider, already in the know with respect to the questions I put to myself. I can remind myself of my happiness at exam success and make light of my loneliness. ‘That’s how everyone felt’, I tell myself, and leave it out of the reckoning. In this way, as I rehearse my reasons for my answer to my own question, I would be being less than honest with myself. This is the dishonesty of laziness, not of hypocrisy or brazen lying; I ought to have pressed myself harder on my evasion. I am like someone who knows that there are unread legal documents in a trunk in his attic which could make troubling reading but who prefers to let them lie undisturbed. In the self­ deceiver’s metaphorical, though not necessarily mental, attic lies truth concealed in its locked box but, although he posses­ ses the key, he gives himself bad reasons for not turning the lock and looking inside. Philosophers who insist on seeing self13

Self-deception

deception as deceiving oneself into believing what one knows to be false have been driven to this grossly self-contradictory account because they have started out from the wrong kind of example in which the person is already fully aware of the answer to the question he is putting to himself. This is a perfectly natural sort of example to think of in connection with deceitful otherdeception but where the truth is known for certain and you never waver in your conviction you can no more deceive yourself about the matter in hand than you can be deceived about it by someone else. It might be thought that my suggestion that dishonesty with oneself is a feature of self-deception is not helpful because dishonesty with oneself is self-deception by another name. But this would be a mistake. The presence of dishonesty with oneself is not by itself enough for self-deception, any more than dishonesty towards others is by itself enough for other-deception. The thief who steals from clothes hanging in the unattended cloakroom does not need to dissemble or deceive in order to be dishonest. What is distinctive about the self-deceiver is that he erects a deceptive screen of evasions, excuses, half-truths, rationalisations, etc., between himself and some things he already knows to be true on the one hand and the whole of the truth on the other. We saw this happening to Pip when he invented reasons for not staying with Joe and made excuses for putting up at the Blue Boar. His unexpected arrival would be inconvenient; his bed would not be ready; Joe’s was too far away from Miss Havisham’s, which might make him late and annoy Miss Havisham. The truth, the reader knows, is that Joe will be terribly hurt if Pip does not stay with him and that Pip, newly educated to be a gentleman, now feels ashamed of Joe’s humble background because he wants to cut a fine figure in society in order to impress Estella. Dickens does not present Pip as knowing this galling truth about himself. Indeed, if Dickens had done so, Pip could scarcely have been portrayed as deceiving himself into believing that his motive for preferring to stay on his own at the inn was to save Joe from inconvenience. Pip has, as Dickens remarks, done a curious thing. But, contrary to the implications of the analogy with the counterfeiter who passes banknotes he knows he has forged on himself, Pip, the self-swindler, does not know the truth about himself. That misleading implication arises, not from the narrative itself, but from the following philosophical thought which had clearly struck Dickens: ‘A self-deceiver is both 14

Self-deception

deceiver and deceived. As deceiver, he must know the truth in order to know how to effect the deception; as deceived, he is a victim of the deception and so cannot know the truth. And all this at one and the same time in the unity of a single consciousness. How is this possible?’ I have tried to show how to make sense of self-deception by tracing a journey of understanding with a fork in the road at two different points and so two risks of a wrong turning. The first wrong turning is to construe self-deception as deceitfulness practised on oneself and to overlook deceptive behaviour, in the form of one’s own deceptive thoughts, reasons, excuses, etc., produced in response to one’s own self-questionings. A wrong turning here leads either to scepticism about the possibility of self-deception or to acceptance of a self-contradictory account of self-deception. For, on the one hand, how can I, with the slit eyes of deceit, go behind my own back and take myself in? I cannot, so, some have concluded, self-deception is impossible. Others, on the other hand, have seen this as proof of the fact that selfdeception is a ‘conflict state’ in which it is somehow possible for a person to believe what he knows to be false. This is, in fact, Sartre’s solution to the paradox. The second fork is reached when it is realised that it is possible to deceive oneself quite innocently through no fault of one’s own (as did Demos’s scientist and my camouflage expert). It is tempting to conclude from this that this is all there is to self-deception. As an antidote to this conclusion consider the following thoughts on inviting oneself to a party. Because one can see readily how it might happen that an ambassador has inadvertently addressed and sent to himself an invitation card inviting himself to his own garden party (or it might have been done deliberately if he needed to produce an invitation card to get past the sentry on guard at the embassy gate), one might think that one understands all that there is to understand about how it is possible for one of the ambassador’s disreputable school friends, who has not received an official invitation, to turn up unexpectedly and invite himself along. This, I submit, is not the case. The unwanted guest’s inviting himself, when he has no invitation card in his pocket, is an altogether trickier accomplishment than was the ambassador’s inviting himself, with just the paradoxical flavour of selfdeception about it. How, one asks in puzzlement, can someone who is not the host do any inviting? And if he has invited himself, has he, or has he not, been invited? I shall look more closely at 15

Self-deception

inviting oneself in the next chapter. For the moment I am content to suggest that the correct course to follow is to see self-deception proper as always involving the additional element of dishonesty with oneself. Although no match for Dickens’ powers of invention and sus­ tained narrative, Thomas Love Peacock had a sharp eye for the psychological realities of self-deception. The following passage is taken from the opening of his Nightmare Abbey which Peacock told Shelley he had written ‘to bring into philosophical focus a few of the morbidities of modern literature, and to let a little daylight on its atrabilarious complexion’.4 The self-deceiver in the following passage is Mr Christopher d o w ry ’s wife, who had married her husband for his wealth and who, in Peacock’s words ‘in so doing, violently tore asunder the bonds of a tried and youthful attachment’. Riches she possessed, but that which enriches them, the participation of affection, was wanting. All that they could purchase for her became indifferent to her, because that which they could not purchase, and which was more valuable than themselves, she had, for their sake, thrown away. She discovered, when it was too late, that she had mistaken the means for the end — that riches, rightly used, are instruments of happiness, but are not in themselves happiness. In this wilful blight of her affections, she found them valueless as means: they had been the end to which she had immolated all her affections, and were now the only end that remained to her. She did not confess this to herself as a principle of action, but it operated through the medium of unconcious self-deception, and it terminated in inveterate vice. She laid on external things the blame of her mind’s internal disorder, and thus became by degrees an accom­ plished scold. (Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, Chapter 1) The truth is, we are not unreasonably asked to believe by Peacock, that the giving and receiving of affection brings happiness but riches are not in themselves happiness. Mrs Glowry deliberately married for money when she had the opportunity to marry for love. Love never blossomed between Mrs Glowry and the wealthy husband she had chosen. Another person might have lived to regret such a decision. But not Mrs 16

Self-deception

Glowry. She made a means to happiness into an end in itself. ‘Money is all that really matters in life’ was her abiding thought. That was the self-made deceptive screen behind which she sheltered and so deceived herself that she had made the right choice in life, whereas others, happier in love but less prudent than herself, had not. If she was often angry and impatient, this was because the world was wrong and at fault, not because she was personally unhappy or unfulfilled. Finally, as Peacock makes clear, this was not the result of some innocent mistake; the blight of Mrs Glowry’s affections had been her own wilful doing. There was culpable dishonesty with herself in the making of that deceptive screen which shielded her from the bitter truth and which allowed her to believe so much that was false. I wish now to take up the much-disputed question of whether self-deception must necessarily result in a false belief.5 No doubt many tales of self-deception, real and imaginary, finish with a false belief s being held by the self-deceiver. But must this always be the case? On my account of self-deception, there is no reason why it should not be possible to deceive oneself into believing something which happens to be true. But whether the final belief be true or false, to count as self-deception the route to that belief has got to go via error as a result of the self-deceiver’s being deceived by a deceptive screen of his own devising. Usually, that deceptive screen will consist of his own thoughts, hopes, fears, beliefs, atti­ tudes, etc. There will have to be error on the way even if the belief he eventually deceives himself into holding happens to be true. In this sense, then, there is a logical connection between error and self-deception. It is the same logical connection as that which holds between error and other-deception. A well-intentioned person may feel he has to resort to deception in order to get someone else who is being, say, stubborn, to do the right thing or to believe what is in fact the truth and greatly to his advantage. If you have been deceived in this way, you will hold a false belief and so be in error, believing, for example, that the document you have just signed was a petition when it was an application for the free benefits to which you were sure you were not entitled. You end up having been deceived into doing the right thing, as you later admit, and into believing that you have never claimed for anything to which you were not entitled, which is still true. In this way it is possible to end up believing something true as a result of being deceived into holding intermediate false beliefs 17

Self-deception

which encourage you to form the desired true belief. Provided the truth is arrived at through error, the self-deceiver can, after all, end up with the truth. There is, however, a distinction available to us which, as long as it passes undetected, makes it very difficult to rest content with the above answer. What I have in mind is the difference between ‘He deceived himself into believing, thinking, supposing, etc., that p’ and ‘He deceived himself that p \ At first glance, it looks like no more than a stylistic variant to report a seriously ill patient, who is deceiving himself into believing that he is going to get better, as deceiving himself that he is going to get better. But there is this important logical difference between these two claims. ‘He is deceiving himself that p’ entails that it is false that p, whereas ‘He is deceiving himself into believing that p’ carries no such entailment. A patient with cancer cannot deceive himself that he has got cancer any more than he can have witnessed a crime which never took place or know what is false to be the case. But a patient with cancer could deceive himself into believing that he has cancer. His reasons for his true belief will prove to be bad reasons, acting as a deceptive screen which enables him to think that his worst fears, which happen to be correct, have been confirmed. He does not have to be deceived in the belief he has deceived himself into believing any more than a last-minute holidaymaker has to be constantly in a rush on the holiday his wife rushed him into taking at short notice. In trying to get clear about the relationship between self-deception and false belief or error, it is easy to overlook this difference between deceiving oneself that p and deceiving oneself into thinking that p, each of which could equally well be called a case of self-deception. The idea that the belief the self-deceiver deceives himself into holding must be false is, I think, a confused recognition of the fact that ‘He is deceiving himself that p’ entails the falsity of p. This fact, I have tried to show, has a more limited significance and must not be allowed to dominate our picture of the relationship between self-deception and the truth or falsity of the belief in which it results. Error, when it takes the form of a false belief, is the selfdeceiver’s necessary means, but not his inescapable final goal. One of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex poems, ‘My Cicely’, appears to me to achieve its eery effect on the reader by exploiting the possibility of deceiving oneself into holding a true, as well as a false, belief. It tells of a man who returns after a long absence to the village of his boyhood. He had been told that his childhood 18

Self-deception

sweetheart, Cicely, had died. In the village churchyard he finds a tombstone bearing the inscription ‘Cicely’ but is now told to his surprise that this is the grave of some other Cicely and that his former sweetheart is still alive and keeps a tavern ten miles hence. Horrified, he realises that this was the very tavern he had visited on his way to the village and that he had already seen Cicely, now much changed. I’d looked on, unknowing, and witnessed Her jests with the tapsters, Her liquor-fired face, her thick accents In naming her fee. He fled the village, carefully avoiding the tavern this time, and now, looking back after many years, says: A feeling stirred in me and strengthened That she was not my Love, But she of the garth, who lay rapt in Her long reverie. And thence till today I persuade me That this was the true one, That Death stole intact her young dearness And innocency.6 The man in Hardy’s poem, it might with justice be said, has deceived himself into thinking that his childhood sweetheart was dead when she was not. He preferred to keep his idealised, sentimental memory of her rather than face an unwelcome truth. ‘Far better / To dream than to own the debasement / Of sweet Cicely’, he says. But, in reaching the judgement that this is a case of self-deception, does it really matter who it was who lay beneath the sod? Could it still be self-deception even if it turned out that what the man had been told in the graveyard was false, and that Cicely had died after all? There is, I realise, a strong temptation to answer no to this question on the grounds that, if he is to count as self-deceived, his belief must be false. On my account, one thing that cannot possibly be true if, as we are now supposing, Cicely was dead all the time, is that he was deceiving himself that she was dead. But does the reader of the poem need to know that Cicely is alive before he can be sure that 19

Self-deception

the visitor has deceived himself into believing that she was dead? Part of the strange effect of Hardy’s poem depends, I believe, upon the fact that this knowledge is not required before the reader can make this judgement. Strangely, the facts might all be quite different from how the man in the poem relates them and yet he would still be guilty of self-deception. To test out my theory, suppose that Cicely is not the keeper of the tavern but died just as he had first been told. Still, the man reached his final belief that she was dead, which we are now supposing to be true, by erecting a deceptive screen of his own devising between himself and the truth. The truth, for such we are now supposing it to be, that Cicely was dead was reached by his dishonest evasion of the truth that time brings big changes, not always pleasant ones, in those we once loved. He would have reached the same conclusion even if she had been alive. He told himself that the Cicely of his dreams could not possibly have allowed herself to be reduced to the creature he had seen behind the bar of the inn. Could not his informant have been mistaken? He deliberately avoided visiting the tavern, either then or later, when even a brief confrontation would have put the identity of the innkeeper beyond any possible doubt and would have rendered his deceptive screen useless. In these respects he was being dishonest with himself. It was he himself who thought these deceptive thoughts and acted in this deceptive manner; he was not put up to it by others. He was his own victim. He did not act with the intention of concealing the truth from others, nor did he set about forming a deliberate, cold-blooded plan to deceive himself. Rather, the strength of his feelings for Cicely arose naturally and so did the deceptive thought-screen. Here we would have, I think, a case of a true belief resulting from self-deception, a special case of stumbling blindly and in error on the truth. What you are selfdeceived in believing cannot but be false; but, paradoxically, what you have deceived yourself into believing can be either true or false. Self-deception is no more a deliberately intentional process than nettling oneself usually is. Picking up a piece of nettle under laboratory conditions and deliberately rubbing it across your skin does not count as nettling yourself. Calculated self-indoctrination is not self-deception. But a naughty child on a family ramble who does not want to have to walk any further can deliberately nettle himself by walking into the nettles that grow beside the path; and you can plan to deceive yourself about some matter, though, of 20

Self-deception

course, at some stage events will pass out of your control if you are ever to be successful.

A ppendix T he etym ology o f ‘deceit’ and ‘deception9 Etymology is not philosophy but philosophical understanding sometimes permits otherwise puzzling etymological information to be seen in a new light; and etymology is often a fruitful source of conceptual distinctions which have a bearing on perplexing philosophical questions. ‘Deceive’ comes from Classical Latin decipere. The prefix de- means from or out of or down and the verb-stem capire means take or grasp (whence ‘capture' and ‘captive’ in Modern English). The basic meaning of decipere was thus to take or bring down.1 How has the modern meaning of deceive ever come to be associated with a word which originally appears to have been used to describe a certain characteristic action performed with the hand? The earliest recorded uses of the word are in connection with the hunting and snaring of wild animals and the trapping of birds. When the hunter had caught his prey, he had brought it down (decipere) and trapped it in a snare. I conjecture that the connection with deception came about in the following way. When the hunter is trying to catch wild animals — birds, say — it is natural for him to want to prevent them from being aware of the location of his nets, snares, traps, etc. In other words, the hunter will want to create a deceptive appearance of normality in the hope of deceiving the birds into settling on, say, the tree he has limed or is about to throw a net over. A creature caught in this way was a creature which had been deceived.8 An animal which had avoided the trap and had not been caught had not been deceived. When a human being fell into a literal or figurative trap set for him, it would be natural to see an analogy between his plight and that of the animal caught in the cunningly concealed, deceptively positioned, real trap. Where today we speak idiomatically of someone who has been deceived as having been ‘taken in’, the history of decipere and its connection with the capture of wild animals allowed people to say ‘He has been taken down.’ In each case a phrase describing movement in a certain direction is used to mean deceive. The presence in English of ‘deceive’ and ‘deception’ is linguistic testimony to the Roman conquest of Britain. But ‘deceit’ we owe more specifically to Britain’s second, Norman, conquest. Classical Latin decipere evolved via Gallo-Roman decapere and Old French deceveir into Modern French décevoir. In the course of this journey Middle English acquired deceite, adapted from Old French. I conjecture that we owe our notion of deceit and deceitfulness to the medieval French preoccupation with courtly, feudal notions of loyalty, trust and honour. A baron who sides with the enemies of the emperor king, to whom he has sworn allegiance, is deceiving him. The wife who goes with another man deceives her husband to whom she has made vows of faithfulness. The trusted servant who steals from his master’s purse deceives him. Deceit is

21

Self-deception

deception where the victim is entitled not to expect it. I think this also explains why in Modern French décevoir can mean disappoint as in attente déçue (= disappointed expectation). The husband or wife who has been deceived by his or her unfaithful spouse is normally permitted to feel a little disappointment too. As a consequence of this dual inheritance, the nouns ‘deceit’ and ‘deception’ have openly gone their separate ways but the verb ‘deceive’ leads a double life in phonological disguise in Modern English. This explains why philosophical questions about the logical relationship between being deceived and knowing the truth are so bewildering. As long as you are deceived by the con-man’s lie there is no question of your knowing the truth behind his lie. You are his unwitting victim. But a husband who suspects his wife of unfaithfulness may hide behind the arras, or its modern equivalent, and actually watch her deceiving him with another man. The husband’s knowledge of his wife’s infidelity is no bar to her deceiving him in this sense, as is shown by the fact that he might silently acquiesce in her continuing to deceive him. But if the wife flaunts her lover openly before her husband, she is still unfaithful but no longer deceitful or deceiving him. The husband spying on his unfaithful wife from behind the arras is no longer deceived about the fact that he is being deceived by his wife. This is because it is possible to deceive in a deceptive as well as in a deceitful way. Explanations of self-deception are likely to go better if they are not put forward in ignorance of this curious piece of etymology.

Notes 123456 1. J.-P. Sartre, Being and nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (Methuen, London, 1958), p. 49. 2. Raphael Demos, ‘Lying to oneself, Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1960), pp. 588-95 (p. 588). 3. ‘Self-deceit’ is a perfectly good word in the English language. It means the same as ‘self-deception’, just as ‘self-murder’ means suicide. An explanation of the ‘deceit/deception’ doublet is provided in the Appendix at the end of this chapter. 4. Reported by P.M. Yarker in his Introduction to the 1961 reprint of the Everyman Library edition of Thomas Love Peacock: Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey (Dent, London, 1910), p. xii. 5. For two interesting discussions of this question see Patrick Gardiner, ‘Error, faith and self-deception’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 70 (1969-70), pp. 221-43, and Béla Szabados, ‘Self-deception’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 4 (1974), pp. 51-68. 6. ‘My Cicely’ in Samuel Hynes (ed.), The complete works of Thomas Hardy (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), I, pp. 67-72. I got the idea of using Hardy’s poem as an illustration of self-deception from Professor Peter Geach, who puts the story to another use in his Reason and argument (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1976), p. 3.

22

Self-deception

7. My source for the etymology of ‘deceive’, etc., is the entry for decipere in Eric Partridge’s Origins: a short etymological dictionary of Modem English (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1958). 8. St Augustine in the De magistro, X, 32, speaks of deceptio avium, the

deception of birds, as part of the job of the bird catcher, to be carried out with the aid of canes and lime.

23

3 Anatomy of a Reflexive Paradox

I propose to carry out a post mortem examination of the paradox of self-deception which I analysed in the previous chapter. My aim is to draw attention to features of the paradox of self-deception which are also shared by other reflexive paradoxes to be discussed in later chapters. I shall try to diagnose the common causes of philosophical puzzlement in reflexive paradoxes and to suggest several dos and don’ts on how to think one’s way through the problems they raise. I shall raise more questions than I can answer in this chapter. My intention is to illustrate briefly a whole series of analogies between different reflexive paradoxes.

1. Reflexives as sources o f philosophical puzzlem ent He who deceives himself is both deceiver and deceived. As deceiver, he must know the truth in order to be able to effect the deception; as deceived, he must not know the truth. And all this, at one and the same time in one and the same person. How is this possible? A similar paradox can be raised about teaching oneself something. If a teacher is to be able to teach his pupil something, he must know more than his pupil. If the pupil is to learn something from his teacher, he must know less. How, then, can someone who knows no Russian ever teach himself Russian? How can he be his own teacher in a subject of which he knows nothing and can be, at best, a willing though ignorant pupil? Smuggling in the assumption that he already knows Russian is of no help. For how can he teach himself the bits of the language he already does know, and therefore docs not need to be taught, any more than he can teach himself the bits he does not know, and is therefore in no position to teach to anyone else? 24

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

Reminding oneself of something looks similarly problematic. I can remind you of something you have forgotten — a friend’s address, say — provided that I have still remembered it. But your suddenly remembering the address does not put you in a position to remind yourself of the address; it renders reminding yourself superfluous and, anyway, is not a case of reminding yourself of something you have forgotten. To take another similar example, at the end of your visit to an elderly, infirm relative who lives alone, the relative says, ‘I’m sorry but my arthritis won’t let me get up from this chair today. You’ll have to show yourself out.’ How can you show yourself out of someone’s house? If you know the way out, you can act as a guide to someone else. But how can you act as your own guide? The reader should have no difficulty in constructing similar puzzles for the reflexive forms of ‘invite, appoint, surprise, beat, surpass, amuse, fool, cheat, delude, control’, and many others. He will, I hope, become sensitive to the strangeness of a remark such as ‘He’s an only child and his mother leaves him on his own a lot. It’s a good thing he enjoys his own company.’ Here, there is no explicit grammatical reflexive but the principle that generates reflexive paradox is at work. We know what it is for one person to enjoy the company of others. We can accept that a child can play all day on his own and be quite happy and contented. But how does one person all on his own provide company for himself? ‘. . . enjoys the company o f. . .’ is gibberish if the same person’s name is put into the two gaps. In view of that fact, what does ‘he enjoys his own company’ really mean? Surely, you might be forgiven for thinking, if a child is all alone, he has no company to enjoy. The conclusion I draw from these puzzles is that they exemplify a similar pattern and yet their subject matter is too diverse to be itself the cause of their similarity. Their striking common feature is that they turn on reflexive forms of verbs and/ or reflexive-related phrases such as ‘self-’ followed by a noun or verbal phrase, or on the possessive adjective ‘my, your, his’, etc., followed by ‘own’, as in ‘When a patient treats himself he is his own doctor’, or on repeat-name substitution as in ‘Art for art’s sake’. Paradox arises when we note that the typical features present in the non-reflexive case will not fit together when transposed to the reflexive or the reflexive-related case without self-contradiction. The notion of self-contradiction was intro­ duced just then in an unexamined, intuitive way; but it too generates a reflexive paradox of its own which will be the topic of 25

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

Chapter 4. It has, in my opinion, received less attention than it deserves. My ‘It has stopped snowing’ is contradicted by your ‘No it has not.’ As an example of a self-contradictory statement it would be natural to suggest something like ‘It is and it is not snowing.’ But do we have here a single statement which contradicts itself? How can one and the same statement be the contradictory of itself? In order for a statement to contradict, surely, it has to say the opposite of the statement it contradicts. How then does one statement manage to be its own opposite, that is, to be self-contradictory?

2. T he fallacy o f isolationism Because the self-deceiver is his own victim and not the victim of somebody else’s deceit or deception, it is tempting to picture him in isolation so that the phenomenon of an activity which is carried out solely by oneself upon oneself may be studied under, so to speak, ideal laboratory conditions. But it is easy to push this isolation too far, with the result that vital ingredients are left out and self-deception becomes impossible. This can be seen to be happening when the self-deceiver is pictured alone with his thoughts, removed from all outside influences in a sort of mental and physical solitary confinement. ‘I know how many “O ” levels I obtained,’ someone reflects. ‘How shall I deceive myself into believing that I got a different number from the number I know I did get?’ The correct answer is that in these circumstances nothing is going to count as self-deception. For self-deception to gain a foothold we need to escape from the picture of the mind as a small, brightly lit cell, lit by a bulb that casts no shadows and provided with furniture which affords no hiding places. Selfdeception becomes possible when the self-deceiver asks himself questions to which he does not immediately know the answers. In his search for an answer he is dishonest with himself. Up billows a deceptive smokescreen of thoughts which deceive him. There are, after all, places in the mind of the solitary thinker in which the truth can hide. The smokescreen arises as a result of his being dishonest with himself when, for example, he asks himself, ‘Am I drinking too much?’ — which, let us suppose, he is doing — and answers, ‘Well, I shan’t count lunchtime drinking because then the alcohol gets washed down with the food and the alcohol doesn’t get into your system as it does when you take a drink on 26

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

an empty stomach.’ The ‘O ’ level case is like being in real solitary confinement in a cell with no hiding places and being told to hide a packet of cigarettes from oneself. Even if the cell has a small cupboard, the prisoner will know’ where he has put the packet and so it will not be hidden from him. But one would be guilty of the isolationist fallacy if one thought that this showed it to be impossible under any circumstances for someone to hide some­ thing from himself. For that to be possible, one needs, so to speak, the right setting and stage-props. In a warehouse stacked with piles of identical packets of cigarettes you turn your back and throw your packet over your shoulder in amongst thousands of other packets. You hav e hidden the packet from yourself. For it is you, not someone else, who has done the hiding; you act on your own and in isolation but you need the right environment to act as camouflage for your discarded packet. Or take the case of teaching yourself a new language. An appropriate ‘stage-prop’ here would be a Teach yourself book to serve as a substitute for an actual flesh and blood teacher. The book enables you to set yourself exercises, to correct your own mistakes, to mark your own work and to test yourself and generally to monitor your own performance. You do all of these things by yourself but not in the absurd, madly isolationist sense of not relying on anything which comes to you from without, a book, say, which has been written by someone more knowledgeable than yourself and which reveals that, after all, you do depend on the labours of others for the things that enable you to teach yourself something on your own. The need for the right setting and stage-props, as well as the dangers of isolationism, can also be seen in the curious case of showing, or seeing, oneself out.1 A prospective house buyer arrives at an empty house which is up for sale. He lets himself in with the estate agent’s key and wanders from room to room. Pausing in the dining room, he thinks, ‘The perfect opportunity at last! I’m all alone in an empty house. Now I can show myself out. I’ve always wanted to do that.’ If he manages to retrace his steps and remembers how to regain the front door without taking a wrong turn, what extra can he do which will ensure that what he does counts as showing himself out? As he reaches the street door he steps quickly aside and bows low to his imaginary Doppelganger on the way out. But that would be a fanciful performance, an isolationist’s concession to scepticism about the possibility of showing oneself out. The extraordinary fact is that a certain stage-prop is needed in order to make showing oneself out 27

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

a real possibility. What is needed is the physical presence of the host, who, for some reason, cannot do the usual honours of accompanying his departing guest to the door. An empty house, which is what the isolationist demands in order to put the claim to the test, is precisely not what we need to imagine in order to make sense of this puzzling phenomenon. Furthermore, the right kind of setting is required. There is, for example, no such thing as showing yourself out of a small, one room log cabin or a small tent, even when the owner is present. The structure of the dwelling a guest can show himself out of has to be of sufficient complexity to permit him to get lost on his way out. An isolationist account of reminding oneself of something which one has forgotten has the effect of turning it into altogether too ‘cerebral’ an affair, all mind and no body. The isolationist searches for one mental process of internal reminding to trigger off another of internal remembering. But this overlooks the importance of our dependence on readily available objects close at hand; the forgetful man ties a knot in his handkerchief so that, when he pulls the handkerchief out of his pocket in order to blow his nose, the knot will remind him of the appointment that will by then have gone clean out of his head. It is upon a physical piece of paper that the nervous speaker jots down brief notes of the seven points he wants to make in his speech; it is this piece of paper he consults, as he is about to mount the platform, in order to remind himself of the fifth point which has gone clean out of his head. How a child can enjoy his own company will remain baffling as long as one pictures the child alone, smiling but inactive, with an empty mind and idle hands. For that is the picture of a child who is happy on his own whereas enjoying one’s own company is something more particular than this. You enjoy your own company when, left to your own devices, you know how to keep yourself entertained and prevent yourself from getting bored by providing for yourself what the company of others normally provides. A child might think up things to do to keep himself amused and occupied, inventing games to play by himself and talking to himself in games of make-believe. In the case of self-contradiction, to be discussed in Chapter 4, all I shall say for the moment is that the nature of a self­ contradictory statement will remain puzzling as long as, in a spirit of isolationism, one fixes one’s attention on a single sentence, like ‘It is raining and it is not raining’ — encouraged

28

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

by logicians who offer p & not-p as the standard form of a self-contradictory proposition — and forgets about the fact that a self-contradiction arises when a person contradicts himself, something which rarely happens in a single sentence uttered in a single breath. Isolationism is the ally of scepticism about the reality behind these reflexives. It may help to ward off isolationism to remember that when an isolationist learns that a trainee pilot has gone solo and has flown on his own for the first time, the isolationist takes this to mean that the pilot left his plane with his instructor behind him on the tarmac before he took off'.

3. Scylla and C harybdis A Scylla and Charybdis guard the philosophical approaches to self-deception. The very act of avoiding the one peril increases the risk of running foul of the other. At times it is hard to believe that there is a safe course to be steered between them. Charybdis appears on most philosophical charts as the whirlpool of deceit. In visualising the self-deceiver, we give him the slit eyes of deceit; we try to think of him as somehow going behind his own back and practising deceit on himself. In struggling to free ourselves from these absurdities we shoal upon the deceptively located rocks of Scylla. It occurs to us that not all deception is deceit. Now we see the self-deceiver, not as cunningly deceitful, but as behaving deceptively (which makes him sound somewhat nicer), as setting up a deceptive screen, either in reality (like my camouflage expert) or in the mind, between himself and reality. He is then deceived by this deceptive appearance of his own making. The trouble with this sort of innocent deception of oneself by oneself is, however, that it seems to omit what many believe to be a vital element in self-deception proper, a moral dimension which makes self-deception a moral weakness and not just an oversight or a bit of harmless wishful thinking. Yet to reintroduce the missing moral element would seem to set us on a course heading straight back towards the Charybdis of deceit. The way out of this seeming impasse is, I have suggested, to steer clear of deceit altogether in the account of self-deception, to acknowledge the separate possibility of someone’s innocently deceiving himself and to explain the plight of those guilty of full-blooded self-

29

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

deception as the state of someone deceived by a deceptive appearance of his own devising (his own thoughts, beliefs, etc.) which has arisen as a result of his being dishonest with himself. Other reflexive forms present us with a similar choice between apparently mutually exclusive, but equally unacceptable alter­ natives which are either too ‘strong’ or too ‘weak’. Showing oneself out of someone’s house, for example, might seem to have to be either ( 1) a piece of politeness which is normally directed at others but is here turned upon oneself; or (2) no more than finding one’s own way out unescorted. Yet (1) sounds strange and is, surely, too ‘strong’. How can you be polite or impolite to yourself? And (2) is too ‘weak’. Showing oneself out has, after all, some kind of connection with etiquette in a way that simply finding one’s own way out does not. Promising oneself something can seem to defy analysis in a similar way too. That you promise yourself a holiday by giving yourself your own word to take one sounds too ‘strong’ because it leads to absurdities. Should you, for example, fail to take the holiday you have been promising yourself, you have hardly broken your word to yourself. Yet there must be more to it than merely intending to go on holiday. Teaching yourself to play the guitar cannot be a case of already possessing all the skills of an accomplished player and passing them on to yourself (that is too ‘strong’); but neither is it just learning to play by listening to others and imitating them (too ‘weak’). Peaching yourself a language can, as we have already seen, be misunderstood in ways that are similarly too 'weak' and too ‘strong’. Teaching yourself French is no more teaching yourself what you already know than deceiving yourself is persuading yourself to think the opposite of what you already believe (too ‘strong’). Yet it is more than just going to live in France and picking up the language as you go along (too ‘weak’). Indeed, teaching yourself a language is an occupation much more suited to stay-at-homes in their studies anyway. Likewise, reminding oneself is not telling oneself what one has remembered all along (too ‘strong’), but it is more than just suddenly remembering something (too ‘weak’). The lesson to be learned from this section is that when interpretations of reflexives that are either too ‘strong’ or too ‘weak’ force themselves on us — when we feel we have to choose between two seemingly mutually exclusive accounts — we arc only at the beginning of our philosophical investigation, at the 30

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

foot of the philosophical mountain, so to speak. It may yet prove possible to reject both accounts and to seek some third way of understanding what is puzzling us. In particular, we should resist the temptation to think that, when trapped in the dilemma, all that now remains to be done is to wreigh up which competing considerations tell most in favour of which of the two options.

4. V anishing reflexives On my account, the man who has deceived himself that something is the case thinks thoughts which act as a deceptive screen coming between himself and reality; in thinking these thoughts he is dishonest with himself and is self-deceived; these thoughts, further, deceive him into holding a false belief. When one looks again at the words following ‘is the case’ in the previous sentence, one notices that, in explaining what it is for someone to deceive himself that something is the case, the reflexive ‘deceive oneself has vanished. It is tempting to object that, since in the analysis it is the thoughts that deceive the man, not the man who deceives himself, this is not a genuine case of a man’s deceiving himself. Similarly, when the train’s wheels crush the skull of the person who is at first reported to have killed himself by placing his head on the railway track, it is tempting to challenge the report by arguing that it was the train that killed the man, not the man who killed himself. Getting into our philosophical stride, we now tell the student who says that she is teaching herself French from a Teachyourself French book that her true teacher is the author of the book she has been reading and that she is merely a case of distance learning. And should an aesthete defend his slogan ‘Art for art’s sake’ by appealing to the value of art, we shall be sure to tell him that the value of art is one thing and art itself is another, and that if he means that art should be pursued solely for its own sake, he had better stick to art alone and not muddy the waters with talk of its value. These objections arise the moment an instrumental account of a reflexive is offered (‘How did he kill himself?’ — ‘With a dagger’). To stiffen resistance to this line of reasoning I suggest it be remembered that it is, after all, possible when peeling potatoes with a knife to cut oneself (reflexive). In explaining the way this comes about, we may speak of the person’s manipulating the knife in such a way that the knife cuts his finger. Here too the 31

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

reflexive has vanished from the explanation. In spite of this, it is a perfectly good explanation of how one can cut oneself with a knife. That it is by means of his own thoughts that the self­ deceiver deceives himself does not make him any the less of a selfdeceiver. On the contrary, it is this which turns him into one.

5. ‘Conflict-state’ theories Many contemporary philosophers cling to the view that the self­ deceiver, as deceiver, must know the truth which, since he is also deceived, he somehow does not know.2 The self-deceiver, they say, exhibits a ‘conflict state’. They then devote their energies to trying to explain how such a state could possibly exist. Various suggestions have been put forward. Perhaps the self-deceiver knows with one part of his mind, his unconscious mind perhaps, what he does not know with the conscious part. Perhaps he has unconscious intentions as well as unconscious knowledge.3 Perhaps he does not notice the knowledge he actually possesses.4 Maybe self-deceivers merely hold contradictory beliefs.r>Perhaps the results of psychological experiments on people whose brains have been split into two separate parts can throw light on selfdeception. 1* For myself, I do not see how any of the above suggestions can make sense of the idea at the heart of the ‘conflict theory’, namely, that the self-deceiver deceives himself into believing what he knows or believes to be false. Equally absurd results can be obtained from applying the principles o f ‘conflict-state’ theories to other reflexive forms. We would have to say that the student teaching herself French was teaching herself a language which she already knew. For how can a teacher teach something unless he has prior knowledge of it? Teaching is like pouring water from the teacher’s own full jug into his pupils’ empty vessels. But if you start out with an empty jug, how can you fill it from itself? Similarly, we would have to say that the guest who showed himself out of his infirm host’s house was displaying politeness to himself; and that the smoker who hid his cigarette packet from himself secretly knew its hiding place all the time. Perhaps the following example may help to break the hold of the spell which makes us want to say such things as, ‘Teaching oneself something is not possible. For how can someone who is ignorant of a subject ever teach it to anyone else? And if not to 32

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

anyone else, then how is it any easier for him to teach it to himself?’ I propose to show that it is possible for someone who can neither read nor write to teach himself to read certain words. In his case, note, a Teach yourself to read book would be of no use. But if he became curious about, say, names on documents that passed through his hands from time to time, he might memorise the shapes of the letters forming the names and copy them out from memory in the presence of other people who could themselves already read and write. He might get them to say aloud to him the names spelled by the letters he had copied out. In this way he might slowly and laboriously teach himself to read the names on the documents. It would be a misunderstanding to object that, because he had to rely on the pre-existing ability of others to read, he had not truly taught himself. Readers will recognise that I am describing the behaviour of Mr Krook in Dickens’ Bleak House.1 The important thing to notice about the person in this example is that he has succeeded in teaching himself to do something which, at the outset, he was not in a position to teach others to do. At best, he might have given them an idea as to how they too might teach themselves to do it, before he got around to teaching himself.

6. ‘Tw isted logic’ theories Howard Mounce has proposed an interesting variant on a ‘conflict theory’ of self-deception.8 Alongside the ‘conflict state’ theorists’ objection (which, if conceded, leads to paradox) ‘If the self-deceiver does not know what he is doing then he is not a case of self-deception but of mistaken or biased belieF Mounce in­ vites us to consider the less familiar, but equally troublesome, ‘If the self-deceiver is not really ignorant of what he is doing then he is not a case of self-deception but of a man who knows but simply pretends not to.’ According to Mounce, both objec­ tions are muddled (Mounce, p. 66). What makes them seem cogent is that the self-deceiver partially satisfies our criteria for knowledge and partially satisfies our criteria for ignorance at one and the same time. Compared with the real thing, his knowledge is a kind of ignorance and his ignorance is a kind of knowledge (Mounce, p. 67). The thought here is that we find the idea of a man deceiving himself problematic because we fail to appreciate that in the reflexive form our words have to be understood as 33

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

having a different logic from that of their normal employment. We are, to use my own example, like someone who hears the disgruntled coach say to his defeated team, ‘They didn’t win that match. You lost it!' It would be just like the philosopher on the losing side to protest, ‘If we lost the match, they must have won it. That’s logic. The coach must be wrong because he knows as well as everyone else that the final score was 2-0 in their favour.’ But was the coach wrong? It is true that the coach’s words do ‘twist’ the logic of winning and losing. But what gives his words that special meaning is the fact that a team which wins 2-0 may not have won because of its own skill or ability but because of its opponents' bad blunders and unforced errors. Similarly, not win­ ning when your own side plays well but the other side plays a blinder and has all the luck can be a kind of not losing the match too. I agree that we do sometimes use words in ways which do ‘twist’ their normal logic, as in the above example, but I find Mounce’s explanation of self-deception in terms of a ‘twilight state’ (Mouncc, p. 65), in which one is a bit like a deceiver with a distorted form of knowledge and a bit like a man deceived with a distorted form of ignorance, ultimately as implausible as explain­ ing playing oneself and beating oneself at chess in terms of a peculiar amalgam of victory and defeat, or teaching oneself to play the piano as a mixture of beginner’s fingers and thumbs and maestro’s virtuosity/* The description of the ‘twilight state’ of self-deception continues to be an affront to logic in a way in which the coach’s words are not. Mouncc secs the ‘conflict-state’ theory, which he rejects, as a consequence of looking for too much symmetry between self-deception and other-deception. It is, he thinks, a virtue of his own solution that it recognises an asymmetry between self-deception and other-deception. The selfdeceiver is, he stresses, unable to make his behaviour explicit to himself whereas the other-deceiver is able to do this (Mouncc, p. 65). But I question whether there is really an asymmetry here. Why not point out that, symmetrically, neither the self-deceived nor the other-deceived can make their behaviour explicit to themselves? A doctor and his patient may treat themselves for the same ailment with the same drug. Does the fact that the doctor can be both his own doctor and his own patient, whereas the patient can only be his own doctor (since only a doctor can be his own patient), reveal an asymmetry or a symmetry between the self-treatment of patient and doctor? The trouble is that we are 54

Anatomy of a Reflexive Paradox

not operating here with any dear idea of what is to count as same or different. Philosophers torture themselves over ‘Can you deceive yourself into believing what you know to be false?’, a question they purport to find central, deep and difficult, and would look down on the question ‘Can you deceive someone else into believing what you know to be false?’ as peripheral, superficial and straightforward. But perhaps they ought to have compared their allegedly deep question about self-deception with ‘Can you deceive someone else into believing what he knows to be false?’ I am suggesting that the answer to both questions is the same, namely, no. ‘Twisted logic’ theories, ingenious as they undoubtedly are, are not the solution to reflexive paradox.

7. C ircular explanations? Dishonesty with oneself is, I have argued, an essential ingredient in self-deception and I have tried to explain the latter in terms of the former. Is this explanation circular? Doesn't it presuppose the very thing that calls for explanation? This would be a fair objection if dishonesty with oneself was just another name for self-deception or if dishonesty with oneself always included selfdeception. But neither of these two propositions is correct. You can be dishonest with yourself without the presence of any deceptive behaviour on your part at all, for example, by not raising certain issues and by avoiding certain topics when thinking things over by oneself. There is the dishonesty of silence, evasion and avoidance as well as of the dissembling liar. The charge of circularity might come from a different source. Self-deception has been explained as a matter of dishonesty with oneself, of asking oneself questions and answering oneself in a deceptive way. If what is puzzling is the logic of the reflexive form, how can it help if the explanation is itself heavily reliant on the same form? My reply to this is that it ought not to be too surprising if it takes one reflexive to explain another. leaching yourself French is not the same thing as being taught French by a teacher and is different again from just picking up French as you go along. You teach yourself French when you become your own teacher by doing for yourself the things an independent teacher would normally do for you. So, you set yourself exercises, time yourself, correct yourself, etc. It is the presence of these reflexively formulated, self-directed activities which marks off this 35

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

learning as teaching yourself. Where there are no activities calling for reflexives and reflexive-related expressions to describe them, there is no teaching yourself. It must be no part of our plan to expunge all reflexives from the explanation of a given reflexive, though, of course, we must avoid the very same reflexive. All reflexives would have to be banished only if we were attempting to explain reflexivity as such, which we are not; we are at this moment explaining what it is to teach oneself. It must, however, be conceded that the reflexives that figure in the explanations of other reflexives may themselves seem as problematic as the original reflexives. If that is so, there is nothing for it but to press on with yet more explanation. But it would be a mistake to abandon the whole project as fundamentally flawed because it sometimes falters in apparent circularity. If dishonesty with oneself is always present in self-deception, it will itself bear closer investigation. Being dishonest with oneself is not to be thought of as cynically giving oneself what one knows full well to be a dishonest answer but as giving a dishonest answer to the question one has put to oneself without realising that one is being dishonest. The self-deceiver’s readiness to be deceived by his own deceptive thoughts is to be compared with our receptiveness to the flattery of others and to the indulgent excuses others sometimes make on our behalf. The self-deceiver who lies to himself is like the inveterate, compulsive liar who has reached the stage where he does not know when he is lying or telling the truth. It may help to recall that the sort of person who is described as his own worst enemy has not openly declared war on himself and is usually blissfully unaware of this aspect of his personality.

8. Reflexives and in ternal m echanism s Upon being asked to explain how it is that a self-deceiver deceives himself, that a man who has lost his self-control lost it or that the creature who is a self-mover moves, it is tempting to postulate some kind of internal mechanism, whether physical, psycho­ logical or whatever. The self-deceiver, for instance, is pictured as divisible into parts and it is supposed to be because of the interaction between these parts that the phenomenon of selfdeception arises. Not unexpectedly, the commonest kind o f‘part’

36

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

suggested to explain self-deception is that of a part of the mind compartmentalised along roughly Freudian lines. Unpleasant thoughts begin life in the conscious mind and are repressed into the unconscious mind. So the self-deceiver is supposed to be able to go on thinking something in his unconscious mind while his conscious mind is now empty and can be filled with more congenial thoughts, even if they are the opposite of the thoughts lurking in his unconscious mind. The unconscious is then cast in the role of the real deceiver. This idea of an internal mechanism also appears in a very clear form in the appeal to the results of the observation of the behaviour of people whose brains have been divided into two separate parts. Here the idea is that a split brain may possess separate centres of independent conscious mental life and perhaps self-deceivers somehow replicate this queer pheno­ menon. I think that these explanations are trying to make a scientific, causal explanation do the work of a philosophical one. Consider the self-cancelling indicators to be found on most cars nowadays. It is true that it is because of the way their internal parts are arranged that they cancel themselves after the driver who has indicated and completed a turn straightens the wheel. A detailed sequence of events could be set out explaining how the flashing lights are turned off. But at no stage do we find any individual, internal part causing itself to do something. With this detailed sequence of events fresh in our minds, we may say that what cancels the indicator is the movement of the steering wheel. A doubt now arises. If it is the movement of the steering wheel which cancels the indicator, does the indicator really cancel itselP This may sow the seeds of doubt about the reality of self­ cancellation or it may make us try to explain self-cancellation as an epiphenomenon of inner complexity, as a loose, metaphorical way of speaking. I suggest, however, that the right answer to the question ‘What makes the reflexive “cancel itself’ applicable?’ is not to be found by studying closely the internal mechanism at all. Instead, we should stand well back and observe the practical consequences of this piece of internally complex, sophisticated machinery for the average driver in the driving seat. Before its introduction a driver had to perform a separate hand movement to cancel his indicator. Now the cancelling happens on its own without his needing to do anything. What is it that happens? Who can describe the wiring diagram accurately? ‘The indicator

37

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

cancels itself says the driver, thinking of what he no longer has to do, with not so much as a thought for the complex inner workings of the gadget upon which he is relying. The psychological mechanisms of Freudian psychology and the neurological mechanisms in split brains are, I am suggesting, as irrelevant to the question of what we mean by self-deception as the wiring diagram of a self-cancelling indicator is to what we mean by ‘It cancels itself.’ Someone who knew nothing at all of the inner workings of the mechanism could answer that question by saying, ‘It cancels on its own without the driver needing to do anything to cancel it.’ This has repercussions for the analysis of other reflexives. It is not to anatomy that we should turn if we want to know when, if ever, it is correct to describe someone or something as, not just moving, or moving by itself, but moving itself. Knowledge of the muscular structure of the human body is not what is needed if one wishes to understand the force of ‘Come on, move yourself. I want to clean under that armchair’, spoken brusquely by the charlady to the chair’s dozing occupant. Nor will physiology or psychiatry tell us why losing your temper is, but losing control of your hands through sudden paralysis is not, loss of self-control. If you wish to know what self-knowledge is, you will be looking in the wrong place if you turn to the psychologists’ theories of learning and the acquisition of our so called ‘self-concept’.

9. C ounting w ith reflexives ‘The colonel hates everyone who lives in the village. The colonel lives in the village. Therefore, the colonel hates himself.’ Is this a good argument? Could the premises be true and the conclusion false? If the colonel, who has lived in the village for years, shows no signs of self-hatred, must it then be false that he hates everyone who lives in the village? In everyday life, I feel sure, there would be no problem about accepting the premises without accepting the conclusion. Yet the argument appears to be of the form ‘All As (= villagers) are Bs (= hated by colonel); this is an A; therefore, this is a B.’ A different reaction is to be expected to ‘The doctor has immunised everyone who lives in the village. The doctor himself lives in the village.’ The objection, ‘But if the doctor has not immunised himself, then he has not immunised everyone living in the village’ carries force and reveals a loophole 38

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

in someone’s thinking. Yet, setting aside changes of subject matter, these two arguments seem to be of the same form. Counting with reflexives is not a straightforward business. The presence of the reflexive clashes with a certain picture of the logic of the words ‘all’ and ‘everyone’. We associate ‘everyone’ with a room crowded with people, ‘no one’ with the same room, now empty. The colonel was in that room, did something to all those present in the room and yet did not do it to himself. How is that possible? Could it be that this picture associated with the word ‘all’ is a bad one anyway? It does not fit, for example, the fact that a child can drink all of its milk and then the dirty glass from which the child drank will be washed clean, only for a forensic scientist afterwards still to be able to detect in it traces of milk. It does not fit the fact that whenever a cricket team is all out the score sheet will show one member of the team ‘not out’. If the harmonica player in the band is said to have taught everyone in the band to play the harmonica, there is no presumption that he must have taught himself to play. It is not that we spoke sloppily in the example about the harmonica player or the colonel, or that no cricket team has ever been all out or that 'everyone’ or ‘all’ sometimes does not really mean everyone or all. It is rather that, given the kind of example it is, hating and teaching in the two cases with which we began, our logical eyes are shut to the inclusion of the hater or the teacher amongst the hated and the taught. Later, in the paradox of the Barber and Russell’s Paradox, we shall see that the paradox springs in part from its counter-intuitive way of counting with the reflexive in question. It would not be hard to envisage a comparable situation involving self-deception in which we have to respond to the objection ‘If he has deceived everyone, then he must have deceived himself too!’

10. Setting the stage for reflexives The reflexive form is sensitive to context. Like an actor who needs the right stage-props in order to play his part properly, a reflexive needs a special background if it is not to be used in an off-colour way. If you saw a letter in the newspaper columns of an agony aunt signed ‘worried father’ in which a teenage daughter was said to have started shaving each day, you would suspect one kind of 39

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

problem; but if the father said his daughter had started shaving herself each day, a rather different scene would flash onto your mental screen. It would be unnatural for the secretary, who had noticed her boss’s unshaven chin in the office one morning, to say, ‘He hasn’t shaved himself this morning.’ ‘He hasn’t shaved’ is what we would expect. The reflexive carries the implication that the circumstances are not the usual ones associated with the simple intransitive. ‘I’ve shaved myself trumpets the disabled person for whom the task of shaving represents a special challenge. ‘I had to shave myself complains the tycoon who is normally shaved each morning by his personal servant but who finds that he has to drive himself to the office that morning because his chauffeur has taken the day off too. But the chauffeur who drives the tycoon to the office each day does not drive himself to work. Unlike the tycoon, he is not being his own chauffeur for the day. Similarly, its parents were pleased when baby began to feed itself but the well-fed don at high table, into whom the baby grew, is neither feeding nor feeding himself even when he is stuffing himself with food at the annual college feast. A partially paralysed, bed-ridden patient may have to be moved frequently to prevent bedsores. ‘Leave me alone’ he protests to his nurses, ‘I can move myself.’ But it does not follow that every time the ablebodied patient in the next bed moves, that he moves himself. It is easy to overlook these subtle differences between the intransitive and reflexive forms of ‘shave, drive, feed, move’, etc. The possibility of an unwanted guest’s inviting himself to your party is the ivy of informality growing on the tree of etiquette. In a strictly ordered world in which the pushy would-be party-goer never gets access to the party-thrower, and in which admission is always by invitation card only, there would be no such thing as inviting yourself to someone else’s party. The best you could do would be to turn up uninvited and gatecrash. But when an acquaintance you have resolved not to invite to your party can buttonhole you in the street or call you on the telephone, ostensibly about some unrelated matter, then introduce the topic of your forthcoming party and breezily promise to bring along his records, saying how much he enjoyed the last party and is looking forward to the next — when, in short, he has the opportunity before the party to act as though he has already been invited — you may feel too embarrassed to disappoint him and walk away from him or put down the phone, cursing, ‘I never invited him. He just invited himself.’ 40

\natom y o f a Reflexive Paradox

Showing oneself out calls for an equally specialised setting. At a crowded party the shy guest decides to leave early by slipping out through the back door unnoticed without troubling his host who is busy with his other guests. The shy guest has not shown himself out. To do that, the guest needs to pluck up at least enough courage to attract his host’s attention. ‘Don’t trouble yourself,’ he tells him, ‘Look after your other guests. I can show myself out.’ He orchestrates his own leave-taking in a way that publicly removes from the host the burdens of etiquette, which normally require the host to see the departing guest to the door. Showing oneself out is misconstrued if it is thought of as dis­ playing politeness to oneself (too ‘strong’) but it is, nevertheless, a form of politeness, displayed, in point of fact, to one’s host, and is not just a ‘map and compass’ affair (which would be too ‘weak'). Similarly, self-deception has its own special requirements. The self-deceiver’s mental horizons must be such that, given the topic about which he deceives himself, it is possible for the truth to be concealed from the self-deceiver by a deceptive thought of his own invention. He must not know the truth, yet the truth must be within his reach so that, if he were to make the effort which would count as his being honest with himself, he would come to know the truth. He is like the person teaching himself Russian. He must not already know Russian but Russian has, so to speak, got to be within his reach in the form of a Teach yourself Russian book or, perhaps, access to native speakers of Russian. Without the appropriate stage-setting, the delicate job cannot be done whereby the self-deceiver, or the person teaching himself, shifts for himself in the right manner and yet does not end up taking things too far by arranging for himself to be taught Russian or to be deceived by someone else.

11. V erb -n o u n asym m etry Self-deception, I have argued, is not quite the same thing as just deceiving oneself. To some this has sounded far-fetched but I think that other reflexives display a similar verb-noun sensitivity and it is a feature of reflexives we should be on the look-out for.10 Not everything you do not know about yourself, for example, your blood group, reveals lack of self-knowledge. The general who denies himself the use of his enemy's railway system by 41

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

effecting its pointless destruction is not practising a modern form of self-denial. The defendant who refuses legal representation and insists on defending himself in court is not acting in self-defence. The man who hears of a dreadful fate in store for someone and pities him, without realising that this is to be his own fate, has been feeling pity for himself without realising it but he has not given way to self-pity. To give way to self-pity you have to look inwards consciously at yourself and bewail your own fate. That is not what he was doing before he learned the truth. At that stage he would not have said, ‘0 me miserumP The person who hears his own voice tape-recorded for the first time may not be able to understand himself but this is not the sort of lack of self­ understanding to worry a psychiatrist. The headmaster who constantly expresses himself well-satisfied with his own achieve­ ments is not competing with adults in drama schools and infants in playschools for marks for self-expression. I do not claim that each and every reflexive form shows this asymmetry. In some cases, a similar distinction is made in a different way. Thus, not all car drivers who kill themselves in crashes as the result of their reckless driving are suicides. There is no absolutely regular verbnoun asymmetry here but it is widespread: all the more reason for vigilance.

12. R eflexive-related expressions By a ‘reflexive-related expression’ I mean such expressions as hyphened compounds containing the prefix ‘self-’, as in ‘selfdeception’, ‘his, her, its own so and so’, etc., as in ‘his own deceiver’ or ‘a victim of his own deception’, and ‘in itself as in ‘an end in itself used to mean an end which is being pursued for its own sake and which is said to justify itself. I also propose to call ‘of its own accord’ reflexive-related when it appears in theories of spontaneous generation and combustion. The idea that life can generate itself (true reflexive) is logically connected with the idea of a living creature’s coming into existence ‘of its own accord’. The relationship between the reflexive-related expression and the genuine reflexive form to which it is related is not always as straightforward as this might suggest. A self-deceiver deceives himself, a self-winding watch winds itself up and a self-righting lifeboat rights itself. But a self-portrait is not a portrait of itself nor has a self-inflicted wound inflicted itself upon itself or upon the person suffering from it. Self-portraits and self-inflicted 42

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

wounds are, nevertheless, the products of artists who portray themselves and of people who wound themselves; for this reason I shall call the corresponding phrases ‘reflexive-related’. With many reflexive-related expressions, for example, ‘self-contra­ dictory’ (to be discussed in Chapter 4) and ‘self-explanatory’, and ‘self-evident’ (to be discussed in Chapter 12) the philosophical problem centres on if, and if so, how, they are related to which cognate reflexive forms. Is a self-contradiction, for example, to be thought of as statement which contradicts itself, on the model of a self-deceiver’s deceiving himself, or is it something which results from someone’s contradicting himself, on the model of a selfportrait? Or is it sometimes the one and sometimes the other? And if it is sometimes the latter, how does a contradiction differ from a self-contradiction? Not every use of ‘self-’ is reflexive-related. A footnote in one of Cecil King’s diaries contains the phrase ‘Anguilla’s selfappointed President’.11 Whose ‘self is intended here, Anguilla’s or the President’s? Was the President Anguilla’s own chosen appointment, not HMG’s, as befits a would-be independent, selfgoverning country, or had someone, upstart fashion, appointed himself President without bothering to consult the wishes of either the Anguillans or HMG? The difference could be of the utmost diplomatic significance. A self-made man has made himself what he is today, but a thrifty housewife’s self-made jam has not made itself; rather, she has made it herself (emphatic use of the reflexive pronoun ‘herself, which is not the object of ‘made’, so the verb is not reflexive in form). Where ‘their self-appointed President’ means the President they appointed themselves (emphatic, not reflexive use of reflexive pronoun) and where ‘self-made jam ’ means jam the housewife herself (emphatic) has made, we do not have a genuine reflexive-related use of ‘self-’. Similarly, ‘his, her, its, etc., own . . .’ is often in no way linked to a reflexive verb-form. But when it is, there are interesting peculiarities. A person who treats himself for some minor ailment is often called ‘his own doctor’. It would be odd to call him ‘his own patient’: that fits better a doctor who happens to be treating himself, even if the ailment and the treatment are identical in both cases. You need medical qualifications to be your own patient but anybody can be his own doctor. The ordinary patient is, so to speak, at the bottom of the pile; any borrowed plumage worn by him will bring him an improvement in borrowed status. 43

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

Can a doctor be his own doctor? Is it a matter of indifference whether we describe a doctor who treats himself, as his own patient or as his own doctor? There are, I think, subtle differences here. Suppose the ruling is that everyone, doctors included, must be registered with a doctor and that it is permitted for a doctor to register with himself. In that case, he becomes his own doctor (he gives his own name as the doctor with whom he is registered) and he numbers himself amongst his own patients (his own name appearing on the records of patients registered with him). Before the ruling he might have denied that he had a doctor. ‘Doctors don’t need doctors’, he might have said. Similarly, the barber who shaves at home in the morning before setting out for work may deny that he has a barber. ‘Nobody shaves me, I shave myself, he says. He definitely becomes both his own barber and his own customer if he shaves himself in the shop and puts the standard charge for shaving a customer in the till. The beginner without a teacher who teaches himself to play the guitar is much more naturally described as his own teacher than as his own pupil. When the great classical guitarist Segovia said that he had had to be his own pupil and his own maestro, he was, I think, referring, not to any modest claim to his being initially selftaught, but to the later stages of his studies when he was a young but already accomplished player who had outstripped the established teachers of his day. The barman may serve himself the odd drink and his customers may do likewise during the barman’s occasional absences from the bar, but only the barman becomes his own customer by paying for his drinks. What can fill the space in ‘You are your own . . .’ depends on who you are as well as what you are currently doing. When you appear in borrowed plumage you still take your description from your natural habitat. It takes a king to be his own cook for the day and a cook to be his own king.

Notes 1. Kingsley Amis, Sunday Observer, 25 April 1982, dismisses the phrase ‘to see oneself out’, ‘as in the American films’, as an illogical barbarism. I do not know whether Amis is right about the American provenance but his objection to the reflexive form ‘to see oneself out’ is clearly based on what I have been calling the isolationist fallacy. 2. This is the predominant view held by psychologists and philo­ sophers alike in a recent, representative collection of essays on self-

44

Anatomy o f a Reflexive Paradox

deception, Mike V. Martin (ed.), Self-deception and self-understanding (University Press of Kansas, Kansas, 1985). 3. A suggestion made by David Hamlyn in his ‘Unconscious intentions’, Philosophy, 46 (1971), pp. 12-22. 4. Suggested by Raphael Demos in his seminal ‘Lying to oneself, Journal of Philosophy, 57 (1960), pp. 588-95, and popular ever since. 5. A good example of this view is Stanley Paluch’s ‘Self-deception’, Inquiry, 10 (1967), pp. 268-78. 6. See Herbert Fingarette, Self-deception (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Henley, 1969), Appendix, ‘The neurological context of selfdeception’, pp. 151-62. 7. In Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Ch. 5, it is by a very similar process to this that Mr Krook, who can neither read nor write, is able eventually to read the word ‘JARNDYCE’. 8. See H.O. Mounce’s contribution to a symposium on self-deception with David Hamlyn, The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 45 (1971), pp. 61-72. 9. The paradoxical consequences of this line of reasoning were exploited to comic effect by Dr Johnson. In Boswell’s Life of Johnson, vol. 2, Ch. 17, Johnson tells how he dreamed someone had the better of him in argument. On waking, he consoled himself with the thought that, since he had had the dream, the superior argument was his own invention and therefore no one else had had the better of him. He had had the better of himself! 10. For doubts about the validity of my claim see John King-Farlow, ‘Deceptions? Assertions? Or second-string verbiage?’, Philosophy, 56 (1981), pp. 100-5; see also my reply, ‘Self-deception in second-rate English’, Philosophy, 59 (1984), pp. 259-61. 11. Cecil King, The Cecil King diary, 1965-70 (Jonathan Cape, London, 1972), footnote to p. 249.

45

4 Self-contradiction

What docs a self-contradictory proposition contradict? The obvious answer would seem to be that a self-contradictory proposition contradicts itself. This answer seems to be just as obviously correct as it would be to say that a self-righting lifeboat rights itself. In the case of self-contradiction there is, however, a difficulty with this seemingly impeccable answer. For how can one and the same proposition contradict itself? When one person says something and another person wishes to contradict him, the second person often says the opposite of what the first person said. You say /?; I contradict you with not-p. My not-p contradicts your p. It is now tempting to say that a self-contradictory proposi­ tion results when two propositions, p and not-p — which, uttered separately as your p and my not-p, gave rise to my contradicting you — arc put into the mouth of just one person in a single proposition (for example, my saying p & not-p). If/? & not-p is self­ contradictory, does p & not-p contradict itself? Isn’t this the same as asking if/? & not-p contradicts p & not-p? But, surely, isn’t it the negation of p & not-p, that is, not (p & not-p), which contradicts p & not-p, not p & not-p itself? Since not (p & not-p) is equivalent to either p or not-p and is quite a different proposition from p & not-p, the former being the negation of the latter, this is hardly a case of the same proposition’s contradicting itself. Indeed, on this plausible but, as I hope to show, wrong-headed account, it is hard to see how one proposition could ever contradict itself. It is as though we were trying to explain what it means to call a written report self-contradictory by obtaining a second, identical copy of the report to sec if it is contradicted by the original. That would be, of course, a complete misunderstanding of what it is 46

Self-contradiction

about, say, a witness’s description of his attacker which makes it self-contradictory. That charge is justified when we read in the opening paragraph of the report that the assailant was of small build but later in the same report that he was of above average height. Yet this explanation continues to sound like a cheat because all it points to is a contradiction between different parts of the witness’s description, whereas we wanted to understand what it is that makes a description itself self-contradictory. Not all contradictions, surely, are self-contradictions, any more than all portraits are self-portraits. But what is the difference between a contradictory and a self-contradictory report, description, etc.? Can the logic textbooks help us here? Logicians, after all, make frequent use of the phrase ‘self-contradictory’ and it is a damning objection to any principle or axiom in logic to be called self­ contradictory. I have not found the textbooks very helpful on this point. They define a contradiction between two different state­ ments by saying that two statements contradict each other if the falsity of the one entails the truth of the other. Unfortunately, this definition is already at odds with the way we actually do contradict each other in real life. One witness’s ‘He was wearing a blue shirt’ is contradicted by another witness’s ‘He was wearing a grey shirt’, even if both statements prove subsequently to be false because it turns out that he wore a white shirt or no shirt at all. The logicians’ definition of a contradiction is, as a matter of fact, much closer, not to what we do when we contradict each other, but to what we do when we say the opposite or the reverse of someone else, or start off a sentence with ‘On the contrary, . . .’. I am contradicting you but not saying the opposite of what you said if I say he wore a grey shirt and you say the shirt was blue. This element of artificiality in the logicians’ definition of a contradiction reduces its usefulness to someone who is interested in the real thing. It is puzzling to note the casual way in which logicians treat the difference between contradiction and selfcontradiction. You could be forgiven for concluding from the following two passages from well-known works that all contra­ dictions are self-contradictions. A statement form which has only false substitution in­ stances is said to be self-contradictory, or a contradiction. The statement form p.~~p is self-contradictory, for in its truthtable only F’s occur under it, signifying that all of its substi­ tution instances are false. Any statement, such as 47

Self-contradiction

which is a substitution instance of a self-contradictory state­ ment form, is false in virtue of its form, and is itself said to be self-contradictory, or a contradiction. (Irving M. Copi, Introduction to logic, second edition (Macmillan, New York, 1961), pp. 265-^6) And compare these two definitions taken from the same glossary of logical terms: contradiction. The joint assertion of a proposition and its

denial. self-contradiction. A proposition that in effect both asserts and

denies some proposition. (from the glossary of logical terms in the Encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards (Macmillan, New York and London, 1967), vol. 5, p. 61 and p. 74) This is a suitable point to say that the common suggestion to be found in logic textbooks that a self-contradiction is a proposition which entails two contradictory propositions is not of much use to us because exactly the same could be said of any contradiction; and we are trying to distinguish between contradiction and selfcontradiction. There is also something misleading about the logicians’ suggestion that a self-contradictory proposition is of the form p & not-p. ‘It is snowing hard and it is not snowing hard’ is, I take it, a proposition of this form. But suppose, on a mountaineer­ ing expedition, holed up in a small refuge in a blizzard, you ask your climbing companion what the weather is like. He peers out through the window and says, ‘It is snowing hard and it is not snowing hard.’ Has he contradicted himself? My feeling is that this would be an unnatural thing to say. Contradicting oneself is not just a matter of coming out with one statement followed by its negation all in the same breath. Even if your companion had gone off his head and talked like this all the time he was being escorted down the mountain, I would not report his symptoms to a doctor as his contradicting himself if all he did was to keep coming out with sentences of the form p & not-p. Any more than I’d say he’d contradicted himself if he said, ‘left and right’ and pointed in both directions when he was asked in which direction lay the summit. Though if he pointed left and said ‘right’, then he would be contradicting himself. The reason why it is hard to see ‘It is snowing hard and it is not snowing hard’ as contradicting oneself 48

Self-contradiction

is similar to the reason why ‘hoadoick’ is not a misspelling of ‘jeopardy’, though ‘hoadoick’ is just a more extreme case (eight wrong letters) of what makes ‘jeapordy’ (two wrong letters) a misspelling of ‘jeopardy’. A difference in quantity can make a difference in quality. A much more realistic example of someone contradicting himself would be the person who said, ‘The personal details in my new passport, such as my date of birth, age, etc., are all correctly filled in; I am 43 years old’, overheard at passport control in 1985 spoken by someone born in 1942, whose passport gives 13 June 1943 as his date of birth (he confused his age with the last two numbers of his year of birth when he filled in the passport details). Let us make a fresh start and try to learn something from the paradox of self-deception in Chapter 2. There is, after all, a strik­ ing resemblance between the problem about self-contradiction and self-deception. We were inclined to say that it took two people to produce a case of deception and to be baffled as to how one person could combine in himself the role of deceiver and deceived. Similarly, we are inclined to think that it takes a pair of contradictory propositions, the original proposition and its opposite, to produce a contradiction. So how can one proposition be its own opposite? Let us take a closer look at this question. How does self-contradiction normally arise? How does one contradict oneself? Let us be on our guard against the temptation to find our explanation in some ‘inner propositional mechanism’. Instead, let us look ‘outwards’ at what surroundings and stage settings are needed to enable one to contradict oneself. Think of the text of a play. One of the play’s characters will have contradicted himself when on page three he mentions his having a sister but on page one had introduced himself as an only child. His ‘I have a sister’ on page three contradicts ‘I am an only child' on page one, though, of course, if different characters in the play had spoken these lines they would not have been contradicting themselves or each other. It is when the same character speaks these lines — it does not have to be in the same speech on the same page — that he contradicts himself. When did he contradict himself? Not until page three, line seventeen, when he said, ‘I have a sister.’ We could point to the place in the play where the self-contradiction occurs. It is because of what he said on page one that what he says on page three is self-contradictory. If it was felt necessary to make it crystal clear that he had contradicted himself, it might help to set down the offending remarks side by 49

Self-contradiction

side. We draw the offender’s attention to the fact that he said both ‘I have a sister’ and ‘I am an only child.’ Here is something which could be said to be of the form p & not-p; but the form would be exegetical not genetic. At no point did he utter this combination of words all in one breath and if he had done so he would have been mad or messing about. That would have been too blatant to count even as a blatant self-contradiction. Contradicting oneself is like repeating oneself. A character in a play can have repeated himself on page three by telling the same story to the same person to whom he told it on pages two and one. The story occurs only once on page three but he repeated himself in the telling of it. To repeat oneself is not the same thing as to say something repeatedly. The repetition of someone’s name is not the same thing as saying his name repeatedly. Similarly, to contradict oneself is not the same as saying something which contains within itself a contradiction. The character in the play contradicted himself; it was self-contradictory of him to say it; what he said was self-contradictory. ‘Self-contradictory’ gets its sense here in the same way that ‘self-congratulatory’ does when it follows that what the politician said, that is, his speech, was selfcongratulatory if he has made a speech in which he con­ gratulated himself on his achievements. In calling the speech selfcongratulatory, no one is saying that the speech congratulated itself. I propose the following account of self-contradiction. Someone says p and later he says not-p. When he said not-p, he contradicted himself. Given that he had earlier said p, his later not-p was self­ contradictory. Not-p, his self-contradictory remark, does not contain within itself an internal contradiction; it contradicts his earlier p. The answer to the question, ‘What does his self­ contradictory remark, not-p, contradict?’ is ‘It contradicts his earlier />.’ This sounds paradoxical (‘How can what is self­ contradictory fail to contradict itself?’ is what bothers us) but similar paradoxes abound in the logic of the reflexives. I said earlier that a self-righting lifeboat rights itself but, to stay in the nautical idiom, a self-steering mechanism does not steer itself; it is the yacht to which the self-steering mechanism is attached which steers itself. The person congratulated by the headmaster’s self-congratulatory speech is none other than the headmaster (and not his speech). Before you protest that a self-contradictory remark, one which truly contradicts itself, cannot possibly contradict its opposite because if it does so then it contradicts 50

Self-contradiction

something other than itself and is therefore not self-contradictory, you might bear in mind that a self-pollinating apple tree depends on the birds and insects to pollinate it; even the wind plays its part and pollination would not occur if the tree had to manage on its own in an enclosed greenhouse. Yet, in spite of its dependence on these external agencies, the tree is self-pollinating because it does not depend on cross-pollination from neighbouring trees and is self-fertile. I mean my account to apply to cases in which the selfcontradicter contradicts himself in the same breath as well as to the more usual case in which there is a reasonable gap separating the two parts of the contradiction he has committed himself to. I have, however, cautioned against viewing contradicting oneself in the same breath as a matter of simply coming out with a blatant conjunction of one assertion followed immediately by its opposite, such as ‘It is raining and it is not raining.7 This is madness or obtuseness, not self-contradiction. The same account of contradiction is to be given, whether it be of people contra­ dicting themselves or of what they say contradicting itself. Whether it is a newspaper reporter contradicting himself or the reporter’s report contradicting itself, the pattern is one of something being said and later contradicted by the same person or thing. In my previous example, the character in the play contradicted himself on page three when he said something which contradicted his earlier remark on page one. That his self­ contradictory remark on page three was not a remark which contradicted itself ought not to surprise us any more than the fact that neither self-congratulatory, -deprecatory, -condemnatory, -accusatory, -justificatory, -laudatory, -exculpatory, etc., remarks congratulate, deprecate, condemn, etc., themselves. In other words, this is the norm, but the influence of modern logic is so strong that our attention is easily diverted from this aspect of self­ contradictoriness to the special case where what is self-contradictory contradicts itself, as though this were the whole of the story. Let us now consider this special case. The account of his family circumstances given by the character in the play in the first three pages was, let us suppose, self­ contradictory. Here we are thinking, not of the point on page three at which he contradicted himself, but of his whole account, to be found on pages one and three, which was self-contradictory in that it was in conflict with itself; that is, one internal part of his account contradicted another. Here, note, it would be correct to 51

Self-contradiction

say that his description of his family circumstances, taken as a whole, contradicted itself, something which, I have argued, it would not be right to say of his single self-contradictory remark on page three. If, on the other hand, a single sentence, uttered in a single breath, is self-contradictory in this sense, then it does contradict itself. An example of such a sentence is ‘My passport is correctly filled in and I am 43 years old’, uttered in the situation described a moment ago. To count as contradicting itself, the sentence does not have to consist of a proposition and its negation conjoined by ‘and’. ‘Don’t forget that I am twelve years older than my father’ (a son’s Freudian slip?) also contradicts itself and can be said to contain a contradiction, in the sense that it pro­ vides the materials for the construction of a pair of contradictory statements to the effect that the son is older than someone and this same person must have been born before him. I have argued that ‘self-contradictory’ means different things depending on whether it is to be understood as ‘contradicting itself or not. In the chapter ‘Self-refutation’ in his Philosophical reasoning Professor John Passmore also speaks of accusations of self-contradiction as having two forms.1 One way, according to Passmore, of contradicting oneself is to assert p and not-p at different times and places; another way is to assert p and not-p on a single occasion. Passmore concludes from this ‘(But) to contra­ dict oneself is not the same thing as to utter a self-contradictory statement’ (Passmore, Philosophical reasoning, p. 58). I, however, think this mis-states the position; it is no more plausible, or true, than to say that to congratulate, etc., oneself is not the same thing as to utter a self-congratulatory, etc., statement. But I do accept, with Passmore, that, in order to contradict oneself it is not neces­ sary to utter a statement which contradicts itself (and is self­ contradictory in that sense). Philosophers have disputed whether G.E. Moore was right to deny that ‘I believe he has gone out but he has not’ is self­ contradictory.2 Moore gives as his reason his opinion that the proposition could be true since the speaker may falsely believe that a certain person has gone out. Passmore criticises Moore and argues that the proposition is self-contradictory (Passmore, Philosophical reasoning, pp. 74-6). Moore has been defended and Passmore criticised by J.L. Mackie.3 I agree with Passmore to this extent. My ‘He has not gone out’ is contradicted by your ‘I believe he has gone out’; you are not saying ‘He may or may not have gone out but I believe he has.’ When both sentences are 52

Self-contradiction

combined and put into one mouth, something has obviously gone wrong which prevents us from making sense of the resultant sentence but it is not clear to me that a genuine self-contradiction arises except in the artificial sense assigned by logicians and philosophers. A self-contradiction, I am suggesting, is like an own goal in football; it is a foolish or unfortunate move which is allowed for in the rules, whereas producing a second ball, while the first is still in play, and kicking it between your own goalposts is not. Modern logic has confined itself to the kind of self-contradictory statement that contradicts itself. The idea that it must be repre­ sented as being of the form p & not-p is a gesture at the idea that it must contain an internal contradiction and be in logical self­ conflict. But modern logic ignores the dynamics of the cut and thrust of face to face argument in which it matters who is saying what to whom and who has already said what, if we are to distinguish between one person’s contradicting another and his contradicting himself. Modern logic is not concerned with the fact that a single statement which is not in internal conflict with itself can still be self-contradictory because its wider setting re­ veals that the speaker has contradicted himself. Even in logic, however, it does not follow, as some textbooks imply, that all contradictions are self-contradictions. What one is entitled to say is that if a statement does contain a contradiction, that statement is self-contradictory. But this does not mean that the contradictory parts of the contradictions contained in the self-contradictory statement are themselves in their turn self-contradictory (in the sense of contradicting themselves). Modern logic has produced an artificially narrow definition of contradiction and self-contradiction because it has chosen to ignore the ‘Who said what to whom?’ and ‘In what order?’ dimension which breathes life into the distinction between contra­ dicting others and contradicting oneself. The artificiality and narrowness of this approach is shown by the following example. A woman is filling in a questionnaire which asks for personal details. Starting at the top of the form, she writes down ‘none’ opposite marriages and a few lines further down she enters ‘Brown’ opposite maiden name. ‘None’ and ‘Brown’ are contradictory answers. As a heuristic device, the contradiction could be brought home to her by getting her to see that, if she tried to stand by her answers, she would be forced to answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the same breath to the same question, namely, ‘Have you ever been mar53

Self-contradiction

ried?’ I have been arguing that, although ‘Brown’ is rightly called a self-contradictory answer — on the grounds that she contra­ dicted herself at the point when she gave the answer ‘Brown’ in her form-filling, given her previous answer — it is not an answer which contradicts itself. If one were solely concerned with the business of forcing a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ answer in the same breath out of someone as a way of getting him to see that he had previously contradicted himself (rubbing his nose in his self-contradiction, as it were), one might decide to define a self-contradictory answer as a ‘yes and no’ answer and a contradictory answer likewise. This would be like confusing a repetition of a name (saying the name once more) with saying a name repeatedly (saying the name over and over again) in one’s explanation of what it is to repeat oneself. Something like this seems to have happened to accounts of selfcontradiction in modern logic. ‘Self-contradictory’ can be used in two senses, both of which are reflexive-related. The same is true of ‘self-imposed’. All self­ imposition, one might have supposed, is a matter of someone’s or something’s imposing itself on something, as in ‘The weakened and divided medieval church fell under the control of a number of self-imposed popes’ (of popes, that is, who imposed themselves on the church). But when it is a question of the remorseful priest’s self-imposed penance, it is the priest who imposes the penance on himself, not the penance which imposes itself on the priest. I began by asking whether a self-contradictory proposition contradicts itself. At first, I felt that this had to be the right answer but in many of the examples I have discussed this does not seem to be the case. Where, then, do I now stand? Many selfcontradictory propositions contradict other propositions with which they conflict; these other propositions do not have to be their plumb opposites, their contradictories, though they may be. In the jargon of logicians, they are often their contraries. These propositions are self-contradictory because they are used to con­ tradict oneself with, as self-congratulatory speeches are used to congratulate oneself with. But it is possible for a proposition, theory, statement, etc., to be self-contradictory and to contradict itself. Self-contradictory utterances of this second kind may con-

Self-contradiction

proposition, that is, a compound proposition, recognisable from the presence of conjunctions connecting its various clauses, but we need to be careful not to try to read the wrong thing into it. We are inclined to want to break that compound proposition into its separate parts, to take what is represented by a single lower case letter of the alphabet, p , q, r, etc., and to ask if it all by itself can contradict itself. Can p contradict itself? How can the answer be yes because p cannot be of the form p & not-p? The simple cannot be compound. It is true that neither of the two parts which contradict each other in a self-contradictory proposition which contradicts itself, contradicts itself. That is the only point we are making when we manipulate the symbols in this way. Our point is comparable to the observation already made that a tree all on its own in a self-enclosed greenhouse shut away from insects, etc., cannot pollinate itself. Similarly, a self-propelled vehicle, a veteran car, say, cannot move unless it is propelled by its engine. But the tempting conclusion, namely, that no single proposition ever really contradicts itself, is no more obviously true than the claim that a solitary tree standing all by itself in the garden with no other trees nearby cannot pollinate itself. A brief, single-sentence utterance can contradict itself but, like the solitary apple tree in the garden which pollinates itself, a single selfcontradictory proposition which contradicts itself needs, so to speak, a rich logical insect life around it to make possible what would be a miracle if it occurred inside a complete logical vacuum, namely, a single self-contradictory sentence. Isn’t it really only compound propositions, made up of more than one proposition, which contradict themselves? Doesn’t a proposition which contradicts itself have to have the right kind of internal complexity, that is, to be really two propositions, in order to be able to produce a contradiction between its parts? I think the answer to this is no. Not any old sentence picked at random can contradict itself but that does not mean that, when a single sentence is suitable to serve as a self-contradiction, it is really two sentences thinly disguised as one. Consider this analogy. A former colony can demand self-rule and want to govern itself. For a country to govern itself is for it to be ruled by, say, its own narliament not hv that o f another countrv. But if the Dresident o f

Self-contradiction

identify one thing as ruling over the other. ‘Self-rule’ as applied to a country is no help when suddenly applied to one person who happens to be its leader. But it is not that one man cannot rule over himself whereas many men can rule over themselves. It is not that three hundred can do what one cannot. Note, I am not saying that we could never give a sense to a king’s ruling over himself. If a religious sect can call every man his own priest, then, surely, a sense could be given to every man’s being his own king. Are we not all descended from kings and cannot each man’s home be not just his castle but his palace too? It’s just that, as things stand, we don’t readily do this, whereas, by contrast, we have given a special sense to the reflexive ‘self-employed’ and the reflexive-related ‘being one’s own boss’. It isn’t numbers that make the difference, it is the kind of stage setting in which the individual finds himself and his surrounding circumstances that matter. It took our distinctive forms of taxation and financial legislation to create the situation in which one man can set up a company and be in business for himself, having to fill in forms asking for the name of the employer of the company for which he works and the names and number of the company’s employees. He writes his own name down twice; he pays himself a wage, gives himself a rise or a pay cut and works for himself. As a selfemployed man, he is his own boss and might even give himself the sack and leave the rest of the employees to carry on the business without him. A state that had fallen on hard times might have only one member left, the rest having emigrated and changed citizenship, and still have self-rule. A scientist’s theory, a witness’s statement to the police, a list of recommendations, all comprising many separate sentences, are natural candidates for the accusation ‘This contradicts itself.’ Such items are long enough to contradict themselves in several places. By contrast, the single sentence, ‘The birds are singing’ won’t do. But the wry single-sentence observation about a rigged trial, ‘The culprit was innocent’ con­ tradicts itself and leaves you free to draw your own conclusion. To contradict itself, a single sentence has to speak simultaneously with two opposing voices and be at odds with itself, for instance, the slogan ‘Property is theft’, the proverbial saying ‘More is less’ and the comment ‘The silence was deafening.’ There has to be a conflict between parts of the single sentence but the parts do not themselves have to be sentences or propositions. Two words, as well as two statements, can mean the opposite of each other. I am not, it will be obvious, following the view that a proposition 56

Self-contradiction

which contradicts itself must be meaningless. I think that some­ one who says, ‘A single proposition cannot contradict itself is like someone who denies that just one person can employ himself on the grounds that it takes at least two people for the relation of employment to be instantiated. I do not take myself to be attacking the use of p & not-p to symbolise a proposition which contradicts itself but rather a misleading interpretation of that symbolism which is expressed in the thought, ‘Only a compound proposition can contradict itself.’ The comparison between self-contradiction and self-employment invoked a moment ago can be extended to help me clarify my position. An agency specialising in giving advice to the selfemployed might adopt for its letterhead a picture of two small figures standing side by side with arms linked. One figure is wearing a bowler hat, the other holds a spanner in his free hand. The faces and bodies of the two figures are otherwise identical. The logo is meant to symbolise the fact that many of those who are self-employed are in one-man businesses in which they play the role of both master and man, of employee and employer. It would be a perverse, but not impossible misinterpretation of the agency logo to see it as indicating that whoever is self-employed must also always employ an assistant, an employee to work alongside him. As though, in order to count as self-employed, every plumber had to have a mate. ‘A single proposition all by itself cannot contradict itself misinterprets the double occurrence of p in p & not-p in the same way. The desire to see all self-contradiction as involving two propo­ sitions lies very deep. I recognise that someone who feels strongly inclined to see matters this way will feel he has right on his side because, in case after case, he will find he can split the original, allegedly single, self-contradictory sentence into two parts and write them down separately. He will, for example, take ‘The culprit was innocent’ and recast it as ‘There is an x such that x is a culprit; and there is a y such that y is innocent; and x is identical with y.’ But in doing this, I do not believe he has shown that what looked like a single sentence was really two. He has simply adopted a particular attitude which says, ‘This sentence is really two sentences.’ And the fact is that one can adopt this attitude and treat what is one as two quite happily. He is like the stranger who, travelling along a straight road between two towns, encounters from time to time two signposts, the uprights fixed back to back, each with a sign bearing the name of one of the 57

Self-contradiction

ried?’ I have been arguing that, although ‘Brown’ is rightly called a self-contradictory answer — on the grounds that she contra­ dicted herself at the point when she gave the answer ‘Brown’ in her form-filling, given her previous answer — it is not an answer which contradicts itself. If one were solely concerned with the business of forcing a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ answer in the same breath out of someone as a way of getting him to see that he had previously contradicted himself (rubbing his nose in his self-contradiction, as it were), one might decide to define a self-contradictory answer as a ‘yes and no’ answer and a contradictory answer likewise. This would be like confusing a repetition of a name (saying the name once more) with saying a name repeatedly (saying the name over and over again) in one’s explanation of what it is to repeat oneself. Something like this seems to have happened to accounts of selfcontradiction in modern logic. ‘Self-contradictory’ can be used in two senses, both of which are reflexive-related. The same is true o f ‘self-imposed’. All self­ imposition, one might have supposed, is a matter of someone’s or something’s imposing itself on something, as in ‘The weakened and divided medieval church fell under the control of a number of self-imposed popes’ (of popes, that is, who imposed themselves on the church). But when it is a question of the remorseful priest’s self-imposed penance, it is the priest who imposes the penance on himself, not the penance which imposes itself on the priest. I began by asking whether a self-contradictory proposition contradicts itself. At first, I felt that this had to be the right answer but in many of the examples I have discussed this does not seem to be the case. Where, then, do I now stand? Many selfcontradictory propositions contradict other propositions with which they conflict; these other propositions do not have to be their plumb opposites, their contradictories, though they may be. In the jargon of logicians, they are often their contraries. These propositions are self-contradictory because they are used to con­ tradict oneself with, as self-congratulatory speeches are used to congratulate oneself with. But it is possible for a proposition, theory, statement, etc., to be self-contradictory and to contradict itself. Self-contradictory utterances of this second kind may con­ tain internal parts which contradict each other, as self-pollinating trees are pollinated by birds, bees and insects. But the parts of a single sentence which contradicts itself do not have to be sentences as well. The symbolism p & not-p fits one type of self-contradictory 54

Self-contradiction

proposition, that is, a compound proposition, recognisable from the presence of conjunctions connecting its various clauses, but we need to be careful not to try to read the wrong thing into it. We are inclined to want to break that compound proposition into its separate parts, to take what is represented by a single lower case letter of the alphabet, p , q, r, etc., and to ask if it all by itself can contradict itself. Gan p contradict itself? How can the answer be yes because p cannot be of the form p & not-p? The simple cannot be compound. It is true that neither of the two parts which contradict each other in a self-contradictory proposition which contradicts itself, contradicts itself. That is the only point we are making when we manipulate the symbols in this way. Our point is comparable to the observation already made that a tree all on its own in a self-enclosed greenhouse shut away from insects, etc., cannot pollinate itself. Similarly, a self-propelled vehicle, a veteran car, say, cannot move unless it is propelled by its engine. But the tempting conclusion, namely, that no single proposition ever really contradicts itself, is no more obviously true than the claim that a solitary tree standing all by itself in the garden with no other trees nearby cannot pollinate itself. A brief, single-sentence utterance can contradict itself but, like the solitary apple tree in the garden which pollinates itself, a single self­ contradictory proposition which contradicts itself needs, so to speak, a rich logical insect life around it to make possible what would be a miracle if it occurred inside a complete logical vacuum, namely, a single self-contradictory sentence. Isn’t it really only compound propositions, made up of more than one proposition, which contradict themselves? Doesn’t a proposition which contradicts itself have to have the right kind of internal complexity, that is, to be really two propositions, in order to be able to produce a contradiction between its parts? I think the answer to this is no. Not any old sentence picked at random can contradict itself but that does not mean that, when a single sentence is suitable to serve as a self-contradiction, it is really two sentences thinly disguised as one. Consider this analogy. A former colony can demand self-rule and want to govern itself. For a country to govern itself is for it to be ruled by, say, its own parliament, not by that of another country. But if the president of some country were to announce that he has broken free of his former masters and now rules over himself, we cannot imme­ diately attach a clear sense to his words because we cannot discover in him the right kind of complexity to permit us to 55

Self-contradiction

towns. ‘They point in opposite directions,’ he says to himself, ‘so they can’t both be right.’ Later he comes across just one post with two signs attached to it, again, pointing in opposite directions. ‘This is not one signpost pointing in two directions; this is really two signposts, each pointing in the opposite direction to the other’, he says. And he might saw the single signpost down the middle and fasten the separate pieces back to back to prove his point. His attitude makes him see two signposts where we see one. But this is not insight on his part; it is decision. This is like the logic-chopping of a moment ago. That it can be done is not to be denied but it does not have the significance given to it. Finally, here is a list of similarities between philosophical puzzles about self-deception and self-contradiction. First, at the heart of each puzzle is a strikingly similar movement of thought in which the reflexive and non-reflexive forms seem to be at war with each other. For there to be deception, there has to be a deceiver and a deceived. So how can the self-deceiver combine both roles and practise deception on himself? Similarly, a contra­ diction can exist only between a pair of contradictory statements. So how can a single statement be its own contradictory? Secondly, just as ‘I know I got four “O ” levels, so how can I deceive myself into believing I got eight?’ is the wrong place to look for a possible case of self-deception, so ‘It is raining and it is not raining’ is the wrong place to look for an example of someone contradicting himself. Thirdly, not all deceiving oneself turned out to be selfdeception; and not every case of self-contradiction requires one to utter a statement which contradicts itself. Fourthly, the objection that for p & not-p to be a self-contradiction, p & not-p must contradict p & not-p, and that this is impossible, closely resembles the idea that self-deception is impossible because the self-deceiver has, per impossible, to know the truth because he is a deceiver and not to know the truth because he is deceived all at one and the same time. Fifthly, the temptation to try to explain self-deception as a product of internal psychological division, for example, a split mind, or a divided self, corresponds to a similar urge to explain self-contradiction in terms of an internal logical in­ compatibility between the internal atomic parts of a compound molecular proposition.

N otes 1. John Passmore, Philosophical reasoning (Duckworth, London, 1961), 58

Self-contradiction

pp. 58-9. 2. G.E. Moore, ‘Russell’s “theory of descriptions’” in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The philosophy of Bertrand Russell, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. V (Northwestern University, Evanston and Chicago, 1944), pp. 177-225 (p. 204). 3. J.L. Mackie, ‘Self-refutation: a formal analysis’, Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1964), pp. 193-203 (pp. 195-6).

59

5 For Its Own Sake

I would like to understand better two opposing reactions — each of which I have personally experienced — on coming across the phrase ‘for its own sake’ used in earnest. When told that knowledge is worth pursuing for its own sake and that this is what the study of science at a university ought to be about, not as an adjunct to commercially motivated research in a product design and development team funded by local industry, I, and others, feel that something pure and noble, holy, good and true is being said. On the other hand, I recognise that to some, who would probably describe themselves as more realistic than myself, the claim that knowledge should be, and is being, pursued for its own sake has a hollow ring. Nowadays, academics themselves feel uneasy when they hear this sort of thing being said in public in mixed company. But they do continue to say such things to each other, at least occasionally in private, among consenting adults. Furthermore, I do attach importance to the thought that to do the right thing for its own sake is a shining example of moral goodness. At the same time I acknowledge that the idea of a good deed done for its own sake is less than crystal clear and that, to many, the person who claims to be doing something for its own sake sounds like someone who smiles at himself in the mirror in the morning in order to find at least one approving face before setting out to commit his next crime against humanity. I’d like to know whether this phrase ‘for its own sake’ will bear the weight I want to place on it or whether a more sceptical attitude is called for. Why, then, do I want to say that the idea of doing something for its own sake is paradoxical? I have the idea of doing something for the sake of something else. The former ‘something’ 60

For Its Own Sake

is the means to the latter 'something1, which is the end. The means is employed for the sake of obtaining the end. Suppose, to use a familiar example, I want a book which happens to be on the top shelf out of reach. By means of a convenient stool I gain my end and empty-handed pursuit is rewarded by possession of the book. The stool appears as the means and the book as the end in a chart marked out with separate columns headed ‘means’ and ‘end’. Life is full of such ‘means for the sake of ends’ relationships. We take exercise to lose weight, go to Luton to get to Venice, take a dive to make a buck, etc. At the half-way stage you will have selected your means but you will not have reached your final destination. On this account, what is it to be doing something for its own sake? When Kant tells you that you are to do your duty for its own sake, are you to write down ‘my duty’ twice, once in each column of the mcans/ends chart? What is it to be employing a means in order to obtain the same thing? If you have a thing already in your possession, what is the point of making it your final goal? How can one and the same thing be a means to itself? Confronted by these intellectual difficulties, one is inclined to fall back upon what are, in philosophy, strong measures, namely, a thoroughly perspicuous notation. Doing something for its own sake is, one thinks, best represented by the symbolism ‘doing A for the sake of doing A’, where the replacement of the treacherous reflexive-related ‘for its own’ by the more perspicuous repetition of the same symbol will enable us to focus on what is especially puzzling, namely, how means and end can coincide. A good example on which to try out our new symbolism would be the saying ‘Virtue is its own reward’, something which is often said by those who want to encourage us to do the decent thing for its own sake, not from fear of punishment or in the hope of reward. But how are we to understand ‘The reward for doing virtuous act A is virtuous act A’ or, more generally, ‘Virtue is the reward of virtue’? An awkward objection insinuates itself: I know what it is for a deed to go unrewarded. For example, your lost dog turns up on my doorstep and, in response to your advertised ofler of a reward of five pounds, I promptly turn up on your doorstep to claim my reward in return for your dog. My good deed got its reward. However, things might have gone differently. There might have been no offer of a reward and yet I might have found and good-naturedly returned your dog and received no reward. In the first case my good deed got a reward; in the second it got none. I understand ‘deed plus reward’ and ‘deed but no reward’ 61

For Its Own Sake

but what, pray, in meant by 'deed an it* own reward'? This is a cheat. The vocabulary of a reward ethic is being used without delivering the goods. The thought is bound to occur that people who say that virtue is its own reward are not quite saying what they mean. Really, they must think that good deeds do get rewarded, only not in any obvious, tangible way; not by praise, money, success, etc., not now but later, by heaven, (Jod’s approval, no waiting in purgatory, etc. Virtue cannot be self-rewarding any more than a matchbox can contain itself amongst its contents. Or so one thinks. Kant is a philosopher who clearly attaches great importance to the idea of doing something for its own sake. What he has to say, however, is, in the light of our present problem, not straight­ forwardly reassuring. Kant's Groundwork oj the metaphysic oj morals' shows him to be preoccupied with a conception of the purity of ethics as expressed in a person doing his duty for its own sake, with duty as something to be pursued as an end in itself (note the reflexive-related ‘end in itself here). To act from an absolutely good will is to pursue virtue for its own sake, disregarding all impurities. ‘To behold virtue in her proper shape’, says Kant, ‘is nothing other than to show morality stripped of all admixture with the sensuous and of all spurious adornments of reward or self-love’ ( Groundwork, p. 8Î)). To one critic, a Professor Sulzer, who had complained that the pure thought of duty, unmixed with the alien element of added empirical inducements, would make moral instruction ineffective, Kant makes the following revealing reply. The teachers themselves do not make their concepts pure, but — since they try to do too well by hunting everywhere for inducements to be moral — they spoil the medicine altogether by their very attempt to make it really powerful. For the most ordinary observation shows that when a righteous act is represented as being done with a steadfast mind in complete disregard of any advantage in this or in another world, and even under the greatest temptations of affliction or allurement, it leaves far behind it any similar action affected in even the slightest degree by an alien impulsion and casts it in the shade: it uplifts the soul and rouses a wish that we too could act in this way. Kven children of a moderate age feel this impression, and duties b!2

For Its Own Sake

should never be presented to them in any other way. ( Groundwork, p. 75) Sulzer’s question puts Kant on the spot. Moral instruction is often thought of as training people to do the decent thing for its own sake. But what form shall such training take? Is there to be a system of rewards and penalties? How is Kant to be interpreted here? Is he rejecting all inducements to be moral or only those of a certain kind? Is he answering yes or no to the question ‘Can the pursuit of virtue for its own sake be taught by means of inducements?’ Is an inducement to do the right thing for its own sake a contradiction in terms or not? Kant’s reply to his critic provokes in me the question, ‘What has become of the vaunted purity of ethics?’ We were supposed to pursue duty for duty’s sake alone but now we are told of the uplifting of the soul and of the desire to emulate others, of a universal, instinctive thirst for righteousness. There is, after all, something distinct from virtue to enter as an end on Kant's means/ends chart, namely, inner moral satisfaction, boost, uplift upon contemplating and carrying out our duty whilst emulating others. How is this to be squared with the pursuit of duty for the sake of duty alone? There is another side to Kant — his official voice, you might say, in view of the fact that the reply to Sulzer was added later in a footnote — in which Kant is determined not to admit any taint or admixture or alien impulsion. But this too, I suggest, is disconcerting. In a famous passage, seen by some as autobiographical, Kant portrays the man who acts for the sake of duty alone. Suppose then that the mind of this friend of man were overclouded by sorrows of his own which extinguished all sympathy with the fate of others, but that he still had the power to help those in distress, though no longer stirred by the need of others because sufficiently occupied with his own; and suppose that, when no longer moved by any inclination, he tears himself out of this deadly insensibility and does the action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone; then for the first time his action has genuine moral worth. Still further: if nature had implanted little sympathy in this or that man’s heart; if (being in other respects an honest fellow) he were cold in temperament and indifferent to the sufferings of others — perhaps because, being endowed with the special gift of patience and robust 6»

For Its Own Sake

endurance in his own sufferings, he assumed the like in others and even demanded it; if such a man (who would in truth not be the worst product of nature) were not exactly fashioned to be a philanthropist, would he not still find in himself a source from which he might draw a worth far higher than any that a good-natured temperament can have? Assuredly he would. ( Groundwork, pp. 63—4) The philosophical motives behind the construction of the good man’s character in Kant’s example of virtue pursued for its own sake are, I take it, these: to pursue virtue for virtue’s sake, nothing must count with you but virtue alone. All else must be excluded — pleasure in the happiness you bring to others, contentment, peace of mind, good nature, fellow-feeling, a sunny disposition. Hence Kant’s gloomy, philanthropic misanthrope (a James Mason part, if ever there was one). When, having dutifully extended a helping hand to one less fortunate than yourself, you are asked ‘Why did you do your duty?’, you must truthfully be able to reply, ‘For duty’s sake alone.’ Something of the oddness of Kant’s account is brought out in the following. You are cast away with Roy Plomley on a desert island and are asked to choose eight gramophone records to take with you. ‘Did you choose this piece of music for reasons of nostalgia or for its own sake?’ asks Plomley. ‘I chose this piece, not as a peg on which to hang a memory, but because I find it very beautiful. Listening to it gives me great pleasure’ is your reply. Plomley, turned Kantian inquisitor, pounces. ‘You claim’, he says, ‘to have chosen the music for its own sake, yet you also admit that you chose the music for the sake of its beauty and for the pleasure it gives you. The music is one thing; its beauty and your aesthetic enjoyment another. On my means/end chart I shall write “beauty and/or aesthetic enjoyment” under “end” and “gramophone record no. 6” under “means”.’ The man who chooses music for its own sake will — you are given to understand — seek the music purely for itself, not for any of its adjuncts. He may, for example, be a professional instrumentalist who has lost his love of music and who can no longer take pleasure in his musical ability but who, nevertheless, forces himself to practise regularly and to perform in public, although without enjoyment. In him we see what it is to choose a piece of music for its own sake. But this is, surely, quite mad. Somehow, in stripping the music 64

For Its Own Sake

bare, as we do when we exclude its power to evoke associated memories and to create nostalgia, in our desire to get at the music all by itself, we push things too far and end up having excluded something we need to keep in order to make sense of what it is to choose a piece of music for its own sake. Yet, if we do retain it, it looks as though we are playing fast and loose with the meaning of ‘for its own sake’ because we seem to be introducing an extra element in addition to the music. Kant on the purity of ethics, in his official account of doing one’s duty for its own sake, is adopting a misplaced technique of what I shall call ‘isolationism’ which is all too tempting to someone struggling to come to terms with ‘for its own sake’ and other reflexive-related constructions. The following is a parody of Kant on the purity of ethics. A city analyst is asked to report on the purity of a substance submitted for his chemical analysis. The description on the packet says ‘self-raising flour’. Upon labor­ atory examination, the substance proves to be a mixture of flour and baking powder. The presence of the baking powder, explains the analyst, is what causes the flour to rise. The flour rises only because of the presence of the foreign admixture. ‘The description “self-raising flour” is really rather misleading’, comments the analyst. ‘For flour to raise itself, flour must raise flour. A perspicuous symbolism would have helped to bring out that point. For that to happen, corn must grow, ripen and be harvested, the grain must be milled and the flour used, with no unacknowledged additives, to bake loaves of bread which rise on their own. We know that this does not happen.’ The steps in the analyst’s train of thought seem to follow from one another but there is another way of looking at things — from the doorway of cook’s kitchen rather than from the bench of the analytical chemist’s laboratory. When cook makes bread with self-raising flour it is a fact that nothing needs to be added by cook to the ingredients in the basin to get the loaves to rise. It is terribly easy to overlook the significance of one less journey to the cupboard for cook, to see this as a trivial domestic detail in comparison to the important scientific facts. Indeed, there is a marked tendency for puzzles about reflexives to turn the relationship between science and everyday life into a battlefield. The following tall story shows how easily such conflict arises. It fell to the lot of Immanuel Kant to be reincarnated in a station of life not unbefitting the son of a saddle maker. He returned as the son of a garage proprietor in the twentieth 65

For Ils Own Sake

century. As a young man, he would help his father with odd repair jobs on cars which had developed small faults. One day his father asked him to put right a fault on the self-cancelling indicators of a customer’s car. It took Kant some time to fathom how the indicators worked. There was an eccentric cam fixed to the steering column and when this was rotated by the driver’s turning the steering wheel, it activated an electrical make-break contact which in turn interrupted a circuit which caused the hashing light to cancel. Kant looked hard at each piece of the mechanism but he could not see any way in which any part cancelled itself. The replacement part came in a box labelled ‘self-cancelling indicators’ but Kant told his father that this must be a misnomer. My point is that the conceptual applicability of the reflexive is determined by what takes place in the driver’s seat out on the road, not by what you can see and say with your head under the dashboard in the garage. The indicators cancel themselves because of the fact that the driver does not have to perform any additional movements of his own in order to cancel them, once he has straightened up the wheel after indicating and completing a turn. The causal story as told from close up by the technical expert is causally correct but conceptually irrelevant — irrelevant, that is, to the applicability of the reflexive-related concept. The real Kant was, I fancy, trying to do moral philo­ sophy with, so to speak, his head stuck under the psychological dashboard. He could see that in the descriptions of the normal psychological pulls and pushes, the stimuli and responses, ‘for its own sake’ had no place. His search for true autonomy in ethics, his account of the human being as an end in himself in a kingdom of ends in which each man is his own Moses and his own Israel, all rolled into one, puts me in mind of my youthful, reincarnated Kant, peering at the parts of the self-cancelling indicator mechanism, looking for what cannot be had on his terms: a genuine automat, some single thing capable of being the cause of its own motion so as truly to cancel itself. As further evidence in support of my claim that the logic of other reflexive-related constructions works in the same way, compare ‘for its own sake’ with ‘of its own accord’. Once again, a detailed causal story told from close up will be seen to challenge the legitimacy of the reflexive-related expression. In a hospital ward for cancer patients it is noticed that a few patients who have been despaired of as incurable and for whom no treatment is being given, get better on their own. Spontaneous remission 66

For Its Own Sake

occurs. The symptoms of their illness clear up of their own accord. A hard-headed student of modern medicine, who knows that for every medical effect there must be a medical cause, might react in a hostile way to talk of spontaneous remission. He is sure that there must be something which is responsible for his patient’s improvement in health. ‘Spontaneous remission’, he sneers, ‘belongs with the dark ages when men invested nature with a mind and a will of her own. Modern medicine knows better. In a causal chain nothing ever happens “of its own accord”.’ What this overlooks, I suggest, is that spontaneous remission occurs when the patient who is not being given any treatment nonetheless proceeds to get better or, more complicatedly, where the improvement is not attributable to the treatment that is actually being given. A clever doctor might deduce correctly what it is that is causing the spontaneous improvement. New patients, given the new treatment, might also get better, only not in their case by spontaneous remission, in spite of the fact that the causal accounts of the improvements are identical in both cases. The concept of spontaneous remission arises on the wards where a keen interest is taken in getting better, with or without approved treatment or proper under­ standing, not down in the basement among the microbes and bacteria and the test-tubes filled with blood where the talk is of chain reactions in the blood-chemistry of diseases. These reflexives are homely, home-grown concepts that cannot survive the journey downstairs to the scientific basement but they are no worse for that if they are used on their own home ground. To return to ‘for its own sake’. The point I want to make is that the over puristic, isolationist account of doing something for its own sake loses its grip by destroying any intelligible contrast between what is and what is not done for its own sake. This can be seen to be happening in the following story. There were once two girls, one very pretty, the other just pleasant to look at without being plain. Both were about to marry. The pretty girl pondered, ‘Is it me he loves or is it my good looks he’s after? Beauty fades and looks are only skin deep. Will he still love me when I’m forty? Is it the real me he loves now? Is he marrying me for my own sake or not?’ The second girl mused as follows, ‘Is it me he really loves or is it my appearance he likes? Or could it be my personality, my cooking or my sense of humour? Given time, my appearance is sure to alter and so may my personality. Who knows, I might one day want to try out new kinds of cooking. 67

For Its Own Sake

Shall I always keep my particular sense of humour? Is it the real me he loves or just things which happen to be mine at the moment but which could change with the passing of time? Is he marrying me for my own sake or not?’ In my view, the first girl is expressing a genuine anxiety whereas the second girl is not. Indeed, if in real life someone had the second girl’s fears, one natural interpretation would be that there was something mentally wrong with that person. The queer misapplication of a concept often produces this effect and, as is often the case, it contains a kernel of truth. For it is true that a person may change radically and yet still be the person he has always been; and the question ‘Does he love me for my own sake?’ does invite us to look for an internal/external, intrinsic/extrinsic contrast to apply to ourselves. These two facts can lead to an absurdly ‘sublimed’, over enthusiastically pruned account of loving someone for his own sake. The heiress’s ‘Is it me he’s after or my money?’ deserves ‘It’s me’ as the answer when she finds that he continues to like her warm personality and could not care less about the money, even when she is unexpectedly disinherited. But the second girl’s ‘Is it me or my personality, etc.?’ fails to provide a proper internal/external contrast; for it fails to indicate what could possibly count as an answer in favour o f ‘It’s me’ and this means that no grounds are being provided for giving the answer ‘It’s not me’ either, which is the answer the second girl feared and yet felt driven to accept. The following short poem by W.B. Yeats, ‘For Anne Gregory’, would be unintelligible if Yeats could not rely on our immediately grasping the kind of internal/external contrast he is thinking of, which can make the external, extrinsic quality of physical beauty an obstacle to being loved for one’s own sake. ‘Never shall a young man, Thrown into despair By those great honey-coloured Ramparts at your ear, Love you for yourself alone And not your yellow hair.’ ‘But I can get a hair-dye And set such colour there, Brown, or black, or carrot, That young men in despair 68

For Ils Own Sake

May love me for myself alone And not my yellow hair.’ T heard an old religious man But yesternight declare That he had found a text to prove That only God, my dear. Could love you for yourself alone And not your yellow' hair.'It would, I think, be helpful if I gave a few more clear examples of the kind of internal/external contrast required for the meaningful employment of ‘for its own sake'. ‘What on earth persuaded you to buy that painting?’ enquires the country-house guest of his host. ‘I didn’t buy the picture for its own sake,’ his host assures him, ‘I bought it as a hedge against inflation.’ The picture was not bought because the buyer liked it as a work of art but as an investment. The buyer might have given a différent reason; and that would have called for a different internal/ external contrast. He might have said, ‘I bought the picture for its frame, not for its own sake.’ Note how, in these two examples, it is natural to link doing something for its own sake with liking something. It would be a manifestation of what I have been calling ‘isolationism’ to object that the picture is one thing and the aesthetic pleasure it produces, another. To buy a picture because you like it is, in these examples, to buy it for its own sake. Note also that there is the same kind of uncertainty as to what is to count as the picture (is the frame included or not?) as there was over what was meant by ‘the flour’ (was the baking powder included or not?) and by ‘the direction indicator’ (was the cam on the steering column included or not?). The attraction of a restrictive definition makes it easy for the quest for purity suggested by ‘for its own sake’ to get out of hand and lead to pruning off too much. I turn now to a genuine historical example in which Tor its own sake’ has been put to work. In his Idea oj a university* John Henry, Cardinal Newman, championed the idea of knowledge as an end in itself. I turn to Newman in the hope of hearing the authentic voice of a man speaking up for knowledge as something worth pursuing for its own sake. It will be instructive to see how he draws the contrast between what does and what does not count as seeking knowledge for its own sake. 69

For Its Own Sake

I am asked what is the end of a University Education, and of the Liberal or Philosophical Knowledge which I conceive it to impart: I answer, that what I have already said has been sufficient to show that it has a very tangible, real and sufficient end, though the end cannot be divided from that knowledge itself. Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward . . . Now, when I say that Knowledge is, not merely a means to something beyond it, or a preliminary of certain arts into which it naturally resolves, but an end sufficient to rest in and to pursue it for its own sake, surely I am uttering no paradox, for I am stating what is both intelligible in itself, and has ever been the common judgement of philosophers and the ordinary feeling of mankind. (Idea of a university, pp. 77—8) Newman proceeds to contrast the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake with the pursuit of knowledge for utilitarian ends — a liberal education with commercial, professional and vocational education. He contrasts pursuits pursued for their own sakes, such as fox-hunting and cricket, with first aid; racing done for its own sake as in Ancient Greece with racing for money or as an occasion for gambling. Quoting from Aristotle, Newman says that useful things bear fruit whereas liberal things sought for their own sakes tend to enjoyment. Nothing accrues from them of consequence beyond the using. How different is Newman’s account from the one Kant would have given, who, if he had to depict the university academic pursuing his subject for its own sake, might have imagined a scholar on whom his subject had gone dead but who chillingly persevered with his researches, his reading and his lecturing, although he could take no satisfaction or enjoyment from them. To omit the thirst for knowledge, the intellectual enthusiasm, in order to guarantee that it is knowledge alone that is pursued, is like arguing that if the driver has to use his own muscle power to straighten the wheel before the self­ cancelling indicator works, then it is not a truly self-cancelling device; or that if a student is teaching himself Russian from a Teach yourself Russian book, then he is not really teaching himself but is only a case of distance learning; or that if you buy a picture because you like it, you cannot be buying it for its own sake. G.E. Moore’s account of intrinsic value in his Principia ethicax 70

For Its Own Sake

and his Ethics* seems to me to be another isolationist version of what makes something worth doing for its own sake. Moore himself speaks of his method for arriving at intrinsic value as one of absolute isolation. Before discussing Moore’s views on intrinsic value I want to draw attention to Moore’s criticism ofJ.S. Mill on doing something for its own sake. I agree with Moore but I mean to put in a word on Mill’s behalf. In Section 43 of Principia ethica Moore speaks of Mill’s ‘contemptible nonsense’ in having maintained, first, that happi­ ness is the sole end of human action and, secondly, that money is desired for its own sake and is desirable as an end-in-itself. Mill said both of these things as part of his attempt in Utilitarianism6 to square the theory of utilitarianism with the high-minded ideal of pursuing virtue for its own sake. Moore is surely right that if E is the sole end for the sake of which all else is done, and M is a means to E, then M cannot be an end in itself. Any more than Bill can be self-employed if he lives in a one-company logging town where Bronowski is the sole employer and everyone living in the town works for Bronowski. Yet there is a point of substance I want to salvage from Mill and it tells against Moore’s isolationist method shortly to be described. Mill can be interpreted as saying that the miser hoards money for its own sake much as the anorexic girl slims for its own sake. What is to most people a means to an end has become for them an end in itself. For the normal slimmer it is his or her improved looks that will make them happy. But what makes the anorexic happy is the thought ‘Another half pound off this week. That’s better than last week. Aren’t I doing well?’ This is the same thought as might be found in the normal slimmer but in the anorexic’s case she is all skin and bone, underweight and unattractive. Mill’s point would be that her behaviour can still be seen as a route, albeit an unusual one, to happiness. The same point applies to the miser in rags who gloats over his hoard at midnight but does not spend any of his money in the usual way. Mill’s point is that the psychological motivation of someone who does something for its own sake can be described in the same terms as that of someone who does it as a means to a further end. Just as, when a tree falls in the forest of its own accord and another tree is felled by the woodcutter’s axe, a causal story of Newtonian forces and accelerations can be told in each case. What happens of its own accord does not lie outside the causal nexus or take place in defiance of the laws of mechanics. Now Mill, I think, is like someone who places a false 71

For Its Own Sake

construction on this fact. It is as though someone said that this showed that all the trees that fall are felled by just one thing. If the trees could speak and make a similar mistake to Mill’s mistake about the pursuit of happiness being our sole end, they would say, kIt’s the Newtonian impulses that get us all in the end.’ The isolationist, in his desire to distinguish the man who does something for its own sake from the man who does it for the sake of something else, is led to deny the sound point that Mill is making, namely, that both men can be seen to be doing something which makes them happy. In Principia ethica Moore distinguishes between ends and means, between what is good as an end in itself and what is good as a means (Principia, pp. 21-3). To find out whether something is good as an end (intrinsically good) or good as a means (instrumentally good), Moore tells us to consider the thing in isolation. The reasoning behind his suggestion is straightforward enough. If something is good as a means, you will hardly be satisfied if all you end up with is the means but not the end it serves. Moore says: To assert of any one thing, A, that it is intrinsically better than another, B, is to assert that if A existed quite alone, without any accompaniments or effects whatsoever — if, in short, A constituted the whole Universe, it would be better that such a Universe should exist, than that a Universe which consisted solely of B should exist instead. ( Ethics, p. 28) To call something intrinsically good is to assert that it would be good, if it existed quite apart from its consequences, and even if it existed all alone. It is by this method of absolute isolation that Moore pretends to discover what things possess the highest degree of intrinsic value in the chapter on the Ideal in the Principia. By far the most valuable thing, which we know or can imagine, are certain states of consciousness, which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects. No one, probably, who has ever asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art and Nature, are goods in themselves; nor, if 72

For Its Own Sake

we consider strictly what things are worth having purely for their own sakes, does it appear probable that any one will think that anything else has nearly so great a value as the things which are included under these heads. (Principia, Section 113) Many things could be said about this remarkable passage. How extraordinary that Moore should have thought that ‘it is only for the sake of the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects that anyone can be justified in performing any public or private duty; that they are the raison d’être of virtue’ (Principia, p. 189). And how revealing is the phrasing ‘what things are worth having (my emphasis). A curiously passive frame of mind is conjured up in which one is invited to choose the proper mental food and appropriate interior decoration for the gods, on the basis of a perfect day in Bloomsbury spent visiting friends and receiving visits in return, talking of books and art and travel. All I mean to do here is to draw attention to the shortness of the list of things worth having purely for their own sakes and to offer an explanation for this shortness. In earlier chapters of the Principia Moore had already done a lot of work to show, as he thought, that a great deal of what is usually considered to be good in itself, worth doing for its own sake, an end in itself, etc., is really not so. Industry, respect for life, temperance, the keeping of promises, legal rules for the protection of property have all fallen by the wayside before we reach the chapter on the Ideal, the things most worth having for their own sakes. According to Moore, such things turn out to be only good as means for the preservation of civilised society, which is itself no more than a prerequisite for anything good in itself (Principia, p. 157). Knowledge, we are told, has little or no value in itself (Principia, p. 199). Moore quotes with approval Sidgwick’s argument that the common sense ideal of knowledge as something worth pursuing for its own sake turns out to be utilitarian on closer inspection (Principia, p. 86). Chastity is not an end in itself; it would not even qualify as a means to good in a society free of conjugal jealousy or where paternal affection was non-existent. There, its violation would produce no evil effects (Principia, p. 158). Even the preservation of society, as we have already noted, is only a means, not an end in itself (Principia, p. 165). The virtues themselves, Moore argues, are not good in themselves and have no intrinsic value whatsoever. Moore 73

For Its Own Sake

attacks the Christian ideal of virtue as its own reward and Kant’s claim that a good will is the only thing to have intrinsic value on the grounds that both smuggle in happiness by the back door (Principia, p. 174). ‘Is knowledge worth pursuing for its own sake?’ asks the isolationist. He eliminates not merely the practical applications and commercial spin-offs of knowledge, but also the intellectual interest and pleasure of the researcher in pure physics. If virtue is worth seeking for its own sake, the isolationist feels, quite rightly, that he must find some motivation other than love of praise or fear of punishment but, wrongly, in my opinion, he also rejects a thirst for righteousness or inner contentment or peace of mind in the knowledge of having done the right thing, and in not having to live with yourself in the knowledge of having done wrong. To understand the force of ‘for its own sake’ you have to recognise an internal/external contrast of a different kind from that encouraged by a reading of Kant and Moore. Suppose you had said to a friend, ‘If you are stopping overnight at Rheims on your car journey to the south of France, visit the Romanesque church at Vézelay the next day. The journey from Rheims to Vezelay is worth making for its own sake.’ You would be amazed if your friend, on returning from his holiday, said, ‘I’ve a bone to pick with you. You said that the journey was worth making for its own sake. I made the journey, as it happened during the hours of darkness, and I found nothing of interest to report.’ The temptation to go into greater detail, to enumerate just exactly what it was you thought worth seeing and in what circumstances, does not explain how to operate with the phrase ‘for its own sake’. Indeed, it could even make it harder to understand, as happened with my garage apprentice who could trace all the detailed workings that led to the indicator’s being cancelled but could find nothing that cancelled itself. My motto is ‘Don’t do philosophy with your head under the dashboard.’ How much more insightful are the words of Dr Johnson, who is always worth listening to when he turns his mind, if only briefly, to a point on which the philosophers have disputed. Before quoting Johnson’s words I would remind you that it was Johnson who told Sir Joshua Reynolds that the great business of his life had been to escape from himself. I take this interesting reflexive to mean that there were often times when Johnson could not bear his own company and sought the company of others in order to take himself out of himself (do not be surprised if it takes one 74

For Its Own Sake

reflexive to explain another). Writing in the Rambler for Tuesday, 6 January 1751, Johnson said, ‘But such is the constitution of man, that any labour may be styled its own reward; nor will any external inducement be requisite, if it be considered how much happiness is gained, and how much misery escaped by frequent and violent agitation of the body.’ Johnson was, I suspect, thinking of such things as going for long walks, of the kind he had undertaken at the time of his coming down from Oxford without a degree, when he would walk from Lichfield to Birmingham and back, a distance of 32 miles in one day. Such activity was its own reward because the happiness it produced came from the activity itself, the vigorous exercise, not from something external, say, the destination reached, a message delivered, sights seen on the way, etc. In my final example I want to try to pinpoint where the isolationist account of doing something for its own sake goes wrong. A recent issue of Which? magazine tells its readers that double glazing, though it increases comfort for those sitting close to the window and though it reduces noise and improves the appearance and value of a house, is not worth installing for its own sake. Which? explains that this is because double glazing is a form of heat insulation which will not pay for itself (note the reflexive) within a given number of years. Loft insulation, on the other hand, will pay for itself and is worth installing for its own sake. Over a relatively short number of years, savings on fuel bills will outweigh the cost of loft insulation and the installation will pay for itself. A typical isolationist misunderstanding of the logic o f‘for its own sake’ might go as follows: ‘The insulation you speak of as “worth installing for its own sake” is really being done for the sake of the money it saves. You are therefore not insulating for insulating’s sake. You are insulating in order to save money. Why not come clean and admit it?’ In order to count as ‘insulating for its own sake’ you must, you are told, isolate the insulation from all else. You must have eyes for the double glazing alone, regardless of all extrinsic benefits and disadvantages, such as heat loss or gain, costs, savings, comfort, house prices, etc. You must worship the jealous god of insulation, not the god of money. Concentrate your attention on the double glazing alone to the exclusion of all else and you will discover the intrinsic worth attaching to it and to it alone. There are two confusions here. One confusion I have labelled ‘isolationism’; another name for it might be ‘the myth of intrinsic 75

For Iis Own Sake

value’ and I shall return to it in a moment. The other is the confusion between a man insulating his loft in the belief that it will pay for itself in due course (a Which? reader, perhaps?) and a man insulating his loft for the sake of it (he has put down seven inches already and now he has started on another lot). These two men differ as prudent thrift differs from neurotic obsession. Similarly, for the editor of a journal to publish an article for its own sake (not because it was written by a friend or by someone with a famous name) is not to publish for publishing’s sake — which is, anyway, a contributor’s rather than an editor’s vice. To advance an argument for its own sake (not to keep in with intellectual fashion) is not to argue for argument’s sake, as some irritating people do who don’t know when they are beaten. And to buy two oil paintings for their own sakes (not for the sake of their frames) is not the same as buying two paintings just for the sake of it, which is an indulgence probably only for the idle rich. By the same token, to do one’s duty for its own sake is not to be confused with doing one’s duty for the sake of it. The latter is neurotic, obsessional, compulsive. The Kantian conception of morality is sometimes portrayed in this way but it is unfair to Kant. The isolationist is greatly tempted to confuse these things because the neurotic form puts duty on a pedestal in a way which fits in with the isolationist’s wish to focus his attention on duty alone. The myth of intrinsic value arises from the isolationist account of Tor its own sake’ and, in this example, of ‘pays for itself. The isolationist is told by the salesman that double glazing pays for itself ( Which? readers will know better). Next minute he is asked to put his hand in his pocket to pay for the double glazing. He finds this suspicious. If the girl he takes out to dinner tells him she will pay for herself, something has gone wrong if, after the meal, he finds he is paying for her. If you have mentally isolated the double glazing, which is supposed to pay for itself, from your pocket, as you do the girl who says she will pay for herself, you will feel cheated when you find yourself stumping up later on. Yet the fact is that an investment which saves you more than you originally spent, pays for itself in due course. Language disguises thought and there is a natural tendency to locate the external/ internal contrast in the wrong place, in this case, to concentrate on the short-term and to ignore the medium-term possibilities. At the beginning of this chapter I gave as my reason for my interest in the idea of doing something for its own sake the fact that I wanted to know if the phrase ‘doing something for its own sake’ 76

b or Its Own Sake

would bear the weight I and others have wanted to place on it. I was thinking of the importance which has been traditionally attached to the pursuit of knowledge, art, research in the sciences, moral good­ ness, etc., for their own sakes. The chief enemy of clarity here is, I have been arguing, isolationism or the myth of intrinsic value; it is the secret ally of scepticism masquerading as high-minded purism. The line between what is internal and what is external to that which is done for its own sake needs to be drawn in a much more relaxed way: sufficiently relaxed to permit the line to be drawn in different places for different purposes. Even the property speculator can be said to have bought a house for its own sake when the intended contrast is with his local council who wanted to buy the same house for the land it stands on, and then to demolish it as part of a road widening scheme. The motive of financial gain does not rob the speculator of the status of having bought the house for its own sake. In order to buy a house for its own sake, one does not need to have fallen in love with its architectural qualities and to buy it with the intention of settling there for life. The tidy-minded philosopher’s thought that the use to which a house is put is one thing, the land on which it stands is another, and the house an sich is something else again, is the first step on the isolationist slide which leads, if un­ checked, to a windowless house, cut off from the mains and open to the skies, lacking everything except what is needed to make it still a house, and only then, when bought in this reduced condition, bought truly for its own sake. There are differences between the person buying a house to live in it, the speculator buying to sell at a profit and the council buying the house for the sake of the land it occupies. In their different ways, the first two want the house for its own sake whereas the third does not. I expect some to feel that this latitude over where the line marking the external/internal distinction is drawn detracts from the sense of nobility and purity often associated with doing something which is morally good for its own sake. But why should it? I am not maintaining that to act for reasons of financial gain is bound to be morally good or that such action is necessarily an instance of doing something for its own sake. What I will admit, however, is that my account favours a certain robustness in the interpretation of Tor its own sake’. Thus, when in the nine­ teenth century Oscar Wilde and the painter Whistler, together with the French Parnassian poets, took up the cry ‘Art for art’s sake’, they were not, in my view, divorcing art from life in the manner of a philosophical isolationist. To insist, as they did, that art is to be pursued for art’s sake is to insist that in artistic matters the artist be 77

For Its Own Sake

his own boss. It is for the playwright to decide whether his hero will heed the good advice of his priest, prefect, or commissar given in the second act or whether he will ignore it and go to the dogs in the fifth. The hero’s bad morals do not make bad art. The artist is not in the service of religion, conventional morality, party politics, diplomacy, patriotism, the state or any of the other forces which try to reduce art to a means to their ends and to rob art of the status of an end in itself. A playwright can have all sorts of reasons for ending his play the way he does, reasons which make no mention of Art with a capital ‘A’ or of high-falutin’ theories of pure artistic form, and yet embody the ideal of art for art’s sake provided his reasons arise out of his artistic independence. ‘For its own sake’ has an affinity with reflexives and reflexiverelated constructions. The connection I have in mind is of the following kind. When the external/internal boundary is redrawn as I have suggested it should be, there is often a feeling that a fraud is being practised on us: that, strictly speaking, virtue cannot be selfrewarding once it is admitted that there is a definite gain in the form of, say, peace of mind in the knowledge of having done the right thing. The frame of mind accompanying such thoughts is, I think, also present in the philosopher in each one of us who feels momen­ tarily certain that the solitary apple tree growing in the garden cannot possibly be self-pollinating if it needs the bees and insects to do the job for it. Here, as in all really interesting philosophical errors, is an illusion which builds upon an insight.

N otes 1. Quotations from Kant’s Groundwork (1785) are from H.J. Paton's translation, The moral law: Kant's groundwork of the metaphysic of morals (Hutchinson University Library, London, 1948). 2. W.B. Yeats, ‘For Anne Gregory’, in Richard J. Finneran (ed.), W.R. Yeats, the poems: a new edition (Macmillan, London, 1983), p. 245. 3. John Henry, Cardinal Newman, The'idea of a university (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1960), based on the 3rd edn of 1873. 4. G.E. Moore, Principia ethica (Cambridge University Press, Cam­ bridge, 1903; my references are to the paperback reprint edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1971). 5. G.E. Moore, Ethics, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, London, New York, Toronto, 1966). 6. See Ch. iv of Mill’s Utilitarianism in Mary Warnock (ed.), Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, (Collins, London, 1962), pp. 288-95.

78

6 Self-movers

A grammatical reflexive is often used to express the idea of something’s doing something to itself. It is therefore natural to find reflexives performing this role in discussions of the origins of things whose present existence seems to depend causally upon the prior existence of other things of the same type. If today’s living creatures, without exception, depend for their existence on yesterday’s living creatures, how did the first living creatures come into existence? Have there always been living creatures? If that sounds improbable, has life somehow created itself or brought itself into existence (the reflexive here supposedly expressing the idea of something's doing something to itself)? And if that does not make sense, then how did life begin? This interesting reflexive paradox will be the subject of the next chapter. Here we shall be concerned with a similar question about origins, this time the origin of motion. Has there always been some movement somewhere in the universe or was it once true that ‘all in solemn stillness lay’? When something which has been at rest moves, docs it have to be moved by something else or can some things move themselves (reflexive)? If there once was no movement of any kind in a certain region of space, could it be that the first thing to move within that region did so by moving itself? Plato thought that, since the whole universe had — as he thought — at least once in the past been at a total standstill, unless something had once had the power to move itself, nothing would now be moving. Aquinas, on the other hand, took the view that it was impossible for anything to move itself. In this, Aquinas followed Aristotle, whose view it was that, although we do say that animals move themselves, nothing, strictly speaking, 79

Self-movers

moves itself.1 Shortly, I shall want to question whether it is at all natural, or even correct, to describe, say, a dog walking beside its master as ‘moving itself. But first, there is a general point to be made. Nowadays the question ‘Can an object move itselP' is not a live issue. It is not so much that there is a consensus of opinion among either contemporary philosophers or scientists as to whether Plato or Aquinas was right, or whether Aristotle was wise to hedge his bets, as that the question is no longer asked. Are we wasting our time in raising a question about motion which, however much it exercised the minds of the ancients, has lost its original importance because it has been answered by the rise of scientific theories of motion, or by the development of precise laws of mechanics and kinetics? Lack of interest in the question is not because of progress made in either logic or the philosophy of science or in science itself. No one has settled the question of whether an object can move itself. No one has proved theoretically that it can or cannot be done or has performed a celebrated, decisive experiment in mechanics whose result has been accepted as binding by the disputing parties in order to resolve the issue once and for all. It is rather that the point of asking the question has been lost. In my view, the point of the question is philosophical, not scientific, and I shall try to show what that philosophical point is in this chapter. Should the thought have occurred to my reader that the modern electronics industry can readily make a cordless, battery driven toy car which can initiate its own movement without external control and that, therefore, an object which moves itself has actually been built, the reader is asked to consider whether he might be being too hasty. That ‘therefore’ begs the question: on seeing this self-propelled toy car stopping and starting by itself as it moves across the carpet without anyone touching it, would he really want to say, ‘Oh look! It’s moving itself!’? We should not take it for granted that, because the toy car is moving by itself, all on its own, that it follows that it is moving itself There are circumstances, as we shall see, in which we do talk naturally of something’s moving itself but this is not one of them. I suspect that the main reason for contemporary lack of interest in this question is that when it occurs in Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas it does so in the course of a proof of the existence of a supreme being or principle, very much — to use Pascal’s words — a God of the savants and philosophes and not the God of 80

Self-movers

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus Christ, a God whose job it is, in some oddly non-physical way, to keep the whole world turning. Few people see any point in, and some experience real distaste for, discussions about whether the soul can move itself (Plato) or whether God initiated the first instance of motion in his capacity as an unmoved mover (Aristotle and Aquinas) or as a self-mover (Plato), or how many eternal, primary, unmoved movers there may have been and whether they occupy space or not (Aristotle). Such dislike of ‘metaphysics’ in its bad sense is sometimes the sign of philosophical misunderstanding and is only justified, I think, when philosophy is no longer in the driving seat — which happens not to be the case in the authors we are examining. But I recognise the existence of such distaste and I want to propose a different approach. I suggest that we see the question ‘Can an object move itself?’ as yet another illustration of the way reflexive verb-forms turn the relationship between, in this case, science, religion and ordinary life into an intellectual battlefield. What looks like a question to be settled by appeal to everyday observation, or, failing that, to theoretical mechanics, turns out to raise interesting and, I hope by now, recognisably familiar issues of quite a different kind. ‘Have you moved yet?’ can mean different things. It can even mean ‘Have you moved house yet?’ A photograph of you may be blurred if you moved, for example, by making a movement with your head instead of remaining motionless. The tennis player who is told by his coach that he should not be moving when he strikes the ball, should plant his feet firmly on the ground and be stationary but not motionless when he takes a swing at the ball with his racket; he is not meant to ‘freeze’ as though he had been told not to move by the photographer. The reader of a novel may be moved, perhaps this time to tears by a moving passage, implying neither motion nor movement on his part but rather emotion. There is also a distinction between something’s being able to move things (transitive) and its being able to move simpliciter (intransitive). We must be wary of leaping to the conclusion that ‘to move oneself, itself, etc., (reflexive) is simply a synonym for ‘to move’ (intransitive).2 When discussing whether an object can move itself we need to be on our guard against similar possible ambiguities of the above kind in the reflexive form too. The solution, it might be felt, is to think of the motion of an object in the intended sense as its moving from one place to another. Then one can begin to frame 81

Self-movers

necessary truths about moving from one place to another, for example, ‘If something moves from one place to another, it must follow some continuous path in time and space between the two places.’ Unfortunately, even at this early stage, things are not so straightforward. A cold in the head and a clot of blood can move from the head to the chest. The clot of blood travelled along the veins and arteries but, although the chest and the head are physical places, it makes no sense to ask, ‘Which route did the cold follow on its journey from the head to the chest?’ Told that in the twelfth century the capital of France moved from Aix to Paris, the pupil could speculate on which rivers the king and his courtiers crossed but the capital itself did not cross any rivers. A beleaguered general can, with one quick telephone call, move his headquarters three miles back from the front without having had time to evacuate any of his staff or to give them time to move a single filing cabinet. Colds, capitals and headquarters are not figments of the imagination or will-o’-the-wisps, yet they can move and be moved without ever having been in motion. ‘Motion’ and ‘movement’ in the discussion of whether anything can move itself will prove to be as treacherous a pair of doublets as ‘deceit’ and ‘deception’ were in the paradox of self-deception discussed in Chapter 2. Two opposing reactions to the question ‘Can an object move itself?’ can be envisaged, the former favouring no, the latter yes as the answer. Let us examine each reaction in turn. One reaction would be to place some object, say, a book, on the table in full view in front of one and to consider how it could come about that the book moves. It might move as a result of its being pushed across the table by someone with his outstretched hand. But could it ever spring into life and move on its own without some form of external assistance while you were staring at it? Could it ever move without being moved by something else other than itself? The answer seems to be no. Would it make any difference if the object placed on the table had been a fully wound chiming clock, set to strike the hours, instead of a lifeless book? Beneath its calm exterior the clock’s mechanism contains all sorts of objects which are moving. But does anything in the clock move itselP The hands move because the wheels and cogs turn as the spring unwinds. Without something to move it, each moving object in the clock would, in time, become as powerless to move as the book lying on the table. Even a self-winding watch will run down and stop if left lying on the table for long enough. In ordinary 82

Self-movers

parlance wc say that a self-winding watch winds itself up but we know that in order to do this it has to be worn for several hours each day on the wrist of a reasonably active person who communicates his motion to the watch. A tugboat can tow other boats but it cannot attach its own hawser to itself and tow itself along. As Aquinas said, it is impossible that in the same respect and in the same manner anything should be both mover and moved, or that it should move itself (Summa theologiae, la, 2, 3). I turn now to a second, contrasting reaction which favours the answer yes to the question about the possibility of something’s moving itself. On the table before you lies a book and in his basket in the corner sleeps a dog. No matter how long you stare at the book, it will never do what the dog might suddenly begin to do. For the dog might wake up, stretch itself (note this reflexive) and begin moving round the room. The Athenian in Book Ten of Plato’s Laws asks, Tf we ever saw this phenomenon — self­ generating motion — arise in an object made of earth, water or fire (alone or in combination) how should we describe that object’s condition?’ Cleinias replies, ‘Of course, what you’re really asking me is this: when an object moves itself, are we to say that it is “alive”?’ Athenian, ‘That’s right.’ Cleinias, ‘It emphatically is alive’ (Laws, Book 10, p. 425). Things that are alive are animate and were said by the Greeks to have souls. The Athenian goes on to suggest that ‘soul’ is to be defined as ‘selfgenerating motion’.3 This ties in with certain aspects of human experience. If the camp-follower chances upon the body of a soldier lying on the field of battle, one good way of telling if the soldier is still alive is to shake him to see if he moves on his own. If such movement as a wounded but still living creature is capable of is not imparted to it from an outside source, a living creature must, one might be forgiven for thinking, be capable of setting itself in motion (whence, perhaps, Aristotle’s willingness to say that animals are able to move themselves). Aristotle explains how it is that a man moves himself in the following way. Consider a man who shifts a stone by using a staff held in his hand as a lever (Physics, VIII, 256a 5-10 and 15-25). The stone is moved by the staff, which is moved by the man’s hand, which is moved by the man. Although it is true to say both that the man moved the stone and that the staff moved the stone, the man, not the staff, according to Aristotle, is the primary mover. For the staff could not have moved the stone unless the man had moved the staff. ‘But the man is not moved by anything other than himself says 83

Self-movers

Aristotle, for it follows ‘that if everything that is in motion is moved by some agent, and if the primary agent itself is in motion but is not moved by anything else, it must be moved by itself (Physics, VIII, 256a 20-3). Thus, we are surrounded on all hands by instances of self-generated movement to be found in quite ordinary cases where a person moves something with the aid of a tool or instrument and therefore supposedly moves himself. These two sets of considerations pull in opposite directions. Aristotle himself felt the force of their rival attractions. For he too asked what could be meant by a continuous and homogeneous body ‘moving itself (Physics, VIII, 255a 10-15). To move itself, he argues, a body has to have separate parts (there is no suggestion in Aristotle that these ‘parts’ must both be physical entities), so that one part can be the agent of motion and another the recipient of the motion. It is impossible, says Aristotle, that that which moves itself should in its entirety move itself (Physics, VIII, 257b 1-5). A case of a thing’s moving itself, suggests Aristotle, is always best represented symbolically as AB’s moving itself (where ‘AB’ reveals the hidden complexity of the thing in question), understood as the complex whole AB’s being moved by one of its parts, either A, or B (Physics, VIII, 258a 1-5). But no truly individual part can move itself.4 Aristotle now sounds much closer to Aquinas. And Aristotle’s question as to how it is possible, given that it takes two for there to be motion (namely, an unmoved mover and something moved), for a single contin­ uous, homogeneous body to move itself is reminiscent of Sartre’s question about how, given that it takes two for there to be a lie, the self-deceiver’s lie can continue to exist in the unity of a single consciousness. Aristotle’s solution for self-movers is like the solution for self-deception which posits split selves, two levels of consciousness, two parts to the mind, etc., housed in a single, but complex, person. For Aristotle the key to the puzzle about self­ movement is that every so-called self-mover is to be treated as two things, one of which moves the composite whole. The time has come for a closer look at both sides in the dispute over the possibility of self-movement. I shall argue that there are serious flaws on each side but also insights which can be combined in a fresh account of what it is for both men and inanimate things to move themselves. The strange idea of an unmoved mover in Aristotle and Aquinas is, I shall try to show, a consequence of a philosophically mistaken explanation of what it is for something to move itself. It is not a totally unintegrated 84

Self-movers

addition, tacked on to a philosophical discussion in the name of outdated cosmological, scientific or theological doctrines. Let us begin by reconsidering the argument that nothing can move itself. The argument invited us to consider a region of space in which there were objects but none of them were moving. We were then asked to consider whether motion could arise in this region where no motion was present without resorting to the communicated motion of moving bodies coming in from outside the allotted area. But the question ‘Can motion arise de novo in such circumstances?’ is not the same as the question ‘Can an object move itself?’ Any more than the question ‘Can heat arise in a previously cold body without heat’s having been communicated to it from a hotter, external body?’ is the same as the question ‘Can an object heat itself up?’ The plumber may ask us, ‘How long does it take the bedroom radiator to heat itself up after the boiler has switched itself on?’ without any suggestion that the central heating system possesses the desirable characteristics of spontaneous generation of heat or of spontaneous motion in its time-clock. The idea that the only clear case of something’s moving itself is the emergence of motion in something where previously no motion was, is already the expression of an isola­ tionist account of the reflexive ‘moving itself. The isolationist feels it necessary to isolate the thing that is said to heat itself up, switch itself off or move itself, etc., from contact with all other bodies; he feels entitled to do this so as to exclude the possibility that the object is not heating itself up but is really being heated up from some external source. The discovery that the boiler which switches itself off is connected up to a controlling time-switch sounds like cheating to him. Yet the fact is that if, contrary to all our expectations, an object such as a book lying on a table were to move suddenly on its own, it would not be at all natural to say that the book was moving itself. Similarly, when a piece of phosphorus, removed from ajar of water, begins to heat up (and is thus an example, first of the generation de novo of heat and eventually of spontaneous combustion when it bursts into flames), it is not correct to describe this as a substance heating itself up or setting itself alight. All that happens is that it gets hotter and bursts into flames of its own accord. And when a sleeping child awakes and rises from its bed, the child moves about the room on his own but this is not a case of a person s moving himself at all. Aquinas says that it is impossible for anything to move itself. I 85

Self-movers

agree with Anthony Kenny that Aquinas has not shown that there cannot be a body which can initiate its own movement without external causal concurrence (Kenny, The five ways, p. 19). The cordless, battery-driven toy car was already an example of this sort of movement. But this cuts both ways. Even if Aquinas was wrong and movement were to occur in special circumstances where before there had been no movement, for instance, after the toy car had been at rest for several seconds, this still would not show that something, namely, the toy car, had moved itself. I disagree with Kenny in tracing Aquinas’s denial of the possibility of self-movement back to bad physics (see Kenny, The five ways, Introduction, pp. 3-4). Aquinas’s point is that to set a thing moving is to turn a possibility into an actuality. In order to do this, an actual mover is needed. The mere possibility by itself of motion in the thing to be moved is not enough to move it. Now, nothing can be both mover of itself and moved by itself, not if it is a single, continuous, rigid, homogeneous body. This step ought to remind us of ‘One and the same person cannot be both the deceiver of himself and also the deceived victim of his own deception’ or ‘One and the same person cannot be both his own teacher and his own pupil’ or ‘No one can be both the one who is surprised and the one who springs the surprise’, etc. If the above is correct, a self-deceiver is impossible because he would have to know and not know something at the same time, which is a logical impossibility. Likewise, allegedly, for a single thing to move itself, it would have to communicate its own motion to itself by being both actually in motion and simultaneously in a state permitting that motion — its own motion — to be communicated to itself (for example, by moving more swiftly or slowly than itself). This would require one object to be moving at two different speeds at once, which is logically impossible. This is not outdated physics; it is a powerful philosophical objection to the idea of something’s moving itself.5 Let us agree with Aquinas that neither in flight nor in the quiver can an arrow communicate its own motion to itself, any more than a hot or a cold potato, in which the distribution of heat is even, can pass its own heat to itself; and that a man who already plays the guitar well can no more teach himself to play the guitar than can a savage with no notion of music nor contact with other players, who happens to chance upon an abandoned musical instrument. Though, of course, he might learn to play it by trial and error. It is, indeed, cold radiators, not already hot 86

Self-movers

ones, which heat themselves up and hot children who cool themselves down with a cold drink; and to do that, the radiators need a supply of hot water from the boiler and the children must have access to a fridge. It is people who cannot play the guitar, but who can learn from studying in a self-disciplined way those who already can, who are in a position to teach themselves. It is people who do not know the truth about themselves but who could come to know it if they took the right steps, who may deceive themselves. And the same principle holds for moving oneself. You do not have to be already on the move to move yourself. The partially paralysed hospital patient who has to be moved by his nurses to prevent bedsores says, ‘Please don’t move me. I’ve got to learn to do this for myself. I'll move myself.’ He moves his lifeless legs in the same way that he might move an object which was not part of his body. But when the patient in the next bed who is not paralysed turns over in his sleep, he is not ‘moving himself. ‘Moving oneself is as many-hued as we have seen plain ‘moving’ to be. The occupant dozing in the armchair beneath which the charlady wishes to clean is brusquely asked to move himself out of the way. But not everyone who shifts from one armchair to another moves himself. Any more than every commuter who is driving home along the motorway is moving his car. But if his parked car has been causing an obstruction, he might comply with the policeman’s request to move his car out of the way by driving off in it. Nor is it only human beings that can move themselves. A versatile, self-propelled industrial robot might be designed which, instead of needing to be manhandled into each new position on the production track, could detect the presence of work awaiting its attention and automatically move itself on its small wheels to the new work station. The more gullible of those attending a seance are sometimes convinced that the Ouija board they are all touching is moving itself across the surface of the table. And finally: ‘Who moved you?’ asks the production director in the film studio; ‘Nobody did; I moved myself, replies the self-willed girl in the tableau vivant whose leg has been giving her cramp. I turn now to the opposing side’s argument in favour of self­ movement. In the above examples someone or something moved himself, herself or itself (or was thought to have done so) but not in the way we were led to expect by Plato or Aristotle. Movement appearing where formerly no movement was (as in bubbles rising from an Alka Selzer tablet dissolving at the bottom of a glass of 87

Self-movers

water) is what the isolationist demands before he will take seriously the possibility of something’s moving itself. But because this is not how we would in fact describe what is happening to the bubbles in the glass of water, the isolationist account constantly threatens to play into the hands of the sceptic who points out the inappropriateness of the reflexive in order to deny the possibility of anything at all moving itself. When dealing with similar examples in which movement appears apparently without any external cause, Aristotle avoids having to follow the logic of his own isolationist approach to self-movement (which would require him to call these cases of self-movement) by appealing to the natural tendencies inherent in physical objects to seek their proper places. Thus, the rising bubbles from the dissolving tablet in the glass of water would not, I take it, be regarded by Aristotle as moving themselves. They would be displaying their natural tendency to rise in water.6 In this way he can stick to the theory of the isolationist account of self-movement and yet not have to recognise in practice the embarrassment of many actual instances of its occurrence. I call this an embarrassment because we would not naturally describe such occurrences as instances of some­ thing’s moving itself. Instead, it takes the special stage setting of the partially paralysed patient to give us a case of someone genuinely moving himself, not the normal movements of a fit, healthy person going about his daily business. It is very unnatural to say, as Aristotle does, that the man who moves the stone with the staff held in his hand, moves himself. Aristotle’s argument that everything in motion is moved by some agent and that therefore what is not moved by something other than itself must be moved by itself, and so be self-moved, is no better than the argument that to be convinced is to be convinced by some agency and that therefore whoever is not convinced by someone or something other than himself must be convinced by himself, that is, must convince himself. But you can be convinced simpliciter that something is so without having been convinced by someone else and also without having convinced yourself of its truth. Just as you can be surprised at an event without having surprised yourself or having been surprised by someone else. There is moving (intransitive), being moved by something (passive), and moving oneself (reflexive). I agree with Aristotle that, in the sequence ‘The staff moved the stone; the hand moved the staff; the man moved the hand’, the man enjoys a special status. Aristotle says that he is the 88

Self-movers

primary agent. I think this understates the difference by reducing it to a temporal or a causal difference. ‘He moved his hand’ and ‘The staff moved the stone’ do not report the same kind of ‘moving’. The former is not about the communication of the man’s motion to his hand by means of contact or collision or the transmission of forces in the way that the latter is about the transmission of motion from the staff to the stone. We do not have one moving object called ‘the man’ which makes contact with a second object, his hand, and communicates its own motion to the hand. The man’s hand, after all, is part of him. Just as ‘A deceived B’ can cover deceptiveness as well as deceitfulness so ‘A moved B’ covers communication of motion (as when a moving billiard ball collides with a stationary ball and sets it in motion) and a different relationship which exists between a person and a part of his body when he makes a movement with it (for example, a child in school raising his hand to ask a question — but not the patient who moves the paralysed lower half of his body). A mechanical description in terms of bodies, masses, accelerations and forces can still be given of what happens inside the body of the child who puts up his hand but it does not reveal the point of collision or contact between a human hand and the child who moved it. Aristotle, however, treats the sequence of movings as though they were all on the same level, that is, as cases of communicated motion. ‘For if the staff moves the load because it is itself moved by the hand, the hand indeed moved the staff, but if the hand itself is moved by something else, what moves the hand is in turn a distinct thing’ (Physics, VIII, 256a 30-5). In the sense that the man is not the same thing as his hand, the man and his hand are distinct things; but, in another important sense, the man who moves his hand is not a distinct thing apart from the hand he moves. A man’s hand is, after all, part of his body; it is part of him. The requirement that A and B must specify physic­ ally distinct things with no overlap only applies to those cases where ‘A moves B’ means communicated motion, calculable in accordance with the mass, momentum and accelerations of separate bodies. In fact, what Aristotle is doing is offering an account of how a man might move his inert, paralysed limb as the account of how a normal man moves his hand. In keeping with what Aristotle says, the partially paralysed man moves his paralysed leg with something, a sling, or his good arm perhaps; but the normal man does not have to move his normal leg with anything or with any part of his body. He just moves it. 1 he 89

Self-movers

search for what this ‘distinct thing’ is that moved the hand in the example of the able-bodied man who moved his hand (and so, allegedly, moved himself since he was not moved by anything outside himself), where this is not treated as an anatomical investigation into what is taking place in the muscles, bone, nerves, electrical activity in the brain, etc., inside the body of someone who is moving his hand, has an impossible goal. It is like looking for deceit amongst the animals and plants because one has heard of their deceptive colouring and marking, which help to conceal them from their predators. And the observation thrown in by Aristotle that men who move stones with sticks are often moved so to do by their desires, intentions and other aspects of their intelligent life (disregarding the awkward fact that you can move a stone with a stick without the faintest awareness of what you have done), with its implication that the true mover within us is the soul, mind, intelligence, etc., is to get still further into the mire (see Physics, V III, 256b 25-7). There are two different senses in which a person can move something or set it in motion. The tractor driver sets the tractor in motion when, with the engine running, he selects bottom gear and lets out the clutch. He could also set it in motion by getting down from the driving seat, putting his shoulder to the wheel and, after making sure the handbrake is off, shoving it down a slight slope. In both cases there is a story to be told of mechanical forces and movements. But in the first case the weight and strength of the thing named as setting the tractor in motion, that is, the driver, is not relevant to the calculation of the tractor’s eventual speed and distance covered. In the second, but not the first, case, one might feel, the true mover is communicating his own motion to the tractor. When the driver gave the tractor a shove, but not if he just drove off in it, it would be natural to say that he had moved the tractor. Though, if the police had asked him to move the tractor because it was blocking the road, he could move it by driving it away. It is tempting to see the first sort of setting in motion as taking place between an all too solid tractor and an ethereal something in the tractor driver. Ethereal, because the usual physical factors affecting resultant quantity of motion as in the second case seem unimportant here; whereas, when the moving force is provided by the driver’s shoulder, the brawnier the driver, the bigger the shove. And because in the first case we can ask what caused or moved the driver to set the tractor in motion, and answer in terms 90

Self-movers

of the driver’s mental state, his knowledge, perception, will and intention, etc., rather than the size of his biceps, it is tempting to see this as the discovery of the ‘distinct thing’ in the man which moved him to set the tractor in motion. This temptation can be resisted once it is realised that there is more than one way of taking ‘move’ and ‘set in motion’ when these words occur in a sequence in which one thing ‘moves’ another or ‘sets it in motion’. I f ‘A moves B’ and ‘A sets B in motion’ bear two senses, then so does the question ‘Gan an object move itself or set itself in motion?’ If the question is taken to mean ‘Can an object communicate its own motion to itself?’ the answer is no, except in the case where the object has loosely connected parts, some of which could be in motion whilst the others are still at rest (for example, a length of bicycle chain gradually slipping link by link over the edge of a table or a coiled rope being paid out behind a harpoon in flight). But this still leaves open the question of whether an object can set itself in motion or move itself in the other sense. We have already seen how the partially paralysed patient was able to move himself; but an inanimate object can move itself too. An ancient tractor stands with its engine ticking over. The uneven throbbing of the engine causes the gear stick to drop out of neutral into first gear and the tractor jerks forward for several yards until the engine stalls. It set itself in motion. If the driver had been asked to come and move his tractor, he might have arrived on the scene and scratched his head in puzzlement at how the tractor had managed to move itself from the place where he had left it. For Aristotle, to move (intransitive) is always to be moved by something, and when not by something else other than oneself then necessarily by oneself (or itself). Aristotle traces all motion back to primary agents, all of whom move (transitive) other things, some of whom move (intransitive), others of whom do not. The ones that move (intransitive), move themselves. But the process of tracing the motion back to its source does not stop there, even in the case of the man who moves the stone, and who therefore moves and is therefore supposedly a self-mover. Behind every self-mover there is — has lo be, thinks Aristotle — an unmoved mover. Indeed, although there are many self-movers, there is, Aristotle thinks, only one unmoved mover. I his is not some remarkable piece of eccentricity on Aristotle s part but a standard, though, I believe, mistaken, development in the 91

Self-movers

thinking of a philosopher wrestling with a reflexive paradox. The following passage from Aristotle’s Physics on something’s moving itself needs to be read in the light of what modern philosophers have had to say about self-deception. In order to practise deceit, they have said, you need to know the truth; it follows that, if there is to be such a thing as self-deception, the self-deceiver must contain within him an undeceived deceiver, a cunning id, maybe, to dupe a gullible ego. Now it is impossible that that which moves itself should in its entirety move itself: for then, while being specifically one and indivisible, it would as a whole both undergo and cause the same locomotion or alteration . . . Therefore when a thing moves itself it is one part that is the movent and another part that is the moved. {Physics, VIII, 257b 1-15; Ross edn) The unmoved mover plays the same role in Aristotle as the undeceived deceiver in some contemporary theories of selfdeception. The same idea lies behind the view that, if you can remind yourself of something, there must be one part of you that still remembers and reminds another part of you that has forgotten. Or that if a proposition is self-contradictory, it must be a compound proposition consisting of two separate parts which contradict each other. Aristotle reasons as follows. The man who moves the stone with a stick held in his hand must himself move (intransitive) in order to move the stone. But, unlike the stone, the stick or his own hand, the man is not moved by anything other than by himself. So, since to move (intransitive) is to be moved by something, the man must be moved by himself, in other words, must move himself. Nothing, however, can com­ municate its own motion*to itself. Anything that can move itself must consist of at least two parts, one of which moves the other. The part that imparts motion need not itself move (intransitive), that is, it need not be being moved, any more than a teacher needs to be being taught the lesson he is teaching, or a doctor needs to be being treated for the disease he is treating, or a metal object needs to be being heated in order to communicate its heat to another piece of metal. Thus, the true mover does not need to be being moved; it can be unmoved, and there must be an unmoved mover ultimately since no sequence of things imparting motion to one another can be infinitely long. It only remains to 92

Self-movers

decide whether the unmoved mover is one or many, eternal or perishable, corporeal or not. These details occupy the closing stages of Aristotle’s discussion in Book VIII of the Physics but I shall leave them on one side. My point is that the unmoved mover in Aristotle is a direct consequence of a mistaken analysis of what it is for something to move itself. The unmoved mover who moves the self-mover is first cousin to that other myth, the all-seeing inner self who plans the strategies of the self-deceiver.

Notes 1. I have used the following sources. Plato: The laws, translated by Trevor J. Saunders (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1970), Book 10, pp. 4258; Aristotle: The physics, translated by Philip H. Wicksteed and Francis M. Cornford, with accompanying Greek text, The Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (William Heinemann, London, 1929), vol. II, Book VIII, pp. 264—425); Aquinas: The First Way, Summa theologiae. Part la, Question 2, Article 3, in the translation with accompanying Latin text in Anthony Kenny’s Thefive ways: St Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God's existence (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1969), pp. 6-7. At one point (Physics, Book VIII, 257b 1-15), where I thought it came closer to the original Greek, I have used R.K. Gaye’s translation of Aristotle’s Physics, Book VIII, in volume II of the W.D. Ross edition of Aristotle’s Works (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1930). 2. In many languages, including modern French and German, medieval Latin and ancient Greek, ‘to move’ (intransitive) is not translated by a corresponding intransitive form. In French, it is translated by a reflexive, se mouvoir, in German, also by a reflexive, sich bewegen\ in Latin, by the deponent moveri; in ancient Greek, by the middle voice kineitai. ‘To move oneself becomes se mouvoir soi-même, sich selbst bewegen, seipsum movere (in Aquinas’s Latin), and auto heauto kinein respectively. The translators of Aristotle’s Greek have not always scrupulously observed this distinction and I have for this reason used my own translations of some passages of Aristotle’s Physics, Book VIII. Similar care needs to be exercised when translating Sartre on selfdeception out of French into English. Se tromper means merely to make a mistake, not to deceive oneself which is se tromper soi-même. 3. Plato puts the same idea into the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedrus 245 E: ‘And now that we have seen that that which is moved by itself is immortal, we shall feel no scruple in affirming that precisely that is the essence and definition of soul, to wit self-motion. Any body that has an external source of motion is soulless; but a body deriving its motion from a source within itself is animate or besouled, which implies that the nature of soul is what has been said’ Plato's Phaedrus, translated by R. Hackforth (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1952), pp. 63-4. 4. I agree with David Furley in thinking there is a tension between the passages where Aristotle says that animals move themselves and other 93

Self-movers

passages where he denies that any truly single object can move itself (see David J. Furley, ‘Self-movers’ in G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen (eds), Aristotle on mind and the senses (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978), pp. 165-79). 5. But it may be that Aquinas did have to contend with a different kind of handicap in his thinking about motion. In Aquinas’s Latin ‘to move’ (intransitive) is translated by the deponent moveri, passive in form but active in meaning, which is also the regular passive of movere (transitive) meaning to move (something). There is thus no simple way of distinguishing in Latin between ‘It is moving’ (intransitive) and ‘It is being moved’ (passive). It has been suggested that this is why Aquinas found it easy to accept Aristotle’s argument that whatever moves (movetur) is being moved (movetur) by something (see Anthony Kenny, The jh e ways, p.8). 6. I base this suggestion on the way Aristotle explains why an inflated bladder, which rises to the surface when released under water from the stone holding it down, is not moving itself (Physics, VIII, 255b 25-30).

94

7 Self-generation of Life

Once there was no plant or animal life anywhere on the face of the earth. Today there is. Where did this life come from? Living creatures reproduce themselves but where did the first living creature come from? Did life emerge spontaneously, that is, of its own accord, or as the result of an act of divine creation? Like Tor its own sake’, ‘of its own accord’ is reflexive-related; for if life appeared of its own accord it generated itself. These puzzling questions and the concepts employed in them will be investigated in this chapter by considering an episode in the history of the debate about the spontaneous generation of life. In the nineteenth century the great French scientist Louis Pasteur became involved in a quarrel with Félix Pouchet, Director of the Natural History Museum of Rouen and Professor of Zoology at the local medical preparatory college. Through their improved microscopes scientists of the day were detecting what looked like huge numbers of minute, living organisms in what had been thought of as dead organic materials of animal and vegetable origin. The question that divided Pasteur and Pouchet was the following: ‘If an infusion of putrescible organic material was placed inside a glass flask and every care was taken to kill any minute organisms initially present in the infusion by boiling it, and if any air-borne organisms had been filtered from the air left in the flask and if the flask was then sealed so that no organisms could enter the flask, would living organisms be observed with the aid of the microscope inside the tightly sealed flask after it had been left to stand for some period of time, a few days, say, or a week, or even several months or years?’ Pasteur claimed to have performed experiments to show that such organisms did not appear; Pouchet claimed to have performed 95

Self-generation o f Life

similar experiments in which living organisms were observed inside his sealed flasks. I suspect I am not alone in having been brought up to believe that Pasteur had had the right in this and that his opponents, who were not usually dignified with a name, were wrong. Pasteur had, I was taught to believe, disproved the theory of spontaneous generation experimentally. Life cannot generate itself inside a sterile, sealed glass flask. If living creatures are in there, they, or the eggs from which they came or their parents got in there somehow from outside. Pouchet had not started off with material that was free, as he thought, of animalculae or of their eggs. Pouchet’s oft-quoted objection, ‘How could germs contained in the air be numerous enough to develop in every organic infusion? Such a crowd of them would produce a thick mist as dense as iron’, betrays a mind that had yet to come to terms with the totally and astonishingly different orders of magnitude involved in the sizes of, say, small insects and germs. I see no reason to modify the fundamentals of my childhood belief, although recent research has cast doubt on the thoroughness of Pasteur’s experimental methods and on the scrupulousness of his reports of his observations.1 The fact is that in many cases animalculae were found by Pasteur in his sealed flasks but were explained away as being caused by faulty sealing techniques or by imperfectly sterile materials. More damagingly still, it is now admitted that if Pasteur had repeated Pouchet’s experiments, he would have obtained Pouchet’s results. Pouchet used an infusion of hay whereas Pasteur used an infusion of yeast. The spores of the organisms associated with hay are resistant to boiling, unlike those present in yeast. I do not wish to take this line of criticism of Pasteur as a scientist any further. Instead, I intend in this chapter to discuss some puzzling features of the concept of spontaneous generation and of the idea that life can generate itself or come into existence of its own accord. After an introductory section on the idea of something’s happening spontaneously or of its own accord I shall concentrate on two issues. First, I hope to show that in his Hétérogénie ou traité de la génération spontanée2 Pouchet was putting forward a genuinely testable hypothesis and was not making an obscurantist appeal to causeless creation e nihilo. Secondly, Pasteur’s reputation has recently taken a further knock in that he has been accused of secretly believing in spontaneous generation as the explanation of the origin of life on the cosmic scale but of lacking the courage to admit this when publicly attacking Pouchet’s theory of spontaneous generation within the confines of 96

Self-generation o f Life

a glass bottle.3 I hope to show that these criticisms of Pasteur rest upon a misunderstanding of the logic of spontaneous generation.

L Self-generation I expect we would all agree that lions and tigers, butterflies and birds, fishes, frogs, midges and fleas, amoebae, bacteria and germs, all sorts of creatures large and small, reproduce them­ selves. The modes of reproduction are enormously varied — they may not even all be sexual — but each fresh generation of creatures owes its existence to the reproductive activities of earlier generations. Like begets like. This is what Pouchet was denying in the case of the tiny living organisms he had detected with the microscope inside his sealed flasks and it explains the title of his book; he believed in heterogenesis, that is, in a living creature’s having been created from dead organic material, that is, from something of a different kind, because not from another living creature of the same kind. The invention of the microscope had provided a lot of evidence which made it hard for the nineteenth-century scientist to accept that micro-organisms reproduce themselves. Large numbers of what looked through the microscope like living things seemed to appear where previously no signs of life, such as other small creatures or their eggs, could be detected. This encouraged the view that the tiny organisms did not reproduce themselves like other living creatures but were self-generating: that they had come into existence spontaneously4 or of their own accord. As a matter of fact, the invention of the microscope had not been essential to the formation of ideas about spontaneous generation. Most animals that are small, creepy crawly, thought of as pests, exotic or furtive in their mating habits and the rearing of their young had been put forward in earlier centuries as suitable candidates for spontaneous generation. According to this theory, living creatures can come into existence of their own accord without the need for parents. Thus, the early seventeenthcentury Brussels physician and poet Van Helmont gave a wellknown recipe for obtaining mice from wheat kernels. Believing that human sweat could furnish the necessary generating principle, he stated that it was enough to place a dirty shirt in a vessel containing wheat germ: after 21 days, when fermentation had ceased, the vapours from the shirt together with the vapours 97

Self-generation o f Life

of the seeds would generate live mice. In case this makes it sound as though Van Helmont was utterly foolish and hardly a man of science, it ought to be added in his defence that he was particularly surprised to find that these spontaneously generated mice were exact replicas of natural mice originating in the customary fashion from the semen of their parents. Van Helmont’s recipe for scorpions is equally interesting. ‘Scoop out a hole in a brick. Put into it some sweet basil, crushed. Lay a second brick upon the first so that the hole may be perfectly covered. Expose the two bricks to the sun, and at the end of a few days the smell of the sweet basil, acting as a ferment, will change the herb into a real scorpion.’5 It was Van Helmont’s sort of claim Wittgenstein had in mind when he stressed the need to tailor a philosophical investigation to suit the particular worries of the person who is philosophically perplexed. If I am inclined to suppose that a mouse has come into being by spontaneous generation [ Urzeugung] out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine these rags very closely to see how a mouse may have hidden in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then the investigation will perhaps be superfluous. (.Philosophical investigations, § 52) The detailed philosophical investigation I propose to undertake here is directed at the perplexity of those who, like myself in certain moods, are inclined to look askance at the idea of something’s happening ‘of its own accord’, particularly at the idea of life’s generating itself, or of something’s coming into existence ‘of its own accord’. I shall discuss a number of objections to the use of these reflexives — if, as you might be forgiven for wondering, that is what they are — and of their reflexive-related counterparts. To begin with, let us look more closely at the claim that an animal or creature of a certain sort ‘reproduces itself and at what this entails. When this phrase occurs in the mouth of an opponent of spontaneous generation, is it actually a genuine reflexive? Suppose we read in a textbook on evolution, ‘Horses have successfully reproduced themselves for millions of years.’ There is a strong temptation to deny that ‘reproduce themselves’ is reflexive. The voice of what in Chapter 3 I called isolationism 98

Self-generation o f Life

speaks loud within us saying, ‘A single horse kept separate from any kind of contact with other horses cannot reproduce itself. It takes two horses, even allowing for artificial insemination, to make a horse.’ This is true but is, I think, beside the point. It does not affect the truth that the horse (referring to the species) has reproduced itself (reflexive) for millions of years. Biology is not entitled to correct grammar here. Furthermore, if my mare foaled last night, it does not follow that my mare reproduced herself last night. Horses reproduce themselves and my mare is a horse (which could be alternatively expressed as ‘The horse reproduces itself and my mare belongs to a species which reproduces itself); but these two claims do not commit me to asserting that, when my mare foals, she reproduces herself. Similarly, the Soviet politbüro is a self-electing oligarchy, that is, the politbüro elects itself and does not have to appeal to a separate electorate for votes. Yet no individual member of the politbüro has elected himself to office. Each was elected by the other existing members. Or again, catalogues of office furniture have for many years offered for sale what are termed ‘self-stacking chairs’, intended to be specially suitable for use in cramped public rooms in which the chairs often have to be stored on top of one another in order to create space for some other purpose. You cannot take hold of a single chair of the self-stacking type and stack it on top of itself. It requires two of these chairs before one chair can be stacked on top of the other. Yet the salesman is not wrong when he says, pointing at a single example of this type of chair, ‘These chairs can be stacked on top of themselves’, or ‘This chair/a chair of this type can be stacked on top of itself.’ In all of the above examples we do have genuine examples of the reflexive form. The reflexive logic of the opponent of self-generation who believes that all creatures reproduce themselves is complicated enough. Now let us turn to the target of his criticism, self-generation itself. The claim of the defender of the theory of spontaneous generation that life can generate itself has to be understood in the same way that we understand the doctor’s reassurance that our spots will clear themselves up without the need for any special treatment, or the bank manager’s hope that our financial problems will soon solve themselves or sort themselves out without his help. What is to be understood in the same way can also be misunderstood in the same way. If you visit the doctor hoping for some ointment to clear up your spots or if you ask your bank manager for a loan with which to repay your overdraft in 99

Self-generation o f Life

order to solve your financial problems, and you emerge emptyhanded from the surgery or the bank with nothing to show for your pains but the same problem with which you went in, how can this, you might well angrily demand, do anything to clear up the spots or to solve or sort out the problem with which you went in? Should your spots disappear, this will not be as a result of their having been cleared up because you have not been given anything with which to clear them up, unless the spots produce their own ointment, which is not what your doctor was implying. And what can count as a solution to a problem unless it is something different from the problem? No problem can be its own solution. Similarly, how can a living organism generate itself? Isn’t that as absurd as the idea of something’s giving birth to itself or of an egg’s laying itself? Spots’ clearing themselves up, a problem’s solving itself, and life’s generating itself have, if they are to be understood at all, to be understood in a way that escapes the force of these objections. The idea behind these reflexives is, I suggest, that some things do not just happen: they happen of their own accord, spontaneously. ‘Of its own accord’, like ‘for its own sake’, which was studied in Chapter 5, is reflexive-related. There is a tempting, though, as I hope to show, mistaken line of thought which leads to the conclusion that nothing ever really happens of its own accord. As long as this goes unchallenged, it denies a fair hearing to the believer in spontaneous generation, and indeed in any kind of spontaneous occurrence, because it threatens to exclude him on a priori grounds. A group of children are sitting round a card-table upon which one of them is building a house of cards in the pagoda shape familiar to all who have ever tried to do this. A fine example of a house of cards is constructed, several storeys high, and the children sit back admiringly, savouring the moment when someone will bring it toppling down. To their dismay, the structure collapses before their eyes. ‘What a pity it fell down of its own accord,’ says somebody, ‘I’d been looking forward to knocking it down myself.’ But now the miscreant owns up. When no one was looking, he admits, he gave the leg of the table a tap with his foot, which made the house of cards wobble and that is what brought the cards tumbling down. 1 he house of cards did not, after all, fall down of its own accord; it was made to fall down and we know who did it. Whatever was meant by ‘It fell down of its own accord’ is defeated by this discovery of what and who was responsible for its collapse. Suppose, however, that the situation had been slightly different. 100

Self-generation o f Life

Once again, we have a house of cards but this time none of the children misbehaves or makes any attempt to bring the cards down. No one gives the table leg a sly nudge; no one purses his lips and blows air in the direction of the cards; no sudden draught of air is let in to the room from an open window or door; no piece of the ceiling flakes off and drops onto the cards; the ground is not shaken by a near or distant earthquake or a passing heavy lorry. And yet, all of a sudden, out of the blue, down goes the house of cards: but not to universal consternation of all present at a lusus naturae. In fact, no one turns a hair. ‘It fell down of its own accord’, says one of the children, adding that in his experience houses of cards, unlike houses made of bricks, are liable to do just that. The scientifically trained mind may not be happy with this. Is he being asked to believe that nothing caused the cards to fall? That they fell causelessly? That cannot be: there has to be a scientifically ascertainable answer to the question, ‘What caused the cards to fall down?’ Perhaps we have overlooked the fact that the temperature of the air in the room was rising and that this caused the cards to buckle slightly and to become less rigid than before. But if there was no change of any kind in the prevailing conditions, the house of cards would still be standing. Suppose the scientist was right and that the collapse of the cards was due to a rise in air temperature. In the first case, the miscreant’s revelations about his secret activities, which caused the cards to collapse, put paid to the idea that they fell down of their own accord. Ought the hitherto unsuspected effects of the rising air temperature to lead us to the same conclusion in the second case? It is certainly tempting to think that in both cases, once you know the hitherto hidden reason for the collapse of the cards, you cannot say that they fell down of their own accord. In this frame of mind, explanatory success goes to your head. Similarly, in debating the origin of life, once you have explained how it was that, on a few occasions, living creatures appeared to have developed spontaneously inside a sealed glass flask thought to be devoid of life (perhaps they were there all the time but were too small to be seen at first until they had grown a bit, or maybe they hatched from eggs which were already present but were too tiny to be identified), you will begin to think that any successful causal explanation will push ‘of its own accord’ out of the picture. Science and spontaneous generation will seem incompatible in principle. But is it true that the explanation in terms of a rise in air 101

Self-generation o f L ife

temperature discredits the idea that the cards collapsed of their own accord? If a storm blew down a tall tree which once stood in the forest, the tree did not fall down of its own accord. If the woodcutter felled it with his axe, it did not fall of its own accord either. But suppose the woodcutter arrives in the forest one morning, when there has been no storm the night before, intending to chop down a tree he has previously selected and marked, only to find it lying on the ground amongst other trees he had felled the previous day. No one else has felled it; it fell because it had been weakened at the base by disease. Disease caused it to fall but it did not fell the tree. Does this prove that the tree did not fall of its own accord? Does ‘of its own accord’ exclude all possible causes, or only some causes of a certain kind? This question ought to remind us of the desire of the isolationist in Chapter 5 to reject all possible qualities in a loved one as of no relevance to the loved one’s being loved for his or her own sake. In the same chapter it was argued that a spontaneous remission of an illness, during which the symptoms clear up of their own accord, does not imply that there were no causes of remission but rather that the remission was not caused by any form of actual medical treatment being given to the patient for his condition. In a long queue of sick people waiting for medical treatment from the only doctor on duty, all remissions are spontaneous. Similarly, spontaneous laughter is not a sudden outburst of laughter apropos of nothing; you laugh and applaud spontan­ eously when you laugh of your own accord in response to a joke and when the laughter or the applause is not rehearsed, coached or produced in response to a pre-arranged signal to the audience from a studio floor manager. ‘Of its own accord’ excludes a certain kind of cause, not every kind of cause. It excludes outside intervention where what counts as ‘outside’ or ‘external’ is as problematic as what counted as an external feature of the person loved for his or her own sake. Which explains how it is that farmers can know that brucellosis causes spontaneous abortion in cattle: the cattle abort of their own accord, that is, they abort without having been aborted by the vet. I he chemistry teacher demonstrates the phenomenon of spontaneous combustion when he removes a piece of phosphorus from its dish of water and leaves it to dry at room temperature, hvcntually it bursts into flames of its own accord. The pheno­ menon is observed and an explanation of the observed event is put forward. It is true that it was the teacher who by his 102

Self-generation o f Life

intervention brought it about that the phosphorus went on fire of its own accord, since it was he who removed it from the safety of its protective dish of water and exposed it to the atmosphere. But that is not the same thing as setting light to a piece of phosphorus by playing the flame of a bunsen burner directly upon it. A comparable difference exists between helping someone to commit suicide by, for example, complying with his request to fetch him a large bottle of aspirins from the chemist’s and then leaving them within his reach by his bedside, and holding his nose in order to force the tablets down his protesting throat with one’s fingers. A disgruntled farm-hand with a grudge and a knowledge of what causes spontaneous combustion in haystacks (green, damp straw kept under tarpaulins without adequate ventilation) could arrange for spontaneous combustion to occur in the hayrick he had been building for his employer. He did not set light to the stack; there were no petrol-soaked rags or incriminating spent matches; and yet he created the circumstances in which the stack went on fire of its own accord. A court might find him guilty of arson but not of incendiarism because he used no incendiary device. The force o f‘spontaneous’ in ‘spontaneous combustion’ is to rule out the possibility of something’s having been set alight. The teacher who took the phosphorus from the jar and the man who lights a match by striking it on the side of a matchbox both intervene and do something to the phosphorus and to the match in order to get them to burst into flames. Why, then, isn’t lighting a match a case of spontaneous combustion? Because, when the phosphorus (lifted out of its dish) and the match (removed from its matchbox) are laid side by side on the laboratory bench, the match has to be struck before it will burn whereas the phosphorus bursts into flames without further human intervention. The teacher’s previous intervention in removing the phosphorus from the water in the dish simply doesn’t count for the purposes of this comparison; just as, how far the competitors may have run before reaching the starting line doesn’t count when it comes to deciding who has won the race. The example of the lighted match is interesting in that it warns us not to concentrate on the absence of flame or fire before the phosphorus bursts into flame as the key feature of spontaneous combustion — as though the only alternative to spontaneous combustion was always something along the lines of the lighting of a cigarette by means of a lit match, on the model of the Olympic flame’s being carried from one already burning torch to 103

Self-generation o f Life

another waiting to be lit from it. In a struck match we see a transition from no flame to flame which is not a case of spontaneous combustion. We shall have occasion shortly to remind ourselves similarly that not every causal story of the transition from the non-living to the living, which is not based on one living creature’s bringing another into existence, is neces­ sarily a story of the spontaneous generation of life either. In the case of spontaneous generation, what is excluded by ‘spontaneous’ is that the animal should have been given birth to; or, if it is an egg which is supposed to have formed spontaneously, that it has been laid by another creature. Spontaneous generation is a challenge to reproduction or self-propagation, not to any possible causal explanation whatsoever.

2. Pasteur versus Pouchet In a paper delivered to the Chemical Society of Paris in 1861 Pasteur asked, ‘Are there any circumstances in which cases of spontaneous generation have been observed, in which matter that once belonged to living creatures has been seen somehow to retain vestiges of life and to organize itself of its own accord? {la matière . . . s'organiser d'elle-même?).’H It was not possible ever to prove a negative, continued Pasteur, but he had the temerity to hope to show that in all such putative cases the observer had been the victim of illusions or of causes of error which he had either overlooked or had not managed to avoid. The questions ‘Can life organise itself? Can living beings come into the world without having been preceded by beings similar to them?’ were also the central questions to which Pasteur addressed himself in his famous lecture at the Sorbonne on 7 April 1864 before an audience attended by the scientific and literary swells of tout Paris. Pasteur described how he had kept sterile infusions of organic materials in sealed containers for several years and had seen no signs of developing life. And I wait, I watch, I question it [the liquid in the flask], begging it to recommence for me the beautiful spectacle of the first creation. But it is dumb, dumb since these experiments were begun several years ago; it is dumb because I have kept it from the only thing man cannot produce, from the germs which float in the air, from life, for 104

Self-generation o f Life

life is a germ and a germ is life. Never will the doctrine of spontaneous generation recover from the mortal blow of this simple experiment.7 Although Pasteur’s Sorbonne lecture was intended to refute Pouchet, it gave a misleading impression of Pouchet’s actual position. Pouchet was, in fact, at one with Pasteur in denying that living microscopic organisms could be created spontaneously. What Pouchet and his supporters suspected were spontaneously formed in the dead organic matter inside the sealed flasks were the eggs (ovules) from which the creatures later emerged, following all the normal stages of development. ‘We think that the plastic force never generates anything but eggs and that, accordingly, a creature which results from heterogenesis follows all the phases of development of one which comes from normal generation’ (Pouchet, Hétérogénie, p. 659). Pouchet had arrived at this hypothesis as a result of his earlier studies of ovulation and fertility in mammals which he had already published in his Théorie positive de Tovulation et de la fécondation dans le mammifères et Vespèce humaine (Paris, 1847). At ovulation, Pouchet had con­ cluded, eggs appear spontaneously in the lining of the womb, right at the start of the process that results in the birth of every human being. Could it be, he now wondered, that eggs also form of their own accord in dead organic matter as they do in the tissues of the womb of a living female at the time of ovulation? Later discoveries, though not, I think, Pasteur’s experiments or arguments, have shown this suggestion to be incorrect. But there is nothing absurd in Pouchet’s saying that the egg appears of its own accord in what he calls the membrane proligère, the lining of part of the womb. For this is the description which we ourselves might naturally give when watching a modern film of the same process. ‘Of its own accord’ here does not deny that there is a causal explanation for what is taking place, any more than it does for spontaneous combustion, abortion or remission; nor does it imply that capricious nature is acting here with a mind and a will of her own. ‘Of its own accord’ excludes the possibility that the eggs we see being formed have been laid or somehow produced by other creatures and sets them apart from, say, the eggs laid by lice in other parts of the body or the egg laid by a chicken. Pouchet’s idea was that, since we know of one set of circum­ stances in which eggs appear ‘dénués de parents\ perhaps there are other circumstances as well. 105

Self-generation o f Life

Pasteur’s own theory was not without its difficulties. He held that life could not generate itself. Living creatures owed their existence to other living creatures and germs were no exception to this principle. But if all life comes from a germ, where did the first germ come from? Pasteur’s answer was that we must bend the knee before this mystery, it being a question of the origin of things and therefore outside the proper province of scientific enquiry. This does not seem to me to be a tenable position. Instructors who teach apprentices in the engineering industry are wont to plague their new charges with the question, ‘How are precision machine tools, such as capstan lathes and milling machines, made?’ The apprentice who says ‘On other precision machine tools’ is praised for having given the right answer. But then he is asked, ‘In that case, how did the first precision machine tool come into existence?’ This conundrum calls, surely, not for reverent silence but for a good answer. The point of putting the question to the apprentices is to make them realise the signifi­ cance of their early free-hand filing, drilling and cutting, etc.; for men must have had ways, before the first precision tools were built, of producing a straight edge in metal and very flat surfaces with only hand-held hand-made files and steady abrasion; in their early training the apprentices recapitulate the ingenuity of man which has enabled him to construct parts of machines which, as they evolved, culminated in machines which so far outstripped man’s unaided powers of fabricating and working with metal that the latest machines could not possibly be built by hand and eye alone. In the final section of this chapter we shall examine one modern example of an attempt to answer the question about the origin of life before which Pasteur was content to bend the knee. The claim that such a theory must involve a revival of the doctrine of spontaneous generation will be challenged.

3. P asteur a secret believer in spontaneous generation? In a recent paper John Farley and Gerald L. Geison have drawn attention to aspects of Pasteur’s research which seem to show that Pasteur took the idea of spontaneous generation seriously as an explanation of the origin of life in the whole universe while publicly attacking spontaneous generation as the correct explana­ tion of the appearance of life within the confines of a glass bottle. 106

Self-generation o f Life

Pasteur’s public rejection of the theory of spontaneous generation in his quarrel with Pouchet was, they claim, heavily influenced by his religious and political convictions.8 It suited Pasteur's reli­ gious and political conservatism, they suggest, to appear as an opponent of the spontaneous generation of life because of that theory’s implication that life could have arisen on the earth with­ out needing the assistance of a divine creator. On this account, a somewhat discreditable picture of Pasteur emerges as a man of science who in his science had an extra-scientific axe to grind and who in private took seriously a theory he attacked in public. I hope to show that this picture, though persuasive, is mistaken, not because further historical evidence shows otherwise but because it trades on a conceptual muddle in interpreting the evidence we already have. The mistake has its origins in a misunderstanding of the reflex­ ive logic of what it is for life to generate itself and so appear ‘of its own accord’, or spontaneously; but we also need to distinguish between (1) what Pasteur was seeking to explain, namely, the transition from a world without any forms of plant or animal life in it to our own; and (2) the scientific theory he advanced in order to do the explaining. I shall argue that, while in Pasteur's case (1) can fairly be described as involving a spontaneous change (but without necessarily causing serious intellectual difficulties for his belief in divine creation), (2) did not, and did not need to, appeal to spontaneous change at all. The mistake about the concept of spontaneous change is the idea we have already encountered according to which there has been a spontaneous change whenever the appearance of something new and hetero­ geneous cannot be accounted for on the principle that ‘Like begets like.’ The allegedly damaging facts about Pasteur’s scientific research are these.9 Pasteur’s conviction that the gulf between the living and the non-living could not be crossed by ordinary chemical procedures had not prevented him from trying to find a way across the divide by some other route. As early as 1852, Farley and Geison tell us, Pasteur had, while at Strasbourg, tried to per­ suade crystals of inorganic substances, such as sulphur, potassium, copper, together with hydrogen, oxygen, chlorine and carbon (in the form of diamond) to develop an asymmetric arrangement of their atoms in the belief that asymmetric molecules were essential to life and that symmetric molecules were by themselves in­ capable of supporting life. Pasteur inferred asymmetry of atomic 107

Self-generation o f Life

structure from the asymmetry of the faces of his crystals seen under the microscope. A crystal face was called asymmetrical if, when seen in the mirror, its mirror image could not be super­ imposed on its image when examined directly. Thus, a righthand glove would count as asymmetrical because, when seen in a mirror, it looks like a left-hand glove but a cube would be sym­ metrical because its mirror image is indistinguishable from its normal appearance to the naked eye. Pasteur’s manuscript notes suggest that between 1852 and 1870 he was experimenting with a powerful Ruhmkorff magnetic apparatus in a vain attempt to generate organic from inorganic compounds. Farley and Geison interpret this to mean that Pasteur had been speculating that life could have arisen spontaneously on the earth, perhaps through the influence of a strong magnetic field upon certain inorganic compounds. No doubt there would be more steps than this in the fully worked out theory but the first step had been taken. Pasteur, they say, could deny the possibility of spontaneous generation in his quarrel with Pouchet only by suppressing part of his own scientific beliefs.10 Should you believe that it is impossible for any series of purely physical changes to culminate eventually in living things on the grounds that a divine ‘quickening’ is needed to transform what would otherwise be dull clay, you will be bound to deny the pos­ sibility of the sort of enterprise upon which Pasteur was engaged. You will reject all such theories of the ‘spontaneous’ generation of life because you will be sure that life cannot have emerged of its own accord without the need for an act of divine creation. God, for you, is a divine chemistry master and inert matter is like the match lying on the bench waiting to be struck before it will burst into flame. No doubt, a sophisticated believer would not wish to be associated with this view and would want to offer a quite different account of the significance of the creation myth in the Bible. I mention this view because it explains how ‘spontaneous’ is to be understood when it is said that Pasteur, unlike such a person, held that it wâs possible that life had arisen spontan­ eously on the earth. Pasteur’s rival, Pouchet, appreciated that spontaneous genera­ tion conflicted with a popular conception of God as supreme scientific experimenter and tried to remove its sting by suggesting that the Genesis story of the creation was itself a case of spontaneous generation and that therefore it could not be against religion to believe in the spontaneous generation of micro108

Self-generation o f Life

organisms.11 Pouchet’s defence strikes me as unconvincing because it too relies on the suspect idea that all heterogeneous development must automatically be spontaneous development. It hardly fits the Genesis account to describe Adam and Eve as appearing spontaneously in the Garden of Eden as do, say, the weeds and wild flowers in the garden at home. Weeds appear spontaneously because they, unlike their domesticated counter­ parts, sow themselves and can look after themselves (note the explanatory reflexives) without depending upon the gardener’s care and attention. It is no part of the Biblical account to suggest that living creatures appeared spontaneously while God sat back with, so to speak, his arms folded as a passive spectator. If we imagine a tribe who did not possess the secret of how to make fire and who therefore had to keep at least some of their wood fires going all the time so as to be able to kindle a fresh fire from an existing one (they fear the loss of fire as we fear the extinction of the human race), we might imagine that they spoke in their myths of God as having created the first flame. In spite of the fact that this would be a transition from no flame to flame, and hence a heterogeneous development, this would not be correctly reported as their God arranging for an instance of spontaneous combus­ tion. Any more than we would be right to infer that the first machine tool which was not made on another machine tool must have appeared spontaneously, or that at some point on the loom cloth emerges spontaneously from wool. We fall into the trap of equating heterogeneous change with spontaneous change, of supposing that the transition from no flame to flame or from no life to life, must be spontaneous because we can see that where fire is used to produce fire or where one living creature is begotten by another, this guarantees that we are not dealing with spontaneous combustion or generation. The trouble is that this picture of, first, no life or no flame, and then life or flame, is compatible with either spontaneous or nonspontaneous change. It fits both the match struck on the matchbox and the phosphorus igniting at room temperature. What was once a bare garden and is now covered with plants may have resulted from either spontaneous vegetation or careful cultivation. I have agreed that Pasteur was speculating as to how life had arisen spontaneously, in that he was seeking a scientific explana­ tion of how plant and animal life had emerged of its own accord, not as a result of divine intervention to facilitate a change in a 109

Self-generation o f Life

chemical process. This conflicts with a crude view of God as the great chemist or gardener, etc., but I see no reason to think such a scientific interest must clash with belief in a Creator. And, so far, there is no evidence to show that Pasteur appealed to the idea of spontaneous change in his actual scientific theorising. Yet this is what Farley and Geison need to prove, since their aim is to show that in his cosmological theories Pasteur made use of spontaneous generation as did Pouchet in his theory to explain the appearance of micro-organisms in his sealed, supposedly sterile flasks. There can be no doubt about Pouchet’s commitment to spontaneous change in his theorising, for his idea was that, just as eggs appear spontaneously in the lining of the womb of a mammal at the time of ovulation, so it might be true that the eggs from which the micro-organisms later emerge have formed spontaneously in infusions of what was once the living tissue of plant or animal life. But Pasteur’s theory of the transformation of inorganic into organic compounds under the influence of magnetism has no step in it involving spontaneous change at all. Pasteur can be compared to a doctor who is dealing with a case in which his patient has made a spontaneous recovery, that is, he has got better of his own accord, and not in response to any medical treatment provided by the doctor. The doctor speculates as to what can be the cause of the spontaneous recovery. Within his causal theory there need not be any appeal to spontaneous change. If there is, then ‘spontaneous’ will need to be justified in the same way inside the theory as elsewhere in the rest of science. Medical science, for example, speaks of ‘spontaneous pneumo­ thorax’ because there is a theory explaining why a common symptom of pneumonia is collapsed, congested lungs, yet here is a patient with collapsed, congested lungs but without the preci­ pitating disease. The lung collapse has occurred spontaneously, says the scientist. Scientists do very frequently make use of the idea of spontaneous processes, witness the spontaneous emission of radiation, spontaneous mutation of cells, spontaneous ignition of volatile fluids, etc., but in order to explain successfully a spontaneous recovery there is no need for the explanation in terms of say, the clotting processes of the blood to be based on any spontaneous changes at the level of the chemical reactions taking place in the blood. I have been arguing for the following six points. Firstly, Pasteur’s theory of how symmetric crystals change into asym­ metric crystals under the influence of a strong magnetic field is 110

Self-generation o f Life

not a theory of the spontaneous generation of living creatures or their eggs from material devoid of either. It is to be compared to the story of how cloth is made from wool or of how coal comes from forests. Secondly, his theory can, however, be quite properly described as one which treats life as having emerged spontan­ eously from the non-living; life is self-generating in the sense that it did not arise in response to the external agency of a divine 'quickening’. Similarly, one might explain how weeds appear spontaneously in the garden, in the sense of ‘not in response to the external agency of the gardener’. The weeds sow themselves, establish themselves and look after themselves but they come from seeds, tubers, etc., just like the cultivated plants and not by spontaneous generation. Thirdly, if A is a causal stage in the causation of B and A is spontaneous, it does not follow that B must also be spontaneous; it may be that it is the spontaneous combustion of the fuse that is designed to cause the bomb to detonate but the bomb itself does not explode of its own accord. The latter calls for a more tragic possibility, at least from the bomb handler’s point of view. Fourthly, if B occurs spontan­ eously, and A is a causal stage in the explanation of why B happened, A need not be spontaneous either, as when the bomb goes off of its own accord and the explanation is that its electrical fuse is sensitive and somebody dropped the bomb on purpose to see what would happen. Fifthly, Pasteur was trying to explain the spontaneous appearance of life on earth but this is not to be confused with acceptance of spontaneous generation (in the same way, we can see that the weeds appeared spontaneously without endorsing the theory of their spontaneous generation). Lastly, Pasteur’s actual explanation of the origin of life made no appeal to the idea of any kind of spontaneous change whatsoever. Had he wished to do so, he would have needed to explain how magnetism, say, causes molecular rearrangement and then to encounter puzzling cases in which the rearrangement occurs without the trigger of the standard cause. There is no reason to believe that his scientific findings were of this kind. I conclude that it has not been shown that Pasteur was ever a secret believer in spontaneous generation.

Notes 1. See John Farley and Gerald L. Geison, ‘Science, politics and spontaneous generation in nineteenth century France: the Pasteur111

Self-generation o f Life

Pouchet debate’ in Colin Chant and John Fauvel (eds), Darwin to Einstein: historical studies on science and belief (Longman, London and New York, 1980), pp. 107-33; first published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 48, no. 2 (1974), pp. 161-98. Subsequent page references are to the slightly abridged version of Farley and Geison’s article in Darwin to Einstein. 2. Félix A. Pouchet, Hétérogénie ou traité de la génération spontanée (J.B. Baillière et fils, Paris, 1859). 3. See Farley and Geison in Darwin to Einstein, pp. 112-16. 4. Thomas Hobbes was the first person to use the word ‘spontaneous’ in print in his The questions concerning liberty, necessity and chance, 1656. The following quotation shows, I think, that there has been no change of meaning: ‘That all voluntary actions, where the thing that induceth the will is not fear, are called also spontaneous, and said to be done by a man s accord’ ( The English works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (John Bohn, London, 1938-45), vol. V (1841), p. 79). 5. Both of Van Helmont’s recipes are given in Benjamin Moore’s The origin and nature of life (Williams and Norgate, London; Henry Holt and Co., New York [1913]), pp. 11 and 164. 6. Quoted in Louis Pasteur, pages choisies. Introduction, notes and commentary by Ernest Kahn (Editions Sociales, Paris, 1957), p. 96. 7. See René Vallery-Radot, The life of Louis Pasteur, translated by Mrs R.L. Devonshire, (Dover Publications, New York, 1960), p. 109. 8. See Farley and Geison in Darwin to Einstein, pp. 121-5, 127-30. 9. See Farley and Geison in Darwin to Einstein, pp. 113-15 and p. 131, note 24. 10. See Farley and Geison in Darwin to Einstein, p. 116. 11. See Pouchet, Hétérogénie, p. 95.

112

8 Reflexives and Solo Performances

In previous chapters and throughout the rest of this book the reflexive form of a large number of verbs is much in evidence. This is natural because I am endeavouring to make sense of the puzzling fact that we live in a world in which it is possible to deceive oneself, invite oneself to other people’s parties, succeed and fail to know oneself, contradict oneself, teach oneself, and — in subtly different ways depending on whether one does these things with or without realising it or meaning to — to pity, kill, and injure oneself. Lights can switch themselves off and on, plants can sow and propagate themselves, symptoms of illness can clear themselves up, statements can refer to themselves and problems can sort themselves out. Given the right conditions, it is even possible for an object to move itself. In this chapter I want to look more closely at an area of life to which anyone who is interested in the role played by reflexives will naturally be drawn. I am thinking of the times when we find things taking over from us and developing what might loosely be termed ‘a life of their own'. We find ourselves living in a world in which something can happen automatically, or of its own accord, or spontaneously. The two immediately preceding chapters in this book on spontaneous generation and self-mov ement are of obvious relevance to this topic. I have two aims: my first aim is to show how these three phrases differ in meaning in surprising ways — surprising, because the truth comes as a surprise when there is a very tempting picture of the true state of affairs which excludes the truth; my second aim is to combat this picture. But first, because I have found the view I wish to challenge to be a very attractive alternative account, I want to make it as vivid and plausible as I can. What I have in mind is a certain conception of what it is for 113

Reflexives and Solo Performances

something to happen ‘on its own' which fits each of these three cases well enough to blind us to their real natures and to the differences between them. Into this account the reflexive form of the verb enters naturally at the point when, in each case, we explain what we mean when we say that something occurs spontaneously, or of its own accord, or automatically. When weeds appear spontaneously in the garden, it is natural to explain what we mean by saying that, unlike their cultivated counterparts, which have to be sown and tended by the gardener, spontaneously appearing weeds sow and spread themselves (note the reflexive) without the gardener’s ministrations. When doctor assures us that our symptoms will clear up of their own accord, we might tell others that the symptoms do not need to be treated or cleared up by, for example, having ointment rubbed in, but will clear themselves up (reflexive) without treatment and take ourselves to be saying much the same thing. When the street lights come on automatically at dusk we explain that the lights switch themselves on (reflexive) and do not need anyone to switch them on. In each of these three examples there is the same basic pattern of something’s happening on its own (an unaccom­ panied ‘solo performance’, whence the title of this chapter) without the need for an external agency to be introduced in order to achieve the same effect. The use of the explanatory reflexive seems entirely in keeping with something’s doing something to or for itself which might otherwise have to be done by something or someone else. In our mind’s eye we see the gardener sitting back with folded arms while the weeds spring up spontaneously around him. We see the patient’s skin gradually healing of its own accord while his doctor is away on holiday. We see the electrician standing motionless before a light which is flashing on and off automatic­ ally. It is this picture of a human being sitting back with folded arms watching things happen before him which I wish to reject as an inadequate account of the subtle differences that separate a spontaneous change from one which takes place of its own accord, or from one which happens automatically. It is, however, tempting to think that this ‘folded arms’ account tells the whole of the story and that the three phrases really mean the same thing, the one being preferable to the others only on grounds of custom, euphony or idiom. What, after all, is the difference between saying that phosphorus bursts into flames spontaneously rather than ‘of its own accord’? Straight off, it is 114

Reflexives and Solo Performances

not easy to say. And what is the difference between saying that the car’s direction indicators cancel automatically rather than ‘of their own accord’? One could be forgiven for not being sure how to reply. Indeed, when Hobbes originally introduced the word ‘spontaneous’ into the English language, he actually appeared to define it to mean of one's own accord (see note 4, p. 122). It is also true that each of these three phrases has about it a similar air of magic and mystery, which strengthens the belief that they are similar in meaning. By which I mean that it is not difficult to imagine someone believing that whoever makes a serious, literally intended, use of one of these phrases must be appealing to some sort of magic. ‘Can a car move of its own accord?’, we ask ourselves. An ignorant savage, with no know­ ledge of the internal combustion engine might say as much upon seeing someone start the engine and drive off in a car which had been parked at the kerb a moment before. But we, unlike the savage, know that the car is being propelled by its engine. Further, we know — or rather, our knowledge of mechanics makes us think we know — that all motion is communicated motion. Then what moving object communicated its motion to the stationary car? We shift uneasily between the answer ‘Well, the driver had to turn the key in the ignition to start the engine’ and the apparently more technical ‘The secret lies in the car’s battery; here is a source of minute moving particles, or whatever ready to travel, or at any rate, to cause movement, along a wire at the turn of the ignition key.’ Of course, this bothers us because a car battery, whether fully charged or dead, looks suspiciously like an indisputable case of something in which, by all the normal tests, nothing is moving. Yet the pull of the scientific answer may be strong enough to make us feel we ought to say that, strictly, nothing can move of its own accord; so that, if it is the battery which causes the car to move, there has to be motion of some kind in the battery. The conviction that nothing moves of its own accord goes unchallenged until the day we happen to see an early silent comedy film in which a car is left parked on a steep hill with the handbrake on. Suddenly, the empty, parked car moves off of its own accord and rolls downhill. How is that possible? Well, the brake linings of the car heat up and expand in use and contract upon cooling. If the handbrake is not applied sufficiently firmly, the contraction of the linings, as they cool, may be enough to cause the brakes to fail to hold the car on a steep slope. Our use of 115

Reflexives and Solo Performances

‘of its own accord’ here is quite different from that of the savage in the previous case. We even supply a scientific, non-magical explanation of what causes the car to move of its own accord. A similar transition from the world of magic to that of science can be seen in, for example, on the one hand; Dickens’ fanciful description of the death of Mr Krook by spontaneous combustion allegedly as a result of the amount of alcohol in his body occasioned by heavy drinking (see Dickens’ mock serious documented proof of the existence of similar cases of human spontaneous combustion in the preface to Bleak House), compared with, on the other hand, the modern scientist’s explanation of what causes spontaneous combustion in phosphorus or in volatile gases and liquids. For similar reasons, we may feel inclined to deny that doors described as opening automatically do really open themselves. Surely, what opens the door is the servo­ mechanism to which it is attached, which, in its turn, is set in operation by the approach of the pedestrian? ‘Automatic’ belongs, we may feel, in the world of those who attend seances and believe in automatic writing, where messages are said to ‘write themselves’ and writing pens to ‘move themselves’ across the table. The detailed, exploded diagrams of the workings of a pair of automatically opening and closing sliding doors seem tame by comparison with the world of mystical psychic forces and clearly belong to the humdrum world of pushes and pulls in which an ordinary door has to be opened and closed by the application of forces through the turning of a knob and by the movement of an arm. It is easy to feel that in their everyday, humdrum employment these words have been robbed of their true meaning which properly belongs to the world of magic in which the rules of logic do not apply. This mood has a long history and a strong hold in philosophy. ‘Nothing is truly permanent’, we say and it makes no difference that we know full well that it is given to some mortal men, who will in due course retire and die, to have permanent, not temporary jobs. It is possible, however, to think of certain everyday, nonmagical examples in which ‘of its own accord’, ‘spontaneous’ and ‘automatic’ clearly do not mean the same thing. Would you not feel the parachutist about to jump was right to be worried if he had just been told that his parachute was of a design which had been found to open of its own accord during descent? Unlike a parachute which opens automatically, this suggests that his parachute may open at the wrong moment, too soon or maybe too 116

Reflexives and Solo Performances

late, that it ‘pleases itself when to open in an erratic, unpredict­ able way. A stand-up comic might complain that last night’s audience kept laughing of their own accord, that is, they suited themselves when to laugh and so laughed in what the comic thought were the wrong places, not at the punch lines of his jokes perhaps, as he had intended but at other things they found funny. The comic was not complaining that his audience’s laughter was spontaneous; he was complaining about its timing, not its quality. Street lights which come on of their own accord in broad daylight may be, though they need not be, automatic in their operation but there is a malfunction and they keep coming on erratically at the wrong time when they are not supposed to. A gas stove, equipped with automatic ignition, lights when the gas is turned on but, to count as automatic, there is no need for it to work by the altogether more alarming sounding system in which there is spontaneous ignition of the mixture of gas and air, without benefit of pilot lights or electrically produced sparks (i.e., spontaneous but not automatic ignition). To count as automatic, it is enough that the burners light when the gas is turned on without anyone needing to perform the additional operation of lighting the gas, with a match, say, or a flint-gun. Close study of the behaviour of phosphorus exposed to the air under laboratory conditions may enable the scientist to calculate the precise moment at which a piece of a given size will burst into flames. He will then be able to predict precisely the moment of spontaneous combustion. But, in that case, the phosphorus will not be bursting into flames of its own accord. No doubt, in practice, where such precise prediction and control is not possible, most cases of the spontaneous combustion of phosphorus in the school laboratory are also cases of phosphorus’s bursting into flames of its own accord and that explains why in the normal course of events it is unusual to distinguish between them. ‘Of its own accord’, unlike ‘spontaneous’, demands a degree of unpredict­ ability and absence of control. It cannot be known in advance that a bomb will go off on the dot at exactly 2.30 p.m. of its own accord. After the event, however, when the bomb did go off at 2.30 p.m., it may be possible to work out why it should have been at precisely that moment that the bomb went off of its own accord. Just as the confident actor can know in advance that one of his lines delivered in his inimitable way will get a laugh, and a spontaneous one at that, from his audience but no one can know in advance when an audience is going to do something of its own 117

Reflexives and Solo Performances

accord. With things that happen of their own accord, as with a poet’s writing an original set of verses, you can only be wise after the event. At the seaside you can sit back in your deck-chair with arms folded and eyes closed and listen to the tide coming in or going out. Indeed, there is not a lot you can do to alter the progress of this regular, natural event. But you are not witnessing a series of automatic changes. The tide does not ebb and flow automatically any more than the sun rises and sets automatically each day. The rise and fall of the level of the sea is both regular and outside our control but it is not automatic. Driving in a car fitted with an automatic gearbox, you can sit back and hear the car changing gear automatically. Why the difference between the car and the sea? In the case of the car what happens automatically when the appropriate gear selects itself could be done manually by the gear being selected by the driver. The difference has nothing to do with the actual technical feasibility of man's ability to automate some process as against controlling it manually. ‘Manually’, in other words, is not the only intelligible contrast with ‘automatic­ ally’ but ‘automatically’ only makes sense where control could have been handed over to some form of external agency with the same end result being achieved. The difference has everything to do with what counts as an automatic process or change, whether it be a man-made technical feat of invention and engineering, or one of the wonders of nature, for example, the automatic adjustment of the eye to different levels of light intensity, or the mother who goes automatically to the doorway to look for her children returning home from school when they are all playing quietly in the attic enjoying the first day of their school holiday. We must, incidentally, beware of falling into what might be termed ‘the engineer’s fallacy’, namely, that of thinking that nothing happens automatically unless it is the result of some piece of prior automation. This mistake is comparable to others we have already encountered, like supposing that whenever one deceives oneself this must be self-deception, that whatever one knows about oneself is a piece of self-knowledge, or that everyone who contradicts himself utters a proposition which contradicts itself. The mother goes automatically to the door because of the intelligibility of the contrasting case in which her going to the door is in response to her explicitly conscious thought ‘Are my children on their way home from school? Let me go and look.’ That is the ‘manual’ response which ‘automatic’ excludes when 118

Reflexives and Solo Performances

the mother is, so to speak, on ‘automatic pilot’ and not in conscious control of her own behaviour. With the tides, there is normally no background presupposed to give the required contrast to enable ‘automatic’ to gain a foothold. But this is not to say that one could not be invented, as the following story shows. In the beginning, there were no tides and the sea was as flat as a mill-pond. The god of storms therefore ordained that large numbers of men had to spend all their lives churning the water with huge paddles to produce a twice daily surge in the levels of the oceans of the world. At last he took pity on them and in order to spare them further toil he arranged for the movement of the tides to occur just as they do today, that is, (those who accept the fable can now say) automatically, for which men have subse­ quently always had cause to be grateful. This fable owes nothing to mechanics but it satisfies the requirements of the logic of what it takes for something to qualify as taking place ‘automatically’. A spontaneous offer of help is different from an automatic offer. Someone who offers his help spontaneously will, upon perceiving the need, anticipate the request for help and make his offer even before he is asked. An automatic offer is triggered off by some set of conditions such that whenever they are present, help is forthcoming. Should the set of precipitating conditions stipulate that a formal, written request must be made (as in, say, the Bank of England’s automatically propping up an insolvent licensed lending company), the automatic offer to help will hardly be spon­ taneous. Spontaneous applause differs from automatic applause as an enthusiastic first-night audience at a West End theatre differs from a plenary session of the Soviet praesidium. I hope this has done something to show the subtly different ways in which ‘of its own accord’, ‘spontaneously’ and ‘auto­ matically’, and the explanatory reflexive forms which might accompany them, can be used to describe the world of ‘solo performances’ in which things happen on their own and not in response to some form of external agency, without conjuring up an illogical universe of magic and mystery in which the laws of nature have been suspended.

119

9 Self-reference

A number of paradoxes, known variously as the Antinomies or the Logical Paradoxes, are often said to share the common feature of self-reference.1 In a typical list of such paradoxes one usually finds Russell’s Paradox, Cantor’s, Burali-Forte’s, and Curry’s Paradox; also the Liar, the Barber of Seville, Richard’s, Berry’s, and Grelling’s Paradox. In this Chapter I shall concen­ trate on the Liar; Russell’s Paradox will be dealt with in Chapter 11. Following a suggestion made by F.P. Ramsey, it has become commonplace to call the first group ‘logical’ and the second group ‘semantic’ paradoxes.2 I should make it clear that I hold no brief for the suggestion that these paradoxes can be divided into two separate camps. In my view, these paradoxes can profitably be treated together because what they have in common is not just self-reference but their dependence on reflexive forms. In Russell’s Paradox, for example, intellectual difficulties arise when we try to make sense of a class’s being a member of itself. We are asked to consider the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Is it a member of itself? If it is, then it is not a member of itself; if it is not, then it is a member of itself. Does this contradiction show that the whole idea of class self-membership should be written off as incoherent? Or, less dramatically, is there some slip in our reasoning which leaves us feeling mistakenly confident that we broke no rules of logic in constructing the phrase ‘the class of all classes which are not members of themselves’, which, on closer inspection, permitted an unexpected contradiction to be derived? Before trying to answer this question I want to say something about the significance of the fact that, although self-membership is not the same as self-reference, and although Russell’s Paradox 120

Self-reference

is not expressed in the vocabulary of self-reference, we could, if we wished, make use of the vocabulary of self-reference to describe what is puzzling in Russell's Paradox. ‘Does the phrase “the class of all those classes which are not members of themselves” refer to itself or not?’ we might ask. Or we might instead have wondered whether this peculiar class included itself or contained itself (I am disregarding any special technical senses in set theory which have subsequently been given to such terms as ‘self-inclusion’ or ‘self-containment’, etc.). I do not see any reason to elevate ‘self-reference’ to a special status not shared by these other reflexive-related phrases which could also be equally usefully employed to describe what is odd about Russell’s Paradox. Instead of stressing the element of self-reference, we might have spoken of the element of self-inclusion, that is, of something’s including itself, which is common to this and many other of these paradoxes. What I do wish to stress is that the problem of how to make sense, if at all, of a class’s being a member of itself has close affinities with the problem of how to make sense of a person’s deceiving himself, an object’s moving itself, a proposition’s contradicting itself, an unwanted guest's inviting himself, etc. Self-deception is not self-reference but it is reflexive-related, as is self-membership. Self-reference is just one more reflexive-related notion among many and we must not get its importance out of proportion by assuming that it is the basic genus of which all the others are but species. Ramsey said that the semantic paradoxes cannot be stated in logical terms alone because they contain some reference to thought, language or symbolism.3 On the face of it, this sounds like a distinction without a difference. Does not Russell’s Paradox also contain a reference to thought, language and symbolism? I follow James Moulder in his ‘Is Russell’s Paradox genuine?’ (to whom I am generally indebted in this and my later chapter on class self-membership) in rejecting the view, to be found in Copi, Quine and van Heijenoort, that there are two fundamentally different kinds of paradox.4 All one can say is that some of the paradoxes employ technical terms in logic and mathematics, for example ‘set’, ‘class’ and ‘member’ in Russell’s Paradox, and others do not, for example, the Barber of Seville, which is about a barber and a peculiar way, employing the reflexive form of ‘to shave’, of describing whom he shaves (‘all those who do not shave themselves’). What unites the Barber and Russell s Paradox is the similar way they combine reflexivity, generality 121

Self-reference

(that is, the use o f ‘all’) and negation. As we saw in Chapter 3, counting with reflexives can be a tricky business. In this chapter I want to study some cases in which puzzling questions about the possibility of self-reference naturally arise. Russell’s Paradox will be given a separate chapter later to itself. I shall deal with three topics: (1) can a proposition refer to itself?; (2) the paradox known as ‘the Liar’; and (3) how exactly do I refer to myself? In the first section a powerful isolationist objec­ tion to the possibility of a proposition’s referring to itself will be discussed and rejected. The paradox of the Liar, in the second section, raises the issue of self-reference, not because the Liar actually uses those words ‘self-reference’ or ‘referring to oneself, but because when the Cretan Liar said that all Cretans were liars, his words ‘All Cretans are liars’ are only a source of puzzlement if what the Liar says is understood to refer to his own very words at the moment of speaking and not, as one would naturally expect on first hearing, to his immediately preceding or following remarks. In other words, it is only when ‘What I am now saying is false’ is taken as referring to itself, as meaning, ‘The sentence I am now at this very moment uttering is false’, that the paradox of the Liar arises. Topic (3) raises the question of whether the pronoun ‘I’ is the supreme example of a word whose function is to facilitate self­ reference, that is, our ability to refer to ourselves. I shall argue that, although it is extremely tempting to think that the answer to this question is obviously yes, there are good reasons for denying that this is the right answer. I shall, in particular, be arguing that much of the recent contention surrounding this topic arises from a misunderstanding of what it is to refer to oneself. The true account of what we do when we refer to ourselves is, I think, much more entertaining than the prospect of a discussion about the role of the first person pronoun might lead one to expect. Although initially this sounds like rather an arid topic on which nothing of importance turns, it helps to focus two important ideas in the history of philosophy. First, there is the idea that, when each of us uses the word ‘I’, he is naming some mysterious, non­ physical entity which cannot be identified with his body, showing that there is more to the universe than matter and motion; secondly, many accounts of self-reference foster the idea that the relation between language and the world cannot be reduced to the interaction of physical forces as is found in a man exercising a skill or in a machine interacting with its environment. For 122

Self-reference

whoever says ‘I’ or ‘me’ seems to hit his target, that is, refer to himself in the first person, unerringly every time with a success rate that exceeds the capacity of any possible mechanism in an uncanny way. ‘I’ seems, in short, to behave like a magic bullet, finding its target more surely than the dart thrown from the hand of even the most skilful of darts players and more swiftly than the fastest missile guided by the most sophisticated of homing devices.

1. Can a proposition re fe r to itself? No proposition can make a statement about itself [kann etwas über sich selbst aussagen], because a propositional sign cannot be contained in itself (that is the whole of the ‘theory of types’) . . . The reason why a function cannot be its own argument is that the sign for a function already contains the prototype of its argument, and cannot contain itself. (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 3.332 and part of3.333)’* For a proposition represented by the symbol ‘p’ to say something about itself, ‘p’ would have to say something about ‘p’. But ‘p’, one may well think with Wittgenstein, says simply ‘p’. As a counter-example to Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus, 3.332, however, it might be suggested that if we label the sentence, ‘The sentence “r” is in English’, with the label V, then the sentence labelled V refers to itself and says something true about itself. But the Wittgenstein who wrote this passage would be quick to point out that “‘The sentence T’ is in English” is in English’ does indeed say something about the sentence V but this longer sentence is not itself ‘r’ because it contains ‘r’ as part of itself. To say something about a sentence, you have to get outside the sentence and into another, longer, sentence to say it. A picture, one might remind oneself, cannot depict itself because an image cannot be ‘of itself; it has, so to speak, to face outwards and be ‘of things other than itself. One can see how the longer sentence contained V because you could, for example, cover V up with your hand and still see the rest of the sentence left uncovered. How can a sentence contain itself? Can a matchbox contain itself? In mathematics we are familiar with such functions as the square root of a number or the cosine of an angle. Cos is the function: its 123

Self-reference

values, or arguments, are angles of varying degrees. A cosine is one thing and an angle another; one cannot make sense of the cosine of a cosine. Similarly, it is numbers that have square roots; ‘the square root of the square root function’ makes no sense. A function cannot be its own argument. And if this talk o f‘function’ and ‘argument’ is transported from its original home in math­ ematics into grammar, so that one talks of a propositional function — as Wittgenstein in the Tractatus did under the influence of Frege and Russell — the force of the mathematical analogy will seem that bit more immediate. Russell had felt the need to devise a special symbolism in which objects were identified as belonging to different ‘types’. So that what was true or false of objects of one type could not be significantly said about objects of another type. Wittgenstein, however, is scornful of these preventive measures. There is no point in taking precau­ tions against a logical impossibility, which is what Wittgenstein takes a sentence’s referring to itself to be.b The above reasoning in the extract from the Tractatus is a beautiful illustration of the isolationist fallacy as applied to a sentence’s being about, or saying something about itself, or referring to itself, ‘p’, the isolationist thinks, is powerless to say anything about itself unless it is taken out of its isolation and embedded in a larger sentence, ‘“p” says “p”’, perhaps. This sort of thinking has been encountered in earlier chapters. No door, examined in true isolation, closes itself; you will always find a servo-mechanism attached. No man in true isolation ever taught himself anything; he has always had to depend on others to provide him with the information he needs in order to learn anything in the first place. Nothing is ever done purely for its own sake; there is always some hidden gain pandering to self-interest. Yet the fact is that ‘This sentence is not in French’ does say something true about itself. How is this achieved? Because the phrase ‘this sentence’ refers to the whole sentence in which the phrase occurs. The first two words anticipate the whole, if you like. To the isolationist, with his impossible ideal of what it would be for a sentence to refer to itself, this sounds like a cheat. The fact is, however, that we do, where the context warrants it — in, for example, a book showing samples of typestyles in different languages — react naturally to ‘This sentence is in English’ in the same way that we react to “‘This sentence is in English” is in English.’ We treat both as saying the same thing, though only the former refers to itself. 124

Self-reference

When Wittgenstein says that no proposition can make a statement about itself he is clearly appealing to the idea that a container cannot contain itself; what goes into the container must be something other than itself.7 This fits the example of a matchbox and the matches it contains but it cannot be generalised to guarantee that self-containment makes no sense elsewhere. A list, for example, can be said to contain the various items listed on it. About to go away on holiday, you might decide to make a list of what you will need to take with you, clothing, books, food, etc. The title of the list is ‘things to take on holiday’. Each item contained in the list is entered on a separate line, ‘spare pair of socks’, ‘camera’, ‘gloves’, etc. As the list grows longer, it suddenly occurs to you that one very useful item to have with you on holiday would be the list itself, so that you can refer to it when on holiday to remind yourself of what you have brought and of what you have left behind. In order not to overlook the list itself, you enter the words ‘this list!' on a separate line on the list. The list contains a large number of different items which you are to take with you on holiday; one of them is itself. This list lists itself; it contains itself. The fact that a matchbox cannot contain itself is neither here nor there when it comes to deciding whether it makes sense to speak of a list’s containing itself. You could, of course, point out that a list’s containing itself is different from the way a physical container like a matchbox contains its contents. And that would be true; a list can have contents but it is not a physical container. The lesson we need to learn is that there is no a priori way of deciding in advance whether a given reflexive form has a use or not. Surrounding circumstances make an enormous difference. It will not do, for instance, to insist that every number is equal to itself on the grounds that in algebra ‘a = a’ is a perfectly acceptable conclusion in a proof designed to show that two expressions of different form can be simplified and reduced to the same form. If a is equal to itself, then, surely, one thinks, 2 = 2, 4 = 4, etc. What is wrong with this is that it overlooks the differ­ ence between the role of the statement of identity in a proof in algebra and the role of the numbers in the simple addition and subtraction sums which one learns as a child. ‘2 + 4 = ?’ and ‘8 — ? = 3’ are possible problems in addition and subtraction in elementary arithmetic. But ‘2 = 2’ plays no part in any calcula­ tion or preliminary for calculation such as is played by ‘1 times 2 is 2’ when this is learned parrot fashion as part of learning one’s 125

Self-reference

multiplication tables. ‘2 = ?’ might be answered by such replies as ‘2 = 7 — 5’ but there is no ‘And, of course, don’t forget that 2 = 2.’ It is not that the answer is that 2 is obviously equal to itself, too obviously, perhaps, to be worth mentioning; it is rather that we have no use for the reflexive form ‘equals itself at all in this application. ‘Every number is equal to itself is as empty there as ‘Every one is equal to himself in height’ would be if taught to tailors’ apprentices learning to measure customers for their new suits. The same point could be made about the interpretation of ‘p D p' in the propositional calculus. If the detective says that there is at least one thing he can infer from the fact that the bottle of wine is missing, namely, that the bottle of wine is missing, one thing he has not done is to make a genuine, if pointless, inference. The fact that ‘p d p’ may be assigned a useful role as a step in a proof in symbolic logic must not be allowed to make us think that it is a foregone conclusion that in real life every proposition implies itself. Earlier, it was suggested that the alleged impossibility of a sentence’s referring to itself is supported by the impossibility of a picture’s picturing itself. The picture of the bowl of flowers, hanging on the study wall, is one thing; the bowl of flowers in the artist’s studio, that is, what the picture is of, is quite another. But suppose the artist chose to paint a picture of his own studio, complete with his easel, the bowl of flowers and this very picture of the bowl of flowers resting on the easel. Looking into the picture, which now hangs on our wall, we recognise in it the picture which is now hanging on our wall, reproduced on a smaller scale, shown resting upon the artist’s easel in the picture. And, if there is space, an even smaller scale copy of the picture inside that. Do not say, ‘But this process cannot be repeated indefinitely, since no brush strokes could be fine enough, as they would have to be, were this picture truly to depict itself.’ For that is like objecting that ‘2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and so on ad infinitum does not describe an infinite series on the grounds that what we can see on the page enclosed between the quotation marks is not itself infinite in length, nor could it be so. This suggests how it is possible after all for a sentence to refer to itself. But we are about to discover in the next section that some sentences cannot be interpreted as being about, or referring to, themselves.

126

Self-reference

2. T he paradox o f the Liar What are we to make of the claim, ‘All men are liars’? Should we pause to consider whether, coming from the lips of a man, this is only another of one more man’s lies? If it is, does it count as evidence for or against the truth of his general claim? For if it is a lie, then here is a positive instance to support the generalisation; but if he is lying when he says that all men are liars, then what he says is no lie and he is in fact telling the truth, which surely ought to count against the generalisation. The foregoing thoughts are, I acknowledge, very unnatural. It takes a philosopher to bother to think them. The sentence ‘All men are liars' is, on other occasions, outside philosophy, a perfectly innocent sentence with a decent, uncontrovcrsial job to do. It can be seen performing this job in the following quotation from one of Max Miiller’s lectures in Cambridge in which he tried to combat racism against Hindus portrayed as a people supposedly lacking respect for the truth. Certainly I can imagine nothing more mischievous, more dangerous, more fatal to the permanence of the English rule in India, than for young Civil Servants to go to that country with the idea that it is a sink of moral depravity, an ant's [j/r] nest of lies; for no one is so sure to go wrong, whether in public or in private life, as he who says in his haste: ‘All men are liars.’H In a country where all men are liars, no one tells the truth. It would be a perverse, pedantic misunderstanding of the sweeping generalisation ‘All men are liars’ in the above passage to see its assertion as impossible. This would be like objecting that a child cannot have drunk all his milk if his mother has to wash the dirty glass after he has done so; or finding fault with the remark that someone has been a Liberal all his life on the grounds that as a babe in arms he cannot have held political convictions in the cradle. The paradox of the Liar turns, not on a set of words, which can be perfectly intelligible in their own right, but on a particular interpretation which in a certain mood we feel entitled to place upon them. ‘What I am now saying is false,’ says the liar. Suppose that was all he did say. This compels us to try to treat the liar’s words as referring to themselves and not to something else he has said or is

127

Self-reference

about to say. If what the liar said was true, it was false; and if it was false, it was true. How can that be possible? If there is, as I have suggested, no absolute embargo on a proposition’s referring to itself, what is happening here? If self-reference is not absolutely forbidden, how, if at all, is this sentence to be forbidden? If the aim of the liar was to tell us nothing but lies, where has he gone wrong? I believe that the following story might help. There was once a simple labourer who was instructed to collect a number of new ly painted road signs from the carpenter and to take them back to their appropriate positions at the roadside and re-erect them with the help of his assistant. The labourer loaded the signs onto his lorry and set off. His assistant knew straightaway that there was something wrong when he asked the labourer how they were to find their way around since they had previously taken down many of the local road signs. ‘Not to worry,' said the labourer, ‘We’ve got all the signs we need in the back of the lorry. If we get lost, we can always stop and get out and take a look at them and they’ll show us the way.’ His assistant noted that each sign already had a label stuck on it. The label said, ‘This sign is the wrong way up.’ The label had been attached in the workshop so that if the labourer could read the label as he was erecting the sign, he would know that he was putting it in upside down. This system had brought about a big reduction in the number of wrongly installed signs. A label saying, ‘This sign is the right way up’ was also being tried out and it seemed to produce the desired effect too. Imagine the assistant’s astonishment when the labourer said, ‘The label has stopped me getting into trouble for putting the signposts in upside down. But I still keep putting them in the wrong way round. I wish they would label the signs “This sign is the wrong way round” in the workshop and then all my problems would be solved. The inspector does have some labels with these words on them but he only attaches them after I’ve put up the signs. I wish they would not leave it so late before putting the “wrong way round” labels on and then I could follow the instruction on the label and not make so many mistakes over the positioning of my signs.’ As the labourer spoke, his assistant had a momentary vision of the labourer standing back and looking at a sign he had just erected, seeing the label, ‘This sign is the wrong way round’, and then carefully twisting the sign round one full turn before proceeding contentedly on his way. I want to draw a comparison between ‘This sentence is false’, the sentence at the heart of the 128

Self-reference

Liar paradox, and ‘This sign is the wrong way round’ in my story. I f ‘This sentence is in English’ can be taken, when referring to itself, to mean '“This sentence is in English” is in English’, it seems to be only fair to treat ‘This sentence is false’ in a similar way. ‘“This sentence is false” is false’ can, one supposes, be treated mechanically in order to simplify it by eliminating the double appearance of ‘is false’. If the sentence inside double quotation marks is false, then we seem to be entitled to say, ‘This sentence is not false.’ In other words, we can say, ‘This sentence is true.’ But do we know what we mean when we go through these successive transformations, which are, on the face of it, no more than an instance of the rule, ‘If it is false that it is false that p, then it is not false that p, in other words, it is true that p’? Are we any different from the labourer who goes through the motions of obeying the instruction ‘This sign is the wrong way round’ by twisting it round one complete turn, pauses, then twists the sign round again, and so on? What the labourer did would have made sense if it had been in response to the inspector’s labelling a post the labourer had previously erected facing in the wrong direction. But that is because the sign had then been already planted in position, albeit the wrong way round. In position, the sign points. In the back of the lorry, it does not. The use of the label ‘This sign is the wrong way round’ is parasitic upon a signpost that points. Similarly, ‘This sentence is false’ cannot be used as a guide to the truth or falsity of itself; it is parasitic upon the truth or falsity of other sentences. It has, so to speak, to point outside itself in order to be of any use. But we may be tempted not to realise this because ‘This signpost is upside down’ acts perfectly satisfac­ torily as a guide before the signpost is planted. The introduction of ‘is false’ and ‘is true’ (if you substitute ‘is true’ for ‘is false’ and replace the liar with someone who mysteriously says, ‘ I his sentence is true’, the air of paradox is not removed) into an example of alleged self-reference is what is giving rise to problems which are not present with other predicates, ‘is in English , for example, used in conjunction with a sentence referring to itself. ‘This sentence is true’ is used as a tick is used to show that a piece of written work is correct or like the rubber stamp ‘approved’. There has to be something apart from the tick or the stamp to be ticked or stamped for the symbol to do its job properly. A tick all by itself cannot be seen as somehow ‘ticking itself. 129

Self-reference

Unlike ‘wrong way round’, ‘wrong way up’, painted on the signpost before it is planted, could be a useful instruction. The label ‘wrong way round’, when it is attached to a signpost before it is planted, just cannot be used to determine the signpost’s siting in the way that the labourer, pleased with the success of ‘wrong way up’, was hoping. Similarly, the sentence, ‘What I am sayin ç is false’ cannot be used to pass comment on its own falsity; it has to be used to point outside itself to the falsity of other independent sentences. The explanation for this difference between ‘wrong way round’ and ‘. . . is false’, on the one hand, and ‘wrong way up’ and ‘. . . is in Fmglish’, on the other, is that a signpost does not have to be in position and pointing before it can be held the right or wrong way up, and that someone who can read English can tell merely from reading a sentence that it is printed the right or the wrong way up, and whether it is or is not in English. But merely from looking at a sentence which can be used to say something true or false you cannot tell whether it is true or not, any more than you can tell from looking at a signpost on the work-bench whether it is the right or the wrong way round. The sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’, to be found on this very page beneath the reader’s eyes, is a sentence lying, so to speak, on the work-bench; it is neither true nor false. In order to determine whether it is true or false, the sentence has first to be actually used to say something — the equivalent of the signpost’s being planted — and then you have to lift your eyes from the written word and look about you to tell if it is true or false. The carpenter in the workshop cannot tell from looking at the signpost he is repairing whether it is the right or the wrong way round. In the workshop, it is neither. The significance of the paradox of the Liar is that it picks out a type of sentence, superficially extremely similar to other successfully self-referential sentences, which cannot be used to refer to itself.

3. H ow to re fe r to o neself You can pity yourself without realising it. ‘T hat poor man!’ you say, unaware that the poor man in question whose fate you are bewailing is yourself. You are pitying yourself but you are not able to express your thought correctly by putting the gram­ matical object of the verb ‘to pity’ into the first person. You do not say, ‘I pity myself.’ In short, your thought is not captured by 130

Self-reference

the first person reflexive form of the verb. ‘Poor me!', on the other hand, is the voice of self-pity, of one who pities himself and who could say of himself, ‘I am pitying myself.' Self-pity is pitying yourself when this could be expressed reflexivcly in the first person, that is, it is pitying yourself self-consciously. Self-esteem and self-respect also behave like self-pity. A poet with a bad memory might come across a few of his own lines of poetry, written several years ago, and, failing to recognise them as his own, express his admiration for their composer. His discovery that it is he who wrote the admired lines will boost his self-esteem but his earlier voiced admiration for their author was not already at that stage a manifestation of self-esteem. Similarly, you can refer to yourself without realising it. To borrow and adapt an example from Elizabeth Anscombe, Mr Albert Smith might read out a will in which a Mr Horatio Smith is left a lot of money without appreciating that he is the Horatio Smith in question, because, let us suppose, this is the name that was given to him by his parents before he was orphaned as a small baby and sent abroad to be adopted.9 Albert Smith could not say, ‘When I say “Horatio Smith'’ I am referring to myself.' Had he tumbled to the identity at the time, he would have realised that every time he said ‘Horatio Smith' he was referring to himself. If, however, in a different, perfectly straightforward case free from any problems of concealed identity, the beneficiary had simply said, ‘I am going to inherit the money’, would he have been referring to himself? In this latter example, does the first person pronoun ‘I’ do directly and unambiguously in the first person what ‘Horatio Smith’ did obliquely in the third person, namely, allow its utterer to refer to himself? Let us look more closely at this idea of being able to refer to oneself in the first person through the use o f‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘myself. Each morning at the office the manager finds a large pile of letters on the desk for him to sign. Each time he signs his signature, has he referred to himself? Has he spent a good part of his morning referring to himself? That, surely, is not how' he would naturally describe his morning’s work to head office. A manager who could not sign a letter without referring to himself, whether on paper beneath his signature or out loud as he wrote his name, would be mad. Suppose he sat in the middle of his office, repeating his own name out loud over and over again. Would, then, that be his referring to himself? Again, it would not be natural to describe his symptoms to his psychiatrist in these 131

Self-reference

terms. Suppose, instead, he had sat there and said, ‘I, I, I, I, . . . me, me, me, me’ endlessly or kept repeating 41 am in here’ (I include this example for those inclined to say that ‘I’ refers to its utterer only in the context of a complete sentence). Would any of this be describable as his for ever referring to himself? That sounds wrong too. On the other hand, we do know what to expect when told that the trouble with someone new in the office is that she is constantly referring to herself. That might be a secretary who was constantly speaking of her own exploits, interests and daily doings to the exclusion of all else. No matter what the topic of conversation was, she would bring it back to herself. What began as your description of your holiday would soon become her description of hers. We would expect someone who kept constantly referring to himself to be self-centred, self-obsessed even. To refer to yourself requires more than the unselfish saying out loud, or the writing down, of your own name or the pronoun T \ I am not saying that you have to do more than refer to yourself to refer to yourself. Signing your signature or saying your name or T aloud is not referring to yourself at all. It is, as one might expect, not just in reflexive examples that ‘to refer to’ requires a wider stage setting than the mere mention of a name or the use of a pronoun. To turn, for a moment, to non­ reflexive examples: you refer to your father by quoting his legal or medical case, by referring to his latest book, consulting him for his expert opinion, etc. Some fathers have not got up to the necessary tricks in life to be ever much referred to by their children. ‘To refer to’ can be quite properly used to connect language with reality but it is not the sort of connection envisaged by the logicians, as, for instance, in the following explanation of the title of a piece of music by Granados: ‘Rondalla Aragonesca refers to a street dance performed in the evenings by the young men in the towns and villages of Aragon where Granados once lived.’ The logician will say that whoever simply pronounces that title thereby refers to the piece of music of which it is the name but I think that you have to do more than announce the title of the piece about to be played to count as having referred to it. The schoolmaster who calls the roll and reads aloud the name of each child is not referring, not even briefly referring in passing, to each child as he does so. The logician’s way of talking about our making reference to things does not do justice to the possibility of making a brief reference to something. I want to remind myself of the kinds of circumstances in which 132

Self-reference

we would naturally speak of someone’s referring to himself. An author with several books already to his name can refer to himself in his latest book by including in it an openly acknowledged reference to a passage from one of his earlier writings. Someone can be in the habit of referring to himself in the third person as ‘the old un’. ‘They don't care about the old ’un’, he complains, meaning himself. I can coyly tell someone, ‘You do have at least one secret admirer’ and be referring to myself, although I keep her guessing. ‘It’s me', I say to myself under my breath. Should I come out into the open with it and say, ‘You have at least one admirer, namely, myself, do I then refer to myself with ‘myself? I think not. She can’t now ask, ‘Who ever do you mean?’ And this is not because it is obvious who it is that I mean when I say ‘It’s me.’ A different story is needed to illustrate its being obvious that I am referring to myself. ‘You have at least one admirer and I don’t think I need to spell out to you his name.’ It might be obvious to her by now that I am referring to myself. Or again, asked to give a lecture on divorce and re-marriage, a social worker can decide not to mention his own case and so avoid referring to himself. The account of referring to oneself which I have just put forward is in conflict with the standard account of reference to be found in most modern logic textbooks and in many books and articles written by philosophers who have been trained to follow the textbook. Logicians say that the speaker uses the word ‘I’ to refer to himself.10 Proper names have long been regarded by logicians as paradigm cases of referring words. I think this favours an isolationist account of referring to oneself. As though one could take a page from a diary and blank out all the text except for the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘myself and thereby count up the number of times the diarist has referred to himself. But I think we need to know more than such a blanked out text could tell us before we could be in a position to say how many times the writer had referred to himself. One way, just mentioned, for an author to refer to himself is for him to make references to passages in his previously published writings. Referring, not just to oneself, is a much more specialised activity than modern logic, with its tendency to treat a huge range of words as ‘referring words would suggest.11 The logician will treat the sentence, ‘In the last two weeks of August my father and mother took me and my brother David on the first of our two holidays' as containing a large number of referring words and phrases. ‘The last two 133

Self-reference

weeks' refers to the last two weeks, ‘August’ refers to August, ‘my father’ to my father, ‘(my) mother’ to my mother, etc. The idea of referring is thus worked to death in the logician’s account of what the speaker is doing. It occurs so frequently that it is emptied of any real content. The fact that in certain contexts, including this one, it would not make sense to ask ‘Who do you mean by “my father”?’ is — I think mistakenly — thought to show that it is obvious that you were referring to or meaning your father when you said ‘my father’. But if it makes no sense to ask ‘Who do you mean?’, it makes no sense to answer, ‘I mean so and so.’ As Anscombe puts it, ‘Getting hold of the wrong object is excluded, and that makes us think getting hold of the right object is guaranteed. But the reason is that there is no getting hold of an object at all’ (Anscombe, ‘The first person’ p. 59). Hence the magical element, the feeling that referring is a mysterious process, which creeps into modern explanations in the recent history of philosophy as to how the referring relationship between language and the world has arisen in so many places. A particular manifestation of the account of referring which I am attacking is to be found in statements such as ‘“Hesperus” refers to Hesperus’ or ‘“Aristotle” refers to Aristotle.’ Such statements are sometimes presented as the corner stones of modern theories of meaning and language.12 In my view, they are degenerate bits of English, like ‘Every number is equal to itself, ‘Every proposition can be deduced from itself and ‘Everyone is equal to himself in height’ discussed earlier in Chapter 1 (p. 4). When there are two people of our acquaintance, each called David, and I say, ‘David did it’, you may enquire, ‘Which David are you referring to?’ This question can be answered in a num­ ber of different ways but ‘ “David” refers to David’ is not one of them. When we know of just one person called David, am I entitled to say then that ‘David’ refers to David? This is like the suggestion that, because it makes sense to tell the Frenchman learning English that ‘horse’ means cheval, it must be correct to tell the Englishman who is not learning any language that ‘horse’ means horse. The trouble with this is that, whereas the first sentence gives the foreigner the meaning of the word ‘horse’ in his own language, the second sentence has no job to do. Do not regard it as a foregone conclusion that, because we can give the meaning of almost any word in our own language to a foreigner in his, it follows automatically that we can give the meaning of any word in our own language to another native speaker. Perhaps the 134

Self-reference

English reader has at some stage been given the meaning of the English word ‘carapace’ but he has never been given the meaning of the word ‘red’ or ‘egg’ or ‘themselves’ in sentences beginning, ‘The meaning of the word . . . is ’ What we need to do is to restore the notion of referring to someone to its rightful place and to reinstate the natural description of what is being done in the examples alleged to be of referring. Thus, when someone introduces himself with the words, ‘I am David’, he is not referring to himself twice over and expressing the relationship of identity between the two referents: he is giving his own name, or saying who he is, or maybe introducing himself. It is no more true that ‘I’ in ‘I am David’ refers to me than that ‘today’ in ‘Today is Wednesday' refers to today. In the first sentence I give my name and in the second I give the date. Neither is a statement of identity. A similar loss of content can afflict the reflexive phrase ‘identifying oneself as it is used by modern logicians. One of the chapters of a recent book on reference, The varieties of reference, is entitled ‘Self-identification’. ‘The essence of “I” is self-reference', says the author, Gareth Evans, and the chapter is based on the idea that ‘I’ serves as a vehicle for self-identification.I:* Anscombe’s view that the first person pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything is described by Evans as ‘an extraordinary conclusion’ (Evans, The varieties of reference, p. 212, footnote 14, and again on p. 215, footnote 20). It is true that in certain special ‘self-in­ solitary’ examples — brains in vats, amnesia, total anaesthesia — Evans is prepared to accept the possibility o f‘I’-thoughts without the ability to identify oneself (Evans, The varieties of reference, p. 253) and he is anxious to stress the use o f ‘I’ in thought, but not in speech, where it performs no communicative role. Yet the gap between Evans and Anscombe may not be as great as it at first appears for Evans also tells us that, when a subject thinks one of these ‘I’-thoughts, there is self-identification and a thought about oneself but it need not be the case that the subject’s T thought has an object (Evans, The varieties of reference, p. 251 ). I wish to bring out the unnaturalncss of Evans’ way of talking about identifying oneself. You have not identified yourself twice to the police, who have you cornered in the woodshed, but do not know your identity and keep asking you to identify yourself, if you shout back ‘I am staying in here and I am not coming out alive!’ Two uses of the pronoun ‘I’ do not add up to two acts of selfidentification. In order to identify yourself you need to give your 135

Self-reference

name, your next of kin, shout ‘Friend!’ to the sentry on guard, etc., so that you count as having told others who you arc, whose side you are on, etc. Using the first person pronoun is not, by itself, anything whatsoever to do with identifying oneself. There is a similar tendency to abuse the logic of ‘identify’ used nonreflexively in the philosophy of perception, when ‘identify’ is substituted for ‘see’, ‘hear’, etc. The suggestion is that whenever we see or hear things, we are identifying them by sight, by sound, etc. This thought has a strong attraction for any philosopher who wishes to show that there is always an additional element of interpretation, nowadays often construed as inner mental com­ putation, present in perception. But this obscures an important distinction. The bird-watcher identifies birds by consulting his bird books and checking up on their distinctive markings. But he does not first identify the markings he goes by in identifying the birds he has seen. He just sees the markings. Someone who has seen the bird the bird-watcher saw may not have identified it at all. But that does not mean that he hasn’t seen it and can’t put a name to it. To identify a bird on the wing you have to work out what kind of bird it is from its distinctive features. Looking it up in a bird book is one way of doing this. The peasant who has worked in the fields all his life can see a plover and tell you its name without having identified the bird he saw as a plover at all. It is a positive mistake to explain the peasant’s performance as dependent on some extremely rapid form of looking up and identifying carried out in an analogue of a bird book stored in his allegedly computer-like brain. On each occasion when someone who is not so self-centred as to make himself the centre of the conversation all the time, and not so mad as to say nothing but his name or the word ‘I’ out loud, uses the word ‘I’, is he referring to himself? When a modest, self-effacing man speaks and uses ‘I’ is he too referring to himself, but in modest amounts? ‘I’, it has been said, is the word used by the speaker to refer to himself. ‘“I” names me, not my body and cannot fail to do so every time I use it’, is the conviction I wish to test. Is the social worker’s ‘In discussing personal problems connected with divorce I shall not refer to myself self-defeating? If the person who said this kept off his own personal problems and made no mention of his own case, even when it was similar to the one under discussion, would he have broken his pledge and referred to himself just because his talk was given in the first person? If we are to say this, we need a reason for doing so. What 136

Self-reference

I am suggesting is that mentioning or keeping quiet about one’s own case, in this example, is what makes sense of the difference between referring and not referring to oneself. But an isolationist treatment of self-reference will see the intrusion of talk about ‘one’s own case’ as an irrelevance; the isolationist will want to get a man alone with his name or the first person pronoun, repeated out loud or said silently in imagination in order to study self­ reference in its purest form. It is possible to resist the attraction of this picture by attending to some circumstances in which someone actually does refer to himself. ‘There is at least one other person here who agrees with you.’ When we hear this said at a meeting, we might wonder, ‘Is he referring to himself or could it just be that he realises that I am in agreement and means me?’ If the speaker had come straight out with it and said, ‘I agree,’ would he have been openly referring to himself? There is something that the use o f‘I’ does openly which ‘one other person here’ does covertly, but is this something ‘referring to oneself? ‘I agree with you’ lets others know that you are the one who agrees. How does it do that? In order to gain an insight into the role of the first person pronoun, consider what might make the use of ‘T, as in ‘I agree’ in this example, inoperative. Suppose that, when we spoke, nothing visibly changed in our external appearance. Suppose our voices all sounded metallic and very similar. In a room, the sound, when anyone spoke, came from a loudspeaker placed in one corner. At a meeting, ‘I agree with you’, coming from the loudspeaker, would not be a great deal of help from the point of view of communication. Somebody had expressed his agreement. But who? Such creatures would have no use for ‘I’. We are different from them. It is a very general fact about us that we can tell from someone’s uttering ‘I agree’ in our presence who said it. We go by facial changes, the direction of the sound, the timbre of the voice, and so on. The alleged function of ‘referring’ does not get a mention in this description of how the utterance of ‘I’ gets us to attribute ‘He agrees’ to the utterer o f‘I agree’ and not to someone else who was present and who also spoke. It may seem paradoxical to suggest that ‘one other person here in the above example refers whereas ‘I’ does not. I think this feeling is to be compared to a similar feeling that may be experienced when it is claimed that, although babies are taught to feed themselves and the elderly sometimes can no longer feed 137

Self-reference

themselves, a normal adult eating with knife and fork is not automatically to be described as ‘feeding him self. We are inclined to think that if the baby had to acquire the skill and the aged can lose it, then it must be with us in our middle years. But ‘Don’t go in there; father is feeding himself requires a rather different scene to be going on behind the closed door from that conjured up by ‘Don’t go in; father is eating.’ Similarly, in Chapter 6 I argued that not every one who moves, moves himself. And shaving, that is, having a shave (se raser in French), is not quite the same thing as shaving oneself (se raser soi-même in French). Babies who no longer need to be fed can feed themselves and the elderly who cannot feed themselves have to be fed. When cook is away, her employers may have to feed themselves. It is cook who usually feeds them and they must fend for themselves and do for themselves what cook normally does. But when cook returns, they are not feeding themselves as they put the food cook has prepared into their mouths. Those who employ no cooks and are long since weaned may also eat the food they themselves have cooked but that does not mean that they too are feeding themselves. When they do their cooking, they are not standing in for their cooks or taking over from their mothers; they are not their own cooks for the week or for life. For most of his life many an adult male in our society eats the food set before him and leaves feeding himself to his infancy, his dotage and the times when his wife is away. Some people use 'Yours Truly’ to refer jokingly to themselves. Might not someone deliberately refrain from using the first person pronoun ‘I’ and say ‘Yours Truly’ instead? Wouldn't he then be referring to himself by ‘Yours Truly’ all the time and wouldn’t the possibility of this substitution show that he has also been referring to himself all along with ‘I’? I do not accept the force of this objection. It is true that, on hearing someone say ‘And what did he say about Yours Truly?’, we can wonder momentarily who he means but this is because this use o f‘Yours Truly’ is jokingly mysterious. Against this background ‘Who does he mean?’ makes sense because one has to work it out. Similarly, a translator may interpolate his own opinions into the middle of his simultaneous translation of someone else’s speech. ‘When you said “I feel sick” did you mean yourself or the person for whom you arc translating?’ makes sense here as a question to put to the translator. We might also ask the translator whether he was

138

Self-reference

speaking for himself in his own voice or not. But what these two examples show is that only in the context of an intelligible contrast can one half of the contrast be instantiated. It does not follow that every time I use the word ‘I’, especially when ‘Who are you referring to?’ makes no sense, that I am referring to myself; nor is it true that every time I speak I am either speaking for myself or allowing someone else to speak through me. Often when I speak I am doing neither. The old man sitting alone on the park bench, who thinks he is talking to his brother who died several years ago, is talking to himself without realising it. The teacher whose class sneaked out on him when he turned his back on them to write on the board found to his surprise that he had been talking to himself. The lecturer who is alone in his study is overheard talking to himself but the difference between him and the first two cases is, let us charitably suppose, that he believes he is alone. Talking to oneself comes to different things in these three examples. The lecturer can be overheard to say, ‘I shall do so and so’ and ‘You should do so and so.’ In both sentences the lecturer is talking to himself — he does not need to address himself as ‘y°u as *n the second sentence to count as talking to himself— but in the first sentence, ‘I shall do so and so’, he is not addressing himself at all. You cannot address yourself if you stick to the first person pronoun. So far we have looked at referring to someone chiefly in the sense of making a reference to him but there is also such a thing as referring to someone, including oneself, as so and so. Someone can refer to himself as ‘the old ’un’ or as ‘Caesar’ or as ‘Yours Truly’ or even as ‘you’ (as we have just seen in the example of the lecturer addressing himself as ‘you’) or ‘he’ or ‘a veteran of two world wars’. But I cannot refer to myself as something just by the use of the first person pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘myself. Whatever I choose to refer to myself as, secret pet names included, I could, if these names were bruited abroad, be known as, or addressed as this, or called this by others. Others can’t call me ‘I’, where ‘I’ is the first person pronoun followed by a verb in the first person singular, and I do not call myself‘I’ either when I use ‘I’ in this way. ‘During this lecture I shall refer to myself as “I”’ will rightly raise a few eyebrows in the audience. I f ‘I’ is to be used by me to refer to myself, I shall have to say such things as ‘You can tell I later' and ‘I is waiting for an answer’ and others will be able to refer to me as T ’. W hat I and others then say is not

139

Self-reference

ungrammatical because T here has ceased to be a first person pronoun and has become a queer name, by which I could be called by others as well as myself. I do not believe that the first person pronoun ‘I’ refers, whether it occurs in a spoken or written sentence or in a silent thought. Philosophers who lay stress on the silent, meditational use o f ‘I’ and who treat it as referring to something are likely at some stage to want to call the alleged referent of ‘I’ or ‘me’ the self Thus, Evans suggests that it is useful to reflect on the etymology o f‘the self. ‘The self is presumably whatever it is about which a thinker thinks when he is thinking about himself (Evans, The varieties of reference, p. 259, footnote 2). First, this tells us nothing about the etymology of the noun ‘self. Secondly, as a guide to explaining what is meant by the philosophers’ use o f‘the self, it is as helpful as the observation, ‘The self is whatever it is which a rambler nettles when he nettles himself ’ The idea that whoever thinks a thought expressed in the form ‘I am . . .’ must be thinking about a self, namely, himself is no better than the idea that a spoken ‘I’ always refers to or identifies the speaker. You would be quite right to object to my second ‘definition’ o f‘the self that a rambler who had nettled himself might have nettled his leg but that this is not what is meant by the ‘self. And you would be equally in the right if you objected to Evans’ definition on the grounds that a thinker who is thinking about himself might be thinking about his dinner and that ‘self does not mean ‘dinner’ either. There are perfectly good uses for the noun ‘self, for instance in ‘The trouble with you is that it is self first, self last, and self all the time’ but the philosophers’ self, the thing which cannot but be unerringly referred to by the first person pronouns ‘T, ‘me’ or ‘myself, is a mythical creature born of the fallacy of isolationism as applied to self-reference.

Notes 1. For brief summaries of the various paradoxes mentioned here see Witold Marciszewski (ed.), Dictionary of logic: as applied in the study of language (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1981), ‘Antinomies’, pp. 22-9. 2. The suggestion is to be found in F.P. Ramsey, ‘The foundations of mathematics’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, vol. 25, 1926, pp. 338-84; also in Ramsey’s Thefoundations of mathematics, and other logical essays (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., London, 1931), Ch. 1, pp. 1-61. 3. See F.P. Ramsey, The foundations of mathematics, p. 20. According to 140

Self-reference

Ramsey, the group of paradoxes to which Russell’s Paradox belongs ‘involve only logical or mathematical terms such as class or number, and show that there must be something wrong with our logic or mathematics’, while the other group to which the paradox of the Liar belongs ‘all contain some reference to thought, language or symbolism, which are not formal but empirical terms.’ 4. James Moulder, ‘Is Russell’s Paradox genuine?’, Philosophy, 49 (1974), pp. 295-302. Support for the division of the paradoxes into two groups can be found in I.M. Copi, The theory of logical types (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1971), pp. 15-20; W.van O. Quine, ‘Paradox’ in The ways of paradox, and other essays, revised edn (Harvard University Press, Cam­ bridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 10-13; and J. van Heijenoort, ‘Logical paradoxes’ in P. Edwards, (ed.), The encyclopedia of philosophy, vol. 5 (Macmillan, London, 1967), pp. 45-51. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1961), p. 31. 6. Commenting on Wittgenstein’s two claims at this point in the Tractatus: (1) that no sentence can make a statement about itself; and (2) that no function can be its own argument, Hidé Ishiguro says ‘These two theses were seen by him as truths about symbolism or language. They tell us what can and cannot be expressed. They are more like the truth that in a map one cannot express at the same time that Paris is north of Rome and that it is to the south of it. It is not as though a map shows that Rome is both south and north of Paris and it be for us to decide whether what the map says is false or nonsense’ (Hide Ishiguro, ‘Wittgenstein and the theory of types’ in Irving Block (ed.), Perspectives on the philosophy of Wittgenstein (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1981), pp. 43-59 (pp. 48-9). This analogy seems to me to miss the force of Wittgenstein’s objection. There is nothing to prevent the same map showing in error the same town in two different places. This might even be done deliberately when the map maker is unsure where the town really is and knows of two likely positions. A suitable map-making analogy for Wittgenstein's point about the alleged impossibility of sentences and functions containing them­ selves would be ‘No map can show itself on itself.’ Russell mentions that Royce appealed to this map analogy when discussing whether there could be reflexive classes (Russell, Introduction to mathematical philosophy (Allen and Unwin, London, 1919) p. 80). 7. ‘As W. says 3.332, no sentence can (possibly) be contained in itself wrote G.E. Moore in his Commonplace book. ‘No whole can possibly be identical with a mere part of itself but it does not follow from this that a sentence cannot “say” (= be used to say) something about itself. E.g. “This sentence, which I am now uttering (or writing), began with a I”' (G.E. Moore, Commonplace book: 1919-1953 edited by Casimir Lewy (Allen and Unwin, London, 1962), p. 313). 8. Quoted in Nirad C. Chaudhuri, The life of hriedrich Max Müller: Scholar extraordinary (Orient Paperbacks, New Delhi, 1974), p. 304. 9. G.E.M. Anscombe, ‘The first person’, in Samuel Guttenplan (ed.) Mind and language (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), pp. 45-65, (p. 47). 141

Self-reference

10. For example, P.F. Strawson, Introduction to logical theory (Methuen, London, 1952), p. 213: ‘Examples of referring rules are: the word “I” is correctly used by a speaker to refer to himself; the word “you” is correctly used to refer to the person or persons whom the speaker is addressing 11. I suspect that the biggest influence on recent thinking about reference has been exerted by P.T. Geach, Reference and generality (Cornell University Press, New York, 1962), the translation of Bedeutung (the ordinary German word for meaning) as ‘reference’ in the English translations of Frege’s works published by Geach and Max Black, P.F. Strawson’s Introduction to logical theory (see note 10) and also the second half of Strawson’s Individuals (Methuen, London, 1961). In Introduction to logical theory Strawson says ‘Elucidation of some or all of the uses of such words as “the”, “a”, “over there”, “he”, “they”, “now”, “here”, “this”, “those” are elucidations of referring rules; so are some discussions of the uses of many tenses of verbs’ (p. 213). Interestingly, Geach has recently attacked the idea of a ‘referring expression’ and argued that neither his own work nor his translations of Frege have been responsible for the widespread, and in his view, mistaken theory that there is some single job of referring performed by a large number of grammatically different phrases (P.T. Geach, ‘Reference and Buridan’s Law’, Philosophy, 62 (1987), pp. 7-15). 12. A recent endorsement of this view of reference is to be found in John McDowell’s ‘On the sense and reference of a proper name’, Mind, 86 (1977), pp. 159-85; ‘“Hesperus” stands for (denotes) Hesperus’ is, according to McDowell (p. 161), a typical axiom in a theory of truth dealing with fragments of English in English. 13. Gareth Evans, The varieties of reference (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982), edited bv John McDowell; see Ch. 7, ‘Self-identification’, pp. 205-66 (p. 207).

142

Suicide and Self-killing

Suicide has been seen by some as a wicked sin against the divine gift of life, no matter how burdensome one’s life may have become to oneself or to others, and, at the other extreme, suicide has been seen as a courageous course of conduct to be preferred to constant, agonising, suffering, to the immanent prospect of senile dementia, or of a vegetable existence or permanent coma, to the abject loss of face or to becoming a burden to those who have to care for a person in such desperate circumstances.1 Philosophers tend to feel the need to take a stance on the question of whether there is an absolute prohibition on suicide or whether, and if so, when, it is permitted. In this respect, the ethics of suicide is discussed in a way which bears a resemblance to discussion of the ethics of self-deception. 'Isn't suicide self-murder and isn’t murder always wrong?’, someone asks, and in the same tone of voice he might ask, ‘Isn’t self-deception really self-deceit and isn’t deceit always morally wrong?’ But others will think these stern words murder and deceit give suicide and self-deception too bad a press and will come up with examples where, they think, only an absolute ‘Thou shalt not!’ prevents one from regarding suicide as sometimes regrettably acceptable or self-deception as occasion­ ally harmless. In the case of self-deception I have already suggested that we need to be on our guard against the suggestion that the fact that self-deception has been called self-deceit shows that self-deceivers practise deceit upon, or behave deceitfully towards, themselves. Phis is because there are logical difficulties in the way of making sense of dcceitfulness directed at oneself. Similarly, ‘He has murdered himself is odd because it breaks the logical ties which connect m urder with other sorts of slaying in which the 143

Suicide and Self-killing

murderer’s victim is someone other than the murderer himself. In those cases we can contrast murder with manslaughter and other forms of killing (by car drivers of pedestrians in fatal accidents, of the enemy by soldiers in battle, etc.). But, where suicide is illegal, could the verdict be ‘manslaughter’ rather than ‘murder’? What would this mean? ‘If suicide is self-murder, suicides must murder themselves’ is reflexive logic decided by etymology rather than by consideration of what it makes sense to say and think. There are other respects in which suicide shares the logic of the reflexives and this is hardly surprising, it might be felt, because the suicide kills himself (reflexive). True enough, but even that innocent sounding observation can lead us into interesting conceptual difficulties. The Roman senator who dies as a result of plunging a dagger into his heart commits suicide. He kills himself. But what about the twentieth-century suicide who places his head on the railway line and is crushed to death by the train he normally catches each morning to the office? Wasn’t he killed by the train? Then did he kill himself into the bargain too? Exactly what was it that killed him? What do you have to have done in order to count as having killed yourself What if, instead of being killed by a train, he had been killed by some other person, could that still be suicide? Suppose, for example, a deranged, suicidal parent persuades his three-year-old son to point a loaded pistol at his parent’s head and to pull the trigger in sport. The gun goes off and the parent is killed, as he intended. Did he kill himself? Yet surely he didn’t shoot himself. It wasn’t his finger that pulled the trigger. Was he not killed by his innocent, ill-used child? Has the child shot someone who nevertheless still managed to kill himself? Is this a real, if paradoxical, possibility or a logical absurdity? It is upon these and other puzzling questions about the logic of suicide and killing oneself that I wish to concentrate in this chapter. I do not propose to moralise about the ethics of suicide. My belief is that the apparent gulf between the liberal view that suicide is sometimes permitted and the absolutist view that it is always wrong owes its existence, in part at least, to an over-simplified interpretation of the complex logic of suicide and self-killing. To go back to the example of the commuter and the train for a moment: what if the driver of the train had had time to stop but had recognised the man lying on the track to be someone he hated and had deliberately failed to brake fiercely? Would the com­ muter, who knew nothing of this complication, have committed 144

Suicide and Self-killing

suicide (and thereby have killed himself) and the driver have committed murder (and thereby have killed the man who killed himself)? Can one and the same death be both a murder or a manslaughter or a killing by someone else and at the same time a suicide? Somehow, that seemingly clear picture of the Roman senator committing suicide does not help us to get a clear grip on what is happening in these other cases. I believe that it will be helpful to compare such puzzling cases with other puzzling situations in which reflexives play the key role. That way, we can free ourselves from this over-simplifying picture and learn to see it as only a part of a larger pattern. In this case, for example, it is important to notice that the Roman senator who plunged the dagger in his own breast died by his own hand. The suicidal commuter in the original example, where the driver’s motives were of no importance, did not and that is where the difference between them lies. But both committed suicide. What the example of the commuter and the train shows is that it is possible to kill yourself without dying by your own hand. You can kill yourself and so commit suicide without laying a finger on yourself, as did the commuter who threw himself under the train. It helps, I find, to be able to recollect that you can teach yourself to play a musical instrument either by trial and error, relying on your own resources in an independent, self-reliant, stay-at-home way, or by going out and buying a Teach yourself book written by someone else. Your dependence on the writer of the book does not necessarily invalidate your claim to be teaching yourself (‘I’m teaching myself from this very helpful book’ makes sense) provided the author does not take over the job of being your teacher. Not to die by one's own hand from a self-inflicted wound still allows one to kill oneself under the wheels of a train and for this self-killing to be suicide. The mistakenly restricted picture of suicide as taking one’s own life by one’s own hand comes about because of a characteristic philosophical reaction. We stare at the sentence ‘He killed himself and see in our mind’s eyes two pictures of the suicide, one captioned ‘the killer’, the other ‘the killer’s victim’. The picture of the killer shows him standing with a gun or a dagger, etc., in his hand; the picture of the killer’s victim shows the same man lying dead with the fatal wound visible and the fatal instrument shown in the first picture still in his hand. This might remind us of that misleading picture of a self-contradictory proposition as having to appear twice in the subject and object 145

Suicide and Self-killing

position in the sentence frame \ . . contradicts . . on the grounds that it must contradict itself. But, as we saw in Chapter 4, this fits only one kind of example which is not necessarily the commonest way in which self-contradiction occurs. Or again, there is a similar tendency to picture the self-deceiver cut ofTfrom all outside influences and contacts in order to see how it is possible for someone all on his own to deceive himself. As a result, one’s examples are all of cases in which the self-deceiver deceives himself only about some aspect of himself and one overlooks the fact that it is possible to deceive oneself about other people and other things unconnected with oneself. The world of reflexive logic is self-enclosed and self-contained but not in the ‘isolationist’ way we first suspect. One way in which it might be thought that the philosophical response to suicide has differed from that shown to other reflexive-related notions, such as self-deception or the self-mover, is that it is hardly likely that anyone will want to argue that suicide or killing oneself is logically impossible. I acknowledge that such thoroughgoing scepticism has not found support in the discussion of suicide but there is a modified version which resembles the sceptic’s position. Spinoza, for example, argued that it was impossible for anything to destroy itself without external assistance, deploying arguments which sound similar to those used by Aristotle against self-movement (hardly surprising, because Spinoza sees the destruction of an object as its being broken up into bits and so its constituent parts are being ‘moved’), and that, as a consequence, no one ever committed suicide for ‘internal’ reasons.2 In modern times, moreover, there is a widespread tendency to argue that only non-instrumental deaths, that is, where one is not threatening to kill oneself as a means to achieving a further end, can count as suicides in order to exclude self-sacrificial death, the laying down of one’s life in the name of some cause, from the disfavour attaching to suicide.■* This view teeters on the edge of scepticism about the possibility of suicide because it means that you can never threaten suicide as a form of blackmail in order to achieve, say, your political objectives. To count as suicide you must have no ulterior motive in mind other than the wish to ‘end it all’ without viewing your death as a means to a further end. The suicide’s wish must be a death-wish and nothing else. It becomes unclear whether any actual case ever meets this requirement, a consequence not necessarily unwelcome to those who want to place an absolute 146

Suicide and Self-killing

prohibition on suicide. But I should, in fairness to the absolutist, also make the corresponding point against the liberal view which holds that it is absurd to say that every act of suicide is wrong. The liberals are inclined to define suicide so widely that anyone who sacrifices his life for the sake of others, a pilot, for example, who stays with his stricken plane in order to steer it clear of the inhabitants of the houses below, is said to have committed suicide.4 In this chapter I hope to show that some of the complexities surrounding the idea of suicide can be sorted out by deliberately comparing the logic of self-killing with that of other reflexives.

1. C aptain O ates: suicide o r self-sacrifice? They went on to look for Oates’s body, but it has never been found. Instead they built another cairn and left this note on it, a last message speaking to the power and impenetrability of wilderness: Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L.E.G. Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons. In March 1912, returning from the Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard to try to save his comrades, beset by hardship. This note is left by the Relief Expedition, 1912. (David Thompson, Scott's men (Allen Lane, London, 1977), pp. 294—5) When C aptain Oates walked away from his exhausted comrades to his certain death so as not to be a burden to them in their desperate race to reach the food and shelter of One Ton Camp, did he commit suicide or was it self-sacrifice, or maybe, both? The first thing to note is that Oates did not die by his own hand. Had he, for example, deliberately shot himself I think there is no way in which this could not have counted as an act of suicide. Though, of course, his suicide could still have been seen as an act of heroic self-sacrifice. Even if his motive in turning his gun on himself had been to give his friends a better chance of survival and even if he would not have taken his life if their fate had not been in the balance, this would still have been suicide. The self-sacrificial element does not turn deliberate death by one’s own hand into anything other than suicide; it merely 147

Suicide and Self-killing

transforms the suicide into a suicide for the sake of others. Good intentions, I am about to suggest, do not matter with deliberate self-killing involving self-inflicted death by one's own hand; they do not change the essential character of the act. But the same is not true, 1 wish to argue, for situations in which someone knowingly goes to a death which he has contrived but which is not at his own hand. In Charles Dickens' A tale of two cities Sydney Carton takes the place of Charles Darnay who has been condemned to die on the guillotine. Dickens describes him as laying down his life for another; there is no suggestion that Carton is committing suicide. Oates' death was, I believe, a reallife death of this kind. The blizzard is what killed Oates; he did not kill himself with a gun or with anything else.* Here, Oates' intentions do matter in determining the nature of his act. Suppose, for example, he would not have walked willingly to his death had he known that his companions could have reached safety, even if they would have had to haul him along on a sledge. His thought was not, ‘My life is not worth living; I am in such pain and am bound to die anyway, or if, by some miracle, I survive I shall be a cripple and cannot face that prospect.’ Rather, it was, ‘The survival of my friends is worth dying for; I am willing to lay down my life in order that they might live.’ In other words, Oates was not in a suicidal frame of mind when he decided to walk to his death. He resembles the rabbi in the concentration camp who took the place of another camp inmate, a stranger to him, who had been selected for extermination. The rabbi was willing to lay down his life for the stranger but his life had not become a burden to himself. Of course, if the rabbi’s life had been a burden to him and if he was in a suicidal frame of mind anyway, then he might have chosen this occasion as a way of committing suicide and of preserving another life. But that would still have been suicide, even if it also served another purpose. Similarly, the soldier who knows that he is about to take part in a suicidal attack may know that death awaits him but he doesn’t commit suicide when he advances into no man’s land and is killed in a murderous hail of machine-gun fire. We mustn’t, incidentally, be misled by that word ‘suicidal’ in ‘suicidal attack'. The soldier who takes part in a suicidal attack doesn’t commit suicide any more than the machine-gunner who directs the murderous hail of bullets at him murders him. The soldier is willing to die but he doesn’t want to die. Contrast him with a civilian who is caught up in the fighting and who wants to end it 148

Suicide and Self-killing

all and is looking for a way of doing so. Should he rush towards the enemy line to be mown down too alongside the soldier obeying orders, the civilian will have got what he wanted and have committed suicide. Here, where one puts oneself in the way of death without dying by one’s own hand, intentions matter in resolving whether you have killed yourself. It is not from their bullet-ridden corpses, which may look very similar, that one determines the different fates which have befallen the civilian and the soldier. I think this explains why it has been said that only non-instrumental deaths count as genuine suicides. This fits giving up one’s life without taking it by one’s own hand but a life taken deliberately by one’s own hand is always suicide and the intentions only reveal beneath what banner the suicide died when he committed suicide; they do not affect the nature of the deed. This may sound rather unfair to what might be called the oldfashioned kind of independent 'do-it-yourself suicide who dies by his own hand. Why should dying by your own hand make such a difference? I would expect there to be a feeling that one group is being allowed to evade the taint of suicide when both might be acting from equally high-minded motives without an adequate difference between them having been provided. The feeling that there is some uneven-handedness here is, I think, an expression of conceptual confusion. It is like the feeling voiced earlier in the previous chapter in the discussion of what it is for something to happen kof its own accord’ when it did not seem fair to distinguish between a match’s bursting into flames after having been struck on the side of a matchbox and a piece of phosphorus bursting into flame after having been lifted out of its dish of water and exposed to the atmosphere at room temperature. 'Of its own accord’ was supposed to mean 'not in response to external causation’ and yet the action of the person who lifted the phosphorus from its dish was just as much the external cause of its bursting into flames as the action of the person striking the match was the external cause of the match’s combustion. But this similarity is ignored in the application of ‘of its own accord’; our eyes are shut to this possibility as we use the phrase. We sit with folded arms in front of the match and the piece of phosphorus, each laid on the bench (having lined up the two competitors at the start of the race whose victor is to be rewarded with the title ‘of its own accord’), and after a while the phosphorus but not the match bursts into flames without our doing anything to it. Then we say, ' The phosphorus went on fire of its own accord.’ How far you have had 149

Suicide and Self-killing

to run to reach the starting line is not taken into account in deciding who has won the race. YVe treat the courageous soldier and the self-sacrificing rabbi differently from the suicidal civilian or the suicidal death-squad substitute because the former have not killed themselves despite the fact that all four have gone voluntarily to their deaths. The difference between killing oneself by one's own hand and killing oneself by making use of external forces outside one's control has a counterpart in the different circumstances in which one can hurt oneself. One can hurt oneself by, say, landing a blow intended perhaps for someone else, on oneself; and, differently, one can hurt oneself when one’s punch connects with its intended target but one hurts oneself on him in delivering the punch. A boxer can hurt himself by landing one of his own punches on himself but also in landing a punch on his opponent and this is not the same as the opponent’s hurting him. Thus, you can hurt yourself without needing to land a blow on yourself. The difference between, say, (1) a rabbi in the death camp who sacrificed himself for the sake of another person (but, I maintain, did not kill himself); (2) a suicidal rabbi who used the oppor­ tunity of changing places with a condemned man as a way of both killing himself and saving another life; and (3) a rabbi who, whatever his frame of mind and motives, deliberately poisoned himself, is like the difference between ( 1) the boxer who by his courageous attack exposed himself to being hurt by his opponent’s counterpunch (he created an opportunity which his opponent took to hurt him but that is not the same as his hurting himself); (2) the boxer who hurt himself on his opponent as he punched him (he jarred his thumb); and (3) the boxer who, whether intentionally or not, we may never know, missed his opponent and landed a painful uppercut on his own chin. I think, therefore, that the role played by the frame of mind of the person who has deliberately put himself in the way of death in determining whether he has committed suicide differs depending on whether he died by his own hand or not. If you knew what you were doing when you shot yourself, you have killed yourself and your death is suicide, whether you acted of your own free will, under duress, after careful reflection or on impulse, preoccupied with self or hoping to save others. But where you engineer the circumstances of your death without dying by your own hand, your frame of mind acquires a new significance. Killing yourself here is not decided by ballistics and the orientation of the body 150

Suicide and Self-killing

and the weapon (‘Could he have killed himself with that gun if he couldn’t reach the trigger with the barrel in his mouth?’, asks the suspicious detective in the previous sort of case). In both cases, I hasten to add, the deed must be deliberate and the victim must have known what he was doing; otherwise we have a case of acci­ dental death. But where such knowledge can be taken for granted and the evidence is not of a man’s hand turned against himself, so that he is not like the boxer who landed a punch on himself, ‘He has killed himself requires fresh criteria. It need not, of course, mean suicide at all; the driver can kill himself accidentally at the wheel in a car accident and you can electrocute yourself unintentionally on the switch you have recently, unfortunately faultily, fitted. But suppose the person went willingly to his death, though not by his own hand? Then, I believe, the spirit of selfsacrifice can transform your going willingly to your death, in a manner and at a time chosen by yourself, into something other than suicide — but only if you do not die by your own hand. It will, I realise, seem implausible that the manner of one’s killing oneself can make such a difference but other reflexives show similar discontinuity. Consider self-defence. You can defend yourself against a hail of blows by adopting a cowering defensive posture in order to shield yourself against the onslaught. It is true that one can defend oneself with a shield. But you can also strike back in self-defence. You can defend yourself with a sword too, and then, not just when parrying a thrust but also when thrusting home with the sword too. What you must not do, of course, is to start a fight and strike the first blow' if you wish to plead that you were acting in self-defence. Defending yourself with a sword is a very different sort of thing from defending yourself with a shield. I can imagine someone thinking that there isn’t much of the true spirit of defence about a sword in comparison to a shield. And that is right: a shield is, and a sword is not, a defensive weapon. Similarly, planning your death by utilising forces over which you do not have control does not sound at first like a true suicide’s way out. But if someone with a gun picks a quarrel with you, you may be unlucky enough to have nothing to defend yourself with but a knife; self-defence here will not mean catching his bullets on the blade but getting in close and injuring him with the knife so that he cannot injure you. Cel animal est méchant, quand on l'attaque, il se défend does not imply that there is no need to fear the bite of the animal which has been attacked and is defending itself. 151

Suicide and Self-killing

2. Did Socrates poison him self? . I believe that I should gain nothing by drinking the poison a little later— I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it has no more to offer. Come, do as I say and don’t make difficulties.’ At this Crito made a sign to his servant, who was standing near by. The servant went out and after spending a considerable time returned with the man who was to administer the poison; he carried it ready prepared in a cup. When Socrates saw him he said, ‘Well, my good fellow, you understand these things; what ought I to do?’ ‘Just drink it,' he said, ‘and then walk about until you feel a weight in your legs, and then lie down. Then it will act of its own accord.’ As he spoke he handed the cup to Socrates, who received it quite cheerfully, Kchecrates, without a tremor, without any change of colour or expression, and said, looking up under his brows with his usual steady ga/.c, ‘What do you say about pouring a libation from this drink? Is it permitted or not?’ (Plato, Phaedo, 117A-117B) Did Socrates poison himself? Did he commit suicide? Or was he executed by being forced to drink poison? Was he forced to commit suicide? Or is that impossible? The poison that killed him did not have to be forced down Socrates’ rising gorge. He drank the cup of poison willingly. Plato presents Socrates as believing that every citizen has an obligation to obey his state’s law even when there has been a miscarriage of justice and he himself is the unfortunate victim who has been unjustly condemned to death by the Athenian court. He preferred his lawfully ordained death to the dishonour of evading the sentence by bribing his jailors and fleeing to a neighbouring state. R.G. Frey has recently argued that, since Socrates died a selfinflicted, intentional death, he committed suicide?' For Roy Holland, on the other hand, the alleged entailment between Socrates' taking of the hemlock and his committing suicide is non-existent. ‘Taking hemlock does not,’ says Holland, ‘in the context of an Athenian judicial execution, amount to slaughtering

152

Suicide and Self-killing

oneself: in this circumstance it is no more an act of suicide than the condemned man’s walk to the gallows was in ours.’7 There ought to he a difference between ( 1) the condemned man who co-operates in his own execution rather than resisting till the last gasp; and (2) someone who is ordered, forced maybe, to commit suicide. This difference is comparable to the difference between ( 1) the pupil who actively co-operates in the process of his being taught; and (2) the person who is ordered or forcibly made to teach himself something. And, surely, a pupil does not have to be unwilling to learn before he can count as being taught nor do his individual initiatives when under his teacher’s tuition turn him into an autodidact. I agree with Roy Holland that Socrates was not in the position of being forced to commit suicide. Not that the idea of being forced to commit suicide makes no sense. Had Socrates been handed a cup of poison and told to go off and drink it as befits an impious wretch judged unworthy of the association of his fellows, he might have felt that he had no choice but to drink it. He would have behaved like the nineteenth-century officer and gentleman who had brought disgrace on his regiment and been left alone with a revolver and his sense of duty. The one would have poisoned himself and the other would have shot himself. But if the condemned man strapped in the electric chair is given the chance of pulling the switch on himself (perhaps his jailors have grown a little squeamish about pulling the switch themselves), his death would not be suicide. The French aristocrats who placed their own heads on the block and waited for the fall of the blade of the guillotine were not committing suicide or executing themselves. My question is, ‘Did the real Socrates who drank the hemlock poison himselfT If he did, then I admit that the game is up and that he killed himself and thereby committed suicide. Taking poison is certainly one well-established way of commit­ ting suicide. Equally, administering poison is how men have killed other men and animals. Socrates was given poison to drink in fulfilment of his death sentence. This is different from the spy who is captured and swallows his suicide pill rather than betray his country or face torture.8 If the spy had smuggled his suicide pill with him into his cell, he would have had the opportunity to swallow it and poison himself. In the condemned cell with his cup of poison handed to him, Socrates could not kill himself with it and thereby cheat his officially decreed manner of execution. He

153

Suicide and Self-killing

was like the man condemned to hang standing on the trapdoor with the rope already in position round his neck — too late to cheat the hangman by hanging himself. Even placing the rope around his neck and shouting ‘Ready when you are!’ would make no difference in those circumstances. Poison and a rope are suitable instruments for the would-be suicide with plenty of time on his hands but when they are also the tools of his executioner they can arrive too late for suicide to be a possibility. R.A. Duff has suggested that what really happened to Socrates was that he was his own executioner. Socrates was, suggests Duff, expected to execute himself as a way of acknowledging his guilt. Duff speaks o f ‘self-executions of the Socratic kind’.-’ I think we can firmly rule out this suggestion. Being your own executioner is like being your own chauffeur. When the regular chauffeur is off work through illness the boss has to be his own chauffeur. He drives himself to work in the company car. Socrates could have been his own executioner, had, for instance, the regular execu­ tioner failed to turn up for duty. Then Socrates might have mixed his own poison and made arrangements for the disposal of his body, etc., performing for his own execution all the normal duties of the executioner, at least up to the time of his death. Plato tells us quite clearly that this did not happen. Socrates’ co-operation in his own execution no more turns him into his own executioner than the fact that the boss does not have to be dragged kicking and screaming from the house to the car by the chauffeur each morning shows that the boss sitting happily in the back seat behind the chauffeur is driving himself to work. Socrates was never more than a back-seat driver at his execution. The idea that Socrates poisoned himself when he drank the hemlock may have arisen in the following way. The hapless victim who all unknowingly takes and eats the poisoned apple prepared for him by his poisoner has not poisoned himself. He has been poisoned. But if I insist on sprinkling a poisonous substance on my daily porridge in the mistaken belief that it will give me added pep (I may even ‘swear’ by it and recommend it to friends), I am poisoning myself without realising it. If, however, I know full well that the substance is poisonous, then it seems even more obvious that I am poisoning myself, this time deliberately. It is tempting to conclude that the Socrates who drank the hemlock fits neither the first nor the second case but that he fits the third case perfectly. I have been arguing that what this overlooks is the possibility of knowingly co-operating in one’s 154

Suicide and Self-killing

execution by poisoning (by knowingly drinking the poison) without poisoning oneself in the same way that the condemned man in the electric chair who pulls the switch on himself is not electrocuting himself. The first and second cases call for further comment. Whilst tampering with an intermittently operating light switch, I may inadvertently electrocute myself. But if I die as a result of touching a hidden live wire intended by an enemy to electrocute me, while fumbling in the darkened hallway trying to find the metal knob of the door to my flat, I do not electrocute myself. Similarly, the drunken driver who misjudges the bend in the road and dies in the resulting car crash has killed himself but if a sober driver stood no chance when he ran into some poorly lit road­ works and died in the crash, he has not killed himself. To count as having killed oneself, one has to be in some way at fault, respon­ sible for having smoothed the way for trouble for oneself. It is important to note that this distinction between who has and who has not killed himself docs not raise the question of suicide at all.

3. W hat m anner o f death? Where someone has been killed by someone else it is always possible, at least in theory, to specify the manner of his death. He may have been poisoned, shot, gassed, drowned, run over in a car accident, strangled, etc. The killing must take some determinate form. It is easy to misapply this principle to the reflexive form 4He has killed himself and to conclude, by what looks like parity of reasoning, that whenever a person kills himself, he must either poison, shoot, gas, strangle, hang, etc., himself. If this is correct, any example of deliberately killing oneself will have a correspond­ ing determinate reflexive form. But what of the spy waiting to be tortured who briefly eludes his captors and deliberately jumps to his death from a high balcony? Or the suicidal rabbi who is anxious to exchange places with another concentration-camp inmate as a means of committing suicide and, perhaps, doing a good turn at the same time? Because there is no simple determinate form kXing oneself to describe the manner of these self-inflicted deaths it is tempting to draw' the conclusion that they cannot, after all, be real suicides in which someone has deliberately killed himself. For we seem to have a killing with no determinate form, which offends against our principle. 155

Suicide and Self-killing

There is, however, a flaw in this argument. It arises from a failure to appreciate the difference which the two sorts of suicide ((1) killing oneself by one’s own hand; and (2) killing oneself byrelying on external forces outside of one’s own control) make to the operation of the principle that a killing, whether it be by oneself or by others, must take a determinate form. If you kill yourself by your own hand, then the principle works straight­ forwardly and it is true that you must have poisoned, shot, gassed, etc., yourself. But if you kill yourself by relying on external forces other than by your own hand, this rules out the possibility that you have poisoned, shot, gassed, etc., yourself. For these are all determinate descriptions which only fit taking your own life by your own hand. The principle still holds good, however, in that it is possible, in theory, to specify determinately the manner of your death when you kill yourself but do not die by your own hand. This was in fact what we were doing when we described how- the spy awaiting torture and the suicidal rabbi exploited the lethal possibilities of the circumstances in which they were placed and killed themselves. The fact, if it is one, that Socrates did not poison himself cannot by itself be taken to rule out the possibility that, if he died from the poison he drank, he killed himself by arranging for his death by poisoning to take place at the hands of others. In other words, it is possible to contrive one’s suicide by arranging for others to poison one and this need not be the same thing as arranging to have oneself murdered. There is I hasten to add, no historical evidence to suggest that this is what Socrates did. It follows from what I have been arguing that there ought theoretically to be a possible case of suicide not at one’s own hand in which the victim kills himself and dies, say, from gunshot wounds without having shot himself. I have constructed the following admittedly outlandish example to test out this para­ doxical possibility. Two desperate armed men are on the run from the police. They are eventually cornered and exchange a few shots with their pursuers. Capture, they are sure, will mean torture and death. There is a brief silence and two shots ring out simultaneously. It is known that the two men had made a suicide pact earlier. Suppose that the police find that the men were armed with longbarrelled shotguns, awkward to use to shoot yourself with, and learn from an eyewitness that one man said to the other, 'Remember our pact! We’ll point the guns at each other’s heads. 156

Suicide and Self-killing

I’ll count “One, two, three” and we’ll both pull the trigger on “Three”.’ Which is just what they did. Neither shot himself. Each shot the other. But did each kill himself? Did they carry out their suicide pact? If one of the two men had survived, would he be guilty of murder or manslaughter, or (where suicide is a crime) of attempted suicide, or some combination of all three? Once we are clear about the difference between killing oneself by one's own hand and killing oneself by resorting to forces outside one’s control, I think it becomes easier to see that the above example could be double suicide although neither shot himself. It would be wrong to describe them as having agreed to murder each other because there is no question of malicious intent. Though they did shoot each other; and if they shot each other, they killed each other. Of course, a man could arrange for someone to murder him but that would require a different background in which the murderer was given a grudge and stirred up to act in a way which left the murderer with the motives of a murderer and with a degree of independence so as not to reduce him to the role of assisting in a suicide. What the two men did was to kill themselves by arranging for each to kill the other. Shortly after I had constructed this bizarre, imaginary example I came across an historical account of the behaviour of the Cossaks who had fought in the German army and been captured by the Allies when in 1945 they realised that they were going to be forcibly repatriated to Russia.10 Soldiers who had been eyewitnesses told reporters that the Russians had fought like beasts to destroy themselves. Two prisoners tried to disembowel themselves with broken glass. Others stood side by side, slashing with pieces of glass at each other’s throats. It was, says the author of this account, apparently easier to cut someone else’s throat than to cut one’s own. Men who had been cut down, still conscious, after hanging themselves from the rafters, were screaming in Russian, pointing at the guns of the guards, then at themselves, begging the soldiers to shoot. The whole incident is presented, in my view correctly, as attempted mass suicide. Suicide is often characterised as intentional self-killing. Where the manner of the killing is specified, as in poisoning, shooting, hanging, gassing, etc., oneself, it is easy to draw a mistaken inference from this definition of suicide, with which I have no quarrel as a simple definition. It is easy to slip into the view that, in order to count as having poisoned, shot, hanged, etc., oneself, 157

Suicide and Self-killing

one must have done these things intentionally. Absence of intention, however, does not guarantee that the clumsy bomb planter who inadvertently sets off his bomb has not blown himself up. The above definition of suicide seems to work correctly here, in that since he has not killed himself intentionally, he has not committed suicide. But he has blown himself up, the last thing he was intending to do. Note that, had the bomb been successfully planted and set off by the intended unwitting victim, the victim would have done something, for example, switched on the ignition of his car and this would have been what caused his death, but he will not have blown himself up, even if both he and the unlucky bomb planter both did exactly the same thing, in the sense that they touched the same switch, perhaps, without intending to kill themselves. The difference between them is that only the bomb planter was hoist with his own petard. He was his own victim, blown up by his own bomb. The bomb planter has killed himself unintentionally: but that would not be true of his unfortunate victim. The victim would not have killed himself or blown himself up at all.

4. Spinoza on suicide and self-destruction PROP. IV. Nothing can be destroyed save by an external cause. Proof. — Phis proposition is self-evident. For the defini­ tion of anything affirms its essence and does not deny it: or it imposes the essence of the thing and does not take it away. And so while we regard the thing alone, and not the external cause, we can find nothing in it which can destroy it. Q.E.D. (Spinoza, Ethics, 3p4d)M Spinoza does not actually say that nothing can destroy itself. It is worth pointing out that what he is putting forward here is the rather different proposition that nothing can destroy itself unless it has outside assistance. ‘Self-destruction’ is sometimes used as a euphemism for committing suicide. In fact, this is one of the commonest uses of the reflexive form ‘to destroy oneself. Like ‘to move itself, oneself, etc., the use of the expression is more restricted and specialised than the philosophers’ usage would imply. We are entitled to expect a connection between the above 158

Suicide and Self-killing

passage and the following passage on suicide which occurs a little later in Spinoza’s Ethics. No one, therefore, unless he is overcome by external causes and those contrary to his nature, neglects to desire what is useful to himself and to preserve his being. No one, I say, from the necessity of his nature, but driven by external causes, turns away from taking food, or commits suicide, which can take place in many manners. Namely, any one can kill himself by compulsion of some manner who twists back his right hand, in which he holds by chance his sword, and forces him to direct the sword against his own heart; or, like Seneca by the command of a tyrant, he may be forced to open his veins, that is, to avoid a greater evil by encountering a less; or again, latent external causes may so dispose his imagination and so affect his body, that it may assume a nature contrary to its former one, and of which an idea cannot be given in the mind (Prop. 10, Part III). But that a man, from the necessity of his nature, should endeavour to become non-existent, or change himself into another form, is as impossible as it is for anything to be made from nothing, as everyone with a little reflection can easily see. (Spinoza, Ethics, 4p20s)12 Note once again that Spinoza does not say that it is not possible to kill yourself but rather that it is not possible to kill yourself unaided. The two positions, (1) ‘Nothing can destroy itself and (2) ‘Nothing can destroy itself unaided’ are not, of course, equivalent. If something can destroy itself with the aid of something else, then there is something which can destroy itself and (1) is false while (2) may be true. I disagree with Jonathan Bennett who, in his recent study of Spinoza’s Ethics, says in his commentary on these passages that ‘Spinoza needs . . . to conclude that a self-destroyer would have an inconsistent nature, and thus to infer that it is logically impossible for anything to destroy itself unaided.’13 It is not clear from these passages that Spinoza is arguing that self-destruction simpliciter is logically impossible. However, I do not think Spinoza himself was consciously aware of this distinction. First, some examples of the kind of thinking that lies at the heart of the sort of philosophical difficulties in which Spinoza 159

Suicide and Self-killing

here finds himself. A modern chemist might observe that all change, for example the gradual rusting and disintegration of the metal panels in the body of a car, can be explained in terms of reactions taking place between various substances. There is no room in this account for the idea of a substance’s reacting with itself. It is only with other substances that any given substance can react. All destruction, on this theory of chemical combinations, is a series of reactions between different chemical substances. Nothing can be composed of two substances which immediately react with each other to produce a violent chemical change; such a compound would be bound to be unstable and could not exist. If the substances cannot exist peaceably in each other’s company, the compound formed from them cannot exist at all. An engineer reminds himself that he cannot channel the pressure stored inside a pressure vessel out and then back into itself so as to rupture the walls of the selfsame vessel, not, that is, without adding some extra device to it, for instance, some sort of gun powered from the pressure in the vessel to fire a pointed captive bullet into the skin of the vessel — which would, of course, require an additional modification to the original object itself. A jewelry maker remarks that you cannot use a material of the same hardness as the stone upon which one is working to produce a sharp clean cutting edge suitable for working upon the medium. The cutting tool always must be harder than what is intended to be cleanly cut with it. No cutting tool will cut cleanly the material from which it is made. A badly fitted propeller on a boat is discovered to have broken up when the prop shaft is run at high speed. ‘The propeller shook itself to pieces’, says the owner. The engineer tells a different, detailed, causal, story in which vibration produced in one object affected another and caused it to rotate irregularly. Nothing vibrated itself. ‘A propeller all by itself is just a propeller,’ he thinks, ‘it is only when attached to the shaft and when the shaft is connected up to the engine that the propeller is shaken.’ We met this type of thinking before in the apprentice in Chapter 5 who tried but failed to work out how self-cancelling indicators manage to cancel themselves. Euphemistically, we say that someone who has committed suicide has ‘destroyed himself but Spinoza looks closer and sees that what really destroyed him is the idea that had come to lodge in his brain, the wish to end it all. As long as a man continues in existence, we can be sure that 160

Suicide and Self-killing

the ideas in his brain are not incompatible with his existence. If they were, he would be like the unstable chemical compound that could not exist. Spinoza's conclusion, however, is not that suicide is impossible but that all suicide is forced upon one by outside factors. I hope to explain how it is that a certain line of thinking about what happens when something is said to ‘destroy itself can lead to the sceptical conclusion that all suicide is brought about by external compulsion. We can recognise in Spinoza's thinking several characteristic elements of philosophical reflection on a reflexive theme. There is, for instance, his classic sceptical line in ‘Nothing can destroy itself (or it may be, ‘Nothing can destroy itself unaided'); all des­ truction (or maybe, ‘all destruction, including self-destruction') has an external cause', his appeal to a curiously drawn internal/ external distinction both for the causes of destruction and the reasons for a man's committing suicide, and a spirit of what I have called isolationism in that what is regarded as truly internal is taken in a tempting but peculiarly narrow way which leads to further paradox. There is also the queer way in which what looks like a reflexive proves, upon closer analysis, to reveal that we do not have a genuine case of something doing something to itself; the true causes of a man’s killing himself are found to be ‘external’. For nothing can continue in existence if it has the seeds of its own destruction within it and if they can do their work immediately. Thus, if a human being has been in existence for some time, we can be sure that he is not so constituted as to be able to destroy himself from within, since nothing so constituted could stay in existence. The distinction I have been stressing between two sorts of suicide, (1) deliberately killing oneself by one’s own hand and (2) the ‘oblique' kind, in which one deliberately kills oneself but by relying upon outside forces beyond one’s control, is of immediate relevance in interpreting Spinoza. On one level, the man who throws himself under the wheels of the train and is killed by them has relied upon an external cause in comparison writh someone who has taken his own life by cutting his own throat w'ith a carving knife. The movement of the knife, but not the train, is under his direct control. I hough a determined isolationist will be sure to call the use of the carving knife into question. He will sec the use of an instrument of any kind as introducing an ‘external’ element. I he man considered in himself is one thing, the carving knife another separate thing. If we go 161

Suicide and Self-killing

down this path we end up with a naked man who has been stripsearched, alone in an empty cell trying to strangle himself with his own bare hands. A thoroughgoing isolationist will question even the presence of the cell walls. Might not the prisoner dash himself into them? And what about the floor? Might he not fatally injure himself on that? Surely, however, if the would-be suicide relies on nothing more than his own bare hands, the isolationist cannot cry ‘Foul!’ He alone, at last we have it, is truly trying to kill himself without relying upon external causes. But then, can he succeed? When one man strangles another he needs to be stronger than his victim. How can one man all on his own be stronger than himself? As his hands close round his windpipe he begins to feel faint, his strength ebbs away, his hands relax, his strength returns, his grip tightens, slackens, tightens again . . . As strangler he needs the strength which as victim he needs must lack. A man considered in himself alone cannot strangle himself! As Spinoza says, this is as impossible as it is for anything to be made from nothing, as everyone with a little reflection can easily see. Now this may be wrong, both physiologically and logically speaking, but, if it is wrong, it is wrong in a fascinating way which connects up with scepticism about deceiving, teaching, moving, surprising, inviting, etc., oneself. The upshot of this train of thought is that it is not possible for a man considered solely by himself to kill himself, say, by self-strangulation. We are left with cases where the suicide depends, without exception, on external factors, not just cases like that of the man who throws himself under the wheels of the train but even those cases in which one dies by one's own hand with something else held in the hand, a knife, a gun, a cup of poison, etc., with which to kill oneself. This isolationist account of killing oneself has the consequence noted by Spinoza that nothing can count as killing oneself unaided. There is also another sense in which it is natural to speak of an internal/external contrast when discussing cases of suicide. One can kill oneself of one’s own free will or one can be forced to do so by external agencies. One can be driven to commit suicide. I think there is a possibility that Spinoza is running these two dif­ ferent ways of taking the ‘internal/external' distinction together. So that the idea that no man can strangle himself unaided, proving that no one can destroy himself without outside cause, is used to show that no one ever commits suicide ‘of the necessity of his nature', that is, freely and voluntarily, but only as a result of outside pressures brought to bear upon him. A picture emerges 162

Suicide and Self-killing

which shows that no man carries the seeds of his own destruction within him. The suicide is always the victim of foreign-borne invasion; latent external causes affect him in mind and body so that he is no longer his former self. The wish to do away with oneself is not ‘given in the mind’, as Spinoza puts it. It is planted there from without. All Spinoza is really entitled to say he has proved is that the wish to commit suicide cannot be considered a basic human instinct, like the drive for food. If we had an instinct for suicide, seeking it at every opportunity, we would not exist as a species. Self-preservation, on the other hand, can be seen as a basic, builtin characteristic, present ‘from the necessity of their nature’ in any species of living creatures. But this, of course, does not show that external compulsion is always present in every case of suicide. Spinoza's three examples of supposed suicide are all meant to show how, in a variety of cases, the suicide is always ‘driven by external causes’. They are a mixed bag. They are all, I think, meant to be cases of dying by one’s own hand. The supposed suicide in the first example is described as holding by chance his sword in his right hand. The hand holding the sword is twisted back by someone else and the victim is ‘forced to direct the sword against his own heart’. Death is externally caused here and yet the dead man held the sword in his own hand. But is this suicide at all? Suppose he had been planning to take his own life. Just as he was about to deliver the fatal thrust, his enemy arrives by chance, seizes his quarry’s hand clenched round the hilt of the sword and delivers a fatal wound by pressing down on top of his hand. Isn’t this a case of a would-be suicide frustrated by his murderer? The second example, of Seneca who was forced to kill himself by Nero, is indeed a case of a forced suicide but it would normally lead us to contrast it with cases where no such external force, no threatening tyrant, is present, which is not possible according to Spinoza. But the impression of an impossibility here is achieved by appealing to the first, and different, sense of ‘external’ in which even deliberate death at one’s own hand is caused by ‘external’ factors. The third example is only lightly sketched; it suggests to me a case of someone who kills himself in a state of mental depression brought on, perhaps, by a virus infection which has led to brain disease. The virus is the external cause which has entered his body and has made him sick in mind and body. But if such a person were to hang himself, he would not 163

Suicide and Self-killing

have turned to outside agencies as he might have done had he thrown himself under the wheels of a bus or gone out onto the moors on a bitterly cold night with the intention of dying of exposure; and we can still ask whether the person who suffered such a fate took his life of his own free will or, could it be, was bullied into it by his nagging daughter.

Notes 1. St Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine are the best-known representatives of the absolutist condemnation of suicide and David Hume of the permissive attitude: see Aquinas, Summa theologiae, IT, II, Q.64, Art.5; St Augustine, The city of God, Book I, Chs 17-27; and David Hume, ‘Essay on suicide’, published posthumously in 1783 in Essays moral, political and literary by David Hume (Oxford University Press, London, 1963), pp. 585-96. 2. Spinoza, Ethics, 3p4d and 4p20s. 3. For example, the comment, ‘I would say the real act of suicide is non-instrumental self-killing . . . I recognise that the religious sin of suicide becomes, on this definition, an almost inconceivable act', in Terence M. O'Keeffe, ‘Suicide and self-starvation’, Philosophy, 59 ( 1984), pp. 349-63 (p. 362). This paper contains an excellent account of the application of the Principle of Double Effect to suicide. 4. This would be suicide by the pilot according to R.B. Brandt, ‘The morality and rationality of suicide', first published in Seymour Perlin (ed.), A handbook for the study of suicide (Oxford University Press, New York, 1975); reprinted in Tom L. Beauchamp and Seymour Perlin (eds), Ethical issues in death and dying (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1978) pp. 122-33, (p. 125). 5. For this point I am indebted to Roy Holland, ‘Suicide', Ch. 10 in his Against empiricism (Blackwell, Oxford, 1980), pp. 143-57 (p. 151). 6. R.G. Frey, ‘Did Socrates commit suicide?', Philosophy, 53 (1978), pp. 106-8. Frey's article has provoked an interesting discussion: see replies by Michael Smith, ‘Did Socrates kill himself intentionally?’, and by Harry Lesser, ‘Suicide and self-murder', in Philosophy, 55 (1980), pp. 253-4 and pp. 255-7 respectively; R.G. Frey again, ‘Suicide and selfinflicted dernh', Philosophy, 56 (1981), pp. 193-202; and Terence M. O’Keeffe, ‘Suicide and self-starvation'. 7. Roy Holland, ‘Suicide’, p. 146. 8. Again, I am indebted to Roy Holland, ‘Suicide’, p. 148, for the example of the spy who prefers suicide to betrayal. 9. R.A. Duff, ‘Socratic suicide?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 83 (1982-3), pp. 35-47. 10. Nicholas Bethell, The last secret (Deutsch, London, 1974), p. 248. 11. Spinoza's Ethics, translated by Andrew Boyle, Everyman’s Library, first published 1910 (J.M. Dent, London, revised translation 1959), p. 90. 164

Suicide and Self-killing

12. Spinoza's Ethics, pp. 156-7. 13. Jonathan Bennett, A study of Spinoza's Ethics (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984), p. 234.

165

Self-membership

This chapter will deal with the question ‘Can a class be a member of itself?’ In order to appreciate the significance of this question, it is first necessary to prepare the ground a little. Logicians speak of classes of, or sets of, things. Their use of the words ‘class’ and ‘set’ is related to our everyday use of these words, as these words occur in phrases such as ‘collecting a set of cigarette cards’ or ‘seeking a better class of accommodation', in the sense that the logicians’ use of the word ‘set’ or ‘class’ has somehow grown out of the everyday use of these words; but it is also clearly and distinctively different. As an analogy for the peculiar nature of this connection and this difference, I suggest we consider briefly the use of the humble word ’path’ as it occurs in Critical Path Analysis, which is a recently developed technique for representing on paper all the many jobs that have to be done in the course of, say, a complex building project. Kach job is represented by a line and the length of the line corresponds to the estimated amount of time it takes to complete the job. The advantage of this method of representation is that it allows one to work out in advance which is the ‘critical path' running through the ma/.c of tasks, each stage of which has to be completed before the next can commence, so that any delays along any part of this ‘critical path' will result in a delay in the completion of the whole building. Such ‘paths’ are related to familiar garden paths but they are clearly different. The technique of preparing such charts in order to represent something in a special w'ay has brought with it a special use of the word ‘path’. The same thing holds o f‘class’ and o f‘set’, the latter word having come increasingly to supplant the former in modern logic and mathematics. Clearly, in order to 166

Self-membership

understand better what a class or a set is in logic, we need some insight into the technique in which these words are embedded. When introducing the idea of a class or a set, logic and mathematics textbooks are usually surprisingly brief. ‘A set is any collection of well-defined objects’ or ‘A class is a collection of entities having some common property’ is typical. This fleeting mention of a ‘well-defined object’ gives only a hint as to the motivation behind the logicians' distinctive use of ‘class' and ‘set’. Logicians have wanted to represent certain patterns of reasoning in a perspicuous way by means of a symbolic notation in order to distinguish with certainty between good arguments in which the conclusions really do follow from their premisses and bad arguments in which they appear to, but do not, follow. Many arguments contain steps in which it is stated that something is or is not true of all or one or some or no items of a certain kind. ‘All politicians are liars' is said to be about two classes, the class p of all politicians and the class / of all liars, and is represented as saying that the first class is included or contained in the second (p € I in the conventional notation) which means that every mem­ ber of the first class is also a member of the second class. Suitable notations have been devised to display various possible relation­ ships between classes. Most are ‘algebraic’ in appearance but one of the most perspicuous is the Venn Diagram, which consists of two or more intersecting circles with various segments suitably shaded or otherwise marked, named after the nineteenth-century English mathematician and logician John Venn. Logicians talk of classes or sets in two importantly different ways (from now on I shall stick to classes in my own examples for the sake of simplicity and conformity with the wording of the examples from which I shall be quoting). The members of a class can be given either ( 1) by enumeration, typically, by listing their names; or (2) by a general description. Thus, there can be the class of famous people discussed in last week’s history lecture, whose members just happen to be, let us suppose, King Charles II, William Pitt the Younger and Thomas Carlyle, and there can also be the class of red-headed men. The members of the second class are not named, they are simply those who answer to the description. But the second method of giving the class brings with it a problem. Commenting on Russell’s having defined a number as a class of all similar classes, Wittgenstein is reported as having said in a lecture: 167

Self-membership

A class can he represented in either of two different ways, ( 1) by a list, (2) by a common property. The class of men in this room, for example, might be represented by a list of their names. But Russell did not think of this class as represented by such a list, but by a property, man in this room. When Russell talks of a class he really means a property. He wanted to talk of a class in two ways. An existent class he wanted to talk about as a list, but he also wanted to be able to replace the list by a function.1 How to tell for sure who is and who is not a member of the class of red-headed men? Should we, for example, reckon future, as yet unborn red-headed men as members of the class, or only, so to speak, yesterday’s red-headed men? What does it mean for something to be included in a class today which does not yet exist and may not come into existence for several centuries? We know­ how to tell when two different lists have the same number of items on each list and so we know how to compare the sizes of classes of the first kind by listing only one item at a time as we produce each list and then pairing the items off. But how can we tell if two classes of the second kind, the class of red-headed men and the class of brown-haired men, say, have the same number of members? Notice that this is not just a problem of vagueness or imprecision in description which could be remedied by a fuller, more detailed specification of the common property possessed by all the members of the class. Our difficulty is not of the same kind as that raised by someone who wants to know how red does your hair have to be to make you red-headed? Or who asks how old is a man, or whether women are definitely excluded. And so forth. The problem here is that the change in the method of giving the class means that the first method of determining class member­ ship, which is closely modelled on writing down a list of items by placing their names one after another on a piece of paper, is no longer applicable to the second type of class. It is one thing to say that Ivan is a Russian but to say that Ivan is a member of the class of all Russians raises questions about what this new thing is of which Ivan is a member. For if the logician says that, on the assumption that Russians will continue to be born in the future, the class of all Russians has unborn Russians as its members, as well as living and dead Russians, what is still needed is a clear explanation of what counts as class membership. How large, for

168

Self-membership

example, is the class of all Russians? Is it of an unknown finite size or may it even be infinite? Does it change in size with the passage of time? It can be seen that there is already a problem about the idea of something’s being a member of a class which the spectre of a class’s being a member of itself intensifies but is not solely responsible for. I hasten to add that I am not suggesting that these philosophical difficulties are insurmountable, only that this is where the philosophical problems start, namely, as ever, right at the beginning. For the fact is that the two ways of giving the members of a class belong to two quite different techniques, so that what makes sense in the one case does not necessarily make sense in the other. I propose to concentrate on the question ‘Can a class be a member of itself?’ This is because the idea of a class’s being a member of itself was a problem — I am tempted to say that it was the problem — for the logicians who first invented this symbolism deploying classes. They thought class self-membership an in­ coherent idea, produced arguments to support their contention and devised strategics to banish such alleged illogicalities as the formula x € x, meaning ‘Class x is a member of itself’, from their representations of arguments and of patterns of arguments. I shall not be trying to evaluate the many recipes for avoiding class self-membership or the special rules that have been suggested in order to prevent self-membered classes from popping up in unexpected corners of one’s symbolism. I agree with the philosopher who wrote recently, ‘The set theories of Russell, Zermelo, von Neumann, el al., can hardly be said to have “solved” Russell’s paradox: “avoidance” of the paradox would perhaps best describe their various ad hoc, temporizing moves. Yet’, he adds, ‘the philosophical community seems in no hurry to better the position.’2 My aim is to show that the idea that it is not logically possible for a class to be a member of itself has an enormous amount in common with the idea that, say, it is impossible to deceive oneself or for an object to move itself, a single statement to contradict itself, a sentence to refer to itself, or that it is impossible to teach oneself, surprise oneself, invite one­ self, etc. Such sweeping scepticism about the possibility of class self-membership has the best of philosophical considerations behind it but is of a type we have encountered before in previous chapters and is, I believe, ultimately based on a misunder­ standing of the logic of the reflexives.

169

Self-membership

1. R ussell’s P aradox In his Introduction to mathematical philosophy Russell tells how, by considering the class of all imaginable objects, he was led to the following contradiction. The comprehensive class we are considering, which is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members. In other words, if there is such a thing as ‘everything’, then ‘everything’ is something, and is a member of the class ‘everything’. But normally a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man. Form now the assemblage of all classes which arc not members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of itself or not? If it is, then it is one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e. it is not a member of itself. If it is not, it is not one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e. it is a member of itself. Thus of the two hypotheses — that it is, and that it is not, a member of itself — each implies its contradictory. This is a contradiction. (Bertrand Russell, Introduction to mathematical philosophy (Allen and Unwin, London, 1919), p. 136) There is, Russell remarks, no difficulty in manufacturing similar contradictions ad lib. He then offers his solution. The fallacy consists in the formation of what we may call ‘impure’ classes, i.e. classes which are not pure as to ‘type’. As we shall see in a later chapter, classes are logical fictions, and a statement which appears to be about a class will only be significant if it is capable of translation into a form in which no mention is made of the class. This places a limitation upon the way in which what are nominally, though not really, names for classes can occur significantly: a sentence or a set of symbols in which such pseudo-names occur in wrong ways is not false, but strictly devoid of meaning. The supposition that a class is, or that it is not, a member of itself is meaningless in just this way. And more generally, to suppose that one class of individuals is a member, or is not a member, of another class of individuals will be to suppose nonsense; and to construct symbolically any class whose members are not all of the same grade in 170

Self-membership

the logical hierarchy is to use symbols in a way which makes them no longer symbolize anything. (Ibid.) Echoing Russell’s sentiments, Fred Waismann says: The mistake here plainly lies in our allowing a class to be counted as a member of itself. We might therefore be tempted to say ‘No class can be a member of itself; that is to say, it is false to suppose that a class ever occurs among its own members’. Yet saying this would achieve nothing. For then every class would be normal [= not a member of itself), and the class of all normal classes would be the class of all classes, and with that we should be back to the previous antinomy. (F. Waismann, Principles of linguistic philosophy, edited by R. Harre (Macmillan, London, 1965), p. 89) The significant thing about these two answers from Russell and Waismann is that they reject the idea that a class could conceivably be a member of itself. Yet, at first sight, there seems to be little to trouble us in permitting this development. Once we have agreed that there can be such a thing as a class which has other classes as its members, it is but a short step from this to the thought, ‘And what if a class be a member of itself?’ The philosopher is often depicted as musing after the following fashion. ‘Most classes, it is true, do not seem to be members of themselves: for example, it is not true that the class of donkeys is itself a donkey. But some classes do appear to be members of themselves. For instance, the class of all things that can be counted would appear to be itself capable of being counted.’ At this juncture, a troublesome thought occurs. ‘Some classes are members of themselves; other classes are not. Consider the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Is it or is it not a member of itself? If it is, then it is not; and if it is not, then it is.’ There is, I think it will be acknowledged, a pattern to this thinking, with its generation of an apparent contradiction, which strongly resembles a similar step in the paradox of the Liar, examined earlier in Chapter 9. I wish to argue that, just as there is no general ban on a sentence’s referring to itself, so a class may be a member of itself. But, just as some sentences cannot be 171

Self-membership

construed as referring to themselves — on its own, with no other sentence to latch on to, ‘This sentence is false’ and ‘This sentence is true’ are meaningless — so ‘the class of all classes which are not members of themselves’, when taken as giving the defining characteristics of a class of which it itself is potentially a member and not as alluding to a class whose definition turns, so to speak, a blind eye to its own existence (as ‘This sentence is false’ turns a blind eye to itself when used meaningfully), is also meaningless; and therefore on this interpretation there is no such thing as the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. But that is not the end of the matter. ‘The class of all classes which are not members of themselves’ can, given a certain understanding of what is meant by ‘all’ here, still make perfectly good sense. In what follows I am indebted to James Moulder’s ‘Is Russell’s Paradox genuine?’.* My own solution is not the same as his but I have learned a lot from it and have incorporated it as one possible way of evading the force of the paradox. In particular, I have taken from Moulder the idea that the so-called ‘pseudo­ paradoxes’ such as the Barber of Seville and the Catalogue (both to be discussed shortly) are no less, and no more, genuine paradoxes than Russell’s Paradox and that they are all to be resolved in the same way. Russell was in the habit of invoking the paradox of the Barber to throw light on his paradox about classes. According to this paradox, in a small Spanish town there is a barber, male, adult and clean-shaven, who shaves everyone who does not shave himself, and who shaves no one who shaves himself. Who shaves the barber? It is customary to dismiss the Barber as an easily solved pseudo-paradox and to contrast its easy resolution with the allegedly profound significance of Russell’s Paradox and its resistance to a truly satisfying solution.4 I propose to stand the usual approach on its head. Because I think that both paradoxes are of equal philosophical interest, exhibiting the same thought disorientation, I shall argue that the paradox of the Barber can be viewed as the really interesting paradox and that it is far from a simple matter to find a solution to it because it embodies all the ingredients which make Russell’s and the other similar paradoxes a source of philosophical interest. My aim is to show that the paradox of the Barber presents us with exactly the same type of problem as Russell’s Paradox, deriving from its use of the reflexive (shaving oneself) in combination with its appeal to generality and negation (the barber shaves all those who do not 172

Self-membership

shave themselves), which perfectly matches Russell’s Paradox (with its ‘being a member of itself and ‘the class of all classes which are not members of themselves’).

2. C ounting w ith reflexives ‘I see you are clean-shaven. Would you care to tell me who shaves you?’ ‘Nobody shaves me. I shave myself.’ ‘Forgive me, sir, but if you shave yourself, you are shaved by none other than yourself. So someone, namely, yourself, does shave you and your first answer was false. Is this not so?’ This brief exchange might have turned up in a fragment from a lost Platonic dialogue. Is it wily Socrates or one of his gullible fall-guys who is asking the questions? And anyway, who is in the right here? In the fracture clinic sister tells doctor ‘This patient slipped and fell and injured himself on the icy pavement this morning.’ Has the patient who injured himself when he fell on the ice been injured by himself? Surely, that turn of phrase would fit better a case in a different part of the hospital, the psychiatric wing, maybe, used of an unsuccessful suicide bid, in which someone has cut his wrists and sustained a self-inflicted injury. When you slip and fall and hurt yourself in an accident, you have not been injured by yourself. The passive of an active reflexive form is, you might say, logically treacherous. A tidy-minded philosopher, at any rate, could easily trip himself up over it. But then, would he have been tripped up by himself? Would it be wrong to reply to ‘Who was he tripped up by?’ with ‘He wasn’t tripped up by anybody. He tripped himself up’? It would be just like a tidyminded person to think that if you have hanged yourself, it must follow that you have been hanged by yourself. But does this really follow? If the town hangman in a small German state in the nineteenth century slinks off and commits suicide by hanging himself from a tall tree in the forest, has he been hanged by the town hangman? In later years, should his children tell their children, ‘Grand­ father was hanged by the town hangman’? Wouldn’t that be more appropriate if grandfather had been condemned to death and had presided at his own execution? Penny-pinching to the end, perhaps, grandfather wished to spare the townsfolk the cost of sending for a relief hangman from a neighbouring town. In other words, only if he had been his own officially appointed 173

Self-membership

executioner (which, according to the story, he was not), would he have been hanged by himself.n ‘Who is your barber?’ ‘Nobody. I am my own barber.’ Then in that case you must have a barber after all,’ thinks the eaves­ dropping, primitive philosopher in each one of us, ‘namely, you yourself.’ But wait: that ‘must’ is absurd. From the postman’s ‘I am my own barber’, ‘I am a barber’ does not follow. A postman who is his own barber is a postman for all that. Logic must respect trade. Many a man has chosen to be his own boss, his own teacher and his own barber too, in order to avoid having a boss or a teacher or a barber. The politician who turns into his own worst enemy when it comes to advancing his career may have no enemies inside or outside his own party?' Do not say ‘Since he is a member of the party, he does have an enemy inside the party, namely, himself.’ For this is like maintaining that no teacher ever got the ‘total silence’ he demanded in the classroom on the grounds that whenever the children obeyed him and stopped talking, the sound meter would always have shown some level of background noise. When the barber shaves himself, he too may be his own barber, like the clean-shaven non-customers walking past his door who are also their own barbers; but he, in virtue of being by trade a barber, can be something which his customers cannot be, that is, the barber can be his own customer, giving himself a shave in his high-street shop, not at home in the morning before setting off for work, and putting money in payment for the shave (at a discount, no doubt) into the till. Then, he, unlike those who do not patronise his shop but who choose to be their own barbers in the privacy of their own homes, can correctly give his own name in answer to the market researcher’s question, ‘Of which barber are you a regular customer?’ The barber who shaves himself and who is also his own customer is regularly shaved by himself. Let’s hope it wasn’t Socrates who was answering the question in the fragment at the start of this section. Logic can, I fear, make you blind, especially to the above complexities. A formula of the form ‘X is the barber of X’ is a singularly bad way of capturing the nuances of ‘X is his own barber’ because it lulls you into thinking that, if X is the barber of X and Y is the barber of Z, X and Y must both be barbers. Yet the postman who saves money by being his own barber and his friend the barber are not both barbers. According to J.F. Thompson, the logician W.V. Quine, discussing ‘(x) Fxy D Fyy’ as 174

Self-membership

a theorem in logic, once said or implied that it is a truth of logic that if everyone hates Herbert, then Herbert hates himself!7 Counting with reflexives is a tricky business, trickier than the neat regularities of a well-formed formula in logic would suggest. The introduction of the words ‘all’ and ‘everyone’ into our examples complicates matters still further. Someone has not had jaundice all his life if he did not have jaundice as a baby and the onset of the illness did not occur until he was thirteen years old. But someone has been a Liberal all his life if Liberalism has been his only political cause, regardless of the fact that babies have no political beliefs and that his began at thirteen, which is quite precocious, anyway. Parents are pleased with the child who has eaten all his chicken dinner but expect him to follow the decencies and to leave the bones behind on the plate. You do not have to be dead before it can be true to say of you that you have lived in the same town all your life. Depending on the example, we turn a logical blind eye to portions of a person’s life and disregard that part of his life, so that ‘all of one’s life’ comes to different things in different examples. The same thing happens with ‘everyone’, as is apparent from the following example which now contains the added complication of a reflexive. The colonel who lives in the village says that he hates everyone who lives in the village. Do not say, ‘If “everyone” really means everyone, then the colonel must hate himself.’ We turn a logical blind eye to the reflexive, and the colonel as an object of his own hatred is left out of account in the same way that, in the above case, the first thirteen years of life are disregarded in testing the truth of the claim that someone has held the same political convictions all his life. But when the village doctor assures us that he has tested everyone in the village to try to trace the carrier of an infectious killer disease, we point out the falsity of his claim on discovering that he has omitted to test himself. The doctor’s, but not the colonel’s ‘everyone’ includes himself in its scope, just as ‘all of one’s life’ covers the early years of childhood in the doctor’s claims that someone has had a physical disease all his life but not in the politician’s claims to have had a certain political conviction all his life. Should this seem incredibly haphazard and a positive indictment of ordinary habits of thinking and speaking, I find that it helps to compare the words in our language to the cards in a pack of playing cards.” In some card games Ace counts high and in others it counts low. In practice this is less confusing than it sounds. In fact, this is not normally a source of confusion in card games at all. The ‘helpful’ 175

Self-membership

suggestion that cards of different designs be used for different games would be likely to increase, rather than decrease, opportunities for confusion. The fact that the different values apply to the same cards, the Aces, but in different games, keeps confusion at bay when playing cards and the separateness of what we are doing when using the same words in different contexts to do different things, insulates us from confusion in a similar way. It is only when the examples are placed side by side without their different surroundings being stressed that the seeming seamless­ ness of language and life suggests an unmanageable confusion. The following example also combines this deadly mixture of reflexive and ‘all’. In a one-company logging town in Canada all those in work are either employed by Bronowski, who owns the company and lives in the biggest house in town, or else they are not employed by Bronowski and are self-employed. But what about Bronowski? Remember, we said ‘all those in work’. Bronowski is in work and he lives in the town. But if he is selfemployed, then, according to the initial claim, he cannot be employed by Bronowski and therefore (or so it might seem it had to be argued) is not self-employed. Yet if he is not self-employed but is employed by Bronowski, then, since he is none other than Bronowski, he is self-employed (or at any rate, it might seem as if this had to be so). Whichever possibility we try to put words to, a contradiction arises. It is tempting to conclude that our original description of the pattern of employment in the logging town must have been incoherent and must have contained a secret contradiction. But look again at one of our assumptions. To get the contradictions, we have been assuming that a self-employed person is employed by himself. Perhaps we have been saying to ourselves, ‘If A employs B, B is employed by A; so if A is selfemployed, A employs himself, that is, A employs A; therefore, if A is self-employed, A is employed by A.’ Is that assumption correct? Does every self-employed person always employ at least one person, namely, himself? ‘How many people do you employ?’, the village blacksmith is asked. ‘None,’ he replies, ‘since Joe left me I have been single-handed at the forge and employ no one.’ The postman who cuts his own hair can be his own barber without thereby becoming his own customer, so why can’t the factory wage-slave throw up his job and be his own boss, setting up in business for himself without having to be his own employee? Of course, Bronowski could have put himself on his own company’s payroll, so that his name appeared at the top of 176

Self-membership

his list of employees. But, equally, he might not have done this. And then he would have been self-employed without being employed by himself, that is, without being his own employee. If you want to go clean-shaven in this town, either you shave yourself or, failing that, you are shaved by our only barber.’ There is a perfectly natural way of taking this, which fits in with the barber’s answering ‘No one, I shave myself in answer to the question ‘Who shaves you, seeing that you are the only barber in town?', in which the barber’s shaving himself before he sets out for work each morning does not falsify the original description of the town’s shaving habits. If, however, the barber is his own most regular customer and shaves himself each day in his shop, then he is both a customer of the barber’s and someone who shaves himself and cannot be fitted into just one of the ‘either/or’ categories provided for us. A barber with a beard, of course, presents no problems. But what if a clean-shaven barber turned out to be regularly shaved by someone else in town? Then, clearly, this would make a difference and we would have found an exception to the original claim. For that barber would be being shaved by someone other than the town’s only barber, namely, himself and yet he would not be shaving himself, which could not occur if the original description of the town’s shaving habits was correct. Given the intelligibility of this complex reaction to this paradox, I am loath to call the paradox of the Barber a pseudo­ paradox. What I do think, however, is that, when thinking about the puzzle as it is first presented, it is very difficult to remind oneself of all the strange complexities with which we are already familiar in the private and business life of someone who is sometimes a paying customer for his own services and sometimes provides for himself at home what his business customers have to pay him for. The ‘reflexive facts’ about a barber’s life are so convoluted that they will bear repeating. Not every barber who is his own barber, daily shaving himself, unpaid, in the privacy of his own home outside working hours, is his own customer. By regularly shaving himself, a barber, but not someone who is not a barber and who regularly shaves himself, is potentially his own customer. Not everyone who is his own barber is a barber. Not every barber who is his own barber is his own customer. A ‘systematic’ philosopher could build a whole ‘Theory of Employ­ ment’, with a special supplement on self-employment, on these foundations. The paradox of the Barber is deceptively easy to state but it raises a hornets’ nest of reflexive-related complexities. 177

Self-membership

The simple possibility of a barber’s shaving himself draws us into such things as needing to distinguish between being your own barber when you are and aren’t a barber, and between a barber who shaves himself and who is, and a barber who isn’t, his own customer.

3. A reflexive fable The following fable is intended to throw light upon the question ‘Can a class be a member of itself?’ by comparing it with the question ‘Can a king rule over himself?’ The point of the comparison is to suggest that, contrary to appearances, the first question cannot be settled by purely abstract considerations alone. Once upon a time there was a king who wished to rule the whole world. His armies grew more and more powerful as he defeated more and more kings in battle. When he had conquered another people he did not have their king slain. Instead, he allowed the defeated king to continue to rule over his own people but he made it clear that he himself was the supreme monarch. He ruled over all the kings whose armies he had defeated and through them over all their subjects. These kings were not all of equal status: some simply ruled over their subjects and enjoyed the lowest status — they were known as ‘rank 0’ kings; others ruled over their own subjects but also over other kings of the lowest status and through them over these subject kings’ subjects as well—these were ‘rank 1’ kings; others ruled over various ‘rank 1’ kings and through them over their subject ‘rank 0’ kings and both their peoples — and were known as ‘rank 2’ kings; and so on. The ‘rank number’ of a king told you how many different grades of kings he ruled over. At the annual gathering when all the kings assembled, they sat in tiers appropriate to their ranks. A ‘rank 0’ king sat on the lowest bench with no kings and no benches to look down upon; a Tank 1’ king sat on the next row above him and a ‘rank 2’ king on the row above the row filled with ‘rank 1’ kings. From his seat at the annual gathering a king of greater than rank 0 could see somewhere before him on the benches beneath him the kings of differing ‘ranks’ who were his particular subjects. Naturally, our king sat by himself in the topmost row. In his case, no other king sat beside him and all he surveyed sitting in the rows beneath him were his subject kings. 178

Self-membership

One day his servants came to the king and said, ‘There are no more kings left to conquer. You are now the most powerful king in all the world. Every king and every king’s subjects are your subjects.’ And they placed a sign above his throne which read, ‘The King of Kings, Subject to No King’. Beneath this sign they carved the names of every king over whom he ruled. All went well until the court logician visited the king and saw the new sign. The court logician said, ‘I see you call yourself the king of kings. A king of kings must rule over all the kings there are, otherwise his rule is incomplete. Yet there is the name of one king I do not see on your list, that is, your own name. To make your rule over all kings complete, you must rule over yourself, for you too are a king; and you must add your own name to the list.’ At first, the king did not warm to the logician’s suggestion. He felt it would be beneath his dignity to put his own name alongside those of the kings he had defeated. On the other hand, he did not wish to be cheated by his sign-painters’ careless logic out of the title he had won in battle, namely, ‘King of Kings’. ‘What would it mean to say that I ruled over myself?’ he asked his wife. She replied that she did not know but that she had heard an ambassador say that a certain king had once asked for self-rule and there had occasionally been whispers by others about selfgovernment, so no doubt there was such a thing. Which made the king rather thoughtful. On his bad days he disliked the idea of his being anyone’s subject, even his own; but on his good days he was happy at the idea of extending his rule still further to cover one more king. ‘Being one’s own ruler’ did not sound quite as bad as ‘being one’s own subject’. But how could he be the one without being the other? The whole business gradually unhinged the king’s mind and he was to be found wandering around the palace at night muttering, ‘Must the king of kings rule over himself, or not?’ He obtained a copy of the seating plan at the annual assembly and drew a circle around his own seat and placed a large question mark inside the circle. The king would show the plan to visitors, asking, ‘As the king who rules over every king seated in the assembly, am I sitting in the right place or not?’ Some of the king’s advisors said the answer to the king’s question was yes, others said it was no, and others said it was neither yes nor no. Some said there really was no such thing as a ‘king who ruled over all kings’ and that the most powerful king was bound to be outside his own jurisdiction and therefore not subject to himself. Some said it evidenced a grave inconsistency 179

Self-membership

in the idea of kingship and subjecthood, and warned of a contra­ diction at the heart of the Constitution. One old constitutional lawyer was even heard to remark that the foundations of the monarchy were tottering. For as king of kings, the king must rule over nothing less than all the kings there are and be subject to no king; therefore, as a king himself, he must rule over himself; but, if he ruled over himself, he was subject to someone, namely, himself. Others blamed the court logician and said everything had worked fine until he came along with his unsettling remarks, so why not forget them and carry on as before? The king had no more battles to win or fresh kings to conquer, so what was the worry? In claiming that the above fable is a close parallel to the puzzles philosophers have raised about set or class membership, as these are understood in logic and mathematics (Cantor’s Paradox is probably the closest, and the seating arrangements are reminiscent of Russell’s Theory of Types9), I would not wish the reader to think that I am dismissing the philosophical problem about the self-membership of sets or classes as trivial. I believe Russell when he says in his Autobiography that his inability to find a solution to his problem taxed him severely and caused him great intellectual torment. What I do think, however, is that the closeness of the parody shows that Russell’s Paradox is not a problem in mathematics or set theory. Rather, it is a problem in philosophy, which can take on a wide range of possible forms — one of which happens to be expressible in terms of sets or classes — because it is a problem, not restricted to any specific subject matter, but to patterns of thinking dependent only on certain reflexive forms and the use of ‘all’ and the concept of negation. The deliberate choice of a humorous example is intended to turn the reader’s mind away from the mystery and awe surrounding mathematics. I do not want the mathematician to be allowed to get away with anything in a philosophical argument by trading upon his undoubtedly deserved reputation for rigour inside his own subject. Can, then, a king rule over himself? I do not see this as being a question for logic rather than custom and practice to settle. The reflexive form may or may not make sense, as the case may be. This is like asking ‘Can you sue yourself?’ or ‘Can a policeman (or an ordinary citizen, for that matter) arrest himself?’ The king in the fable did well to ponder what it so much as means for a king to rule over himself. He ought not, however, to have accepted so 180

Self-membership

readily his wife’s suggestion that because they were familiar with a king’s demanding self-rule that it follows that it must make sense to speak of a king’s ruling over himself. This is no better than arguing that whoever is self-employed is an employee of himself and has a boss. We cannot sit down and ‘analyse’ the concepts of kingship and kingly rule in the abstract and somehow determine whether the reflexive form makes sense. The question is like asking ‘Can sailors in distress rescue themselves?’ It may seem glaringly obvious that, if no lifeboat or other aid comes to the rescue of men on a sinking vessel in the middle of a storm, there is nothing they can do which counts as their ‘rescuing themselves’. Some of them may be lucky enough to survive, by, say, swimming for the shore but they will not have been rescued. Rescuers come to one’s aid from without and that is true by definition, or so one thinks. And yet . . .Suppose the sinking ship carries on board a small boat capable of transporting the crew to safety. Imagine that the crew grow tired of waiting for the lifeboat to appear and decide to shift for themselves by providing for themselves from their own resources what they might have obtained from the arrival of a lifeboat, namely, a boat in which to escape, food, fuel, shelter, a plan of survival, etc. Would it not then be possible for one of them to say ‘We got fed up of waiting to be rescued and decided to rescue ourselves’? This is not, note, the same thing as merely trying to escape drowning by swimming for the shore. There has to be a good deal more to what one does for oneself before it counts as rescuing oneself, just as there is more to teaching oneself a foreign language (which is more for the stay-at-home swot) than simply spending time abroad and picking up the language as one goes along. This opens up the further possibility of the regular lifeboat itself getting into difficulties and having to rescue itself in a similar manner by launching its own lifeboat and effecting its own rescue. And then there is the possibility of the lifeboat’s lifeboat turning out to have its own small inflatable liferaft stowed aboard it. We can carry this pattern over to the world of kings and their possible rulership over themselves. Imagine a country which has recently lost its central monarchy but in which the idea is widely promulgated that every citizen is his own king. They are levellers but they are levelling up. To a visiting monarch they explain that he too is his own king, just like each one of them. Their behaviour is reminiscent of ours in that we have in our own recent history sent out missionaries from sects believing in the 181

Self-membership

priesthood of all believers to tell other peoples, including, in some cases, their own priests, that each one of them is his own priest and needs no priest to minister to him. It is for each man, say my levellers, as his own king, to make his own laws and obey them, and in time of crisis to be true to himself before any other, to issue his own decrees and grant what titles, sign what treaties and ennoble whomsoever he pleases. This may sound a little crazy but is, I think, not more absurd than the real thing. The reason why our king lost his reason in the reflexive fable was that he was trying to get logic to do for him what only either imagination or a queer, unexpected twist of fate can provide, namely, the right kind of background to breath sense into a reflexive form for which no use existed at that particular time and place. Similarly, logicians might employ the idea of a class of things in their symbolic representations of arguments without having yet attached any meaning to a class’s being a member of itself. There is no inner logical necessity which dictates that this is something which they must do.

4. T he C atalogue Imagine a country in which there is a central, national library and many smaller regional sub-libraries affiliated to it, all with inter-library lending rights. A librarian at the central library is given the task of compiling a master catalogue of all existing library catalogues within his country’s library system. This could clearly be a useful work of reference. Into the new catalogue he is creating go the names of the catalogues at the sub-libraries as well as of the catalogue at his own central library. He cannot help noticing that some of these catalogues do, and some do not, contain their own names. He wonders which practice to follow himself. He has decided that his new catalogue will be known as ‘The compleat catalogue’. This name could be entered on a line on one of its pages or it could be omitted. Up to this point it looks as though his catalogue might or might not list itself. A catalogue is a set of well-defined items and we would expect the logician to be willing to call this a set of items which may or may not include itself as a member. But maybe the librarian should compile two separate catalogues, one catalogue listing all those catalogues which do list themselves and another which lists all those which do not list themselves? Is this a coherent choice? 182

Self-membership

One reaction he might have is to put the names of the catalogues which do list themselves on to separate cards and to arrange them alphabetically in a single pile in front of him. He does the same thing for the catalogues that do not list themselves. He then creates two catalogues, in the form of two books, each containing the names on successive separate lines taken from the two separate piles of cards. In response to the protest ‘But in the catalogue supposedly of all those catalogues which do not list themselves you have omitted to include its own name. So your catalogue is not complete!’, he might reply that, on the contrary, his catalogue is complete, just as someone might insist that his friend had been a Liberal all his life in spite of someone’s protesting that as a tiny child (which is as much as to say, ‘for a part of his life’) his friend held no political convictions. And he justifies this by saying ‘Anyone who says my friend’s ever been anything other than a Liberal is a liar.’ The same person might coolly agree that someone claimed to have had a lifelong illness, had not had the disease all his life if he had not had it during his childhood, that is, for the very same part of his life that was under discussion a moment ago. Expostulating that this is hopelessly inconsistent and that ‘all’ means all is like the card player’s objecting that an Ace is an Ace and counts for one and cannot be worth more and less than a King in different games. The librarian simply points to the fact he has entered every name that was on the cards in one of the piles in front of him into the catalogue. There are no cards from that pile left over on the table. Had he carelessly omitted to create a card for each catalogue then in existence, or dropped one of the cards on the floor and over­ looked it, then, of course, he would agree that what he now has is an incomplete record. But what about his own, newly created catalogue listing the catalogues that do not list themselves? If it is to be truly complete, must it not contain an entry for itself? I do not see why there is any ‘must’ about it. He might respond to this as the script writer would to the claim that if the colonel who lives in the village hates everyone who lives in the village, then the colonel must hate himself. Or as we would to the objection that the child has not drunk all its bedtime milk since it was left a dirty glass behind which will have to be washed clean. On pressing the librarian with the point that, if he tries to meet the charge of incompleteness by making his catalogue of all the catalogues which do not list themselves complete by adding the line ‘My “Compleat catalogue’” to it, this will be self-defeating 183

Self-membership

because his catalogue will now list itself and so not be entitled to an entry in a catalogue exclusively for names of catalogues which do not list themselves — the supposedly killing blow at the equivalent stage in Russell’s Paradox — what then? In his mind’s eye, the librarian can picture himself adding the entry, saying the words ‘But now my catalogue does list itself and then erasing the entry, then reentering and erasing it, until he gets sick of it. He might treat this empty charade as confirming that his catalogue was already complete as it stood and could not be made more complete. Equally, however, he might react in a different way. (In what follows I am borrowing from James Moulder.10) He might react differently and agree that there cannot be such a thing as a list or a catalogue listing all the lists or catalogues which do not list themselves. The paradox of the Barber of Seville, he says, makes his point for him. If you insist on dividing the male inhabitants of Seville into two separate, mutually exclusive groups, according to the principle that everyone in both groups is clean-shaven, and further stipulate that each inhabitant belongs either to the group that is shaved by the only barber or else to the group of those who shave themselves (but no one to both groups), you will discover that this works fine for everyone except the barber. You may find you want to put the barber into both groups because he may shave himself in his barber’s shop and, as his own customer, be by the same token being shaved by the town barber, but the rules forbid the same name to appear in both groups. So you will not be able to complete the task of allocating all the male inhabitants to the two groups in accordance with the principles you have set up for yourself. There cannot be such a barber; but, of course, this does nothing to show that there is no such thing as a man’s shaving himself. On the contrary, the demonstration of the inconsistency of the descrip­ tion as a whole takes the intelligibility of the reflexive for granted. Similarly, a list can list itself, for example, the holidaymaker puts ‘this list!’ down on the list he is making out of things to remember to take away on holiday with him. But, assuming he is fond of making lists, which either list themselves and are not recorded elsewhere on another list, or which do not list themselves and of which a record is always kept by listing them on a single master list, he cannot produce a list of all the lists which do not list themselves for the unexciting reason that he cannot have his cake and eat it. And there is nothing to stop the logician who has to make up his mind as to how he is going to operate with the idea of 184

Self-membership

class membership from taking the same way out of the difficulty in which the cataloguer has been placed. The logician does not have to do so; he could have followed instead the alternative strategy adopted by the librarian who insisted that, by his reckoning, he could compile a catalogue of all the catalogues which do not list themselves; either approach is possible and neither excludes the possibility of a class’s being a member of itself.

Notes 1. Wittgenstein's lectures: Cambridge 1932-1935, from the notes of Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald, edited by Alice Ambrose (Rowman and Littlefield, New Jersey, 1979), p. 150. 2. B.H. Slater, ‘Sensible self-containment', Philosophical Quarterly, 34 (1984), pp. 163-4 (p. 163). 3. James Moulder, ‘Is Russell’s Paradox genuine?’, Philosophy, 49 (1974), pp. 295-302. 4. Copi, Quine and van Heijenoort have each claimed that Russell’s Paradox is a genuine paradox whereas the Barber of Seville is a pseudoparadox. See Irving M. Copi, The theory of logical types (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1971), pp. 15-20; Willard van Orman Quine, ‘Paradox’ in his The ways of paradox and other essays (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1976), revised edition, pp. 10-13; and J. van Heijenoort, ‘Logical paradoxes’ in P. Edwards (ed.), The encyclopedia of philosophy, vol. 5, (Macmillan, London, 1967), pp. 45-51. 5. Just as hanging oneself is not quite the same thing as being hanged by oneself, so hanging (shaving, deceiving, etc.) oneself is not the same thing as hanging (shaving, etc.) someone who is hanging (shaving, etc.) himself. See Analysis, 43 (1983), pp. 113-15, for Colin Radford’s report on the entries to his competition question about seeing oneself in the mirror. ‘If I am looking at myself in a mirror I am directly facing,’ asks Radford, ‘do I see myself looking at myself? If so, do I also see myself looking at myself looking at myself looking at myself— and so on?’ In a second angle-mirror you may catch sight of yourself (out of the corner of your eye) looking at yourself in the mirror directly in front of you. Similarly, by employing a second tape recorder, you can make a tape on which you can hear yourself listening to yourself talking on the first. But listening to yourself on tape isn’t automatically listening to yourself listening to yourself, etc. In order to create a situation in which someone is shaving someone who is shaving himself, there needs to be two people, one shaving his own right cheek, say, whilst the other shaves the left cheek of the man who is shaving himself. 6. There are interesting problems concerning beliefs about oneself, as P.T. Geach points out in his ‘On beliefs about oneself, Analysis, 18 (1957), pp. 23-4. This article is discussed more fully in my Chapter 13. 7. Quine is taken to task by J.F. Thompson for saying or implying 185

Self-membership

that it is a truth of logic that if everyone hates Herbert, then Herbert hates himself (J.F. Thompson, ‘On some paradoxes’ in RJ. Butler (ed.), Analytical philosophy (Blackwell, Oxford, 1962), pp. 104—19 (p. 107). ‘Herbert told an unpleasant anecdote about everyone who was at a dinner he had attended’ would not, says Thompson, be ordinarily taken to suggest that Herbert told an anecdote about himself. For Quine’s assertion see Willard van Orman Quine, Methods of logic (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952), p. 144. 8. Effective use of this deceptively simple comparison between words and cards is made by Gilbert Ryle in his Dilemmas (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1954), pp. 85-92. 9. For a short, lucid presentation of Cantor’s Paradox and for detailed examinations of Russell’s Simple and Ramified Theories of Types, which I have not discussed, see Irving M. Copi, The theory of types, pp. 4—7, and Chs 2 and 3, respectively. 10. ‘I, however, want to maintain that it is clear why r [the class of all and only those classes which are not members of themselves] is not a class; namely, that nothing, not even a class, has self-contradictory characteristics. On these grounds, therefore, Russell’s paradox is simply a proof that there is no such class as the class of all and only those classes which are not members of themselves’ (Moulder, ‘Is Russell’s paradox genuine?’, p. 300). I differ from Moulder in that I think this is a possible response, but not the only possible response, to the paradox.

186

12 Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

I shall briefly deal with self-explanatoriness before going into self­ evidence at greater length.

1. Self-explanatoriness When we are puzzled by something, we commonly seek for fresh information to explain what is puzzling us. Should a purported explanation fail to satisfy us, it may be possible to explain what was supposed to be the explanation more fully in its turn. But this process has, one might well think, got to stop somewhere. Does it stop when we reach self-explanatory facts, or statements, or states of affairs, etc.? Does this mean that there must ultimately be some things — their exact nature is as yet unclear — facts or propositions, maybe, which are self-explanatory, in the sense that they are their own explanations, that they explain themselves? But how can anything be its own explanation? Surely, what induces puzzlement in us and what removes the puzzlement can­ not be one and the same thing. How can anything explain itself? It is tempting to think, at only slightly differing moments, that, if explanation itself is to be possible, then self-explanatoriness must necessarily exist in some form, somewhere, and that it is impossible. We have seen with other reflexive-related concepts — selfdeception and self-contradiction, for example — that there is a tendency to offer accounts of reflexive-related concepts which are either too ‘strong’ or too ‘weak’. Too ‘strong’ an account of what it is for something to be self-explanatory leads to the quest for that remarkable property allegedly possessed by some single 187

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

sentence or phrase of being both a source of puzzlement and its own explanation. This seems as difficult as combining a dark night and a bright day. In disgust, we give up the task as hopeless and weakly conclude that ‘self-explanatory’ means no more than very clear or requiring no explanation. But this is unsatisfactory because there does seem to be a connection of some kind between a self-explanatory remark and explanation, which is missing in the case of what is no more than a very clear remark which stands in no need of an explanation. Our difficulty is reminiscent of an earlier problem in Chapter 5 of how to distinguish between an end in itself and a single end single-mindedly pursued. The distinction, we found, could be observed in the contrast between the miser’s attitude to his money and that of the young businessman whose sole ambition is to have made a million before he is thirty. The latter is not pursuing money as an end in itself, not if he spends it on himself (large house, fast car, swimming pool, etc.) in the usual way. It is the miser in rags, not the expensively dressed entrepreneur, who amasses money as an end in itself. The solution to our difficulties over self-explanatoriness lies, I believe, in considering what we would be meaning if we recommended to a friend a set of instructions accompanying, say, a kit of parts from which a small radio may be built, as ‘selfexplanatory’. As you peruse the instructions, your eyes will fall on unfamiliar words and your brow will pucker in puzzlement. ‘What on earth is a trim-pot?’, you ask yourself. With a sinking heart you will begin to reach for the dictionary on the shelf, the specialist manual in the library, or the telephone to put you in touch with the nearest expert. But, to your relief, the writer of the instructions has anticipated your problem and there in the instructions themselves the question you thought would have to be answered with outside help is answered internally with a helpful picture of a trim-pot and a description of how to adjust it. Your brows begin to unknit in relief. These instructions explain themselves; they are self-explanatory. This is not at all the same thing as saying that the instructions are all plain sailing and crystal clear. In order to count as self-explanatory, an instruction needs to have a certain degree of complexity about it which is incompatible with absolute crystal clarity from start to finish. It has to be complex enough to induce puzzlement at one moment and to remove it by, say, a helpful hint in brackets. Searching for some very simple declaration about some elementary, uncontro188

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

versial matter — which is probably what we were inclined to do when we first went looking for self-explanatory propositions — is exactly the wrong place to look because it will be the least likely to provide the necessary temporary obscurities which can be swiftly cleared up in the next breath. We were looking in the wrong place for the self-explanatory in the same way that philosophers (for example, Sartre) have tried and failed to make sense of being able to deceive oneself about some matter where the truth is already well known to one (the number of children one has, perhaps), and have then concluded that self-deception is impossible. But, just as self-deception can only gain a foothold when one asks oneself questions to which one does not know the answer and can then be dishonest with oneself in giving an answer, so self-explanatoriness has its home in utterances about sufficiently complicated matters to require the darker passages to be illuminated by explanations all contained within the same document, or within the same set of instructions, etc. It is perhaps worth mentioning that, just as a self-congratula­ tory speech is one in which the speaker congratulates himself, so a self-explanatory letter may be either a letter in which the writer explains himself (he explains, maybe, his recent coolness towards the recipient of the letter) or a letter which explains itself (for example, it explains something which would otherwise be puzzling about it). In this respect ‘self-explanatory’ works like ‘self-contradictory’. As we have already seen, a self-contradictory sentence may be one which contradicts itself or, alternatively, one which the speaker uses to contradict himself with. I appreciate that I have not tried to say what sorts of things can count as self-explanatory. Certainly, there is no reason to think that the range is restricted to instructions or to utterances in general of some kind. Just as one fact can explain another, so the fact that in dry seasons the water in the wells is lower than in wet ones, given an elementary understanding of the water-cycle, will be self-explanatory.

2. Self-evidence and first principles The idea that some truths are self-evident has played an important role in the history of philosophy. In many different areas of life we make certain claims and are challenged to justify them. So we fall back upon other claims in support of our 189

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

previous statements. But, surely, this process cannot go on for ever; somewhere we reach the ultimate foundations, the first principles, whose truth cannot be made evident by being illuminated by other truths, and it is these truths which are selfevident. These self-evident truths have their own source of illumination within them. They are like bonfires or lighthouses; they are the sun rather than the full moon. In his Essay on the intellectual powers of man Thomas Reid took up just this view: But there are other propositions which arc no sooner understood than they are believed. The judgment follows the apprehension of them necessarily, and both are equally the work of nature, and the result of our original powers. There is no searching for evidence, no weighing of arguments; the proposition is not deduced or inferred from another; it has the light of truth in itself, and has no occasion to borrow it from another. Propositions of the last kind, when they are used in matters of science, have commonly been called axioms: and on whatever occasion they are used, are called first principles, principles of common sense, common notions, self-evident truths. . . . When we examine, in the way of analysis, the evidence of any proposition, either we find it self-evident, or it rests upon one or more propositions that support it. The same may be said of the propositions that support it, and of those that support them, as far back as we can go. But we cannot go back in this track to infinity. It is evident we must stop only when we come to propositions which support all that are built upon them, but which are themselves supported by none — that is, to self-evident propositions.1 When we arrive at a self-evident proposition, says Reid, there is no searching for evidence, no weighing of arguments; the proposition is not deduced or inferred from another; it has the light of truth in itself, and has no occasion to borrow it from another. Such propositions are, Reid tells us, no sooner under­ stood than they are believed.2 Among the examples Reid gives of self-evident propositions are ‘A material world exists’, ‘There is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse’, ‘Every change that happens in nature must have a cause’, ‘There is a right and wrong in human conduct’, ‘When a man is conscious of pain, he is certain of its existence’, ‘The testimony of 190

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

two is better than that of one, supposing them equal in character, and in their means of knowledge’, ‘Every complete sentence must have a verb’, ‘Every proposition is either true or false’, ‘No proposition can be both true and false at the same time’, ‘A face wanting a nose or with the mouth on one side is not beautiful’, ‘No man ought to be blamed for what it was not in his power to hinder’, ‘A generous action has more merit than a merely just one’, and the axioms of Euclid’s geometry/* Reid is well aware that what is self-evident to one man may be denied to be so by another. When men differ about things that are taken to be first principles or self-evident truths, reasoning seems to be at an end. Each party appeals to common sense . . . Thus I conceive, that first principles, which are really the dictates of common sense, and are directly opposed to absurdities in opinion, will always, from the constitution of human nature support themselves, and gain rather than lose ground among mankind.4 It is not difficult to see how the appeal to self-evidence, understood in this way, could become sterile, if what is selfevident to me might not be self-evident to you and yet neither of us can adduce reasons to support our disputed contention without forfeiting our right to call it a self-evident proposition. For on this view, a self-evident proposition, being evident all by itself, cannot be made evident by any other proposition. Quite simply, as a first principle, it cannot follow from anything. A selfevident proposition is one where the evidence-giving buck stops. At the prospect of disagreement over what is self-evident, Reid is simply expressing the pious belief that our common human nature will lead us all to accept commonly shared starting points in our reasoning about morality, metaphysics, art, science, logic and grammar, etc. Others may well feel less optimistic than Reid. The striking thing about this view of self-evidence is that what is self-evident cannot be justified by giving reasons as to why it is self-evident. The appeal to reasons or to external evidence clashes with the very idea of self-evidence. Or so one thinks. I hope it will by now not seem unreasonable to question this account of self­ evidence. It is one thing to say, as Reid does, that a self-evident proposition has its evidence within itself, and another to gain a clear conception of what this means. The idea that it cannot be 191

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

possible for it to follow from certain considerations that it is selfevident that so and so is the case, is, I shall argue, an isolationist account of self-evidence. It ought to remind us of the thought that one cannot possibly be teaching oneself French, say, if one is reading from a book with a name other than one’s own advertised as the author on the dust-wrapper; that you have not killed yourself if what killed you was the poison or the train; that the researcher is not pursuing his academic subject for its own sake if he derives enormous intellectual pleasure and satisfaction from doing so. In viewr of G.E. Moore’s isolationist account of doing something for its own sake discussed in Chapter 5, it comes as no surprise to find Moore in Principia eihica putting forward a beautiful expression of the isolationist interpretation of self­ evidence. Having said that the fundamental principles of ethics must be self-evident, Moore continues: But I am anxious this expression should not be misunder­ stood. The expression ‘self-evident’ means properly that the proposition so-called is evident or true, by itself alone; that it is not an inference from some proposition other than itself The expression does not mean that the proposition is true, because it is evident to you or me or all mankind, because in other words it appears to us to be true. That a proposition appears to be true can never be a valid argument that true it really is. By saying that a proposition is self-evident, we mean emphatically that its appearing so to us is not the reason why it is true: for we mean that it has absolutely no reason. It would not be a self-evident proposition, if we could say of it: I cannot think otherwise and therefore it is true. For then its evidence or proof would not lie in itself, but in something else, namely our conviction of it. That it appears true to us may indeed be the cause of our asserting it, or the reason why we think and say that it is true: but a reason in this sense is something utterly different from a logical reason, or a reason why something is true. More­ over, it is obviously not a reason of the same thing. The evidence of a proposition to us is only a reason for our holding it to be true: whereas a logical reason, or reason in the sense in which self-evident propositions have no reason, is a reason why the proposition itself must be true, not why we hold it so to be. Again that a proposition is evident to us may not only be the reason why we do think or affirm it, it may even be a 192

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

reason why we ought to think or affirm it. . . . Nothing whatever can take the place of reasons for the truth of any proposition: intuition can only furnish a reason for holding any proposition to be true: this however it must do when any proposition is self-evident, when, in fact, there are no reasons which prove its truth.’’’

In conformity with this understanding o f ‘self-evident’, Moore says that statements about what is good in itself can be selfevident, that is, no reason can be given for them (Principia, p. 148). But no moral law is self-evident since moral laws are capable of being confirmed or refuted by an investigation of causes and effects (Principia, p. 149). If Moore’s account were correct, it would be impossible for someone ever to say intelligibly ‘From this, it follows that such and such is self-evident’ or for someone to explain to someone else why something was self-evident. But such cases are readily imaginable. A garage mechanic is tinkering with the engine of his car which has suddenly broken down. The ignition is repeatedly switched on but each time the engine refuses to start. He shouts to his girlfriend, who is sitting in the passenger seat, ‘Aha! At last I’ve solved it. No petrol is getting through to the carburettor.’ ‘What’s that got to do with why the car won’t go?’ she asks. ‘Why, surely, it’s self-evident! If there’s no petrol reaching the carburettor, then there’s no petrol reaching the cylinders and that’s why the engine won’t start’, he explains. To someone with a rudimentary grasp of the workings of the internal combustion engine it is self-evident that if no petrol is reaching the carburettor, then no petrol is reaching the cylinders because that is the only way the petrol gets to the cylinders and this explains why there is no explosive mixture in the cylinders for the spark to ignite. Men of common sense have gone to their graves not knowing this; the mechanic was not born knowing this and his girlfriend maybe still doesn’t understand what is self-evident to him. What do we mean when we say, as the mechanic did, that something is self-evident? We mean that, given what the person already knows and has worked out or been taught, the next step follows immediately without further head-scratching or external assistance or prompting by someone else. The next bit is evident without further, additional things being needed to make it evident. What is self-evident does not require anything in addition to what you already possess by way of knowledge and 193

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

understanding for you to spot it. It makes itself evident, as a self­ opening door opens automatically for you as you approach it without your needing to do anything extra to get it to open. There are no intellectual handles that need to be turned for the truth to make itself evident to you. I want to press further this analogy between the evidentness of what is self-evident and the openness of an open self-opening door. A self-opening door is not more open when it is open than is a manually opened door. The difference between the two open doors lies rather in the different ways in which they have come to be open. Similarly, a self-evident proposition is not more evident than an evidently true one; where they differ is in how they got to be evident. You need to walk towards a self-opening door to get it to open but you do not need to turn any handle. When something becomes self-evident, you need to be thinking and trying to work out what is true but you do not need to discover any additional clues over and above the ones that are already in your possession. A self-opening door is a boon to someone with both hands full. A self-evident answer comes as a relief to the researcher whose mind is already fully occupied with solving other problems. There is no intermediate puzzle that has to be solved. What is self-evident follows automatically as the self-opening door opens automatic­ ally. By some strange mischance it is possible that you might fail to negotiate your way through a door which has opened automatically before you. It is not logically necessary that you will see what is self-evident. People have been known to miss a sitter and not to notice what was staring them in the face. The geometry teacher may have to explain to his pupil how it is that, at this stage in the proof, the answer is self-evident and there is no more proving to be done. Should you protest that a proposition cannot be self-evident if it is evident only to someone with con­ siderable background knowledge and specialist understanding, and consequently, hardly ‘evident in itself, this is like protesting that a door can hardly count as self-opening if its opening is triggered by your approach and would not open unless a separate servo-mechanism was activated by your body’s interrupting a beam of infra-red light. But the fact is that the door deserves the title ‘self-opening’ because it opens for you without needing to be manually opened. ‘Self-opening’ excludes certain causes, in particular, your opening it by turning the knob and pulling or pushing, but it does not exclude all causes of a door’s opening. It would be a manifestation of the isolationist fallacy to interpret 194

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

‘You don’t have to do anything’ in our explanation ‘You don’t have to do anything. The door just opens automatically as you approach it’ as meaning that walking towards it is not required for a self-opening door to open. Similarly, something can be selfevident only to those who bring to the situation considerable background knowledge. Then, at a certain stage, the next bit is self-evident when nothing extra needs to be done to establish that it follows from the information already possessed. Of course, you still need to be thinking and concentrating in order to see what is self-evident, just as you need to do something, namely, walk towards the self-opening door to make it open automatically. It is also worth pointing out that there is no reason why the axioms in our logical systems or in our geometries, our basic laws in physics, phonetics and chemistry, or the first principles of our political constitutions and codes of conduct should necessarily be self-evident. Self-evidence is desirable wherever it will be an advantage if people react with ‘Well, that stands to reason.’ I observe in passing that ‘Your common sense tells you that’ is too weak for self-evidence. What your common sense tells you may turn out to be wrong; but if it stands to reason that something is so, then it must be so. Possibly we are influenced by some such thought as ‘Either a man is self-supporting or he is supported by others; but if he is neither, then he perishes.’ Thus, if a first principle is to bear the weight of all the rest of the argument resting on it, we think it had better be self-supporting. For how else shall it stand? Similarly, as we have seen in Chapter 6, Plato had argued that when motion came into the world, it must have been as a result of the first object to move moving itself, since there was nothing in motion to move it. But if we take seriously the comparison between an object’s being physically supported by something else and one proposition’s supporting another in an argument, we can see that we are not forced to choose between the evident and the self-evident. ‘The book is supported by the table, which is supported by the floor, the floor by the walls, the walls by the foundations, the foundations by the soil, the soil by the rocks, and so eventually we must come to something which is not supported by anything else and which supports itself is not a valid argument. There is no reason why the structure of our thoughts in mathematics, science, morality or the arts should have at its foundations self-evident, ‘self-supporting’ propositions any more than we should expect to find self-supporting founda­ tions at the foot of our buildings. 195

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

3. Self-evidence and ‘trifling p ro p o sitio n s9 A modern defender of the idea that the first principles in logic and mathematics are self-evident would probably not be happy with most of the examples Reid gave of self-evident propositions. He would probably feel that they were far too substantive to be selected as uncontroversial, self-evident starting points. He will be much more likely to put forward propositions of the following kind: ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining’, ‘Whatever is, is’, ‘Red is not blue’, ‘No proposition can be both true and false at the same time', ‘No object can be in two different places at the same time’, ‘If p, and if (if p, then q), then q’, ‘If it is false that not-p, then it is true that p’, ‘2 + 2 = 4’. Thus, in a chapter entitled ‘Self-evidence, logical truth, and analytic propositions’, Peter Geach says: Many propositions are evident but not self-evident. It is evident that there are many dogs around and that many men wear shoes: but so far as the meaning of the terms goes, dogs might be as extinct as dodoes and shoes as much out of fashion as togas. What is wrong with denying either of these propositions is that it is contrary to observations anybody can make. But we need no observation to show that either it is raining or it isn’t, nor to show that 3 is odd. Propositions like these, evident independently of observation (or testi­ mony or memory, for that matter), are called self-evident.(> Not all propositions that can be shown true or false by mere logic are true or false self-evidently, says Geach. The paradox of the Barber is, he says, logically false but not self-evidently so. However, all truths of logic either are themselves self-evident or follow by evident methods of proof from self-evident truths of logic; and ipsofacto their contradictories arc shown to be false. A very natural reaction to such alleged examples of self-evident statements, including Geach’s, is that, in contrast to most of Reid’s, they do not say anything worth remembering or repeat­ ing. They put one in mind of the pale, bespectacled academic, who does not own a television set or read the newspapers, hunched all day long over a desk, eyes glued to the page in front of him, struggling to write down on a piece of paper a number of sentences which will command instantaneous, universal assent. In this way he re-establishes his links with the rest of humanity 196

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

beyond his study wails, since, allegedly, these are the common starting points from which he and they must all set out. Locke describes such propositions as self-evident but trifling. I agree that they are trifling but I want to question whether Locke has not conceded too much in granting that they are self-evident. In a chapter entitled ‘Of trifling propositions’ in Book IV of his Essay concerning human understanding, Locke discusses what he agrees is the self-evident proposition ‘What is, is.’ For at this rate, any very ignorant Person, who can but make a Proposition, and knows what he means when he says, Ay, or No, may make a million of Propositions, of whose truth he may be infallibly certain, and yet not know one thing in the World thereby; v.g. what is a Soul, is a Soul; or a Soul is a Soul; a Spirit is a Spirit; a Fetiche is a Fetiche, etc. These all being equivalent to this Proposition, viz, What is, is, i.e. what hath Existence, hath Existence; or, who hath a Soul, hath a Soul. What is this more than trifling with Words? It is but like a monkey shifting his Oyster from one hand to the other; and had he had but Words, might, no doubt, have said, Oyster in the right Hand is Subject, and Oyster in the left hand is Predicate: and so might have made a self-evident Proposition of Oyster, i.e. Oyster is Oyster, and yet, with all this, not have been one whit the wiser, or more knowing: and that way of handling the matter, would much at one have satisfied the Monkey’s Hunger, or Man’s Understand­ ing; and they two would have improved in Knowledge and Bulk together.7 Among Locke’s self-evident but trifling propositions — he calls them ‘maxims’ — we find ‘Whatsoever is, is’, ‘It is impossible for the same to be, and not be’, ‘A man is not a horse’, ‘Red is not blue’, ‘The same is the same’, ‘The same is not different', ‘A circle is a circle’, ‘Two bodies cannot be in the same place’, ‘Equals taken from equals, the remainder will be equals’, ‘One and one are equal to two’, ‘The whole is equal to all its parts taken together’, ‘The whole is bigger than the part', ‘A hill is higher than a valley’, ‘Space is not body.' Compared with Reid's selfevident first principles, these seem a tame bunch. A retreat has taken place from the bustle and noise of life, down from the pulpit and out of the debating chamber, the observatory and the laboratory, into the study and onto the page. To find out whether 197

Seif-evidence and Self-explanaioriness

a sentence expresses a self-evidently true proposition, you write it down on a piece of paper, retire into your study, close the curtains — for you will not be needing to look out — and keep your eyes focused on the page in front of you. The only book you are allowed to consult is a dictionary. For what is self-evident is evident independent of observation, or testimony or memory.8 ‘The self-evident is evident in itself, is what one says to oneself. So the truth has to glare back at you from the page on which it is written. If, knowing what the sentence means, you have to check up on what the sentence on the page says in order to establish its truth or falsity, that will automatically destroy its title to being self-evident because it will, at best, be being made evident by something external to itself. But, as we have already seen, it was not by staring at words on the page that it was self-evident to the mechanic that no petrol was reaching the engine. He had first to get his hands dirty. And the fact that you have to walk towards the door to make it open does not destroy its claim to be a self­ opening door. Perhaps it is true that many people, if asked to take a test in which sentences are flashed up on a screen in front of them, will say that ‘A man is a man’, ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining’, or ‘Red is not blue’ are true without hesitation. Some might just be bewildered as to what is going on. But I question whether a general willingness to say they are true shows that such sentences are true or are self-evidently true. Consider, for instance, Geach’s example, ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining.’ All who speak English as their mother tongue and who know something of the subtleties of the English climate will be familiar with the response ‘Well, it is and it isn’t’ to the question ‘Is it raining?’ So, there is a third possibility and we are not restricted to saying either that it is or that it is not raining, in which case the first statement is not self-evident because it is false. Tertxum datur. Or perhaps the original either/or statement was uttered by someone who had the job of ringing up different people in different parts of the country and asking them a series of questions about the weather. To make the task of recording their answers manageable, he lists each question and places a tick in one of two columns, labelled ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Perhaps he will treat the answer ‘Well, it is and it isn’t’ as a yes in answer to his question ‘Is it raining?’ When he says ‘father it is raining or it is not raining’, this is tantamount to deciding to accept only yes or no as answers to his question. But in that case, he is expressing a perfectly reasonable decision on how to treat certain answers by 198

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

simplifying them, not uttering a self-evidently true statement about the weather.

4. T he evidence o f self-evidence There are two ways in which we can talk about evidence, and self-evidence fits only one of them. The distinction I am about to draw is reminiscent of other distinctions that have been drawn earlier in this book in the course of explaining other reflexiverelated concepts. I am thinking of the importance of the distinction between deceit and deception for self-deception, of the importance of the contrast between motion and movement (as between one billiard ball's colliding with another and setting it in motion, and a man’s moving his hand) for the idea of something's moving itself, of the contrast between the host who invites himself to his own party by sending himself a printed invitation card and the unwanted guest who invites himself along. ‘It is evident that p’ differs from ‘The evidence is that p’ in that the former, but not the latter, entails that it is true that p. Not even ‘All the evidence is that p’ entails that p. When it is evident from the child’s tearstained face that he has been crying, we have the evidence of his having been crying to go by. But when we have evidence for (not ‘of, note) something's being so, all the evidence may point in one direction while the truth lies in another. We have, I think, a natural tendency, inside and outside philosophy, to think mainly of evidence as evidence for some proposition and to overlook ‘It is evident that p' or to assimilate it to the other way of speaking. Similarly, when invited to think of the relation of appearance to reality, we readily think o f ‘It appears that p’ when the reality is different, and pay insufficient attention to ‘It is apparent that p', whose truth requires that reality be as the sentence claims. What is apparent when it is apparent that such and such is the case, unlike what appears to be so, or what is only apparently so, cannot not be so. When Franz Brentano writes of the Evidenz of a moral judgement, he is making a comment on its evidentness, not on its being backed by supporting evidence for it. We can be sure of this because the German language uses the noun Evidenz and the adjective evident, which are Brentano’s stock terms, only in the sense o f‘It is evident that . . .' and T he evidence of his guilt . . .’ but not for the other way of speaking about evidence, in which the evidence supports a theory which may or may not correspond to 199

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

the truth (the commonest German word for this is Zeugnis). This connection between truth and something’s being evident must not, however, blind us to the fact that it is possible for there to be such things as evident lies or evident untruths. An evident lie is uttered when it is evident that what is said is a lie. It is not that what is called ‘evident’ must be true. Similarly, an apparent error is something which appears to be but does not have to be an error. It does not have to be apparent that there is an error for there to be an apparent error. Brentano, I notice, can be found objecting to someone speaking of ‘evident conjectures’ (évidente Vermutungen) which may well be wrong ‘in spite of their Evidenz\ as Brentano puts it.9 But to speak of an evident conjecture is to speak of a thought or remark where it is evident that it is a conjecture and says nothing about its being evidently true. The idea of self-evidence is related to evidentness, to its being evident that something is so, not to the idea of there being evidence for some claim. Because philosophers have sought selfevidence by tracing their path backwards down successive steps in a chain of reasoning in which each preceding step is evidence for the later one, it is tempting, but, I think, a mistake, to treat the self-evident proposition as being its own evidence, as providing evidence for its own truth. Oscar Wilde has one of his characters say that a really good lie is a statement which is its own evidence,10 so I do not want to say that the idea of a statement’s being its own evidence is an outright logical absurdity.11 But it is amusing that in Wilde’s bon mot it should be a false statement that is its own evidence and this surely gives the lie to the philosophers’ notion that such a statement would be bound to guarantee its own truth. After his latest invasion, Hitler announces ‘I have no more territorial ambitions’, which is a bare­ faced lie but decent people who do not fancy a fight take him at his word. For where else shall they look except at his words for evidence of a sudden change of heart in a man who has recently mended his ways? It would be unfair to rake up his past conduct. The evidence of self-evidence derives, however, from its being evident that something is so. The task confronting us is to explain how the self-evident differs from the merely evident. I want to use the account I have already given of self-explanatoriness as my model but I recognise that self-evidence seems more pu/./.ling than self-explanatoriness. The explanation for this difference lies, I believe, in the following problem. When something is evident, a normal person, suitably informed, will be able to see it straight 200

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

off. There is nothing that he needs to do before it becomes evident to him, otherwise this would not be a case of something’s being evident to him at all. With self-explanatoriness, there was something you did not need to do, namely, to turn to outside sources of advice and explanation. And again, with a self-opening door, you do not need to turn the knob. But what is the mental counterpart in the case of self-evidence to not needing to turn the handle? How can you do less than nothing? It is not that the selfevident is easier to see than the evident, any more than it is true that it is easier to pass through a self-opening door which has opened than through a door you have had to open yourself. How, then, does the self-evident differ from the evident? I want to suggest that the concept of self-evidence belongs to an area of life quite distinct from the proper sphere of influence of the concept of evidence in the sense of evidentness. This may sound implausible in view of the grammatical affinity between the two phrases ‘It is evident that . . and ‘It is self-evident that . . .’ But we have already had occasion to see, in the case of inviting oneself, for example, that grammatical closeness can conceal an extraordinary conceptual gulf. The host who invites himself to his own party, whether deliberately or inadvertently, and thereby becomes his own guest, is not playing the same game as the unwanted guest who has invited himself along. We have seen that to deceive oneself is not necessarily to fall into self-deception, and that the barber who shaves himself is always his own barber but only sometimes his own paying customer. It would be helpful to give an example in which it is evident, but not self-evident, that something is the case. 'Even at that distance,’ recollects one of the children who had been anxiously waiting for their father to return home on foot to the farm after spending the day at the market, ‘when he was still a whole field away from us, it was evident that he had been drinking.’ I hope that you will agree, intuitively, that ‘self-evident’ would not be in place here. Their father was not close enough for them to smell his breath or hear his slurred speech, but they could tell from his gait that he was drunk. In order for this to be evident to them, they had to be there on the spot at the time and they had to use their eyes and go by the evidence of their senses. Self-evidence, however, is not a matter of the exercise of one’s senses. What is self-evident stands to reason. Where ‘It is self-evident that . . .’ fits, it is possible to replace 'is self-evident’ with 'stands to reason’. It would not have made sense to say that it stood to reason that their father was drunk in 201

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

the above example and that is why what was evident to the children was not self-evident. What is self-evident is evident to the mental, not the physical, eye. To have failed to spot what is self-evident impugns your powers of reasoning, not your eyesight or hearing. Cracks in the masonry of a bridge may be faintly, barely or glaringly evident, upon visual inspection, but they are not the kind of things that can be self-evident. This is why the retreat to the darkened study in the pursuit of the self-evident was apt enough in that it brings out the point that, in order to spot the self-evident, you do not have to go outdoors and carry out observations and look about you in the world. Given where you have got to, you can see what is self-evident from the comfort of the armchair with your eyes closed. This is why Sherlock Holmes could get others to do the leg work, gather the evidence, etc., and report back to Baker Street. Then he could sit down in his study in possession of many queer, seemingly unconnected, facts and question Watson on who Watson thought the culprit was. Watson, ever the man of common sense (so Reid will have high hopes of him), stumblingly presents a weak inductive argument which suggests that the caretaker committed the crime. Watson, note, relies heavily on a long chain of reasoning in which one thing is evidence for another. What is more, Watson is correct. But when he tentatively names the murderer, Holmes snaps 'Selfevidently, I would have thought’ and dazzles Watson and us with an argument to show that he and we already knew all we needed to know to be able to work out for certain who it was who did it.11 At the end of his demonstration, Holmes, but not Watson, is entitled to say 'It stands to reason that so and so did it.’ Similarly, once the mechanic knew that no petrol was reaching the carburettor, he too could have retired from the scene and told us without the need for further investigation why the engine would not start. It is in this sense that it is right to say that no observation is needed to show that something is self-evident. ‘No observation’ means ‘no further observation, given the observa­ tions we have already made’ not ‘against a background of no observations whatsoever’. We must not overdo the importance of the darkened study. In particular, it would be a mistake to insist that the study, being no place in which to make observations about the outside world, is the ideal place in which to spend your time if you wish to specialise in seeing as much of the self-evident as possible. This is the fallacy of isolationism once again. Should you spend too much time in the study, you will become like 202

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

Locke's monkey shifting its oyster from the left hand to the right. Shifting the words from the left to the right hand side of the sentence, ‘If it is raining, then it is raining’ you will say. ‘What could be more self-evident than that?’ If it takes the brilliance of a Sherlock Holmes to show Dr Watson and the average reader that it is self-evident that something is the case, how can it possibly be self-evident that it is the case? The idea behind this objection is that the self-evident must be the sort of thing that is immediately and glaringly obvious at first glance to any ordinary person. A self-evident proposition, on this conception, has to be like a conspicuous object, a noisy elephant, say, which is too big to be hidden from someone entering even a decent sized room for the first time. There is, however, no more reason to insist that what is selfevident must be immediately seen by the normal person than to insist that a set of self-explanatory instructions must be under­ stood by whoever happens to pick them up and read them. In order to write a set of self-explanatory instructions to accompany a kit of parts with which to build your own electronic calculator, its author does not need to assume no knowledge whatsoever of electronics or soldering on the part of his readers. Of course, I agree that what may be self-evident to a brilliant mind may not be self-evident to the rest of us, and that just because something is self-evident to someone somewhere it does not follow that it is self-evident. The fact that it is daytime in Australia does not prove that it is daytime here too. But just as there would be no point in snatching people from the surface of the earth and removing them to a distant corner of the universe and then asking them ‘Is it night or day?', so there is no point in creeping up on people unawares and asking them to say if certain propositions are self-evident. Far from being the best people to judge, these people are in no position to judge. Before Watson had listened to Holmes’ masterly demonstra­ tion of why only one person could have committed the crime, Watson would not have said ‘It is self-evident that so-and-so did it.’ Afterwards, he would. Watson’s situation is like that of the person who has been shown a ouzzle picture in which several faces are cunningly hidden. At first, it is not obvious whereabouts in the picture the faces are hidden. Once you have seen them, you cannot look at the picture with innocent eyes again. It is obvious where the faces are hidden. What is not obvious to the innocent eye can be obvious to the eye of experience. What was self-evident 203

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

to Holmes was not self-evident to Watson until he had had it explained to him. And just as we can compare our puzzle picture which has faces hidden in it with a picture which has an obvious face painted in one corner of it, so we can compare cases in which complications need to be cleared away before the answer is obvious with straightforward ones in which the answer is obvious from the start. In saying that it is obvious where the hidden faces are once they have been pointed out, I am not suggesting that it is self-evident that that is where they are. On my view, we get self­ evidence where it is intelligible to say ‘It stands to reason that . . .’ It is not a question of its standing to reason that the hidden faces are where they are in the puzzle picture. A much better place to find a legitimate appeal to self­ evidence, and, happily, far removed from the fear of any trifling propositions, is the American Declaration of Independence of 1776. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted amongst men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .’ How could Thomas Jefferson ever have held it to be self-evident that all men are created equal? I take it that Jefferson knew, or at any rate, would have said that he knew, that God had made man in his own image. All men had come out of the same mould. This is not a biological fact, of course. It is not about equality or inequality of height, weight, strength, etc. It is about equality and inequality of birth (master and slave; nobleman and commoner; the great and the little people), about the inequalities that trouble an egalitarian. Given what Jefferson knew, or thought he knew, about men and their creator, it stood to reason, it followed automatically from what he believed — in other words, it was self-evident — that God had created us all equal, equally important, equally deserving of care and consideration. Finally, we should beware of calling what Locke would have called mere verbal propositions such as ‘A bachelor is an unmarried man’ self-evident. Such a statement is true, and, being a dictionary definition of a bachelor, is true solely in virtue of the meanings of its constituent words. But it is not something that stands to reason. A passage from Dickens’ Pickwick papers illustrates what I think is deliberately intended to be an off-colour

204

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

use of ‘self-evident’ in connection with a Verbal proposition’ followed by its correct use. ‘Ah,’ said the newcomer, ‘it’s a good thing for both of us, isn’t it? Company, you see — company — is — is — it’s a very different thing from solitude — ain’t it?’ ‘There’s no denying that ’ere,’ said Mr Weller, joining in the conversation, with an affable smile. ‘That’s what I call a self-evident proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he waren’t no gentleman.’1* When the newcomer says that company is different from solitude, what he says is not the right kind of thing to count as selfevidently true. It does not stand to reason that this is so. Reason does not enter into it. He is saying no more than that two different things are different. Which is, as Locke says, to say nothing. But given what the housemaid knows about the way of the world and about manners and men, it stands to reason that a dog’s-meat man will not turn out on closer acquaintance to be of gentle birth. There are no further observations she needs to make to enable her to draw that inference. So, when the dog’s-meat man takes liberties and says something racy or does something saucy to the housemaid and she tells him he ain’t no gentleman (her double negative not cancelling itself out, note, so we should be suspicious of the suggestion that is sometimes made that it is self-evident that a double negative cancels itself out), that is, that he is illmannered and vulgar, the dog's-meat man can pretend to defend himself against her accusation by treating it as something it was never intended to be, a self-evident remark about the general connection between class and occupation, of which he is but a self-evident instance. 1 have to admit that many, perhaps most, modern philosophers would be unwilling to admit that the dog’s-meat man was right to say that what the housemaid said was self-evident. And if what the housemaid said was self-evident, then the theories of the philosophers are false. ‘To be self-evidently true,' it has recently been stated, and is the received wisdom, ka proposition has to be both a priori and necessary (and, if all a priori necessary propositions are analytic, it also has to be analytic).’14 Neither the housemaid’s kYou ain’t no gentleman’ nor the dog’s-meat man’s joking gloss ‘A dog’s-meat man is no gentleman' are any of

205

Self-evidence and Self-explanatoriness

these. The modern philosopher’s requirements for self-evidence seem better served by the newcomer’s ‘Company is a very different thing from solitude’, sarcastically endorsed as selfevident by Mr Weller. Yet 1 cannot escape the feeling that to insulate the allegedly self-evident from the risk of falsity or the demands of justification and proof is only another expression of what I have been calling the fallacy of isolationism with respect to reflexive-related concepts. Since the choice lies between philoso­ phers and a dog’s-meat man, it pains me as a philosopher to have to say so, but I think the dog’s-meat man has it.

Notes 1. Thomas Reid, Ch. 4, 'Of first principles', Essay 6, 'Ofjudgment’, in his Essays on the intellectual powers of man in The philosophical limits of Thomas Reid 2 vols., (James Thin, Edinburgh, no date), vol. I, p.434 and p. 435. 2. Reid's view is still popular today and is endorsed by AJ. Ayer: ‘To say of a proposition that it is self-evident is not just to say that it is certainly true, but also that it does not stand in need of proof. One has only to understand the sentence which expresses it in order to be able to see that the proposition is true' in Ayer's 'Self-evidence', Essay 5 in Edo Pivcevic (ed.), Phenomenology and philosophical understanding, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975), pp. 79-92 (p. 80). 3. This selection of supposedly self-evident propositions is taken from Chs 5 and 6, 'The first principles of contingent truths' and ‘The first principles of necessary truths', in Essay 6, Reid's Essays, pp. 441-61. 4. Reid, Essays, p. 437 and p. 439. 5. G.E. Moore, Principia ethica (Cambridge University Press, Cam­ bridge, 1903), pp. 143-4. 6. P.T. Geach, Reason and argument (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1976), P-71. 7. John Locke, Ch. 8, 'Of trifling propositions'. Book IV, An essay concerning human understanding edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), pp. 609-17 (pp. 609-10); first edition 1690. 8. This selection of what Locke takes to be self-evident propositions is taken from Chs 7 and 8, 'Of maxims' and 'Of trifling propositions'. Book TV*. Locke's Essays (Nidditch edition), pp. 591-617. 9. See Franz Brentano, ‘On the evident', in The origin of our knowledge oj right and wrong, edited by Oskar Kraus, translated by Roderick M. Chisholm and Elizabeth H. Schneewind (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969), pp. 76-83 (p. 83); originally published as lom Vrsprung sittlicher Erkenntnis, 1889. 10. ‘What is a fine lie? Simply that which is its own evidence' says Vivian in ‘The decay of lying' in Oscar Wilde's Intentions (Methuen, London, 1891), pp. 1-54 (p. 4). 206

Self-evidence and Selfexplanatoriness

11. I agree with Max Black that when a proposition is called 'selfevident', ‘the old sense of “evidence" that is relevant is approximately “that which makes the proposition true," and not the later sense in which evidence is always evidencefor something' (Max Black, ‘The justification of logical axioms', Essay 2 in his Margins of precision: essays in logic and language (Cornell University Press, London, 1970), pp. 14—22 (p. 18). T do not, however, accept — because I do not understand — Black's proposal later in this same essay that what is intended in calling a proposition self-evident is that it contains its own truth-ground. 12. Holmes' ‘Self-evidently, . . .' and his subsequent explanation of why his solution to the identity of the criminal is self-evident sorts ill with Ayer's concluding remark (‘Self-evidence', p. 92) ‘To say that a proposi­ tion is self-evident is never an argument. At best it is an invitation to one's audience to look at things again, in cases where, if they are unable to see them as we do, we have no further argument to ofTer.’ Needless to say, I think the explanation for this disagreement between myself and Ayer is that Ayer is putting forward an over-pruned interpretation of the idea that the self-evident is evident ‘on its own' or ‘by itself. A self­ opening door opens by itself but you over-prune ‘by itself if you take this to mean that a self-opening door does not need you to approach it to make it open. 13. Dickens, Pickwick papers, Ch. 22. 14. Jonathan Harrison, Our knowledge of right and wrong (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1971), p. 60.

207

Self-knowledge

When a modern philosopher proposes to discuss self-knowledge, he may mean by ‘self-knowledge’ two very different things. I should make it clear straightaway that I shall be tackling only one of these topics. The distinction I have in mind is nicely drawn by Sydney Shoemaker in the preface to his book Self-knowledge and self-identity.1 ‘The topic of this book’, says Shoemaker, ‘is not nearly so lofty as its title may suggest. The term “self-knowledge” is used here, not in the Socratic sense, where it refers to something that few would be able to attain, but in such a way that a person can be said to have self-knowledge whenever he knows the truth of a statement in which there is reference to himself.’ My topic is self-knowledge in what Shoemaker calls the Socratic sense. I shall be trying to find out what someone who possesses self-knowledge knows. I shall be asking why it is that we commonly regard self-knowledge as an unattainable, or, at any rate, an elusive ideal, as Shoemaker clearly does when he says that few would be able to attain it. Why shouldn’t selfknowledge, unlike getting to know one’s next-door neighbours, be inescapable, on the grounds that one is, so to speak, always ‘at home’ to oneself? Further, what makes self-knowledge ‘lofty’, as Shoemaker puts it? You would scarcely say the same if the subject had been our knowledge of other people, or their knowing us. Knowledge of other people is, surely, in itself neither lofty nor unattainable. Shoemaker’s book includes a discussion of the question whether there are some things which, when they are true of us, we cannot but know about ourselves. Must, for example, the person who is in pain know that he is in pain? He might not know that he weighs exactly thirteen stone, when he does. But isn’t he bound to know it when he feels pain? These are excellent philosophical questions which throw a searching spotlight on the 208

Self-knowledge

nature of knowledge. But I, becoming a little more combative, want to question whether it is right, as Shoemaker and many others have done, to treat each and every case of knowing a true statement in which there is reference to oneself as a case of selfknowledge. Take the case of someone who weighs himself. Has he gained in self-knowledge if he now knows that he weighs thir­ teen stone? Was it a lack of self-knowledge on his part if he previously did not know how much he weighed? Both of these claims sound odd. Already, my suspicion is that, as we have seen with other reflexive-related concepts (e.g. deceiving oneself and self-deception, pitying oneself and self-pity, injuring oneself and self-inflicted injury), there is a verb—noun asymmetry here between knowing true facts about oneself and possessing selfknowledge. Could it be that the title of Shoemaker’s book was, in part at least, a bit of a misnomer?

1. W hat does the person who has self-know ledge know? In the first flush of his early retirement, an academic decides to write his autobiography. Naturally, he will want to be as accurate as he can about dates, names, places and events, who said and did what to whom, etc. He will have to gather a lot of facts about himself. Uneasily, he recalls the harsh things he and others have had to say about the amazing, hilarious even, lack of selfknowledge displayed in several recently published autobio­ graphies by academics and others who have climbed into the public eye, if not exactly into public life. That is a judgement he will certainly wish to avoid. How is he to do so? How is he to ensure that he has the self-knowledge they so conspicuously lacked? How is he to obey the Socratic injunction to ‘Know thyself? How is he to keep self-deception at bay? He resolves to take a long, cool, hard look at himself and to make a careful assessment of his own character. Will this be enough? The trouble is that, even when it is a question of knowing another person, knowing what they are like does not count as knowing them. As David Hamlyn has pointed out, the regular television viewer may know very well what someone who appears often on television is like but the viewer does not know the television personality.2 And certainly, the television personality, never having met the viewer, does not know him. 1 he viewer, remember, might well possess a sharp, penetrating insight into 209

Self-knowledge

the television personality whom he has never met in the flesh. If knowing what someone is like is not enough to count as knowing another person, why should it be enough to give us selfknowledge? The Socratic injunction to know ourselves looks as though it cannot be obeyed by studying and memorising the print-outs from a battery of personality tests to which we have been subjected — not even if the results are accurate. In order to know another person, there has to have been some kind of personal contact between two people. A relationship of some sort, not necessarily a close one, has to exist. * They work in the same office, at the same factory, live in the same street, belong to the same clubs, etc. The relationship may not be face to face; they may be pen-friends or speak to each other only on the telephone. But they are in communication with each other and a relation­ ship exists. That relationship does not have to be friendly or even cordial. His victim probably knows the playground bully and you can know someone you dislike. One way of putting this point is to say that knowing another person is not just a matter of having knowledge in your head about him. The schoolboy can be tested on his knowledge of the Ancient Romans, though he doesn't know any. The police ‘tail’ may get to know all sorts of intimate details about the person he is following and spying on. But to do his job effectively, it is vital that they do not know each other. Similarly, knowing yourself, possessing self-knowledge, is not the same thing as possessing the sort of knowledge about yourself which could be tested under examination conditions. Self-knowledge, then, is not knowledge you can acquire as you can knowledge of, say, mathematics or German. Self-knowledge is not knowledge you could forget either, as is shown by the absurdity of the story which begins ‘Once upon a time there was a man who possessed great self-knowledge but as he grewr older, his memory got worse until he had forgotten most of what he ever knew. He bewailed his loss of self-knowledge and regretted not being able to recall to mind what it was that he had once known about himself. Try as he might, however hard he racked his brains, it never came back to him.’ A strange sort of knowledge self-knowledge must be if it can be neither learned nor lost! Little wonder our autobiographer was troubled about how to ensure that he had it. There is, I hasten to point out, a different sense in which knowing oneself is memory-dependent. Advancing years and senility can result in a person of whom his relatives say ‘He no 210

Self-knowledge

longer knows himself.’ He cannot tell us his name, what he did for a living, where he lived, etc. He does not know who he is. It is not that he has forgotten these things. That way of putting his plight seriously understates it. He is suffering from loss of memory; his mind has gone. Notice, however, that not to know oneself in this sense is not the same thing as lacking self-knowledge. Lack of selfknowledge is not a form of amnesia or senile dementia. The upshot of all this for self-knowledge is rather disconcert­ ing. Our autobiographer could see that knowing facts about oneself such as one’s weight, height, date of birth, etc., was irrelevant to having or lacking self-knowledge. He was hoping that self-knowledge would turn out to be just a matter of knowing the right things about oneself, one’s character traits, degree of introversion, fears and ambitions, strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures, etc. But, as the perceptive fan’s knowledge from afar of the television personality showed, even knowledge of these more intimate aspects of character and personality do not result necessarily in one’s knowing someone else. So why should they lead to self-knowledge in one’s own case? Self-knowledge does not seem to be the fruits of any process of fact gathering of any kind of facts about oneself. So what is self-knowledge? Is it really a form of knowledge at all? Moreover, the difference between knowing facts about others and actually knowing the people themselves was attributed to the existence of a relation­ ship of some degree of social intimacy and contact between two people. How on earth are we to build a relationship that is a counterpart to this into the life of the person possessing selfknowledge? How can you have a relationship with yourself? Doesn’t it always require two people to get a relationship going? Or ought we to be looking for a reflexive relationship of some rather special kind? I have already explained in Chapter 1 why I am unhappy about the whole idea of reflexive relationships as these are commonly explained in the logic textbooks. I think we should also steer clear of such notions as ‘self-involvement’ as the plausible name of a supposed relation in which the self-knower can stand to himself.4 Perhaps we can content ourselves merely by looking for an appropriate reflexive verb-form. ‘Understand­ ing oneself is a popular candidate. It has been suggested that there is some connection between self-knowledge and understanding oneself.0 At first, this sounds far-fetched. Why is it not one thing to know certain facts to be so and another to understand why they are as they are? I might 211

Self-knowledge

know that you are impatient with children but not with adults and not have any idea why this should be so. Similarly, I might know that I like dogs but not cats, am good at French but poor at Latin, and yet not really know why this is. Perhaps a psychologist could find out, or maybe my schoolteachers could tell me why. Knowledge is one thing and understanding is another but I think there is a sound point behind the suggestion that what is distinctive of the person with self-knowledge is that he under­ stands himself. I think this stems from the fact that with selfknowledge the contrast lies, not between knowledge as opposed to ignorance of certain facts about oneself, but between possessing insight into yourself as opposed to being blind to aspects of yourself. Just as the knowledge of the religious believer who says ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ is a manifestation of faith, whereas the knowledge of the scientist who knows the formula for prussic acid has nothing to do with faith, so self-knowledge is a manifestation of insight, whereas the knowledge of the person­ ality tester using the latest techniques of psychometric measure­ ment is not a mark of his insight into his guinea-pigs. Knowledge of facts about oneself or about another person, gained as a result of fact gathering, can indeed be contrasted with understanding why these facts are as they are. The facts may leave you saying ‘I know all this about him and yet I do not understand him.’ But if, in virtue of knowing certain facts, you possess insight into either yourself or some other person, it is not clear that you can be left not understanding yourself or them. Insight into one facet of a person, is, of course, compatible with not understanding another facet. But that is beside the point. What I am urging is that what is distinctive of the self-knower is knowledge qua insight, not simply any old knowledge. A certain sort of ‘no nonsense’ philosopher is likely to retort that knowledge is one thing, insight another, and that if self-knowledge is our topic, then we ought not to be switching horses in midstream and telling the autobio­ grapher who wanted self-knowledge to cultivate insight into himself instead. I think this reaction is important, persuasive, but mistaken. What is wrong with this reaction can be illustrated by a comparison between knowing oneself and forgetting oneself.

2. K now ing oneself and forgetting oneself Knowing oneself, I am going to suggest, is no more to be seen as 212

Self-knowledge

simply acquiring knowledge about oneself than forgetting oneself is having a lapse of memory about oneself. Or, at any rate, my suggestion is that this is true for a certain way of understanding what it is to know oneself and to forget oneself. There are at least two clearly different ways in which we may speak of someone as forgetting himself. I am doling out sweets from a bag one at a time in turn to each of those seated round a table. ‘Hang on! You forgot yourself, says a helpful voice when I miss myself out as I am distributing the sweets. I had forgotten to give myself a sweet and inadvertently left myself out of the round. A similar lapse of attention can result in my forgetting my briefcase or umbrella by leaving them behind when I get off the train. There is also another way in which we speak of forgetting ourselves and it is this use of the reflexive form which I wish to compare directly with the knowing oneself that is connected with self-knowledge. The captain can so far forget himself as to tell the general what to do with his orders. It is also possible to forget oneself in a downwardly mobile way. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, III, ii, 83, King Richard says ‘I had forgot myself: am I not a king?’ It would be an absurd consequence of muddling up these two separate sorts of forgetting oneself to say that no one can forget himself because no one can ever leave himself behind, as though we always travelled around with ourselves and never went on ahead as ‘unaccompanied baggage’. To forget oneself, in this second sense, is to forget one’s place, one’s position, one’s status. But when the servant forgets herself and gives her mistress a piece of her mind, she has forgotten her place but has she suffered from a lapse of memory? Had she really forgotten temporarily that she was only a maid? Had her memory let her down? I don’t see why we should say this. Had she really forgotten that she was just the servant, so that, if asked ‘What is your position in this household?’, she would not have been able to remember it, it is hard to see how it would be fair to describe her as having forgotten her place. In order to count as forgetting yourself, in this sense, you need to know the score and not be suffering from a gap in your memory or labouring under the delusion that you are the mistress talking to the maid. In order to overstep the mark you need to know which side of the mark you are on. Forgetting oneself, here, is not a phenomenon of absent-mindedness or a bad memory, whereas forgetting your briefcase is. Forgetting oneself, in this sense, is a manifestation of stepping out of your allotted role. You are a king, a leader, and in a crisis you let yourself down 213

Self-knowledge

and panic like a commoner, a member of the rabble that needs to be led. You are the office-boy and fancy yourself so much that you tell the managing director how to run his business. A good or a bad memory does not enter into it. Similarly, I am suggesting, the way to understand self-knowledge is to see it as knowledge which is a manifestation of insight into oneself, not knowledge about oneself acquired in the fact gatherer’s way. To know your weight is to know something about yourself but is not thereby to display insight into yourself, and therefore does not count as selfknowledge. This position is not at variance with what Gilbert Ryle says about self-knowledge in The concept of mind: ‘The sorts of things I can find out about myself are the same sorts of things that I can find out about other people, and the methods of finding them out are much the same. . . . In certain quite important respects it is easier for me to find out what I want to know about you than it is for me to find out the same sorts of things about myself. In certain other important respects it is harder. But in principle, as distinct from practice, John Doe’s ways of finding out about John Doe are the same as John Doe’s ways of finding out about Richard Roe.’6 But it does not follow from what Ryle says here that finding things out about oneself or others is automatically to know oneself or others and I do not think Ryle is sufficiently sensitive to this in his account of self-knowledge. The explanation for the inade­ quacy of Ryle’s treatment of self-knowledge lies, I believe, in the fact that he does not discriminate sufficiently clearly between selfknowledge proper and merely knowing things about oneself, one’s mental states, for instance. Ryle tends, in other words, to assimilate the distinction Shoemaker drew. Ryle is out to attack the Cartesian thesis that the mind is better known than the body, especially when this thesis takes shape as the suggestion that I cannot but know for sure what I feel whenever I feel it (so I always know when I feel pain or anger) and can never know for sure what you are feeling since I never feel it (so I never know when you feel pain or anger). In his anxiety to deny that there is any asymmetry between our knowledge of ourselves and our knowledge of others, Ryle is inclined to treat, or at any rate encourages others to treat, the difference I am anxious to draw between self-knowledge and knowing facts about oneself, as a reinstatement of the doctrine of privileged access for knowing things about oneself. Which it is not. Earlier I drew a contrast between, on the one hand, the fan’s 214

Self-knowledge

knowing what his television star is like to such an extent that, though his hero worship is from afar, the fan has genuine insight into the star, and, on the other hand, a wife, say, knowing the husband she has lived with so long, so well as to have insight into him. Which of these two kinds of knowing another person is selfknowledge to be compared to? Our dilemma is comparable to that experienced in Chapters 2 and 3 over the correct model for self-deception. Deceitfulness was not the same thing as deceptive­ ness. Was the self-deceiver practising deceit upon himself or was he behaving deceptively towards himself? There has been a strong but, I argued, mistaken tendency amongst philosophers to prefer a deceit-based account of self-deception on the grounds that both self-deception and deceit, unlike merely deceptive behaviour, are morally bad things. Similarly, but, I think, equally mistakenly, there is a temptation to think that, because self-knowledge and a deep relationship between two people who know each other very well, unlike the fan’s knowledge from afar of the television star, however insightful, are fundamental, worthwhile features of any normal human life, the model for selfknowledge has to be taken from what it is to have intimate knowledge of another person arising out of a shared, close relationship. But just as there is no such thing as turning the slit eyes of deceit upon oneself and going behind one’s own back, so there is no such thing as entering into a close, personal relationship with oneself. And just as innocently deceiving yourself (for example, the camouflage expert who inadvertently deceived himself into mistaking a clump of bushes for a gun) is not the same thing as self-deception, so knowing true facts of any old kind about oneself (the hour of one’s birth, for example) is not self-knowledge. What turns deceiving oneself into self-deception is dishonesty with oneself. What turns knowing something about oneself into self-knowledge is insight into oneself. What, then, is insight and how in particular do you get insight into yourself? It comes, if it comes at all, with experience and maturity. It is, with a bit of an exaggeration, a virtue of later years, in the sense that you do not look for self-knowledge in a sixyear-old. There are no examinations or degree courses in it and no teachers of it (which is not to deny that claims to provide and to be such things are not irresistible to quacks). For it to be possible to gain insight into something, it has to be the kind of thing you can look into, and not just look at. 1 he metaphor of visual depth is significant. By being able to look into a river you 215

Self-knowledge

can see what is going on below the surface. To understand something is not enough to give insight. If you know the language, you will be able to understand the street signs on your visit to Moscow. But you do not get an insight into street signs because there is nothing there to be understood in depth. A passage in the original language in the Bible will need to be translated in order to be understood, just like the street signs, but by studying the Biblical passage, going into it more deeply, you can gain insight into it. When it comes to understanding human beings, the study of ourselves is more like studying a hard saying in the Bible than reading a street sign in a foreign language.

3. Self-knowledge: unattainable ideal o r inescapable reality? Though you have never met the Prime Minister, you have seen him on the television, heard him on the radio and read so much about him that you know what he (or she) is like. But you do not know the Prime Minister because the two of you do not share a relationship based on some degree of contact and shared intimacy of some kind. On the other hand, you do know your workmates, flatmates, shipmates, cellmates, colleagues, neighbours and casual acquaintances, even if you do not know them very well. There is no reason why you should have insight into them in order that what you know of them through such contact with them should count as your knowing them. Could you know someone very well indeed and yet lack insight into them? It is one thing to agree that the clinical observer might have marshalled a vast number of facts, especially of a psychological kind, about his patient and yet not understand why the facts are as they are. But then, the observer would not thereby know his patient as he knows his colleagues, even if he is a bit ‘stand-offish’ towards them. Could a couple have lived together for many years, know each other very well, and yet have no insight into each other? I think that lack of insight would argue that they did not really know each other in spite of the length of time they had spent together. If this is correct, then self-knowledge differs from knowing others in that it is not based on the existence of some relationship, in particular, not on some kind of peculiar ‘reflexive’ relationship one has with oneself, and, further, that it always demands that 216

Self-knowledge

what you know is the expression of insight into yourself, not just, say, the satisfaction of idle or purely scientific curiosity. This account of self-knowledge resembles that of self-deception in Chapter 2. There is also, I think, an interesting logical connection between self-knowledge and self-deception. We display selfknowledge in what we know about ourselves where, when we have tried and failed to achieve self-knowledge, the alternative could have been self-deception about ourselves. When insight into oneself is lacking, there is blindness to some aspect of oneself. Why do we talk of blindness here? I think it is because what we do not see about ourselves, our impatience with others, say, is not hidden and yet we do not see it. We resemble the blind man in the daylight, not the sighted at dusk. You will not get the man who lacks self-knowledge and thinks of himself as very patient with others, when really he is impatient and intolerant, to see what he has not seen by pointing it out to him. For he is blind to that side of himself and the cause of the blindness will first have to be removed before he can see it. Self-deception too, it will be noted, has been seen by many, especially modern, professionally trained, academic philosophers and psychologists, as non-existent because logically impossible.7 But others, especially poets, playwrights, novelists and the more independent thinkers and moralists have often seen self-deception as the ineluctable condition of all mankind. As with selfdeception, such starkly opposed views of the prevalence of selfknowledge stem from partially correct glimpses of different aspects of the complex logic of the concept. Since getting to know another person depends so obviously on contact, association, meeting, etc., it is tempting to think that the one person in whose company you forever spend your time is yourself and that therefore you have the opportunity to know yourself better than anyone else. This overlooks the fact that self-knowledge is not built on a relation of intimacy with oneself. Nobody is a casual, or close, acquaintance of himself. The idea that self-knowledge is unattainable, or at least, elusive, or never fully realised, deserves closer inspection. Suppose the auto biographer with whom we began this chapter is deceiving himself about a good many important aspects of his own life and about the attitudes of those around him. He is anxious to paint an accurate portrait of himself in his auto­ biography. But how shall he do it? How shall he rescue himself from his state of sell-deception? Does he even need to? Won’t it be 217

Self-knowledge

enough, artistically speaking, if, as with poor Rousseau in his Confessions, his self-deception shines through? Well, maybe so, but he wants the truth to shine forth because he himself sees it, not in spite of himself. How does someone who is deceiving himself ever set about undeceiving himself and acquiring self-knowledge? This can seem to be impossible. He has locked himself out of the house of truth and yet we seem to be shouting at him to open the door. The Socratic ideal ‘Know thyself, addressed to him, now sounds like telling a blind man to watch where he is going. And if he is not deceiving himself and knows the truth about himself, then there is no point in telling him to seek what he already has. Either way, an actual gain in self-knowledge sounds impossible. But this picture of the allegedly helpless plight of the self-deceiver trades on a subtle distortion of his real situation. The self-deceiver is flatteringly portrayed here as a helpless victim of deception. If you are being deceived by me about, say, the mileage of the car I am selling you, there may be nothing to alert you to what is going on. You are, let’s suppose, my hapless, trusting, unsuspecting victim, unless I happen to take pity on you and relent. But the self-deceiver is not just a victim, he is his own victim and the agent of his own deception. He is not entitled to plead ‘Don’t blame me for getting it wrong. I was the victim of a deception.’ Equally, note, it would be a distortion to insist that, because he is his own deceiver, and deceivers generally know what they are up to, he must somehow really know what he is doing.” The self­ deceiver, remember, is being dishonest with himself. Typically, he is giving dishonest answers to questions he has put to himself, to which, initially, he does not know the answers. For the answers he gives to count as dishonest, the truth has got to be within his reach. It is possible to ask yourself if you have pressed yourself hard enough on a certain answer which puts you in a favourable light. In Chapter 3 I discussed the example of the heavy drinker who paused to ask himself if he was drinking too much. He had read somewhere that a certain level of consumption was considered dangerous and had wondered how he compared. He excluded his lunchtime drinking on the grounds that alcohol taken with food did not affect the system in the same way as drinking in the evening in the pub and ought therefore to be discounted. His evasion was a piece of self-deception but there is no reason why, at the time or later, he could not have been honest instead of dishonest with himself. The resulting piece of selfknowledge, ‘I am drinking too much’, is not a logical impossibility. 218

Self-knowledge

4. Being oneself David Hamlyn has suggested that you have to be being yourself in order to have self-knowledge. The supposai that one could be alive to what one is by bringing more and more of one’s activities under intention is a likely recipe for self-deception; it would certainly entail an abstention from being oneself — something which, as it seems to me, is a necessary condition of self-deception.9 In the section from which this quotation comes, Hamlyn has been expressing some sympathy with the idea that too much selfconscious prying into oneself (especially into one’s reasons for acting), in the name of the pursuit of self-knowledge, might inhibit spontaneity, encourage rationalisation and prevent bne from being oneself. This would be undesirable and could give rise to the idea that too much self-knowledge could be a bad thing. Hamlyn suggests that this view of self-knowledge as harmful in excess depends on seeing self-knowledge as just a matter of acquir­ ing information about oneself. As an alternative to this, Hamlyn opts for the solution I have argued against, namely, that, since constantly holding yourself up for observation is a sign of your being as he puts it, ‘detached from yourself, and so not being yourself, what is needed is a relationship with yourself to heal the breach. His name for this relationship is ‘self-involvement’. It is true, as I have already mentioned, that Hamlyn links selfknowledge with both understanding oneself and with insight into oneself. So we are not that far apart. Where we differ is in the fact that, in order to account for self-knowledge, I think there is no need to look for some mysterious relationship which we have with ourselves, modelled on the close relationships people need to have with each other if they are to gain insight into each other. Fur­ ther, I think this explains why Hamlyn sees being oneself as essential to self-knowledge. This claim strikes me, anyway, as dubious. I take seriously the suggestion that self-knowledge is a lofty ideal worthy of the good man’s life10 because I can see that it yields insight and not just knowledge but I am suspicious of the idea that self-knowledge is incompatible with a bad life or with someone who is not being himself much of the time. ‘Being oneself conjures up a picture of someone in whom there are no internal splits, no gaps between appearance and reality, but 219

Self-knowledge

instead an internal union in which all the parts are united in a harmonious relationship. However, turning away for a moment from the requirements of the ‘self-knowledge as involving a relationship with oneself theory, cannot someone who is not being himself in certain important areas of his life still possess self-knowledge, and even know that this is just what he is doing, namely, putting on a false front, an act, in order to mask his true feelings from others? Why cannot the self-conscious hypocrite who is not being himself have genuine insight into himself and therefore self-knowledge? The heroes of Stendhal’s novels, for example Julien Sorel in Le rouge et le noir, seem, I would have thought, to be clear-eyed, selfish hypocrites, displaying all the vicious inner rage of the poor student brought in to the rich man’s house to act as tutor to his children, ever envious, ever obse­ quious, ever ready to exploit a situation to his own advantage, but certainly not lacking in self-knowledge, which is what makes him so frightening, effective and ruthless. Being oneself is easily mishandled in the same way selfdeception and self-knowledge can be mishandled. It can, by turns, seem impossible, and inescapable, to be oneself. For since I cannot be you and you cannot be me, how can each of us ever be anything other than ourselves? Are we not forever condemned to be what we are, namely, ourselves? We say things like ‘If I were you’ and ‘What would you do, if you were me?’ but these are dud cheques which no one has ever honoured. Nobody ever says ‘Since I am you, . . .’ or ‘Do you remember when you were me?’ On the other hand, being oneself can seem to be a possible role, only not one we can play in real life. If a play were written about a famous actor who was still alive, he might be asked to take the lead part and to play himself. ‘Who are you in the play?’ he is asked on the opening night. ‘I am myself he proudly replies. He would appear nightly on stage as himself. But he would not walk out of the theatre after the performance through the stage door as himself. During the play he was himself; back in the real world when he is no longer playing the part, no one wants to say ‘Look! He is himself.’ It is only when he is playing his part, the part of himself, on stage that he becomes himself again. In his Being and nothingness Sartre appeals to such specialist uses of ‘to be oneself in order to soften us up for his solution to the paradox of self-deception. A human being is what he is not and he is not what he is. So we ought not to be surprised if we find the self-deceiver both knowing (as deceiver) and not knowing (as 220

Self-knowledge

deceived) the truth about some matter; for this contradiction is but a special instance of a universal phenomenon of being and not being what we are, at one and the same time. So universal, says Sartre, that even the instruction ‘Be yourself!’, addressed to someone acting in bad faith and pretending to be what he is not, will, if obeyed, only result in his both being and not being himself. Truly to be ourselves seems suddenly to be forever beyond our grasp. Here is Sartre on what it means to be oneself: If man is what he is, bad faith is for ever impossible and candor ceases to be his ideal and becomes instead his being. But is man what he is? And more generally, how can he be what he is when he exists as consciousness of being? If candor or sincerity is a universal value, it is evident that the maxim ‘one must be what one is' does not serve solely as a regulating principle for judgements and concepts by which I express what I am. It posits not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being; it proposes for us an absolute equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being. In this sense it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are. But what are we then if we have the constant obligation to be what we are?11 Before we cave in and agree with Sartre that the law of identity, ‘Everything is what it is', holds only for the world of things and not for the world of human beings, let us take a closer look at what we mean by ‘Be yourself!’ addressed to someone who is, we reckon, not being himself. A person who is not satisfied with some aspect of himself may pretend to be what he is not. He may aftect a posh accent when visitors call or pretend in interviews to be interested in art and the theatre when we know he is not. As a result of persisting with his pretence, he may eventually change and become what he once was not. Now' he has a posh accent and is a concerned theatre critic. But, pace Sartre, this docs not mean that he succeeds in becoming what he is not. The tense is wrong. He becomes what he was not, but wanted so much to be, that he at first pretended to be it until he gradually became it. from the fact that you can pretend to have gone to public school and that I have actually been to public school, it does not follow- that there is such a thing as both (1) pretending to be what you are not and at the same time (2) succeeding in being what you are not. Any more than it follows that, because you can pretend to be better off 221

Self-knowledge

than you are, it follows that you can be better off than you are. You can pretend to be tall (a short person on stilts behind a wall, perhaps, or boasting on the telephone) but, although you can pretend to be taller than you are, no one can be taller than he is. I can tell you to be your age, if you are not being your age, that is, if you are making a fool of yourself by acting as though you were much younger than in fact you are. But that does not mean that it is possible for a person, unlike the chair upon which he is sitting, which cannot be told to be its own age, not to be the age he is by being younger than he is and so to be two different ages at once. ‘He is not being his own age’ does not mean ‘He is not his age’ or ‘He is not as old as he is.’

5. Beliefs about oneself A false belief is not, of course, knowledge; but a true belief, like a correct suspicion, can, in appropriate circumstances, also be something one knows. Just as a purchase can also be a gift, provided the giver and not the recipient has to pay for it. Peter Geach has raised an interesting problem about beliefs about oneself which can be treated as raising corresponding difficulties for self-knowledge.12 Geach’s problem raises an interesting point about the correct use of such reflexive-related constructions as ‘being my (your, etc.) own worst enemy’ and their implications for what we know and believe about ourselves. In Geach’s example, Philip may be his own worst enemy and he may believe that his worst enemy is dead without believing that he himself is dead. This possibility, if it is one, calls for explanation. Geach points out that the truth o f‘Philip is his own worst enemy’ does not entitle us to substitute ‘Philip’ for ‘his worst enemy’ in the sentence at the start of this paragraph but Geach does not go into details as to how it is possible for Philip’s belief that his worst enemy is dead not to be a belief about Philip himself when he, Philip, is his own worst enemy. One way in which this might arise would be if Philip wrongly thought that John was his worst enemy. This is certainly one possibility but, surprisingly, perhaps, it is not essential for Philip’s belief that John is his (Philip’s) worst enemy to be false for the paradoxical state of affairs described by Geach to obtain. In other words, Philip could know that John was his worst enemy and still be his own worst enemy. In particular, it would, I think, 222

Self-knowledge

be a mistake to suppose that, when Philip is his own worst enemy, there is only one possible right answer Philip can make to the question ‘Who is your worst enemy?’, namely, ‘Myself.’ Philip, who is his own worst enemy, can be right about John’s being his (Philip’s) worst enemy (note, for Philip to say ‘John is my own worst enemy’ would here be off-colour, though, of course, ‘my own’ can sometimes be used to bring out a contrast with ‘someone else’s’ so that I can know that you are my own, that is, not somebody else’s, worst enemy, first choice, etc.) and can still correctly believe that his worst enemy is dead without believing that he himself is dead. We ought to feel suspicious of the idea that if a man is his own worst enemy, his name must always be placed at the top of the list of his enemies. How strange it would be if, as this view implies, the only place Philip regularly sees his worst enemy is in the mirror. But cannot someone who is his own worst enemy point out the worst of his many enemies in the street and say truly ‘There goes my worst enemy’? Cannot someone who is his own worst enemy (when it comes to getting jobs around the house finished: he’s always finding fresh ones before the old ones are completed and chiding himself for being lazy) be a solitary recluse who has never made an enemy in his life? If this is possible, then the superlative ‘worst’ in ‘his own worst enemy’ cannot be based on a comparison between the recluse and two or more real-life enemies of his in order to establish which is worst. Only you can be your own worst enemy; that is something which even your deadliest rival cannot be to you. You and he are not in competition with each other for that title. A corollary of this is that you cannot be one of your enemies; that is always a role to be played by someone else. Being your own worst enemy, your own barber, your own boss, is not necessarily a way of being an enemy, a barber or a boss and it would be wrong to think like is being compared with like when someone who is his own worst enemy is being compared with an enemy of his. I say ‘not necessarily’ because, of course, a barber who is his own most regular customer, and is therefore his own barber, is nonetheless a barber and your enemy can be his own worst enemy. In a similar vein, the misanthrope who enjoys only his own company can truly say ‘I do not enjoy human company.’ Being your own worst enemy is not a way of being an enemy of yours. This is why truth is not preserved in sentences where the substitution of the name of one’s worst enemy for ‘one s own 223

Self-knowledge

worst enemy’ has been carried out. This is not to deny that a man who is his own worst enemy can do more harm to himself, in advancing his career, say, than his worst enemy can do to him, or that someone else’s company can provide a person with more, or less, enjoyment than he gets from his own company.

Notes 1. See Sydney Shoemaker, Self-knowledge and self-identity (Cornell University Press, London, 1963), p. vii. 2. See David Hamlyn, Section (e), ‘Self-knowledge and knowledge of other persons’, in Ch. 8 of his The theory of knowledge (Macmillan, London, 1971), pp. 245-8 (p. 246). 3. ‘A condition of knowing something is that we should stand to the object of knowledge in relations which are appropriate to things of that kind’, says David Hamlyn, ‘Self-knowledge’, Essay 6, in Theodore Mischel (ed.), The self: psychological andphilosophical issues (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977), pp. 170-200 (p. 183). 4. For an interpretation of self-knowledge as requiring ‘self-involve­ ment’, see Hamlyn, ‘Self-knowledge’, pp. 183-7. 5. For example, by Hamlyn in his ‘Self-knowledge’. 6. See Gilbert Ryle, ‘Self-knowledge’, Ch. 6, in The concept of mind (Hutchinson, London, 1949; reprinted, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963), pp. 148-89 (p. 149). 7. This is the position adopted by nearly all the contributors to a recent collection of essays by philosophers and psychologists on selfdeception: M.W. Martin (ed.), Self-deception and self-understanding (Uni­ versity Press of Kansas, Kansas, 1985). 8. Hamlyn endorses the view that the self-deceiver generally knows what he is up to and says that ‘the state of self-deception is not incompatible with knowing what one is up to’ in his contribution to a symposium with H.O. Mounce on self-deception, ‘Self-deception’, Proceedings oj the Aristotelian Society, supplementarv volume 45, 1971, pp. 45-60 (p.45). 9. See Hamlyn, ‘Self-knowledge’, p. 193. 10. ‘Self-knowledge is a requirement of good lives, but it must include knowledge of our limitations’ is the first of three theses defended by John Kekes in his ‘Self-knowledge and convention’, Philosophy, 61 (1986), pp. 313-29 (p. 313). 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and nothingness (1943), translated by Hazel E. Barnes (Methuen, London, 1958), pp. 58-9. 12. P.T. Geach, ‘On beliefs about oneself, Analysis, 18 (1957), pp. 23-4.

224

14 Conclusion

Because the concepts discussed in the chapters of this book are not related by a common subject matter, it may be helpful to look back and to draw together some of the threads which do, nonetheless, run through the book and can be traced back to what was said in the Introduction. In the Introduction I spoke of the need in philosophy to be ready to learn something totally new before one can make progress with a problem such as ‘Can an object move itself?’ or ‘Can a single sentence contradict itself?’ The element of surprise in the preceding chapters has come from two sources: some things which looked the same have turned out to be different and other things which looked different have proved to be connected. Let me turn first to the second, and perhaps more obvious, type of 'surprise’. Self-deception, suicide, self-knowledge, self-reference, self-membership of classes and self-evidence, etc., are not connected at all in terms of subject matter and yet I have tried to show how easy it is to misunderstand them and to fall into the fallacy of isolationism in the same sort of way in case after case. Here we have the same philosophical blindness encouraging the same kind of philosophical scepticism re-appearing in countless different guises in the midst of the widest possible variety of subject matter. The thing which unites the paradoxes discussed in this book is the presence of grammatically reflexive and reflexive-related phrases. But this grammatical similarity masks further conceptual differences, which takes us back to the first type of ‘surprise’ mentioned above. Two different people, the camouflage expert and the autobiographer who cannot face the truth about himself, may both have deceived themselves but only the latter is guilty of self-deception. The person who in an 225

Conclusion

accident slips and falls on the ice and the person who slashes his wrists in a suicide bid have both injured themselves but only the latter has sustained a self-inflicted injury. The reckless car driver and the suicide have both killed themselves, although only the latter has committed suicide. The person who has inadvertently or deliberately sent himself a printed invitation to his own party and his unwanted guest who bumps into him in the street a few days before the party and invites himself along have both invited themselves to the same party but the latter, unlike the former, has not received an invitation or been invited to any party. In the Introduction it was said to be a characteristic of philosophy that he who would seek the truth ‘about must and about must go’. I believe that it is the presence in our language of these grammatically unmarked conceptual distinctions intro­ duced by reflexive forms which are responsible for the many twists and turns which must be taken in each reflexive paradox on the journey towards understanding. The distinctions we need to draw are not differences of sense to be recorded by a lexico­ grapher; they are not figures of speech to be studied by a student of literature; but they are the life-blood of philosophy. It is the existence of this type of distinction, preserved for us and at the same time concealed from us by our language, which makes philosophy a possible subject. The existence of such distinctions is best demonstrated by means af examples in which the context naturally draws one’s attention to a difference which otherwise lies hidden from view because of the sameness of the words. It is so easy to be ‘nearly right’ in trying to think clearly about these distinctions. It is easy to be too hasty and mistakenly to conclude from the sound point that there is no such thing as practising deceit upon oneself, that self-deception is impossible; to slide imperceptibly from the sound point that no container can be its own contents to the untrue conclusion that nothing can contain itself and hence no class can contain itself or be a member of itself; to slip from the correct view that no statement can be its own opposite to the mistaken view that no statement can contradict itself; to drift from rightly insisting that no solid, rigid object can communicate its own motion to itself into adopting the position that nothing can move itself; to hold that if a reaction between two substances obeys known chemical laws, then it cannot take place spontaneously or of its own accord. It is equally tempting for the philosopher who is anxious to avoid the extremes of philosophical scepticism to overlook the 226

Conclusion

fact that the selfsame grammatically reflexive form can conceal a conceptual distinction (which can, however, be sometimes brought to the surface grammatically in, for example, the verbnoun asymmetry discussed in Chapter 3) and to try to demon­ strate the intelligibility of the one concept by appealing mistakenly, and without realising it, to the other. So he tries to reassure him­ self of the existence of, say, self-deception — now, as an added complication, described (too ‘strongly’) as practising deceit upon oneself— by appealing to the fact that it is possible to deceive oneself quite innocently (too ‘weak’, I have argued, for selfdeception). Bui this omits the really hard part to be accounted for in self-deception proper, namely, the element of dishonesty with oneself in ih«* course of deceiving oneself. Similarly, there is more to self-know edge than knowing true facts about oneself, more to what is self- explanatory than clarity alone, more to self-evidence than that wh ch is obvious, more to pursuing something as an end in itself than pursuing it single-mindedly, and more to teaching oneself something than picking it up as you go along. The fallacy of what I have termed ‘isolationism’ is ever present throughout the pages of the preceding chapters. A reflexive form, it is tempting to believe, such as ‘teaching oneself, must, strictly speaking, report an activity done by oneself to oneself in complete isolation from others and exclusively from one’s own resources. Then how can someone who knows no Russian ever teach himself Russian? If he uses a Teachyourself Russian book, then he is a cheat because he is relying upon the knowledge of Russian of others and they have become his true teachers, not he himself. But this line of reasoning embodies a fallacy, I have argued, which depends upon misinterpreting ‘in isolation’ in a logically absurd way. An ignorant, though willing, pupil cannot at the same time be the knowledgeable teacher, of himself or of anyone else, of a subject about which he knows nothing. But he can still teach himself it and become his own teacher by taking over the role of a genuinely independent teacher in various ways. He can mark his own work, set himself tests, criticise his own performance and progress, plan his own work, time himself, record and monitor his own perform­ ance (as I said earlier, it takes one reflexive to explain another). It is true that he does need access to Russian to be able to do this but there is a way of gaining access to the language which falls short of submitting oneself to a process of being taught it by others, and which yet amounts to more than casually picking up the language as one goes along. Similarly, it is the hold of the 227

Conclusion

fallacy of isolationism which makes us deny that self-deception is possible on the grounds that the self-deceiver needs to know the truth in order to conceal it from himself. And it is the same fallacy which makes us want to deny that any proposition can say something about itself, or that anything can be pursued as an end in itself. From this fallacy may spring either frank scepticism about, or allegedly non-sceptical explanations of the reflexive phenomenon which are themselves either self-contradictory or else too weak or too strong in the senses explained in Chapter 3. When it is eventually noticed that they are too weak or too strong or vulner­ able to the charge of self-contradiction, this in its turn feeds the flames of still more scepticism. For each of the reflexive forms analysed in this book I have tried to allow my reader to feel the full force of the sceptic’s position before eventually trying to show how such scepticism is to be avoided. Finally, a word about the organisation of this book. I began with self-deception because I think it is one of the most easily accessible of the reflexive paradoxes. I left Russell’s Paradox till quite late because I expected those of my readers who are already particularly interested in Russell’s Paradox to be suspicious of the idea that a solution to the paradox of self-deception or a discus­ sion of any other philosophically troublesome reflexive can have any bearing whatsoever on Russell’s Paradox about the self­ membership of classes and I hoped to persuade them in advance of the plausibility of my strategy by achieving a measure of success in other areas unrelated by subject matter but connected by common grammatically reflexive ties. I decided to omit three topics upon which I had worked on the grounds that they over­ lapped with other areas. These were self-interest, self-respect (and self-esteem, with which it is usually coupled) and selfconsciousness. What 1 had to say about self-interest coincided too much with the chapter on doing something for its own sake; selfrespect raised issues that were too close to those raised by both self-deception and self-knowledge; self-consciousness — especially that view of it which presents doing something self-consciously as requiring the capacity to speak and think about oneself in the first person, using the personal pronoun ‘I’ — took me too close to the topic of self-reference which I wanted to treat separately. I have been guided in my choice of topics by the desire to produce a comparative study of a number of philosophically puzzling problems unrelated by subject matter but connected by 228

Conclusion

grammatical reflexivity. Hence my wish to range over a number of philosophical topics which would normally be kept separate. There is, I believe, a natural philosophical tendency within all of us to find reflexive constructions paradoxical and the history of philosophy bears witness to this. Aristotle on self-movement, Thomas Reid on self-evidence, G.E. Moore on doing something for its own sake, Wittgenstein in the Tractatus on a proposition’s saying something about itself, and Russell on class self-member­ ship are just some of the instances to have been considered in this book of the remarkable spectacle of reflexive paradox at the very heart of fundamental issues discussed by some of the most in­ fluential thinkers in the history of philosophy.

229

Index Chant, Colin 112n 1 Chaudhuri, Nirad C. 141n8 Chisholm, Roderick M. 206n9 circularity (in accounts of reflexives) 35-6 clear themselves up (spots) 99-100, 114 ‘conflict state’ theories of reflexives 14—15, 32-4 contain itself, whether anything can 123, 125 contradict oneself 40-52 see also self-contradiction Copi, Irving M. 48, 121, 185n4, 186n9 Cornford, Francis M. 93nl counting with reflexives 38-9, 173-8

accord, of its own 8, 9, 42, 66-7, 71,85, 95-8, 100-5, 107-11, 112n4, 113-19, 149, 226 activities, reflexive 4, 8 address oneself 139 Ambrose, Alice 185nl Amis, Kingsley 44nl Anscombe, G.E.M. 131, 134—5, 141n9 Aquinas, St Thomas 8, 79-81, 83-6, 93nnl & 2, 94n5, 164nl Aristotle 8-9, 70, 79-81, 83-4, 87-93, 93nnl, 2 & 4, 94nn5 & 6, 146, 229 Art for art’s sake 7-8, 77-8 asymmetry, verb-noun 12-13, 41-2, 209, 227 Augustine, St 23n8, 164nl automatic 8, 113-16, 118-19, 194-5 Ayer, A.J. 206n2, 207nl2

deceit vs deception 2, 11, 14—15, 21-2, 29-30, 89, 199, 215 deceitful vs deceptive 11 deceiving oneself that p vs into believing that p 18 without self-deception 12-13, 201, 215, 227 see also self-deception Demos, Raphael 12-13, 15, 22n2, 45n4 destroy oneself/itself see selfdestruction Devonshire, Mrs R.L. 112n7 Dickens, Charles 10, 14, 16, 33, 45n7, 116, 148, 204, 207nl3 dishonesty with oneself 13—14, 20, 26, 30-1, 35-6, 189, 218 Donne, John viii, 1 drive oneself (by car) 40, 154 DufT, R.A. 154, 164n9

Barber, paradox of the 39, 44, 120-1, 172-4, 176-8, 184, 185nl, 196, 201, 223 Barnes, Hazel E. 224nl 1 Beauchamp, Tom L. 164n4 being oneself, 219-22 belief, whether self-deception can lead to true 17-20 beliefs about oneself 222-4 Bennett, Jonathan 159, 165nl3 Bethell, Nicholas 164nl0 Black, Max 142nll, 207nll Block, Irving 141 n6 blow oneself up 7, 158 Boswell, James 45n9 Boyle, Andrew 164nl 1 Brandt, R.B. 164n4 Brentano, Franz 199-200, 206n9 Butler, RJ. 186n7

Edwards, Paul 48, 141n4, 185n4 ends in themselves 8, 61-6, 70-3, 78, 188, 227-8 enemy, being one’s own worst 36, 174, 222-4

Cantor’s Paradox 120, 180, 186n9 Catalogue, paradox of the 172, 182-5 230

Index

Hume, David 164nl hurt oneself 8, 150, 173 Hynes, Samuel 22n6

equal to itself 125-6, 134 escape from oneself 74 etymology of ‘deceit’ and ‘deception’ 21-2, 22n7, 23n8 Evans, Gareth 135, 140, 142nl3 evident vs self-evident 194, 199-202 see also self-evidence Evidenz 199 execute oneself 154

T, whether used to refer to oneself see self-reference identify oneself 135-6 implies itself, whether every proposition 126, 134 injure oneself 3, 8, 113, 162, 173, 209, 226 without self-inflicted injury 8, 173, 209, 226 internal/external contrast 68-9, 74, 76-8, 146, 161-2 internal mechanisms 36-8, 58 intrinsic/extrinsic contrast 68 see also internal/external contrast intrinsic value 70-5 myth of 75-7 invite oneself (to a party) 15-16, 25, 40, 113, 169, 199, 201,226 Ishiguro, Hide 141n6 isolationism, fallacy of 26-9, 44n 1, 65, 67, 69, 71-8, 85, 88, 98, 102, 122, 124, 133, 137, 140, 146, 161-2, 192, 194, 202, 206, 225, 227-8

fable, a reflexive 178-82 Farley, John 106-8, 110, 11 l-12nl, 112nn3, 8, 9 & 10 Fauvel, John 112nl feed oneself 40, 137-8 Fingarette, Herbert 45n6 Finneran, Richard J. 78n2 first principles see self-evidence forget oneself 212-14 Frege, Gottlob 124, 142n 11 Frey, R.G. 152, 164n6 Furley, David J. 93—4n4 Gardiner, Patrick 22n5 Gaye, R.K. 93nl Geach, P.T. 22n6, 142nll, 185n6, 196, 198, 206n6, 222, 224nl2 Geison, Gerald L. 106-8, 110, 11 l-12nl, 112nn3, 8, 9 & 10 Guttenplan, Samuel 141n9

Jefferson, Thomas 204 Johnson, Dr Samuel 45n9, 74—5

Hackforth, R. 93n3 Hacking, Ian 9n3 Hamlyn, David 45nn3 & 8, 209, 219, 224nn2, 3, 4, 5, 8 & 9 hand, dying by one’s own 6, 145, 147-51, 156-7, 161-3 see also suicide hang oneself 154—5, 157, 163, 173-4, 185n5 Hardy, Thomas 18-20, 22n6 Harrison, Jonathan 207nl4 hate himself, whether the man who hates everyone must 38-9, 175 Hobbes, Thomas 112n4, 115 Holland, Roy F. 152-3, 164nn5, 7&8

Kahn, Ernest 112n6 Kant, Immanuel 61-6, 70, 74, 76, 78nl Kekes, John 224nl0 Kenny, Anthony 86, 93nl, 94n5 kill oneself not necessarily suicide 6, 151 see also suicide King, Cecil 43, 45nll King-Farlow, John 45nl0 Kraus, Oskar 206n9 Lesser, Harry 164n6 Lewy, Casimir 141n7 Liar, paradox of the 9, 120, 122, 127-30, 141n3, 171 231

Index

Palmer, Anthony vii Paluch, Stanley 45n5 paradoxes, reflexive 2, 4, 5, 7-9, 24-6, 35, 79, 92, 120-1, 161, 226, 228-9 as sources of philosophical puzzlement 24-6 Partridge, Eric 22n7 Pascal, Blaise 80 Passmore, John 52, 58nl Pasteur, Louis 95-7, 104-11, 11l-12nl, 112n6 Paton, H.J. 78nl pay for itself/oneself 75-6 Peacock, Thomas Love 16—17, 22n4 Pears, D.F. 141n5 Perlin, Seymour 164n4 picturing itself, a picture’s 123, 126 pity oneself without self-pity 130-1 see also self-pity Pivcevic, Edo 206n2 Plato 8, 79-81,83, 87, 93nnl & 3, 152, 154, 195 poison oneself 152-7, 162, 192 possessive adjectives, reflexive 9n2 Pouchet, Félix A. 95-7, 104-5, 107-10, 112nnl, 2 & 11 promise oneself something 30

listing itself, a list’s 125, 182-5 see also Catalogue, paradox of the Lloyd, G.E.R. 94n4 Locke, John 9, 197, 203-5, 206nn7 & 8 logical vs semantic paradoxes 120, 140n2, 141nn3 & 4 Macdonald, Margaret 185nl McDowell, John 142nnl2 & 13 McGuinness, B.F. 141n5 Mackie, J.L. 52, 59n3 Marciszewski, Witold 140nl Martin, M.W. 45n2, 224n7 meaning, reflexive 2-4 Mill, J.S. 71-2, 78n6 Mischel, Theodore 224n3 Molesworth, Sir William 112n4 Moore, Benjamin 112n5 Moore, G.E. 52, 59n2, 70-4, 78nn4 & 5, 141n7, 192-3, 206n5,229 motion vs movement 82, 89 Moulder, James 121, 141n4, 172, 185n3,186n10 Mounce, H.O. 33-4, 45n8, 224n8 move oneself/itself 9, 38, 40, 79, 80-8, 90-3, 93n2, 93-4n4, 94n6, 113, 116, 121, 138, 158, 162, 169, 195, 199, 225, 226 see also self-movers mover, primary 81, 83-4, 88-9, 91 Müller, Max 127, 141n8 murder oneself 12, 143-4

Quine, W. van O. 121, 141n4, 174, 185n4, 185-6n7 Radford, Colin 185n5 Ramsey, F.P. 120-1, 140n2, 141n3 reason, it stands to 195, 201-2 see also self-evidence reflexive-related expressions 5-8, 25,36,42-4,54,56,61-2, 65-6, 78, 95, 98 reflexives, defective theories of based on ‘internal mechanisms’ 36-8, 58 causing counting problems 173-8 ‘conflict state’ 15, 32—4

nettle oneself 20, 140 Neumann, John von 169 Newman, John Henry 69-70, 78n3 Nidditch, Peter H. 206n7 Oates, Captain L.E.G. 147-8 O’Keefle, Terence M. 164nn3 &

6

Owen, G.E.L. 94n4 p & not-p 29, 46-8, 50, 52-5, 57-8 p -Dp 126 232

Index

isolationist 26-9 neglecting verb-noun asymmetry 12-13, 41-2, 209, 227 omitting right ‘stage-setting’ 27-8, 39-41, 88, 132 too ‘weak’ or too ‘strong’ 29-31,41, 187, 228 ‘twisted logic’ 33-5 Reid, Thomas 190-1, 196-7, 202, 206nnl, 2, 3 & 4, 229 relations, reflexive 4 remind oneself 25, 28, 30, 92 repeat oneself 50 reproduce itself 97-9 rescue oneself 181 Ross, W.D. 92, 93nl Rousseau, J.-J. 218 Royce, Josiah 141n6 rule over himself, whether a king can 178-82 Russell, Bertrand 9, 59n2, 124, 141n6, 167-72, 180, 186n9, 229 Russell’s Paradox 9, 39, 120-2, 141 nn3 & 4, 169-73, 180, 184, 185nn3, 4 & 10, 228 Ryle, Gilbert 186n8, 214, 224n6

self-contradiction 8, 25-6, 28-9, 43,46-58, 92, 113, 145-6, 169, 189, 225-6 and contradicting oneself 49-52 in logic 46-8, 53 Moore on 52 Passmore on 52 whether confined to compound propositions 54-7 whether of form p & not-p 57-8 self-deceit 13, 22, 22n3, 143 see also self-murder self-deception vii, 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 9nl, 10-20, 22nn3, 5 & 6, 24-6, 28-39, 41-3, 44-5n2, 45nn5, 6, 8 & 10, 49, 58, 82, 84, 86-7, 92-3, 93n2, 113, 118, 121, 143, 146, 162, 169, 185n5, 187, 189, 199, 201, 209, 215, 217-20, 224nn7 & 8, 225-8 demands dishonesty with oneself 13-14, 20 Demos on 12-13, 15 Dickenson 10, 14, 16 in Hardy’s My Cicely 18-19 model for study of other reflexive paradoxes 24—44 not a ‘conflict state’ 14 T.L. Peacock on 16-17 truth and error in 17-20 vs innocently deceiving oneself 11-13 self-defence 42, 151 self-destruction 6, 146, 157-64 self-electing 99 self-employed 56-7, 71, 176-7, 181 self-evidence 9, 43, 187, 189-206, 206nn2, 3 & 8, 207n 11, 225, 227, 229 danger of ‘trifling propositions’ 196-9 of first principles 189-95 stands to reason 195, 201-2, 204 what kind of evidence 199-206 self-explanatoriness 9, 43, 187-9, 200-1, 203, 227

sake, doing something for its own 7, 8, 16, 25,31,42, 60-78, 95, 100, 102, 124, 192, 228-9 Dr Johnson on 74—5 isolationist account of 60-2, 65, 67, 69, 75-6 Kant on 61-5 Mill on 71-2 Moore on 70-4 myth of intrinsic value 75-7 Newman on 69-70 Yeats’ For Anne Gregory 68-9 Sartre, J.-P. 9, 11, 15, 22nl, 84, 93n2, 189, 220-1, 224nII Saunders, Trevor J. 93nl Schilpp, P.A. 59n2 Schneewind, Elizabeth H. 206n9 ‘self-’ as a prefix 42-3 self-appointed 43 self-cancelling indicators 37-8, 66, 70, 74, 160 233

Index

self-reference 9, 120-40, 169, 171- 2, 225, 228 in the Liar 122, 127-30, 171-2 role of‘I’ 122, 130-40, 142nl0 Tractatus dismissal of 122-6, 141nn6 & 7 self-rule 55-6, 179, 181 self-sacrifice 147-51 self-stacking chairs 99 self-supporting 191, 195 self-winding watch 82-3 semantic paradoxes see logical vs semantic paradoxes shave oneself 39-40, 44, 121, 138, 1724, 177-8, 184, 185n5, 201 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 16 Shoemaker, Sydney 208-9, 214, 224nl show oneself out 1, 25, 27-8, 41 Sidgwick, Henry 73 Slater, B.H. 185n2 Smith, Michael 164n6 Socrates 93n3, 152—4, 156, 164nn6 & 9, 173—4 solo performances 113-19 see also accord, of its own; • automatic; and spontaneous solve itself 99-100 Spinoza, Benedict 146, 158-63, 164n2, 165nl2 spontaneous 8-9, 42, 67, 95-8, 100-11, 11 l-12nl, 112n4, 113-17, 119, 226 combustion 42, 85, 102-5, 109, 111, 116-17 generation 9, 42, 85, 95-101, 104-11, lllnl, 113 remission 66-7, 102, 110 ‘stage setting’, importance of right 27-8, 39-41,88, 132 Stendhal 220 strangle oneself 162 Strawson, P.F. 142nnl0 & 11 suicide 5-9, 12, 22,31,42, 103, 113, 143-64, 164nnl, 3, 4 & 8, 173, 192, 225-6 by one’s own hand vs with outside help 145, 147-51, 156-7, 161-3 death of Captain Oates 147-51

self-generation oflife 9, 95—111 Pasteur vs Pouchet on 95-7, 104-6 spontaneous change occurring of its own accord 100-4 Van Helmont on 97-8 whether Pasteur secretly believed in 106-10 self-involvement 211, 219, 224n4 self-killing see kill oneself and suicide self-knowledge 9, 12, 38, 41, 118, 20&-20, 222, 224nn2, 3, 4 & 10, 225, 227-8 alleged need to be oneself 219-22 and beliefs about oneself 222-4 demands insight into oneself 212, 214-18, 220 forgetting oneself 212-16 nature of what is known 209-12 whether unattainable 216-19 self-membership of classes 9, 120-1, 166, 169-73, 178, 180, 182, 185, 186nl0, 225, 228-9 counting problems with 173-8 parodied by reflexive fable 178-82 Russell’s Paradox 170-3 the Barber 172-4, 176-8, 184 the Catalogue 182-5 self-movers 8, 36, 79-93, 93n3, 146 Aristotle on 79-81, 83-4, 87-93 Aquinas on 79-81, 83-6 Plato on 79-81, 83, 87 whether dependent upon unmoved mover 81, 84, 91-3 see also move oneself/itself self-murder 22n3, 144 see also self-deceit self-opening doors 7, 194-5, 198, 201, 207nl2 self-pity 42, 113, 130-1, 209 see also pity oneself self-pollinating 51, 54, 78 self-raising flour 65 234

Index

death of Socrates 152-5 forced to commit 162-4 manner of death 155-8 Spinoza on 158-64 see also kill oneself Sulzer, J.G. 62-3 surprise oneself 25, 86, 169 Szabados, Béla 22n5

unconscious, the 32, 37, 45n3 understand oneself 211-12, 219 unmoved mover 81, 84, 91-3 Vallery-Radot, René 112n7 van Heijenoort, J. 121, 185n4 Van Helmont, J.B. 97-8, 112n5 vanishing reflexives (upon analysis) 31-2 verbs reflexive vs reflexive forms of 2-4, 9nl

talk to oneself 139 teach oneself 1, 24, 27, 30-6, 39, 41,44, 70, 86-7, 113, 124, 145, 153, 162, 169, 174, 181, 192, 227 Thompson, David 147 Thompson, J.F. 174, 185-6n7 too ‘weak’ or too ‘strong’ (theories of reflexives) 29-31, 41, 187, 228 treat oneself (for an illness) 25, 34-5, 43-4 ‘trifling propositions’ 196-9 see also self-evidence ‘twisted logic’ theories of reflexives 33-5 types, theory of 123—4, 180, 186n9

Waismann, F. 171 Walker, A.D.M. vii Warnock, Mary 78n6 Whistler, J.M. 77 Wicksteed, Philip H. 93nl Wilde, Oscar 77, 200, 206nl0 Wittgenstein, Ludwig vii, 1, 98, 123-5, 141nn5, 6 & 7, 167, 229 Yarker, P.M. 22n4 Yeats W.B. 68, 78n2 Zermelo, Ernst 169

235