Arc OneThe Unreliable Narrator

Sour Grapes, or: How to Tell Growth From Surrender

There’s a person you used to want to be. At some point you stopped wanting it, and it felt like maturity. How would you know if that were false?

You stopped wanting something you couldn’t have, and it felt like growing up. From the inside, growing out of a want and giving up on one feel identical. This episode is about whether you could ever tell the difference.

The concept is adaptive preference: a desire that adjusts itself to what’s available and then covers its tracks. It starts as a fable about a fox and ends as a problem for anyone who thinks asking people whether they’re happy is the way to find out.

Then the objection: if your contentment doesn’t count as evidence, who gets to decide? That question doesn’t get answered. It gets worse.

Sections

1. The pour
2. The person you used to want to be
3. The fox, and the worse version of the fox
4. Where it stopped being about character
5. The objection: who decides, then?
6. What changed

Reading

• Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (1983). The source; chapter III.
• Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2000). The argument taken into the world.
• Serene Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women’s Empowerment (2011). The best case against everything in this episode.
• Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Transcript

Available on release.

I’m Just Not That Kind of Person

“I’m just not a confrontational person.” It sounds like a fact about you. But you said it, just now, at exactly the moment the alternative was hard.

Someone at work is taking credit for what you did. You’ve drafted the sentence on the drive home. You don’t say it, and you explain it to yourself with: I’m just not a confrontational person.

That sentence turns a choice into a thing you are, and the moment it does, there’s nothing left to argue with. Sartre called the move bad faith, and it isn’t hypocrisy. It’s something you do to yourself, with yourself as the only audience.

The history matters here: when Sartre took God out of Kierkegaard’s account of self-deception, there was no true self left to be false to. Which makes the concept far more aggressive and, in its cheap version, cruel. That’s the objection, and it’s a fair one.

Sections

1. The pour
2. The sentence on the drive home
3. Facticity, transcendence, and the waiter
4. What Sartre did to Kierkegaard
5. The objection: some people cannot
6. What changed

Reading

• Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part One, Chapter Two, “Bad Faith.”
• Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism. The accessible version, with caveats.
• Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Part One.
• Ronald Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy (1995).

Transcript

Available on release.

The One Who Wants and the One Who Objects

Ten past two in the morning, still scrolling. You want to stop. You want to keep going. Both are you. Which one is really you, and why is it the one that’s losing?

Two wants in the same head at the same time: stop, and keep going. We don’t treat them as equals. We call the one that wants to stop the real you and the other one a hijacking. But they’re both yours, and the one you call you is losing.

Harry Frankfurt’s answer is that the real one is the one you endorse, yours by adoption, not by merit. That’s more unsettling than it sounds, and the two-addicts case makes the cost of it plain.

Then the callback to episode one: the endorsing voice can itself be installed. The desire to want to be different is exactly the kind of thing a parent, a church, or an algorithm puts there. Frankfurt has no way to tell.

Sections

1. The pour
2. Ten past two
3. First-order, second-order, and the wanton
4. What Frankfurt took out of Plato
5. The objections: the regress, and the installed second floor
6. What changed

Reading

• Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Journal of Philosophy (1971). Short, and the whole episode is in it.
• Frankfurt, “Identification and Wholeheartedness” (1987).
• Gary Watson, “Free Agency” (1975). The main rival account.
• Plato, Phaedrus (the charioteer); Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII.

Transcript

Available on release.

There Is No Vault

Try to lie to yourself. Right now, deliberately. You can’t. And yet you’re doing it about something. Either there’s a hidden room, or self-deception isn’t what we think.

The first three episodes all assumed you can keep something from yourself. This one asks whether that’s even possible. To lie you have to know the truth; to be deceived you have to not know it. Self-deception needs you to be both.

The traditional answer is that the mind has parts: a room where the truth is kept and a room where you live. Freud built a system on it and Davidson made it rigorous. Alfred Mele’s account takes it away: no rooms, no censor, no plan. Just wanting, which tilts the floor, and fifty small moments where you could have looked and didn’t.

Which is worse, not better. The objection section is where I catch myself preferring the theory that lets me off, and episode one comes for me.

Sections

1. The pour
2. Try to lie to yourself
3. Two paradoxes and the room with the door
4. Mele: there is no vault
5. The objections: surgical avoidance, and where the blame went
6. What haven’t you checked

Reading

• Alfred Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (2001), chapters 1 to 3.
• Donald Davidson, “Deception and Division” (1985).
• Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception (1969). A third option.
• Sartre’s objection to the Freudian censor is in Being and Nothingness, Part One, Chapter Two.

Transcript

Available on release.

What It Cost

Four episodes of taking things away. So: what was that for? Socrates has the strongest answer there is, and he paid the maximum price for it. Whether the answer holds.

The arc ends where the show’s name comes from. Not the story of the trial, which you half-know, but whether the answer Socrates gave holds up when you put weight on it.

The facts: the charges, the defence that wasn’t a defence, the counter-penalty that talked a divided jury into killing him, the escape he declined. Then what the story has been made to mean, and why the comfortable version, philosophy against tyranny, may be one that people who like philosophy adapted into. Episode one’s concept, applied to the show’s own founding myth.

Then the case against him, given properly: he may have been finished rather than brave; he didn’t pay alone; and the examined life may simply not deliver. If this arc made you worse, I don’t have a good answer for you. I say so.

What’s left is thin, and I’ve tried to keep it that way. Arc Two begins in January.

Sections

1. The pour
2. What was that for?
3. What happened in 399
4. What the story was made to mean, and who it flatters
5. The case against him
6. What he wouldn’t give up

Reading

• Plato, Apology. Read two translations; Grube and Reeve are both standard.
• Plato, Crito and the last pages of Phaedo.
• Xenophon, Apology. The other contemporary portrait.
• I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (1988). The political reading.
• Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died (2009). The better-balanced version of it.

Transcript

Available on release.