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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 326 her as he conceived it, and thereby his value and importance in his own eyes. It is not simply the combination of her suicide and his son's death that drives Sigismond to suicide, but the now-inescapable realization that he meant so little to her that his love provided her with no consolation or further reason to live. In demonstrating through her suicide that he provides her with no reason to live, Sergine has taken away his reason to live. Sigismond is goaded to suicide by the realization that his self-conception as the valued and beloved object of her devotion was false; that in fact he is of value to no one whose opinion matters to him. This is the truth that he went to such lengths to avoid; that Sergine's suicide makes inescapable; and that makes his own suicide inescapable as well. What makes Sigismond a self-deceiver, then, is not just that he manages to avoid unpleasant truths because he prefers not to know them, as the familiar analysis would have it. What makes him a self-deceiver is his selfaggrandizing self-conception, sustained by denial, dissociation, and rationalization: by a studied obliviousness to the conclusive, tragic evidence of his wife's indifference; by dissociation of the letter that contains it; and by rationalization of the earlier unresponsiveness to him that otherwise would have indicated it. His personal investment in his pseudorational selfconception is self-deceptive because it enables him to avoid recognition of who he really is. 1.4. Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge But why is it in general so important for the self-deceiver to avoid selfknowledge? My thesis explains this by the self-deceiver's personal investment in a self-aggrandizing self-conception, in conjunction with the disparity between that self-conception and what the pseudorationalized evidence in fact indicates is a less exalted truth. In Chapter V.2.2 I argued that our highestorder disposition to literal self-preservation made the horizontal and vertical consistency of our favored theory of our experience tantamount to a normative good; and in Chapter VII that this disposed us to ascribe to it, and to the things it explains, an honorific status. I also argued there that a particularly fragile or provincial theory elicits an even more intensely selfprotective desire to preserve it, proportional to one's personal investment in it. For these reasons, the self-deceiver is particularly recalcitrant and impervious to any attempts of her own to survey and critically revise her own pseudorational self-conception. Her investment in it is too great, and increases not only with its fragility, but also with the bogus value it confers on her. This is why the project of convincing a self-deceiver that she is self-deceived often seems such an exasperating and futile one: The self-deceiver has not only the rational intelligibility of her experience, but her self-conception as a valuable person, to protect. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
