Tea With Socrates

Try to lie to yourself. Right now, on purpose. You can’t. To tell a lie you have to know the truth, and to be taken in by one you have to not know it, and self-deception asks you to be both at once, in one head. So either there’s a hidden room where the truth gets kept, or self-deception is not what we think it is.Episode four of Arc One, The Unreliable Narrator. The first three episodes all assumed you can keep something from yourself. This one asks whether that’s possible. Freud and Donald Davidson say yes: the mind has parts, and one of them holds the truth behind a door. Alfred Mele says there’s no door, no room, and no one in there who knows. Just wanting, which has weight, and a floor that tilts.In this episode: the static and dynamic paradoxes of self-deception; Davidson’s partitioned mind and Sartre’s objection to the censor; Mele’s deflationary account and the four small ways wanting bends evidence; why surgical avoidance seems to need a navigator; where the blame goes if nobody ever decided; and the host catching himself preferring the theory that lets him off.Tea: Bai Mu Dan.

This isn’t an episode about your phone. Doomscrolling is just the easiest example to catch yourself. You can want to stop and keep going. But we don’t treat them as equals. We think of the one that wants to stop as the real you and the other one an intrusion, a hijacking of your free will. But the one you call you is the one that loses most nights. Why is that?Harry Frankfurt’s answer dates back way before cellphones. Reading, chapters, and the transcript are at teawithsocrates.com.

"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.Second of five episodes in Arc One, The Unreliable Narrator.Reading: Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part One, Chapter Two, "Bad Faith." Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Part One. Ronald Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy (1995).Tea With Socrates is free and stays free. New episodes Tuesdays. teawithsocrates.com

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.First of five episodes in Arc One, The Unreliable Narrator.Reading: Jon Elster, Sour Grapes (1983), chapter III. Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (2000). Serene Khader, Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment (2011). Aesop, "The Fox and the Grapes."Tea With Socrates is free and stays free. New episodes Tuesdays. teawithsocrates.com

 An excerpt from Episode 1, Sour Grapes. There's a person you used to want to be. At some point you stopped wanting it, and it felt like maturity. Tea With Socrates takes one philosophical idea per episode and works it through: what it means, the moment in history where it changed, the strongest objection against it, and what it does to how you see your own life. Arc One is five episodes on why you're not a reliable witness to your own life. The first two arrive Tuesday, November 3. teawithsocrates.com