by Laura Kipnis
Take the former presidential candidate and one-time vice presidential nominee who turned out to have been stepping out on his much-revered cancer-stricken wife, even fathering a love child with the other woman before finally terminating his presidential campaign. This was John Edwards, who’d billed himself as the model family man, then betrayed his family in the arms of a New Age twit everyone agreed was far inferior to his wife, then lied when asked about it, then hedged, then split hairs about the timing of the affair, then said that his wife’s cancer was in remission at the time (as if that mattered), and to cap it off accused himself of narcissism and egotism during his televised mea culpa. As an apology, this backfired.
Because it’s difficult to make embarrassing things go away on the Internet, it’s actually still possible to find a number of so-called webisodes from the Edwards campaign online, shot and produced by the woman Edwards finally admitted to having the affair with. You can even hear her on the sound track asking coy questions of Edwards and giggling at his answers. Though there’s some ambiguity about when the affair started, what’s not in dispute is that the affair-mate had no prior video production experience when Edwards put her on the campaign payroll. Pretty clearly they were sexually involved while she was shooting these videos of him; clearly he knew that what was being recorded would be posted on the Web for the world to see, and also knew—at some level—that if these facts became public, it would decimate his shot at being leader of the free world, which for a while didn’t look entirely impossible.1 So the stakes were, arguably, high.
For the student of self-deception, these webisodes are quite a trove of research material, especially the one on the subject of … “authenticity.” We track Edwards to various political rallies, we’re with him relaxing on his campaign plane in a backstage, unbuttoned view of the man behind the glossy posters. So what should we make of it when Edwards says, to the camera:
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am. I don’t know what the result of that will be. But for me personally, I’d rather be successful or unsuccessful based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll that you put up in front of audiences. That’s not me, you know?
Even for those of us who don’t care to sermonize about other people’s sex lives, or who admired Edwards’s position on the wealth gap, it’s hard not to be mortified by such a flamboyant performance of self-contradiction on such a national scale. Political cynics will say that whenever a politician talks about authenticity he’s sure to be lying, but here Edwards is also erecting the scaffolding for his own beheading, which is unsettling no matter how cynical you are. No doubt this accounts for the jokes. Levity at least forestalls having to look too closely at any similar propensities of one’s own.
But there’s another reason philosophers are interested in the question of self-deception. When we joke about the latest bimbo eruption, we’re not just trading views on sexual morality, we’re also having an implicit debate about how consciousness is structured. Where you come down on Edwards reveals what philosophers would call your philosophy of mind.
For instance: one of the more widespread explanations of Edwards’s behavior was “hubris.” This was shorthand for the view that Edwards was lying, knew he was lying, knew that exposure of his lies would mean downfall, thought he could get away with it, and simply miscalculated. Those who hew to this story are taking the position that all mental activity is conscious, and all facets of the mind are transparent to itself. Self-deception per se doesn’t exist for this camp; those who engage in what might look like self-deception are actually fully conscious of what they’re doing—they’re deliberately acting badly and they know it; they’re just hoping not to get caught.
Opposing the hubris camp we have what might be called the “compartmentalization” camp. Compartmentalization proponents would say that Edwards wasn’t consciously deceiving his audience. He both knew what he was doing, and didn’t: the main person he was deceiving was himself. This camp would lean toward a more Freudian account of the psyche: there are forms of knowledge that are accessible to one part of the psyche and not to another. Two incompatible beliefs can coexist because humans are eternally and irrevocably split, making complete self-mastery an impossibility. To a compartmentalization theorist, a hubris-camp joke like “He couldn’t keep it zipped” is itself an instance of compartmentalization, a symptom of the same forms of split consciousness it means to condemn. Fooling yourself about the supremacy of self-knowledge makes you a walking example of compartmentalization.
At this point our picture of how the mind is structured becomes necessarily more ornate, because if you’re lying to yourself, who’s the self doing the lying, and who’s the self being lied to? And if we’re so essentially split-uppable, such bifurcated beings, is this any way to live—not knowing at any moment whether one part of you is actively working to sabotage the other?
Watching Edwards proclaim, in that “authenticity” webisode, that he wants the country to know who he really is, I don’t doubt that he meant every word of it. He wanted the country to see who he was, while at the same time knowing that he was a man with a career-destroying secret—after all, the secret was sitting across the aisle from him on the campaign plane, holding the camera that was recording those very words. Yet if two such opposing forms of knowledge can coexist autonomously in the same psyche, then none of us is in such great shape from a self-preservation standpoint. It’s not that Edwards is a stupid guy. What he failed to grasp was his own capacity for self-deception. But let’s face facts: aren’t any of us capable of massive forms of self-betrayal every waking hour of the day?
* * *
Here’s someone who would disagree. One of our most adamant anti-compartmentalizers was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose explanation for what afflicted Edwards (were he still around) would probably have been “bad faith,” a condition to which he devotes a well-known chapter in his otherwise unreadable tome Being and Nothingness. Sartre vigorously rejected the whole premise of the Freudian unconscious: not only is it possible to consciously believe something in the face of evidence to the contrary, but in his terms, lying to yourself is always a conscious decision. The Edwards authenticity webisode would be doubly ironic for Sartre, since for him bad faith is the quintessential form of inauthenticity—you’re appropriating a false notion of self, because you’re knowingly participating in your own self-deception. You’re refusing the radical possibilities of freedom he thinks are obtainable, and instead acquiescing to life in a social cage.
He offers up a series of charming little vignettes to illustrate the point. The most famous one involves a waiter in a café whose movements are just a little too precise, who “comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.” What’s he up to? “He’s playing at being a waiter in a café,” Sartre diagnoses. Why? Because this is what his customers want, so the waiter becomes alienated from himself, and imprisoned in his social role.
What’s so charming is how closely observed and present this waiter seems—it’s like you’re there witnessing the scene yourself, as Sartre, a major café-goer, obviously was on many occasions. In addition to the waiter immortalized in his semi-comic impersonation of waiter, there’s another much-cited example: the story of a young woman who consents to go out with “a particular man” for the first time and pretends not to notice his sexual advances. As Sartre explains, she actually knows quite well what the man’s intentions are, but puts off deciding what to do about them, “concerning herself only with what’s respectful and discreet in his attitude,” instead of admitting to herself what’s really going on.
Sartre charges the young woman with bad faith. Why? Because she wants to see these compliments and attentions as about her personality, even though she knows it’s not her personality that interests the guy. But for h
er to recognize “the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and horrify her.” Yet there’s no reward for her in just being respected either, Sartre guesses. So she refuses to recognize the guy’s lust for what it is, because in the end she doesn’t actually know what she wants. Next comes a lengthy analysis of what ensues when the man pushes the situation further by holding the woman’s hand, which calls for a decision: if she leaves her hand there she’s saying yes to his advances, but if she pulls it away she breaks the charm of the moment. So she tries to postpone a decision as long as possible. “We know what happens next,” Sartre mocks. She leaves her hand in his, but she pretends not to notice what’s happening to her hand and starts expounding about Life instead, in lofty, sentimental ways. Meanwhile her hand stays inert, “between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.”
“We shall say that this woman is in bad faith,” reproaches Sartre.
But who is this “particular man”? Is he in good faith? This question we somehow never get around to. Given Sartre’s reputation as one of the twentieth century’s great chasers of women, known to discourse freely on his career as a seducer in the same suavely knowing tones of these vignettes, perhaps we can be forgiven for engaging in a bit of biographical fallacy. Critic Louis Menand writes of Sartre’s legacy in these matters: “As one would expect of the great advocate of transparency, he discussed his reasons [for pursuing women] frankly”; these reasons, he frequently said, were primarily the pursuit of female beauty. (He saw it as a way of developing his aesthetic sensibility.) As Menand quotes Sartre: “First of all, there is the physical element. There are of course ugly women, but I prefer those who are pretty.… Then there is the fact that they’re oppressed, so they seldom bore you with shop talk.… I enjoy being with a woman because I’m bored out of my mind when I have to converse in the realm of ideas.”
Well, that is frank. So let’s be equally frank. One recalls on reading this that Sartre himself was not exactly physically prepossessing, in fact he was rather ugly—about five feet tall, wall-eyed, and with a serious indifference to hygiene, Menand notes, though he could still rely on charm and charisma as seduction tools, not to mention his status as a famous philosopher. Who needs hygiene when you have charm and charisma? Still, the ugliness had to rankle for someone so attuned to aesthetics. Indeed, in his wonderful memoir about his childhood, The Words, Sartre writes devastatingly about the shattering effect that realizing that he was ugly had on him. Always having been an adored child, at age seven his grandfather snuck him off to get his long blond ringlets cut off. This turned out be a grave error since without the hair as distraction, his ugliness became undeniable. From that point on, the mirror showed him what a monster he was—and from that point on he became a little imposter, he writes, overplaying his part “like an aging actress” to court his family’s attention and adoration.
The description of childhood bad faith, of impersonating an adorable child, is one of the more brutally honest descriptions of childhood I’ve read—reading it brings horrible memories rushing back of performing for adults as a child myself, in hopes of a few crumbs of love. (In my case I pretended to know how to read by memorizing a Peter Rabbit picture book at the age of three or so, including exactly where to turn the pages, astounding any relative who was willing to sit through a rendition.) You feel, reading The Words, that this is an author who knows about inauthenticity firsthand, and is well equipped to diagnose it in himself and his fellow sufferers. Of course, here you’d be wrong.
Back to that uncooperative young woman. According to Hazel Rowley’s superbly gossipy excavation of the self-mythologizing relationship between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre spent two years trying and failing to seduce a seventeen-year-old student of Beauvoir’s named Olga (Beauvoir had already slept with her); he finally gave up and spent another two years trying to seduce her sister Wanda, at which he eventually succeeded. These campaigns do sound awfully similar to the seduction vignette from “Bad Faith.” If the seducer’s position in the story is less thoroughly investigated than that of the young woman, if it’s taken for granted that her acquiescence is his due, the reader finds herself pondering whether there’s something simply inaccessible to “philosophical” knowledge here. That is, whether contrary to Sartre’s theories, not everything in the mind is completely available to consciousness.
When Sartre pronounces, of the recalcitrant young woman, that she possesses “a certain art of forming contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea,” I have a hard time seeing why it’s she alone who’s in bad faith. The whole thing reeks of falseness. To put it bluntly, he’s deceiving himself.
To a philosophical philistine like me, what we have are a lot of words being thrown at the world’s most banal situation, which is a disparity in levels of sexual attraction between two people, something the less-desired person both knows and refuses to know. When Sartre proclaims that this woman is free, then rebukes her for refusing the possibilities of her own freedom—while simultaneously attempting to pinion her within the most constricting forms of submissive femininity—you feel the narrator is desperate to persuade you that if she were fully conscious of her freedom she’d jump on her companion and start humping away.
How is it that Sartre, who doesn’t believe in self-deception, doesn’t allow himself to see how self-deceptive he’s being?
I’m pressing a bit hard on this example because it’s astounding how enshrined it remains to this day in the literature on self-deception, with succeeding generations of philosophers circling around it still like some sort of talisman. Take an anthologized article by a philosopher named Bruce Wilshire that opens by retelling Sartre’s vignette: “A young woman is invited out by a man who she knows will try skillfully to seduce her. This troubles her. Nevertheless she accepts his invitation, for she finds him attractive.…” But nowhere does even Sartre say that the woman finds the man attractive. What a strangely reverent alteration, as if to retroactively airbrush the great man’s grotesqueness! Wilshire does update the vignette with a little psychologizing of his own: “She colludes with him to relieve herself of responsibility,” because “in all likelihood she’s acting out archaic responses to early authority figures who molded her mimetic life.”
Well, maybe so—after all, she’s a fictional character and I guess anyone can say what they like about her mimetic life. And since this isn’t 1970 and I’m not Kate Millett, I’ll refrain from grumpy commentaries on the gender assumptions and asymmetries that stud our philosophical inheritance since it would sound too obvious at this late date. But I suppose this example especially rankles because I myself am old enough to recall once being called “bourgeois” for not wanting to go to bed with an unattractive man (who also seemed to think sexual compliance was his due), which felt not unlike being accused of bad faith. I too was playing a false social role, he was saying, just like the comedic waiter in the café.
The setting was some kind of Marxist summer institute we were both attending, though even then the accusation sounded musty; it smacked of party meetings and sectarian correctness. Doris Lessing’s early Communist stories are full of scenes like this—male radicals recriminating their female counterparts for their bourgeois failings, and indeed, my miffed accuser was a left-wing South African academic, so perhaps a bit behind on North American advances in female autonomy. He’d been caught up in real political struggles back home, his tales of which impressed me. But being called bourgeois stung—nowadays I’d readily agree and whip out my Barneys charge card, but back then I always felt I had something to prove. Still, the label didn’t make me change my mind. I just wasn’t attracted to him, though it wasn’t something I was capable of saying.
Or that’s how I remembered the evening. Not long ago I happened on two rather passive-aggressive letters from the man in question, in a stash of old correspondence. In the first, which arrived out of the blue some six months after the institute conclud
ed, he lamented that something had been left unconcluded between us. “Perhaps writing is closer to ping pong” he wrote elliptically, and I recalled that we’d spent part of an evening playing ping-pong (being Marxists, we were housed in some kind of shitty dormitory). I suppose he meant to imply something about playfulness in lieu of heavy scenes, though the letter wasn’t really playful, it was somewhat cutting, even though written in an elegiac mode. He mused about why he hadn’t called me before he’d left the States; wondered why he was bothering to write now, and concluded with hopes that my work was going well but who knows, “time slides by so rapidly these days, maybe you’re into something else—perhaps even babies.” It didn’t take an expert in textual analysis to read the condescension, though there was also a pleasing postscript about his sharp images of me not having been blunted by time.
Or I suspect it would have pleased me—I wanted to be found attractive, and being memorable would suffice—though apparently I sent a caustic reply, reminding him that he’d called me “bourgeois” and chiding him for being such a leftist cliché. I don’t actually have a copy of my reply, but he quotes portions of it back to me in his second letter, which was addressed “Dear Unsuspecting Young Thing,” and chides me for chiding him for what he calls “mere linguistic excesses.” “Tsk tsk” he faux-reprimands himself, then accuses me of trying to transpose our encounter into the battle between “Feminism” and the “Male Left,” where according to him, we hardly belonged. “I mean, what we have here is Laura and J—–, after an evening of food, drink, ping pong, and artful sparring, unaccountably in Laura’s room, sitting on Laura’s bed, when WHAM! By the effect of some camera obscura, we are transposed onto the larger screen of History itself. Don’t our protagonists feel a mite swallowed-up by the clash of battle so skillfully sketched?”