A strengthened ethical version of Moore's paradox? more

Philosophical Psychology A strengthened ethical version of Moore’s Paradox?: Lived paradoxes of self-loathing in psychosis and neurosis. URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu rP Fo Journal: Manuscript ID: Manuscript Type: Keywords: ee Philosophical Psychology CPHP-2009-0138 Original Paper Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, paradox, self-loathing, delusional belief, David Finkelstein, Eroom's Paradox rR ev ie w On ly Page 1 of 11 Philosophical Psychology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 A strengthened ethical version of Moore’s Paradox?: Lived paradoxes of selfloathing in psychosis and neurosis. Moore’s Paradox is that it may be true that it is raining and also true that I don’t believe that it is [raining], but that it is absurd or means nothing to say “It’s raining, and I don’t believe it [i.e., that it’s raining]”. (Usually such a sentence is regarded as absurd, and the paradox as pragmatic. I myself believe that the sentence means nothing at all, and regard the paradox as semantic. But I don’t think anything much hangs on this difference, in what follows here.) Moore’s friend and colleague Wittgenstein once remarked: "Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself" (Culture and Value, amended second edition, edited by G. H. von Wright [Oxford University Press, 1980]). This has an immediate corollary, which has not until now been noted. It is this: That it may be true that someone is simply filth – a rotten person through and through – and also true that they don’t believe that they are filth, but that it is absurd / means nothing to say “I’m filth, and I don’t believe it.” And now it looks like we have on our hands a new version of Moore’s Paradox. Now, one might respond that there is nothing special here, nothing new. For it means nothing to say (e.g.) “I’m a good person and I don’t believe it” either (unless it be taken to mean, as in fact it quite reasonably might be, that I somehow find myself unable to believe in my own goodness even though I fully deserve to be able to. In URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Philosophical Psychology Page 2 of 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 this case, the first conjunct would be something that one doesn’t fully believe either, but is (as it were) quoted from what others have told one that one ought to believe.). For it may be true that I am a good person and also true that I don’t believe that I am, but nevertheless, for good ‘Moorean’ reasons, it means nothing to say, “I’m a good person and I don’t believe it” (unless it be taken, harmlessly, to mean what is parenthetically noted in the previous sentence as a possibility). In other words: Isn’t this just like any other version of Moore’s Paradox? (After all, there is nothing special about it raining; Moore’s example-choice, of “It’s raining”, is random.) But note that there is a particular difficulty, more severe than that that occurs in the case of Moore’s Paradox, in even considering or stating (at least, in the first person, as opposed to in the third person) the ethical version of Moore’s Paradox perhaps suggested by Wittgenstein’s remark. (And this difficulty is of course connected intimately with the reason why it was worth him making this specific remark (about being filth), rather than using any old moral concept, such as ‘good’ or whathaveyou, in his remark.). The particular difficulty is implicit in the wording (i.e. the use of the third person – a use echoing Wittgenstein’s own, a fact suggesting that he may perhaps already have been aware of the point that I am making in this paper) that I perforce employed in introducing the sentence, a difficulty (to put it mildly) which might license the entitling of this paper “A strengthened ethical version of Moore’s Paradox”. It is this: In introducing my new ‘post-Wittgensteinian’ paradox, I could not have written “It may be true that I am filth and also true that I don’t believe it, but it means nothing to say “I’m filth, and I don’t believe it.”” Because I cannot sincerely affirm nor even entertain that “It may be true that I am filth”. For pretty much the reason that Wittgenstein actually gave. Even considering the possibility seriously already URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Page 3 of 11 Philosophical Psychology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 prevents it from being true of one that one is (simply) filth. You just can't say "I'm filth" and mean it. In the act of saying it, is already untrue. Nor can you even say and mean it “It may be true that I’m filth”, and it still be true that you are filth. This then, “I’m filth”, or, if you like, “I’m filth, and I believe it [i.e. I believe that I’m filth]”, unlike Moore’s Paradox, is a paradox that cannot even be entertained in the first person. But notice what has happened. The Wittgensteinian paradoxical remark is not “I’m filth and I don’t believe it.” It is possible for someone to say “He’s filth and he doesn’t believe it” (It would be much more likely in fact, and more apposite, for one to say, “He’s filth and he doesn’t know it”. This is telling. Because it tacitly indexes once more that there simply isn’t anything that it is for one to believe that one is filth. Whereas one can be in ignorance of oneself to some degree: one can not know things about oneself. If he is filth and doesn’t know it, then there is simply a truth about him that he doesn’t know, and that truth is the main subject of our remark, when we say “…he doesn’t know it”. WE can know that he is filth while he doesn’t; but it would be peculiar to say that we can believe that he is filth while he doesn’t, because it would seem (wrongly) to imply that there could be such a thing as him entertaining such a belief himself. Roughly: there is potentially such a thing as the truth that he is filth, but there is no such thing as the belief on his part that he is filth). The Wittgensteinian paradoxical remark is simply “I’m filth.” To make it take on the surface form of Moore’s Paradox, one could put it thus: “I’m filth, and I believe it [that I’m filth]”. But the addition is surely unnecessary, and unhelpful. It is certainly entirely unnatural to English. URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Philosophical Psychology Page 4 of 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Thus this is the situation: Wittgenstein’s remark, as explicitated by me here, depends completely upon the peculiar status of the utterance, “I’m filth”. That is why there is a question-mark in my title. For: There is a clear sense in which there is a direct similarity to Moore’s Paradox here: that is why Wittgenstein says after saying “Nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth” that “it can be true in a sense”. It can be true perhaps that someone is filth; but it cannot be truthfully said by someone of himself. But: There is also a sense in which we are concerned here with something quite different from Moore’s Paradox. It is “I’m filth” that does the work here, while “It’s raining” alone does no work. That is what leads to my conclusion above that this is a paradox that is even stronger than Moore’s. A paradox that cannot even be entertained. It means nothing to say “It’s raining and I don’t believe it.” But: There is a certain sense in which one can consider that it maybe it is raining even though one doesn’t believe that it is. Namely: One can consider the possibility that one may be wrong in one’s belief (that it isn’t raining). Whereas: One can consider that someone else may be filth; but one cannot seriously even consider this, with regard to oneself. To consider it is already not to need to consider it. One cannot be wrong about not being filth. One cannot simply be right in the claim that one is filth. But wait; there remains another segment of Wittgenstein’s remark that we have not yet considered. That I’m filth “is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself” (italics added). Are there motivated forms of psychopathology that can produce remarks that genuinely URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Page 5 of 11 Philosophical Psychology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 resemble (a) Moore’s Paradox and/or (b) The unstatability and unconsiderability of “I’m filth” (which perhaps we should now dub ‘Wittgenstein’s Paradox’)? I believe that there are. The remainder of this paper examines cases which arguably fit one or another of these. Let us begin with (a), Moore’s Paradox. Remarks such as “P, and I don’t believe that P” cannot be intelligibly made. At least, not for normally-rational beings in anything remotely resembling normal circumstances. But what if one is in a situation in which one finds oneself believing things against one’s will and even against one’s judgement? Or again: if one finds oneself being moved to assert things as true which one doesn’t really believe? I think that those two scenarios are more or less inter-changeable. That is because they are ways of attempting to describe a situation where our normal concepts have partly broken down, and where as a result there is an inevitable lack of clarity about how to describe a situation. The kind of situation inhabited by some persons embroiled in psychotic delusions. Or, to use Wittgenstein’s crude and old-fashioned but evocative term: ‘mad’. Here is a real case. This is a case of someone well-known to me, an intelligent young man with indeed some philosophical training, who suffered a very prolonged borderline psychotic episode. He would seemingly find himself with a handful of beliefs that did not fit in with his general world-view at all, and that he found extremely unpleasant and terrifying – and bewildering. (He did not hear voices; he simply couldn’t shake off these terrifying beliefs.) The most persistent of these beliefs was that, because of what a thoroughly bad person he (allegedly) was (clear echoes URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Philosophical Psychology Page 6 of 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 here of the would-be situation under consideration by Wittgenstein), the Devil (or sometimes it was God, but God conceived of as thoroughly malevolent) was out to get him, was closing in on him. Now, this man did not even believe in the existence of the Devil (nor of a God, malevolent or otherwise). Or at least, he still averred what had previously been his settled disbelief therein. And yet he would at times say – and even, say again and again - that he felt that the Devil was about to get him. On one occasion, he expressed his quandary to me in just this way: “This is what I am strongly inclined to say: The Devil is out to get me, and I think about to get me; though I don’t actually believe in the Devil!” This (the underlined sentence) is very close to a Moore’s-Paradox-style remark. Though it is of course needfully striking that the remark was preceded by a sort of Wittgensteinian prefix: “This is what I am strongly inclined to say.” As it were: he recognised that he wasn’t quite actually saying this. Not actually affirming it. This is important. On another occasion, he wrote the following to me: “The Devil is chasing me; even though I don’t actually believe this, I somehow can’t help feeling intuitively that it is true.” This is if anything even closer to manifesting as psychologically real and uttered the pragmatic or semantic absurdity or nonsense that is Moore’s Paradox. Though again the ‘hedgings’ are important. Most notably, perhaps: “somehow” and “can’t helping feeling”. On yet another occasion, and this is perhaps the strongest case of all, he wrote this down while recording his thoughts, and showed it me later: “I find myself believing that God is going to annihilate me, even though I know it isn’t true.” (And naturally, he found this depressing, terrifying – and confusing.) However, there is of course something subtly and tellingly different here from the standard ‘Moore’s Paradox’ formulation: the place of the truth/fact, and of the belief, are reversed from how they URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Page 7 of 11 Philosophical Psychology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 are in the normal presentation thereof. Rather than ‘x, but I don’t believe x’, we have here something very roughly along the lines of ‘I believe x, even though not-x’. While it is clear, as we have already noted, that the situation of this young man was one that he intrinsically found difficult to describe, and this itself is important and partially accounts for the superficially very different presentations of his dilemma, I think that this is actually the most ‘natural’ way for something like an instantiation of Moore’s Paradox to occur: the belief in this case is something which seems to be forcing itself upon one, even though one remains immune enough to it to not grant it truth… I am not sure exactly what to make of these. What is important about the 3 ‘examples’ here from this one young man, is that they each exhibit something along the lines of the kind of impossible ‘split consciousness’ which is why we speak of Moore’s Paradox. A couple of remarks from Wittgenstein’s discussion of Moore’s Paradox in Philosophical Investigations come strongly to mind: “The language-game of reporting can be given such a turn that a report is not meant to inform the hearer about its subject matter but about the person making the report.” (P.190 of Part II of PI) The utterances of this young man that we have looked at here, one might say, hover between being one of these and being the other. “ “Judging from what I say, this is what I believe.” Now, it is possible to think out circumstances under which these words would make sense. // And then it would be possible also for someone to say “It is raining and I don’t believe it”, or “It seems to URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Philosophical Psychology Page 8 of 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 me that my ego believes this, but it isn’t true.” One would have to fill out the picture with behaviour indicating that two people were speaking through my mouth.” (P.192 of Part II of PI) Is the case we have been examining of the latter kind? That would be much too extreme a way of looking at. But it points us in something like the right kind of direction, so far as understanding the self-dividedness of someone who says something like the sentences that we have been examining here. Provisionally, then, we might say at least this: That sentences surprisingly similar in key respects to Moore’s paradoxical sentence can be deliberately asserted, sometimes, by people subject to but not saturated by a delusional belief. Or again: That one can seemingly say and mean something and yet not believe it, in certain extreme circumstances which put one’s rationality and sense of the world – or one’s sense of oneself as a unitary agent - under extreme pressure.1 As mentioned above, this young man was also seemingly close to (b), ‘Wittgenstein’s Paradox’, too, in that he was inclined to say things roughly along the lines of “I’m filth; I’m bad through and through.” But once more it is important to note that he was inclined to say things like this: he didn’t actually (simply) say them. Usually in fact he explicitly said things like, “I’m feeling inclined to say that I’m just bad”. Sometimes it Let us note here that the case being considered is not at all the same as that that David Finkelstein works though in his Expression and the inner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2003), p.117f. (some interesting similarities notwithstanding): “A number of writers have…noted that Moore’s point does not hold for self-ascriptions of unconscious belief. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with saying, “I unconsciously believe that p, and it is not the case that p.” I’m calling something further to your attention—that, prima facie, there does seem to be something wrong with saying, “I unconsciously believe that p, and it is the case that p” (even though, as with Moore’s Paradox, both conjuncts might be true). When we consider unconscious mental states, we find not only the failure of Moore’s paradox, but, as it were, the inversion of it. We might call this “Eroom’s paradox.”” Indeed; or we might call it Finkelstein’s Paradox: it is a neat piece of philosophical thinking. But the potential case(s) that I am considering is ‘crazier’; it involves beliefs (if that is what they are) that are conscious. 1 URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Page 9 of 11 Philosophical Psychology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 very much seemed to me as if his inclination to say or believe this was in fact an effect of his quasi-belief in the Devil chasing him. I.e. It seemed to me that he was reaching for the possibility that he was completely bad as an explanation for why it might be that the Devil/God was out to get him. In that sense, it seemed a theoretical hypothesis that he was endeavouring to entertain, and sometimes nothing more. (It is also worth noting in passing that for his anxiety to reach a peak, it was necessary for him to believe that the Devil (or God) was nothing but malevolence; was, to coin Wittgenstein’s phrase, penetrated by malevolence. Whenever he reflected on the possibility that such a powerful and more or less omniscient ‘demonic’ figure would perhaps also feel some identification with him, or have some capacity to recognise mitigating circumstances, or to find some good in him that even he (the young man in question) sometimes found it impossible to find, his anxiety eased. He wasn’t inclined to think that he was simply and entirely filth whenever he reflected upon the possibility or probability that any powerful supernatural agency that did exist wasn’t likely to be simply and entirely malevolent.) If we are to find something with a stronger claim than that just examined to be a case of (b), “Wittgenstein’s Paradox”, then, we may need to consider a different psychopathology. I believe that there is one that is closer to the mark. I am thinking of certain cases of extreme depression. Cases where a neurotic selfloathing reaches an almost unimaginable pitch. Where we might usefully speak of a delusion about the self’s moral status or nature. Here are references to a few possible examples, on the web, of subsequent selfreportings of such a state. They are worth a quick perusal (and there are many more like them that can easily be found): URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Philosophical Psychology Page 10 of 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 http://tigerpr0n.com/category/opposite-day/ http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=25005 http://www.crackwalker.ca/cracked/disorders/avoidant.html It seems most likely that such a state – I mean, a state in which one is inclined to say “I’m filth”, and not to notice that one cannot sanely (note that word) continue to say this while one is ‘penetrated’ by it, cannot simply mean it fully and seriously - could arise for someone in a particularly negative portion of a bipolar depressive condition. For the state would need to be one in which fails to notice the kinds of points Wittgenstein makes, and thus fails to notice that the ‘I’ saying “I’m filth” could not be just filth. The ‘part’ of you that notices that you ‘are’ filth cannot be itself fully filth (otherwise it would not notice). One could only then say “I’m filth” and fully mean it in a situation in which one was dead to the self-refuting nature of the claim. That would require a situation of failure of rationality, and/or a situation of such complete negativity that one managed somehow to seem to oneself to repeat the operation (of regarding oneself as filth) instantaneously with regard to each moment or ‘part’ of such realisation. I.e. That one found the self that did the realising that one was filth instantly itself to be filth in turn. Is this possible? Is it possible for a human being to live this? I am not sure. Our concepts do, as I say, importantly give out somewhat at these extremes of psychopathology. But it may be possible, in a state of sufficient psychological self-loathing that one fails to notice the rational limits of that loathing. I think we should say at least this: for both (a) and (b), it may well be phenomenologically possible for people to have the experience of at least believing URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly Page 11 of 11 Philosophical Psychology 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 that they believe what they are saying. That is: in the grip of certain delusional conditions, persons who have certainly not lost all touch with rationality, and are still very much seeking to understand themselves and their world, may believe that that they believe that “P, and I don’t believe that P”, for certain values of ‘P’ (such as ‘The Devil is out to get me’), and/or may believe that they believe that “I’m filth, through and through.” That there isn’t anything that it actually is to believe these things may not necessarily prevent people in extreme psychopathology from believing that they believe them…2 Fo rP ee rR ev iew On ly 2 Grateful thanks to Michael Clark, Angus Ross, Phil Hutchinson, for comments and thoughts. URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cphp E-mail: pp@mechanism.ucsd.edu