On the Relation Between Virtue and Knowledge: Aristotelian and Kierkegaardian Critiques of the Socratic View
One enduring question in Western philosophy concerns the relationship between knowledge and virtue. The question’s first known treatment comes from Socrates. His position on this relation, according to Plato and other writers, is that they are perfectly correlated, if not wholly identical. On the Socratic view, to know what is good is to do what is right; without exception, therefore, a person who fails to do what is right does so out of ignorance. As Socrates declared, in Plato’s Protagoras, “[n]o one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present course.”1placeholder The background assumption in this statement is that what is virtuous is always, in an objective and rational sense, the best course of action, for virtue is both necessary and sufficient for “happiness” (eudaimonia).
Allowing for the ambiguity of terms that is frequently noted by scholars who study the works of Plato (in which most accounts of Socratic teaching are found), we may reasonably interpret Socrates’ argument as follows:
1.) All people in all circumstances take what they judge, on the whole, to be the best course of action (that is, the course of action that is most conducive to “happiness”).
2.) The best course of action for any person at any time is to do what is right and thereby cultivate virtue, which is both a necessary and sufficient condition of happiness.
3.) Hence, the only reason why anyone would not do what is right and thereby cultivate virtue is ignorance of what really is, on the whole, the best course of action.
Though Socrates does not himself make it, a helpful distinction can be drawn between two kinds of ignorance that prevent a person from attaining virtue. First, one can be ignorant of the fact that right action and virtue are always more conducive to happiness than wrong action and vice. Second, one can be ignorant of the true nature of right action or virtue (i.e., what action is really right in a given circumstance, or what the telos of human nature, which determines the content of “virtue,” really is).
Socrates’ focus is on the latter kind of ignorance, and he gives no indication, at least in the passages being examined, that the former kind of ignorance is a problem. It is likely that he took this knowledge for granted because the ancient Greek word eudaimonia held together, in a single unified concept, parts of what is meant in modern English by both “goodness” and “happiness”. As Owen Barfield points out, the things most often taken for granted by people in a given time and place are encoded in their language: “the most fundamental assumptions of any age,” he said, “are those that are implicit in the meanings of its common words.”2placeholder Socrates probably took it for granted, then, that no one was ignorant of the link between virtue and happiness because it was, for himself and his contemporaries, a matter of “common sense.” But the distinction must now be made because this connection is no longer taken for granted. All that is crucial to recognize at this point, however, is that according to what is here stipulated as “the Socratic view,” apart from ignorance (of either kind), a person will unfailingly choose to do what is right and thereby cultivate virtue.
The Socratic view of the relation between knowledge and virtue has been both challenged and enriched in important ways by later engagement from two of Socrates’ admiring but ultimately unsatisfied successors: Aristotle (384-322 BCE), and Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855 AD). Both of these thinkers took Socrates’ views seriously, but both maintained a similar reservation about them, which is that Socrates locates the ultimate source of moral failure in the intellect rather than the will. The Aristotelean and Kierkegaardian attempts to give the will a central place in moral decision-making are important because they speak to the two reservations that are most often expressed about the Socratic view. The first is this: Insofar as Socrates is committed to the belief that moral failure is ultimately a failure of the intellect, his view fails to account for common features of the phenomenology of moral decision-making: namely, the experience of what Aristotle called akrasia (“incontinence” or “weakness of will”). Secondly, the Socratic view appears to implausibly mitigate, or even preclude, the possibility of a person being culpable for wrongdoing and vice.
The first objection needs little exposition. Most people, when examining their own experience of moral failure, feel that, in at least some instances, they acted against their better judgment by choosing a lesser good at the expense of a good they knew to be greater, at least in the end. The second objection gains force from the fact that according to ordinary moral intuitions, culpability is mitigated insofar as an action is done in ignorance of morally relevant facts. A person who does something wrong cannot be rightly blamed if we can show that they did not “know better” when they acted wrongly. If, for instance, two people’s actions are equally implicated in the death of an innocent person, but person (a) was genuinely ignorant of the morally relevant facts (being, say, miseducated, being a person who, due to age or mental capacity, is unable to understand the consequences of certain actions) while person (b) was not ignorant of the morally relevant facts, person (b) is guilty while person (a) is not (not, at least, insofar as their ignorance was complete). This is usually thought to be true even though, ex hypothesi, the actions of both people were the same and the consequences equally bad. On the Socratic view, however, one must conclude that neither person is culpable because their moral failure incontrovertibly proves their ignorance of the morally relevant facts. In the face of objections such as this, it is clear that the Socratic view, as presented, must be modified or rejected.
Taxonomies of Moral Action
Aristotle considered the relation between knowledge and virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics. “How,” he asked, “can a man fail in self-restraint when believing correctly that what he does is wrong?”3placeholder Aristotle began his considerations, as he was wont to do, by stating the opinions of his philosophical predecessors: “Some people say that [a person cannot fail in self-restraint] when he knows the act to be wrong; since, as Socrates held, it would be strange if, when a man possessed knowledge, some other thing should overpower it, and ‘drag it about like a slave.’”4placeholder He went on to characterize Socrates’ view as “implying that there is no such thing as unrestraint [akrasia], since no one acts contrary to their better judgment, believing what he does to be bad, but only through ignorance.”5placeholder The Greek word akrasia is here translated as “unrestraint,” though it is often translated, perhaps unhappily, as “incontinence”; but its meaning is best rendered in contemporary English by the phrase “weakness of will.” Aristotle differentiates himself from Socrates in that he believes that incontinence or weakness of will can, and often does, cause a person to act contrary to their better judgment. His primary reason for rejecting the Socratic view is simple: it “plainly contradicts the observed facts.”6placeholder According to Aristotle, people are commonly observed acting contrary to their better judgment.
For this reason, Aristotle works out a more complex taxonomy of moral actions than that put forward by Socrates.7placeholder For Socrates, as already noted, moral action can be divided into two categories:
1.) virtuous action, which follows from knowledge of what is, on the whole, the best course of action, and
2.) vicious action, which follows from ignorance of what is, on the whole, the best course of action.
Like Socrates, Aristotle distinguishes between actions done in accordance with knowledge of what is best, and actions that are done in ignorance of what is best. Also, like Socrates, he categorizes the latter kind of action as “vicious.” But unlike Socrates, Aristotle thought that only some actions in the former category are virtuous. What makes his taxonomy more complex is that he distinguishes between three kinds of action that are possible for a person who has knowledge of what is, on the whole, the best course of action:
1a.) virtuous action is right action that follows from knowledge of what is, on the whole, the best course of action, coupled with a supporting desire and lack of competing desires;
1b.) continent action is right action that is chosen out of recognition of what is, on the whole, the best course of action despite lack of desire to do it, or is chosen in the face of competing desires; and
2a.) incontinent action (which is itself vicious) is wrong action that is chosen in the face of one’s better judgment, because of one’s lack of desire for what is believed to be best, or one’s weakness of will in the face of competing desires for other ends.
Virtuous action and vicious action are explicitly recognized by Socrates, and continent action is compatible with the Socratic view. Incontinent action, however, is asserted in contradiction to Socrates, for it combines knowledge of what the best course of action really is with a contrary choice.
Aristotle’s Account
What account, then, does Aristotle give for the possibility of incontinent action? How can akrasia or “weakness of will” account for the propensity of people to act against their better judgment, since the will, presumably, is aimed at what a person believes to be best? The first consideration he offers to justify his belief in the possibility of genuinely incontinent action is based on a distinction that he drew between knowledge that a person possesses, and knowledge that a person exercises in the process of deliberation about an action. Knowledge can be possessed in an abstract and theoretical way, such that it does not affect one’s actions. A person may know how to swim, in the sense of knowing which actions must be performed in order to float and propel oneself through the water, but this knowledge is not likely to be operative if the person in question has never tried it before, and is unexpectedly pushed into deep water. What is likely, unless this person has extraordinary presence of mind, is that he or she will flail about unproductively. The immediate perceived need will overwhelm the will so that the process of deliberation cannot continue until the relevant knowledge is brought to mind. The basic insight here is that possessing knowledge does not, in itself, guarantee that that knowledge will be operative in any (much less every) decision a person makes. As Aristotle said, “[i]t will make a difference whether, when a man does what he should not, he has the knowledge but is not exercising it, or is exercising it; for the latter seems strange, but not the former.”8placeholder
Aristotle suggested a number of reasons why a person might not “exercise” their knowledge. First of all, a person may act in a hurry, or their knowledge may be temporarily suppressed by a transient bodily condition such as illness or drunkenness.9placeholder More often, the process of deliberation that would make a person’s knowledge operative may be interrupted by various distractions, and a person may act before deliberation brings relevant beliefs to bear on the decision in question.10placeholder It may take a significant amount of deliberation to make all relevant knowledge operative because a person might “know” something in a very shallow sense, but their knowledge is not sufficiently internalized or integrated to have an effect on their moral decisions. For instance, Aristotle pointed out that a dilettante in the moral sciences may know enough to “string together its phrases,” and come to correct conclusions about the best course of action in a given situation. But this knowledge does not help in everyday life because there is a deeper sense in which the person in question does not “know” what is best, “for it has not become a part of themselves.”11placeholder In other words, a person must not only know what is best; in order for their actions to reflect that knowledge, the knowledge must become “second-nature.” It must be integrated into a person’s habits, for people are generally more inclined to act in accordance with habit before deliberation about the best course of action is complete (indeed, often before it begins). In this response, one sees the rudiments of the more psychologically sophisticated analysis offered by later philosophers, especially Kierkegaard.
Assessment Of Aristotle’s Response
Socrates, it seems, implicitly assumed that actions are always deliberate (in the sense of “resulting from deliberation”). Aristotle understood that this is not the case. As shown above, Aristotle thought that the process of deliberation is often interrupted resulting in people acting contrary to what they would have judged to be the best course of action if the process had been brought to completion. In this analysis, when a person is said to have acted against their better judgment, they should be interpreted as saying that they acted against what would have been their better judgment if the deliberation by which the judgment would have been made were brought to completion. It is not clear, then, on the basis of the considerations he offered in the Nicomachean Ethics, that Aristotle has succeeded in refuting one of the main Socratic contentions, which is that people never act contrary to their better judgment.
One can imagine Socrates replying to Aristotle by saying that the people in his examples either acted in accordance with their best judgment at the moment in which they decided to act or acted without making a rational judgment at all, but did not act contrary to a rational judgment about what the best course of action was. Those who were ill or inebriated, for instance, did not do what they may have otherwise believed to be best, but that is because, in the moment of decision, their judgment itself was impaired. Those whose potential knowledge, which would have contributed to their ultimate judgment if the process of deliberation had not been interrupted, did not really act contrary to their better judgment: they acted contrary to the judgment that they would have made if the process of deliberation had made all their relevant beliefs operative in their judgment. Aristotle showed that the knowledge that a person possesses is not always and to the same degree operative in their deliberations, meaning their judgment about what is best may vary from day to day, hour to hour, or even moment to moment. He has not shown that choices are made against what one’s better judgment is in the moment they are made. Those who acted on the basis of habit, without initiating the process of deliberation at all, cannot be said to have acted against their better judgment because a judgment was not the cause of the action.
The advantage that Aristotle’s analysis provides is that it makes room for the will to play an important role in moral decision-making. This accords well with common experience and alleviates concerns about the extreme mitigation or elimination of culpability that arises from the Socratic view. While Aristotle’s treatment of the relation between virtue and happiness is immune to the major objections that can be leveled against the Socratic view, it fails to answer the questions that Socrates found so difficult, and which motivated his inquiry into the matter. Aristotle asserts that it is clear that people act contrary to their better judgment, but he gives little by which a response can be developed to the questions of why and how they do it.
Kierkegaard’s Account
Kierkegaard was also concerned with the relation between virtue and knowledge, which he considered at length in The Sickness unto Death. Like Aristotle, he began his consideration by explaining Socrates’ assertion that all vice is attributable to ignorance. He starts with Socrates’ because, in his words, “everything Socratic is an authority meriting attention,” and because he believed that there is genuine insight in the Socratic view which should not be ignored.12placeholder Nevertheless, he brings some familiar reservations before the reader.
His first concern was that experience seems to suggest that it is common for people to maintain beliefs that are not reflected in their actions, and many of these examples are morally significant. He recalled, for instance, a memory of a man who brought tears to his own eyes in speaking about the nobility of self-sacrifice for the sake of a greater good, then turned around (with tears still in his eyes!) and sought his own good at the expense of those around him.13placeholder In response to this recollection, Kierkegaard asked whether this man’s profession of the truth was proof of his understanding of it (contra the Socratic view), or whether Socrates was right in saying that his failure to live in accordance with the truth was proof that he had not really understood or believed it. And again, Kierkegaard tells his reader about a professed a conviction that Christ came to earth in the form of a servant who was reviled and mocked; and yet, Kierkegaard says, the man in question sought above all things to secure for himself comfort, security, and wealth, and publicly offered thanks to God “for being wholeheartedly honored and esteemed by all.”14placeholder Kierkegaard’s response to this recollection was dramatic: “Socrates, Socrates, Socrates, can it be possible that this man has understood what he says he has understood?”15placeholder If he has not understood the truth, Kierkegaard thought, some account must be made of how he was able to profess it in such a clear and compelling way.
Kierkegard’s second concern, again like Aristotle, is that Socrates leaves the will out of account. Kierkegaard shared Aristotle’s belief that equating vice with ignorance, thereby making moral failure a matter of the intellect rather than the will, would severely mitigate or completely eliminate culpability for wrong action. But Kierkegaard also had another motive which Aristotle did not: that is, to make his answer compatible with Christian teaching, which, in Kierkegaard’s view, emphasizes the role of the will. According to Kierkegaard, Socrates had gone as far as any pre-Christian philosopher could go without the benefit of divine revelation; he had understood the human propensity to vice, but he did not have (and cannot reasonably be expected to have had) a Christian conception of “sin.” Sin is something of which a person is culpable, and this, Kierkegaard argued, is because it is, in its essence, an act of willful defiance.
Kierkegaard also believed that the role of the will is central to making sense of the New Testament, which contains passages that seem to support the contention that it is the will, not the intellect, that is the ultimate cause of moral failure. Paul’s description of the power of sin over the will (and not the intellect) in the following passage, is a good example:
“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.”16placeholder
It is certainly not obvious how this passage can be reconciled with the Socratic view, for Paul is aware of his sinfulness— indeed he repudiates the sin that lives in him— and yet continues to act contrary to his better judgment.
Did Kierkegaard Reject the Socratic View?
Given the reservations expressed above, it seems that Kierkegaard would reject the Socratic view, and passages like the one below seem to put that interpretation beyond all doubt. “If sin is ignorance,” he wrote, “then sin really does not exist, for sin is indeed consciousness.” He went on to say that
“[i]f sin is being ignorant of what is right and therefore doing wrong, then sin does not exist. If this is sin, then along with Socrates, it is assumed that there is no such thing as a person’s knowing what is right and doing wrong, or knowing that something is wrong and going ahead and doing wrong.”17placeholder
Since Kierkegaard clearly believed in sin, his assertion that ignorance cannot account for sin seems to be proof that he parts ways with Socrates on the relation between knowledge and virtue, but that is not exactly the case. Despite all his reservations, Kierkegaard did not simply dismiss the Socratic contention that no one knowingly does wrong. Indeed, he forthrightly concedes that “in one sense [Socrates’ view] certainly cannot be deni8ed.”1placeholder The difficult interpretive question, then, is this: In what sense does Kierkegaard think Socrates was wrong, and in what sense does he think he was right?
The apparent contradiction arises from what Kierkegaard perceived to be an ambiguity in the language that Socrates used to expound his view. This ambiguity, according to Kierkegaard, needs to be remedied by drawing two related distinctions: the first is between different kinds of knowledge, and the second is, relatedly, between different kinds of ignorance. The distinction between different kinds of knowledge will be discussed first since it is similar to a distinction already mentioned in the reference to Aristotle. Aristotle distinguished between knowledge that is operative in deliberation and knowledge that is not. He further observed that some knowledge is more likely to become operative in deliberation because it is understood at a deeper level, and better integrated into a person’s whole view of the world, rather than merely affirmed in an abstract way. Kierkegaard similarly distinguishes between levels of belief. Many, in some cases most, of a person’s beliefs are merely intellectual. This is especially true, according to Kierkegaard, in reference to religious beliefs; and even more so in reference to “the hard sayings of Jesus,” which reveal the immense requirements that Christianity places on a person’s life. For Kierkegaard, the ability to maintain one’s convictions as mere abstractions is one way of protecting oneself from the inconvenience and disruption that the truth can cause. There is, then, often an element of will involved in preventing abstract convictions from being fully internalized.
Thus, two people may profess similar convictions and may appear equally informed and sincere, but their lives may not be equally affected by their convictions because one may fail to pull the conviction from the realm of abstraction and connect it to the concrete particulars of their life. Two different people may preach Christianity, and appear to understand the same things, but one may be speaking from an understanding that comes out of an existential commitment to the truth of the gospel and the other may have learned (to reappropriate Aristotle’s phrase) “to string together its phrases,” and give the appearance of deeper knowledge. There is clearly a sense in which the latter preacher understands Christian teaching, but there is also clearly a sense in which he does not. The former understands it existentially, while the latter only understands it propositionally.
It is in the former sense of “knowledge” and “understanding” on which Kierkegaard believes the Socratic view is correct. To possess the existential understanding of the former is to live in accordance with one’s knowledge. Failure to live in accordance with it is proof that it was only ever known or understood in the abstract and propositional sense. In this way, Kierkegaard was able to relieve some concern that the Socratic view contradicts experience since it makes it possible for a person to “know” something that is not operative in the decisions a person makes. Kierkegaard goes farther than Aristotle in identifying the role of the will can and often does play in ensuring that beliefs which may turn out to have unwelcome consequences for one’s life remain abstract and unconnected to one’s practical decisions. He attributed the persistence of this abstraction to self-deception. This brings us to the other distinction that needs to be made in order to understand the sense in which Kierkegaard believed that the Socratic view is correct and the sense in which it is not; that is, the distinction between kinds of ignorance; namely, between ignorance and willed-ignorance, or honest ignorance and ignorance that is in some way the result of self-deception. If sin is the result of ignorance, and a person is culpable for sin, then the ignorance must be, in some way, related to the will. Sin, Kierkegaard concluded, “must lodge in a person’s efforts to obscure his knowing.”19placeholder
It would be impossible for anyone to catalog all the ways in which human beings deceive themselves in order to obscure their own knowledge and protect beliefs that they wish to continue believing or prevent themselves from coming to terms with things that they do not wish to be true. Kierkegaard, throughout his voluminous work, approaches the idea of self-deception from many angles and offers many more examples than can be put here. However, one which is explicitly connected to his discussion between the relationship between sin and ignorance will be explored below.
All the forms of self-deception that Kierkegaard discussed are assumed to be possible because of the human propensity, mentioned above, to maintain certain beliefs in an abstract and merely propositional manner. When this is the case, it is possible to continue living one’s life without fully making up one’s mind about whether the belief has unwanted practical consequences. Indeed, a person can keep delaying the process of integrating one’s belief indefinitely and thereby forever avoid coming to terms with the deeper kind of understanding that is, in Kierkegaard’s view, incompatible with contrary action.
Sometimes, however, decisions must be made about how one is going to live, and doubts and concerns begin to arise about whether what one is in the habit of doing or what one would like to do is compatible with what one professes to believe. Thus, according to Kierkegaard, one way a person can deal with the possible conflicts between belief and desire is to avoid making up one’s mind about the truth, and to delay decisions about what the truth implies about one’s actions. The consequence of this is that the decision, if it ever has to be made, can be made at a different time when the inconvenient knowledge is not present in one’s mind. This is why Kierkegaard offered this warning: “if a person does not do what is right at the very second he knows it- then, first of all, knowing simmers down.”20placeholder The limited attention and memory that an individual possesses, then, become assets in the will’s struggle to dominate the intellect. Since it cannot overcome what is existentially understood, it prevents such understanding from arising. Kierkegaard describes this process in a passage that will be quoted at length:
“If willing does not agree with what is known, then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite of what knowing understood … rather, willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: ‘We shall look into it tomorrow.’ During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure, and the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more; alas, for the good must be done immediately, as soon as it is known … but the lower nature’s power lies in stretching things out. Gradually, willing’s objection to this development lessens; it almost appears to be in collusion. And when knowing has been duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that what it wants is absolutely right. And this is perhaps how the majority of men live; they work gradually at eclipsing their ethical and ethical religious comprehension, which would lead them out into decisions and conclusions that their lower nature does not much care for, but they expand their esthetic and metaphysical comprehension, which ethically is a diversion.”21placeholder
Kierkegaard goes on to insist that everything he has said up to this point is consistent with a way of interpreting the Socratic view. He imagines that Socrates would respond to such reflections as those offered above by saying: “If this happens, it just shows that a person such as this still has not understood what is right.”22placeholder But there is still the sense in which Kierkegaard believed that Socrates was wrong. Kierkegaard notes that it would not have been possible for a pagan like Socrates to go farther than he did because, in his view, sinful creatures cannot understand the deepest truths about sin apart from the divine revelation of Christianity. What Christianity reveals, according to Kierkegaard, is that “[s]in is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right.”23placeholder He went on to elaborate the point as follows: “Socrates explains that he who does not what is right has not understood it … but Christianity goes a little further back and says that it is because he is unwilling to understand it, and this again because he does not will what is right.”24placeholder
Assessment of Kierkegaard’s Account
Kierkegaard’s analysis of the relation between knowledge and virtue is superior to that of both Socrates and Aristotle in its psychological subtlety. Since one important consideration to the discussion is the phenomenology of moral decision-making it is important that any account do justice to common human experience, which Kierkegaard achieved admirably. Another advantage of Kierkegaard’s account is that he, unlike Aristotle, found a way to account for the role of the will in moral decision-making that does not come at the cost of dismissing genuine Socratic insights. If Kierkegaard’s view is correct, then the objection to the Socratic view regarding its mitigation of culpability appears to be sufficiently answered.
A few troubling questions arise at this point, however. While Kierkegaard’s account of self-deception rings true to experience, it is not obvious how the process of self-deception can be initiated unless a person understands, in some sense, what the consequence of failing to initiate the process of self-deception would mean. This implies that a person is acting contrary to their better judgment when initiating the process of self-deception. A person may respond by saying that this process is not ordinarily initiated or carried out consciously, which is usually true, but it must be that, in some sense, the person in question engages in self-deception knowingly and intentionally, or they cannot be rightly regarded as being culpable for the vicious actions that result from their false beliefs.
Though he did not develop a response to it, Kierkegaard seemed to be aware of this problem, which he referred to as “that obstinate and tenacious ambiguity,” which was “whether a person was clearly aware of his action when he started to obscure his knowing.”25placeholder He goes on to suggest a possible dilemma. On one hand: “If he was not clearly aware of it, then his knowing was already somewhat obscured before he began doing it, and the question arises again and again.”26placeholder On the other hand:
“If … it is assumed that he was clearly aware of what he was doing when he began to obscure his knowing, then the sin (even if it was ignorance, insofar as this is the result) is not in the knowing but in the willing, and the inevitable question concerns the relation of knowing and willing to each other.”27placeholder
Concerns, such as the one that Kierkegaard here suggests, have been developed with more precision since his day, and used as objections to the possibility of self-deception.28placeholder In particular, philosophers have identified a paradox that arises in consideration of self-deception. The paradox is that insofar as a person is capable of self-deception, they appear to be capable of holding two contradictory beliefs. When one person deceives another, the deceiver does not believe that the proposition in question is true, yet he attempts to make the person being deceived believe that it is true. If a person deceives himself, however, it appears that he believes the proposition in question to be false, yet tries to make himself believe it is true. Importantly, if a person persuades himself through reflection that he was formerly incorrect, it does not count as a case of self-deception. He must convince himself through manipulative, not rational, means. But manipulative means seem to be dependent upon the deceived person’s inability to detect the manipulation, which is difficult to imagine when the deceived and the deceiver are the same person.
A response to this sort of objection to the possibility of self-deception can be developed by means of an appeal to the importance and power of the subconscious mind and also to Kierkegaard’s distinction between two kinds of knowledge (here called “propositional” and “existential” knowledge). Nevertheless, at the very least, one must conclude that even if self-deception is possible, it is a very mysterious process.
Conclusion
It is probably safe to say, on the basis of this inquiry, that the Socratic view, as Socrates himself presented it, is too simple. Nevertheless, it is not easy to refute. Aristotle, at least, failed to demonstrate that no one acts contrary to their better judgment. What he actually showed is that a person’s actions are not always the result of a complete and perfect deliberative process that brings all relevant beliefs to bear on their practical judgment. For this reason, people often act contrary to what they would have judged to be best if they had not only initiated the deliberative process, and brought it to completion. His contribution to the discussion is, therefore, valuable, despite the fact that he did not prove what he set out to prove. Kierkegaard did not attempt to refute the Socratic view. Rather, he attempted to Christianize it. As a result, he concluded that there is a sense in which the Socratic view of the relation between knowledge and virtue is correct. Sin, for Kierkegaard, is indeed a result of ignorance, but a person is only culpable insofar as their ignorance originates in the will. Thus, he saw self-deception as playing a central role in the moral life.
Works Cited
Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Loeb Classical Library Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926).
Barfield, Owen. Speaker’s Meaning (Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1984).
Dunnington, Kent. Addiction and Virtue: Beyond Models of Disease and Choice (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011).
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Protagoras (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.
Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Protagoras (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 358b–c.
Owen Barfield, Speaker’s Meaning (Middletown CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 44.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Loeb Classical Library Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 379.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 379.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 379.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 380.
In what follows, I have relied on the analysis of Kent Dunnington in Addiction and Virtue: Beyond Models of Disease and Choice (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2011), 38-39.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics. Loeb Classical Library Edition (Harvard University Press, 1926), 381.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 381.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 381.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 382.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 87-88.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 91.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 91.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 92.
Romans 7:15-20.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 89.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 88.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 95.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1980), 94.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1980), 94.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 94.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1980), 95.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 95.
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna V. Hong (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press 1980), 88.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 88.
Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 88-89.
See the overview of the paradoxes of self-deception in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Self-Deception”: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-deception/.