THE PHENOMENON OF MIRROR
I. Preface
When I come to visit Japan, almost everyone asks me, “Isn’t America extremely dangerous, with drugs, guns, gangs, and mentally disturbed people, so that people not only can not go out at night on the streets, but also in broad daylight people are being shot at with guns and semi-automatic rifles for utterly no reason?”
I usually retort, “But you see, I am here and I have lived in America for more than twenty years. Nothing whatsoever has happened to me. It is not so dangerous as you think….”
“Oh no! You must be lucky! You must always be in the right place at the right time, so that no one has attacked you. We see on TV and read in newspapers everyday that both in the cities and in suburbs, not only innocent adults, but even little kids are shot and maimed… It’s so scary. I do not want to live there!”
No matter how hard I try to change their minds by showing evidence counter to their beliefs, they do not want to see it, they do not want to change their minds and so they continue to believe what they want to believe. Do they make a special effort to disbelieve me and my evidence? It does not seem like it. Are they experiencing reality as it is? Apparently not. How is this phenomenon of rejecting the new, evident imput hidden from self-awareness? How do we know that they do not experience reality as it is? How can you or I shed light on this phenomenologically? This is the question which initiates my pursuit of the following investigations. We would like to avoid any “explanations” and “interpretations” and the use of naturalistic categories in psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan and by such cognitive psychologists as Murphy and Coleman, although we may freely make use of their descriptions of experience and of experiments quoted. In this paper we would like to take a step further and beyond what Scheler accomplished and revealed in his many insights in “Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis.” Among these insights, two points are in particular distinguished from the rest in that they are even today still hidden from our awareness: The one is the priority of valueexperience, the other is his indication of the significance of self-deception in philosophical inquiry. Borrowing Bacon’s formulation of the so-called “negative imperative,” Scheler attempted to show that the apodeicticity and absolute indubitability of self knowledge is a dogma to be eliminated. This constituted the basis of Western Contemporary Philosophy for the past three hundred years since Descartes. Scheler contends that this prejudice has hindered many philosophers and scientists from approaching truth. He writes about this “idol”:
…inner perception, as opposed to the external perception of nature, can never deceive…. here the lived experiences themselves coincide with the self-evident and adequate knowledge of lived experiences. This theory, stemming from Descartes, of the superior self-evidence of inner over exernal perception is one of the foundations of every form of subjective idealism and egocentrim. It I one of the foundtions of that alse kind of confident self-certainty which has grown up in the course of the development of our cutlure….
We would like to see first briefly his attempt to phenomenologically elucidate some of the confusions in our self-awareness (more specifically, inner perception).
In this elucidation of self-deception, Scheler felt the need to take a stand not only against Descartes and other philosophers in the history, but also against some of his contemporary psychological theories such as Brentano’s, Stumpf’s and Wundt’s, etc., in regards to the distinction between the inner and the outer perception, the psychic and the physical phenomenon, the internal and the external experience. Thus, Scheler understood the question of perception of the world and introspection into our own awareness as that of external perception and internal perception, and he made many interesting observations. Apart from what Scheler considered selfdeception derived from confusion, the crux of self-deception is seen as phenomena in blinding oneself to, forgetting, repressing a certain experience and transference of one to the other. Scheler’s inquiry anticipates a great many of the outcomes of researches and experiments in today’s cognitive psychology.
II. Unspoken Assumptions that We Make as A Priori
In our everyday life, and often in our scientific investigation as well as in philosophical inquiry, we make a few ontological-epistemological assumptions of which most of us are not aware. They are not only “invisible” to our normal experience of the world, they make our perceptual illusion possible. In this sense, they may be called “transcendental” conditions for perceptual illusions.
1) It is true that, perhaps next to “being” which may be the nearest and the farthest from us à la mode Heideggerienne, one’s own self is nearest to one’s self, and yet is indeed farthest at the same time. I am my self and, due to this immediacy of the self’s givenness to myself, I have taken for granted that the self is the most lucid and most clearly known, or at least, following Descartes, clara et distincta idea. Since Descartes, the primacy of the self and self knowledge in the pursuit of knowledge has been unquestionably self-evident and that introspection into our self has been considered the only reliable source and way of philosophical inquiry into knowledge itself.
It was Freud and Scheler that called it to our attention that, indeed, the self is not transparent to our self, and is perhaps the farthest from our self. They exposed and attacked the assumption long held as to the primacy of self knowledge and attempted to demonstrate that it is the opposite case, namely that one’s own self is evanicent from our attempt to gaze at and thus known to us at best by our subliminal consciousness, although the self is always accompanied by all conscious activities. However, because the self is closest to oneself via introspection and its accustomedness, the self perhaps is least known to its self. In both common sense and philosophy, this assumption has blinded us from understanding its reality, as it actually is.
2) At the same time, there is another assumption in our everyday life and in the naive naturalist’s thinking: It is a firm belief that in our practical, everyday life we are able to experience and, indeed, do experience the world as it is, making use of tools (including our hands, feet, etc.) to manipulate and control “real” things in the world, and that if we see it with normal eyes, we are seeing it as it actually is. Not a few philosophers have challenged this bias in the past and more recently physicists, biologists and astronomers have provided an alternative “picture of reality” which is totally incompatible with this faith in our normal experience and its ability to “portray” genuine reality. Nevertheless, in our everyday intercourse with our milieu and the world, we must have faith in our experience and the true picture of reality via this experience in order that we are able to behave, act on, be reacted upon, control and so on. Unless we hold such an unspoken belief in the “validity” of experience, we would be perhaps, like skeptics, held in suspension and could not act at all. In our practical, everyday life, we wake up in bed, go to the bathroom, brush our teeth, wear clothes, get in the car, and start driving on the basis of our firm belief that what we are experiencing is real. Sometimes, this unspoken belief in reality known by experience is challenged by a specific phenomenon such as a red light on the dashboard indicating the car is overheating, an acute pain in the chest, an unusual sound outside our house at night. Upon having these experiences, our belief is immediately suspended by a concrete, specific doubt about the reality of these “strange” phenomena. Such a doubt instantly initiates an inquiry into the content of the doubt in my mind, leads us to an attempt to resolve the inconsistency of our overall experience with this particular phenomenon and recover our faith in the experienced reality. This faith in the world is what Husserl called the “universal doxa or thesis” about the world, but as he correctly pointed out, such a thesis can not be known to us until we are first free from the belief in our everyday experienced reality.
3) Furthermore, in our normal everyday life, we believe that we are right in whatever we know, in whatever we do and it is taken for granted that whatever we say is true (this is why a lie works as a lie in our everyday life). Together with our more or less egocentric way of looking at and interacting with the world (even in the case of Heidegger’s Dasein), this dogma literally blinds us to and prohibits us from developing an inquisitive doubt about these assumptions as a priori conditions. How many times do we have disputes over the correctness of our own memories against others’? How often do scientists fail to take notice of and sometimes completely ignore evidence counter to their own hypothesis? On the other hand, how easy it is for us to take as prophesy of truth our own opinion and thought. How many geniuses in the sciences and mathematics have been repressed and rejected by the academic establishment, which in fact decides the truth of a discovery and the validity of a scientific theory? How seldom do we acknowledge during our lecture a student’s criticism, which is inconsistent with our own beliefs? We as philosophers are not always exceptions to this, because there are always certain “things” which we take for granted and which appear to be self-evidently true, particularly those which we inherited from our predecessors as a part of the tradition.
4) In our practical everyday life, in the natural sciences and even in philosophy, again what is known to us as the world of experience are the things, which, stripped of value and value qualities as secondary qualities, may be described by their primary qualities. Thus what we understand by “perception” is intuitive knowledge of things in their thinghood. The world is understood (contrary to Scheler and Heidegger) as the universe whose knowledge “is written in mathematical language” as Galileo stated. Against those philosophers and scientists of the ancient world, we have been “brainwashed” since the Renaissance in the West to see reality as the world which consists of things, free from values and value qualities.
In parallel, our perception of the world is perception of mere thingness and of what constitutes information. My perception of a beautiful sunset on the beach is “abstracted” and “reduced” to consisting of a mere sum total of thing-qualities such as color, shape, arrangement, sunlight, etc. Anything which is not mechanically causal is rejected as byproduct as an after-effect. There exists no such things as parallel experience, mutual interactions, teleological causality, but every event is linearly related to its cause, and so forth. For example, the feeling of pure joy I experienced while looking upon my mother’s face again after so many, many years apart is said by many philosophers to be my perception of her face and its shape in material thingness, not “joy” itself, and that I imagined it or associated it with one of my past experiences of joy.
5) Thus, in parallel to this assumption about the nature of perception and the nature of reality, we could not help but believe the naturalistic, reductionistic bias that any values or value-qualities as well as their relationships (and “feelings” which are their valuerecognizing intentional acts) are totally “subjectivistic” in that they are for the most part seen as a posteriori “reactions” of our emotion, attitude and passion. This simplistic, mechanical causal explanation strengthens assumptions 3) and 4) such that what I perceive is exactly as reality and this reality is stripped of values and value qualities.
These five assumptions, although they are working, seem hidden from our “vision” or knowledge in our deepest way of knowing, constitute part of the a priori conditions for the possibility of perceptual illusions in the total innocence that we have, and we are caught in an illusion. Therefore, we may call them philosophical assumptions, too. They are philosophical in the sense that those assumptions work as the a priori meta-structure for perceptual illusion and selfdeception.
As long as these assumptions work as live beliefs “in” us and in our everyday life, we raise no questions, i.e., no “doubt” about our own experience of the world, nor do we become suspicious of how and what we are given as our own self. Indeed, once in a while we may be disturbed by a certain scientistic view of the universe, where the ultimate reality is understood as being neither “seen,” nor “touched” and thus without color, smell, sound or taste. Interestingly enough, however, this inconsistency of our concrete, experiential view of reality and the scientistic view of colorless, odorless, intact reality does not necessarily disturb most of us, unlike that of the scientistic view and the religious myth of Genesis. Indeed, strangely enough we are content to see the world as being in two distinct ways: The one is the scientistic understanding of reality, which is far from our concrete, actual experience; the other is the reality of our everyday life in which we interact with things in the world and others.
III. How Perceptual Illusion Occurs
This world of our everydayness is normally bombarding us with an enormous amount of information, so in actuality it is not possible for us as finite beings to receive, process and react to all of the input information. It is indeed selectively filtered, if not overlooked or rejected, since “too much information is beyond the capacity of our consciousness to operate with.” Instead, in our everyday experience we depend on two distinct strategies to deal with this information overflow: The one is our ability to simultaneously parallel-process more than one series of information, so we are able to react to and infer more than one strand of experience, something which has been greatly neglected in our epistemological investigations due in part to our naive faith in the linear, mechanical causality. The other strategy is to make a selection, pay attention to a particular sequence of events, ignore some, and sometimes blind ourselves to or repress fully certain information.
Hence, it is completely natural in our everyday life that certain information is processed while some other is not. The question is, how is such a choice made, and under what criterion?
It is also true in our everyday life that the majority of our behaviors are performed automatically or quite habitually without our explicit awareness. I can drive my car, chewing gum, talking to a colleague by phone at the same time. Unless we encounter an experience which is exceptionally different from the normal, we are able to live habitually and ribungslos without any questions.
It seems that only a totally counter-evident instance of an event and of its experience can catch our attention and sometimes raise a question or doubt in our mind, as Peirce said. Even in the case where we experience something which deviates from the normal, we are disturbed and tend to make it fit within the normal frame of reference and context of our pre-existing experience. Freud “explained” it as “having invested” in it perhaps.
Many of us have experiences similar to mine: When I saw my parents in 1967 at the Frankfurt Airport after my ten-year absence from home, I was greatly annoyed to see that they had gray hair and that their facial configurations had changed. (As is always the case in other experiences, soon I became accustomed to their “new,” “disturbing” changes and found them “acceptable.”) We want to experience what we are accustomed to experience. In this case, however, the adjustments were made against the previous way in which I expected to see my parents.
In Greek tragedy, its tragic conclusion is prophesied. Not only the audience, but characters in the play, are fully aware of the tragic consequence. Though they are well aware of this consequence in advance, they keep choosing the alternative which they have the “grande illusion” to optimistically believe will not lead to that tragic end. The sequence of choices based on these illusions is played out and the drama is concluded with the inevitable tragedy. In the case of Oedipus, aware that his own fate has been prophesied, he makes a succession of decisions based on illusions in which he intends to do good at least at that moment or in the near future. But having realized that he has actualized the tragic prophesy, Oedipus hollows out his own eyes and set himself to wonder, symbolic of his denial of seeing any alternatives. (Thus, there will be no choice and the end of tragedy). Leon, Antigone’s uncle, decides to prosecute Antigone, following his own decree, although he overlooks the possibility of Antigone’s determination to bury her brother. Leon was also aware of his son’s love for Antigone and suppressed or ignored the information that his choice may result in tragic events by Antigone’s prosecution. This ends with the catastrophe of the deaths of his son and his wife.
In the case of one of Sartre’s examples of bad faith, a young woman sits across the table from a young man and although she is not in love with him, allows his advances and allows him to hold her hand as if she were totally unaware of it. It is possible that in fact she does not see nor feel her hand being held by the young man. Many of these cases of perceptual illusion are denial or refusal to accept things as they are. They are self-deceptions. They are either completely blotted from awareness (in the narrow sense of repression cases) or facts are realigned to obscure the actual cases. After the unexpected revelation to a person that he has only three more months to live due to cancer, Coleman points out that “the denial typically passes, followed by another reaction such as rage.” He also indicates multiple personality cases also involve perceptual illusion.
IV. Self-deception is not a Subspecies of Deception
From these examples, it becomes obvious that perceptual illusion does not involve deception in the strict, moral sense. Deception is a morally evil act which tries to filter, avoid, repress and deny certain information with a clear and distinct intention to mislead a person, to intentionally do a moral wrong-doing. On the contrary, such dodging, distracting, repressing and denial in self-deception are pursued without “awareness” in the Freudian sense, thus are aside and “out of his/her sight.” .
The terminal cancer patient’s effort to wipe out the true information from his consciousness is apparently not deliberate and intentional, although it is done very artfully and quite skillfully. Nor was suppression of the information by Leon accomplished by willfully pushing this information outside the domain of consciousness. In this sense, it is apparently a mistake to conventionally call perceptual illusions self-deception. It appears deceptive and yet in reality it is not, for there is no intentional, moral wrong-doing involved in the phenomena of so-called selfdeception. It is thus misleading for us to continue calling these perceptual illusions self-deceptions, for self-deception is not a sub-species of deception at all.
Freud’s discovery that perceptual illusion is not accomplished willfully, but automatically (or habitually) and without reaching explicit consciousness led him to believe it to be the work of the unconscious. This act of the unconscious is called for when the ego (in the most pregnant sense) is threatened. Freud called the mechanism of such repression a self-defense mechanism. A great many cognitive psychologists follow in Freud’s steps, and consider that perceptual illusion in the sense of self-deception never reaches our awareness, our conscious psyche. This act of perceptual illusion is learned by ourselves with strong urges and inner inclinations, and develops always more skillful and becomes ever more complicated proces.
This example may not be called self-deception, but it is a splendid case for perceptual illusion. It is said that only approximately two thirds of linguistic communication is comprehended, while one third of it is not heard, nor understood, but “guessed” on the basis of the basic structures of our use of language. In other words, in our accustomed oral communication using language, with the help of Gestalt, we supplement one third of the (sound) information without actually hearing it.
According to Murphy, who quotes an interesting experiment by Kilpatrick at Princeton Laboratory:
We have abundant experimental evidence that we can learn to see things as they assuredly are not. In the Princeton Laboratory, FL, Kilpatrick introduced his subjects to a series of little “rooms.” Looking through a peephole into the first, one sees a well-shaped hollow cube with floor and ceiling perpendicular to the sides, as in an ordinary room. Then one tosses a ball, which bounces so peculiarly that one soon begins to grasp that the room is not a cube at all but a truncated inverted pyramid. Within thirty or forty minutes the room comes to be seen as what it really is.
The cubical relationships have given way to the true perception of the inverted pyramid. Then the subject is wheeled about and looks through a peephole into a second room. He see it as a truncated inverted pyramid. Actually it is nothing of the sort; it is a true cube! First he learned to see the room as it is; now he sees it as it is not. The point at issue is whether the practice of seeing always leads to correctness of seeing, and the answer is no.
Indeed, we can observe that ordinarily we have a very strong inner readiness and tendency to perceive in the way in which we always perceive and, sometimes in this effort illusions or misperceptions may occur, which we shall describe in more details later.
In this context, however, following Max Scheler, we must perhaps distinguish the sensory illusion from the perceptual illusion. The latter is due to our “learning,” while the former is based on the structure of sensory experience. An example of the former may be found when we see a stick broken in the middle as it is dipped halfway into water. The moon near the horizon looks larger, while it looks much smaller when it is way up in the sky. These are illusions, but illusions of this kind (Scheler calls them sensory illusions) must be distinctly distinguished from so-called perceptual illusions. As an example of the latter, we refer to the above experiment by Kilpatrick. The sensory illusion can only be “corrected” by introducing a different sense perception of the same under different conditions. In no way can we learn, improve or try to develop to correct or to make sensory illusion “disillusioned.”
Thus, what we are interested in for phenomenological elucidation of self-deception (as perceptual illusion) is our drive to learn, or our “urge to learn perceptual skills” which apparently takes place habitually and without awareness in the case of perceptual illusion. There are several potential “explanations” for this process, which we are not interested in here, but we would like to see and understand rather how it occurs.
It seems quite obvious from the above that what is given to us “raw” (“unfiltered” so-tospeak) in our immediate, sensory given does not reach our normal perception as it was. To the contrary, the former is filtered, selectively noticed and selectively attended to, partially (or entirely) dodged, repressed or partially (or entirely) forgotten to form the information for our normal perception. This process of selection which is not inborn to us, but which we acquire and develop, except in the case of the mentally disturbed, may reflect a certain structure. It is interesting to observe that we always (unconsciously ‹according to Freudians, subliminally consciously‹according to Scheler) attempt to “process” received information from the complex to the simple, from the irregular to the regular, from the undependable to the dependable, from the unfamiliar to the familiar, from the disagreeable to the agreeable, from the meaningless to the meaningful, from the unintegrated to the integrated, from the chaotic to the orderly, from the unstable to the stable and so on.
When we see a non-figurative abstract painting, we try to see some figurative form or figure supposedly extracted from it. Even if we recognize that an abstract painting does not represent any figure or form, we would like to see a certain structure, a certain regularity, a certain “meaning,” etc.
In order to understand and describe how such dodging takes place, Lester Luborsky traced the movement of a subject’s eyes on a painting which portrays a man reading a newspaper and a woman with a naked breast. The subject’s eyes do not direct themselves to the portion of the painting which portrays the breast. This “program” to unfailingly ignore or not notice a certain “thing” is the crucial “mechanism” to understanding the phenomenon of self-deception, and cognitive psychologists are finding it a difficult task to develop a complex theoretical construct which “explains” how such dodging or filtering takes place. As we said before, we are not interested in explanations or naturalistic causal relationships. Our question here is how is it possible at all for us to dodge, avoid, repress certain portions of our perception without knowing that perception of that portion of the object. As we have no explicit awareness of such dodging, selection, avoidance or repression, Freud and his followers tried to understand that it is the “unconscious” by which such dodging, ignoring, selection, or repression, occurs in the process of our perception. As pointed out earlier, Freud already had indicated the self-defense mechanism as the motive for such unconscious, i.e., to protect our ego from threatening information.
The question, however, is how one knows which is to be dodged, ignored, distracted, repressed or excluded and which is not. For example, Coleman introduces such a theoretical construct called “lacuna,” a blind spot, the spot where our consciousness is blank. His difficulty consists in how we do indeed articulate which to notice and which to ignore or repress. A lacuna does not occur totally arbitrarily. Therefore, he constructed a complicated scheme which bridges the unconscious or preconscious with our past memory. Further, an interesting result of an experiment is available in lieu of the process from the unconscious or the preconscious to the conscious awareness. In this process, the filtering, dodging or repression is to take place. According to Coleman, there is processing (filtering, censoring, repressing) of information for 150 milliseconds or so in our pre-conscious and then, 100 milliseconds pass after the information appears in our awareness. If Coleman were right, we should be able to process and identify certain shapes and forms in relation to our memory as being acceptable or rejected. Repression has come to mean “the defense wherein one forgets, then one forgets that one has forgotten.” How is it possible for us to censor and differentiate what is permissible from what is to be rejected within such a short time and particularly when it is forgotten that we have forgotten?
…The penalty for repression is repetition. Painful experiences not dealt with are, unconsciously, repeated. We do not quite realize that we are repeating ourselves, because the very diversionary schemata (=psychic paradigm) we are repeating keep the fact of their repetition from awareness. On the one hand, we forget we have done this before and, on the other, do not quite realize what we are doing again. The self-deception is complete.
Before we attempt to elucidate this intricacy, however, tentatively we must stop here and ask ourselves, “How do we know which is to be forgotten, when we forget that we have forgotten it?” Should it be completely forgotten (that is, even from the “unconscious,” his term), there would be nothing left in our unconscious and conscious activities. Then, how do we know which is to be forgotten? In particular, according to Donald Spence, “the avoidance is not random but highly efficient‹the person knows just where not to look.”
In order to solve this puzzle, it is necessary to go back to one of the unspoken, a priori assumptions we discussed previously. The secret seems to lie in the greatest bias of all, namely to assume also in this context that what we feel or perceive is strictly so-to-speak pictorial and a material thing, totally devoid of values and other value and emotive qualities. Such a sterile content of perception is considered subject to the law of mechanical causation. Such abstraction of perception from the concretely perceived necessarily implies that the object of such perception consists in thinghood, “extension” if we prefer to borrow the Cartesian concept.
V. The Priority of Value Experience
The incessant monitoring takes place in our psyche and the question of how monitoring is accomplished cannot be ignored. Indeed, we must agree with Jerome Brunner and ask, “How could people know that something was potentially threatening unless they could see it first? Was something letting a perceiver decide whether to open the portal of perception to let it in?” Once we get rid of our unspoken assumption mentioned above, it is easy to see that we realize not the mere thing-image on which we decide whether it is permitted or it is censored. To the contrary, it is the value and value quality of the idea or of perception which is a priori given and immediately known to us. It is the value which is so-to-speak premonitionally given in our psyche, before the thing-image as perception is recognized. The censoring, dodging, selectively filtering, repressing or rejecting takes place in feeling value prior to our cognition of the thing-image in perception. The priority of Heidegger’s Zuhandensein to Vorhandensein is seen in the same vein. Long before Heidegger’s exploration and pursuit of the implementality of the givenness of the world, Max Scheler had already opened this vista by removing the biases and assumptions which had hindered us from experiencing reality as it actually is.
The aroma of value (das Wertparfüm), so to speak, of an experience, of a stirring of feeling, or striving is already present to inner perception, even if the experience itself, especially the content to which the striving or feeling, the hate or love, is directed, is not yet present.
In an earlier place, Scheler also states:
On the contrary, it is the primarily given fact from which we must first artificially abstract the value-free (wertindifferent) state of affairs. This primary givenness of value is also demonstrated by the fact that, when memory and expectation are hampered, the value-quality of the pertinent content is what first comes to light…. Thus the values of experiences are always brightly on display within the compass of our consciousness, while the bearers of these values are not themselves present to us.
As is obvious from the above (and much clearer when we know Scheler’s insights into material values), it is our own fault that we are not able to really comprehend how perceptual illusion takes place without reaching the explicit awareness. Once we overlook, blank out or consciously and unconsciously ignore what really is, then we must develop an elaborate construct for artificial explanation to cover up such an oversight.
Thus, our phenomenological elucidations disclose: 1) Among phenomena of illusion, sensory illusion is to be clearly distinguished from perceptual illusion. Sensory illusions and perceptual illusions are different sui generis; 2) self-deception has been explicated better as one of a special class of perceptual illusion, for on the one hand self-deception is not a species of the genus “deception,” free from any moral significance in relation to others, while on the other, selfdeception takes place without reaching our explicit consciousness (In order to deceive, one has to have a distinct, explicit awareness of what one is deliberately trying to do); 3) our knowledge of self is in one sense closest to our self, and yet it is de facto farthest and least known to one’s self, as we “know” very little of the world as well as of one’s self, as they actually are. Oversight of the latter may be due to our confusion between being accustomed to and knowing; 4) through perceptual illusions we filter, censor, realign, dodge, blind ourselves and repress some information in processing them; 5) such perceptual illusions are perhaps called self deception when perceptual illusion takes place in the fragile, unstable ego and it tries to fulfill its responsibility to solidify itself with a stable, well-organized structure. When new information inconsistent with pre-existing structure or paradigm of values appears and is threatening the ptr-established stability, harmony and order, we develop and repeat self-deception for protection; 6) thus, self-deception or perceptual illusion is learned. It will develop further and become highly sophisticated and refined, so it is not only before but also beyond our consciousness; 7) perception, self-deception in particular, involves choice, selection which is not arbitrary, nor at random, but highly efficient and accurate; 8) and yet such choice or selection does not involve and is done prior to conscious will or deliberation; 9) Freud and his followers try to “explain” these selections by means of the unconscious “self-defense mechanism,” which, despite employment of such concept as a “threat to our ego,” operates under the assumption that all perceptions are concerned with mere image-, thing-experience; 10) consequently, they are not able to adequately understand how such a highly efficient choice and skillfully accurate selection of information in perceptual illusion, selfdeception, is meaningfully accomplished; 11) our phenomenological elucidation reveals that it is a priori value cognition which is the key and the condition for our accurate discernment of what is permissible from what is to be ignored;
12) Such a psychoanalytic concept as the subconscious threat to one’s ego may be more meaningfully understood, when we comprehended that our concrete experience is not a mere thingexperience, but is full of value-qualities and rich with so-called “emotive” characters with which we in perception recognize a real “object of consciousness” as a whole, and that in our concrete, full perception, whether it is a perception of an object in the world or of our self, we recognize value and value-related qualities prior to our perception of such abstracted thinghood. 13) It is not our task to assert or deny the subliminal and yet a priori way of recognizing value and valuequalities in our concrete perception; 14) Is it possible that we may be rid of self-deception at all? And, if yes, how?
V. Domains of Self-Deception
All these descriptions and distinctions of perceptual illusion and self-deception through our phenomenological analyses discloses what we have overlooked and have been mislead about assumptions which are operatively working in our self, now the question is what is the way to know reality as it actually is. In other words, how do we see our self “in a much closer distance” in order to experience reality as it actually is? We are not interested in development of methods for self-help, as many of psychoanalysts do. Rather it is our concern to uncover our dogma in our approach. In order to accomplish this, it may be necessary for us to take into consideration a variety of experiences which we may stipulate as self-deception.
1) There is a group of self-deception on the individual level. I have no doubt about completing this paper before the deadline, although only a half of it has been completed so far. As long as that young French lady does not see, nor takes notice, it is all right for her to allow the young man’s advance and let him hold her hand. I am coping well with my mother’s death as I no longer even dream of her. Almost all of us think that we will not die, but that I will continue to live forever. In these case, self-deception or perceptual illusion, if you prefer, involves in the mere individual concerned. This is continuously shaping the individual’s character. And often it is transmitted to the family member.
2) There is another group of self-deception which occurs in the family. There are often an unspoken dogma among the family, which no one dares to venture to question. Every member of the family knows that their drunkard father one day violated his youngest daughter, but everybody is blanking out of this memory. The spouse abuse is said to repeat itself in generations. The selfdeception about abuse is no longer a moral wrong-doing, but is re-oriented to become acceptable even to the abused. As pointed out above, the personal character which is prone to self-deception is cultivated by the family.
3) There are larger social groups in which self-deception is shared, the group of ethnicity, the group of a certain culture, and that of nation. It is a myth about the Japanese’s inscrutability, the irrationality and fanaticism of the Germans, and the rationality of the Ancient Greek. It is also the case that the medical establishment does not recognize a new discovery. They often use the socalled argumentum ad ignorantiam to fortify their conviction. In the establishment of Western philosophy, we had been firmly convinced for these three hundred years that the apodeicticity of self-knowledge was the self-evident truth.
Furthermore, what we calls cross cultural difficulty of communication is due to these selfdeceptions in each of the nations and the cultures. The so-called “myth” like the “genesis myth” was created and held through also self-deception. It may be another case of this that in the Prehistoric Greek, the Northern blond, barbaric invaders attempted to integrated the original inhabitants of the Aegean civilization. The culture and principles of the former are represented by Olympian gods (Zeus and his fellow gods) who lived in the Heaven, while the other goddess (headed by Hella) were the goddesses of the Earth or the Netherworld. In order to integrate two cultures, they created the myth, in which Zeus has many illegitimate relationship with other goddesses than Hella to develop an integrated unity. So did the leaders of Chou Dynasty. They unified China, whereby all these Chou families were made feudal lords of various regions of China, but they are totally foreign and outsiders to the inhabitants of the local region. They created a myth of ancestry such that all those original inhabitant families and subjects in the local are ultimately related to the ancestor of the Chou family. Thus, self-deception is not only harmful, but sometimes very useful to particularly construct a “social reality.”
The “stereo-typing” involves also self-deception among a certain group. It is transmitted from one to the other, form one generation to another generation. Ethic hatred and rivalry in BosniaHerzkovina is based on profound, more strengthened and more refined self-deception. In the case of the life-right versus the woman’s right (abortion right), self-deception is so deep that some one who believes the right to life committed murders. The greatest difficulty of self-deception is that it is “invisible” to those who employ self-deception. Self-deception provides the basis for not only cognition, but also action.It works as fortification and defense for solidarity within the group. Such a value as “self-esteem” is crucial in its blind defense.
VI. The Priority of Experience of Others
Precisely because of this, the self and self-deception included is not transparent to the own self, it is very difficult fir the outsider to fight with the “socially constructed reality” by the insiders in a certain closed society. When I moved with my family to Shiga Prefecture to avoid the US bombing, I went to the “local” school. I looked different, closed different, talked different, behaved different, far advanced in learning. I had everything which symbolized the outside to the community. To defend and protect their identity and self-esteem, they alienated me in every possible way. I did not why and was got hurt. They did not certainly know why they treated me like this.
All these dichotomy between the insiders and the outsiders, and these cross-cultural crushes are based on self-deception of the members of the groups regarding their two different “outlooks” and their opposing “values.” As they are firmly rooted in self-deception, they are “invisible,” hidden, obscured and sometimes repressed to those who live in such self-deception.
Therefore, we said earlier that the self and self-knowledge is the farthest to one’s own self. We are not able to see ourselves as they actually are. We also saw earlier that self-deception is a part of culture of a family, an ethnic group, a group of the resident of a small town, a nation. Selfdeception is transferred from one to others and from one generation to another. It is learned and developed and strengthened by repetition.
Nevertheless, self-deception may be questioned and doubted. Self-deception is covered and protected by thick layers of self-evidentness and being-taken-for-granted-ness to ourselves, so we are far from being aware of it. However, when we look ourselves in others, and when we deliberately question such self-evidentness in view of others, we are able to start seeing ourselves through the dense fog of these self-deception.
The following story called “The Seeking” by Will Thomas describes exceptionally well the situation in which Willie was going to be awaken to the notion of race.
“Looka here, Willie,” Jess said quietly, “how come you don’t like to be called ‘nigger’? You don’t think you are a Peck, do you?…”
“Well,” I said, fumbling to explain what I did not understand, “it is a bad word. You fight a guy that calls it to you.”
“You fight a white guy that calls you that,” Jess corrected. “You fight a Peck when he calls you that or ‘darky’ or ‘coon’ or “Sambo’ or ‘snowball.'”
A dim light was dawning, a foggy understanding. I said, “Those guys were fighting‹they were all white? Is that why you call them Pecks?”
“Well, gah-ah-ah-dam!” Mike exclaimed unbelievingly. “You tryna say you don’t know what a Peck is‹a Peckerwood? Where you been all your life, man?”
“Why‹why in chicago,” I said bewilderedly.
Jess laughed. “Hey, Willie, didn’t you sure ”nough know what a Peck was?”
“I thought it was the name of a gang,” I confessed, ashamed of what new seemed a colossal ignorance, “like in Chicago. We called our gang the ‘Dearborn Street Sluggers,’ because we lived on Dearborn Street. But most we just called ourselves ‘The Dearborns.” So when you said we were going to fight the Pecks, I just thought‹”Jess Laughed. Mike whistled as though amazed. Jess dropped an arm around my shoulders and said, “Willie, you got a lot to learn.” I tried to hold back the tears, but they came and I began to blubber and Mike gave me a punch in the back, not hard, and said, “Well, it ain’t nothing to cry about, Willie.”
It was good moment, but also one of confusion about many matters still unclear. I gulped and scrubbed away my tears and Jess and Mike sat down on the curbing, with me between them, and Jess put his arm around me again gave me a squeeze and said gruffly, “Everything’s all right. Willie,” and Mike said wonderingly, “So that’s how come you popped Jake that day in the park! I ‘ll be doggoned. You sure got a lot to learn, boy…”
When that day began, I was but a boy. At its end I had become a Negro boy, and as such, for the first time, troubledly glimpsed walls which, like morning mists, arose between people different in something called race.
But where does such a potentiality exist o see ourselves in others and question yourselves and selfevident self-deception? It is rooted in our ability to see ourselves in the mirror.
The phenomenon of mirror presupposes as its a priori condition that we are able to “bracket” the rest of our experience of the world itself and seeing thus not the mirror as an object reflecting, but separate it as the means inwhcih we see ourself or something else (“the mountain” reflected in the mirro). In this bracketting the natural experence, we are able to see ours” things (ourselves or the mountain) in the mirror by neutralizing the rest of our natural experience of the world, we are able to experience ourselves in others, rather than we experience others as strange and unfamiliar or weird. We begin to see ourselves as if we were alienated objects. We are able to doubt and question these self-evidentness and soon elf-deception itself.
Should Jacques Lacan be right, the six to eight month old babies would be able to recognize themselves in the mirror as others. Genetically, this ability goes way back to our early stage of development. Transcendentally, we are to refer ourselves back to our ability first to question and doubt, and secondly to philosophize. Socratic irony is indeed the starting point of exploration and elucidation of our self-deception.
Perhaps this is why Lao Tzu wanted us to “see the invisible,” “listen to the inaudible,” and “grasp the intangible.