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Daniel Dwyer
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Bob Dylan on Self-deception  *The Project* Bibliography on Self-Deception Contra Eliot Contra Benedictus Plato:
"There is nothing worse than self-deception--
when the deceiver is always at home and always with you." (Cratylus 428d) Kant: “Self-deception is the root of hypocrisy.” (1791) Dylan: “I didn't agree with school. I flunked out. I read a lot, but not the required readings.” He remembers staying up all night plowing through the philosophy of Kant instead of reading Living With the Birds for a science course. “Mostly,” he summarized his college days, “I couldn't stay in one place long enough.” Sing Out (1966) on the Socratic theme latent in "Like a Rolling Stone": "Dylan is simply kicking away the props to get to the real core of the matter: Know yourself. It may hurt at first, but you'll never get anywhere if you don't." Augustine: Of the 8 types of lies, there is one "which is told solely for the pleasure of lying and deceiving." (109) "[This] liar loves to lie and passes his time in the joy of lying. . . . [He] takes delight in lying, rejoicing in the falsehood himself." ("Lying," in Treatises on Various Subjects, ed. R.J. Deferarri, vol. 16 (NY: Fathers of the Church, 1952, 79) Merleau-Ponty: “It will be necessary to draw a distinction between psychological and metaphysical hypocrisy. (1) The former deceives others by concealing from them thoughts expressly in the mind of the subject. It is fortuitous and easily avoided. (2) The latter is self-deceiving through the medium of generality, thus leading finally to a state or a situation which is not an inevitability, but which is not posited or voluntary. It is even to be found in the ‘sincere’ or ‘authentic’ man whenever he undertakes to be something or other unqualifiedly. It is part of the human lot." (Ph P 162-63, emphasis added) Nietzsche, Die Geburt der
Tragödie,
in Nietzsche
Werke,
vol.3, 9: “Here
spoke—so he said to himself suspiciously—something like a mystical and
almost
manedic soul, that stammers as it were in a strange tongue, with great
trouble
and arbitrarily, almost illogically as to
whether it intends to communicate or conceal itself.
It should have sung,
this ‘new’ soul—and not spoken!” (Emphasis added) Heidegger:
Introduction to Phenomenological Research,
trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom ( “Existence flees in the face of itself and buries its possibilities of encountering itself. . . . In the manner of the flight in the face of existence, it also takes care to bury existence itself, to render an encounter with it impossible.” 217 “We want to envision what it means that existence flees in the face of itself, and, indeed, with regard to its basic determination of being-uncovered, of visibly being-in-the-world.” 218 SZ 184: “a fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself—of itself as the unauthentic potentiality-Being-its-Self.” “fleeing in the face of itself and in the face of its authenticity”
I do believe her though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue; On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed. But wherefore says she not she is unjust, And wherefore say not I that I am old? O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust, And age in love loves not to
have years told. Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be. *** What
draws so many to Dylan’s musical poetry is the evolution of a
singer-songwriter
bent on breaking through the artifice of a hypocritical world gone wrong in
an ever more honest and authentic way. But if Kant is right, then
to expose hypocrisy is at the same time to overcome forms of deception,
the most difficult of which is self-deception. Dylan’s journey
from the sixties until the nineties can be analyzed according to the
progress he makes in digging ever deeper into the self’s tendencies to
think dishonestly about itself as something it is not. The
philosophical themes latent in Dylan should be no surprise now that he
has revealed that "Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Martin
Luther--visionaries, revolutionaries. . . it was like I knew
those guys, like they'd been living in my backyard." (Chronicles, 2004, 30)
Bibliography
on self-deceptionThe young Dylan’s folk period in the early 1960s up to and including The Times They Are ‘a’ Changing (1963) focused primarily on protest songs, whereby the singer points the finger at the powerful elements of society who deceive the poor, the disenfranchised, and the oppressed into thinking they are being ruled with benevolent interest. With the proper perspective, this kind of deception by others is relatively easy to isolate as the cause of societal injustice. For example, In Only a Pawn in Their Game, ostensibly a critique of the murderers of Medgar Evers, sympathy is evoked for the Southern white man who has been hoodwinked by the politicians. And yet this relative ease makes it difficult to see the limitations of an us vs. them mentality whereby we are so focused on the finger pointing outwards, that we fail to see that the same finger is pointing back at us. As he puts it in Chronicles (2004), "Protest songs are difficult to write without making them come off as preachy and one-dimensional. You have to show people a side of themselves that they don't know is there." (54) "Folk songs are evasive--the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be." (71) With Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), Dylan realizes that we're all complicit in guilt for the evils criticized by the Village Sing Out folk crowd. One is reminded here of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, where Zossima says (in an indirect response to the self-deceived atheism of Ivan) "Everyone is responsible for all men, to all men, and for everything." The implication is that if we don't think we are complicit, or if we think we can intellectually distance ourselves from evil and suffering, then we're deceiving ourselves. And those who don't think we are globally responsible in this way are the ones who continue to engage in one-sided social critique. Thus Dylan characterizes his former self as "Fearing not that I'd become my enemy / In the instant that I preach." In hindsight, Dylan writes, "I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of" (Chronicles, 115): "I had been annointed as the Big Bubba of Rebellion, High Priest of Protest, the Czar of Dissent, the Duke of Disobedience, Leader of the Freeloaders, Kaiser of Apostasy, Archbiship of Anarchy, the Big Cheese [and Legend, Icon, Enigma, Buddha in European Clothes. (124)] What the hell are we talking about? Horrible titles any way you want to look at it. All code words for Outlaw." (120) In Bringin’ it All Back Home (1965) there is a radical shift in Dylan’s poetry as evidenced in “It’s Alright Ma” and “My Back Pages,” also released around the same time. Here the problem addressed is not so much other-deception but self-deception, which cannot be analyzed in the same way. For a deceiver deceives himself in a way that is different from how he deceives another. As Aristotle puts it, self-deception is the hardest deception to uncover because the deceiver and the deceived are identical. Dylan therefore takes up poetical devices of distancing, bifurcating, and double narrative in this era as well as in the 1975 “Idiot Wind” and "Tangled up in Blue" to flesh out the difficulty of seeing oneself both as deceiver and deceived. (Compare Sir Walter Scott : "O, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive"--Marmion) The intensity of these zigzag, nonlinear interior dialogues mirrors the inextricable dialectic between who we are and what we want to say about who we are. Finally, in a third period of Dylan’s thematizing of the problem of deception in Time out of Mind (1997), there is evident an even more honest searching about the question of whether we can deceive ourselves about self-deception. In other words, what is the guarantee that our successful attempts to be aware of our self-deceiving tendencies will always be successful? Dylan’s answers in his most apocalyptic of albums yield the best the poet can offer in a variety of lush yet morbid soundscapes: The end of all time and fleshly existence, the asymptotic yearning for an end time, and the grudging assent to the Ecclesiastes theme of overcoming vanity through a desperate faith in life and an affirmation of the ordinary. Thus it is only in a direct, honest confrontation with revelation—with Apocalypse, the divine Unmasker—that one can be sure that one is revealed, unmasked, at the moment of death, as who one was, as who one is, and as who one might still become. However, in his 2003 film, Masked and Anonymous, Dylan seems to fall back into a poetic despair that human nature is condemned to a state of forever changing masks in order to remain anonymous, without name--which brings Robert Zimmerman's adoption of "Bob Dylan" back to its origins in the ceaseless changing of masks. [A long-time companion of Dylan claims that the difficulty of getting to know the real person is that there are only few right moments in which "he just opens up and says, 'Okay, I'm just Bob, and Bob has no last name.'" (Heylin, 2001, 715)] One is reminded here of Oscar Wilde's quote, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person, but give him a mask and he will tell the truth." Thus in the film the Animal Wrangler (Val Kilmer) praises animals as having no "fantasies of glory"; "a lion don't try to be a tiger, a rabbit don't try to do an impression of a monkey. They don't try to be what they're not." But if we put the following two statements together, a troubling picture emerges: "A lot of people don't like the road, but it's as natural to me as breathing. I do it because I'm driven to it. . . . It's the only place you can be who you want to be." (Heylin, 2001, 682) "The stage is the only place where I'm happy." (Irish Times Magazine, 29 Sept 2001) Is Dylan's Neverending Tour simply a way for him to find happiness in being who he wants to be, as opposed to who he is? Or has he taken to heart in an authentic way the Greek aphorism appropriated by Nietzsche: "Become who you are"? Comments appreciated: dwyerd@xavier.edu Most texts and articles listed here are from the systematic and analytic point of view, which concentrates by and large on the paradox of asserting contradictory propositions. Many respond to the classic texts of:
Furthermore,
most of these books and articles take up in some way the question of
the distinction between deception and self-deception--a distinction
crucial for the analysis of Dylan's different poetic phases described
above).
Alfred E. Mele, Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001) Annette Barnes, Seeing Through Self-Deception (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed.
Brian P. McLaughlin and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: U
California Press, 1988). An anthology of many analytic-oriented
essays.
Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Inquiry, ed. Roger T. Ames and Wimal Dissanayake (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996). An analogy of articles from widely different perspectives. Of note are Annette C. Baier, "The Vital but Dangerous Art of Ignoring: Selective Attention and Self-Deception," Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, "User-Friendly Self-Deception: A Traveler's Manual," and Robert C. Solomon's historically-oriented "Self, Deception, and Self-Deception in Philosophy"
Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality,
ed. Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Standford: CSLI, 1998). An anthology of
essays almost all of which critique Davidson 1981 (see above),
including Davidson's own essay here, "Who is Fooled?"
Neil Levy, "Self-Deception and Moral Responsibility," in Ratio 17 (2004): 294-311. Levy argues that we should abandon the traditional notion of self-deception (as involving intentional action or possession of contradictory beliefs) and treat it as "a kind of mistake" that "has no more necessary connection to culpability than have other intellectual errors. Perhaps the best recent work on deception and self-deception is from an evolutionary biological perspective by David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind (NY: St. Martin's, 2004). *** An
Argument will be made in this project against T.S. Eliot's view
of art and the artist in his "Tradition
and the Individual Talent"
Eliot: "The
more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be
the man who
suffers and the mind which creates."
"The poet has not a personality to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality. . . . Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality." "It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting; His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life." "To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad." "The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done." See MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 71,
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