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Paranoia

Stop Kidding Yourself: Kierkegaard on Self-Deception

Gordon Marino explains how we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing.

There is a strong movement afoot calling for more ethics classes, workshops and review boards. The presumption is that our citizenry is in dire need of more knowledge of ethics, and more practice in the art of analysis. While all this may be true, Kierkegaard, a thinker who is seldom included in texts on moral philosophy, can be enlisted to offer some cautionary insights to ethics specialists and those who are serious or perhaps silly enough to believe that the major task in life is to become a good and righteous individual.

In his own oblique way, Kierkegaard maintained that more attention needs to be directed towards the issue of our personal appropriation of ideas – to the question as to whether or not we live in the ideas we espouse. Abiding by your beliefs requires refraining from the impulse to talk yourself out of them when they become highly inconvenient.

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