Honesty ..., The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 332
332
Honesty is a single concept superimposed upon the screen of consciousness as the result of multiple projectors. It is not one thing:
Honesty is returning a five dollar bill to its owner. Honesty is knowing that one only did so out of fear of spiritual condemnation. Or, it can be the self-flattery of holding to a righteous gesture which constitutes one's superiority over the dishonest.
Or, honesty is the suppressed fear of crossing the borders of one's cultural inheritance! Or if not fear, then a laziness – a perfect addition, but of only the most convenient facts. The one who is not clever enough to uncover his private motives for every moral action is stupid enough to claim honesty. To one man, honesty is sincerity, but to another it is exactly the opposite: honesty is a struggle to align one's opinions with one's reality, which presupposes that the two do not always line up – and this is tantamount to saying that the honest attempt is a presupposition of a fundamental insincerity: what one thinks about things is incongruous with the way things actually are, and in the transition toward alignment one is hopelessly incapable of knowing what reality is, let alone have the right to fob off the struggle toward objectivity through inflating the value of subjective sincerity. And there is private honesty and public honesty. The two are incompatible. “Honesty” often arrives out of an unconscious need to be a liar so that one does not seem like one. When there is no separation in the mind between private and public contexts, “what all regard as true” is true. This herd-grunting constitutes our honesty. When the separation does exist, one has become a conscious individual ... but at the cost of being incapable of both honest expression and being understood; that is, one is incapable of communicating in public one's most honest conclusions. It is entirely possible, for example, that every subsequent human being has failed to understand the full significance of Shakespeare's magnum opus. Shakespeare is incapable of communicating that which we are incapable of comprehending, and knowing this, what then would constitute his “proper behavior” with the likes of us?
A distance between private and public minds has become apparent to us. And one is aware of what in the public's mind constitutes “our honesty.” That is, one knows how to be “honest” ... but must first be strong enough to graft dishonesty into one's private morality ... or give up any notion of polite and honorable behavior, not to mention the need to get around petty obstacles, a tactic demanded by every strategy toward higher goals.
Honesty is a single concept superimposed upon the screen of consciousness as the result of multiple projectors. It is not one thing:
Honesty is returning a five dollar bill to its owner. Honesty is knowing that one only did so out of fear of spiritual condemnation. Or, it can be the self-flattery of holding to a righteous gesture which constitutes one's superiority over the dishonest.
Or, honesty is the suppressed fear of crossing the borders of one's cultural inheritance! Or if not fear, then a laziness – a perfect addition, but of only the most convenient facts. The one who is not clever enough to uncover his private motives for every moral action is stupid enough to claim honesty. To one man, honesty is sincerity, but to another it is exactly the opposite: honesty is a struggle to align one's opinions with one's reality, which presupposes that the two do not always line up – and this is tantamount to saying that the honest attempt is a presupposition of a fundamental insincerity: what one thinks about things is incongruous with the way things actually are, and in the transition toward alignment one is hopelessly incapable of knowing what reality is, let alone have the right to fob off the struggle toward objectivity through inflating the value of subjective sincerity. And there is private honesty and public honesty. The two are incompatible. “Honesty” often arrives out of an unconscious need to be a liar so that one does not seem like one. When there is no separation in the mind between private and public contexts, “what all regard as true” is true. This herd-grunting constitutes our honesty. When the separation does exist, one has become a conscious individual ... but at the cost of being incapable of both honest expression and being understood; that is, one is incapable of communicating in public one's most honest conclusions. It is entirely possible, for example, that every subsequent human being has failed to understand the full significance of Shakespeare's magnum opus. Shakespeare is incapable of communicating that which we are incapable of comprehending, and knowing this, what then would constitute his “proper behavior” with the likes of us?
A distance between private and public minds has become apparent to us. And one is aware of what in the public's mind constitutes “our honesty.” That is, one knows how to be “honest” ... but must first be strong enough to graft dishonesty into one's private morality ... or give up any notion of polite and honorable behavior, not to mention the need to get around petty obstacles, a tactic demanded by every strategy toward higher goals.