Dostoevsky - Never Lie to Yourself
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
There’s a lot in that quote, but I’m interested in one single part of it: how lying to yourself prevents you from seeing the truth. What does it mean to lie to ourselves? How does that happen? As usual, I’m gonna explore this idea through a dialogue.
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For weeks, a young student (S) had been having philosophical conversations with a retired priest (P). The following is one of them.
P: When you lie to yourself, you stop being able to see the truth.
S: Is that so? What does it mean to lie to yourself?
P: At the root of all self-deception is one belief: knowledge is truth. When you mistake your own knowledge for the truth, that is the moment you lie to yourself. The greatest lie is to say, “I know the truth.” I think Epictetus said it best when he said, “it is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” If you think you already know something, you prevent yourself from seeing it as it is, and it may be different from how you know it. So thinking you know the truth is the beginning of all self-deception and the end of all learning, because it prevents you from seeing the world as it is right now.
S: Wait, but aren’t you contradicting yourself? You’re saying that statement like you know it.
P: What you’re seeing is the limits of language. Unless you want me to say, “I think,” and “in my opinion,” and “according to my experience,” before every single sentence, I have to talk that way. But I’m just sharing my knowledge with you. I never said it was the truth. Like all knowledge, you have to verify it for yourself. Think about examples in your own life, has mistaking your own knowledge for the truth ever prevented you from seeing the world as it was? For example, have you ever had someone betray you and realize that you never paid attention to the warning signs because you believed you already knew who they were?
S: Unfortunately, I have. Mistaking my knowledge for the truth has prevented me seeing the world as it is, you’re right. But sometimes my knowledge is the truth, isn’t it?
P: No, knowledge is never truth, but it can be true sometimes. That’s a very subtle thing I just said. Do you understand it?
S: Knowledge is not truth, but it can sometimes be true. So you’re using three terms there: knowledge, truth, and true. Can you explain them for me?
P: Truth is the actual way to your destination. Knowledge is the map you have. Sometimes the map can get you to your destination and sometimes it can’t, but you only know if the map is correct by testing it. If the map leads you to your destination, it is true—but only for that moment. Because in the next moment, the rivers may change the land, an earthquake may swallow the bridge, and the old path may no longer work. Do you follow? So knowledge can be true in the moment of testing, but it is never the truth itself.
S: So truth is the actual way to your destination, knowledge is the way you think you can get to your destination, and knowledge is true when the way you think you can get to your destination works? Is that right?
P: Exactly. So when you say, “I know the truth”, which is the root of all self-deception, you confuse the map with the territory, or you confuse your own knowledge with truth. When you think your knowledge is truth, you have begun to deceive yourself. But a mind that has severed this connection between knowledge and truth is unlikely to fool itself.
S: And why is that?
P: Because a mind that has severed the connection between knowledge and truth is a mind that does not confuse the map with the territory, the directions with the actual way, a mind that is always seeing the world as it is and doesn’t hold on too tightly to the world as it was, and a mind that is always open to testing its own knowledge.
S: Hmm… but what about 1+1 = 2? Isn’t that a truth I have in my mind that I don’t have to test?
P: No, that’s a common mistake. 1+1=2 means nothing until you actually test it. I can say 1 Apple + 1 Apple = 2 Apples. And how do I know? By testing it in the real world. But I could just as easily say 1 Apple + 1 Apple = 1000 Atoms. Do you follow? So in that case, 1+1 would not equal two. The answer depends on what you’re looking for, and the trueness of the answer is only found in the testing. Knowledge, which is anything you can construct using language, is never truth. Truth is not something that can be spoken.
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In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love,” and I explored some of the meaning behind this idea through a dialogue.
If truth is the actual way to our destination, knowledge is the map that we have. And when the map gets us to our destination, we say that knowledge is true.
But knowledge is never truth, and to confuse the two is to confuse the map for the territory, the directions for the actual way, what was for what is, and to close oneself off to all learning. Mistaking knowledge for truth is the root of all self-deception. But a mind that separates these two things, that realizes that knowledge is never truth, that the map is never the territory, always remains open to change, to testing, to learning, to updating its map in accordance with the territory, and because of that, it will never deceive itself.
As always, this is just my opinion and understanding of Dostoevsky’s words, not advice. Feel free to use this information however you like, and if you have a different take on Dostoevsky’s words, I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.
