Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [34]
In our desire to make things more interesting, we can fabricate and exaggerate the truth. How often do we massage the truth to make the story more entertaining? To make ourselves appear more articulate, reasonable, or innocent? To make others appear in our retelling of events more obviously how we interpreted them to be? More importantly, how easily do we begin to believe the retelling we’ve fashioned? In the beginning of Mulberry Street, the boy informs us that he only tells his father what he thinks he has seen, suggesting that the boy lets his imagination get the better of him. At the end of the book, the boy reports to his father only the plain horse and wagon he actually saw.
The father serves as an external check on the boy’s tendency to abandon the truth, just as the worm did for the bear and rabbit, and Socrates may for us. The more familiar we become with the character of Socrates, the more comfortable we will become playing the role of gadfly to ourselves. Let’s return to Euthyphro for an illustration. If we settle for a rather unexamined view of some matter, as Euthyphro does with respect to his definition of piety, Socrates will help us test our definition. Being pious is doing what is dear to the gods? If the gods disagree, then this definition generates an inconsistency, since the action is both dear and hated by some god or other. Further, such a definition leaves unresolved a fundamental issue: why are some things dear to the gods, and so some actions pious to perform? If there is some reason, then that reason is what really makes some action pious. If there is none, then the virtue of piety rests on the fickleness of the gods, and it is unclear why one should strive to be pious except to appease the mighty.
It is important to recognize what we want to be true, since this is a reflection of our values. Only once we register these desires can we determine which desires reflect misplaced values and which reflect noble ideals. The bear and rabbit can begin reforming their conceited characters, all of us can reaffirm our appreciation of virtues like Horton’s, and the boy can find a nondeceitful venue for his creative fabrications (say, in truth-oriented children’s illustrated poetry). Equally, it is important for us to recognize the extent to which our desires for certain claims to be true might interfere with our own intellectual integrity. How can we say that we are oriented toward the truth when we only care to define the truth as we see fit? If bullshit is indifference toward the truth, self-delusion is valuing the status of truth but not the reality of it.
Walking in Another Man’s Pants
We have seen how an agenda or a deep-seated desire might make us less careful about how we represent the way things are, leading us to make and accept assertions even without evidence simply because they are efficacious or comforting. Sometimes our drives and desires get us to gather evidence but interpret it in a biased way. Examining emotions like fear can easily illustrate how this can happen, and Seuss gives us an example in “What Was I Scared Of?”
The narrator, who is self-reportedly not prone to fear, finds himself in a deep, dark wood one night when he encounters a pair of pale green pants with nobody inside them. He stands curiously, not scared, until the pants move. Then he runs, heart thumping. Again he tells us he wasn’t scared; he just didn’t care for pants that move by themselves. Later those pants race around a corner, almost knocking him down, and still later they row out toward him on the river while he was fishing. He runs and hides for a couple of nights, until he has to do an errand. At least now he admits that he is scared: “I said, ‘I do not fear those pants with nobody inside them.’ I said, and said, and said those words. I said them. But I lied them” (Scared). His fear ironically forces him to recognize he deluded himself earlier by believing he was fairly fearless.