Are You an Asshole?: A Guide for Introspection
[A lecture for students and the general public, recently delivered at Bloomsburg University, by yours truly.]
In the course of human affairs, after we have duly reflected on the great trends of our time, and we have spare time for personal self-examination, a question may present itself, to every thinking person, of his or her place in society, and his or her own virtues or vices of character. More to the point, at the present stage of history, in age of “greed is good” capitalism, of raging Facebook and reality TV narcissism, and of defensive unwillingness to entertain an opposing perspective—in short, with a rising cultural tide of assholery—it behooves each of us to contemplate the possibility that we ourselves are, or are prone to become, an asshole.
The question ranks among the least profound of philosophical questions of all time. And yet it is both necessary and an occasion for useful philosophy. How can we say whether we are or are not an asshole without knowing what an asshole is, without knowing what the term “asshole” means, and without knowing how to find out whether we are an example?
We might begin, then, with philosophical skepticism, in the present case, skepticism about the very existence of assholes. If the term “asshole” is simply a term of abuse, if it is merely a way of venting foul feelings—a way of blowing off steam—then it will never be true, or false, to say of someone that he is an asshole. Donald Trump will be in the clear, not because he’s been much better behaved lately (which he has), but simply because the term “asshole” is not the kind of term even tries to refer to anything or any person.
In response to such skepticism, I claim that the term “asshole” has a perfectly good “cognitive” meaning. We use the term to describe a particular kind of person. However abusively we may use it in traffic, and however effective it is for venting frustrated feelings, the term, when used judiciously, is the perfectly good name of a moral vice, like cowardice or slothfulness or callousness. While having the vice is perhaps not necessarily as bad as being a treacherous bastard, let alone as odious as being a rapist, murder, or genocidal maniac, it is usually worse than being a mere jerk, schmuck, twit, prat, cad, boor, wazzock, ass, ass-clown, or douchebag.
My argument for this “cognitivist” reading turns on the plausibility of a definition, namely, this one: the “asshole” is the guy (yes, they are mainly, but not only, men—for a woman, think of Ann Coulter) who systematically allows himself special advantages in social life out of an entrenched (but mistaken) sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people. The definition has three parts. First, the asshole allows himself special advantages in social life, and does so systematically; second, he is motivated by an entrenched (but mistaken) sense of entitlement, whatever it happens to be; and third, he’s therefore immunized against the complaints of other people, in the sense that he readily walls them out, finding easy reasons not to listen.
Now, you might quibble about details here, but if the definition gets you to think “Hey, I’ve met that guy,” then that’s all we need to conclude that assholes are a reality. The term “asshole” then purports to describe a distinctive kind of person and in fact does so in certain cases, such as Trump, for instance.
Actually, in the asshole ecosystem, Trump is a fairly exotic bird. The definition is mainly supposed to be about your ordinary, everyday asshole, you know, the guy who swerves through three lanes of traffic, driving like he owns the road, or who cuts in line at the post office and then tells people who complain to buzz off, or talks too loud on his cell phone in the café. When someone complains, the guy either refuses to listen or angrily objects that he is the one not getting the respect he deserves. He gets angry when people complain because, for one or another reason, he feels entitled to the special advantages he allows for himself. He might cut the post office line, for instance, because he is rich, and because, in his view, his time is therefore more important than the time spent by the people waiting.
The Shame Test
A natural question to ask is then who, in particular, among us qualifies as an asshole. But before we rush to judgment about Simon Cowell or Mel Gibson or Newt Gingrich or Silvio Berlusconi, it is best to ask about ourselves: Am I an asshole?
In asking whether someone else is an asshole, we have to touch upon delicate matters of a person’s inner motives. In our own case, we have a more direct way of knowing, a handy self-test, the test of shame. Consider the possibility that you are, really and truly, an asshole. If you feel ashamed of yourself in the thought of being an asshole, then chances are good that you aren’t one. If, on the other hand, you don’t feel ashamed of yourself, and especially if you feel proud in the idea, then odds are good that you are an asshole. (If you aren’t especially moved in either direction, you should probably be worried. But don’t be too hard on yourself if you pull an asshole move from time to time; we all have our moments.)
This self-test is not as straightforward as Descartes’ famous proof of his existence, cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” It is not sufficient that you merely think you are an asshole. You could well be wrong about that, worriedly thinking you are an asshole when you really aren’t one. (“I think I’m an asshole, therefore I am asshole” thus isn’t valid reasoning.) The shame test works differently: you have to be really worried, from a sense of shame, in the thought that you’re a proper asshole. If you think you are an asshole but feel ashamed of yourself, you probably aren’t one, or are at best a borderline case, a half-assed asshole. And even if you don’t usually think of yourself an asshole, if you do feel a certain delight in the thought of it, then you’re in the asshole danger zone.
Are Assholes Confused?
How exactly all of this works is not entirely straightforward from a philosophical perspective. Many assholes seem to proudly own the name. “Yes, I’m asshole, and proud of it,” the asshole might say while he is taunting his mistreated subjects. (As one onion.com headline has it, “Asshole Calls himself an Asshole in Supreme Asshole Move.”) Yet here we might be skeptical about whether the asshole really means it, whether he could sincerely believe he is an asshole, beyond simply saying so for show.
Why is that? Because the very idea of an asshole, according to my definition, implies that someone is wrong about what he is entitled to. The asshole just is the guy who takes special advantages from cooperative life when they aren’t his to have. He vigorously defends his position from a mistaken sense of entitlement. But why would an asshole call himself an asshole if that’s in effect for him to admit that he’s wrong?
There’s no problem at all when we say of someone else that he’s an asshole; we are then simply saying that he is wrong. It is saying this of ourselves that is deeply puzzling. To regard yourself an asshole, as some assholes do, is then in effect to say that you are both right and wrong, that you don’t have the entitlements that you yourself, being an asshole, think you have. But isn’t that some kind of contradiction? Is it even a coherent perspective? If an asshole could take that view of himself, is he not in some deep way inconsistent, in some deep way confused?
It might well comfort us to think that the proud asshole is confused. When he pipes up to loudly brag about his assholery, we’d get to re-assure ourselves: “Ha, buddy, you’re plainly pretty confused.” Alas, I think the asshole is indeed confused, but in a way that makes him more like the rest of us than it might otherwise seem. Let me explain.
There are at least three ways to explain what is going on when an asshole calls himself an asshole.
First, we might say that true assholes don’t really fess up. They truly believe they have certain entitlements, and so they won’t also admit that those entitlement beliefs are wrong. So when an asshole says, “Yes, I”m an asshole; deal with it!”, he’s merely saying this for show. He’s saying, “Yes, I am what you all would call an ‘asshole’.” But he’s merely mentioning rather than using the moral term (he’s speaking “disquotationally” or in the “inverted commas sense,” as philosophers put it). The same would go for a psychopath who lacks moral concepts and yet says, “yes, killing the kid simply to eat his sandwich—hey, I was super hungry–was ‘wrong’.” He doesn’t really believe his actions to be wrong; he merely understands how others would describe what he does and mimics that description, perhaps out of curiosity, or for purposes of better manipulating people, by being able to predict what they will call “wrong.” Likewise, when Milton’s Satan says “evil be thou my good,” what he means is: “evil”—or what people regard as “evil”—be thou my good.
That’s one possibility. The second explanation is that the asshole who calls himself an asshole doesn’t really believe he is entitled to special advantages when he takes them. He takes them anyway, perhaps knowing, deep down, that he’s wrongfully making an exception of himself. In that case, he’s more like the insensitive jerk or dolt who won’t finally go to bat for his misconduct, except that, being an asshole, he’ll keep up a show of defense for a really long time. He vigorously defends what he, in his heart of hearts, knows isn’t true.
The third and final explanation is this: when the asshole calls himself an asshole he is incoherent in a certain way, or at least stuck in a deep internal conflict. In his normal moments of defensiveness, he vigorously defends his specific entitlements, and he believes he has them, even “deep down.” Yet in a moment of clarity, he can also correctly admit that he’s an asshole, and that he doesn’t have a lot of the entitlements he usually thinks he has. His moments of clarity just aren’t well-integrated into the way he normally lives.
How is that possible? Well, it could just be a case of someone accepting a straight-up contradiction (the asshole believes “I’m entitled to X” while at the same time believing “I am not entitled to X”). This is irrational, but perfectly possible; people manage it all the time.
Still more realistically, the asshole’s beliefs could stand in an unresolved tension. Maybe he believes “I’m entitled to X” and “I’m entitled to Y”, etc., while he also believes “A lot of my beliefs about my entitlements are mistaken.” That isn’t a logical contraction. We can all consistently hold that we are probably wrong about something or other but then defend any particular belief when we consider the matter on its merits. Philosophers call this the “paradox of the preface.” At the start of an essay, you might write, “I am sure some of things I am about to write are mistaken.” But then you can go on and write each statement sincerely while believing every one.
Indeed, to different degrees, we are all more or less in this situation about our own beliefs: we think we must be wrong somewhere; we just don’t know where. In that case, the asshole who calls himself an asshole may be deeply confused, but perhaps not in a way that is especially unusual. He’s a lot like the rest of us. What’s special about him is the assholish way his incoherence is maintained. He’ll admit that some of his entitlement beliefs are wrong, in a way that makes him an asshole from his own point of view. But he sees no reason to find out which of his particular entitlement beliefs is mistaken. He just carries on without sorting out which of his particular errors he is making, mainly by ignoring the issue. Maybe he doesn’t care, or prefers the benefits he gets from being an asshole over the benefits he’d get from having a well-integrated mind. He’d rather be rich than perfectly coherent, for example. (And wouldn’t you, if you had the choice?)
If we like, we can add that the asshole who calls himself an asshole (and really believes it) doesn’t take the fact that his entitlement beliefs are mistaken as a weighty reason to do anything about those beliefs. He’s wrong again on that score, since he really should think harder and better about what others can reasonably expect of him in specific situations. But this is of course just another instance of his general failure to see others as equals, another way he is “immunized” (as I put it in the definition) against the complaints of other people.
But By the Grace of God there Go We
All of this suggests that the mind of an asshole isn’t especially pleasant on the inside. Yet many of us may find that we are ourselves already on the inside. Some of us here are perhaps already a proper asshole, or we’ll become one after we take a job in investment banking. And anyway nearly all of us can catch ourselves in an assholish moment of defensiveness. Maybe we are angry, and we are vigorously rationalizing our angry position, while mostly unwilling to entertain the possibility that there’s a better interpretation, or simply a misunderstanding, or that it is we that have made the more important error.
So while I’d say there’s a real difference in kind between the “proper asshole” and the more or less fully cooperative person, I’d also say the difference lies on a larger spectrum. Indeed, if you can’t find yourself thinking like an asshole at some point, might I suggest that you may not be paying close enough attention. If nothing else, getting in touch with one’s inner asshole, through regular introspection, is a healthy bulwark against the descent into assholism, and maybe even a step toward moral improvement. Over time, the asshole moves you do pull—and almost all of us do pull them—might become fewer and fewer.
Then Why Not Be an Asshole?
If it is only human to be an asshole, if the asshole isn’t entirely beyond the pale, if he’s in some sense like us, or one of us, you might wonder: why not be an asshole if it helps you get ahead? Especially if you can get rich doing it! Better to be rich and feared than to be loved and respected—especially if you can be really rich and powerful, and maybe even famous! Maybe Kanye West has turned his back on rap music. Maybe he’s used it to launch himself into pop stardom, but then mainly helped to degrade its important social critical role in challenging authority and injustice. Even so, you might say, So what! He’s doing very well for himself. I congratulate him!
Ever since Plato tried to explain why the tyrant should prefer justice, philosophy has offered answers to this particular kind of moral skepticism. The question, Why not be an asshole? is a version of the question, Why be moral? Or at least many of the answers to the general moral question equally apply to the asshole question in particular.
It will be useful for us to consider some traditional answers for purposes of self-examination. Whatever we make of them, they offer another test for whether we ourselves are an asshole. Let’s say that it is fine to challenge or qualify or quibble with any of the arguments if we do it conscientiously and for sound philosophical reasons. But if we find ourselves simply resistant to the arguments, in a posture more akin to being unwilling to listen to reason, we could take this is a further kind of evidence that we ourselves have the asshole’s disposition to retrenchment and rationalization. We can review the arguments, then, as a further self-test.
Success
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates finally encounters the wily Callicles, who vigorously advocates for the asshole’s position. According to Callicles, it is right by nature “That the superior should take by force what belongs to the inferior, that the better should rule the worse and the more worthy have a greater share than the less worthy…” They have no need for the kind of self-discipline that the weak and the many call “virtue” (they can be confused in the way I was saying many assholes are confused). Rather, as Callicles explains, “the man who’ll live correctly ought to allow his own appetites to get as large as possible and not restrain them…he ought to be competent to devote himself to them by virtue of his bravery and intelligence, and to fill them with whatever he may have an appetite for at the time.” And he ought to do that courageously, or even brazenly, as he puts it, “without slackening off because of softness of spirit.”
Socrates’ (and Plato’s) reply was then that even the tyrant, who should be Callicles’ ideal, only seems to be dangerously flourishing. He really isn’t, since he is himself worse off for being tyrannical, for his soul’s lacking in the order and virtue that constitutes a person as a successful, flourishing, properly happy person. Plato’s argument was not that the tyrant was more likely to get what he otherwise wanted if instead opted for justice; he’d presumably have to give up his virtually unlimited powers, his oil money, his Pleasure Palaces, the many virgins, his Lamborghini’s, etc (I’m updating the example). The point was that, simply in being just, in the very act of having his soul well-ordered, he would thereby constitute himself as successful and happy, objectively speaking, even if he gave up all worldly treasures.
So, the idea might go, you’re not a successful marathon runner when you experience the joys of winning a race while on an Experience Machine—when you merely have super-convincing, “I’m wining” experiences, but are really slouched over in some chair with scientists stimulating your brain chemistry. And, even while off of the machine, in really living, you’re not a successful person when you maximize the experiential satisfaction of your ever-expanding appetites, perhaps in the great societal race to be ahead of the curve or at the top of the pack in money, success, and status. The appearance of “happiness” and “success,” of that sort, is nothing more than an appearance, an illusion, indeed a grand cultural delusion.
So also with assholes: they stay assholes presumably because they feel it works for them, because they get a lot of what they want through assholery instead of through moderating their appetites in fair and respectful cooperation with others. Plato’s claim is that, even so, the asshole lives in a fundamental error. He isn’t really happy; he isn’t really succeeding. As a person, he’s a massive failure, even if he winds up “successful” by every worldly measure. In a concert in Paris, Kanye recently said, “I am Picasso. I am Michaelangelo. I am Basquait. I am Walt Disney. I am Steve Jobs.” To the extent he isn’t Picasso (or any of the others), he’s not only delusional—he’s living inside The Matrix – but also, for Plato, tragically failing as a person. (By the way, for his next album, Kanye is apparently contemplating the title “I am God.” His associates say he’s “half-serious.” So is he’s not joking, but only half-joking? Could he be planning the title as an ironic critique of the social machine that gives him obscene rewards and worldly powers? Somehow I doubt it.)
Making an Exception of Yourself
There’s a powerful objection to Plato’s picture: it is that the real reason you have not to be an asshole is not that your life will be better, but rather that you owe this to all the other people you are or would be mistreating. If you only avoided being an asshole because virtue is its own reward, because you’re being paid off in virtue–and perhaps in self-congratulation–we might think that you hadn’t quite escaped the asshole’s predicament. More is needed: you can’t simply go through the cooperative motions; you’ve got to cooperate with others for the right sorts of reasons, say, out of respect for them, for the fact they are, morally speaking, your equals.
For just these reasons, Immanuel Kant, the quintessential anti-asshole philosopher, roundly rejects Plato’s argument. The asshole, Kant would say, makes an exception of himself. He violates the categorical imperative that he shouldn’t cut in line, simply in order to save time, because he can’t will as a universal law of action that everyone act on the maxim of action – “I will cut in line, to save time.” If everyone were to cut in line simply to save time (and not simply when there’s a special emergency), there’d be no line to cut in, and you wouldn’t be in a position to save time if you had to fight your way to the front of a scrum. Cutting in line is taking a special advantage of a sort that is socially created; its very existence depends on the line-abiding cooperation of others. And so to take the special advantage, unilaterally, on your own terms, is to use those others for your purposes—to treat them, as Kant put it, as “mere means” rather than as “ends in themselves.”
For Kant, the idea that people are ends in themselves is a fully sufficient reason not to act like an asshole. The right reason to comply with your categorical duties of cooperation is and can be nothing more than this: it is your duty. So even if the tyrant took Plato’s advice simply for reasons of making himself really happy, Kant would say, “Sorry, there is no moral worth in your action.”
What then might Kant say to the asshole, to the person of “self-conceit,” as Kant calls him? The asshole plainly cares not about doing his Kantian duty. He makes an exception of himself precisely because, in his firm view of things, he is indeed special. Unfortunately, Kant would have little to offer by way of an answer, even if the asshole were sincerely asking. As Kant might say, his duty to follow the moral law is a “fact of reason,” and the basis for his own “autonomy.” But when the person of self-conceit can’t or doesn’t or won’t appreciate what reason is telling him—because the moral law doesn’t “strike down” his confidence, as Kant put it—well, Kant tells us, we can simply have no hope for him. We can simply write him off as beyond reason, much in the way many psychopaths are beyond moral reason.
Mutual recognition
Here you might say that all is well; we’ve simply reached the limits of reason. If we want a philosophical answer to the question, Why not be an asshole?, we are finished once we’ve answered to our own satisfaction. Surely you don’t have to produce an answer that would satisfy a psychopath, who simply won’t follow the argument simply because he lacks moral concepts altogether. You couldn’t persuade him to see the force of moral reasons any more than you could persuade a fencepost, and so you don’t have to as a test of justification. Likewise, it may seem, for the asshole. Though he does have moral concepts, along with an ability to reason with them—he reasons plenty about his moral entitlements—why should we have to convince someone who is just unwilling to listen to reason, and indeed deeply entrenched against going where it might lead him? Maybe we should hope for his sake that he suffers dearly in some terrible near-death accident that brings him to his senses. Why hope that reasoning with him is going to make any difference, when it is nearly always ineffectual?
But is there nothing we can say to the asshole, nothing he could appreciate from his own perspective, if for some reason he were asking? Do we have anything to say to Kanye, if he wanted to find someway out of his egocentric predicament but couldn’t escape by his own devices? What would you tell him?
You couldn’t just scold him, saying that he should really be ashamed of himself. He’s pretty shameless, and he’s going to want to see reasons why he should do things differently. You probably couldn’t convince him that he’s, yes, talented but not *so* exceptional, since he clearly styles himself as a super-genius. Maybe you could get him to watch the movie “The Matrix,” and then entertain the possibility that he really is, in a similar way, living in a delusional world of his own making. But then he could make the fair point that, if life off of The Matrix is pretty terrible (as it is in the movie), he’d be silly to give up what he’s got just to be more in touch with an ugly reality.
More promising, but perhaps still inadequate, would be to point out his debt to rap music, and so also to R&B, Jazz, the Blues, and Ragtime. From there, he might come to feel obligated to give back to his artistic tradition and to the ghettos that nurtured it. Maybe you could then urge gratitude and responsibility to the society that gave him the gift of creative opportunity.
Maybe, but, from what I’ve seen, Kanye seems just as likely to assume he it all coming, as though God himself set up American capitalism and a consumerist media culture simply in order to bless him. As he himself says, “I am God’s vessel.” Though in saying this he wasn’t especially worried about becoming a prodigal son with God’s sacred mission. As he immediately added, “…but my greatest pain in life is that I’ll never be able to see myself perform live.”
Grandiosity aside, Kanye is onto a deep point about the human’s predicament. He’ll never be able to gaze directly upon his own live performance, without the aid of a mirror or recording devices, because he, like all of us, is stuck in a human’s perspective; we can’t really see the world and ourselves in it from a view wholly from outside, from “a view from nowhere,” from some “God’s-eye perspective,” as philosophers call it. Part of what it is to be a person is to be somewhere and to have a view from there, from one’s personal perspective. We certainly have to live being someone, walking in someone’s shoes, leading one’s own life, from its perspective. And whatever philosophers think they are imagining when they use slogans like “the view from nowhere” or the “God’s-eye perspective,” we arguably can’t really rise to a completely impersonal perspective without also making much of human life unintelligible.
Anyway, Kanye apparently has a sense of this, so it might be the place to start in giving him an argument. As I mentioned, Descartes thought he could prove his existence, since the act of thinking would itself immediately reveal, as a necessary presupposition, his reality as a thinker. That doesn’t yet prove anyone else’s existence, and the solipsist will still insist that no one else is out there. But now consider a further argument by J. P. Sartre, which claims to show that we can grasp the reality of others in much the same immediate way that Descartes thought we could know our own existence.
Sartre asks us to imagine that he is gazing through a keyhole, out of “jealousy, curiosity, or vice,” into an occupied room, with no reflective awareness of himself; he’s completely absorbed in the spectacle. Then, suddenly, when he hears footsteps—a creak in the floorboards—he immediately becomes aware of himself as he is seen by someone, in this case, seen as shamefully peeping. The experience of shame just is a way of sensing the contempt felt by someone else towards us, as they see us from their perspective. But for that basic experience to make sense, we have to assume the possibility that there is someone else, with a real mind that is, for the moment, experiencing us from a separate standpoint that includes us. And so, Sartre tells us, the primitive experience of shame immediately reveals to us our own first-personal grasp of the intelligibility of the Other, the reality of a distinct mind who we share the world with, who can be aware of us and feel either approval or contempt for our conduct. If Descartes gives us “I think, therefore I am,” Sarte gives us “I feel shame, therefore you are.” (That’s an overstatement, but I leave it for suggestive purposes.)
In that basic way we are all equals; all of us who are have a viewpoint that includes our respective views about how we are each treated and treating each other. That doesn’t mean we should be obsessive about pleasing other people; people can be pretty unreasonable. But to the extent that their feelings about our choices is or even might well be reasonable, it seems there’s a basic way we have to take them seriously. Maybe we’ll disagree with their assessment about how we are treating them or others. But if we don’t disagree, if we think they’re right, or even probably right—right that we shouldn’t be a peeping Tom, or kick a dog, or cheat on a test, or betray a friend’s confidences—then we’ve in effect judged for ourselves that we shouldn’t do such things, and that we should be ashamed of ourselves if or when we do them.
For all this, Kanye will no doubt still make arguments about why he really has made a distinctive creative contribution (which he has). But now we might think such arguments will have to go very differently if he firmly grasps the lesson that the basic reality of others requires us to entertain their perspectives with a serious effort at impartiality. The trick in being an asshole is to be partial, to pay attention to reason only selectively, making a big deal of the moral arguments that flatter one’s sense of self-importance or privilege, while refusing to listen to other perspectives, or leaning on convenient rationalization to bolster one’s confidence. But when one is firmly in command of the idea that we each share the world with many other equally real persons, the trick becomes a little bit more difficult to manage, partly because you can more easily see that you’re telling yourself stories.
I’m not saying Kanye wouldn’t still put up a lot of resistance in a real conversation. Plato hoped that careful reasoning—with the aid of Socrates’ dialectical coaching—could itself get the tyrant to see that his own flourishing lies in seeking justice. But maybe reason often speaks softly, and maybe there’s isn’t anything one can do to get someone to quietly listen, even to his or her own voice of reason. Maybe it commands or compels in what feels like a Kantian categorical imperative only when it is joined with vivid, disquieting experience. After all, Scrooge, in Dickens’ tale, did come around, but only after the Ghost of Christmas Present confronted him with the simple beauty of a poor family’s happy gathering, in which each enjoyed just the kind of mutual recognition that Scrooge could see he was lacking. Actually, even that didn’t do it; he finally came around only after the Ghost of Christmas Future showed him that his death would not be mourned, that few would be particularly bothered, while some might even be quietly celebrating. With a serious asshole like Kanye, who clearly is prone to grand delusions, he’d perhaps have to vividly confront the reality of what he’s losing in his relationships with others. Short of ghostly visitations, maybe little could ever get through to him. (Though maybe becoming a father will change him.)
Even so, the philosophical point is about what he’s missing, what we hope he could see if he really wanted to see it. It isn’t, as Plato has it, just or mainly about his own happiness, or even, as Kant would have it, about his “autonomy.” What is at stake is the value of a deep kind of relationship, of mutual recognition, that we can each have with others, simply by relating to them in a way that takes them and their perspectives seriously. Living on mutually acceptable terms with others, we might say, really is worth it, even if you have to be less rich, or less famous, than you’d be if you choose the way of the asshole.
The Virtue of Uncertainty
If you aren’t persuaded by any of the forgoing arguments, you aren’t necessarily an asshole. You could challenge them conscientiously, and for sound philosophical reasons. But here’s a question: how do you know whether you are challenging them “conscientiously” and for “sound philosophical reasons,” instead of simply striking an asshole-defensive posture? If you retort, I AM NOT BEING DEFENSIVE, you’ll have protested too loudly. But even if you’re just quietly not yet persuaded, though maybe a little smug about it, why be so sure that it is the arguments that are wanting? Maybe you’ve yet to give them a serious hearing.
Alas, there’s no way to be certain. Descartes wanted the certainty of supposedly “clear and distinct” ideas, and though he found certain knowledge of his own existence, the larger lesson he taught us is that precious little else is open to proof and absolute certainty. What is certain is this: you can’t be completely sure you’re not an asshole. In that case, you might worry about becoming one, if you aren’t one already. Maybe you’d even adopt a posture of vigilant avoidance. Worrying and staying worried, with regular double-checking, might be a sure step forward, toward success as a person. In which case the main thing is keeping yourself ready to listen to soft voice of reason.
