Lost and Found: One SelfThe Multiple Self. Jon Elster

Abstract

The Multiple Self, a volume edited by Jon Elster, resembles its topic. It is hard to find the core of the book, almost as hard as philosophers and social scientists find it to pinpoint the self, which difficulty is a theme of the book. In his introduction, Elster tries to pull the contributions together but does not succeed. The essay is nevertheless useful, at least to a reviewer trying to keep the pieces of an unassembled jigsaw puzzle in mind. From the standpoint of coherence or unity, the book must be judged a failure, but I enjoyed reading it anyway. It has good contributions from people with interesting things to say. Besides Elster's introduction, there are nine essays, some but not all previously published. Likewise, some but not all were prepared originally for meetings, in 1980 and 1982, of a Working Group on Rationality. Rationality's connection to selfhood, I hope to elucidate below. Meanwhile, there are other ways to distinguish among the essays, as follows. Essays by David Pears, Donald Davidson, and Am6lie Oksenberg Rorty deal philosophically with the ostensible paradox of self-deception and related matters, such as wishful thinking and self-contradictory, self-damaging, or otherwise irrational behavior. These essays attempt to come to grips with how a can wrap itself around logical or empirical inconsistencies in belief and behavior. The question is how a person can believe, or act as if he believes, that p, yet also maintain, on logical or empirical grounds, that not p. To the extent that answers are offered, they draw mainly on the sorts of distinctions among terms that are the special concern of philosophical analysis-among beliefs, motives, and actions, among self-deception, irrationality, and weakness of the will, between logical and empirical inconsistencies, and the like. Jon Elster also contributes an essay (in addition to his introduction) in the philosophical vein, but as literary criticism: Stendahl's purported preoccupation with the self in his fiction and in his personal life is cast as a search for a way around the paradox of wanting to be or authentic. The incompatibility of believing (or acting as if one believes) that p and not p resembles the relationship between the desire to be natural and the hope of succeeding in one's desire, inasmuch as true naturalness implies an absence of trying to be a particular sort of person. Two essays, by Ian Steedman and Ulrich Krause and by Serge-Christophe Kolm, attempt to absorb ostensible, systematic violations of rationality into the