What Would Aristotle Do? Self-Control Through the Power of Reason by Elliot D. Cohen

Author:Elliot D. Cohen [Elliot D. Cohen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-10-03T14:53:00+00:00

Realistically, this was not the way to fly! Exerting the willpower to hold back your actions until you have had an opportunity to check out your itinerary of fallacies can save you some hard times. If you have a tendency to commit any of the above fallacies, you should keep this knowledge at the front of your mind, together with an appropriate antidote before you plunge headfirst into turbulent relationship waters.8

FALLACY SYNDROMES

I have said that fallacies travel in herds. Well, one way in which they travel is in syndromes. This is a progressive series of fallacies where one fallacy leads to another. There are two or more fallacies in the series.

One very popular syndrome is the Slippery Slope syndrome. In this syndrome, first you Slippery Slope, then you Awfulize, then you give yourself ICan't-Stand-It-Itis. Let me illustrate with an example.

At age twenty-six Barney earned a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University. Having graduated from this prestigious Ivy League institution, he had high expectations of landing a job at a top-notch university. But things didn't go as he expected, and he ended up traveling about the country, taking a number of temporary positions (including a one-year, postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Iowa). Barney found himself in a competitive rat race with the nation's brightest minds for a few seats at esteemed institutions of higher learning like Yale, Dartmouth, and Williams, where he interviewed but didn't get hired. Moreover, some of the less highly regarded universities at which he interviewed tended to view him as overqualified and unlikely to remain at their institutions. One interviewer told him, "Ten years ago someone with your credentials wouldn't even apply here." When Barney asked him if he was nevertheless interested in his candidacy, the interviewer winked and said, "You're in the ballpark." But Barney still didn't get the job!

In his struggle to find a permanent position-that is, a full-time, tenure track one-Barney became depressed. He felt like he was just pointlessly going through the motions of trying. He told myself, "Now, all those years of training are going to be wasted. I don't think I can stand it." Barney felt as though everything he had worked for had been in vain.

As you can see, he was exaggerating the consequences of not landing a permanent teaching job in philosophy. Barney was supposing that there wasn't anything else he could do that would utilize his training; and this assumption he made without even exploring alternative job possibilities. Little did Barney realize, at this early juncture in his career, that there could be a gratifying profession of practicing philosophy and that he would become one of its main proponents. Moreover, while in his more rational moments he told himself that, eventually, he would probably get something if he kept trying, this was not an active premise in his emotional reasoning.

Barney was Awfulizing about the perceived consequences of not getting a permanent teaching job in philosophy. He had conceptualized this as terrible, horrible, and awful. And then he told himself how he couldn't stand something so awful happening to him.

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