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Self-Love's Clear Vision
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Maxims

The author suggests that self-love provides individuals with a keen awareness of their own faults, allowing them to skillfully suppress or disguise any behavior that might invite criticism.

What makes us see that men know their faults better than we imagine, is that they are never wrong when they speak of their conduct; the same self-love that usually blinds them enlightens them, and gives them such true views as to make them suppress or disguise the smallest thing that might be censured.
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Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Maxims

Honesty's True Face

This excerpt directly extends the parent's idea by defining true honesty as the perfect knowledge and confession of one's own faults, reinforcing the notion that self-love can lead to clear self-awareness.

Falsely honest men are those who disguise their faults both to themselves and others; truly honest men are those who know them perfectly and confess them.

Blaise Pascal

Pensees

The Unastonished Weakness

This candidate directly challenges the parent's claim by asserting that people are generally not astonished by their own weakness and are self-deceived about their natural wisdom, implying a fundamental lack of the clear self-awareness La Rochefoucauld describes.

...metimes escapes me; but this makes me remember my weakness, that I constantly forget. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought; for I strive only to know my nothingness. 373 Scepticism.--I shall here write my thoughts without order, and not perhaps in unintentional confusion; that is true order, which will always indicate my object by its very disorder. I should do too much honour to my subject, if I treated it with order, since I want to show that it is incapable of it. 374
What astonishes me most is to see that all the world is not astonished at its own weakness. Men act seriously, and each follows his own mode of life, not because it is in fact good to follow since it is the custom, but as if each man knew certainly where reason and justice are. They find themselves continually deceived, and by a comical humility think it is their own fault, and not that of the art which they claim always to possess. But it is well there are so many such people in the world, who are not sceptics for the glory of scepticism, in order to show that man is quite capable of the most...
375 [I have passed a great part of my life believing that there was justice, and in this I was not mistaken; for there is justice according as God has willed to reveal it to us. But I did not take it so, and this is where I made a mistake; for I believed that our justice was essentially just, and that I had that whereby to know and judge of it. But I have so often found my right judgment at fault, that at last I have come to distrust myself, and then others. I have seen changes in all nation...

Blaise Pascal

Pensees

Self-Love's Mortal Enmity

This text explains the psychological 'why' behind the parent's observation: self-love cannot bear the truth of its own faults, so it develops a 'mortal enmity' against that truth. This describes the internal driver that both motivates self-awareness and the desire to conceal.

...tween the actions of the will and all other actions. The will is one of the chief factors in belief, not that it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect in which we look at them. The will, which prefers one aspect to another, turns away the mind from considering the qualities of all that it does not like to see; and thus the mind, moving in accord with the will, stops to consider the aspect which it likes, and so judges by what it sees. 100 Self-love.--
The nature of self-love and of this human Ego is to love self only and consider self only. But what will man do? He cannot prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and wants. He wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, and he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. This embarrassment in which he finds himself produces in him the most unrighteous and criminal passion that can be...
He would annihilate it, but, unable to destroy it in its essence, he destroys it as far as possible in his own knowledge and in that of others; that is to say, he devotes all his attention to hiding his faults both from others and from himself, and he cannot endure either that others should point them out to him, or that they should see them. Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognise them, since that is to add...

Aristotle

Nicomachean Ethics

Hypocrisy's Corrosive Effect

This excerpt reframes the issue from one of internal self-knowledge to one of external judgment and virtue in action. It suggests that the true measure of a person is not their private awareness of faults, but how their actions align with or contradict their stated principles, shifting the lens to practical virtue and public credibility.

...hers who on the contrary maintain that it is exceedingly bad;[1] some perhaps from a real conviction that such is the case, others from a notion that it is better, in reference to our life and conduct, to show up Pleasure as bad, even if it is not so really; arguing that, as the mass of men have a bias towards it and are the slaves of their pleasures, it is right to draw them to the contrary, for that so they may possibly arrive at the mean.[2] I confess I suspect the soundness of this policy;
In matters respecting men’s feelings and actions theories are less convincing than facts: whenever, therefore, they are found conflicting with actual experience, they not only are despised but involve the truth in their fall: he, for instance, who deprecates Pleasure, if once seen to aim at it, gets the credit of backsliding to it as being universally such as he said it was, the mass of men being incapable of nice distinctions.
Real accounts, therefore, of such matters seem to be most expedient, not with a view to knowledge merely but to life and conduct: for they are believed as being in harm with facts, and so they prevail with the wise to live in accordance with them. But of such considerations enough: let us now proceed to the current maxims respecting Pleasure. Chapter II. Now Eudoxus thought Pleasure to be the Chief Good because he saw all, rational and irrational alike, aiming at it: and he argued that, sin...