i'd like briefly to take up the theme of self-esteem, still central to the popular understanding of psychological health and education, particularly for girls and women. now the notion is important in that self-loathing is a real possibility and is debilitating or literally destructive. but the form it takes in contemporary culture - which let's just say i may have encountered firsthand in let's say a marriage or something - is...impoverished. if self-esteem is conceived as a kind of distinct agency or quantity in your head, and of course a positive thing, then it is a moral catastrophe. or it could be. one might think to oneself that one should be the sort of person whom one can admire; then the need for self-esteem would make you better. however, of course one could be an admirable person and also have "low self-esteem," so people go to work directly on the quantity of self-esteem. then you get a situation like this. i am a good person. (i am!!) so whatever i want, it's what a good person would want, and whatever i do, it's what a good person would do. if i did it, it follows that it was right, because i am a good person. self-criticism is absolutely prohibited as being dangerous to self-esteem. any criticism by others is also false, and ought not to be heard at all, as it puts my self-esteem at risk. my self-esteem, in other words, is purely a priori, not an inference from but an inference to my actions and personality. then, let us say, absolutely anything can be justified on the basis of self-esteem; it becomes pathological.

what i'd say is: try to deserve esteem, whether of yourself or anyone else. then hope that this has the effect of making you feel ok about yourself. it might not. but if your basic commitment is to feeling ok about yourself come what may, you are a pretty disastrous  and self-deluded person. but it really is a dilemma, because if you dislike yourself, you're not at least going to be very effective as a good person, and nobody is very good after their suicide. perhaps we should conceive of self-esteem - like perception, for example - as a dialogue with reality. as, for example, ernst gombrich argues in the classic art and illusion, perception of reality would be impossible if you didn't bring to it expectations and schemata. but perception would also be impossible if these expectations and schemata were not corrigible in the face of the world. you have to be permeable, or else you are insane.

self-esteem cannot be an intrinsic property of persons; it is dialogic if it is a decent thing. when you act badly, you have to let this compromise your self-esteem, or you're never going to be any better. this is difficult, to say the least, and one of the very most difficult things is to know, really, whether you are a good person, or how good a person you are. self-reflection is a process of inference from funhouse mirrors. still, the point is to assess yourself as honestly and accurately as possible, not simply to believe of yourself that you are good. the goal has got to be to believe yourself to be exactly as good as you actually are. i actually want to loathe myself, if i am loathsome, and i have my moments. that seems like the likeliest way to get better. even self-loathing, in other words, has a moral function.

maybe we are all blessed children of god. maybe god doesn't make junk, only diamonds. maybe we are all entirely admirable. but that doesn't seem to correspond to our actual experience of ourselves or other people, does it?

of course, the girls/women/self-esteem nexus revolves largely around issues of appearance and attractiveness. here there is a lot of leeway, because standards of attractiveness are notoriously malleable and local. but even here, there's no sense in pursuing the thing at all without some reference to external truth. you could think you're grotesquely fat when you you're skeletally thin. that is a big problem. on the other hand, you could think there's nothing wrong when you're grotesquely fat, on the grounds that that would mess with your self-esteem. that is also a problem, though perhaps less common.