Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as Mike Krebs of the CSULA Math Department and Heidi Riggio of the CSULA Psychology Department, for their many helpful suggestions.
According to Aesop's famous fable, a hungry fox wanders into a vineyard and decides he must have the delicious-looking grapes that hang above him on a trellis. He jumps and jumps, but to no avail. No matter what he tries, he is unable to reach them. Eventually, he gives up, but not without denigrating his prize: "I thought those Grapes were ripe, but now I see they are sour."1In an instant, the fox shifts the problem from his inadequate jumping ability to the undesirability of the grapes. In La Fontaine's slightly modified version, written in the sixteenth century, the fox is even more defensive: "they [the grapes] are too green, although less discriminating folk might like a go."2He not only disparages the grapes but those capable of reaching them. Potential competitors are likewise pronounced sour. Ostensibly, the fable is meant for children and attempts to introduce them to a psychological quirk. It pithily instructs, "it is easy to scorn what you cannot get."3
Historically, however, "The Fox and the Grapes," and many other such fables, were not viewed as child's fare. They were intended for a general audience and were designed to educate a culture.4Some of these fables--especially "The Fox and the Grapes"--have been and still are considered to be profound pieces of moral philosophy and even political theory. Jon Elster has commented that "the idea of sour grapes appears to me just as important for understanding individual behavior as for appraising schemes of social justice."5Additionally, in Sartre's foundational essay Sketch of a Theory of the Emotions, the fable serves as the primary metaphor for explaining his phenomenology of emotional life. Of course, if the fable is to be of philosophic value, more needs to be said about it than that people do not want what they are unable to obtain. First, it is worth pointing out, as Elster does, that the maxim does not hold universally. Sometimes people desire something precisely because they cannot have it, that...