How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust.

But it is our true promises — those we have every intention of keeping — that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust. Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake — not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves. Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be, not a prediction of who we will become.

Nothing, therefore, is more fundamental to self-trust — which is the basis of self-respect, which is the basis of respect for others — than learning to make keepable promises. The English philosopher of language J.L. Austin (March 26, 1911–February 8, 1960) offers a field guide to making promises and keeping them from breaking in How to Do Things with Words (public library) — the posthumously published adaptation of the William James Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1955.

Le Guin, whose praise for Austin led me to his wonderful book. Of all the performatives, a promise is the most binding, the most revelatory of personhood. It is not, Austin argues, merely a mechanical act of utterance that bends language in a certain direction of thought — it is “an inward and spiritual act” that inclines the self toward a certain direction of action.

He writes: “I promise to…” obliges me — puts on record my spiritual assumption of a spiritual shackle. This commitment begins with the simple prerequisite that “the person uttering the promise should have a certain intention” — namely, to keep their word, which doesn’t only represent something but does something. He illustrates the performative and its pitfalls: For instance, the utterance “I do” (take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), as uttered in the course of a marriage ceremony.

Here we should say that in saying these words we are doing something — namely, marrying, rather than reporting something, namely that we are marrying. And the act of marrying, like, say, the act of betting, is at least preferably (though still not accurately) to be described as saying certain words, rather than as performing a different, inward and spiritual, action of which these words are merely the outward and audible sign. That this is so can perhaps hardly be proved, but it is, I should claim, a fact.