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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 83 desires as sources not only of satisfaction and wholeness, but thereby of selfesteem.26 Thus we may recast the highest-order terminating criterion of rationality for the Humean conception, alternately, as the aversion to self-hatred, i.e. as R3' in (1.a'-g) above. This aversion would serve as the highest-order causally effective motive for the Humean self, and also as an alternative way of explaining attachment to the objects of one's lower-order desires. Think of the highest-order desire for wholeness and sufficiency and the highest-order aversion to self-hatred, then, not as equivalent but rather as mutually interdependent. These two mutually interdependent highest-order criteria may explain how it is that thwarted desires may elicit in a Humean self not merely frustration or discontent, but also further desires: for revenge, reparation, or recompense. If a felt failure of wholeness and sufficiency is interdependent with intense feelings of self-hatred to which one is averse, then those feelings will overwhelm and threaten whatever remaining sense of sufficiency the self may retain. Then if some form of desire-satisfaction is not immediately forthcoming, some other form of compensation - some substitute that promises the restoration of completeness - must be. Of course the desire for a substitute for desire-satisfaction is subject to the same frustrations as that for which it is supposed to substitute, since no desire-satisfaction endures, nor fails to generate further dissatisfactions. Persistent frustration of desire, conjoined with the persistent and standing desire for recompense, lead one beyond the object of desire to a persistent and reified sense of oneself as a victim of deprivation and injustice. This not only exacerbates the proliferation of lower-order desires, but rationalizes their pursuit to the agent himself. It also thereby rationalizes any further infliction on others of deprivation or injustice in turn. We have already seen above that a Humean self regards itself and others as players in a zero-sum game in which the stakes are the accoutrements of desire-satisfaction, namely power and status-superiority, such that losses of these things to others are perceived as gains of them to oneself. For the Humean self, sadistic desires and their resulting acts of spite, revenge, or aggression against others are a natural expression of the selfhatred engendered by attachment to the objects of one's desires. I argue in Chapter VI.3 that a sadistic person takes satisfaction both in others' suffering and also in being the instrument of it; and also that satisfying sadistic desires accelerates self-brutalization. Finally, the sense of oneself as a victim of injustice and deprivation consequent on the pursuit of recompense for thwarted desire-satisfaction rationalizes unlimited consumption of objects and experiences perceived as satisfaction-substitutes: of commodities for friendship, sex for love, food for 26 I am grateful to Hans and Linda Haacke for discussion of the concept of self-hatred. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
