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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception 271 proximity and intimacy of my own interests and desires give me reason to accord them motivational priority as well, as I argue in Chapter XIV that Hume himself suggests? By defending the possibility of altruism, Nagel rejects the thesis that each human subject necessarily views her own interests as overriding in importance the interests of spatially discrete and relatively remote others. The second defining element in the Humean conception of the self has to do with my temporal relation, as a bounded temporal subject, to past and future subjects who successively inhabit the same continuous time-line. Again, to whose interests should I give priority? Should I satisfy my present desires simply because of their temporal proximity to me? By defending the possibility of prudence, Nagel rejects the doctrine of pure time preference, that I should view satisfaction of my present desires as overriding in importance, because of their temporal proximity, the satisfaction of my future desires. Thus Nagel proposes to defend a conception of human action as guided by a transcendent, impersonal perspective on its own spatiotemporal limitations; that is, by transpersonal rationality. It is possible to understand this transpersonal, spatiotemporally transcendent perspective as the very embodiment of rationality, according to one early analysis of what rationality is. According to Jonathan Bennett,5 this perspective is what distinguishes human agents as rational from other animals who appear to execute meaningful sequences of intentional actions that promote their common, long-term welfare, as bees do. Bennett argues that bees' behavior is biologically programmed stimulus-response behavior, independently of a genuine ability to conceive intentionally the elaborate sequence of plans that their behavior in fact carries out. By contrast, what makes us rational is our ability to make dated and universal judgments; to conceive any such act as a spatiotemporally localized instance of an abstract type of action which itself is not restricted to the spatiotemporal location of any particular token. This enables us, first of all, to range in thought over all such possible tokens, backward and forward in time and space; i.e. to connect conceptually what occurs in the indexical present to a possible or actual past and future, and to spatial locations other than this one. Second, it thereby enables us to abstract any such event or state of affairs from any particular spatiotemporal location at all, i.e. to understand it as a genuine and consistent abstract concept and apply it back to concrete circumstances accordingly. To do this, Bennett argues, is to exercise our capacity for theoretical reason: This is what generalizing and talking about the past have in common: they are both departures from that which is present and particular. This common feature is what links them with rationality. The idea of rationality is that of the ability, given certain present and particular data, Rationality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1964). 5 © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
