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Show Chapter II. Reason in the Structure of the Self 92 some relevant concept or conversation first calls them to mind and enables us to identify them. Now Joan clearly had the concept of her bed tipping in her arsenal of possible concepts. Why wasn't that sufficient to enable her to maintain the event in memory? Why couldn't she simply have predicated of her bed that it was tipping? And why wouldn't that have been sufficient for her to have made it rationally intelligible to herself? My answer would be that the event in question violated the vertical consistency of her perspective: although she had the concept of the property of her bed tipping, there was no relevant higher-order concept available under which she necessarily could subsume that one. There was simply no room for it within her conceptual scheme. A similar explanation could be offered of more traumatic, conceptually anomalous events that may happen to an agent, such as war or childhood sexual abuse; as well as of normal early childhood amnesia. Freud explains our failure to remember the events of early childhood by the concept of repression. I suggest instead that we simply lacked the concepts by which to identify them. To the extent that we are lucky enough to learn the right ones now, we may "remember" - i.e. make rationally intelligible - those events, just as Joan did the tipping of her bed. The general phenomenon of remaining unconscious of things accessible to an impartial observer is commonly called denial. I discuss it at greater length in Chapter VII below. Denial functions to maintain vertical consistency within an agent's perspective against the threat of external cognitive anomaly. If such cases characterized all of our encounters with the world, we would have no experiences of it at all, and therefore no unified sense of self either. These are the sorts of failures Kant has in mind when he avers, in the A Deduction, that without [the synthetic unity of appearances according to concepts], which has its a priori rule, and subjects the appearances to itself, no thoroughgoing and universal, therefore necessary unity of consciousness in the manifold of perceptions is to be found. These [perceptions] then would not belong to any experience, therefore would be without an object, and nothing but a blind play of representations, that is, less even than a dream (1C, A 112). In this passage Kant sketches - for the first time, to my knowledge - the idea of an unconscious, in which extant perceptions are not rationally structured by the demands of external reality. Kant is saying that if we do not organize cognitively the data of our senses according to consistent and coherent rules, we cannot be rationally unified subjects. "For otherwise," he adds in the B Deduction, "I would have as many-colored and diverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious" (1C, B 134). I would, that is, lack a sense of myself as the subject in whose consciousness those representations © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
