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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 99 But even the naive realist just described must grant this much. For without an implicit recognition of one's collaboration in the character of one's experiences, one would lack a necessary condition of being motivated intentionally to alter those experiences, i.e. to act. By hypothesis, in lacking the concept of the self-consciousness property, such an agent would not necessarily lack higher-order concepts under which all lower-order ones might be integrated by the requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency. But without the highest-order concept of their being objects of her experiences, their rational intelligibility would not be recognized as depending in any way on her behavior or condition, nor as susceptible to any attempts of hers to preserve it. Hence although her perspective might, quite fortuitously, satisfy the requirements of horizontal and vertical consistency at a particular moment, she would be unable intentionally to mobilize the psychological resources - i.e. the acts of attention Kant maintains (1C, B 68-69, 140, 153-6, 157-8a) are essential - for sustaining it in that form from one moment to the next. For example, she might interpret the experience of forgetting, rather, as a temporary lacuna in the objective history of events. She might interpret her experiences of inference or theory-building as a direct perception of nonmaterial processes. She might view her most intimate processes of thought and feeling as external conditions visited upon her over which she had no control. And she would experience actions as involuntary behavior, propelled by external teleological forces to which she was subject. Thus she would lack agency, not just in the ordinary sense of being incapable of gross physical action. She would lack it as well in the more pervasive sense, in which we ordinarily conceive ourselves actively to do things like think, feel, infer, and 28 search our memories. Without the concept of oneself as having one's experiences, everything would be conceived as being done to one, and nothing by one. So we must have some such degree of self-consciousness in order to sustain not only some minimal degree of rational intelligibility, but our agency as well: Each thing, 28 For these reasons, I take issue with Bernard Williams' claim that "When I think about the world and try and decide the truth about it, ... I make statements, or ask questions, ... [which] ... have first-personal shadows, ... [b]ut these are derivative, merely reflexive counterparts to the thoughts that do not mention me. I occur in them, so to speak, only in the role of one who has this thought" (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1985), 67). If I did not occur in such statements in the role of one who had this thought, I would be unable to act on any thought I had. So I think Williams is too quick to differentiate the "I" of theoretical deliberation as necessarily impersonal from the "I" of practical deliberation as necessarily personal. I argued in Volume I, Chapter VIII. 3. 2 that impersonality in deliberation is a function of purely psychological factors, not moral or philosophical ones. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
