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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 103 specie aeternitatis, relative to which we are forced to a principled skepticism 32 concerning the veracity and comprehensiveness of any and all of our beliefs. I conclude this chapter with two brief remarks on Nagel's thesis. First, the process of ascending to higher orders of conceptual abstraction, as I and Nagel conceive it, contains no inevitable subjective-objective conflict. A rationally integrated agent is one who is cognizant both of the fine-grained, perspectival singularity of concrete particulars, and simultaneously of their broader significance as instances of concepts and principles; both of their personal associations and of their impersonal implications. This is a form of cognition in which concrete particulars are viewed as broadly meaningful - or even profound - precisely because they retain both their perspectival particularity for the cognizer and also their function as exemplars of more abstract and impersonal concepts and principles. In contrast with Nagel's double vision, call this form of cognition transpersonal integrity. Double vision, as Nagel describes it, occurs only when transpersonal integrity is violated; that is, when we fail to attend simultaneously to lowerorder properties and the higher-order ones we predicate of them. And while we might fail to attend to both, the holistic regress implies that we could not fail at least implicitly to conceive both, without eradicating both higher- and lower-order properties altogether. We fail to attend to higher-order properties when we perceive some event or state of affairs as a more or less concrete occurrence, but as lacking the significance attention to its more abstract properties might impart. So, for example, one might perceive an acquaintance's offhand remark as factually false, failing to understand it as a joke - and indeed a heavily irony-laden one at that; and so set about earnestly correcting his factual mistake, angrily reprimand onlookers for laughing at him for making it, be mystified by their subsequent condescending attitude toward oneself, and so on. We criticize such an agent as too literal-minded, meaning by this that the person fails to grasp the larger or contextual meaning 33 of an event or state of affairs. If he fails to grasp it even after explanation, or fails to grasp the larger meaning of too many such events or states of affairs, 32 Ibid., 74-89. 33 Another, particularly baroque variation on the bullying tactics described in Chapter I.3 is to refuse an interloper entry to a socially and linguistically defined philosophical community by refusing to recognize as a joke an utterance clearly meant to be one; and instead performing on it a Philosophy 101-style linguistic analysis that earnestly refutes its semantic and metaphysical presuppositions. We might describe this as faux-literalmindedness, a stance intended to reprimand the interloper for presuming familiarity with the reigning linguistic conventions. The effect, of course, is to call into question the viability of those conventions and to reconsider one's interest in joining the community defined by them (to paraphrase the Rolling Stones' famous dictum). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
