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Show Chapter V. How Reason Causes Action 236 The more complexly, vividly and clearly the agent renders this universe in her mind's eye, the more it compels her attention and draws it away from the confining personal drives, desires, and needs whose deprivation supplies its impetus; and the more the pull of those drives themselves recede into the background of awareness. Then the easier it becomes to contemplate envisioned objects, scenarios and principles impersonally, without regard to their particular relation to the agent herself. That is, the easier it becomes to dream and take flight beyond the limits of the self. Abdicating the primacy of the agent's own desires and impulses to the demands of her interior universe further enhances the form, weight, depth and power of this by now quite vast expanse of interiority; and marks the juncture at which transpersonal rationality may outcompete the egocentric drives of the ego itself as a conative force. The modal operations of imagination engender images and visions of as yet-unrealized alternatives, while those of the intellect refine, sharpen and systematize their details. These find form in works of art, architecture, literature, music, philosophy, and in religious, spiritual, and scientific inquiry - in fact, in all of the intellective practices and artifacts of a civilization that transcend the personal and physical limitations of individual agents. Transpersonal rationality of this kind is not only compatible with creativity but also a precondition of it. Spontaneity denied is action and satisfaction deferred, projected into a future indexed by subjectively probable events uniformly with those which have been recalled from the past. Memory and intellect thus force interiority to expand even further, to encompass visions, goals and ambitions that gain substance and power from the complex and painful psychological operations that engender them. With these come fantasies of victory, revenge and retribution for wrongdoing - as well as corrective ideals of justice, goodness, beauty and truth and their corresponding emotional reactions. The capacities for prudence and for altruism develop jointly and simultaneously. By their nature, then, these corrective ideals as well as their shadow fantasies thrive in conflict with external realities of hardship, servitude, deprivation or injustice. Indeed, agents who make a conscious and deliberate commitment to a life of interiority, i.e. of the spirit, sometimes practice voluntarily self-enforced disciplines and austerities that are, in effect, specialized techniques of deprivation, hardship or servitude - for example, fasting, celibacy, vows of poverty, renunciation, obedience or service - as means to accelerate and deepen interiority and the insights and wisdom it offers. As these gain in intensity, vividness and clarity, they compete increasingly with the external realities on which they improve. That is, they function not only as alternatives to external reality, but therefore as powerful criteria against which those external realities are judged. Hardship in conjunction with self-control thus lead interiorized agents to be other-anointing in their value judgments. Comparing external events, circumstances and other © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
