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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 237 agents with the developed interior universes they carry around inside them, they pass judgment on those exterior conditions with an eye to their violation of or conformity to the interior orders they have created. Whereas external conditions - of material abundance, status and power - induce spontaneous agents to confer value on themselves, interiorized agents confer value on or withhold value from the harsh and imperfect external conditions they contemplate. Transpersonal rationality may not be married to any particular moral theory; but it is inherently evaluative, and therefore critical. Thus interiorized agents of necessity develop the ethical capacities for impersonality, disinterest, selflessness, and impartiality that are engendered by the pleasures of abstract speculation and inquiry, in direct proportion to the vividness, clarity and power of the interior universes they are forced by circumstance to create. Alongside these ethical capacities, interiorized agents also develop the unethical capacities for calculated revenge, betrayal, deception, and self-aggrandizement. When exercised, the ethical capacities in turn nourish imaginative insight into others' inner states, and enable the empathic moral emotions that such insight calls forth. Hence just as - as we saw in Chapter IV.8 - memory provides the intrapersonal foundation for the negative moral emotions of guilt, shame and resentment, similarly imagination provides the interpersonal foundation for the positive moral emotions of empathy, sympathy, pity and compassion. I offer an account of the intrinsic interconnections among imagination, impartiality and compassion in the following chapter. The most effective way to quash corrective ethical ideals and their unethical shadow fantasies, or to soften their hard edges, is to amply redress those external realities - in effect, to buy and entitle through the bestowal of material abundance the agent who entertains them. This strategy has two results. First, it gradually reconditions an interiorized agent into a spontaneous one, by arrogating to her desires and instincts the power, authority, legitimacy and freedom of spontaneous self-expression. This returns the agent to the immediate fact of her concrete physicality, by indulging, legitimizing and valorizing her "gut impulses." Second, therefore, it gradually disconnects her from the infinitely expansive interiority of the intellect and imagination. By contrast with spontaneous agents, then, interiorized agents who have survived material deprivation undergo a quite remarkable transformation when supplied with material abundance. In general, material deprivation tends to transform spontaneous agents into interiorized ones, and material abundance tends to transform interiorized agents into spontaneous ones. The weight, complexity and motivational power of fully developed transpersonal rationality are largely inaccessible and inexplicable to spontaneous agents. Because the psychological lives of the latter occur primarily in the external physical environment - in overt action, reaction, and © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
