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Show Chapter VI. Moral Interiority 250 (a) the psychological boundaries of one's self as an acting subject; and (b) the psychological boundaries of the other's self as an acting subject. (a) and (b) apply to cases in which one's imaginative object is another subject. They also apply to cases in which it is not, on the assumption that one's level of involvement in the object itself has consequences for other subjects. The application of these criteria can be illustrated by reconsidering the preceding examples in its light. The first case described above, in which a written description of others' misfortunes scarcely registers in one's consciousness, much less moves one to action, violates (b), for in it one fails to recognize the existence of the other's subjectivity altogether. This brand of self-absorption comes closest to the primitively egocentric and narrowly concrete view of others described in Section 2. In this case, however, the mental representations of others' interiority exist at least as surface objects of imagination, while one's own are depth objects. One regards other people as mere furniture in the external environment, and is without a visceral comprehension of their internal conscious states. When we lack a visceral comprehension of what we read, the text in question is a conjunction of empty words without personal meaning to us. Our intellectual grasp of the material is impeded by a failure of the modal imagination those words are intended to spark. By contrast, the second case describe above, in which one cannot sleep for anxiety at the possibility of flubbing a line in one's paper violates (a). Here the mere possibility of an event that is temporally external to the self in its present state invades that self to the point of disrupting its interior equilibrium. That interior equilibrium itself is treated as a surface object of imagination, whereas the envisioned possibility is a depth object. In such cases, one's preoccupation with external events or anticipated external events is so all-encompassing that one fails to notice one's own internal discomfort at all. This is an abdication of the present self to an anticipated future scenario. The third case, in which one experiences the agony of the unfortunate one is reading about to such an extent that one is rendered incapable of action, also violates (a), for here, a spatiotemporally external event is allowed to invade the self in its present state to the point of disrupting its interior equilibrium. In this case, one appropriates others' experience of suffering into the self and replaces one's own responses with it. Whereas a visceral comprehension of others' suffering may motivate one to act, the appropriation of their experience as a replacement for one's own renders ameliorative action impossible. Couples who have experienced the contagious effects of one partner's bad mood may recognize this phenomenon. Taking action to help a © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
