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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 293 which an agent's perspective is limited or inclusive, and so the degree to which a phenomenon is anomalous or recognizable to her respectively, depends on the agent's interests, background, experience, environment, available information, and opportunities for obtaining more. The natural sciences identify certain phenomena on the anomalous nature of which almost anyone trained in the Western tradition can agree. But that even these are not necessarily anomalous to every human perspective, and that other phenomena similarly may function as anomalous relative to some agents' perspectives but not others, deserves emphasis. We exacerbate the challenge posed by conceptual anomaly and multiply its instances through incuriosity, by choosing to know and experience less. The less we explore and inquire, the more our minds shrink and grow shallow, rigid, fragile and scared, because the more easily disturbed and disoriented by virtually any trivial curiosity: The sight of a student sporting dreadlocks, or an interracial couple, or a Scotsman wearing a kilt all become threats to literal self-preservation that therefore must be denied, dissociated or rationalized. On the other hand, we master the challenge posed by conceptual anomaly and reduce its instances through curiosity and inquisitiveness, by actively seeking to learn and experience more. The more variegated the types of experiences and ideas the system of concepts and principles constitutive of our perspectives can accommodate, the bigger our minds become and the deeper their interiority; and the fewer the number and magnitude of conceptual anomalies we are likely to encounter. Our highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation is strengthened, not stressed, by a receptive curiosity about the unfamiliar. I recur to this thesis in Chapter XI; and in Sections 4.1 - 4.4, below, describe in greater detail a variety of attitudes that increase or decrease our propensity to pseudorationality. Nevertheless, there are two distinct kinds of pseudorationality, corresponding to two different pronouncements Kant makes regarding the necessary conditions for the unity and integrity of the self. The most basic is expressed by Kant's assertion in the first Critique that without [the synthetic unity of appearances according to concepts], which has its a priori rule, and subjects the appearances to itself, no thoroughgoing and universal, therefore necessary unity of consciousness in the manifold of perceptions is to be found. These [perceptions] then would not belong to any experience, therefore would be without an object, and nothing but a blind play of representations, that is, less even than a dream (1C, A 112). Kant here describes the coherent conceptual organization and systematization of representations that a unified self presupposes, and adds that any representation that fails these conditions cannot enter into conscious experience at all. These are the conditions I attempted to capture in Part I under the general rubric of rational intelligibility; and I suggested in Chapter © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
