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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 299 with the rationally intelligible cognitive and conative events that constitute her perspective at a given moment. But a self that confuses unintelligible external or internal events with itself loses the ability to distinguish those events from itself, and with it the ability to defend its rational integrity against them; and so, finally, the ability to act intentionally in response to them. That is why your most likely initial reaction to the gray blob on West Broadway will be neither madness nor annoyance, but instead temporary cognitive and conative paralysis. It is this cognitive and conative paralysis, and the loss of unified selfhood and agency it threatens, that motivate us either to render a perceived conceptual anomaly rationally intelligible at any cost - even at the cost of plausibility, accuracy, or truth; or else to suppress the perception altogether. Thus in some ways literal self-preservation may seem to be an impossible task. We are continually assaulted, if not by the presence of gray blobs, by other internal and external anomalies that test the psychological strength of the self to withstand them, or its cognitive flexibility to accommodate them within the constraints of rational intelligibility. And we must take it as a given that we can neither withstand all such events - on pain of the fate that frequently befalls ostriches who bury their heads in the sand; nor can we accommodate all of them - on pain of the fate that befalls overloaded computers, whose simulated cognitive psychoses bear a touching resemblance to our own. The necessary and sufficient connection between agency and theoretical reason thus confronts every such agent with the dilemma of her own imperfection: We cannot possibly make rationally intelligible everything that happens to us, nor everything we think, feel and do, without threatening the coherence of that which we think we do understand rationally. So we cannot possibly integrate all such events without undermining our agency. On the other hand, theoretical reason is all we have for coping with such cognitive assaults. The alternative would be passively to acquiesce in the threat of unintelligibility, disorientation, and ego-disintegration that such anomaly represents. Such an inclination towards literal self-destruction could have no survival value. So the demands of theoretical reason must be attenuated and bent to the contours of our limitations. Its consistency requirements must remain in force, but be made easier to satisfy. The stringency of those requirements must be maintained, yet tempered by rational loopholes. Thus we systematically distort and truncate our intellects, with the help of our rational capacities themselves, so as to achieve the illusion of rationality. The result is not rational intelligibility in the sense described above, but rather pseudorationality. Pseudorationality is our only rational choice. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
