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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 318 I remarked in Chapter VII.3 that pseudorationality was our only rational choice in the face of continual external assaults - of conceptually anomalous events and information - on the rational integrity and coherence of the self. That was not strictly true. In theory, it is open to us to abdicate our personal investment in our favored theories sufficiently simply to endure the anxiety, confusion, disorientation, and powerlessness that often accompany reminders of our subjective fallibility. That is, it is psychologically possible simply to abdicate the aspiration either to inviolable agency, or to infallibility, or to unalloyed moral rectitude. The naïf, and to a lesser extent the true skeptic show us how literal self-preservation and so rational intelligibility thereby might be vindicated in the end. But it is not possible abstractly to assign relative probabilities to the consequences of either letting go of these aspirations, or stubbornly digging in. Reminders of our subjective fallibility are much harder to endure, if being right is more important to us than being genuinely rational - that is, if we are, indeed, dogmatists. The stakes are even higher if the theory about which we need to be right is our theory about ourselves; if we console ourselves too often with the thought that although we may not be perfect, we at least know whom we are. If self-knowledge, i.e. being right in one's self-conception, is even more important to one than being right about other things, then the lure of pseudorationality will be all the more compelling. The more importance we accord to such self-knowledge, the more susceptible we are to pseudorational judgments about what our obligations are, and whether we have fulfilled them. A strong personal investment in any aspect of our self-conception, assaulted and undermined by enigmatic or personally unacceptable attitudes, beliefs, emotions, or actions, will call forth an even more intensified mobilization of the resources of pseudorationality to withstand it. This is the phenomenon we understand as self-deception. Briefly, self-deception is our pseudorational response to first-person theoretical anomaly. Section 1 offers an analysis of self-deception as pseudorational belief about first-person anomaly, contrasts it with the standard analysis, and applies it to an extended fictional example. Section 2 extends the analysis from pseudorationality about conceptually anomalous belief to pseudorationality about conceptually anomalous emotion, motivation, and action; and proposes a solution to the problem of moral paralysis raised in Volume I, Chapter VIII.2.2. Section 3 describes pseudorational reaction to morally anomalous action in the first-person and the third-person case, grounds an account of one (among many) origins of evil on the perverse asymmetry between these two cases, and contrasts this account with Nietzsche's. Section 4 selectively reviews Aristotle's, Kant's and Nietzsche's accounts of pseudorationality, with particular attention to Kant's. This part of the analysis builds on the analysis of moral impartiality in Chapter VI as requiring symmetrical interiority between the first- and third-person cases; and explores several © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
