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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 320 motivationally ineffective intellect in the non-ideal case. For Kant, the question is how to deal constructively with this given. Kant concludes, pessimistically, that we cannot deal with it constructively at all; I discuss his account of the pseudorational mechanisms of self-deception in Sections 4.1 - 3 below. My account builds on Kant's. Both regard weakness of will as a metaphysical given, and both regard self-knowledge about weakness of will - i.e. knowledge of our moral derelictions with respect to our actual motives and obligations - as at the very least cognitively unusual. In my account, the rarity of self-knowledge about weakness of will is rooted in my analysis of self-deception as an antecedent, pseudorational cognitive dysfunction that obstructs it. 1.1. Selfless Dogmatism vs. Self-Deception Above I identified dogmatists as especially susceptible to self-deception. However, not all dogmatists are self-deceivers, because not all dogmatists are personally invested in their self-conceptions. Consider a cult member. A cult member self-identifies with a dogmatic and provincial theory of her experience; a theory in which her degree of personal investment necessitates denial, dissociation, or rationalization of dissonant data, in order to preserve the rational intelligibility of her experience. She might also have a selfconception with which her favored theory is interdependent. Nevertheless, such an individual might be selfless, in the sense that her pseudorationality is motivated solely by her dogmatic allegiance to the theory, and not by considerations of personal vanity or self-esteem. She might, indeed, simultaneously exhibit all the beneficent virtues to a particularly high degree: devotion to others, sympathy, generosity, humility, modesty, and so forth; virtues that lead us to deplore all the more their being squandered in the service of the dogmatic theory that deludes her. To call the cult member selfless is not to say she lacks a self, for it is precisely the virtuous characteristics of the self she expresses whose waste we deplore. Nor is it to say that she lacks a self-conception, for she conceives herself as, among other things, devoted to the dogmatic and provincial theory that commands her cult membership. Rather, it is to say that her selfidentification with her favored theory is not itself motivated by selfaggrandizing considerations. While she defends her self by pseudorationally defending her theory, the defense of her theory is not intended to redound to her own greater glory. Conversely, although an assault on her theory is an assault on the rational coherence of her self, she does not perceive such an assault as a personal insult, nor as denigrating her own value. Her responses to such an assault include anxiety and panic, not rancor or resentment. That the cult member's personal investment in her pseudorational theory is to be explained by her selfless self-identification with it, but not her selfaggrandizement by it, underwrites the intuition that this case is, indeed, most © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
