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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 331 when I conclude from the phenomena of quantum physics that all events must be random and all regularities illusory; or when I attempt to cultivate an attitude of emotional indifference towards anyone whose approval I in fact value highly; or when I offer for sale to the tabloids all of my friends' confidences, in order to demonstrate the moral innocence of having made a killing on yours; or when I ascribe to the person I have maligned through gossip a malevolent power to make me feel guilty. These self-deceptive responses to the internal incoherence of the self are irrational because they themselves ramify that incoherence yet more widely throughout the structure of the self, and motivate yet more elaborate attempts to ameliorate it; attempts that are similarly doomed to failure. Such pseudorational tactics can become so pervasive and overpowering that they can swallow up the self whose tactics they were - thereby replacing the unified subject whose perspective was overridingly governed by the highest-order self-consciousness property with a tangled and incoherent mass of pseudorational defenses no longer capable of weighing from a distanced perspective their psychological costs. The threat of ego disintegrity thus generates a stance of vigilant, selfprotective defensiveness that fails in direct proportion to its extent. The more incoherent and pseudorational the behavior of the self, the more vulnerable to such threats it becomes. 2.3. Behavioral Anomaly and Moral Paralysis For an imperfect but motivationally effective intellect, acknowledging the delinquent behavior of the self as irrational is the best strategy for preserving the self against radical disunity, for this is to recognize that behavior as the painful threat it is to rational intelligibility. Because of the primacy of the highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation, a dawning recognition that the unity of the self is being destroyed by its own behavior disposes it, over the long term, to modify that behavior accordingly. In actual fact, it is questionable whether we ever truly succeed in reforming our conduct, without the prodding of these painful insights into our own irrationality. Those whose prior pseudorationality is so extensive as to render themselves incapable of such a recognition are correspondingly beyond the reach of selfreform. Thus not all actual selves are free to exploit the option of self-reform. Although I argued in Chapters II.3 and V.4.4 that all selves are disposed to satisfy the cognitive requirement of rational intelligibility, it does not follow from this that all selves are disposed to satisfy the linguistic rule prescribing correct use of the concept of rational intelligibility. Hence not all actual selves may be disposed to conceive themselves as overridingly committed to rational intelligibility per se (even though in fact they are), nor to apply that concept correctly to their own behavior. Then the existence of demonstrably irrational behavior may not suffice to ensure its rational modification. Perhaps one may © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
