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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 334 The self-deceiver is thus betrayed by moral anomaly from both sides: from her own interior, by the first-person theoretical anomaly of delinquent behavior that contradicts her honorific but provincial self-conception; and from the exterior environment, by the third-person conceptual anomaly of actual virtue that makes a mockery of it. Her self-conception is undermined by her own unethical behavior as well as by others' ethical behavior, and by the further unethical behavior she herself undertakes in order to suppress them. And her moral judgment is correspondingly perverted by her need to cook up ways of commending and valorizing the first while condemning and devaluing the second. It is in this way, by finally arriving at the point at which the self-deceiver feels compelled to praise vice and condemn virtue in the service of self-aggrandizement, that the entirely innocent disposition to preserve the rational intelligibility of experience disposes the self-deceived dogmatist not only to become evil, but also actively to promote it. On my Kantian account, then, evil is a consequence of moral selfdeception, and moral self-deception is a consequence of the highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation in the non-ideal case, in which horizontal and vertical consistency are subverted by first-person moral anomaly. Evil is the expression of pseudorational defense of one's favored theory of oneself against the external, third-person conceptual anomaly of ethical behavior that, by contrast, threatens to make salient the unethical nature of one's own. The expression consists in pseudorational devaluation of the third-person case that satisfies the desire for self-aggrandizement in the first-person case. Because this expression of evil is itself a theoretical anomaly relative to that morally inflected self-conception, it, too, must be honorifically pseudorationalized through the infliction of yet further damage on the thirdperson case. Thus the asymmetry between the virtue of the third-person anomaly and the vice of the first-person anomaly is compounded by the agent's increasingly energetic, and so futile attempts to pseudorationalize the third-person anomaly out of existence. Think of pseudorationality in this context as a quicksand that sinks the agent ever deeper in a morass of vicious behavior, the more she grasps at psychologically and behaviorally repressive pseudorational mechanisms to extricate herself from it. On Nietzsche's account, by contrast, evil is a consequence of the same conditions that engender interiority, namely self-control in response to external oppression. Self-control requires the interiorized agent to internalize rather than spontaneously to express anger and resentment against the external, spontaneous agent that oppresses him. These internalized emotions ripen into hatred and the desire for revenge against her. They then are sublimated into a demonized representation of the oppressively spontaneous other onto which the interiorized agent projects his murderous rage, by ascribing to the demonized other fantasy motives of deliberate malice that purport to explain her oppressive behavior. However, the interiorized agent's © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
