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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 335 proto-hypothesis about the oppressively spontaneous other is fundamentally mistaken, on Nietzsche's account: in fact, spontaneous agents possess neither the intellectual abilities nor the psychological complexity necessary to be deliberately malicious or oppressive. The worst they can be is careless, insensitive, negligent or stupid. The fantasy motives of deliberate malice that the interiorized agent projects onto oppressively spontaneous others in fact describe only his own vindictive impulses to retaliation. Representing the other as evil incarnate leads him to become evil incarnate himself. Because rational interiority is a species of interiority more generally, it may seem at first glance that my account of the origin of evil is a species of Nietzsche's. However, the very possibility of self-control that engenders interiority presupposes the success, to some degree, of literal self-preservation in the non-ideal case - and therefore the rational intelligibility of the agent's experience at subsentential levels. So in fact Nietzsche's account presupposes mine. Moral self-deception is a necessary pseudorational condition for the demonized fantasy projection of the other that legitimates the interiorized agent's vindictive hatred of her, and the repressive pseudorational mechanisms he exercises in order to gratify it. 4. Kant (and Others) on First-Person Moral Anomaly My Kantian account of the origin of evil presupposes Kant's own analysis of the morally pernicious effects of pseudorational self-deception. I believe this analysis, in turn, is presupposed by Kant's account of evil in Religion within the Limits of Reason alone, but I do not defend that belief here. Instead I focus on Kant's rather unsystematic account of the three pseudorational mechanisms themselves, as they operate on first-person moral anomaly. In all three cases, pseudorationality serves to justify violation of the symmetry requirement on interiority that, as we saw in Chapter VI, essentially defines impartial moral principle. 4.1. Kant on Rationalization Here is Kant's account of how rationalization in reaction to first-person moral anomaly bespeaks interior disintegrity. He observes in the Groundwork that [i]t is indeed at times the case that after the sharpest self-examination we find nothing that without the moral basis of duty could have been powerful enough to move us to this or that good action and to so great a sacrifice; but from this it cannot be inferred with certainty that it is not some secret impetus of self-love which has actually, under the mere false pretence of this Idea, been the actual determining cause of our will. We gladly flatter ourselves with a falsely accommodating nobler motive, but in fact we can never, even by the most strenuous examination, fully get behind our secret drives; …(G, Ak. 407). © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
