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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 341 How is this type of disintegrity to be explained? How can one have in one's conceptual arsenal the appropriate concepts, yet fail to apply them to the ever-present and maximally intrusive particular at hand, namely oneself? In Volume I, Chapter II.2.3, I argued that for a Humean self, rule-blindness arose from the self's orientation towards its future desire-satisfaction, relative to which available moral principles faded or sharpened in salience according to their contingent usefulness in promoting this. But this much does not explain why available moral principles might fade out of salience completely for a Humean self; or why, for any self, desire or other preoccupations ever obscure their application to it. Ignorance of oneself as a particular is a kind of denial that originates in a failure to grasp, at a deep level, what a universal concept or principle really is. Some people self-deceptively conceive themselves as holding certain moral principles to be universally applicable. But in fact those principles only apply within the universe fashioned from their experience and structured by their conceptual scheme - relative to which they as agents figure only inferentially, as the subject-observer of that universe, rather than as a player within it. In an important sense, they do not experience themselves as contained within a universe of many, equally real and significant particulars. Rather, the universe they experience is contained within them. For such a self-deceiver, even lipservice to the concepts of impartiality and reciprocity is a stretch, for the first/third-person asymmetry is so radical that there really is no first person for the universal principles to apply to. Other people are all there are, operating within the constraints of that subject's universe and colored by that subject's emotional responses to them. This self-deceiver's self is absent not as object of her ministrations, as it is for the cult member considered in Section 1.1 above; but rather as individuated subject, one among others, to whom her moral principles apply. This is what Thomas Nagel calls a solipsistic subject: one for whom the world of third-personal agents one subjectively experiences is the only world there is. This is an agent for whom there is no further world in which his own, subjective experiences of other agents occur; no further world in which one is no more or less a subject, no more or less a player, than anyone else. A solipsistic subject fails to conceive any of his own behavior as necessarily instantiating his conceptual scheme. His behavior may conform to this theory. But then again, it may not. Thus denial of one's own violation of moral principles one holds to be universal indicates a solipsistic universe whose creator is structurally exempt from the concepts and principles that in fact apply only to its creatures. As Nietzsche reminds us, The lordly right of giving names extends so far that one should allow oneself to conceive the origin of language itself as an expression of power on the part of the rulers: they say 'this is this and this,' they seal every © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
