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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 344 three cases we call on reason to legitimate those mis- (or non-) applications of principle or concept, by reference to other principles that inherently conflict with the purportedly universal ones. Thus in all three cases there is an internal bifurcation between the universal moral principles we conceive ourselves to hold deeply, and the self-aggrandizing principles we apply when we violate them. Pseudorationality thus sanitizes our conscience so that we may, without self-reproach, shrink from acts of courage or generosity, and embrace acts of cowardice, malice or greed. 5. The Self as Unrecognized Particular It is tempting to conclude that the real culprit here is theoretical reason itself, and its tendency to overreach its natural limits in its hegemonic drive for conceptual control of the self, to the disadvantage of the emotions and instincts. A different version of this criticism, familiar from Western appropriations of various forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, would be that the chatterings of pseudorationality are nothing more than the mind's fulfillment of its necessary and limited function in the self; and that the real mistake is to identify the self in toto - and thus the unity of the self - with any attempt to unify the mind. Both versions of this criticism imply that in practice, integrity and coherence can be achieved only by reducing the domination of reason in the structure of the self. Despite my sympathy, particularly with the latter version of this criticism, I reject it. Pseudorationality promotes self-deception about one's interior rational coherence. The price is a conceptually distorted, marginalized, or unrecognized particular. So far I have been focusing on that illusion itself - on how the theoretically anomalous particulars of an agent's self-conception are distorted, diminished or eradicated when the self's internal unity is riven by the morally self-deceptive disjunctions I have catalogued. I have tried to describe the conceptual violence we do to some of those anomalous particulars in the service of this illusion; and more specifically the conceptual violence we do to ourselves, when we distort, diminish or eradicate the self from conceptual self-awareness. This is the standpoint of reason, battered by the agent's own delinquent behavior, then mended inadequately by the malpractical operations of pseudorationality. But precisely because the mind that undergoes these cosmetic surgeries is not identical to the self, the kind of denial involving ignorance of oneself as a particular affords us the opportunity to sneak under the radar of reason, as it were, to the standpoint of that unrecognized particular itself. From this perspective, the silence of reason in the self is no more a resolution of interior disintegrity than was the invisibility of the self to reason. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
