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Show Chapter VIII. First-Person Anomaly 350 So moral integrity in tandem with freedom in thought and action is a powerful combination: It means acting in unity and inner transparency from drives and motives that lie above and beyond the blinkered perspective of the ego, according to uncorrupted principles and concepts that we deeply believe in and that inspire our action and clarify our perception, and that are unsullied by fear of public disapproval or ridicule or punishment or retaliation or failure. Moral integrity plus freedom in thought and action protects us from this kind of fear because whenever it threatens, we see the trade-off clearly: each time we capitulate, we break our own spirit, piece by piece, one minor fracture at a time. We shatter that internal state of grace to which all other goods are subordinate as we navigate through our lives. Moral integrity, and the untrammeled freedom it nourishes, inoculates us against such self-inflicted damage. Thus we do not need to achieve the distant rational ideal of full horizontal and vertical consistency over time in order to be naturally disposed toward it. We need only the courage to choose the epistemic uncertainty of rational intelligibility to the chimera of certitude that pseudorationality represents. 7. Why I Ought Not Spend My Evenings Howling at the Moon The possibility just described, of preserving rational coherence in that non-ideal case in which we sacrifice certitude for interior integrity, provides the basis for a detailed solution to the problem of rational final ends raised in Volume I, Chapter VIII. Chapter III of this volume laid the groundwork for such a solution, by stipulating rationality criteria a highest-ranked alternative must meet in order to count as a genuine preference. But I acknowledged there that the concept of a genuine preference does not rule out the de re existence of cyclical selection behavior. Therefore it does not rule out the possibility that no actual agent ever chooses rational final ends. I do not rule out that possibility here, either. But I do offer some reasons for its improbability. The Kantian conception of the self developed in this project so far treats the self as a natural phenomenon, in many respects comparable to other natural phenomena we encounter. Like the latter, it is causally determined and shaped by forces - psychological, social, environmental - over which no one individual has any significant degree of control. As we do to other natural phenomena, we respond to the phenomenon of the self by trying to make it rationally intelligible to ourselves in socially conditioned concepts. Like the failure of other natural phenomena, the failure of the self to conform to the concepts and principles by which we explain it provokes in us compensatory defense mechanisms of a pseudorational nature, aimed at preserving the illusion of its rational intelligibility against the reality of its inscrutable conceptual anomaly. The inevitable failure of these mechanisms can lead us to revise our thinking about the self, just as it does our thinking about the © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
