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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 351 behavior of other natural phenomena, and to formulate alternative concepts and principles to which the actual behavior of the self more closely corresponds. But here the similarity with other natural phenomena ends. For unlike them, an essential feature - perhaps the most essential feature of the self - is its very disposition to render its experiences rationally intelligible. By contrast to our characterizations of the behavior of third-personal phenomena that are conceptually anomalous, we are not let off the cognitive hook by dismissing our own theoretically anomalous behavior merely as, say, random rather than causal, or biologically deviant rather than stereotypical, or statistically improbable rather than likely. Instead, the inevitable failure of our pseudorational defense mechanisms to sustain the illusion of rational intelligibility disposes us, in the case of the self, to recognize our behavior, specifically, as irrational, i.e. as incoherent and therefore a harbinger of egodisintegration; and so to reform our behavior accordingly. The disposition to be rational may, in the end, win out over the dogmatic desire to be right. Thus the self is unlike other natural phenomena in that its interior resources for altering its own behavior patterns are identical to its disposition to understand them. And this disposition itself, which I have described as a disposition to rational intelligibility, is in turn identical to our highest-order disposition to literal self-preservation. This point bears repeating: In practice, we are disposed to modify and reform irrational reactions and behavior in light of the ideals described in Part One, not through conscious inspiration; but instead by the hard-wired disposition to literal self-preservation. Despite the pseudorational exertions of self-deception, the very real threat of ego disintegration often pulls us back from the abyss of rational unintelligibility. Now this highest-order disposition to rational intelligibility - i.e. to theoretical rationality - imposes an upper limit upon the proliferation of lower-order concepts and principles constitutive of the Kantian conception of the self, and so solves the problem of self-evaluation posed in Volume I, Chapter VIII.2.1. For the ascent to n+1-order concepts and principles from which to evaluate the n-order dispositions and behavior of the self are finally subject to the requirement that all such n+1-order concepts and principles succeed in rendering those dispositions and behavior rationally intelligible in the sense explained. But to demonstrate their rational intelligibility is to provide an authoritative justification for maintaining them. For it answers the question of why we ought to behave in a certain way by demonstrating that it is in accord with the requirements of theoretical rationality to do so. To then ask for reasons why we ought to do what it is demonstrably rational to do presupposes that in fact we ought to. Thus contra Frankfurt, Williams and Rawls, there is in fact good reason why I ought not spend my evenings howling at the moon, whether I desire to © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
