| OCR Text |
Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 353 I appeal to restore intelligibility to my conception of what I was doing? - That everyone has their harmless idiosyncrasies, perhaps? This appeal would fail to convince because as a matter of empirical fact, the range of behavior we recognize under the rubric of "human idiosyncrasy" does not extend this far. Of course our conception of human nature responds flexibly to the variety of circumstances and ways in which human nature develops. Nevertheless, it is sufficiently circumscribed that we recognize a genuine conceptual anomaly when we see it. That is, we differentiate such behavior from our conception of characteristic human behavior. But where the anomaly is first-personal, I as the anomalous agent then would be self-defensively compelled to dissociate my own identity as a human being from the actual actions I performed. Then I would be compelled to choose: between retaining my humanity by disavowing my own agency, and retaining my agency by disavowing my humanity. That I would in either case effect such a radical incoherence within the self is why it would be irrational for me to spend my evenings howling at the moon. Some such first-person conceptual anomaly is so radical that the demands of literal self-preservation exclude it even for motivationally ineffective intellects. Now the perspective of rational intelligibility from which we are disposed to survey, evaluate and organize the lower-order cognitive, affective and conative components of the self may not be the perspective of our explicit self-conception. For if we are without illusions about the degree of rationality we are in fact able to attain, we may disavow any conscious commitment to rationality, as does the Anti-Rationalist. This may lead us, as it does the AntiRationalist, to reject the rational perspective as impersonal and detached from everything that gives our lives meaning. But I am inclined to dismiss this stance, too, as an instance of pseudorationality that is ultimately incoherent. For without an overriding disposition to rational intelligibility, however involuntary, our lives could have literally no meaning, and in practice we are compelled to recognize this. A failure of rational intelligibility is a failure of comprehension, a lacuna in our accounts of ourselves, others, and the world at large. A failure of comprehension in turn signals our irrevocable alienation from the object under scrutiny, i.e. the admission of the opaque and inexplicably anomalous into our conception of reality. This conflicts with our most basic instinct of literal self-preservation. For typically constituted human beings, the disintegration of the self is psychologically equivalent to the death of the self, and this is a state against which we protect ourselves at all costs. To be at once the agent of disintegration and also the self that tries to evade it is psychological anathema. The Kantian conception of the self I am spelling out in this project acknowledges and accords pride of place to this fundamental fact about us. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
