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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 421 correlated with decreased xenophobia. If it is true that those who have the most economic resources are the most threatened by those outsiders who have the least, then no quantity of accumulation or protection of economic resources is sufficient to quell that fear, for an equal redistribution of them to formerly deprived outsiders might well be anticipated only to exacerbate the stringency of their demand for restitution. In that case, the existence and degree of fear of the alien other is independent of the existence and degree of a community's economic accumulation. The fear that characterizes xenophobia has a different cause. 2. A Kantian Analysis of Xenophobia I shall use the terms person and personality to denote particular empirical instantiations of the concept of personhood, which I assume to be innate for purposes of this discussion. Thus when we refer to someone as a person, we ordinarily mean to denote at the very least a social being whom we presume - as Kant did - to have consciousness, thought, rationality, and agency. The term "person" used in this way also finds its way into jurisprudence, where we conceive of a person as a rational individual who can be held legally and morally accountable for her actions. Relative to these related usages, an individual who lacks to a significant degree the capacities to reason, plan for the future, detect causal and logical relations among events, or control action according to principles applied more or less consistently from one occasion to the next - i.e. who lacks the capacity for resolute choice in McClennen's sense - is ascribed diminished responsibility for her actions, and her social and legal status as a person is diminished accordingly. Similarly, when we call someone a "bad person," we communicate a cluster of evaluations that include, for example, assessing his conscious motives as corrupt or untrustworthy, his rationality as deployed for maleficent ends, and his actions as harmful. And when we say that someone has a "good personality" or a "difficult personality," we mean that the person's consciousness, thought, rationality, and agency are manifested in pleasing or displeasing or bewildering ways that are particular to that individual. We do not ordinarily assess a being who lacks any one of these components of personhood in terms of their personality at all. Persons, then, express their innate personhood in their empirical personalities. With these stipulations in place, I now turn to an analysis of the concept of xenophobia. Xenophobia is not simply an indiscriminate fear of strangers in general: it does not include, for example, fear of relatives or neighbors whom one happens not to have met. It is more specific than that. Xenophobia is a fear of individuals who violate one's empirical conception of persons and so one's self-conception. So xenophobia is an alarm reaction to a threat to the rational coherence of the self, a threat in the form of a theoretically anomalous other who transgresses our preconceptions about people. It is a paradigm © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
