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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 424 states of affairs that deserve separate consideration; or confuses qualities or ideas that are different. Thus lack of discrimination is often associated with aesthetic inadequacy; with an inability to discern quality - or, conversely, to appreciate the lowbrow on its own terms. The following analysis mostly abstracts from these aesthetic associations - without, however, disavowing their relevance to an assessment of moral character. I take up the aesthetic dimension of failures of cognitive discrimination in Section 7, below. 3.1. The Error of Confusing People with Personhood Xenophobia is fueled by a perfectly general condition of subjective consciousness, namely the first-/third-person asymmetry: Although I must identify myself as a person because of my necessary, enduring first-personal experience of rationally unified selfhood, my experience of you as a person, necessarily lacking that first-personal experience, can have no such necessity about it. Kant says it best: Identity of person is ... in my own consciousness unfailingly to be found. But when I view myself from the standpoint of another (as object of his outer intuition), this external observer considers me first and foremost in time .... So from the I, which accompanies all representations at all times in my consciousness, and indeed with full identity, whether he immediately concedes it, he will not yet conclude the objective continuity of my self. For because the time in which the observer situates me is not the same as that time to be found in my own, but rather in his sensibility, similarly the identity that is necessarily bound up with my consciousness, is not therefore bound up with his, i.e. with the outer intuition of my subject (1C, A 362-363). Kant is saying that the temporal continuity I invariably perceive in my own consciousness is not matched by any corresponding temporal continuity I might be supposed to have as the object of someone else's consciousness. Since I am not always present to another as I am to myself, I may appear discontinuously to her consciousness in a way I cannot to my own. And similarly, another may appear discontinuously to my consciousness in a way I cannot to my own. Thus although personhood is a necessary concept of mine, whether or not any other empirical individual instantiates it is itself, from my point of view, a contingent matter of fact - as is the concept of that particular individual herself. Though you may exhibit rationality in your behavior, I may not know that, or fail to perceive it, or fail to understand it. Nor can you be a necessary feature of my experience, since I might I ignore or overlook you, or simply fail to have any contact with you. In any of these cases, you will fail to instantiate my concept of personhood in a way I never can. Because the pattern of your behavior is not a necessary and permanent, familiar concomitant of my subjectivity in the way my own unified consciousness and intellective © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
