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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 428 motives, although that ascription itself does furnish evidence for a similar ascription of them to myself. Thus Kant might put this second error by saying that we have been fooled by the first-/third-person asymmetry into treating the ever-present "dear self" as a source of genuine self-knowledge on the basis of which we make even faultier and more damaging assumptions about the other. 3.3. The Error of Failing to Modally Imagine Interiority These two errors are interconnected with a third, namely our respective failures to modally imagine each other's behavior as animated by the same interior elements of personhood that animate our own, i.e. consciousness, thought, and rationality. Our prior failure to recognize the other's behavior as manifesting evidence of interiority - a failure compounded by conceptual confusion and misascription of motives - then further undermines our ability to bridge the first-/third-person asymmetry by imagining the other to have them. Since, from each of our first-personal perspectives, familiar empirical evidence for the presence of interiority is lacking in the other, we have no basis on which to make the ascription, and so no basis for modally imagining what it must be like from the other's perspective. Our respective, limited empirical conceptions of people, then, itself the consequence of ignorance of others who are thereby viewed as different, delimits our capacity for empathy. This is part of what is involved in the phenomenon feminists refer to as objectification, and what sometimes leads men to describe women as self-absorbed. Kant might put this point by saying that by failing to detect in the other's behavior the rule and order of rationality that guides it, we fail to surmise or imagine the other's motives and intentions. This error, of failing to modally imagine the other as similarly animated by the psychological dispositions of personhood, is not without deleterious consequences for the xenophobe himself. In Chapter VI.2 I described the egocentric and narrowly concrete view of the world that results from the failure to imagine empathically another's interiority, and its interpersonal consequences. From the first-personal perspective, this error compounds the seeming depopulation of the social environment of persons and its repopulation by impenetrable and irrational aliens. This is to conceive one's social world as inhabited by enigmatic and unpredictable disruptions to its stability, to conjure chimaeras of perpetual unease and anxiety into social existence. Relative to such a conception, segregation is no more effective in banishing the threat than is leaving on the nightlight to banish ghosts, since both threats arise from the same source. Vigilance and a readiness to defend oneself against the hostile unknown may become such intimately familiar and constitutive habits of personality that even they may come to seem necessary prerequisites of personhood. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
