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Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 466 individual who engages in an act of communication of any kind intends to have an effect on his audience, at least minimally that it understand him. This does not imply that he intends the actual effect on his audience his communication has. A consumer as well as an art viewer may examine their reactions to a commercial and a work of art respectively, in order selfconsciously to discern and differentiate their personal areas of vulnerability or uncertainty from the intended act of impersonal communication the object represents. 8. Xenophobia, Alienation and the Primacy of Principle In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll describes Alice as walking through the forest of things with no names. Because she has forgotten the name of everything, she fails to remember when things are so different and strange that she is supposed to be afraid of them. She encounters a fawn that similarly does not remember that Alice is a human being and that the fawn is supposed to be afraid of her. So they walk together through the forest, clasped arm in arm. When they come to the end of the forest, they remember that they are human being and animal respectively, and spring apart, terrified. Carroll's idea is that were we not confused by interposing classificatory terms, categories and concepts between ourselves and others, we would have the same, trusting closeness that Alice had with the fawn while they were both in the forest. As long as we can forebear labeling one another, Carroll seems to suggest, we shall all get along just fine. Carroll's suggestion is elaborated in Bernard Williams' concept of moral alienation, discussed in Volume I, Chapter VIII.3.2. As we saw there, Williams' argument is that moral alienation occurs when we interpose abstract concepts and principles of moral obligation between ourselves and other people, or between ourselves and those plans and projects that, he says, are most centrally definitive of who we are. The "one thought too many" is, in Williams' view, that which turns healthy personal interactions based on spontaneous mutual attachment into policy-driven formal transactions based on moral protocol. So Carroll's and Williams' views suggest that xenophobia and moral alienation go hand in hand: Both are engendered by "labeling;" by conceiving of others in abstract and general terms. And both can be defeated by foregoing the need to classify and categorize others in such terms, instead appreciating them for the uniquely complex and singular subjects they really are. Now in this project, I have gone to some length to defend the primacy of abstract and general concepts and principles in the structure of the self. So I am not convinced that things would work out the way Carroll and Williams think they would. Without concepts and principles under which others' concrete particularity could be subsumed and rendered rationally intelligible, other people would be strange and cryptic entities whose behavior we would © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
