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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 467 have to study in order to figure out how to use them to get what we needed. In essence we would treat other people as we ordinarily treat animals - as dinner, fur coats, glue, drugs, pet food, etc. This would be a paradigm case of the egocentric and narrowly concrete perception of reality that would be left to us without the modal imagination that rational intellection supplies. Concepts and principles are absolutely central and crucial in the structure of the self, because they enable us to render rationally intelligible inherently enigmatic concrete particulars, and thus extend their meaning and significance for us, as well as our modal imagination of the interiors their enigmatic façades conceal, beyond the indexical present of immediate awareness. This is one reason why abstract principles can rationally motivate individuals to sacrifice personal projects or relationships for their sake. Yet it is inescapably true that any such concept or principle we apply to any concrete particular, particularly human ones, is necessarily crude, relative to the unique singularity of the thing we apply it to. It is even harder to capture a person in concepts and principles than it is to conceptually capture any other concrete particular, even though without concepts and principles we could apprehend nothing at all. Because in fact each one of us is completely and utterly different from everyone else, no rule-governed term or concept, or conjunction of such, can be fully adequate to anyone's singular and complex reality. So each one of us violates as a matter of course the assumptions, expectations, and theories that others bring to bear on their experience of us. Each one of us is the conceptual anomaly we fear to find in others. The resulting sense of anxiety, irritation, even panic at being thwarted in our attempt at epistemological control of another emerges with particular force when a person behaves or presents herself in ways that are not familiar or comfortable to us. This is the locus of the xenophobic impulse: that moment when another's unfamiliar appearance or behavior begins to violate our familiar presuppositions about her. That moment occurs with far greater frequency between individuals in close relationships than between strangers or groups, often with comparably destructive or even lethal results.12 At one end of the spectrum, the limiting case of xenophobia is to be found when another person - an acquaintance, friend or loved one - starts to move into our psychological orbit. The closer the person comes, the more his strangeness and singularity begin to surface, and the more threatened we feel. Then the more we experience the need for cognitive control and the more we feel invaded by his violation of our space, our privacy, the boundaries of our interiority. At the other end of the spectrum, the more familiar limiting case of 12 Thus psychologists sometimes describe intimacy as the case in which you want to either sleep with someone or kill them. Perhaps it is rather that first you want to sleep with them, then you want to kill them. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
