dascal@post.tau.ac.il

The question I want to raise in this paper is why is it so difficult, as Kant points out in his third critique, to follow what he calls the maxim of consecutive thought or maxim of reason, namely, “always to think consistently”? In so far as Kant believes that the way of avoiding this difficulty is to let the observance of the maxim grow into a habit, he is referring to the psychological or subjective dimension of the difficulty. I will follow suit, although it is not easy to set aside the metaphysical underpinnings of the problem. Psychologically speaking, we may trace the problem, as suggested by Adam Smith, to our tendency to deceive ourselves (in a sense that is quite close to the Freudian notion of “rationalization”), which he connects to our difficulty in criticizing ourselves. Both self-deceit and self-criticism seem to depend upon the existence, within the subject, of different “voices”, representing different entities or at least tendencies in conflict with each other. Couldn’t the very lack of unity of the self be responsible for the difficulty in keeping it self-consistent? Can such conflicts within the subject be so sharp as to prevent consistent thought and action, thus leading to the violation of Kant’s maxim?

These questions can be profitably reformulated in terms of whether and under what conditions a “critical dialogue” between the different components of the self can take place. The answer lies in a phenomenology of self-criticism, which should be a part of “psychopragmatics”, i.e. the study of the uses of language in mental processes. Such a study can benefit from a comparison with its sociopragmatic counterpart, namely the study of the activity of criticism, as manifested in inter-personal debates of various types. To what extend are intra-personal discussions, disputes or controversies similar to the inter-personal ones? What are their typical strategic and tactic aims and moves? What kind of rationality – if any – do they display? Whatever the answer, If Bakhtin is right and “truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person” but rather “between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic [especially dialectical, I would add] interaction”, it may be worthwhile to inquire whether a similar (albeit not necessarily identical) dialectical process takes place “inside the head of an individual person” too.