Abstract
Schulting concentrates on two connected elements of Kant’s theory of self-consciousness: the transcendental conditions for establishing the identity of self-consciousness, which first enables the awareness thereof, namely self-consciousness strictly speaking, and the relation between self-consciousness and self-knowledge. Schulting shows that Kant’s view of the identity of self-consciousness is in fact not derivative, and that instead it shows how any account of self-consciousness and the identity of self is first made possible by transcendental consciousness or transcendental apperception.
The original version of this chapter was revised. An erratum to this chapter can be found at https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_36
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Notes
- 1.
I understand Kant’s Erkenntnis to be more than what is understood by the English “cognition” and less than the English term “knowledge” (for which the German equivalent is Kenntnis or Wissen). For all its potentially misleading connotations to contemporary readers, I shall in general be using the term “knowledge” for Kant’s Erkenntnis, and make no specific distinction with the term “cognition.” For further discussion on this issue, see Dennis Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism: Perspectives on the Transcendental Deduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), ch. 2.
- 2.
For an account, see Dennis Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception: Explaining the Categories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism.
- 3.
Cf. Klaus Düsing, “Gibt es einen Zirkel des Selbstbewußtseins? Ein Aufriß von paradigmatischen Positionen und Selbstbewußtseinsmodellen von Kant bis Heidegger,” in Subjektivität und Freiheit: Untersuchungen zum Idealismus von Kant bis Hegel (Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2002), 111–40.
- 4.
See Dieter Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 10.
- 5.
Ernst Tugendhat, Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung: Sprachanalytische Interpretationen, 6th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 50.
- 6.
See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794), eds. Fritz Medicus and Wilhelm G. Jacobs (Hamburg: Meiner, 1997), 14.
- 7.
See Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, 13.
- 8.
Paradigmatically, Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht.
- 9.
See Düsing, “Gibt es einen Zirkel des Selbstbewußtseins?” 117–18.
- 10.
Kant describes this as follows: “I cannot cognize as an object itself that which I must presuppose in order to cognize an object at all” (A402).
- 11.
Dieter Henrich, Identität und Objektivität: Eine Untersuchung über Kants transzendentale Deduktion (Heidelberg: Winter, 1976), 64 and throughout.
- 12.
In the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo, however, Fichte appears to deny that his notion of intellectual intuition is different from what Kant in fact means when speaking of the way we think of ourselves. According to Fichte, the immediate intuition of myself as a thinker, whereby the thinking “I’” and the thought “I” are one, is the inner intuition of the active “I,” and is intellectual; it forms the immediate ground or basis on which I am able to think of myself. Fichte says that “this does not contradict the Kantian system [and that] Kant only rejects a sensible intellectual intuition, and rightly so” (J. G. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre nach den Vorlesungen von Hr. Pr. Fichte, in Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, pt. IV, vol. 2 [hereafter GA IV/2], ed. Reinhard Lauth et al. [Stuttgart Bad-Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1978], 31). Importantly, Fichte says here – and this might be seen as contrasting with my suggestion earlier, in the main text – that the “I” at issue here is only the “I” “for me,” “insofar as I conceive of its concept through an immediate consciousness”; “another being of the ‘I’, as substance, soul etc. is not at all at issue here” (GA IV/2:29, emphasis added). Therefore, the intellectual intuition only provides one awareness of the activity of thinking of oneself, not of one’s putative substantial self or soul (what Fichte refers to as a “fixed” or “resting” “I,” in contrast to an “acting” “I” [GA IV/2:31]). It would thus appear that neither Kant nor Fichte have in mind a conception of the substantial “I,” when they refer to the thinking “I.” But despite Fichte’s criticism of Kant as beholden to a reflexive s=o model of self-consciousness, I should like to stress that Kant, too, believes that the “I” is first produced in the activity of thinking (see B132). It remains to be seen to what extent, however, Fichte’s and Kant’s views in fact concur, since Kant explicitly sees the “I” of thinking as a mere logical “I,” which is empty, whereas Fichte portrays the “I” as self-positing, not as “beforehand already a substance,” but as such still positing its own “essence” (GA IV/2:31). This latter element goes beyond what Kant would endorse.
- 13.
Tugendhat dismisses Kant’s transcendental theory as “obscure” (Selbstbewußtsein und Selbstbestimmung, 52). But it seems to me that here lies precisely the key to solving the riddle concerning the alleged circularity. See the section “Transcendental Apperception and Self-Consciousness.”
- 14.
See Robert B. Pippin, “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind,” in Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 43.
- 15.
Robert B. Pippin, “The Significance of Self-Consciousness in Idealist Theories of Logic,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114, no. 2, pt. 2 (July 2014): 155.
- 16.
I have dealt with the grounding function of apperception for knowledge in Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception; and Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism.
- 17.
For a brief discussion of the distinction between transcendental and empirical apperception and their relation, see Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism, ch. 4. For a different and more detailed view, see Christian Onof, “Kant’s Conception of Self as Subject and Its Embodiment,” Kant Yearbook 2 (May 2010): 147–74.
- 18.
Like Pluhar, Kemp Smith, and Meiklejohn, I read zu einem Selbstbewußtsein as meaning “to one self-consciousness,” for if the indefinite article were meant here, the preposition and the pronoun would normally have been contracted to zum.
- 19.
For further references, see Dennis Schulting, “Transcendental Apperception and Consciousness in Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics,” in Reading Kant’s Lectures, ed. Robert R. Clewis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 89–113.
- 20.
For more discussion, see Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception, ch. 8.
- 21.
For a detailed account of the modality of apperception, see Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception, ch. 6.
- 22.
This addition should not be read as if the synthesis were an a posteriori one, which might be suggested by Kant’s words here. The act of addition, that is, synthesis, is what happens in the background of any act of apperceiving representations as one’s own, and which constitutes self-consciousness. The act of addition or synthesis is not something that I need to do consciously.
- 23.
I have extensively argued for what I call the rigorous coextensivity of the analytic and synthetic unities of apperception in Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception, esp. 110–13.
- 24.
I must set aside here issues of modality that are alluded to in the above-quoted passage at B133. For more discussion, see Schulting, Kant’s Deduction and Apperception, ch. 6.
- 25.
For discussion, see Schulting, “Transcendental Apperception and Consciousness in Kant’s Lectures on Metaphysics.”
- 26.
See also the account at B68–69 in the Critique.
- 27.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. Günter Zöller and Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 253, boldface added.
- 28.
This knowledge is more than just the “knowledge” of merely thinking the subject of judgment, as the highlighted Anthropology passage suggests.
- 29.
The term self-affection suggests that only self-perception is concerned in the affective determination of inner sense, but internal affection is involved in all determination of sensible manifolds, for any sort of empirical object, as is made clear in the preceding passages of §24. The difference is that in the cognition of outer objects, we are also externally affected.
- 30.
For detailed discussion on the differentiation between mere form of intuition and determinate intuition in relation to space as one of the two pure forms of intuition, see Christian Onof and Dennis Schulting, “Space as Form of Intuition and as Formal Intuition: On the Note to B160 in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason,” Philosophical Review 124, no. 1 (Jan. 2015): 1–58; and Schulting, Kant’s Radical Subjectivism, ch. 7.
- 31.
Compare this with the following passage in the B-Paralogisms: “Thinking, taken in itself, is merely the logical function and hence the sheer spontaneity of combining the manifold of a merely possible intuition;…in the consciousness of myself in mere thinking I am the being itself, about which, however, nothing yet is thereby given to me for thinking” (B428–29).
- 32.
I would like to thank Christian Onof and Marcel Quarfood for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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Schulting, D. (2017). Apperception, Self-Consciousness, and Self-Knowledge in Kant. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_7
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