Notes on <Kant's Transcendental Idealism> - Apperception, Rational Psychology and the Noumenal Self
- Apperception as the consciousness of Spontaneity
- Apperception and Existence
- The Critique of Rational Psychology
- Apperception and the Noumenal Self
The account of inner sense sketched in the preceding chapter constitutes only half of the Kantian view of self-knowledge. The second is his analysis of apperception. Inner sense and apperception are two distinct, yet complementary forms of self-consciousness Together they are supposed to yield a two fold consciousness of a single I or subject.
As we have seen, inner sense is the phenomenal self. This object is more properly described as the succession of representations as they occur in consciousness. The consciousness of this succession requires a reflective art, whereby these representations are made into “subjective objects” and “injected” into the phenomenal world. It follows that we can experience our own mental lives only as a series of conditioned occurrences in the phenomenal world.
Apperception by contrast is supposed to yield a consciousness of the activity of thinking. This involves a consciousness of existence. In this respect, Kant’s conception of apperception stands in an interesting connection with Descartes’s conception of the cogito.
The roots of this conception of apperception is in Transcendental Deduction. Kan treats the unity of apperception as a formal or transcendental condition of experience, expressing a “necessity of a possibility”. He also insists that all unity for the understanding is the product of a unifying act and that apperception involves an actual consciousness of this act. In Transcendental Deduction, apperception is “something real” (B419). The problem is to explain how such consciousness is possible and how it is linked to the consciousness of existence.
Apperception as the consciousness of Spontaneity
Empirical and Transcendental Apperception
Insofar as apperception is “something real”, it contains an empirical dimension. It’s an act of thinking with a determinate content. Kant is not consistent in the definition of empirical apperception and transcendental apperception. I propose to construe the distinction in following manner: Empirical apperception is characterized as the empirical consciousness of the identity of the reproduced representations with the appearances whereby they were given in recognition (A115). This is closely connected with the three-fold synthesis in the First Edition. Transcendental apperception is equated with the recognition of the identity of the ‘I think’ that accompanies diverse representations.
This formulation is promising because it suggests the distinction pertains to two ways in which apperception can be considered. It seems that the contrast Kant needs to draw is between a consciousness of the activity as it functions determinately with a given content and a thought of the same activity, considered in abstraction from all content.
Apperception and Spontaneity
The consciousness of the activity of ourselves engaged in thinking is also a consciousness of spontaneity. It seems possible to distinguish between two senses of spontaneity. First is the spontaneity that pertains to discursive thought per se. Since to think is to judge, and this consists in the combination of given representations in accordance with categorial principles derived from the very nature of the understanding. The main point is that insofar as mind is merely associating its representations, it is passive; the connections which it makes between these representations are all determined by extrinsic and empirical factors, such as past experience. By contrast, insofar as mind is judging, or connecting its representations in a manner that is “objectively valid” it is combining them in accordance with categorial principles which derived from its own resources.
The second epistemic sense of spontaneity is attributed to the mind when it exercises an actual power over its representations. This happens in intellectual activities such as attention, abstraction, concept formation. Spontaneity can be attributed to the reflective capacity of the mind. This is also manifested in the activity of reason, which uses ideas that have no corresponding object in the sensible world. Reason is spontaneous in the sense that it exhibits an inherent purposiveness, it is self-directed, self-determining. Kant analyzes this in length in the Critique of Judgment.
Consciousness but not Experience
What seems questionable is that the consciousness must be distinguished from inner experience and thus from self-knowledge. Behind this claims lies Kant’s thesis that knowledge requires intuition as well as thought. The point is that we can have no intuition of ourselves as spontaneous beings. The conclusion is that one’s consciousness of spontaneity must be regarded as non-empirical or intellectual consciousness.
Although the mental process of thinking the square takes place in time, the thought itself does not involve any reference to time. What Kant must show is that the consciousness of the act of thinking (apperception) is not an experience even when one is thinking about a temporal process.
Kant deals with this problem in Rflexion. The argument takes an indirect form and relies heavily on he status of time as a condition of inner experience. The basic point is that if the latter consciousness is likewise empirical , it would have to be a consciousness of something that is determined in time, but it generates an absurdity. Since the consciousness requires another time for my state.
Reduced to its simplest terms, it is that the conceptual activity through which the mind represents an object, including itself as object, cannot itself be given to it as an object. Insofar as one objectifies thinking, that is, treats it merely as a psychological occurrence. Consciousness (the act of thinking) is incapable of grasping itself as object precisely because it must always be presupposed as already on the scene, doing the objectifying.
Apperception and Existence
In many of those places in which Kant characterizes apperception as a consciousness of the spontaneity of thought he also maintains that it involves an awareness of existence. And just as he denies to this consciousness the status of an experience of one’s spontaneity, he also denies the awareness of existence can be equated with the knowledge of oneself as a thinking being.
Footnote of [B422] is our main text for the discussion of Kant’s view on the connection between apperception and existence. We must distinguish between three closely related aspects: (1). the claim that existence is already given in the ‘I think’ (2). the claim that ‘I think’ is an empirical proposition (3). the critique of the Cartesian inference, cogito, ergo sum.
‘I Think’ and ‘I Exist’
In the footnote of [B422], Kant indicates that his point is simply that the propositions ‘I think’, and ‘I exist’ are all equivalent. Kant’s claim seems to be that existential assumption is already built into the proposition ‘I think’ and therefore cannot be regarded as an inference from it. “I think, therefore, I am” is equivalent to “I am thinking”. There can be no activity without an agent, and to acknowledge the existence of an activity is to acknowledge the existence of something that acts.
‘I Think’ as an Empirical Proposition
Part of what Kant means here is that the proposition expresses a contingent rather than a necessary truth. Some given sensible representation must function as the occasion for the act of thought and therefore, for the awareness of existence. Without sensation, there would be no ergo sum cogitans. The apprehension of some sensible content is a necessary condition of the awareness of existence that is presumed to be inseparable from the consciousness of thinking. Sensation, which belongs to sensibility, lies at the basis of the existential proposition. Empirical is only the condition of the application or of the employment of the pure intellectual faculty. The point here is not that the empirical is only the condition but rather it is the condition. It follows from this that apperception as an actual consciousness of thinking always involves an empirical element.
The thinking subject, whose existence is given or “contained” in the consciousness of thinking, can be characterized only as a “something in general = x”. This is clearly non-empirical, “purely intellectual” representation. It is nothing more than the empty thought of a logical subject. “I am consciousness of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am” (B157).
Kant claims that existence, unlike other categories is not a real predicate or determination of a thing, but merely involves the positing of predicate or determination of a thing, but merely involves the positing of an actual object corresponding to a given concept. Given this, it follows that the category of existence is called into play only when we have a determinate concept and wish to determine whether there is an actual object answering to that concept. But this is lacking in the case of the I of the ‘I think’. Instead of a determinate concept of a thinking subject, we have only an “indetermination perception” that is inseparable from the act of thought.
Cogito, ergo sum: The Kantian Critique
Kant’s critique of the Cartesian cogito inference is embedded in his general critique of rational psychology. The critique falls into two parts. The first is based on Kant’s interpretation of the inference as a syllogism. HIs claims is that this generate the unpalatable conclusion that whatever thinks exists necessarily. Second is directed against the Cartesian project. This project can be described as the attempt to arrive at certainty about the existence of the noumenal self as res cogitans by simply reflecting upon what must be presupposed as a condition of thinking.
Descartes identifies the formal or transcendental I with the real or noumenal self. As a result Descartes erroneously believed that he had arrived by means of the cogito inference at a certainty with respect his own existence as a particular thinking being.
The Critique of Rational Psychology
By ‘rational psychology’ Kant means a metaphysical theory of the soul, mind or self which is based solely upon an analysis of its capacity to think. As rational, such a psychology must abstract from everything that can be learned about the mind from empirical means.
Rational psychology is obviously a systematic extension of the Cartesian project. Kant’s critique for it is that “through this I which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = x”. (A346/B449). The transcendental subject is the counterpart of the transcendental object. Just as the latter is the concept of the bare form of an object when we abstract all sensible content, the former is the concept of the bare form of a thinking subject, which is all that remains when abstraction is made from the content of inner sense. Rational psychologist conflates this empty or formal concept with the concept of a real, or noumenal subject to which non-sensible predicates can be synthetically attached. In other words, the rational psychologist hypostatizes this merely logical or transcendental subject and this generates the Idea of an absolute totality of conditions generates the Antinomies.
The key to Kant’s argument is that the Paralogisms are based upon the following invalid syllogism:
That which cannot be thought otherwise than as subject does not exist otherwise than as subject, and is therefore substance. A thinking being, considered merely as such, cannot be thought otherwise than as subject. Therefore it exists also only as subject, that is, as substance. [B410-11]
The syllogism commits the fallacy of an ambiguous middle term ‘thought’. The thought in the major premise refers to an object or entity in general, and thus to something that can be given in intuition. To say of such an entity that it cannot be thought otherwise than as subject is just to say that it is a substance. This is a synthetic judgment in which an object is subsumed under a category. By contrast, in the minor premise, it is simply the thinking subject which cannot think itself otherwise than as subject. Here the “thought” reduces to the tautology that the subject of thought must consider itself as the subject of thought. It does not license the conclusion that this self-consciousness subject of thought is an actual thinking substance.
The Second Paralogism, which concerns the unity or simplicity of the subject of thought, receives similar treatment. Kant remarks: “That the I of apperception, and therefore the I in every act of thought is one, and cannot be resolved into a plurality of subjects, and consequently signifies a logically simple subject, is something already contained in the very concept of thought, and is therefore an analytic proposition” (B407). But this does not license the conclusion that the subject, whose unity is a condition of the unity of thought, and thus of thought itself, exists as a simple substance. The latter claim is synthetic and can be established only by an appeal to intuition which is unavailable in this case.
The Third Paralogism affirms the numerical identity of the thinking subject, which Kant equates with its personality. The analysis is virtually identical to the previous Paralogism.
The Fourth Paralogism talks about Descartes’s doctrine that the soul can exist independently of its body. The essential move is from separate conceivability to separate existence. Kant insists upon the analyticity of the claim that I can distinguish my existence as a thinking being from the existence of other things outside me, including my own body. Nevertheless, the key point is that I cannot determine from this whether self-consciousness is possible to “apart from things outside me through which representations are given to me, and whether I could exist merely as a thinking being” (B409). The latter is obviously a synthetic proposition.
Apperception and the Noumenal Self
The Critique contains two distinct and incompatible doctrines about the relation between the subject of apperception an the noumenal self. Accoridng to one, Kant’s official view, the subject of apperception is identified with the noumenal self. However this is incoherent and in conflict with the critical thrust of the argument of the Paralogisms. According to other view, the subject of apperceptoin is distinguished from the noumenal self, and from any kind of intelligible object. This view is coherent and compatible with Paralogisms, the problem is that it makes the application of the transcendental distinction to the problem of self-knowledge problematic.
The Official View and Its Incoherence
The official position rests upon an assumed parallelism between outer and inner sense which proven to be untenable for that very reason. The essential feature of the position is that the subject of apperception and the transcendental subject is treated as a special kind of object, a “transcendental object of inner sense”. Such a doctrine is implicit when Kant insists that inner sense and apperception yield a two-fold consciousness of a single I. B68, B152-54, A492/B520 demonstrates Kant’s view in Transcendental Aesthetic, Transcendental Deduction and the Antinomies.
The assumption underlying all three passages is that the problem of self-knowledge is to explain how the subject of apperception can know itself as object. Kant’s claim is that the knowledge of self must be subject to the same epistemic conditions as other species of knowledge. It follows from this that the subject of apperception can only know itself as it appears to itself through inner sense, not as it is in itself. Given this, the identification of the subject of apperception, which is thought only as a transcendental subject = x, with the real, or noumenal self, becomes unavoidable.
This doctrine, according to Strawson, is incoherent on two accounts. First both the consciousness of the activity of thinking and the thinking which is apperceived take place in time. Consequently, both this consciousness and its “object” must be assigned to a being which “has a history and hence is not a super-sensible being, not the subject in which the representation of time has its original ground”. Second, by identifying the empirically self-consciousness subject which has a history with a super-sensible, transcendental subject, Kant commits himself to the absurd doctrine that the empirical self both appears to and is an appearance of the “real”, super-sensible self. The problem stems from the presumed atemporal nature of such a subject. But any attempt to put a non-temporal construction of the verb “to appear” lands immediately to unintelligibility. ALso it does not make any sense to talk about the succession of states in the empirical subject as the appearing of the super-sensible subject.
The incoherence of this view can also be brought out in another manner. The problem lies in Kant’s contention that if the subject of apperception had intellectual intuition it could somehow intuition and know itself in its capacity as spontaneous, determining self. Unfortunately, it is also self-contradictory because it requires the assignment of contradictory predicates to such a subject. It would have to be at one and the same time both an intuitive intellect and a discursive intelligence.
Kant’s Alternative View
Just as Kant’s official view about the subject of apperception is of a piece with his official designation of the soul as the object of inner sense, so his alternative view goes together with his second way of characterizing the object of inner sense. The essential feature of apperception on this alternative view is that it is a consciousness of the activity of thinking, not of a thinker. This parallels the view that the objects of inner sense are contents of the mind (its cogitationes), not the mind itself.
Clearly the second view of apperception is the one at work in the critique of rational psychology. The characterization of the subject of apperception as a “transcendental subject = x” is not intended to assign the act of thinking to some inaccessible noumnal entity. One the contrary, it is to underscore the uninformativeness of the only possible answer available to rational psychology to the question, what is the I which thinks. Rational psychology is intended to provide an non-empirical answer to the question, one that’s based solely upon a reflection on the activity of thinking. Such an answer, is shown by Kant, to be impossible. The reason for this is that such reflection yields only the bare thought of a subject that must be presupposed as a condition of thinking.
It’s instructive to compare Kant’s position here with Wittgenstein’s treatment of a similar issue in the Tractatus. As Wittgenstein puts it, “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertain ideas, the subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world. The philosophical self is not the human being, human body or the human soul, but rather the metaphysical subject, the limit of the world - not a part of it”. It seems reasonable to regard his “philosophical self” as equivalent to Kant’s transcendental subject of apperception. It is a transcendental presupposition and not an object in the world. But if the metaphysical subject cannot be regarded as an object of the world, then it cannot be equated with the noumenal self, for the latter is the concept of an object in the world.
The view is made clear in three passages: [A346/B404], [A402] and [B422].
The common theme running through all of these passages is the impossibility of even thinking (much less knowing) the I of apperception as an object through the categories. This needs to be distinguished from the noumenal ignorance thesis, which is based on a presumed lack of the proper intellectual equipment, namely, intellectual intuition. Kant’s claim is that we are lacking a concept, even a problematic one, of the subject of apperception.
The situation can be nicely illustrated by means of the very analogy to which Wittgenstein appealed to make essentially the same point: that of the eye and its visible field. We can say that just the eye cannot see itself because it is not part of its own visible world, so the subject of apperception cannot think itself as object because it is not itself part of its “conceptual field”. Finally since the subject of apperception cannot think itself as an object at all, it cannot think itself as a noumenal object.
This alternative view would clearly seem to be superior to the official view. However it does raise serious problems for the accommodation of the inner sense - apperception to the phenomenal - noumenal distinction. Morover, these problems extend in both directions. Just as the object of inner sense (on the alternative view) turns out to be something phenomenal, which cannot be identified with an appearance of the soul, so the subject of apperception turns out to be something “intelligible”, which cannot be identified with the noumenal self. We’ll return to the problem of the applicability of the transcendental distinction to self in chapter 15 in connection with the analysis of the acting subject and its practical freedom.