Kant's Theory of the Self

Arthur Melnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415994705
• eBook ISBN: 9781135846459
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

The self for Kant is something real, and yet is neither appearance nor thing in itself, but rather has some third status. Appearances for Kant arise in space and time where these are respectively forms of outer and inner attending (intuition). Melnick explains the "third status" by identifying the self with intellectual action that does not arise in the progression of attending (and so is not appearance), but accompanies and unifies inner attending. As so accompanying, it progresses with that attending and is therefore temporal--not a thing in itself. According to Melnick, the distinction between the self or the subject and its thoughts is a distinction wholly within intellectual action; only such a non-entitative view of the self is consistent with Kant's transcendental idealism. As Melnick demonstrates in this volume, this conception of the self clarifies all of Kant's main discussions of this issue in the Transcendental Deduction and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

Part I
Preliminary Overview

1
The Reality of the Thinking Subject

In this chapter and the next, I present what I take to be Kant’s basic view of the thinking subject: the view, I claim, that constitutes his positive account in the first two Paralogisms as against the rational psychologist’s bogus view. I shall use Kant’s own words to motivate the view, but the ultimate defense will be the detailed and consistent exegesis of the text of the two Paralogisms in Chapters 3 and 4.

For now what I mean by the thinking subject is the subject in the context of the cogito, which is also the context within which the rational psychologist proceeds. The first point to note is that the thinking subject for Kant is real. He says in footnote (a) to B422 that the ‘I think’ expresses an indeterminate perception that signifies

something real that is given, given indeed to thought in general and so not as appearance, nor as thing in itself (noumenon) but as something which actually exists, and which in the proposition, ‘I think,’ is denoted as such. (compare B157)

Taking Kant at his word, then, the thinking subject is real or has ontological status. It is not merely logical, merely formal, or merely intentional. Just as clearly its ontological status is not that of an entity either in the Kantian sense of an intuitable substance or in the rational psychologist’s sense of a conceptually graspable self-subsistent substance. But if it is not an entity, what sort of status does it have?

A clue is given in Kant’s discussion in the Second Paralogism. In that discussion Kant says that the simplicity or undividedness of the subject in regard to a thought

may relate just as well to the collective unity of different substances acting together (as the motion of a body is the composite motion of all of its parts) as to the absolute unity of the subject. (A353)

He seems to be distinguishing here the subject’s being undivided or simple in action, from the action being due to one or more substances. The indivisibility of the ‘I’ in regard to a thought, that is, pertains to action but not to a supposed entity acting. If so, Kant would be saying that the simple thinking subject or the ‘I think’ is literally an action, not an entity.

The question now is what sort of action am I? Clearly the answer for Kant is that in some way I am intellectual or intelligent action. He says at B159,

I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination.

I exist then as an intellectual action conscious of itself not as an entity but as the power it is. Kant says the actus ‘I think’ is

the application or employment of the pure intellectual faculty. (footnote (a) to B423)

A faculty or capacity is not an action except insofar as it is engaged or marshaled, and Kant seems to be suggesting that the action of being a thinking subject is literally an engagement or marshaling of the intellectual faculty. The ontological status (the very existence or reality) then of the thinking subject is that it is a marshaling of intellectual capacity. Note Kant’s claim is that the employment or marshaling is not a thought, or a thinking, but is my having a thought or my thinking (the actus ‘I think’). At B137 he refers to the ‘I think’ (not thinking by itself) as the act of apperception. Thus, intellectual marshaling action is not the existence of a thought; it is the existence of a thought belonging to me, the subject. In sum my intellectual subjectivity, or my being as a subject of thought, is nothing more than intellectual marshaling action.

The question now is how can an action have the structure not just of a thinking but of a being which thinks (a subject of thought)? How literally can a subject of thought exist in an action? Kant says in the First Paralogism (A349),

Now in all our thought the “I” is the subject in which thoughts inhere only as determinations.

All thinking is a matter of a subject having thoughts as its determinations. To see how being a subject with thoughts as determinations can all exist within intellectual marshaling action, consider someone playing chess who is thinking about what move to make. To begin with, the thinking may be inchoate, unformed, and unsettled (as though subliminally going from thought to thought without yet a particular thought being focused on). Suppose they come to settle on a thought of a specific move as their tentative option. The marshaling then is one of settling provisionally on a move, which is having a particular explicit thought as the focus of how one is marshaled in one’s chess capacity. It is not, however, as if the inchoate unsettledness simply disappears, giving way to nothing but the specific thought. Rather, the marshaling settles on and coalesces around the particular thought. Roughly, inchoate, unformed thoughts that are close in content to the focal thought are in readiness to themselves form, whereas unconnected thoughts (not pertinent to the move), though part of my chess capacity, remain dormant and so not part of the marshaling (they remain only as what can be accessed). Once settled, then, the marshaling action is a focal, formed thought around which coalesces a context of unformed, inchoate thoughts, which are more than merely what can be accessed, but less than formed or focal. The marshaling action then is not swallowed up or exhausted by a particular thought, but involves a coalescence or concentration on the thought. This coalescence either maintains the thought in focus or, if the inchoate comprehension is that the move is not a good one, it may move it out of focus. Within the marshaling action, there is a distinction between the particular thought and that which settles on it, encompasses it, and holds it. In these regards, the thought is a determination of (belonging to) the overall inchoate intellectual marshaling action. The marshaling action, then, includes within it not just the thought but that which it is a determination of, and so the thinking subject (that from which the thought emerges, that which concentrates on the thought, that which holds the thought) exists literally within the action of intellectual marshaling, not as a self-subsistent entity to which the marshaling action itself belongs.

Kant says in footnote (a) to B158

I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being; all that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought … But it is owing to this spontaneity that I entitle myself an intelligence.

What I am then is a self-active being spontaneous in regard to thought: viz, the source that settles on a thought (from its own nature as an intelligence), that concentrates on it, and holds it. I exist in or as this self-activity.

Let us return for a moment to the purely unsettled state of the chess player. There is as yet in this state no specific or particular thought at all. I can say that this marshaling is not so much the ‘I think’ as it is the ‘I’ itself from which a specific thinking has yet to emerge. This marshaling is the inchoate ‘I am’ (as intelligence) or the sheer thinking subject. In settling on a thought, this still inchoate (and partially resettling) set of unformed thoughts in various degrees of formation remains what I am. There is, then, within the intellectual marshaling, a distinction between the source, concentrator, and holder of a thought (the ‘I’) and the thought itself as determination of the inchoate ‘I.’ I am not claiming that this descriptive analysis was ever explicitly given by Kant. It is just meant to fill out how the distinction between a thought and the subject that thinks can be made out internally to marshaling action itself, without any invocation of an entity that such action may in its turn belong to or derive from.

Finally, besides the ‘I think’ being real (existential), its reality being that of an action (not a self-subsistent substance) and the action being an intellectual marshaling, Kant characterizes the ‘I think’ as the form of conscious thinking. He says at A342, B400 that the ‘I think’

serves only to introduce all our thoughts as belonging to consciousness

and at A346, B404 that the ‘I’

is a bare consciousness that accompanies all concepts.

He says at B246,

Certainly the representation “I am” which expresses the consciousness that can accompany all thought, immediately includes in itself the existence of a subject,

and at B413,

the “I” is merely the consciousness of my thought,

and finally at A382,

This “I” is, however, as little an intuition as it is a concept of any object; it is the mere form of consciousness, which can accompany the two kinds of representation.

In these passages, Kant is equating the ‘I,’ or the subject, with that by which thoughts are conscious. Note he is not talking of transcendental self-consciousness but, rather, subjective consciousness of thoughts. Nor is he talking of consciousness per se (as with sheer animal perceptual consciousness) but of conscious thinking. My task now is to see how my idea of our existing within intellectual marshaling relates to thoughts being conscious.

To begin with, note that intellectual marshaling is not defined purely in a semantic or inferential way in terms of thought content but also in terms of dynamical action. In the marshaling there is emergence of thoughts, coalescing around thoughts by other thoughts in degrees of readiness to be formed, holding thoughts in focus, etcetera These terms signify, however crudely and figuratively, dynamical notions—not notions of abstract intellectual organization. When a computer plays chess, it calculates moves, goes through options, arranges and grades possibilities for a particular move, and so on, but these terms signify what is functionally specifiable in an abstractflow chart. Though the computer dynamically implements the structure, it doesn’t per se do so in a way that the thoughts are held in focus, coalesced around, etcetera

There is a dynamism within the intellectual marshaling that I have described which has, I suggest, the character of our conscious thinking (or what it is like subjectively for the chess player). In consciously thinking I am not conscious of a thought but of having a thought (of owning it, or of it belonging to me). The thought is conscious by or in this discernment of my having it. This discernment or “sentiment” of my having it is not a conceptual matter of thinking of a determination belonging to me, an entity, but a sentiment of the dynamism by which the thought arises and is held. This dynamism involves both the thought’s coming to be formed and that (inchoate) subjectivity out of which or from which it is formed and within which it is held. The latter is the indeterminable factor (not the formed, but the forming). There are different modes of this dynamism. Suppose I come across a momentarily unfamiliar object. The sentiment is of being unsettled or indeterminate as to what to think, until a fixity or settling in comprehension is reached, whether it is verbalized (fully formed linguistically) or not. The fixed comprehension is determined from or out of an unsettled determining factor. On the other hand, if I come across an immediately familiar object, the sentiment is of immediately coalescing around a fixed comprehension. As in the previous case of settling, this coalescing (of other content-related thoughts in varying degrees of readiness) is inchoate and indeterminate. In this case, the thought or comprehension isn’t formed from an unsettled determining factor. Rather the comprehension is found within or amorphously encompassed by “inklings” of understanding. The coalescence, however, is still the determining factor in the sense that it is what holds the thought or comprehension in focus or what dislodges it. There are surely many more variations, but the theme can be summarized as follows: The sentiment (the what-it-is-like) of conscious thinking is the sentiment of being...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Eighteenth Century Philosophy
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Preliminary Overview
• Part II The Thinking Subject
• Part III The Cognizing Subject
• Part IV The Person as Subject
• Part V The Subject and Material Reality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index