Kant and the transparency of the mind

ABSTRACT

It has become standard to treat Kant’s characterization of pure apperception as involving the claim that questions about what I think are transparent to questions about the world. By contrast, empirical apperception is thought to be non-transparent, since it involves a kind of inner observation of my mental states. I propose a reading that reverses this: pure apperception is non-transparent, because conscious only of itself, whereas empirical apperception is transparent to the world. The reading I offer, unlike the standard one, can accommodate Kant’s claim that the I of pure apperception is the same as the I of empirical apperception.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-consciousness
• transparency
• apperception
• Kant
• Sartre
• Evans

Acknowledgments

I have presented previous versions of this paper at three events. The first was a conference on Introspection, Self-Consciousness, and Self-Knowledge at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in May 2015. The second was a conference on Transparency and Self-Consciousness at Ryerson University in Toronto in May 2018. And the third was a colloquium talk at the University of Leipzig, Germany in June 2018. Thanks to all the audiences at these events for their challenging questions and astute comments. Special thanks to Irad Kimhi, Sebastian Rödl, Matthew Boyle, Adrian Haddock, David Sussman, and Stephen Engstrom for helpful conversations directly related to the topic of this paper. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their extensive and detailed comments, many of which led me to rewrite the latter half of this paper.

Notes

1. See, for instance, (Evans 1982, Allison 2004, 290f.,; Strawson 1966, 248f.. Boyle 2009) distinguishes ‘an active and a passive kind of self-knowledge’, suggesting that passive self-knowledge or inner sense is a kind of inner experience (Boyle 2009, 160).

2. I am grateful to Adrian Haddock for helping me formulate my claim in these terms.

3. Following the recommendation of an anonymous reviewer, I use brackets to mention thought-contents.

4. On this approach, I-thoughts have a peculiar, first-personal Fregean ‘sense’ or mode of presentation [Art des Gegebenseins] of the object they refer to. Longuenesse follows this approach when she writes, ‘’I’ and ‘A’ are different modes of presentation of the entity that is also referred to by the proper name, ‘E.A.’. ‘A’ is sufficiently specified by the description: ‘name that refers to whoever is currently saying or thinking ‘A is F’; but ‘I’ needs the further specification – ‘word that refers to whoever is currently saying or thinking “I am F” and whose use depends on non-thetic consciousness (of) whoever is saying or thinking “I am F”’ (Longuenesse 2017, 65).

5. This is also implied by Strawson’s claim that ‘the concept of a person is logically prior to that of an individual consciousness’ (Strawson 1966, 103). The concept of a person is that of a being in the world, and that of individual consciousness is that of the consciousness possessed by this being in the world. The first-person standpoint is thus parasitic on there being an objective world, and a person within it.

6. The identification of myself with a particular individual in the world is a self-locating thought that I can think only from within a first-person perspective. Thus, in Kantian terminology, Evans’s point is that we can become aware of ourselves as elements in an objective spatial order from within inner sense – indeed, Evans is suggesting that there is bodily self-awareness in inner sense. Evans criticizes Kant for thinking that awareness of oneself as in space would require knowing ourselves as others know us – as objects of outer sense: ‘The idea that I can identify myself with a person objectively construed is often mis-expressed, e.g. in terms of the idea that I realize that I am an object to others (also an object of outer sense, as Kant says: Critique of Pure Reason, B145). This misleadingly imports an ideal verificationist construal of the point’ (Evans 1982, 210).

7. To identify myself with a being in the world is to situate myself within the external, objective context: ‘to know what it is for [δt = I] to be true, for arbitrary δt, is to know what is involved in locating oneself in a spatio-temporal map of the world’ (Evans 1982, 211). It is unclear exactly how Evans thinks he can get self-reference just out of self-locating thought (see Sebastian Rödl’s criticism of this move in his 2017, 280ff.). Perhaps Evans thinks that insofar as I am conscious of myself as occupying a particular perspective from within the world, and thus as having limits, I am conscious of myself as a particular being, because the limits are here understood as given to consciousness – or as simply encountered. But they are not encountered in the same way that I encounter outer objects. They are encountered as my limits – as the limits through which I engage with the world (the world would be nothing to me without them). Whereas Evans thinks of the transparent or ‘purely formal’ I as the limit of the entire world, and thus as lacking a perspective from within it, he thinks of the empirical object-I as a perspective that defines the limit of my ego-centric world. So he thinks that I encounter the empirical I as an object of reference, because the empirical I is the perspective that I encounter as a special kind of inner object. At the end of this paper, I will use Kant to criticize the Evansian view that the empirical I is a perspective, and will argue along Sartrean lines that it is nothing at all (not even a perspective).

8. See, for instance, (Byrne 2011, 2018).

9. This is also Strawson’s strategy: ‘If we try to abstract this use, to shake off the connexion with ordinary criteria of personal identity, to arrive at a kind of subject-reference which is wholly and adequately based on nothing but inner experience, what we really do is simply to deprive our use of “I” any referential force whatever. It will simply express, as Kant would say, “consciousness in general”’ (Strawson 1966, 166).

10. This is taken from Sartre’s criticism of Husserl. See ftn. 19.

11. McDowell notes in his Appendix to Evans’s chapter on self-identification that Evans himself became increasingly aware of the dependence of the ‘fundamental level of thought’ on the subjective viewpoint of the egocentrically located empirical subject. This can make it sound like he began to concede the subjective idealistic consequences of his view: ‘Section 6.3 […] gives the impression that the objective or impersonal mode of thought about space can be understood as a mode of spatial thinking organized around a framework of known objects and places – the “frame of reference”. But such a mode of thinking will not be capable of achieving a higher degree of impersonality than that achieved by the subject’s thought about the objects and places which constitute the frame; […] it seems plausible that a subject’s right to be counted as thinking about these familiar objects and places turns partly on his conception of the role they have played in his past life – being visited by him, seen by him, etc. […] In that case, the seemingly objective mode of thinking about space is, after all, contaminated by egocentricity’ (Evans 1982, 265).

12. Philosophers such as Richard Moran or Christine Korsgaard, who think of the first-person standpoint as the standpoint of a particular being in the world, and thus as already confined to a region within it, would not be Kantian in this sense (Moran 2001, 63; cf. Korsgaard 2009, 125f.).

13. ‘Consciousness is aware of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object’ (Sartre 1960, 40). ‘Every positional consciousness of an object is a non-positional consciousness of itself’ (Sartre BN 1956, 40).

14. In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre puts this by saying that consciousness is ‘purely and simply the consciousness of being consciousness of that object. This is the law of its existence. We should add that this consciousness of consciousness […] is not positional, which is to say that consciousness is not for itself its own object. […] Now we ask: is there room for an I in such a consciousness? The reply is clear: evidently not’ (Sartre 1960, 40–41).

15. Sartre does say that non-thetic self-consciousness is immanent to itself, but it is immanent to itself as an act of transcendence, of going outside (e.g. Sartre 1956, 77).

16. It is a sign of the poverty of language that we have no first-person universal pronoun, and that we always speak of first-person consciousness as a first-person ‘standpoint’ or ‘perspective’. Both of these terms suggest that we are conscious from some place (standpoint) or position (perspective) within the world.

17. This point is helpfully made by Jean-Philippe Narboux in a recent essay on self-consciousness (Narboux, unpublished).

18. Sartre thus would not agree with Moran’s claim that from ‘within the first-person perspective’ (non-thetic consciousness), I acknowledge that the ‘fact believed and the fact of one’s belief are two different matters’ (Moran 2001, 62).

19. Although it is not my intention to interpret Sartre here, I do wish to distinguish the view I am calling Sartrean from other views that bill themselves as Sartrean. Matthew Boyle has argued that non-thetic self-consciousness is transparent to the world because it is entirely directed outwards, at the objects of consciousness. But he thinks that although the mental act of being intentionally directed at the world initially is not an object of consciousness, I am implicitly aware of it as the ‘manner’ in which I apprehend the object: ‘[the subject] shows an awareness, implicit but open to reflective articulation, of the specific kind of relation in which she stands to the object of her representation’ (Boyle, unpublished, 27). Richard Moran similarly argues that there is an unthematized awareness of being committed to the truth of what I think when I am non-thetically aware of my judgments (Moran 2001, 84). The transition from the outward-looking thought <p> to the inner fact, <I believe p>, according to Moran, would not be legitimate if I did not already implicitly see myself (as an empirical subject) playing a role in the determination of what I believe through the exercise of my rational agency (Moran 2012, 3). Thus, on both Boyle’s and Moran’s views, the I of non-thetic self-awareness – understood relationally, as my attitude taken towards an object – can become an object of thetic self-awareness (see also Longuenesse 2017, 47). This means that the self of non-thetic self-awareness is not fully transparent in Sartre’s sense, for the subject is (even if only implicitly) aware of the manner in which she looks outwards, towards the world. Since she implicitly sees the mode of apprehension, in addition to that which she sees through it, her mind cannot be said to be aware only of what is outside, but is also aware of something inner (a ‘manner of apprehending’ the object, or an exercise of rational agency). And it is this implicit awareness of something inner – not merely the awareness of something outer – that, on these views, licenses the explicit self-ascription of mental states in thetic self-consciousness. Boyle’s and Moran’s views are empirical variants of the Husserlian view that Sartre rejects, according to which the transcendental I is ‘so to speak, behind each consciousness, a necessary structure of consciousness whose rays (Ichstrahlen) would light upon each phenomenon presenting itself in the field of attention’ (Sartre TE, 37). As Sartre argues, this implicit awareness of the structure through which I am aware of the world would make consciousness ‘personal’: it would introduce a given character of the subject of awareness into her consciousness of the objective world. (In Husserl, this character is innately given, while in Boyle and Moran it is empirically given.) But this would mean that it destroys the objective character of what she is conscious of: the world would become the world as it appears to her, through her manner of apprehending it. In Sartre’s words, Husserl’s transcendental ego would ‘divide consciousness; it would slide into every consciousness like an opaque blade’, and would thus be ‘the death of consciousness’ (Sartre TE, 40).

20. It is important to distinguish these two senses of ‘identity’, because otherwise these two statements would be contradictory: ‘I am what I am not’ and ‘I am not what I am’. It does not help to insist that I am a contradiction, for which I is it that asserts itself to be a contradiction? We would have to posit a third I that both is identical with the posited ego and is not identical with it.

21. In this paper I am primarily concerned with the sameness of the transcendental and empirical I’s of theoretical cognition. As Kant explains in the introduction to the third Critique, theoretical cognition (and therefore theoretical philosophy) comprises not just perceptions, but also actions (KU 20:200–1, 200n.). So the empirical I of theoretical cognition is both an I that perceives and an I that acts. In practical cognition, peculiar difficulties arise with regard to the relation between the noumenal self (I of moral freedom) and the phenomenal self (the I that acts in nature), which I will set aside for my purposes here.

22. This section is heavily indebted to Stephen Engstrom’s reading of Kant’s Copernican turn in his article ‘Knowledge and its Object’ (Engstrom 2017).

23. For a different reading of this passage, according to which false judgments relate to an object insofar as they are false, see (Tolley 2011, 204).

24. See (Allison 2004, 87–88; Longuenesse 1998, 82).

25. The core case of judgment is assertion, which presents a thought as ‘actual (true)’ (A74/ B100). On problematic judgment, see ftn. 25.

26. Kant obviously acknowledges problematic judgments that do not involve an awareness of the (sufficient) grounds of the truth of the judgment – and thus are not assertoric. However, problematic judgments are not the same as merely problematic judgments, which strictly speaking are not judgments at all, but mere thoughts. Problematic judgments, such as opinions, still count as judgments because they have ‘connection with truth which, although it is not complete, is nevertheless more than an arbitrary invention’ (A822/B851). Problematic judgments can ‘grow up’ to become assertoric and apodeictic, i.e., can be ‘gradually incorporated into the understanding’ (A76/B101). By contrast, merely problematic judgments do not make a truth claim, but instead think of a thought as merely logically possible (i.e., involving no contradiction), and thus cannot become assertoric.

27. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify this.

28. Jennifer Hornsby has called this an ‘identity theory of truth’ (Hornsby 1997).

29. ‘Synthesis alone is that which properly collects the elements for cognitions and unifies them into a certain content’ (A77-8/B103). This can be understood as indicating that content is itself a holding together or synthesis of elements of cognition. This would require further elucidation, but it exceeds the limits of this paper to provide it here. See (Tolley 2011) for a Fregean reading of Kant that distinguishes content and act (force).

30. Notice that being in the sense of ‘reality’ or ‘existence’ (categorical being) is not the same as thinking, since I can think what is not real, or what does not exist. It is only being in the sense of truth (objective validity), which is ‘higher’ than categorical being, that is the same as thinking (judging).

31. To echo Aristotle: ‘When thought has become each thing … its condition is still one of potentiality, … and thought is then able to think itself’ (Aristotle DA, 429b6-9).

32. ‘Thinking, taken in itself, is merely the logical function and hence the sheer spontaneity of combining the manifold of a merely possible intuition’ (B428).

33. This metaphor of ‘filling’ empty forms with content can be misleading, since as discursive forms the logical functions of judging are not to be understood on the model of empty forms of intuition that get filled with matter. Kant distinguishes the way the transcendental I (or capacity for judgment, as an analytic-universal) contains all things from the way time contains all that happens (as a form of intuition), and from the way God contains all things (as a synthetic-universal) (KU §76). Crucially, there is a sense in which the function of judging itself is still empty, even when it has been filled with ‘transcendental content’, since it remains a capacity that can be employed in infinitely many other judgments. This emptiness of logical functions of judging (qua capacities) is a way of characterizing the finitude of the discursive intellect.

34. ‘Objective validity and necessary universal validity are reciprocal concepts’ (P 4:298; see also A104-5).

35. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helping me clarify this point. Notice that on this reading, thought is not initially grasped as the thinking of a being situated within an objective context. Contrary to the Evansian approach to transparency, thinking is not an occurrence in a subject located within an objective, spatio-temporal world, rather the spatio-temporal world, including the time-determinations of the schematism chapter, are internal to thought. Truth therefore will not be understood as truth-at-a-context, rather all contexts will be internal to truth. And most importantly for our topic, self-consciousness will not be consciousness indexed to an individual in the world, rather the singularity of the thinker will be internal to ‘consciousness in general’, the I of pure apperception.

36. I am borrowing from Sebastian Rödl’s language in his new book, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity (Rödl 2018, 1ff.).

37. In other words, as I argued in the last section, the transcendental I (reason) thinks only itself. An anonymous reviewer has expressed skepticism about my construal of reason or apperception here as ‘fundamentally generic or intersubjective rather than individual’. But if the primary truth-bearers are acts of judging (not act-independent contents), and if truths can be shared with others in communication, then surely self-conscious acts can be shared. This means that the I is shared, since the transcendental I is just the unity of such acts of judging. We should not dogmatically assume that reason and its exercises are powers or attributes attached to individual subjects. Instead, if the argument for the priority of transcendental over empirical apperception is valid, we should think of individual subjects as first made possible by the (universally shared) capacity for knowledge (i.e., by reason, or the transcendental I).

38. A species is only partially homogeneous with a genus. For instance, an ostrich is an animal, but it is more besides that. By contrast, all species are fully the same as the <I think>, since there isn’t anything more (anything additional, not contained in the <I think>) that they can be. All species determinations of genera are therefore entirely internal to <I think>. So although the <I think> is not a particular concept (or genus), but the form of all concepts in general, one can nevertheless think of particular concepts as specifications of it.

39. According to Allison, inner sense does not ‘relat[e] representations to objects’ but instead ‘makes these representations themselves into (subjective) objects, which it cognizes as the contents of mental states’ (Allison 2004, 278–9). This would make my inner states into objects given to me; but Kant appears to be saying that representations cannot be made into objects. We can only become conscious of them through the acts of representing outer objects.

40. Valaris emphasizes this aspect of inner sense in his interpretation, to which I am heavily indebted (Valaris 2008).

41. Contrary to Boyle, who restricts the ‘objects of inner sense’ to ‘sensations, appetites, and other kinds of mental “affection”’ (Boyle 2009, 160), I think it is clear that Kant thinks we can become empirically aware not just of our passive states, but also of our acts of thinking and judging: ‘I can say that I as intelligence and thinking subject cognize my self as an object that is thought, insofar as I am also given to myself in intuition’ (B155).

42. In inner sense, Kant says that ‘I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought, i.e., of the determining, and my existence always remains only sensibly determinable, i.e., determinable as the existence of an appearance’ (B158n.).

43. In Self-Consciousness, Sebastian Rödl argues that all knowledge is either ‘receptive knowledge’ or ‘spontaneous knowledge’, and that first-personal self-knowledge is spontaneous knowledge. But if my reading of self-affection is accurate, it is both receptive and first-personal or spontaneous (see, for instance Rödl 2007, 144f.).

44. Strictly speaking the transcendental I appears to be ‘nothing’ in a sense that precedes the ‘concept of an object in general’, which Kant says underlies the distinction between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’, and thus precedes both a table of something and the ‘table of nothing’ (A290/B346). As a logical sort of ‘nothing’, the transcendental I is the concept of the ‘original-synthetic unity of apperception’ that precedes the ‘objective unity of apperception’ and thus precedes the concept of an object (B131ff.). The ‘nothingness’ of the empirical I, like that of the logical I, also does not belong on the ‘table of nothing’ at A292/B348, because the empirical I, as an object of indeterminate empirical intuition, is not an object of determinate empirical intuition, and so does not fall under the ‘concept of an object in general’. I am thankful to Addison Ellis for pressing me to think about these different senses of ‘nothing’.

45. As I will clarify in the following, this is not to deny Valaris’s point that I can become aware of my particular perspective in space and time, and can thus situate myself in the world as an appearance alongside other appearances, through syntheses of the imagination in inner sense. I only mean to deny that this can be an exhaustive account of inner sense.

46. There is also a sense in which the object is the same as its being, since objects are homogeneous with the concepts they can be subsumed under (as argued above). But the sameness of the object and its concept in that sense is merely formal. Since this formal object is the same across different material objects (identity in difference), there is still a distinction between what is the same (formal object: being) and what is different (material objects: beings).

47. This contrasts with Longuenesse’s reading, according to which I refers to a thing that exists even at the level of transcendental apperception: ‘We just learn to use “I” to refer to ourselves insofar as, necessarily, in thinking we ascribe thinking to ourselves, the individual currently engaged in the act of thinking, and aware of thinking by perceiving the fact that we think’ (Longuenesse 2017, 89). See also Kitcher, who interprets empirical apperception as a kind of self-ascription of mental states (Kitcher 2011, 124).

48. This is an allusion to Heidegger’s analysis of the etymology of existence (‘ek-sistence’) as a standing-out (Heidegger 1998, 147f.).

49. I am grateful to Sebastian Rödl for pointing out to me the distinction between ‘particular’ and ‘singular’ in this context.

50. Valaris helpfully shows how even my spatial perspective is something that I become aware of in inner sense, since the juxtaposition of things in space is an act of imaginative synthesis (placing one thing alongside another) and hence available to empirical self-awareness (Valaris 2008, 8f.).

51. Kant indicates that these acts of self-determination presuppose an indeterminate intuition of my existence in the following passage: ‘The I think expresses the act of determining my existence. The existence is thereby already given, but the way in which I am to determine it, i.e., the manifold that I am to posit in myself as belonging to it, is not thereby given’ (B157n.).

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Alexandra M. Newton

Alexandra M. Newton received her PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where she wrote a dissertation on Kant on logical form. She has worked as a ‘wissenschaftliche Assistentin’ at the University of Leipzig in Germany and is currently employed as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interests include all topics discussed by Kant’s works, with an emphasis on the role of self-consciousness in logic, metaphysics, practical philosophy, and aesthetics