‘I do not cognize myself through being conscious of myself as thinking’: Self-knowledge and the irreducibility of self-objectification in Kant

ABSTRACT

The paper argues that Kant’s distinction between pure and empirical apperception cannot be interpreted as distinguishing two self-standing types of self-knowledge. For Kant, empirical and pure apperception need to co-operate to yield substantive self-knowledge. What makes Kant’s account interesting is his acknowledgment that there is a deep tension between the way I become conscious of myself as subject through pure apperception and the way I am given to myself as an object of inner sense. This tension remains problematic in the realm of theoretical cognition but can be put to work and made productive in terms of practical self-knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Kant
• apperception
• inner sense
• self-knowledge
• self-objectification
• practical knowledge
• intellectual intuition

Acknowledgments

I had the great opportunity to discuss versions of this paper at Ryerson University, the University of Leipzig, and the University of Essex. Many thanks to the participants for their perceptive comments. They have largely helped me clarify my tentative thoughts on the issues discussed above. Special thanks are due to Cristóbal Garibay-Petersen, Thomas Land, Dirk Setton, and Alexey Weißmüller for instructive comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

1. I will cite Kant’s first critique according to the pagination of the A and the B edition. Other writings by Kant will be cited according to volume and page number of the Akademieausgabe, with the exception of the Leningrad Fragment I and the Rostocker Handschrift cited according to the page number of the respective cited sources.

2. Our discussion in the following is complicated by a certain terminological issue: What Kant denies is that pure apperception amounts to Erkenntnis, which I will usually translate as cognition. Many English translations, including that of the first critique by Norman Kemp Smith, employed in the following, translate this term with knowledge. This translation has the disadvantage of not differentiating Erkenntnis from Wissen, but I do not think that this is misleading in all cases. As will become clear in the following, I take it that Kant’s denial that pure apperception is cognition of myself indeed implies that it does not in and of itself constitute self-knowledge in the sense the contemporary discussion is most interested in. There is, however, a certain distinct kind of formal self-knowledge that rests upon pure apperception, namely: the transcendental knowledge of what characterizes me as a thinker as such, developed in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Against this background, there is a sense in which Kant’s denial that pure apperception is cognition of oneself (Erkenntnis seiner selbst) leaves open the possibility that it still involves or discloses a certain type of pure formal self-knowledge. For an instructive attempt to clarify the terminological difference between Erkenntnis and Wissen in Kant see Watkins and Willaschek (2017).

3. Cf. Kant (1929) B138, B154.

4. Cf. Kant (1929, B68, transl. modified): ‘The consciousness of oneself (apperception) is the simple representation of the “I”, and if all that is manifold in the subject were thereby given self-actively, the inner intuition would be intellectual. In man this consciousness demands inner perception of the manifold which is antecedently given in the subject, and the mode in which this manifold is given in the mind without spontaneity must be entitled sensibility. If the faculty of coming to consciousness of oneself is to seek out (to apprehend) that which lies in the mind, it must affect the mind, and only in this way can it give rise to an intuition of itself. But the form of this intuition, which exists antecedently in the mind, determines, in the representation of time, the mode in which the manifold is together in the mind, since it then intuits itself not as it would represent itself if immediately self-active, but as it is affected by itself, and therefore as it appears to itself, not as it is.’

5. ‘[A]n object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently, it is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity and the fact that they are modes of cognition.’ (Kant 1929, B137, transl. modified).

6. This characterization of pure apperception is related to what Moran has called ‘the transparency condition’, but obviously makes a different use of the term ‘transparency’. On Moran’s account, the question whether I believe that p ‘is “transparent” to’ (Moran 2001, 66) the question whether p is to be believed. In order to answer whether I believe that p I thus do not have to observe myself and investigate whether I have this belief. Rather, I have to attend to the fact of the matter itself and deliberate whether p is true. In order to determine my self-knowledge in this regard, I have to look to the world, as it were. The point that Kant makes in the cited passage may help to explain how this becomes possible: pure apperception is what makes the mind transparent to the objects given in its cognition. What underlies transparency on Kant’s account is the specific agential self-relation of pure apperception. This comes close to Moran’s important suggestion that the transparency condition is not a simple given but an achievement: It depends on the deliberative stance which can be regarded as the ‘vehicle of transparency’ (Moran 2001, 63).

7. Cf. Powell (1990); Ameriks (2000); Keller (2001); Kitcher (2011); Longuenesse (2017).

8. The issue with Boyle’s account on this point is not that he contrasts the two types of self-knowledge only in terms of their contents – in terms of giving us knowledge of our thoughts and judgments on the one hand or our sensations on the other, knowledge ‘of what we do’ or ‘what we undergo’, knowledge of ourselves as spontaneous beings or as passive beings (Boyle 2009, 133, 157). He does take into account the mode of self-knowledge as well by characterizing the two forms in terms of ‘an active kind’ and ‘a passive kind’ of knowledge (Boyle 2009, 133; 134; 158). The issue is that he short-circuits active form and active content, passive form and passive content, effectively excluding the possibility of active self-consciousness of our sensations and emotions and passive self-awareness of our thoughts. However, as the passage from the Anthropology Boyle himself refers us to makes clear, inner sense does not only give us knowledge of our sensations, but also of our thoughts in so far as they affect us: ‘Inner sense’ is, as Kant writes, a consciousness of what the human being ‘undergoes, in so far as he is affected by the play of his own thoughts.’ (Kant 2006, 7:161, emphasis added). For a more elaborate critical assessment of Boyle on this point see Renz (2015, 589–90).

9. Letter to Marcus Herz, 26 May 1789; Kant (1999), 11:52, transl. modified. On the significance of this letter see Fisher (2017) and Villinger (2018, 121ff.). In a related discussion in one of his Lectures on Metaphysics, Kant (1997, 28:276) denies that we can think of animals as having inner sense at all. He there connects this lack of inner sense to a lack of consciousness of oneself, more precisely, lack of the concept of ‘I’. This just underlines the extent to which Kant’s notion of inner sense depends upon pure apperception. Compare Kant’s definition of inner sense as ‘the mode in which the mind is affected through its own activity (namely, through this positing of its representation), and so is affected by itself’ (Kant 1929, B67f., emphasis added). Whatever it is that remains, when we subtract pure apperception, it cannot be an inner sense of the sort we possess.

10. See Longuenesse (2017, 32) for a clear exposition of the way in which the various forms of empirical awareness of myself ‘depend on ... the activity in which alone, in Kant’s terms, I am “conscious of myself as subject”’, i.e. ‘the activity of thinking’.

11. For this way of elucidating the contrast cf. Engstrom’s distinction between ‘a one that essentially contains many (synthetic unity) and a one that is essentially contained in many (analytic unity).’ (Engstrom 2013, 39f.)

12. Cf. also the parallel rejection from the Aesthetic (Kant 1929, B68) already quoted in fn. 4.

13. As Henry Allison writes, pure apperception yields ‘the thought, though not the cognition, of the self’ (Allison 2004, 280), since ‘self-knowledge requires sensible intuition’ (Allison 2004, 282). Or, as Robert Pippin puts it: Even though it may seem ‘as if I must be able to know myself without the aid of sensation by pure reflection alone’, it defines Kant’s account of the human mind that he ‘must deny that this appearance is correct’ (Pippin 1982, 173). On the necessity to hold apart self-consciousness and self-knowledge at this point since the latter requires a certain form of self-objectification, see Keller (2001), 104, 106.

14. Kant is not completely consistent in terms of terminology here, since we find one passage in the first critique where he explicitly speaks about the human being cognizing itself through pure apperception – Kant (1998, B574, emphasis added): ‘Allein der Mensch, der die ganze Natur sonst lediglich nur durch Sinne kennt, erkennt sich selbst auch durch bloße Apperzeption, und zwar in Handlungen und inneren Bestimmungen, die er gar nicht zum Eindrucke der Sinne zählen kann, und ist sich selbst freilich eines Teils Phänomen, anderen Teils aber, nämlich in Ansehung gewisser Vermögen, ein bloß intelligibeler Gegenstand’.

15. Kant makes explicitly clear that existence is here not to be taken in the sense of the category of existence, but in a different, pre-categorical manner: ‘the existence here [referred to] is not a category’ (Kant 1929, B423FN). It is, of course, a difficult issue to determine whether Kant has succeeded in substantiating this sense of existence that we do not cognize but become aware of through awareness of our own activity. In this regard compare also Kant’s characterization of this awareness as ‘a feeling of an existence without the least concept’ (Kant 2002, 4:334). On the broader significance of such a ‘feeling’ for Kant’s conception of self-consciousness, see Emundts (2013, 70).

16. Regarding this understanding of I as an activity which characterizes especially the paralogisms of the B edition, see Horstmann (1993, 2010, 453).

17. Given that the ‘I think’ expresses the transcendental unity of apperception, we might suggest that I actually know quite a bit about myself by means of this pure apperceptive self-consciousness: I know myself to be engaged in an activity that is informed by the categories. This certainly is a merely formal kind of self-knowledge, but one with far-reaching consequences. It is important to note, however, that in order for the ‘I think’ to yield even this transcendental kind of self-knowledge we have to consider the act of pure apperception in relation to intuition, if Kant is right in suggesting that the categories are the elementary concepts of transcendental logic, a type of logic that does not abstract from cognition’s relation to its object.

18. Since Kant holds that the combination of the understanding itself can become intuitable in inner sense, it seems obvious that he assumes that thoughts themselves can affect us through inner sense. Cf. again the passage from the Anthropology, already mentioned in fn. 8 where Kant explicitly describes a ‘play of thoughts’ as the content of inner sense (Kant 2006, 7:161, emphasis added). Compare also Kant’s famous reflection on the question whether we can experience thinking. In this reflection, he imagines a case in which we think of a square a priori and considers whether this amounts to an experience. Neither the thought itself nor my consciousness of having this thought is in itself something empirical, he argues. However, this thought at the same time can produce (‘hervorbringen’) a product of experience or a determination of our mind (‘Gemüt’) that can be observed ‘insofar it is affected by the capacity of thought’ (‘sofern es nämlich durch das Denkungsvermögen afficiert wird’) (Kant 1928, No. 5661, 18:319). On the passive knowledge of our thoughts in Kant, see also Renz (2015).

19. ‘Now here the “I” appears to us to be double (which would be contradictory): 1) the “I” as subject of thinking (in logic), which means pure apperception (the merely reflecting “I”), and of which there is nothing more to say except that it is a very simple idea; 2) the “I” as object of perception, therefore of inner sense, which contains a manifold of determinations that make an inner experience possible.’ (Kant 2006, 7:134FN). Compare the related opposition of the self as subject and the self as an object in the Prize Essay on the progress of metaphysics: ‘That I am conscious of myself is a thought that already contains a twofold self, the self as subject and the self as object. How it should be possible that I, who think, can be an object (of intuition) to myself, and thus distinguish myself from myself, is absolutely impossible to explain, although it is an undoubted fact; it demonstrates, however, a power so far superior to all sensory intuition, that as ground of the possibility of an understanding it has as its consequence a total separation from the beasts, to whom we have no reason to attribute the power to say “I” to oneself, and looks out upon an infinity of self-made representations and concepts. We are not, however, referring thereby to a dual personality; only the self that thinks and intuits is the person, whereas the self of the object that is intuited by me is, like other objects outside me, the thing.’ (Kant 2002a, 20:270).

20. Cf. Kant (2006, 7:161); Kant (1996a, 4:451).

21. On the problem of negotiating these two perspectives on the self, see Ginsborg (2013, 119). Ginsborg suggests that, in the final analysis, we should become able to identify the I that thinks with a particular human being in space and time but emphasizes that on Kant’s account there is a deep difficulty standing in the way of this identification: Knowledge of myself as an object seems ‘on the face of it to be incompatible with understanding myself as a thinking subject, endowed with the spontaneity characteristic of the I that thinks.’

22. In a reflection on inner sense, Kant makes the related point that through inner sense we only cognize ourselves as being affected, but we do not directly become accessible to ourselves as the ones affecting ourselves: ‘In the case of inner experience ... I affect myself insofar as I bring the representations of outer sense into an empirical consciousness of my condition. Thereby I cognize myself but only insofar as I am affected by myself, whereby I am not so much appearance to myself as I affect myself through representations of outer sense …, for that is spontaneity, rather insofar as I am affected by myself, for that is receptivity.’ (Kant 2005, 365, emphasis added, translation modified).

23. Cf. Kant (2006), 7:134FN: ‘The human “I” is indeed twofold according to form (manner of representation), but not according to matter (content).’ See also the Rostocker Handschrift of Kant’s Anthropology in which he notes that there is in fact ‘not a double I’, but merely a ‘double consciousness of the I’ (Kant 1977, 427).

24. Cf. Kant (1929, B138f., emphasis added): ‘The synthetic unity of consciousness is, therefore, an objective condition of all knowledge… This principle is not, however, to be taken as applying to every possible understanding, but only to that understanding through whose pure apperception, in the representation “I am”, nothing manifold is given. An understanding which through its self-consciousness could supply to itself the manifold of intuition an understanding, that is to say, through whose representation the objects of the representation should at the same time exist would not require, for the unity of consciousness, a special act of synthesis of the manifold. For the human understanding, however, which thinks only, and does not intuit, that act is necessary. It is indeed the first principle of the human understanding, and is so indispensable to it that we cannot form the least conception of any other possible understanding, either of such as is itself intuitive or of any that may possess an underlying mode of sensible intuition which is different in kind from that in space and time.’

25. § 5 of Fichte’s second introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre makes it clear that he uses the term intellectual intuition in order to give a modified account of what Kant calls ‘pure apperception’: ‘This intuiting of himself that is required of the philosopher, in performing the act whereby the self arises for him, I refer to as intellectual intuition. It is the immediate consciousness that I act, and what I enact: it is that whereby I know something because I do it… Everyone, to be sure, can be shown, in his own admitted experience, that this intellectual intuition occurs at every moment of his consciousness. I cannot take a step, move hand or foot, without an intellectual intuition of my self-consciousness in these acts; only so do I know that I do it, only so do I distinguish my action, and myself therein, from the object of action before me. Whosoever ascribes an activity to himself, appeals to this intuition.’ (Fichte 1982, 38) Compare also his Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo: 'The I is by no means a subject; instead it is a subject-object… We must possess some knowledge of this ultimate ground, for we are able to talk about it. We obtain this knowledge through immediate intuition… Pure intuition of the I as a subject-object is therefore possible. Since pure intuition of this sort contains no sensible content, the proper name for it is intellectual intuition. Kant rejected intellectual intuition ... Kant too has such intuition but he did not reflect upon it.’ (Fichte 1992, 114–15)

26. Cf. Kant (1996a, 4:452, 4:458); Kant (1996, 5:31).

27. Fichte himself has pointed out that the type of intellectual intuition he is aiming at has its true place in practical cognition: ‘The intellectual intuition alluded to in the Science of Knowledge refers, not to existence at all, but rather to action, and simply finds no mention in Kant (unless, perhaps, under the title of pure apperception). Yet it is nonetheless possible to point out also in the Kantian system the precise point at which it should have been mentioned. Since Kant, we have all heard, surely, of the categorical imperative? Now what sort of consciousness is that? Kant forgot to ask himself this question, since he nowhere dealt with the foundation of all philosophy, but treated in the Critique of Pure Reason only of its theoretical aspect, in which the categorical imperative could make no appearance; and in the Critique of Practical Reason, only of its practical side, in which the concern was solely with content, and questions about the type of consciousness involved could not arise.’ (Fichte 1982, §6, 46)

28. For these ways of putting the problem cf. Ginsborg (2013: ‘Appearance of Spontaneity’); Cassam (1997, 8: ‘awareness of oneself qua subject as a physical object among physical objects’), and following Cassam, Longuenesse (2006).

29. Cf. Kant’s distinction of theoretical and practical cognition from the first critique: Whereas theoretical cognition relates to its object by merely determining it and its concept, practical cognition also ‘makes it actual’ (Kant 1929, Bx).

30. Respect is a peculiar feeling that is ‘self-wrought by means of a rational concept’ (Kant 1996a, 4:402), ‘produced solely by reason’ (Kant 1996, 5:76), ‘produced by an intellectual ground’ (Kant 1996, 5:74) and to be distinguished from any ‘feeling of pleasure based on the inner sense’ (Kant 1996, 5:80). In Khurana (2017), § 42, 207ff. I argue that in order to make sense of respect as a feeling, and not just as an intellectual estimation, we have to reconsider the way in which we are given to ourselves by means of what Kant’s third critique calls ‘feeling of life’.

31. Note that Kant understands being under obligation as a mode of actualizing this self-distinction: ‘if we think of ourselves as put under obligation we regard ourselves as belonging to the world of sense and yet at the same time to the world of understanding’ (Kant 1996a, 4:453).

32. I think that Hegel’s formula of ‘the free will which wills the free will’ describes the form of a practical self-consciousness that approaches this desideratum. For a reconstruction of this formula as an elaboration of the self-consciousness of desire see Khurana (2018).

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Thomas Khurana

Thomas Khurana is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Essex and Heisenberg Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. Previously, he has taught Philosophy at the University of Potsdam, Goethe-University Frankfurt a.M., and the University of Leipzig. He was Visiting Heuss Lecturer at the New School for Social Research and a Humboldt Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Selected publications: Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017); ‘The Self-Determination of Force: Desire and Practical Self-Consciousness in Kant and Hegel’, International Yearbook of German Idealism 13/2015: 179–204; ‘Politics of Second Nature. On the Democratic Dimension of Ethical Life’, in Philosophie der Republik, eds. P. Stekeler-Weithofer, B. Zabel (Tübingen: Mohr, 2018).