Based in New York City, Ilario Colli is an author, philosopher and former classical music journalist. He has been called “Australia’s leading classical music critic” and his first published book, In Art as in Life, has been described as “a major achievement for any writer.”his achievements also include a groundbreaking essay on the sublime and the founding of a new art movement, ‘Sublimism’.

The Kantian Self

The Kantian Self

Ilario Colli
Enlightenment, Philosophy, Selfhood

ACADEMIC PAPER

In the following paper, I explore notions of selfhood implicit and explicit in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, particularly the transcendental impasse and the impossibility of cognising a unity to the empirical self.

Introduction

What is the self? Is it constructed or discovered? Does it lie within us, innate and preformed, waiting for us simply to coax it out from its subconscious hiding place? Or does it require our continued active creative efforts to form, hold together and maintain? Is there a unity to one’s selfhood, or is such a unity a chimera? Can there be said to be such a thing as a self at all? Of all Enlightenment-era philosophers who tackled these questions, it is perhaps Kant who gave the most startling and original responses. In his Critique of Pure Reason, he makes an argument for selfhood, one spanning the first and second editions of both the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding and the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, which is both a refutation and a development of Descartes, and likewise both a concurrence with Hume’s thought and its correction. It will be the task of this paper to outline the main tenets of Kant’s conception of selfhood, situate it as response to both Hume and Descartes, and finally critique Kant’s self on the basis of general considerations of selfhood transcending the thought of even his two afore-mentioned predecessors.

 

Descartes’ cogito, or the unity of the ‘I think’

 I will begin my investigations into the historical origins of Kant’s conception of selfhood, necessarily, with Descartes. Though never explicitly referred to by that name in either his Discourse or the Meditations, selfhood in Descartes is a manifestly important, if admittedly latent idea. The ‘I think’ is the basic metaphysical foundation upon which Descartes constructs his notion of selfhood. Starting from an epistemological ground-zero, the ‘self’ builds itself up into an edifice sturdy enough to replace the crumbling, ancient palaces of scholastic theology. For Descartes, the self is, in essence, a thinking thing, a res cogitans[1]. This has several implications. Firstly, the self is – at least in part – epistemic. That is, we are who we are in virtue of how we understand the world, how it is cognised by us. Secondly, while constructed in its details by a slow piecing-together of knowledge from a position of doubt, the self enjoys a basic metaphysical premise as its starting point: the premise of unity conferred by the act of thinking. Our thoughts are always present. We cannot exist in any other form than by means of them, than as thinking things. Since our thoughts are always present, they must be what bind us together. I am a unity, and my selfhood is the unity I am as a metaphysically thinking thing that constructs itself epistemically. So, in response to the question, “Is the self discovered or constructed?”, Descartes may well have responded, “both”: one discovers an underlying self once one has pruned away all preconceived illusions of the world – the self of the ‘I think’ – but at the same time, one is enjoined to build anew, to regenerate an authentic version of the self from axiomatic first principles. For now, I will limit myself to that simple assertion, and save further elaborative discursions for later. Now onto Hume.

 

Hume’s ‘theatre of perceptions’, or the illusion of the self

 In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume forcefully – if implicitly – rails against the cogito. Far from a unity, metaphysical or otherwise, the self is a hodge-podge of free-floating representations in which no idea is bound to any other in any truly meaningful way. Our mind is but a stage upon which perceptions appear and disappear, emerging from one wing and shuffling off into the other, and never dwelling on it for any longer than they need to[2]. In this ‘theatre of the mind,’ our perceptions belong neither to each other, nor to us, the individuals receiving them. There is no director sitting in the stalls, coordinating the action, and no pre-written script by means of which a coherent narrative can be enacted. The combination of our perceptions in our consciousness is the result, not of predetermined unity, but of perfunctory habit, of our irresistible impulse to ‘pool together’ those haphazard cognitions which we just happen to register in temporal succession. The self, thus considered, is an illusion. The ‘I think’ can no better bundle up my thoughts than a grasping hand can gather together particles of air. If metaphysics is a ‘fruitless vanity’, as Hume claimed, and knowledge is plagued by the inherent limitations of the synthetic a posteriori, there can be no metaphysical foundation for the self, nor for that matter an epistemological one. Hume’s answer to Descartes’ optimism of the self, therefore, would likely be unequivocally sobering: there is no self to speak of, neither one that is discovered, nor one that can be constructed. Any attempt to locate the first is a futile metaphysical undertaking, and any enterprise of piecing together the latter using rootless impressions and perceptions is likewise doomed to fail.

Kant’s unity of apperception and the transcendental impasse

Hume’s thought proved critically influential for Kant on a number of different fronts, including – at least indirectly – on his conception of selfhood. Roused from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ by Hume’s Treatise, Kant would pen what is arguably the most influential work in Western philosophy, his Critique of Pure Reason. In addition to a response to Hume, the Critique is, at the same time, a grappling with Cartesian notions of the self. Kant’s stance on selfhood, which I will analyse more technically in following sections, can for now be summarised as follows: there is a unity to our consciousness – in this sense, Descartes was right and Hume, wrong – but the unity is not exactly as Descartes would have had it. With its conferral, upon the manifold of intuitions, of a synthesis through a prior combination, the self is a transcendental unity of apperception, a unity which is itself the pre-condition of the structures that constitute it. But this transcendental unity does not, alas, translate into an empirical one. In this sense, Hume was right and Descartes, wrong. In other words, though we have in-built concepts and intuitions, hardware by means of which we make sense of the external world – an ‘I think’, of sorts, or the director missing from Hume’s hapless theatre – these structures fail us as soon as we attempt to use them to cognise, as their object, the self by which they are in fact generated. We can, in this sense, make no more certain an affirmation of the identity of our ‘self’ than we can of anything else in the noumenal world, which for Kant is largely unknowable. We can at most affirm of the self that it exists, but not in which form.

  The implications of Kant’s – shall we say – twofold conception of the self are nuanced. The self is, at once, pre-formed – that is, ‘there’ in a sense that would at first suggest a ‘unearthability’ reminiscent of Descartes – but also unformable; it is an imminently discoverable self which is, at the same time, beyond our ability to uncover. If we attempt to unearth it in the manner of Descartes, we find that we can do no more than clutch at discrepant and disenfranchised representations whose unity – a unity upon which, by the way, they essentially depend – is beyond our grasp to mentally seize although we directly benefit from its synthesising properties. When plunging into the depths of the self, Kant finds, not the bare marrow of the ‘cogito’, but a noumenal impasse. The last cognition of the self is suddenly found to have no more representations to derive its empirical self-conceptualisations from, and it falls miserably short of the full attainment of its own truth.

  And yet to assert that, since Kant believes that knowledge of the self is empirically unattainable, he would therefrom conclude that it forms a disunity in the full Humean sense would be equally false – this has, to an extent, already been explained. The Kantian unity of the self operates transcendentally, not empirically. It is situated beyond our cognitive reach, but it is there. It is a noumenal certainty, albeit a muddy one. One can no more understand its inherent truth than one can know the in-itself nature of a chair, a bird, or any other thing in objective reality, but one can nonetheless rest assured that it exists. In this sense, one might argue that the arguments Kant provides against idealism in the Critique apply also to the self. Perhaps despite himself, Kant is here rather more like Descartes than might at first appear. “I think therefore I am” becomes, in Kant’s hands, “I have basic representations of myself which must correspond to a transcendental unity, therefore I am”. The thing-in-itself, here, is the transcendental unity, and our empirical understanding of it by means of the concepts which inhabit and constitute it, is no more than a clutching at the appearances the thing-in-itself generates. Kant’s ontological justification of the self is a modified cogito: it is the last representation of the inner appearance of one’s self before one’s understanding falls into oblivion, before it hits the transcendental impasse.

 

Deductions A and B: Kant’s conception of the transcendental self

I have thus far made general comments about Kant’s conception of selfhood without providing, in support of them, the technical elaborations Kant himself puts forth in the Critique. It is now time to correct this omission. The main Kantian ideas of selfhood I explored in the previous section are chiefly two in number. The first is the unity of the transcendental self, and the second is the disunity of its empirical counterpart. I shall now attempt to locate both in the pages of the Critique of Pure Reason itself: the first, in the section of the Critique called the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding; the second, in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

In the A Deduction, or the Deduction of the first edition of the Critique, the transcendental unity of apperception is given several definitions, each new one of which is a subtlely nuanced reiteration of the last. The richest and most elaborate of these are arguably to be found in A103-8, where Kant rhapsodises on the notion of selfhood, or more precisely, on the idea of a unity of consciousness. Here, he variously defines the transcendental unity of apperception as the transcendental condition for the unity of consciousness, and as the transcendental ground for the synthesis of the manifold of intuitions into a unity (A106-7)[3]. The synthesis of the manifold of intuitions, which may at first appear to be condition enough for the unity of one’s consciousness, must itself have an a priori ground on which to rest in order for it to operate as a unifying, combinatorial process. “Every necessity,” Kant argues, “has a transcendental condition as its ground” (A106), and the synthesis of the manifold, which operates according to rules mandated by the pure concepts of the understanding, can be no exception. If it is to confer a synthesis upon the manifold – a universal and necessary, that is, a priori function – then it itself must have a transcendental ground to rest on by means of which it finds its own necessary condition. This universal and necessary condition is the transcendental apperception. It is the non plus ultra of consciousness, that innermost part of the psyche in which Nietzsche might have stumbled upon his “minotaur of conscience”[4]; or, perhaps more precisely, that deep and ubiquitous principle of the self within whose all-encompassing embrace all cognitive and intuitive operations of the mind unfold.

It is evident that this transcendental unity lies distinct, in Kant’s system, from any single intuition or group of them. So, where Hume attempts to locate the self in an interconnecting web of perceptions and, failing to do so, dismisses the possibility of a united self altogether, Kant looks beyond the web to its transcendental spinner, to that which, in other words, synthesises the intuitions while, at the same time, preceding them. It is, in fact this “unity of consciousness that precedes all data of the intuitions” that makes all “representations of objects possible” as well as “all cognitions” and “all unity among them” (A107). The transcendental unity is thus not a bundle of intuitions – it is, in fact, no intuition at all. It is the ground of the bundling up of the intuitions into a synthesis.

It is, in a sense, unusual and, in another, expected, that Kant should describe the transcendental apperception as “pure, original, unchanging consciousness” (A107); expected, because, as an a priori condition, it is necessary and universal, and therefore automatically suggestive of a certain ‘unchangeability’ or ‘fixedness’; unusual, because Kant uses the term ‘consciousness’ to describe something which, because of its transcendental location, lies beyond the reach of one’s unencumbered awareness, and therefore cannot be consciousness but rather the ground for it, and must surely be teased out by reason rather than directly ‘gazed at’ with one’s inner eye. Nonetheless, it is this ‘unchanging consciousness’ that Kant lays at the foundation of his conception of the transcendental self and, in so doing, provides, both a technical justification for Descartes’ rather more intuitive unity of the ‘I think’, while at the same time creating a communal resting place for Hume’s rootless, free-floating perceptions. We are able to be conscious a priori of the “thoroughgoing identity of ourselves” on account of the unity conferred on our manifold representations by the transcendental principle (116). The key word here is a priori, for without it, Kant would, in light of the ruthless attack on the possibility of the empirical self he will make in the Paralogisms, contradict himself. The ‘consciousness’ – and again it might be argued Kant is using the term rather loosely – of one’s self as an identity, as a unity, is here a priori rather than empirical. One knows oneself as an ‘identity’, not because one is able to gather together the perceptions dancing on Hume’s stage and bundle them up together, but rather because the theatre in which the stage is situated is itself a sturdy one. There is, then, perhaps not a director managing the cast, but rather an engineer who has rendered the edifice watertight and earthquake proof, so that the cast can perform without the structure imploding around them, but all the while executing a choreography which, in the end, doesn’t necessarily appear to be altogether aesthetically uniform or stylistically coherent. This ‘stylistic incoherence’, as we shall see when we examine the Paralogisms, forms the essence of Kant’s critique of the empirical self.

 In the B Deduction, or the Deduction of the Second Edition of the Critique, Kant both reformulates the arguments he sets forth in the A, and adds several important modifications. Chief among these latter is the idea of the comprehension of the “representation of the identity of the consciousness in [our] representations” (B133), or the idea that a certain notion of one’s self as an identifiable unity is intuitable in the perceptions themselves, by virtue of their having been combined in one’s consciousness. The reasoning here is rather subtle, and I believe that, at first glance, it may be mistakenly confused for an argument for the tangibility of an empirical self, which Kant resolutely refutes in the Paralogisms. A possible way to sidestep what would, if conceded, be a glaring and unconscionable inconsistency in Kant’s philosophy of the self, is to argue that, here, Kant is yet again referring to the transcendental self, even though he is arguing for its evidence in our representations. The transcendental self, which is, at once, working constantly in the background to confer unity of consciousness, and also constitutive of that very unity, can, by virtue of its having produced synthesised representations of the world in my mind, be inferred as indirectly manifested in these, and understood therefore as their necessary precondition. So our representations are thus twofold; they are like so many waves flowing on from that transcendental well-spring that is their source, and the source can be inferred to exist from the ripples we feel around us, even though it itself cannot be bathed in or drunk from, since it is blocked from us by an impassable cave-wall of consciousness. The transcendental identity here indicated is thus alluded to but never showcased directly. In the section of the Critique called Refutation of Idealism, he adds an equally nuanced argument that may be seen to reinforce this assertion: “The consciousness of myself in the representation ‘I’ is no intuition at all, but a merely intellectual representation of the self-activity of a thinking subject” (B278). Here, Kant may effectively be saying that, unlike regular sense-intuitions one might have of external objects, the inner perceptions of the self are, not directly correspondent to, but rather indirect manifestations of the thing to which they allude: an underlying transcendental unity. Again, the argument is the same: my representations point toward an all-encompassing self which they never look upon directly, as one might a vase or a towel, say.

 

Paralogisms A and B: Kant’s critique of the empirical self

It is to the impossibility of an empirical unity of the self that we shall now finally turn. Kant’s attack on the notion of the unity of the empirical self is to be found mainly in that section of the Critique called the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, even though, as we have seen in the previous section, they were pre-empted, to a degree, at least, in the Deductions. In the Paralogisms – both A and B[5] – Kant explicitly assorts these criticisms into four types of paralogisms that correspond to the four groups of the pure concepts of understanding found in the Transcendental Analytic. Specifically, he tackles the ideas of “immateriality”, “incorruptibility”, “personality”, and “immortality” (A344-5/B402-3). Of these, the critique of personality found in the third Paralogism is the most pertinent to the notion of selfhood, and those found in the first and second Paralogism concerning substantiality and simplicity are also relevant, so they shall be also covered. That of the fourth Paralogism shall, for its lack of immediate relevance to the topic at hand, be accordingly left out.

 At the beginning of the B Paralogisms, Kant lays out four ‘general remarks’ to help orient his reader as to the direction his critique of the empirical self will take (B406). The first three, as I’ve said, are of particular use to us, and, upon a close reading of them, it shall become clear that they are, all three, but re-iterations of the following, broadly worded argument: that it lies beyond the reach of one’s reason to affirm the identity of the empirical self, irresistible though it may be for it to attempt to do so. This is, by the way, what a paralogism is: a ‘sophistry of pure reason itself’ (A337/B387); that is, a conclusion that the mind is naturally compelled to arrive at by virtue of how it is structured, though it lack the presuppositional grounds for it. My mind is beset by such sophistical impediments when it attempts to grasp the nature of my ‘self’, and beset specifically in the following ways that are relevant to our topic: firstly, it seeks an affirmation of my ‘self’ as a ‘self-subsisting being’ which demands, as evidence for it, more data than I will ever encounter anywhere in my thinking (B406-7); secondly, it is compelled to prove the proposition, ‘my I is a simple substance’, which, since it is synthetic proposition, could not be demonstrated any other way than through intuitions, which likewise lie outside of myself and my thinking (B408); thirdly and most importantly, my mind, whose natural impulse is to identify my individual personality, could not observe it in any other way than as an object through an act of intuition, that is, in the act of self-observation, and yet, as we have seen, this is not possible (B409); the “consciousness of the identity of its own substance as a thinking being in all changes of state” (B409) is given as an object of the intuitions, which since they are beyond the reach of our thinking, remain inaccessible to our understanding, and render any direct cognition of it an impossibility.

 From this can clearly be inferred a further elaborated schematic argument for the impossibility of the united empirical self: that, since reason would rely, for an affirmation of the self, on intuitions that lie beyond its reach, “it can provide no standing or abiding self in this stream of inner appearances” (A107). Kant himself draws the various strands of his argument together with devastating clarity at the end of the B Paralogisms, in a passage so forceful that it merits a reproduction in full:

From all this one sees that rational psychology has its origin in a mere misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories, is here taken for an intuition of the subject as an object, and the category of substance is applied to it. But this unity is only the unity of thinking, through which no object is given; and thus the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied to it, and hence this subject cannot be cognized at all. (B421-2)

 So we mistakenly apply, to the intuition of the subject, ‘I’ as an object, the unity of consciousness that grounds the categories, and is therefore unable to confer upon the intuition the unity it desires to. In this sense, we see a remarkable affinity with Hume, and we can therefore finally justify, on a technical level, that sceptical assertion which we have hitherto numerous times outlined only naively: that the dancing perceptions on Hume’s stage, though ensconced within a structurally unbreakable theatre that could withstand any hurricane, have little to no regard for each other, dancing as they do to the sound of their own individual orchestras, while their director, who might as well be on sabbatical, has not the expertise nor even the inclination to choreograph them coherently. Here, Descartes’ cogito runs disastrously aground. How can there be a unity to the res cogitans, the thinking thing, if such a unity would depend on a cogito whose very powers fall short of its ambitions? The ‘I think’, stretched to its limit, falls upon a transcendental impasse beyond which it cannot venture, and, along its journey to these depths, it has come across misleading guideposts that, at most, point toward the unity it yearns to seize without ever really being able to clearly and unequivocally reveal it. This ill-fated story of the soul on its doomed mission for self-knowledge is the tragedy of the Kantian self in a nutshell.

General musings, by way of conclusion, on Kant’s conception of the self

 It is easy to imagine how Kant’s transcendental impasse may prove a hard pill to swallow for the philosopher of the mind, who, desperate for the complete unity Kant seems to initially promise but then never delivers, is left unsated by his grim conclusions. It is likewise not hard to understand why various philosophers after Kant constructed elaborate philosophical edifices, at least in part, in order to overcome its limitations. Hegel’s theory of recognition[6] as well as, potentially, Husserl’s concept of ‘meshing’[7] and Heidegger’s grounding of the self in Dasein[8] may convincingly be argued to be responses to the inherent limitation of the Kantian self who, though he clutch and clasp, can never reach outside himself in order to attain self-knowledge.  Well-argued though it may be, Kant’s transcendental idealism, with its radical shying away from a grasping of the noumenal world, is such that it is hard indeed to not see it as a half-philosophy, a philosophy, in other words, that separates the world in two, and focuses obsessively, if not pathologically only on one aspect of it and mystifyingly leaves the other almost completely neglected. The solipsism it indubitably entails weighs upon the sensitive reader as might an existential horror. The subject is isolated, not only form the external world, which it can affirm in no more than the broadest terms – that it exists, simply – but also, and perhaps most nightmarishly, from itself, the only mechanism it, orphaned as it is from everything else, has left to use as its compass. The anguish conferred by this incarceration, by this eternal, internal exile from the world, by this necessary retreat into a transcendental hall of mirrors, is palpable and incontestable. However beautifully architected Kant’s grand and glorious palace of the mind is, it is a palace that is, at the same time, a fortress, an impenetrable edifice whose moat walls are thick and strong, and whose towers soar high into a dark night sky where the air is foggy and rarefied. The self, who sits alone in the tallest of these dark towers, sees not what lies outside of it, and since she stands apart even from the rest of the structure, she is able to understand only one piece of its architecture at a time, and never the whole of it at once. Seen in this way, one might even be forgiven for wanting to settle for Hume’s – by comparison – rather naïf scepticism, or retreat desperately back into the certainty of Descartes’ equally ‘basic’ cogito.

 And yet, dissatisfying and even horrifying though it may be, Kant’s ‘impasse of selfhood’ is a force to be reckoned with, notoriously difficult to argue away with the same force with which its author puts it forth, and even philosophers who have since contested it have, more often than not, been forced to do so in terms rather more descriptive than rational. It is, at once, awe-inspiring and frustrating that a thinker could have built a philosophical system that so minutely details the constitution of the human mind while at the same time dismissing all possibility of knowing it truly. How these two seemingly unreconcilable propositions could be laid side by side by the same philosopher and somehow made to agree with each other, is testament to the genius of the man behind this very operation, and, however fallacious the net result may intuitively appear to be, it remains difficult to contend with, if contending with it entails, as I believe it does, a descent into the same extreme depths of analysis into which Kant himself plunges in order to execute it successfully.

Bibliography

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Hegel, Georg W. The System of Science: First Part of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Terry

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Hume, David. A Treatise on Human Nature. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985

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Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014

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Critique of the Traditional Morality and the Philosophy of the Past. e-artnow. Kindle Edition.


[1] Meditations, p. 18

[2] Pp. 199-200

[3] “A transcendental ground must therefore be found for the unity of the consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of all our intuitions, hence also of the concepts of objects in general, consequently also of all objects of experience, without which it would be impossible to think of any object for our intuitions; for the latter is nothing more than the something for which the concept expresses such a necessity of synthesis. Now this original and transcendental condition is nothing other than the transcendental apperception.”

[4] Beyond Good and Evil, 29: “It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience.”

[5] That is, as found in the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason

[6] Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶178

[7] Ideas I, p. 68

[8] BT, p. 149

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