Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 1 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 Kant and the Philosophy of Mind: Perception, Reason, and the Self Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson Print publication date: 2017 Print ISBN-13: 9780198724957 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198724957.001.0001 Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Andrew Chignell DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198724957.003.0008 Abstract and Keywords Kant seems to think of our own mental states or representations as the primary objects of inner sense. But does he think that these states also inhere in something? And, if so, is that something an empirical substance that is also cognized in inner sense? This chapter provides textual and philosophical grounds for thinking that, although Kant may agree with Hume that the self is not 'given' in inner sense exactly, he does think of the self as cognized through inner sense. It is also argued that he both does and ought to regard this self as an empirical substance in which our changing representations inhere. In the second part of the chapter it is suggested that, if this is correct, it poses a significant problem for most of the leading interpretations of Kant's anti-sceptical argument in the Refutation of Idealism. Keywords: Kant, inner sense, self, self-knowledge, scepticism, selfconsciousness, introspection, idealism University Press Scholarship Online Oxford Scholarship Online Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 2 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 8.1. Introduction The doctrine of inner sense is clearly one of the more mysterious components of Kant's philosophy of mind. Readers of the first Critique have been perplexed by basic interpretive questions about whether inner sense involves a special, reflexive, introspective act, about why time is the immediate 'form' of inner sense and only the 'mediate' form of outer sense, about what it means to say that inner sense has 'no manifold of its own', and about whether inner sense really involves 'double affection'.1 In this paper, I'll bracket most of these questions about the structure of inner sense in order to focus on a somewhat simpler question about its objects. It is clear that whatever the structure of inner sense is, for Kant, its primary objects are mental states or 'representations' (Vorstellungen). It is also clear that inner sense provides awareness of these states as ordered in time and thus as part of the empirical world of 'appearances' (Erscheinungen). This means, in turn, that mental states are able to be cognized, that they are governed in some way by the pure principles and the natural laws, and that they have a very different character when considered as things-in-themselves. The central question of this paper is not even about these states that are objects of inner sense, however, but rather about whether they should be conceived as states of something else. And, if so, is that something else also able to be cognized through inner sense? The natural candidate for the thing in which mental representations inhere, of course, is the self or the mind. Descartes famously argued in the second Meditation that (p. 139) because we inwardly 'perceive' various thoughts (doubts, dreams, and so on), we can immediately infer that a 'thing that thinks' exists (1983 [1647]: VII:28). The inference here seems (to many readers, at least) to presuppose a substance-attribute ontology-a theory according to which, necessarily, any mode or attribute ultimately inheres in a substance. Thus the result of the cogito argument, according to Descartes, is not just that there is thinking, but that there is a thinking thing and-behold!-that this thinking thing is a substance. Descartes goes further still and claims that the Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 3 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 thinking substance is also himself. Naturally, each of these inferences is controversial. Hume famously denies the whole picture. In the Treatise he points out that 'when I turn my reflexion on myself' I am aware only of a series of mental states (ideas, impressions) which vary in terms of their content and vivacity. I have no impression of an abiding self-substance in which these states inhere. Hume also maintains that there is no empiricistfriendly argument for a substance-attribute ontology or for Berkeley's assumption that we have a 'notion' if not an impression of the substantial self. He even suggests that the very idea of substance is 'unintelligible', since it doesn't have a suitable empiricist pedigree. Hume's conclusion from all this is that there is no warrant for the inference from introspective awareness of mental states to the conclusion that there is some underlying substance in which these states inhere. His own approach-which also admits of a number of interpretations-is to hew the empiricist line and refuse to commit to the existence of anything of which we have no impression. The result is often referred to as the 'bundle theory of the self': it says that there is no self over and above the 'bundle' of impressions and ideas or, perhaps equivalently, ''tis the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self'.2 Is Kant more of a Cartesian or more of a Humean regarding the metaphysics and epistemology of the self? That too is a big question, but here again I want to limit our inquiry by focusing on whether something over and above a series of mental representations is cognized through inner sense. More specifically, do we have inner awareness of an empirical substance-self in which these states inhere? And, if not, is there some other way to defend the claim that we cognize the self through inner sense? One advantage of restricting our focus in this way is that we can set aside difficult questions regarding the doctrine of 'transcendental apperception'-i.e. the doctrine according to which we are able to attach an 'I think' or 'logical I' to any of the mental states of which we are first-personally aware (A349; B157–8; B277ff.; B422–3n). Kant clearly endorses this, but he also views the apperceiving subject as 'systematically elusive' (Gilbert Ryle's phrase) to both sense and cognition. As Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 4 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 a result, its concept has no content beyond that of being a mere 'logical' subject (and never the object) of mental representations (A400–1).3 So the doctrine of transcendental apperception (p.140) does not obviously entail anything about inner empirical substances; that's why we can set it aside here and focus on inner sense. For Kant, sensibility is essentially receptive-states and events are 'given' to us through our various sensory faculties. Since he clearly conceives of inner awareness on the model of sensation (hence 'inner sense'), it is reasonable to ask what kinds of items are 'given' by that sense. According to Hume, as we have seen, a look within does not deliver awareness of anything over and above inner states (ideas and impressions). So for Hume-on at least one reading of the bundle theory- the only way we count as encountering a 'self' in inner sense is if the bundle of mental states (or some temporal part of it) is itself the self. But Kant is obviously not a Humean: in his ontology of the spatial world, the 'objects' we cognize are constituted by states as well as the persisting underlying substance in which the states inhere (A182/B224). In other words, what we cognize through outer sense are spatial substances with various states, even if what we are 'given' in perception, strictly speaking, are only the states. So it is important to clarify whether inner sense allows us to cognize something over and above a series of mental states too, for Kant, even if that something isn't 'given', strictly speaking, in the precise content of inner awareness. In the next two sections I provide textual and philosophical reasons for thinking that even if Kant agrees with Hume that the self is not given in inner sense exactly, he still thinks of the empirical self as cognized through inner sense. I also argue that he both does and ought to regard this self as the empirical substance in which our changing representations inhere. If this is correct, then there will be important ramifications for Kant's philosophies of mind and nature. For one thing, we have to adjust our view of the Kantian concepts of empirical 'substance' and 'nature' so that they can incorporate empirical minds as well as bodies. In the final sections of this paper, I focus on another important ramification: namely, that we have to reject most of the Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 5 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 leading interpretations of Kant's famous anti-sceptical argument in the Refutation of Idealism. 8.2. Textual Considerations Let's start with the challenging passages-the places in the Critique where Kant sounds broadly Humean about what we are aware of in inner sense or 'internal perception'. Here's the one that is most commonly cited: The consciousness of ourself in accordance with the determinations of our state in internal perception is merely empirical, forever variable; it can give no standing or abiding self in this stream of inner appearances (es kann kein stehendes oder bleibendes Selbst in diesem Flusse innrer Erscheinungen geben), and is customarily called inner sense or empirical apperception. (A107) This does look like a kind of elusiveness doctrine about the self -i.e. a view according to which all we are aware of in inner sense are representations, rather than a persisting (p.141) self-substance. It thus seems to many commentators to make Kant's epistemology of the self very similar to Hume's: although the subject is aware of changing outer representations of 'extension, impenetrability, composition, and motion' as well as of 'thoughts, feelings, inclinations, or decisions' through inner sense (A358), she is not aware of any persisting self that has that series of states.4 The passage is challenging but inconclusive. One reason to worry is that Kant himself removed it from the B-edition. Another is that Kant might simply be saying here that inner sense does not 'give' a noumenal or transcendental substance -that's clearly at least part of what he means when he says that 'inner perception is merely empirical'.5 Third, and more significantly, it is unclear what Kant means here by 'can give no standing or abiding self'. No one claims that we are 'given' in inner awareness a bare substratum that persists through all the perceived changes of mental states. That may well be an unintelligible claim-a bare, quality-less substance isn't something that we could be aware of, presumably, since awareness is always qualitative. This is a point on which Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley all agree. Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 6 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 But even if we grant that the A107 passage shows that what is given in 'inner appearances' is only a series of changing mental states, Kant might still allow that we cognize both that series and the self to which it belongs. For again, unlike Hume, Kant is (famously) willing to allow that the content of our cognition of objects is much richer than what is given in our sensory awareness of them. That's a central lesson of the Copernican Revolution: if 'the object must conform to our cognition' then we can 'establish something about objects before they are given to us' in sensibility (Bxvi). Similar objections apply to another key text that is used to support an elusiveness doctrine about the empirical self: Inner sense, by means of which the mind intuits itself, or its inner state, gives, to be sure, no intuition of the soul itself, as object (Object). (A22/B37)6 But here again Kant could be saying the 'the soul itself' is not 'given' in the sense that it does not appear in the precise content delivered by inner sense (either as noumenal subject, or as bare substratum, or as underlying empirical substance in which mental states inhere). As we have seen, this is compatible with saying that the soul is cognized through inner sense. Kant himself even uses the 'cognize through' locution in places: . . . I am, by means of inner experience, conscious of the existence of my soul in time-which soul I can only cognize as an object of inner sense through (erkennen durch) the appearances constituting an inner state, and whose being as it is in itself, which underlies these appearances, is unknown to me. (Prol. 4:336, my emphasis) (p.142) A final passage to consider is from the First Paralogism in the A-edition (which, again, Kant removed). There he says that from the fact of apperception we cannot infer that the 'I' is a persisting substance that is simple, immaterial, and immortal. He also says that 'we would not be able to establish such a persistence through any secure observation, even if we supposed one'. This initially looks like the claim that we cannot observe-even in inner sense-a self that persists through various changes.7 Context makes it clear, Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 7 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 however, that in fact Kant is really only making the familiar elusiveness point about the 'logical' or transcendental subjectself. He goes on: For the I is, to be sure, in all thoughts; but not the least intuition is bound up with this representation, which would distinguish it from other objects of intuition. Therefore one can, to be sure, perceive that this representation continually recurs with every thought, but not that it is a standing and abiding intuition, in which thoughts (as variable) would change.(A350, my emphasis) Our awareness of ourselves as apperceiving subjects tells us nothing about the nature of that subject-whether it persists, whether it is a substance, and so forth. But that subject is not the object of inner sense. Moreover, we clearly do have intuitions of our own mental states: Kant speaks of 'inner experience' all the time, and in the B-Deduction says that 'I can be an object for myself in general and indeed one of intuition and inner perception' (B155). So in the passage just quoted he must not be talking about inner sense or the empirical self after all. In the face of this textual situation, perhaps the best way forward is just to grant that the precise content of inner sense is exhausted by the series of changing inner states-we are not aware of or 'given' anything over and above that changing series. As a phenomenological claim, I think this is disputable, but granting it helps accommodate the challenging texts. As we have just seen, though, granting it does not rule out the possibility that we cognize an empirical substance through inner sense. For, again, one of Kant's signature doctrines is that what we cognize goes beyond what we perceive or intuit. When we employ causal principles to claim, for instance, that a 'magnetic matter' must exist and be responsible for the changes we perceive in iron filings (A226/B273), or that there is attractive force in addition to repulsive force (MFNS 4:536– 7), we are going beyond anything that is intuited. Likewise, when we take the changing states of the outer world to inhere in a persisting substance, we go beyond anything that is 'given' in the precise content of perception. Kant clearly endorses this in the First Analogy: he says, for instance, that we count as cognizing material substances through outer sense when we are given a series of changing spatial Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 8 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 properties (A183/B227). The same thing holds, one might suggest, for inner cognition (I'll say more about this kind of parity argument below). Given these qualms about the texts just quoted, it is important to look at other texts in order to get a sense of Kant's considered position. As it turns out, there are far more texts in which Kant explicitly says that inner sense does allow us to be 'conscious of' or (p.143) cognize a 'self', 'soul' (Seele) or even inner empirical 'substance'. Here are some of the most noteworthy ones: Thus external things exist as well as my self, and indeed both exist on the immediate testimony of my selfconsciousness, only with this difference: the representation of my self, as the thinking subject, is related merely to inner sense, but the representations that designate extended beings are also related to outer sense. (A370) [I]n the connection of experience, matter as substance is really given to outer sense, just as the thinking I is given to inner sense, likewise as a substance-in-appearance, and in the connection of our outer as well as our inner perceptions, appearances on both sides must be connected among themselves into one experience according to the rules that the category of substance brings in. (A379, my emphasis) If, therefore, we want to infer the persistence of the soul from the concept of the soul as substance, this can be valid of the soul only with respect to possible experience, and not of the soul as a thing in itself and beyond all possible experience. But life is the subjective condition of all our possible experience: consequently, only the persistence of the soul during life can be inferred, for the death of a human being is the end of all experience as far as the soul as an object of experience is concerned ... Therefore the persistence of the soul can be proven only during the life of the human being, but not after death . . . (Prol. 4:335) Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 9 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 By means of external experience I am conscious of the existence of bodies as external appearances in space, in the same manner as by means of inner experience I am conscious of the existence of my soul in time (wie vermittelst der innern Erfahrung des Daseins meiner Seele in der Zeit bewusst) which soul I only cognize as an object of inner sense through the appearances constituting an inner state, and whose being as it is in itself, which underlies these appearances, is unknown to me. (Prol. 4:336; see also 4:295) [T]ime is an a priori condition of all appearance in general, and indeed the immediate condition of inner appearances (of our souls). . . . (A34/B50–1) Everything that is represented to a sense is to that extent always appearance, and an inner sense must therefore either not be admitted at all or else the subject, which is the object of this sense, can only be represented by its means as appearance, not as it would judge of itself if its intuition were mere self-activity, i.e., intellectual. (B68, my emphasis) [The mind] intuits itself not as it would immediately selfactively represent itself, but in accordance with the way in which it is affected from within, consequently as it appears to itself, not as it is. (B69) [H]ow 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, only, like other phenomena, not as I am for the understanding but rather as I appear to myself-this is no more and no less difficult than how I can be an object for myself in general and indeed one of intuition and inner perceptions. But that it really must be so can be clearly shown . . .(B155–6, original bold, my italics)8 'I' as thinking am an object of inner sense, and am called 'soul'. That which is an object of outer sense is called 'body'. (A342/B400, original bold) (p.144) The view in these texts, as well as others,9 appears to be that the inner states we are aware of can be ascribed, over time, to a persisting subject-self. This subject is not merely a point of view on the world; rather, it is a 'soul', a mind, a Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 10 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 'substance-in-appearance'.10 We can also regard both the states and the self as objects of inner cognition, even if we are not aware of the self alone in abstraction from any of its states, and even if the self is not 'given' in the sense of being part of the precise content of inner awareness. In addition to these texts, it is also worth noting that in the Paralogisms, Kant explicitly says that when he makes elusiveness claims about the self, he is simply talking about the 'logical I' or transcendental apperceiver (again, see A350). He also makes it clear that when he denies the doctrine of the self as substance, he is talking about the high rationalist doctrine of the soul in Descartes, Leibniz, Mendelssohn, and others-the doctrine according to which the soul is a simple, immaterial, and thus physically indestructible substance. For Kant, this is entirely separate from the anodyne claim that we cognize some kind of empirical substance-a 'soul'-through inner sense: Meanwhile, one can quite well allow the proposition The soul is substance to be valid, if only one admits that this concept of ours leads no further, that it cannot teach us any of the usual conclusions of the rationalistic doctrine of the soul ... (A350–1, original bold) As long as we refrain from taking inner cognition to deliver anything like the rationalist's substantial soul, Kant seems quite happy here (as well as at A379 above) to describe the empirical self as a 'substance'. Finally, in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant says that we can generate an 'empirical doctrine of the soul' in 'pure inner intuition', but also that this can never be the basis for a systematic science, in part because 'mathematics is not applicable to the phenomena of inner sense and their laws' (4:471). Note, though, that he also admits that we can apply 'the law of continuity' to the 'flux of inner changes' (4:472). And in any case he clearly doesn't regard the inability to construct a full-blown quantified science of the soul as ruling out inner cognition of the soul altogether.11 Taken together, these passages suggest that Kant's fundamental opposition is to the idea that transcendental apperception and/or inner sense allow us to make rationalistic claims about the soul, or to develop an a priori science of the Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 11 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 immaterial mind, or to regard our empirical-psychological observations as fully scientific.12 But despite (p.145) prominent suggestions to the contrary,13 I don't see how this opposition bears on the question of whether we cognize an empirical substance through inner sense. Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 12 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 8.3. Philosophical Considerations In addition to these textual considerations, there are (in my view) solid philosophical grounds for thinking that Kant's theory of cognition allows the empirical self to be cognized through inner sense, and that the self that is so cognized is a substance that persists through changes. First, the self-as-mind is the natural candidate in any philosophical picture to play the role of that which persists through the perceived changes in mental states. That's just what a mind is. Kant's innovation, I submit, is not to contest this natural thought in the manner of Hume, or to banish the empirical self altogether, but rather to point out that the self, like any outer substance, is a mere 'appearance' rather than a thing-in-itself (again, see the B68 passage above). We would need more than a few scattered texts (like A107) to overthrow this natural picture. Second, there is the parity argument mentioned earlier and explicitly invoked by Kant in some of the passages just quoted.14 In outer sense, awareness of a series of changing states over time, together with the synthesising work of the imagination and understanding, provides cognition of those states as states of an empirical substance. For example: our awareness of the changing surface qualities of the table allows us to cognize the table (or the matter that constitutes it) as a persisting empirical substance that has those qualities. By parity of reasoning, it seems that inner awareness of a series of mental states should be able to provide cognition of the persisting empirical substance that has those states, provided (as Kant himself insists at B68–9 and suggests at B153–5) that synthesis also occurs in inner awareness. Again, this is not the claim that we perceive a 'bare substratum'; nor is it the claim that we can mount a full-blown scientific inquiry into the nature of the empirical self through a priori reflection or introspective psychology. Rather, it is the claim that in being aware of a series of changing inner states, we also cognize the self-substance that has those states. Kant seems to make exactly this kind of parity point at A379, B68–9, and Prolegomena 4:336, portions of which were quoted above. And from a philosophical point of view, it is hard to see what would motivate a lack of parity (p.146) here-i.e., the view according to which, with respect to the inner case only, we Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 13 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 cognize a bundle of states but fail to cognize the underlying empirical substance.15 There is another set of concerns that seems to militate against the idea of the self as object of inner cognition. Call these Strawsonian concerns, since they are typically associated with P.F. Strawson's work on Kant in the 1960s. They are echoed, however, by numerous recent commentators, including Luigi Caranti, who takes them to be decisive: Finally, and most importantly, these [inner] representations cannot be taken as properties of an object in the same way that, for example, colour, shape, or the size of a table are properties of this object. In inner sense there is no reidentifiable object to which these properties can be attributed. This suggests that the symmetry between inner and outer sense, on which Kant often insists (and at times still insists in the B-edition), is not grounded. Given Kant's own assumptions, the representations that flow in my consciousness can at most be said to belong to the mind, but not to be representations of the mind. At least they are not representations of the mind in the same manner that the representations of colour, shape, and the size of the table in front of me are representations of this table. In the latter case we have a reidentifiable object to which these representations pertain as its properties; in the former case we have no such thing. (Caranti 2007: 134) This is a complicated passage, but the main idea seems to be this: the precise content of inner sense only gives a series of states, and we might well take them to 'belong to' an empirical mind or self. But there is no way to 'reidentify' the self that has them as the same over time, and so this precludes us from having inner cognition of the self over time, even though Kant himself seems to think we do.16 In other words, the Strawsonian concern here is that I can't re-identify my self later and say that it-the one that had that representation at t1 -is also the self that has this representation at t4. I can't engage in a full-scale discussion of Strawsonian concerns here; the literature on them is enormous.17 For present purposes, it is worth emphasising, first, that the ability to re-identify the self at t4 isn't obviously required in order for me to count as having inner cognition of the self at t1. That Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 14 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 kind of momentary cognition may require the ability to individuate, but surely at t1 I can individuate the mind in question 'from the inside': I can say that it is this self-the one that has this representation-that I am cognizing through inner sense. It also isn't clear that t1 should be conceived as a mere (p.147) instant as opposed to a short but still temporally-extended period-one that I can hold before consciousness 'all at once', so to speak. One lesson of the Transcendental Deduction is that Kant thinks that any sort of unified consciousness at all has to occur over an unspecified but still extended period of time.18 So if there is room for saying that we cognize the self through inner sense in a single act of consciousness, even over a short period like this, then my main interpretive suggestion is left untouched by Strawsonian concerns. But what about reidentification-why is that so important? Kant does seem to think that genuine empirical selfconsciousness takes place over a prolonged period of time-as this note indicates: The pure (transcendental) apperception has to be distinguished from the empirical apperceptio percipientis ... The first says merely 'I am'. The second [says] I was, I am, and I will be, i.e. I am a thing of the past, present, and future time.19 This is just a reflection, but it's a nice one for present purposes, since Kant explicitly says that empirical selfawareness delivers cognition of a 'thing' that endures through time. We saw something similar above in the Prolegomena: 'if we want to infer the persistence of the soul from the concept of the soul as substance, this can be valid of the soul only with respect to possible experience, and not of the soul as a thing in itself and beyond all possible experience' (4:335). But maybe the Strawsonian concern can survive this, since Kant also gestures in places at the broadly Lockean worry that, for all we know, a substance that we are aware of as having mental states at t1 has been switched out for a different substance at t4, even though the consciousness seems continuous (A363–4 and note).20 The worry, in other words, is that, for all I can tell in inner sense, the self that had a mental state at t1 is a 'different' self from the one that has the state at t4.21 Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 15 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 Insofar as this concern is intelligible, I can think of two broad lines of response to it. First, we again have to keep in mind that our topic in this paper is the empirical self-the object of inner sense-and not the logical or transcendental 'I'. When Kant talks about these 'switching out' scenarios in the Aedition Paralogisms, he is trying to undermine high rationalist doctrines about an immaterial, immortal substance whose continuous existence can be inferred from our experience of ourselves as conscious over time. Second, it is hard to see why we can't mount another version of the parity argument vis-à-vis outer sense here. When I perceive the ship going down the river at t1 and perceive it again at t4, I clearly reidentify it as the same empirical object or substance. In (p.148) that case I am aware of a series of changing outer states over time and I then (in keeping with the First Analogy) cognize those states as belonging to the same substance occupying different spatial locations. Perhaps it is possible for a numerically different blob of matter to be indiscernibly switched in or substituted at t4 for what constituted the original ship at t1, and so in fact is a different substance with qualitatively identical properties. But so what? As long as that hasn't in fact happened, I can successfully reidentify the ship as the same ship, moving along its course. Here again, I want to suggest, it seems like there is parity between outer sense and inner sense. The fact that outer objects can be tracked through contiguous spatial regions doesn't guarantee that they are the same substances; likewise, the fact that inner cognition seems to be of the same self at t4 that it was at t1 doesn't guarantee that this is correct.22 But perhaps the Strawsonian concern isn't about far-fetched sceptical scenarios such as these, but rather about what is required to perform the much more basic act of ascribing states to the same object over time. Perhaps the idea, in other words, is that the very fact that the ship either stays in the 'same place' or moves through spatially contiguous regions is what allows us to regard it as the same persisting object or substance that we re-encounter. Even so, I don't see a real problem here for the case of inner cognition. Barring radical far-fetched scenarios involving different selves being switched in or substituted for earlier ones, it seems as though I naturally and justifiably think of my self at t4-the one that I cognize as inwardly counting-as the same self as the one that I cognized as thinking about prime numbers earlier. There Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 16 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 might even be an analogue of spatial contiguity here: at t4 I am aware of both counting now and as having thought about prime numbers at t1. Perhaps I also remember that the intervening states display a natural psychological progression -first I was thinking about prime numbers, but then I moved to thinking about numbers generally over t2 and t3, and now I'm just inwardly counting (see again the quotation from A363–64 in note 21 above, and also Kant's footnote to that passage). It's logically possible that these selves are somehow numerically different, but I don't see any good reason for us or Kant to take that possibility seriously in the normal context, or to think that it robs us of the ability to cognize ourselves over time through inner sense. Here is a final philosophical consideration on behalf of the cognizability of the empirical self through inner sense: Kant clearly allows that external objects cause various perceptual states in the mind. But in such causal interactions, what are the relata? On at least one plausible interpretation of the Analogies, the ultimate relata involved in causal relations are empirical substances: 'where there is action, consequently activity (p.149) and force, there is also substance' (A204/ B250).23 So when the ship's movement causes, through a complicated causal-perceptual mechanism, the representation of a moving ship in my mind, what are the relata? The natural candidates, it seems, are the (substantial matter of the) ship, on the one hand, and my mind, on the other. But what does 'mind' amount to here? It can't just be a bundle of states, since on this reading the ultimate relata in any causal interaction are substances (with active and passive powers). It also can't be the transcendental or noumenal mind, since here we are talking about an explicitly empirical causal relation. As Jacobi pointed out long ago (and Strawson himself reminded us more recently) the Critical philosophy forbids us from construing noumenal things as engaged in causal relations (i.e. relations that are brought under the schematised category of cause– effect). So it seems hard to resist positing an empirical self-a 'substance-in-appearance'-as one of the relata in perceptual causal relations.24 If that is correct, then when we are aware, in inner sense, of having a perceptual representation (of a ship, say), we can also cognize the substance that has been caused (by the ship) to have that representation. 8.4. Implications for the Refutation of Idealism Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 17 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 There is more to be said about all this, but I hope to have at least raised some serious concerns about the common practice of taking passages like A107 to show that, for Kant, we don't cognize ourselves through inner sense. If this is on the right track, there are some important implications for other aspects of Kant's philosophy of mind and empirical nature. For one, we have to allow not just mental states but the empirical self to be part of nature, even if (as Kant is at pains to point out in the Paralogisms and Introduction to the Metaphysical Foundations) our cognition of it does not rise to the level of science or certainty.25 The implication I want to focus on here, however, has to do with how we interpret the argumentative structure of the famous Refutation of Idealism chapter. The stated goal of the Refutation is to refute Cartesian scepticism-Kant typically calls it 'problematic idealism' because it problematises the inference from cognition of inner states to cognition of an outer world of spatial objects. Although Kant doesn't admit to ever having been vulnerable to external-world scepticism, he does admit in the B-edition Preface that it is a 'scandal of philosophy' that it hasn't been decisively refuted, and that he didn't state his argument against it clearly enough in the A-edition. He thus inserts a new proof of 'the existence of objects in space outside me' into the discussion of the modal categories.26 The overall strategy, he tells us, is to 'prove that (p.150) even our inner experience, undoubted by Descartes, is possible only under the presupposition of outer experience', where the latter is understood to be experience of external objects in space (B275).27 The proof is contained in a few notoriously compressed sentences: Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 18 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 I am conscious of my existence as determined in time. All time-determination presupposes something persistent in the perception (in der Wahrnehmung). This persistent (Beharrliche), however, cannot be an intuition in me. For all grounds of determination of my existence that can be encountered in me are representations, and as such require something persistent that is distinct even from them, in relation to which their change, thus my existence in the time in which they change, can be determined.28 So the perception (Wahrnehmung) of this persistent is possible only through a thing (Ding) outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me. Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only by means of the existence of real things that I perceive outside myself. (B275, original bold) The passage suggests the following preliminary reconstruction: (P1) I am aware that I have had a series of experiences that occurred in a specific temporal order over some period of time t1–t4 = T. [inner sense29] (P2) Necessarily, if I am aware that I have had a series of experiences that occurred in a specific temporal order over T, then something in my perception persisted over T. [premise] (C1) Thus, something in my perception persisted over T. [(P1), (P2), modus ponens] (P3) This persistent perceptible is distinct from my own self and its states. [premise] (C2) Thus, something that is in my perception and that is distinct from my self and its states persisted over T. [(C1), (P3)] (C3) Thus, perceptible objects in space outside me existed over T. [(C2), Kant's conception of what it is to be perceptible and 'outside me'] Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 19 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 The argument is valid, but (P1), (P2), and (P3) obviously require defence. Here I will skip over (P1) and (P2) entirely in order to focus on (P3). My main point is that the considerations adduced above make it very difficult to defend (P3) in any of the usual ways. But if that's right, then we will need some alternate argument for (C3). This is something that I hope to provide elsewhere. (p.151) 8.5. (P3): The Substantial Fly in the Inner Ointment (P1) and (P2) entail, via modus ponens, that (C1) Thus, something in my perception persisted over T. Let's assume here that 'my perception' refers to the consciousness of my existence that Kant describes in the first premise. Clearly, (C1) leaves open the possibilities that the persisting thing is (a) a state of the mind, (b) the mind itself; or (c) an object distinct from the mind.30 Kant wants to get to (c), and so he still needs to rule out (a) and (b). One way to do that is to show that (P3) This persistent perceptible is distinct from my own self and its states. [premise] Let's look at (a) first-the possibility that the persisting item is a mental state or representation. Kant seems to have considered this: recall that the B-edition Preface's official amendment to the Refutation proof says that the persistent 'cannot be an intuition in me' (Bxxxix). His argument, again, is that intuitions or mental states generally 'require something persistent that is distinct even from them, in relation to which their change, thus my existence in the time in which they change, can be determined' (Bxxxix). What is this argument? One thing Kant seems to rely on is an empirico-psychological doctrine according to which individual representations are all fleeting and ephemeral. Consider these passages by way of textual evidence: Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 20 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 The representation of something persisting in experience is not the same as a persisting representation; for that can be quite variable and changeable, as all our representations are ... (Bxli, n.; original bold, my italics) For in that which we call the soul, everything is in continual flux, and it has nothing abiding, except perhaps (if one insists) the I, which is simple only because this representation has no content . . . (A381) [T]ime, however, and thus everything that is in inner sense, constantly flows. (B291) It is hard to know how to evaluate this claim about the fleetingness of representations, since it is hard to know how Kant proposes to individuate representations. Certainly it (p. 152) is true that our experiential state is almost always in flux, and perhaps that is all that is meant in these passages. But why couldn't some of our representations persist relative to some others and allow us to measure changes among the latter? Here one might suggest that, even if there were a representation that somehow persisted over a longer period of time T, it wouldn't be of much use in reconstructing or 'determining' the time-order of other inner changes over T. For if the persisting representation in question were qualitatively constant (e.g. if there were a persisting tone at a constant Bflat), then we wouldn't be able to use it to measure the order of changes (all of our states would simply-horribly!-be accompanied by the ongoing sound of the same B-flat). And if there were qualitative variations in it (i.e. if the tone were slowly to rise over T, or a series of shapes in our visual field were slowly to change over T), then it is hard to see how this could count as just one representation rather than a series. And even if it could, the single representation itself would contain variations, and so in order to determine the temporal order of these variations we would presumably need to make reference to some further underlying framework.31 Perhaps this is Kant's point in the passage that he asks us to insert into the Refutation: Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 21 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 This persistent (Beharrliche), however, cannot be an intuition in me. For all grounds of determination of my existence that can be encountered in me are representations, and as such require something persistent that is distinct even from them, in relation to which their change, thus my existence in the time in which they change, can be determined. (Bxxxix, original bold) Clearly a lot hangs here on the interpretation of (P1): is Kant saying merely that we are aware that our representations change over time (are time-determined), or is he saying that we also have the ability to determine their order? This is a key question for any interpretation of the Refutation, and I won't try to settle it here. But even if he is starting with the latter, stronger claim, a series of inner states could clearly have a logical structure that makes its order determinable from the inside, so to speak. When I close my eyes and count off numbers in my head, for instance, I am aware that I must have said '10' after I said '9' because I know something about the order of the natural numbers. Or if there were a digital clock in the corner of our visual fields, which slowly counts up from 0:00 starting at the moment of our birth, we would be able, in inner sense, to determine the order of a series of remembered visual states. There isn't actually that, of course, but there could be, and (as I have argued elsewhere) it would be odd if Kant's proof of the external world relied on such a deeply contingent premise.32 Finally, perhaps we do sometimes appeal to our representations of spatial objects to determine the order of some of our states. For instance, I know that I had a representation (p.153) as of my car before I had a representation as of my office, because my representations as of a spatial world are such that I first have to represent myself as of going to the office before I represent myself as of being in the office. But all of that could be the case, and allow me to determine the order of my representations in time, even if the representations are merely as of rather than of an external spatial world (i.e. I could do this even if my representations as of an orderly spatial world are all produced in me by an evil demon, and there is no external world). The argument here merely seems to require some discernible progressive or periodic or 'clock-like' structure across a sufficient number of Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 22 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 my states such that I can order those and other states relative to that structure. Again, perhaps (P1)-my 'consciousness of my existence determined in time'-doesn't require something as complex as reconstructing a time-order. But even if it does, I think the argument above is sufficient to make Kant's effort to rule (a) out by appealing to the 'fleetingness' of the representations seem like a non-starter. Setting (a) aside, there is the further question of how Kant would try to rule out (b)-the possibility that the persisting item is the self as it is cognized through inner sense. As we have seen, for Kant there can be no awareness or cognition of the 'transcendental' or apperceiving self, certainly not as a persisting perceptible. But what about the empirical self-i.e. the persisting mind or self in which my various representations inhere? Why can't this do this job?33 A telling piece of evidence to consider here is that in the Bedition Preface, which Kant wrote after the main text had gone to press, he informs us that we should insert the bold sentences above in place of what he had originally written. The bold sentences include the claim, again, that This persistent (Beharrliche), however, cannot be an intuition in me. (Bxxxix, original bold) What Kant had originally written was this: This persistent, however, cannot be something in me, since my own existence in time can first be determined only through this persistent thing. (B275) One of the things he changed, then, is the claim about which internal items cannot play the role of the persisting perceptible. In the first draft he says it cannot be 'something in me' at all, but in the revision he restricts this and says merely that it cannot be an 'intuition in me'. Perhaps he means to say that it cannot be any series of states in me, including a series of intuitive representations. But that just looks like the attack on (a) again. And so this text-as emended by Kant- implicitly leaves open the possibility in (b) that the persistent perceptible could be me as an empirical substantial self. Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 23 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 (p.154) Many commentators will argue at this point either that there is no empirical self in Kant's ontology or that if there is an empirical self it is too elusive to count as a cognizable substance to which the changing states belong (citing A107 and the like). I have offered reasons above for thinking that both of these claims are based on flimsy textual evidence and dubious philosophical grounds. Kant explicitly talks of an inner empirical substance or self or soul in many different places, he says that it is the 'object' of inner sense, and his overall epistemology allows for the cognition of empirical substances in virtue of having sense-perception of their states. But, the objector might reply, even if there is an enduring empirical self, and even if it is cognized through inner sense, it won't be cognized in a way that allows us to determine the order of our representations. For (so the objection goes) what we need in order to reconstruct our inner experience is an enduring backdrop against which we can measure our changing states. Time (for Kant) can't be perceived by itself, and that's why we have to appeal to a spatial surrogate for it- namely, a world of enduring material substances. Here again, though, I think the move to the external world is too quick. For, first, it assumes that what is required by (P1) is this high-level ability to reconstruct large portions of my own inner history using memory and inner sense. That's controversial, as I noted earlier. Second, and more significantly, this 'backdrop' argument only really requires that there be some kind of progressive or logical structure across the content of our representations in the manner described above. In other words, the persisting surrogate for time might be found in the content of some of our representations, representations that we cognize in inner sense as belonging to the self. So there's no need to appeal to an actual external spatial world either to provide a backdrop against which to measure change (supposing that is what is required by (P1)) or to provide the substance in which the representations of such a backdrop inhere. The general line of argument that I've sketched here seems like a serious challenge to both the generic 'persisting substratum' reading of the Refutation (which draws on the First Analogy) as well as the Backdrop reading.34 The empirical self can be the persisting substratum, and even if we Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 24 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 do need some sort of backdrop or underlying framework to measure changes in its states, there's no reason to think that this requires an actual world of external spatial objects as opposed to just the right kind of structured representational content, some of which might be spatial. My own view, which I hope to defend elsewhere, is that we can only motivate Kant's move to the external world by inserting a premise about the origin of this kind of structured, spatial content. If Kant has good reason for thinking that we can't even have representations as of a spatial world of objects without there actually being such a world, then he will have a way to move from (P1) to something outside the mind.35 (p.155) There is another prominent family of interpretations of the Refutation that escapes this objection against the First Analogy and Backdrop interpretations, but still runs into trouble regarding the empirical self. What I have elsewhere called 'Causal' interpretations of the Refutation hold that the successive states of external objects are the only reasonable causal explanations of the determinate successive order of our internal states. The external world of objects is thus posited not as the perceived backdrop against which we perceive a succession of inner states but rather as the causal origin of the determinate (and 'time-determined') character of that succession. Some versions of the Causal interpretation also say that we have to appeal to 'objective successions' in the world of spatial objects in order to determine the order in time of our inner states.36 This is a very different and influential reading of the Refutation-defended initially by Paul Guyer and more extensively by Georges Dicker. But note that it seems simply to presuppose that the empirical self and its own states cannot cause other inner states. Thus Guyer: The states of the self are judged to have a unique order just insofar as they are judged to be caused by the successive states of enduring objects. It is because they must stand in a causal relation to the empirical self ... that the objects which function in subjective timedetermination must indeed be external to or independent of the self, objects conceived of as ontologically distinct from the self. (1987: 309) Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 25 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 Guyer's claim here is that we justifiably judge that at least some of our mental states occur in a determinate order (that is what (P1) says), and that the only good explanation for this will have to appeal to spatial objects that are 'conceived of' as external. But Guyer also explicitly allows that there is an empirical self. This leaves it unclear why the sceptic couldn't argue that, for all we know, the self might be the cause of its own temporally determined series. This kind of thing certainly happens some of the time: I decided at t1 that I want to think about a mathematical theorem that I learned in school; this then led to the production of my thought of the Pythagorean theorem at t2. Perhaps Causal interpreters will respond by saying that the cause in this example is not really the self but its decision to think about a theorem, and that this decision is just another state of the self that is caused in it. Even so: this hardly leads us to something outside the self altogether; on the contrary, it seems to concede that some states of a substance can cause other states in that same substance. And again this seems like an utterly natural picture: my friend and I spent some time in Italy visiting vineyards together, so the thought of him causes me to have the thought of Italy and then the memory of that excellent wine. It's a complicated issue, of course, exactly how mental causation occurs-in Kant or otherwise-but a view that rules it out altogether is not (p.156) going to be very plausible.37 Kant himself is clear that 'our representations may arise' either through 'the influence of external things or as the effect of inner causes' (A98).38 If this is right, then there is an alternative and equally good explanation for the existence and order of a series of mental states-namely, the existence and character of various other mental states, and/or of the self itself. Descartes himself clearly allows that he is able to call up or cause certain thoughts in himself. He also raises the concern, in the third Meditation, that what causes all of his ideas of the external world is 'some as yet unknown faculty within me' (1983 [1647]: VII:39). So the Cartesian meditator-the explicit target of the Refutation-is unlikely to grant that the need for causal explanations of our ordered series of mental states requires an appeal to bodies outside the self. Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 26 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 A final issue: Kant speaks in (P2) and (P3) of the need for a 'persistent in the perception' in order for us to be conscious of our own changing states over time. But we granted above that the empirical self is not a part of the strict content of inner sense-it isn't 'given' to us in that way, even if it is cognized through inner sense. I expressed some reservations about granting this above, but if we do, then my argument that (b) has not been ruled out relies on taking 'in the perception' to refer to the content of cognition rather than the strict content of inner awareness. I think this is acceptable, especially since the precise content of both inner sense and outer sense only 'gives' changing states or properties rather than underlying substances. Indeed, it is characteristically Kantian to say that cognition of something 'permanent in the perception'- through outer or inner sense-will involve the application of the category of substance to what is given in sensory awareness. 8.6. Conclusion The textual and philosophical considerations here suggest that the burden of proof rests on commentators who assume one or more of the following: • there is no empirical self in Kant's ontology • the empirical self is just a collection of mental states • there is nothing in which our mental states inhere (p.157) • the empirical self exists but is wholly 'elusive' to both inner sense and inner cognition • nothing in the self can provide a suitable 'backdrop' against which we can notice change in our mental states • the states of the empirical self cannot cause other such states • the empirical self cannot cause states in itself I have argued that, despite the presence of a few texts in support of some of these claims, it is not obvious that this burden can be met. If that turns out to be right, then we'll need to find another reading of Kant's anti-sceptical argument in the Refutation of Idealism that does not rely on these claims or-I submit-on any of the usual arguments for (P3). Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 27 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 I hope to provide such a reading elsewhere, but as for our titular question: yes, Kant can (or at least thinks he can) cognize himself.39 Notes: (1) For some illuminating recent engagements with these structural questions see Valaris (2008) and Emundts (2007) as well as Bader (this volume). (2) Hume (1978 [1738–40]: Appendix). (3) Some commentators suggest that apperception provides some sort of consciousness of ourselves as thinking, spontaneous cognizers as we perform various mental acts-see Walker (this volume). This is controversial, but it is clear in any case that we aren't aware of any further features of that active first-person consciousness. This is what Kant means when he says it is merely a 'constant logical subject' but not a 'real subject of inherence' (A350). (4) Numerous commentators point to this passage as evidence of Kant's 'Humean' thesis about the elusiveness of the self. See Dicker (2008: 81), Allison (2004: 292), Guyer (1987: 283– 4, 308ff.). See also Kraus (2013: 18). (5) This is what I would say about some of the other passages in the A-edition Paralogisms which commentators like Westphal take to rule out any use of the concept of 'substance' with respect to the subject. See Westphal (2006: 789–90). (6) Dicker (2008: 3) appeals to this passage to support his Humean reading of the A107 passage. (7) Westphal (2006: 789–90) takes this to be one of Kant's points here. (8) Here Kant even seems to say that the soul is 'given' in inner sense. As noted, I'm not trying to defend that stronger claim here. (9) Kant often speaks in passing of 'intuiting ourselves' (B153) or of 'the soul' as the object of inner sense (B415, B427). And here's a nice passage from a metaphysics lecture: 'The subject is affected by itself, and thus can obtain representations of the soul through inner sense and from that can cognize, according Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 28 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 to how the mind was previously affected by objects' (MVi 29:982, my emphasis). (10) Though see Valaris (2008) for an innovative defence of the 'point of view' picture. (11) For discussion of this issue, and an argument that at least some kinds of quantification of the objects of inner experience are possible, see Kraus (2013); also Sturm (2001) and Sturm and Wunderlich (2010). (12) Later in Metaphysical Foundations Kant explicitly refers to the 'substance' which is the 'object of inner sense', and then identifies this with 'my soul'. He goes on to note that the conservation law that he calls the 'First Law of Mechanics' only applies to outer substances, and that there is nothing that could prove 'the persistence of the soul as substance' (4:542– 4). This coheres with his repeated marginal comments, written into his own copy of the A-edition First Analogy, that the conservation law regarding the 'quantum of substance' only applies to objects of outer sense (R 23:30–1). But all of that is consistent with the claim that we cognize a persisting empirical substance through inner sense. (13) See e.g. Förster (1987), Friedman (2013). (14) Jonathan Vogel (1993) introduces a version of this parity argument. I am grateful to him for conversations about this argument. (15) Someone might object here that although you do count as cognizing the empirical self in inner sense, you don't perceive it in the way that is required for it to be the permanent backdrop against which the time-order of change can be determined. That may be important in the context of the Refutation, but it doesn't bear on the present question, which is just about whether cognition of an inner substance is possible at all. See the second half of this paper for discussion of the Refutation. (16) See Caranti (2007). I don't know what to make of Caranti's claim in this passage that despite all this 'the representations that flow in my consciousness can at most be said to belong to the mind, but not to be representations of the mind'. If Caranti means that inner cognition allows us to cognize both Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 29 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 representations and the mind to which they belong, then he may not really be opposed to the view that I am developing here. (17) For an overview, see Glock (2003). (18) For a nice discussion of this point, see Walker (this volume). (19) Kant (1987: 19). This passage was brought to my attention by Caranti (2007)-see fn.16. I have slightly emended his translation (see also Kant 2005: 365). (20) Cf. with Locke (1975 [1689]: 2.27.14; 4.3.6) as well as the discussion in Walker (this volume). (21) 'The last substance would thus be conscious of all the states of all the previously altered substances as its own states, because these states would have been carried over to it, together with the consciousness of them; and in spite of this it would not have been the very same person in all these states' (A363–4). (22) Note: I'm not assuming that either the 'matter switching' scenario or the 'empirical self switching' scenario is even possible, especially in a Kantian framework. But if they are, this might be a line of response. Yoon Choi raises the point (in correspondence) that it might be problematic to think of myself as ascribing properties to an inner substance when I judge that, say, 'I am counting' because I can't go wrong about which substance it is to which I am ascribing the property. I realise that this sort of 'immunity to error through misidentification of the subject' is the basis for another series of Strawsonian concerns, and hope to be able to consider it further elsewhere. (23) See Watkins (2005: Ch.4). (24) Compare Guyer (1987: 309): perceptual objects 'must stand in a causal relation to the empirical self'. (25) Kant: 'A twofold doctrine of nature is possible, the doctrine of body and the doctrine of the soul, where the first considers extended nature, and the second thinking nature' (MFNS 4:467). Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 30 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 (26) I'll set aside interpretive questions here about whether the addition to the B-edition is an elaboration of a doctrine that we find in the A-edition (as Kant suggests) or whether it is something genuinely new. See Caranti (2007: Chs.3–5) for an exhaustive discussion. (27) The inner–outer parity point I was making above is implicit even here: for Kant, 'Erfahrung' is what results when what is 'given' in sensation is synthesised by the mind under the categories of the understanding. (28) I have followed Kant's instructions at Bxxxix and inserted the bold sentences in place of the original second sentence. (29) It is controversial whether Kant is also relying on the reliability of memory here. I don't think he ever seriously entertained memory-scepticism, but I won't address the issue here. (30) Most interpreters leave open the question of whether the persistent is supposed to be (c1) my own body or (c2) some other objects in the external world. But this may not matter, since if my body exists, then it presumably does so within a causal framework of other spatio-temporal bodies, and this is all that is required to refute the problematic idealist. Quassim Cassam (1993) and Robert Hanna (2006: Ch.1) are important exceptions-they explicitly argue that the external object secured by the Refutation is 'my own body'. Kant, too, sometimes seems (in his many and somewhat contradictory reflections on this issue) to be opting for that position (see R5461, 18:189). (31) The 'persisting tone' suggestion is from Strawson; the 'shifting shapes' is from Ameriks (personal communication). See Dicker (2008) for a lengthier discussion. (32) See Chignell (2010). There is a further worry: how would we know that the clock was changing in a consistent and orderly way such that we could use it (or any other perceived periodic process in nature) to establish the temporal order of our remembered states? (33) Caranti (2007: 128): 'If inner sense yielded the intuition of a reidentifiable object (if I had an impression of the Self), then there would be no need to 'look outside' to find the permanent Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 31 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 required for the experience of the succession of my representations in time'. (34) A representative of the 'persisting substratum' reading is Dina Emundts (2007). For the 'Backdrop' reading see Allison (2004). (35) In R6312 Kant says: 'In order for something to seem to be outside use, there must really be something outside us, though not constituted in the way that we represent it, since other kinds of sense could provide other kinds of representation of the same thing. For the representation of something outside us could otherwise never come into our thoughts, since we are only conscious of our representations as inner determinations and for those objects we have inner sense, which, however, we carefully distinguish from outer sense' (18:613). (36) For details, see Chignell (2010). (37) Georges Dicker makes something like this last point against Guyer in his reconstruction of the Causal version of the Refutation of Idealism. He goes on to argue that the account must be based instead on the contingent empirical premise that 'human experience does not exhibit enough regularity or stability for us to establish this order by reference only to subjective experiences themselves' (2008: 98). I have argued elsewhere that the premise is dubious, and that even if it is true, it is out of keeping with the a priori spirit of Kant's argument to rest it on a contingent premise regarding how our actual psychology happens to be. For this debate, see: Dicker (2008), Chignell (2010), Dicker's response in Dicker (2011), my response in Chignell (2011), and Dicker's final word in Dicker (2012). (38) Dina Emundts (2007: 197) makes the very strong claim that the fact that the self is not given in the precise content of inner sensation shows that neither the category of substance nor the category of cause–effect can apply to anything inner. I find this hard to understand, especially in light of a passage like this one, or the reference to the soul as an empirical substance in Metaphysical Foundations (4:442–4). Can't Kant Cognize Himself? Or, a Problem for (Almost) Every Interpretation of the Refutation of Idealism Page 32 of 32 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Princeton University Library; date: 17 January 2019 (39) Thanks to R. Lanier Anderson, Angela Breitenbach, Yoon Choi, Graciela De Pierris Georges Dicker, Dina Emundts, Katharina Kraus, Béatrice Longuenesse, Samantha Matherne, Jonathan Vogel, the editors of this volume, and the participants at the 2015 Oxford conference on Kant's Philosophy of Mind for helpful interactions regarding this paper. The paper is an effort to make an argument in print for a thesis of which I have been trying to convince Michael Friedman for years. I am grateful to him for those conversations, though I suspect he will remain unconvinced. Access brought to you by: