Epilogue - Individuality and Wholeness

Summary

This book set out to explore what, for Kant, makes us unique individual persons and how we come to know ourselves as such. It has done so by examining levels of representational self-determination and by showing how the bits and pieces of a mental life constitute a unified person. Beginning with the lowest levels of self-affection and inner perception (Chapter 2), it moved to the levels of self-consciousness (Chapter 3), logical self-determination (Chapter 4), and inner experience (Chapter 5), and, finally, arrived at the normative demands that govern both the acquisition of self-knowledge (Chapter 6) and the self-formation as a unified person (Chapter 7). These normative demands are based on the idea of the soul, which has been shown to define the unifying form of a person’s mental life. It is the idea under which we have to conceive of ourselves as persons and the idea that prescribes what it takes to be a person at all.