Kant, the ‘I Think’, and Self-Awareness

Summary

Self-awareness, and Kant’s treatment of it in the Critique of Pure Reason, are fascinating, difficult topics that have received much attention in the last three decades. It is impossible in a single essay to do justice to all the issues that arise. However, despite the flood of enlightening discussion, I think that crucial points remain ignored or underappreciated. Below, I try to bring out these points and some of their main implications. I hope that my efforts will serve as a tribute, however modest, to Lewis White Beck, a model of clarity and humanity and a scholar wonderfully receptive to work on Kant from many different standpoints. I begin with a brief review of Kant’s account of knowledge and of self-awareness. Then I compare Kant’s view of such awareness with the modern idea of direct reference by means of “I”; it is in terms of the framework provided by that idea that, I will argue, the insights in Kant’s view are best appreciated. I conclude by considering two basic questions which this framework requires him, and us, to confront. Kant’s remarks on self-awareness suggest three answers to these questions, two of which are of great interest today.

I. Kant on Self-Awareness

Fundamental to the first Critique is the idea that beings like us know objects as single, individuated things that are of general types or kinds (“this thing before me is a tree”). In knowledge, we characteristically have a de re awareness of the object as having a general property that specifies the type or kind of which that object is an instance. Such awareness we of course achieve through intuition and concept. An intuition is a singular, immediate, and sensible representation that presents to the mind, in a de re fashion, the single, individuated object that we know. A concept is a general, mediate representation that, through activities of thought, comes to present to the mind (or comes itself to be) a general property. Through its presentation of this property, the concept represents to the mind, in a de dicto fashion, the objects, whichever in particular they may be, that have this property. When we attain knowledge, the manifold in which the intuition is given is synthesized through thought and imagination, and we perceive the unified object presented by the intuition as having the property presented by the concept.