Kant's Irreversible Achievement

The Centrality of Self-Consciousness

Just what is Kant’s epochal discovery, the philosophical achievement that I and many others take to be “irreversible”?

How can we characterize this decisive breakthrough, in order to justify its status as a point of departure or sine qua non for all subsequent thinking?

We know a name commonly used to designate this achievement: “the Copernican turn” (or perhaps more loosely, “the turn to the subject”). We may even be aware that it refers to Kant’s claim that “objects must conform to our knowledge” rather than, as “hitherto… has been assumed” that “all our knowledge” must conform “to objects.”

As a metaphor, this familiar phrase is certainly memorable.

But if our intention is to understand a) the grounds for this claim by Kant, b) and how it could remain the inspiration for later thinkers who otherwise depart from Kant in radical ways, I’m not sure this formulation, as it stands, is very helpful.

Characterizing Self-Consciousness

Following Dieter Henrich, Robert Pippin, and Sebastian Rödl, I think that it is more illuminating to focus on the the role of “self-consciousness,” the centrality of which for philosophical comprehension Kant might be said to have discovered.

This way of characterizing Kant’s achievement originates with the later idealists (especially Fichte and Hegel). For reasons which need not detain us here, Kant did not always draw explicit attention to this ultimate principle. Not in such terms.

Yet those who attempted to understand Kant’s critical project and articulate its systematic unity in the subsequent decades found that they could only do so in terms of this principle - self-consciousness - which they found everywhere to underlie his thinking.

What is self-consciousness? This terms designates a feature characterizing certain key domains of human life and activity (paradigmatically knowledge or judgment). This feature is a certain reflexivity whereby it is constitutive of me engaging in a certain activity that I know myself to be doing so, and this not in a second, separate act of the mind but in the consciousness of what I am thereby doing. It is not the case with acts which are self-conscious that I’m aware of an action taking place and then somehow come to a second-order awareness that I’m the one doing them. The self-reference is co-original.

Importantly, the prefix “self-” here indicates not the object of consciousness (this is not an instance of introspection or turning my attention to a special object, namely myself) but a way of knowing what I know: from the inside. The self-conscious character of my action is internal to it being the action it is.

An example is helpful here (a traditional one, one Rödl borrows from Anscombe): marriage. It is constitutive of marriage that those getting married, doing what they do, take themselves to be getting married. We can imagine all sorts of odd situations in which every empirical feature we associate with marriage (certain words and actions, the usual setting etc.) is present but no marriage is in fact taking place. The intention to marry (the consciousness in saying certain words that thereby I am getting married) is a necessary element of the act; there is no way of empirically stating the conditions by which we can recognize that a marriage is taking place. Marriage is necessarily self-conscious,

Self-Consciousness as a Way into Kant’s Philosophy

Kant’s discovery, of course, is not merely that this feature - self-consciousness - characterizes specific (and somewhat unusual) activities like marriage. Rather, he recognizes that its true significance occupies a much higher level of generality.

One of putting this is to state that self-consciousness characterizes the use of concepts as such. Kant is acutely aware that determining the content of a concept and determining the conditions of its use cannot be separated. A concept, we might say, is the rule for its own application. The awareness of how a concept is applied is internal to that concept, and without being able (in principle) to specify these conditions, we are not thinking anything determinate. We can never find ourselves in this situation: we know the meaning of a concept all right, but we don’t know the rules for identifying when it is instantiated and have to rummage about (perhaps in empirical experience or in our internal inventory of “clear and distinct” ideas) in search of this know-how. Concept use is self-conscious.

We are on more familiar ground (and closer to the concern of the First Critique) when we approach this generality from another angle. Let’s put it this way: self-consciousness is a necessary feature of (putatively) objective representation, full stop. What differentiates a hypothetical purely subjective experience (what contemporary philosophy labels qualia) from intentional consciousness of something? In part, at least, what so distinguishes my representation of objects from non-intentional consciousness is the constitutive awareness that I am so representing them. (Here, let us recall, we are operating on a quite abstract level; consciousness of something does not mean the experience of an object of a particular sort, but “an object in general,” anything that can be represented as there or being the case).

Empirical experience, whether external (of the world) or internal (of my “inner theater”), may (or may not) serve to confirm the objectivity of my representations. But it cannot account for their being (putatively) objective representations in the first place, the way in which the concept of “an object in general” is determined in such a representation, or the criteria for applying this concept. These are all products of the activity of the “I",” and have their origin in its power of spontaneity. They cannot be derived receptively from the content of an intuition, as realism imagines in both its empiricist and rationalist varieties. (Kant allows for the possibility that they may be, in part, specified by the form of an intuition, or a so-called “pure intuition,” should we possess one.) That is to say: they are a priori.

All this can now be seen as a way of spelling out the self-conscious character of objective representation.

The Unity of Apperception (Or Self-Consciousness)

Kant’s way of putting this is by saying that intentional consciousness is apperceptive. To be clear: the reason why this is the case, why any intentional experience must be able to be characterized as mine, is not merely to help pick it from the experience of others but because objectivity is possible only within the unity of self-consciousness.

Now, as we are well aware, it is not only isolated acts of representing (intending, judging, asserting etc.) which have a self-conscious character. We inevitably, in any complex experience or the totality of a life, represent multiple such representations as being ours. And what is true of the elements must be true of the whole: this unity itself must be self-conscious (self-conscious acts do not admit of being embedded in a context which is not itself self-conscious; they cannot be grasped from the outside). My representations, therefore, hang together by being represented to so hang together. We are dealing with a self-conscious whole, or at least the a priori possibility of one.

This is Kant’s “unity of apperception.” Infamously: “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.” That is to say, all my representations, individually, must be self-conscious, and all must be able to be brought together into the unity of one self-consciousness.

We could say that we are dealing with both a subjective and a (putatively) objective unification here. If any representation of an object is to “make it” into the unity of self-consciousness (and thus be an experience at all), I must be capable in it of holding on to myself as the self-same subject of my other representations, synchronically and diachronically. In doing so (crucially this is not a further act of unification but the same Janus-faced unity viewed from the other side), I must be able to hold on to my other representations as forming with this one a coherent whole (one “world”).

What Self-Consciousness Requires of the “Object in General”

The fact that all self-conscious acts must find their place within an (itself self-conscious) unity of this sort has implications for our concept of the “object in general.” Everything I represent as something, as being the case, must be internally open to being connected with whatever else is the case, and so forming an element of a world. This openness belongs to my concept of an “object in general.”

But it does not exhaust what can be said a priori about my concept of the object. For we must be dealing not merely with an indeterminate openness to forming a unity with other such objects. No, any object which I experience must lend itself to being characterized in terms of whatever rules and criteria prove necessary to bring unity to the manifold.

For thinking, as the self-conscious representation of certain representations as connected and thus forming one thought, measures itself by - is ordered to - judgement. Anything I think must be at least potentially able to figure in a judgment (concepts are “predicates of possible judgments”). For judgment in the last instance is what constitutes the unity of experience (the unity of apperception discussed above).

What is judgment: a self-conscious assertion of a thought, regarding the connection of the representations united in it as valid or necessary. Whereas thinking requires merely that the connection of representations not constitute a contradiction, internal to judgment is an implicit or explicit grasp of the rules and criteria which render such a connection valid or necessary.

The Need for Pure Concepts

If, therefore, there are any a priori rules or criteria for judging, than included in any representation of an object in general is an awareness of its lending itself to being characterized in terms of these rules or criteria. From these a priori rules or criteria for judging, should there be any, we would be able to derive certain determinations of an object in general, of any possible object of experience.

Now there must be a priori rules for judging. Why? Because judging is self-conscious, aware of its validity and thus of the rules and criteria by which it is valid. These rules and criteria cannot be given, coming from outside the I. There are at least two reasons for this. First, I would have to establish how I become aware of these given criteria and rules, and there would have to be rules and criteria for this awareness, and so on in an infinite regress. Second, the application of rules or criteria is self-conscious, and something which is not originally self-conscious (received merely as given) can never become so. Self-consciousness is primordial and unembeddable.

Put in another way, the rules for the possibility of experience cannot themselves be the product of experience. Therefore the rules or criteria by which we judge, by which the unity of experience is constituted, must be a priori. They are “pure concepts.” (Empirical concepts like marriage retain an a posteriori character. For while our application of the concept, as self-conscious, cannot be determined by the sheer givenness of experience, no one would argue that our knowledge that there is such an institution/activity is independent of empirical experience altogether).

Kant calls these pure concepts “the categories,” and he derives them from the table of judgments. They are a priori determinations of the “object in general.” One can quibble with the details of his derivation of these categories (as later idealists do), but the need for pure concepts of some sort or another has been irreversibly established.

The So-Called “Copernican Turn”

If we have followed Kant’s argument to this point, we are now in a position to understand what he means by saying that “objects must conform to our knowledge” rather than, as “hitherto… has been assumed” “all our knowledge” conforming “to objects.”

Or as he puts it elsewhere, we now understand why “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience.”

The “I” and the labor of the understanding are ultimately one and the same; the “I” is nothing but the activity of bringing representations together in judgments. The “I” can only return to itself as a subjective unity by establishing the objective unity of a coherent world. The determinations of an object of possible experience are already given by the rules and criteria for establishing this unity, the single, self-same unity of at once the I and its world.

Conclusion

All this is implied by the fundamental discovery that human life is self-conscious. (Again, in Kant’s terminology: experiences are apperceptive and must always already belong to the unity of apperception).

While our reflections may have gotten technical at points, all that we have said is but a restatement of what we implicitly understand in our every self-conscious activity.

I hope that the way I have presented Kant’s project has made this clear. If I have succeeded, we now see that self-consciousness is the heart of the Kantian revolution, even if his way of proceeding occasionally obscures this fact.

In centering this feature of Kant’s account, I have deliberately bracketed out other of his more controversial claims which will be rejected by later idealists who share his commitment to the centrality of self-consciousness.

I have set to the side Kant’s notion of the thing in itself, his restriction of our “knowledge” to appearances, and his derivation of the categories by simply adopting the forms of judgment as set out by classical logic.

(It goes without saying that I reject any abstractly Enlightened bias Kant has against the speculative and religious).

I have done this because what is irreversible in Kant’s achievement is not these claims, which can (and I think should) be rejected.

What is irreversible, and a necessary starting point for all subsequent thinking, is the following:

1. The fundamental feature of human life and activity is its self-conscious character. The depth of its grasp of this fact is the measure of a philosophy.

2. Any claim made about human life and activity must be subjected to this standard: can it bear the form of self-consciousness? Can it be understood from the inside?

3. We must reject as dogmatic and pre-critical any accounts which take themselves to be entitled to objective or intentional representations that are brought to the “I” from the outside. We must abandon any attempt to trace the objectivity of our practical or theoretical activity to something “given.” Specifically, the source of objectivity cannot be the content of an empirical or intellectual intuition, including one of “Being” or “the Good” (crucial qualification: where these are conceived of as external to our power of spontaneity).

4. Theologically, all of the above apply to any experience of or positive epistemic relation to God. Not even here do we exit self-consciousness’ internality; the site of theology is firmly placed within the “I.”

All this is what is meant by the “turn to the subject.” This turn is irreversible.