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ABSTRACT
Although I begin with a brief look at the idea that as a faculty of mind, apperception must be grounded in some (noumenal) power of the soul, my focus is on claims about the alleged noumenal import of some of Kant’s particular theses about the faculty of apperception: it is inexplicable, immaterial, and can provide evidence that humans are members of the intelligible world (and so possess the noumenal freedom required for morality). I argue that when the claim of inexplicability is placed in the context of Kant’s standards for transcendental psychological explanation, it has no noumenal implications. Similarly, when understood in the context of his views about scientific explanations, Kant’s claim that the faculty of apperception cannot be understood in materialist terms has no important metaphysical payoff. The case of freedom is different, because for a long time, Kant believed that he could establish the freedom required for morality by appealing to the freedom required for thought. In the end, however, he abandoned this hoped for noumenal implication of the faculty of apperception.
Notes
1 To use John McDowell’s pejorative expression (Mind and World, 41–42).
2 Here I am borrowing James Kreines's suggestion that recent interpretations have presented a ‘new Kant’. As Kreines notes, these readings are not effectively parried by criticisms of particular theses, but require a systematic look at the ‘shape’ of Kant’s project (‘Against The New Kant’, 1–2). What follows is intended neither as a general discussion of Kant’s use of ‘power’ nor as a general criticism of Leibnizean readings of Kant. Still, since questions surrounding the ‘I-think’ are often at the centre of arguments for Rationalist readings (Ameriks, Kant's Theory of Mind, chapters 2 and 4), Watkins (Kant and the Metaphysics of Causality, 7, 18, 276–78), the considerations that follow undermine some of the evidence for those readings.
3 I criticize the central move of this effort to re-invigorate agent causation in my Kant’s Thinker, 170–72.
4 I use Wolff’s (Vernünftige Gedancken von Gott) system of giving references with the abbreviated book title, Meta[physik] and the paragraph, as well as by the pagination in this edition.
5 References to Kant’s works other than the Critique of Pure Reason will be given in the text by the volume and page of Kant (Kants gesammelte Schriften). Translations from the Metaphysics Lectures are from Ameriks and Naragon (Immanuel Kant. Lectures on Metaphysics). Citations from the Critique of Pure Reason are in the text with the usual A/B pagination. The translations are from Pluhar Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, but I indicate Kant’s emphases through bold not italics.
6 Translations from the Critique of the Power of Judgment are from Guyer and Matthews (Immanuel Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgment).
7 Although I generally favor Pluhar’s translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, I disagree with his practice of translating both Vermögen and Kraft as ‘power’. Pluhar resists using the English ‘faculty’, in order to dissociate Kant from traditional faculty psychology (Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason, 8, n.16). This seems an odd rationale since Kant is explicit that he usually relies on standard psychological categories in the footnote I discuss in the next section (5. 9n.). It also seems unreasonable as translational practice, since it treats the two German expressions as equivalent and that is a position that needs to be argued for, not assumed.
8 I use the standard R numbers to refer to unpublished Reflections. Translations from the Reflections are from Bowman, Guyer and Rauscher (Immanuel Kant. Notes and Fragments).
9 See Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom, 133; Wuerth, Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics, 237.
10 Translation is largely from Gregor (Immanuel Kant. Practical Philosophy).
11 I offer this reading of the ‘fact of reason’ passages in ‘A Kantian Argument for the Formula of Humanity”.
12 In the counting case, anyone who has mastered the numbers knows that there are ways of determining the number of objects other than counting. A cognizer might remember it or hear about it or just estimate. Since these alternatives are not to the point, because she used none of them in producing the judgement, however, she recognizes the dependence of the judgement on the counting.
13 See my (‘The Critical and “Empty” Representation “I think”’) for further defence.
14 The claim that the ‘I-think’ is a priori and so ‘precedes’ actual thought is consistent with the claim that the unity of apperception is made possible through the unity [or combinability] of representations. Space is also a priori, yet Kant is clear that the representation of space does not precede sensory data, but is originally acquired through interaction with objects (see 8.221–22).
15 Allison addresses the issue of the mutual implication of the unity of apperception and object cognition by suggesting that the unity of apperception is the ratio essendi of the consciousness of the synthetic unity of appearances, whereas the latter is the ratio cognoscendi of the unity of apperception (Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, 230). By the latter, he does not mean the unity of mental life, but the singleness of the faculty. In the very difficult passage on which he is commenting (A108), however, Kant refers to the ‘original and necessary consciousness of one’s own identity’, which does not seem to indicate the singleness of a faculty.
16 Despite its textual support, this interpretation may seem problematic. I address some objections in my (‘Replies to Rödl, Ginsborg and Allais’) and (‘The Critical and “Empty” Representation “I think”’).
17 But see Brandom (Articulating Reasons, 33–34) and McDowell (Mind and World, 71n.).
18 The other possibility is to argue that although Kant contrasts his ‘synthetic’ method of the Critique of Pure Reason with the ‘analytic’ method of the Prolegomena (4.275), he nonetheless premises the Critique on the assumption the humans have knowledge of geometry and natural science.
19 This translation and the following are from Timmermann and Gregor (Immanuel Kant. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals).
20 Timmermann (‘Reversal or Retreat?’) pushes back against the consensus.
21 Translation from Pluhar, Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason.
22 This passage also contrasts the faculties of cognition and desire with the faculty that is involved in judging the beautiful, the faculty of feeling 20.206.