Kant's Refutation of Idealism and Fourth Paralogism: A Response to Vogel
by John Davenport
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Philosophy
University of Notre Dame
email: Davenport.5@nd.edu
I will discuss Kant's arguments in these section in three parts. In Part I, I will try to show how we can make sense of the obviously close relations in theme and content between the Refutation of Idealism and the two version of the Fourth Paralogism, as well as the second Postulate of Empirical Thought. This will serve as a kind of introduction, since on a cursory first reading, the connections might be far from apparent. In the process, I will try to isolate a few basic points about Kant's program in the Paralogisms that will guide us in our analysis. In Part II, I will give an analysis of P4A itself,(2) using the outline in Part I as a basis. This part concludes with some reflections on the inadequacies of P4A for the task for which the Refutation of Idealism is really required.
Part III will concentrate on the Refutation of Idealism itself, with reference to Sir Peter Strawson's analysis of it in The Bounds of Sense(3). After outlining the argument, I will turn to some objections that have been raised against it by Jonathan Vogel in an article discussing Allison and Guyer's reconstruction of the RI argument.(4) The analysis of Vogel's objection will help us understand the difficulty of the argument. I hope to show that his objection can be met by paying attention to a relevant portion of the Transcendental Deduction, but that there remains a fundamental question to be answered. Finally, in Part IV, I will try to show that careful attention to the various things Kant says about the 'I' of the synthetic unity of apperception show us how to resolve the most fundamental remaining problem with RI.
I. From the Fourth Paralogism and Second Postulate to the Refutation of Idealism
In his Paralogisms of Pure Reason, Kant's overall aim is to oppose (actual and possible) arguments of "rational psychology" which draw conclusions about "the soul" ultimately leading to its immortality. His strategy is to diagnose these arguments as arising from the "I think" which accompanies all of our conscious acts of judgment, the "I" of apperception. The paralogisms are all supposed to consist of inferring from this transcendental unity of consciousness some synthetic fact about the self, when all that actually follows from it is a parallel truth about how we must regard ourselves, quite independently of what we are as noumena. Moreover, this transcendentally ideal analog of the false synthetic conclusion is supposed to follow analytically from the "I" of apperception and various categories (although, as we will see, more may be involved). Thus the arguments of rational psychology are all criticized as having the following error in form: "I conclude from the transcendental concept of the subject, which contains nothing manifold, the absolute unity of this subject [in] itself" (A340, p.328).
The Paralogisms thus aim to refute erroneous synthetic conclusions and to replace them with unobjectionable Kantian analogs. However, Strawson and others have argued that "Kant's exposure of the illusions of rational psychology can be conveyed without any reference" to the doctrines of transcendental idealism.(5) This is an advantage to the extent that the problems raised with the paralogistic arguments of rational psychology are themselves supposed to provide warrant for Transcendental Idealism. But I think the matter is more complex than Strawson indicates. The direct arguments Kant provides against the inferences of rational psychology--the arguments that these inferences are indeed paralogistic--are generally arguments that the synthetic conclusion just cannot follow from its basis in the unity of apperception: for instance, in the Third Paralogism, "the simplicity of the representation of the subject is not eo ipso knowledge of the simplicity of the subject itself, for we abstract altogether from its properties when we designate it solely by the entirely empty expression 'I'..." (A355, p.337). The error in form that constitutes the paralogism consists in trying to combine with the transcendental 'I' synthetic contents that only arise from forms of intuition, thus equivocating between the 'I' of apperception and the representation of the 'I' in inner sense.
Sometimes Kant also notes that further difficulties arise if the paralogistic inference is accepted: for example, the fourth paralogism leads to the aporia of the mind-body problem. We cannot say that the argument against the paralogisms consists in the critiques of form, while the warrant these critiques provide for transcendental idealism comes from the latter's capacity to diagnose the error and thus also avoid the avoid the extra problems which result from the rational psychologistic inferences. This is how Kant proceeds in the Antinomies, but I think Transcendental Idealism is involved more directly in the Paralogisms--and for a very good reason. The beginning of Transcendental Idealism in Kant is to be found in the arguments for the ideality of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic, and it is these arguments, which distinguish the pure intuitions from the synthesis achieved through judgments, which are supposed to assure us of the lack of intuitive content in the 'I' of apperception, or thinking consciousness. This much of Transcendental Idealism is directly deployed in the critique of rational psychology's inferences as paralogistic, and out of these arguments, transcendentally ideal interpretations of our way of regarding the self simultaneously emerge.(6) This point will be crucial for showing that P4A actually contains an argument for the paralogistic nature of the rational psychologist's inference.
The first three paralogisms consist of arguments that are supposed to establish for the rational psychologist the "immateriality" of the soul, its simplicity or "incorruptibility," and its identity or "personality," which together form what Kant calls "spirituality" (A345, p.331). In the fourth paralogism, by contrast, the rational psychologist is led from the soul's "relation to objects in space" to "represent the thinking substance as the principle of life in matter"--or what Kant calls the "animality" of the soul (ibid). It is only with this animality that spirituality (the result of the first three fallacious arguments) that we derive "the concept of immortality" (ibid). Kant's point here seems to be that we must first think of the soul as something really independent of sensible bodies in space (whether these are interpreted dualistically as something quite incommensurable with the soul, or monistically as a kind of illusion) before "spirituality" can imply "immortality."
If this is right, we would expect Kant's Fourth Paralogism to establish a negative result, namely that from the fact that we must necessarily think of ourselves as among or in relation to outer objects of sensation, the real animality of the soul does not follow. We can already see a problem here, however. In the case of the other paralogisms, it (relatively) is clear how the the 'I think' of apperception, when combined with the categories of quantity, quality, and relation generate the illusions of substantiality, simplicity, and identity, respectively. But it is not clear how its relation to the category of modality generates the illusion of rational psychology treated in the Fourth Paralogism: namely, "It [the soul] is in relation to possible objects in space." Why must we think of ourselves that way? Perhaps the category is enough to explain why from the judgment 'I think' and the mode of possibility I must be able to think of some possible object(s), but why ones in space necessarily? This is a necessity attending the transcendental 'I' which Kant has not yet explained in the (A) version--it is precisely the topic of the Refutation of Idealism. Hence Kant cannot very easily proceed to diagnose the animality of the soul posited by the rational psychologist as arising from a way we must think about the ourselves following from the transcendental 'I' and the categories. A piece of the Transcendental Analytic needed for this job is essentially lacking.
This explains, I think, why when we get to P4A, we do not find what the architectonic would lead us to expect. The argument stated at A367 appears not to be a case for the animality of the soul at all, but rather an argument for what Kant alternatively calls "sceptical" or "problematic" idealism. Its structure is:
P4A-1: If X can only be inferred as a cause of given perceptions, then X has "merely
doubtful existence."
P4A-2: The existence of outer "appearances" [objects] is not immediately perceived
in representations of them; so we can only "infer them as the cause of given
perceptions."
P4A-3: "Therefore the existence of all objects of the outer senses is doubtful."
The main idea in this argument, namely that "perception is a modification of inner sense" and not a direct perception of the existence of an outer object, is disputed by Kant in the "Postulates of Empirical Thought" directly leading up to the Refutation of Idealism. The second of these postulates, which tell us what we can determine as necessary for possible experience from the unity of apperception and the "modes" of the category of modality,(7) relates to the mode of actuality or existence. The postulate for this mode is: "That which is bound up with the material conditions of experience, that is, with sensation, is actual" (A218/B266; p.239). Thus perceptions of outer objects are not mere representations of inner sense, with unknown outer causes: "the perception which supplies the content to the concept is the sole mark of actuality" (A225/B273; p.243).(8)
Now we see why the rational psychologist's argument for 'sceptical idealism' in P4A focuses on the existence of appearances in space. Kant's attempt to refute this argument in P4A is thus directly related to his later attempt in RI to answer the 'material' idealism, which also challenges the second transcendental "postulate of empirical thought." In the (B) edition, Kant inserts RI precisely at this point in the Transcendental Analytic, between the discussion of the second postulate of actuality and the third postulate for necessity.(9) In addition, as we will see later, this theme of objective existence is also absolutely central to the 'I' of transcendental apperception, which is described--paradoxically, as we see when we reflect on the second postulate of empirical thought--as a bare perception of my existence, which nevertheless provides no content to the "concept" of the "I think." So we are starting to see the point of convergence of all of our assigned topics: the problem explaining our epistemic access to objective actuality. It is the mode of actuality, not possibility, which turns out to be crucial in the relation of the 'I think' to the category of modality. And it is only when we understand this that we can pick up the explanations finally offered in the (B) addition for Kant's apparently mysterious supposition in the (A) edition that the 'I' will necessarily be thought in relation to an outer object.
In P4B, we do finally get the expected argument that immortality of the soul does not follow from this given relation of the 'I' of apperception to outer objects. Kant argues that from the fact that "I distinguish my own existence(10) as that of a thinking being, from other things outside me," it does not follow that "this consciousness of myself would be even possible apart from things outside me through which representations are given to me" nor, therefore, that "I could exist merely as thinking being (i.e. without existing in human form)" (B409; p.370). In this compressed presentation of the rational psychologist's erroneous inference, Kant suggests that we cannot derive the soul's animality (its real difference from outer objects to which it is related), and so neither can we derive its real independence from material objects, its immortality. All we have instead is a strictly analytic inference from the 'I' of apperception to the necessity of regarding ourselves as distinct from "other things outside me."(11) So the original strategy of the Paralogism arguments has re-emerged here.(12)
But notice that this inference is analytic only if we start from the presupposition that the 'I' will find itself in relation to the objective existence of things outside it. No reason at all is given in P4B for why this feature should necessarily attend the synthetic unity of apperception. So we see that the restated Fourth Paralogism really does aim to establish a purely negative result. Given that one does have reason to presuppose that the objective existence of things outside the 'I' is known, one cannot conclude from that that the 'soul' is really in-itself independent of the noumena underlying the objects in space, and thus "immortal" in the classical Platonic sense preserved by rational psychology.
The Refutation of Idealism is obviously closely related to both P4A and P4B, but it differs in a way we can now make clear. P4B tries to show that the real independence of the soul from the bodies to which it is related (as animus), or the claim that
(IT1)(13): Consciousness of myself without access to the objective existence of things in
space distinct from me is possible
cannot be proven from the 'I' of apperception. P4A tries to show that the claim
(IT2)(14): The existence of objects in space is doubtful or impossible,
cannot be proven from the 'I' of apperception. The Refutation of Idealism, on the other hand, roughly speaking tries to establish two positive conclusions that actually refute IT1 and IT2, rather than merely showing that they cannot be validly deduced from the synthetic unity of apperception. The form of RI is essentially the reverse of the rational psychologist's invalid strategy in P4A. Kant will argue in RI that
(TI1)'(15): I cannot be conscious of myself as existing in time without access to the
objective existence of things outside me.
And on this grounds, he will claim to show that given my synthetic unity of apperception, the following is a synthetic/necessary presupposition (a priori):
(TI2)(16): The existence of things in space (outer sense) is objective and independent of
my representations of them.
We can see already that TI2 is the negation of IT2. TI1, or the negation of IT1, would have to assert that I cannot be conscious of my own existence in general without relation to objectively enduring objects distinct from me, but we have yet to consider why Kant argues in RI for TI1' rather than for TI1 itself.
II. Brief Comments on the Fourth Paralogism-(A)
A careful reading of the (A) version of the Fourth Paralogism, however, shows that Kant comes close therein to attempting the task he actually completes only in RI, namely, arguing for TI2. In trying to argue against the possibility of inferring IT2 (the conclusion of sceptical idealism), Kant appears to argue that the minor premise in the paralogism (i.e. P4A-2) is false, and he appears to do so by arguing directly for TI2. He begins by distinguishing "transcendental idealism" from "empirical idealism."(17) While the transcendental idealist insists that "appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only, not things in themselves" (A369), the empirical idealist
...regards the objects of outer sense as something distinct from the senses themselves, treating mere appearances as self-subsistent beings, existing outside us. On this view, however clearly we may be conscious of our representation of these things, it is still far from certain that, if the representation exists, there exists also the object corresponding to it (A371; p.347).(18)
This contrast is fairly subtle. Kant is really suggesting that the empirical idealist posits between our representations and the (real) "outer" objects they represent the distinction that is properly interpreted as the difference between phenomena and noumena.(19) They regard outer objects not as appearances, but as things in themselves, and so they are forced to hold that these appearances/outer objects can only be problematically inferred as the cause of our representations. Based on this diagnosis, Kant argues that the empirical idealism which denies that our subjective representations can be known to track the existence of objects in space (and objective relations among these objects in space), derives from transcendental realism, which interprets "outer appearances" (objects in space) "as things in themselves" (A369; p.346).
The transcendental idealist therefore need not suffer from the division between our perceptions and the existence of objects in space which afflicts material idealism in all its forms. "The transcendental idealist is, therefore, an empirical realist, and allows to matter, as appearance, a reality which does not permit of being inferred, but is immediately perceived" (A371; p.347, my emphasis). But to establish this TI2 claim, in P4A Kant can only appeal directly to the Transcendental Aesthetic. Granted that space is ideal, Kant argues that "what is given in it, that is, represented through perception" must be 'real'(20) because:
..if it were not real, that is, immediately given through empirical intuition, it could not be pictured in imagination, since what is real in intuitions cannot be invented a priori.
All outer perception, therefore, yields immediate proof of something real in space...the real, that is, the material of all objects of outer intuition, is actually given in this space, independently of imaginative invention (A375; p.349).
I think this argument fails for the simple reason that it presupposes a principle about 'creative' imagination (or arbitrary association)(21) that TI2 itself would be needed to ground: namely, that arbitrary inventions of my (or the demon's) imaginations, or connections made in dreams, must draw their 'materials' from true perceptions, and so they cannot constitute the totality of my representations of spatial objects.
In any case, Kant must have felt that his analysis in P4A failed in more ways than one. In the 'Göttingen review,' the first appraisal of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (A-version) published,(22) the author confesses that he cannot see how the distinction between "experiences" as "sensible intuitions" and "mere imaginings and dreamings"(23) is justified. He says that he cannot see how this distinction is based solely on the "application of the concepts of the understanding, without supposing that a single mark of reality is to be found in sensation itself."(24) This shows that the reviewer has grasped neither the argument in the Fourth Paralogism nor the way in which the idealism of the Aesthetic is supposed to give us the second Postulate of Empirical Thought.(25) Even worse, the reviewer compares Kant's prime doctrine that "sensations" are ideal in the sense of being "mere modifications of ourselves" to the Berkeley's idealism.
Nothing could be farther from Kant's intention. When Berkeley says esse est percepi, he does not mean that space is ideal in Kant's sense and that all outer objects in space are "appearances" in Kant's sense. For Kant, these outer appearances have an objective truth and interrelated order which is quite independent of creative imagination, delusion, and omissions which make our subjective representations diverge from the objective order--and yet these errors of imagination and misrepresentation must be founded on our access to the objective existence and order of objects in space thus 'independent' of us.(26) Berkeley, by contrast, means that the subjective representations themselves are the only reality: the mind-independent real things in themselves in space which Locke postulated as the cause of representations are eliminated. Berkeley's view is thus not unlike the Ockamist view that categories are "subjective dispositions of thought" implanted in us (B167),(27) which Kant castigates at the end of his Transcendental Deduction, contrasting it with his own view: "I would not be able to say that the effect is only connected with the cause in the object, that is to say, necessarily, but only that I am so constituted that I cannot think this representation otherwise than as thus connected. This is what the sceptic most desires" (B168; p.175).(28) Clearly, if people could misunderstand his transcendental idealism as badly as his first reviewer, things needed to change in the B-version.
III. The Refutation of Idealism--Objections and Responses
Kant begins RI in a way sure to make clear that he is opposed both to Descartes's dualistic idealism and to Berkeley's subjective idealism. Kant begins RI by distinguishing the 'sceptical idealism' which he opposed in P4A from "dogmatic" idealism as follows:
Idealism--meaning thereby material idealism--is the theory which declares the existence of objects in space outside us to be merely doubtful and indemonstrable or to be false and impossible. The former is the problematic idealism of Descartes...The latter is the dogmatic idealism of Berkeley (B274, p.244).
The Refutation of Idealism is supposed to disprove both forms of 'material idealism' (so I say). Most Kant scholars, including Jonathan Vogel,(29) hold that the "problematic" idealism is its real target, since Kant says that "Dogmatic idealism is unavoidable, if space be interpreted as a property that must belong to things in themselves," and so asserts that what he has shown in the Transcendental Aesthetic already undermines this form of idealism. But I take this merely to be the point that the main argument for Berkeley's position is removed by the prior proof of the ideality of space. That still does not demonstrate that someone cannot hold Berkeley's position, with or without warrant. Moreover, it seems that Kant intentionally formulates the thesis that RI is supposed to establish, namely "that we have experience, and not merely imagination of outer things," or that although space is ideal, the endurance of sensible things in it is objective, in order to contrast more sharply with Berkeley's position as Kant describes it: "he therefore regards the things in space as merely imaginary entities" (ibid). Kant's goal is to prove that the objectivity of endurance in space must be presupposed by every thinking being, thus ruling out the possibility that the appearance of endurance among outer objects is merely an accidental result of our subjective re-representations of them. The goal of RI is thus similar to the aim of the transcendental deductions in the Analogies of Experience, which are all meant to show that some sort of objective relation not dependent on the subjective order of apprehensions must be presupposed. As Strawson aptly summarizes it, the Refutation of Idealism needs to show that
..we must perceive some objects as enduring objects, even if our perceptions of them do not endure, must see them as falling under concepts of persistent objects, even though objects of non-persistent perceptions.(30)
Kant's route towards establishing this remarkable conclusion will be clearer if we schematize or reconstruct the argument as presented in the "Proof" section of RI and supplemented by the "Notes" and the footnote in the B-edition Preface, relating the steps to the analogies of experience on which they draw:
RI-1: I am conscious of my objective endurance through time, as an appearance of inner sense.(31)
RI-2: Because "time itself cannot be perceived" (B225), for a determination of any objective endurance of an appearance in time to be possible, there must be access through perception to something objectively permanent in time--by the First Analogy.(32)
RI-3: Hence if RI-1 is possible, then I must have access through intuition to something objectively permanent in time [from 1 & 2]
RI-4: Endurance and change among representations of objects in relation to one another cannot by itself determine objective endurance and change among the objects themselves.(33)
RI-5: My appearance to myself as an object of inner sense, purely as an appearance of inner sense, contains only representations (of my own thoughts). The rest of inner sense consists of mere representations of outer objects.
RI-6: Hence the representations in inner sense cannot by themselves account for the objectivity of my consciousness of myself as enduring through time [from 4 & 5]
RI-7: Only through the perception of objective existence and objective endurance of outer appearances (objects in space) in time, can the objectivity of my determination of my own endurance through time be possible [from 3 & 6].
This is obviously my own interpretation of the argument, which fills out more steps than can even be correlated with Kant's original "proof" at B275-6, and also anticipates certain objections. I wish to defend RI-4 immediately as true to Kant's intentions. In the Refutation itself, in a footnote, Kant heads in the direction of RI-4 when he substantially repeats the argument of P4A against empirical idealism: it would be impossible to have only "outer imagination" (mere representations of outer objects) but "no outer sense" (objective perception of outer objects through our representations), because even imagining something as outer requires an outer sense, and so we must distinguish "the mere receptivity of outer intuition from the spontaneity which characterizes every act of the imagination" (B277; p.246).(34) He is even more explicit in the footnote to the Preface, in which he argues that "The representation of something permanent in existence is not the same thing as a permanent representation" (the former meaning objective permanence in objects of the representation, the latter meaning only continuity in the representations themselves).(35) Even if the representations are "transitory and variable," as Kant says, they may refer to a permanent object, which requires that it is "an external thing distinct from all of my representations" (Bxli; p.36).
The general point of RI-4 is that because association and 'reproductive' imagination (controlled by freedom, rather than passive synthesis) may affect the interrelation of representations themselves, their lack of alteration is by itself no proof of an enduring object, nor is their variation proof that the objects they represent are not really enduring distinct from our representations, and being reindentified when we begin to represent them again. This premise thus captures Strawson's insight that if "the internal temporal relations of the members of the series" of representations is by itself to determine objectively for the subject that he has "such-and-such an experience at such-and-such a time," or give him access to an objective "wider system of temporal relations", then his own experiences..
..or some of them, must be taken by him to be experiences of things (other than the experiences themselves) which possess among themselves the temporal relations of this wider system [i.e. objective relations]. But there is only one way in which perceived things or processes can supply a system of temporal relations independent of the order of the subject's perceptions of them--viz. by lasting and being re-encounterable in temporally different perceptual experiences.(36)
Strawson's analysis would thus seem to support the argument from RI-4 to RI-6.
However, in his analysis of RI, Jonathan Vogel says that the rationale for a premise needed to get to my RI-6 is "missing altogether" from the proof. His objection is that "If the self can be directly known to persist through change, the Refutation fails, yet Kant seems not to address such a possibility" (my emphasis).(37) According to Vogel, to complete the Refutation, Kant must show that the permanent which provides the basis for objective determination of my endurance in time cannot be simply objects internal to the mind (in time, but not space), such as my mental states. In short, if the self in inner sense were "the only object of knowledge," why would it be impossible to know the permanence of the self in time?(38)
Vogel discusses two proposed solutions to this problem, neither of which work in his opinion. The first is Allison's argument that it is "Kant's essentially Humean view of inner intuition" which dictates that inner sense (by itself) gives us no knowledge of the self.(39) I think Allison is on the right track, although it is not simply because he thinks there is only a bare substratum of predication to serve as "the subject of judgment" in inner sense.(40)
Against Allison, Vogel seems to think that the first premise of RI (my RI-1) indicates that Kant does think we can have real knowledge of the self as an appearance of inner sense. Vogel is right that to complete the Refutation, Kant must establish that there is "some disparity between inner and outer sense, such that outer sense gives us direct knowledge of enduring objects, while inner sense does not," but he is convinced by the first premise of RI that Kant's reasons for this cannot be Hume's--since that would mean that "time-determination" with respect to the self really is impossible.(41)
While the point that Kant's basis for the missing premise cannot be a Humean one seems convincing, I think there is a dangerous confusion lurking in the neighborhood. In refashioning the RI-argument in the Preface footnote, Kant says,
But through inner experience I am conscious of my existence in time (also of its determinability in time) and this is more than to be conscious merely of my representation. It is identical with the empirical consciousness of my existence ...(Bxl; p.35).
But if my appearance to myself in inner sense really does come with objective perception of my endurance, as this passage says, then why cannot this object of inner sense serve as the "permanent" required for objective time-determination as required by RI-3?. But this would be a dangerous confusion, because Kant's point is that the representations which make up inner sense cannot by themselves account for the objectivity which we do actually find in our perception of ourselves as objects of our inner sense.(42) If I really do have objective experience of my endurance (as object of inner sense), as RI-1 claims, then it must come from something outside the determinations of inner sense, even though it applies to an object of inner sense. This is why Kant sometimes seems to be saying that appearances in inner sense can give me nothing enduring, and at other times that my self-consciousness in inner sense does include objective endurance.
In his evaluation of Allison's interpretation of RI, Vogel comes near to falling into this potential confusion when he formulates his objection as follows: "This is our problem: if Kant holds that the empirical self is knowable through inner sense, why does self-knowledge then fail to provide whatever is required for time-determination?"(43) This implies that the beginning of the RI argument (RI-1 in my reconstruction) already rules out precisely the missing premise Kant needs for RI--namely, that the content of representations of inner sense is insufficient to establish the objectivity of my endurance. Vogel does not explicitly draw this implication, but in any case, it would be a sophistical strategy to argue as follows:
Either (1) we have objective knowledge of our endurance 'through' inner sense,
Or (2) we do not have objective knowledge of our endurance 'through' inner sense.
If (2), then RI-1 is denied, but if (1), then we have denied the missing premise we need to move from RI-3 to RI-7.
But this would be wrong because, as we have seen, it sets up a false dichotomy. There is no real problem with maintaining at the beginning of the argument that we do have an objective awareness of 'ourselves' (as objects of inner sense) enduring in time, and maintaining later that the ground of this awareness cannot be found in the contents of inner sense taken by themselves. My reconstruction of the RI-argument, with the steps between RI-3 and RI-7 given in greater detail, is meant to emphasize this point.
Vogel also considers Guyer's reconstruction of RI, which includes the crucial premise that if "Now" and "Then" are representational states, "then they can be judged by me now to be [objectively] successive rather than co-occurring 'only if they are judged to be severally simultaneous with severally successive states of some enduring object."(44) Vogel explains how fulfilling this condition would ensure objective determination of my endurance, using Kant's own example of two mental representations of the sun--one as overhead and another as on the horizon. To judge that the former succeeds the latter representation objectively, we have to judge these mental states "to be correlated with successive states of an enduring object."(45)
Vogel's objection to Guyer, however, is that one might be able to judge the succession of the representations by themselves to be objective, simply because one has representation of logically incompatible states, such as being cold and not being cold: "suppose that you recollect having felt cold while you are perfectly comfortable."(46) If it is possible to make an objective time-determination from such an apprehension, then "The capacity to correlate mental states with successive states of an external object might be a sufficient condition for time-determination, but it does not seem to be an necessary condition."(47) However, there is something dubious about Vogel's objection to Guyer here. First, it does not seem impossible that someone could be mistaken in thinking that they are no longer cold: the delerious prisoner in the Gulag imagines that he is now warm, and remembers being cold, but is in fact still freezing to death. Second, and more importantly, Kant holds that an objective perception of alteration requires "the representation of time," but not that an apprehension of opposite states necessarily constitutes an objective appearance of alteration. In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant introduces the concept of Time through the concept of alteration, which is defined purely as "a combination of contradictorily opposed predicates in one and the same object" (B48, §5, p.76). But temporal alteration for Kant is a specific way that our sensibility makes possible the joint truth of such predications: it is not some contentless index which we must simply presuppose in order to be able to give the opposite predications different index-values. The most primordial content of Time, the one shared by all representation of times (including the experience of my own "endurance") is that of order, or succession in one direction: "Only in time can two contradictorily opposed predicates meeting in one and the same object, namely one after the other" (B49, §5, p.76). If all I have is the representation of two incompatible states of myself in inner sense, then I certainly have no way to tell whether I am warm now and cold earlier, or the reverse. The objective order of appearances is not given in the apprehensions of inner sense taken by themselves (or abstracted from the objective conditions which in fact attend them). So I think Guyer could defend his reconstructed Kantian position that correlation with successive states of external objects is not only sufficient but also necessary for the perception of endurance, since we will not find the objective succession in the phenomenological content of representations of inner sense by themselves.
At a deeper level, I think the key both Allison and Guyer need to make their reconstructions of RI immune to Vogel's objections is to be found in Transcendental Deduction §24. In this section, Kant argues that time is only mediately representable: "Even time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of the synthesis of the manifold wherein we successively determine inner sense" (B154; p.167). The succession of time itself cannot be represented in appearances that are strictly in inner sense at all, which is why we have to move to outer sense to find a basis for time-determination: "we cannot obtain for ourselves a representation of time, which is not an object of outer intuition, except under the image of a line" (B156, p.168). And unsurprisingly, Kant draws from this a conclusion that directly anticipates the Refutation of Idealism: "for all inner perceptions of time we must derive the determination of lengths of time or points of time from the changes which are exhibited to us in outer things" (ibid).
This point about the representation of time is related to Strawson's point that the objective "spatio-temporal frame of things at large" cannot itself become a "pure object of perception...its abidingness must therefore somehow be empirically represented for us in our actual perceptions of objects."(48) As Kant also says in the "Consideration of Pure Psychology as a Whole" following P4A, time as the form of inner sense by itself yields only changes of determinations (representations), not changes in the objects of the determination: "For in what we entitle 'soul' [namely myself as an appearance of inner sense], everything is in continual flux, and there is nothing abiding except (if we may so express ourselves) the 'I'..." (A381; p.253). The temporal flow of representations in inner sense is simply insufficient by itself to give us within the stream of experiences the objectivity of the temporal change and endurance: it cannot represent time itself. As Strawson says, Kant's discovery is that for such an objective representation of time, consciousness requires "such contrasts as 'somewhere else now' and 'here again later on.'"(49) Time, in other words, can only be objectively represented through the perception of objects in space.
This point about the representation of time again shows us that Guyer's condition is not only sufficient but also necessary; it also explains why Allison finds that in the representations native to inner sense by themselves, "There is no additional intuition of a subject to which they appear."(50) The objective consciousness of myself as an appearance of inner sense arises from the relation of the representations constituting inner sense to an objective endurance among objects in space.
IV. The Remaining Foundational Problem for the Refutation of Idealism.
Kant's Refutation of Idealism thus does not succumb to the difficulty Vogel raises against it: adequate grounds for the 'missing premise' that the endurance of the self cannot be directly read off from inner sense can be gathered from Kant's treatment of the representation of time in both the preceding Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. But even after this recovery, RI has not been entirely vindicated. For there still remains a fundamental problem with the RI argument: why should we take it as given that we really do have empirical knowledge of ourselves as appearances of inner sense, i.e. an objective experience of our endurance in time? Unless we are certain of this in the first place, the proof cannot get off the ground. And yet at least initially, it does not seem obviously impossible that my whole sense of my endurance, despite its immediacy, is either an illusion or at best an accident.
Note that the problem suggested here arises only on the wider interpretation of the purpose and overall goal of the Refutation of Idealism which I offered above. If Kant's only purpose in RI is to show that, given that we are starting from Descartes's premises we can reach the conclusion of his Sixth Meditation without bringing in knowledge of God's existence, then there is no remaining problem. If RI attempts that little, it succeeds at it admirably once Vogel's missing premise is supplied. Yet it seems undeniable that Kant envisions a larger role for RI: he intends the conclusion of RI to be an objective deliverance of his own Transcendental Analytic, with just as much universal necessity as the conclusions of the three Analogies of Experience and the Transcendental Deduction. Moroever, as we have seen, the conclusion of RI is needed to provide a basis for the claim, in the fourth Paralogism, that the 'I' of Apperception must necessarily find itself in relation to outer objects, the objective accessibility of whose existence to perception must be presupposed a priori. Only from this basis can the necessary transcendental illusion of "animality" and the body/soul problem of rational psychology result. Without the conclusion of RI as an self-standing deliverance, Kant will have no explanation for the origin of this fourth paralogistic illusion.
But when seen in this light, an undeniable gap appears between the Refutation of Idealism argument and the necessary basis for the Fourth Paralogism. Because the Refutation of Idealism argument begins from the assumption that I do have an objective knowledge of myself as enduring in time, qua appearance of inner sense, it appears at most to prove that the objective existence of outer objects (tracked by perception) must be presupposed because I cannot be conscious of myself as existing in time without such access to objects distinct from my representations of them. In that case, it argues from RI-1 through what I called TI1' to TI2. But because this is apparently the strategy, RI does not appear to answer the objection that consciousness of myself in general might not require consciousness of myself as enduring in time. And if it were possible to have real self-consciousness without consciousness of one's objective endurance, then the rational psychologist's conclusion IT1 (advanced in P4B) would remain undisproven. In short, for RI to justify the conclusion of TI1 (rather than merely TI1'), which would actually refute the rational psychologist's claim to prove the possibility of immortality, RI would have to start from a more primordial implicit basis:
RI-0: The Transcendental Synthetic Unity of Apperception: I am conscious of myself as a thinking being, i.e. as the bare subject of judgments identified with my agency.
To make the conclusion of the Refutation of Idealism stand as an independent result of the Transcendental Analytic on a par with the Analogies, and to complete the refutation of the rational psychologist in the Fourth Paralogism, we need an argument that RI-0 necessarily implies or presupposes principle RI-1.
In view of this difficulty, one may be tempted to look favorably again on the narrower reading of the purpose of RI which avoids it: perhaps the Refutation of Idealism is simply not meant to provide a basis for the Fourth Paralogism after all. For Kant says that the required proof that we have objective experience of outer things "cannot be achieved save by proof that even our inner experience, which for Descartes is indubitable, is possible only on the assumption of outer experience" (B275; p.244). Like Vogel, Strawson takes this to mean that RI-1 is introduced simply as a Cartesian premise: "The argument, being expressly anti-Cartesian in aim, takes empirical self-consciousness as an unquestioned element in an possible experience."(51) "Empirical self-consciousness," however, has to mean objective experience of myself as enduring, not simply the kind of subjective flow of representations Kant describes as filling inner sense. Unfortunately, Strawson's interpretation implies that the argument can be no more than an internal critique of Cartesian idealism: if we accept Descartes's premise about the indubitability of time-consciousness in the inner sense, then Descartes's sceptical idealism about outer appearances cannot be maintained.
There are just too many reasons, however, why this cannot be Kant's real intention. First and foremost, the Cartesian premise is actually inimical to Kant's own program. Kant could not himself accept that an objective experience of myself as persisting in time is really just indubitibly given in inner sense: as we already saw, the Refutation of Idealism argument can only avoid Vogel's objection if it gets us to an intermediate conclusion such as RI-6. If the beginning of the argument were interpreted as a purely Cartesian premise, then this beginning (RI-1) would have to be constructed in a way that already implicitly denied RI-6, and attributed the objectivity of our awareness of endurance directly to the presentations of inner sense themselves.(52) It is this reading which makes the argument appear both to be affirming and denying that we have an objective perception of ourselves as enduring in inner sense--the 'dangerous confusion' we noted in the previous section.
Moreover, in the Transcendental Deduction, Kant argues that "our inner sense is affected by ourselves. Such affection finds exemplification in each and every act of attention" (B157, footnote a). This Berkelian point shows, against Descartes, that the representation-order through which we intuit ourselves in inner sense could be entirely deceptive: our endurance as an object of inner sense cannot be intuitively certain just because the representations therein are immediately given.
Thus we cannot legitimately take the narrow interpretation of Kant's goal in the Refutation of Idealism. The wider interpretation which makes RI directly relevant to the Fourth Paralogism supports my claim that RI is also intended to refute Berkeley, but in addition it means that we cannot avoid the problem of finding a justification for RI-1 within Kant's own system. Such a justification could not possibly come from any other source than the transcendental unity of apperception (RI-0).(53)
V. From the Transcendental 'I' to the Objectivity of My Appearance in Inner Sense
The remaining question, then, is how Kant thought the transcendental unity of apperception assures us that we must have an objective perception of our endurance through time--the perception which he can also show is not groundable purely in the contents of inner sense. The answer is probably in Kant's characterization of the unity of apperception as neither a phenomenon nor noumenon:
...in the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general, and therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am (B157, p.168).
This formulation contains two distinctions. The 'I' of apperception is distinguished from the "I" which appears (in intuition) to myself, because the I of apperception stands for the intellectual unity of thinking consciousness: it is the origin of the "transcendental unity which is thought in the categories" (B151, p.165) or combinations achieved by various logical forms of judgment, and applied to manifolds of intuition. As Kant says, "I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination" (B159, p.169). It is thus clearly distinguished from the representation of oneself in inner sense, by the general distinction drawn in the Transcendental Aesthetic between the synthesis achieved in thinking and continuous fields of intuition: "Apperception and its synthetic unity is, indeed, very far from being identical with inner sense" (B154, P.166).
Kant also asserts that the "I think" is not an immediate awareness of myself as I am in myself. Kant's justification for this further claim is not fully clear in the Transcendental Deduction, but it seems to be twofold. First, he admits that the "I" of apperception does stand for a kind of self-consciousness which we have prior to all sensible intuition:
..if the synthesis be viewed by itself alone, [it] is nothing but the unity of the act of which, as an act, it is conscious to itself, even without sensibility...(B153, p.166).
But this immediate self-consciousness comes from the spontaneity in all acts of thinking, and this does not determine me as any kind of object: as Kant says in the Refutation of Idealism, "The consciousness of myself in the representation 'I' is not an intuition, but a merely intellectual representation of the spontaneity of a thinking subject" (B278, p.246-7). Thus in this consciousness of spontaneity, I have a "consciousness" of myself as the subject of thoughts, but no more. Thus when Kant says in the introduction to the Paralogisms, the transcendental 'I' "can have no special designation, because it serves only to introduce all our thoughts" (A341/B399, p.329), he means quite literally that it is the agent of our thoughts: the self-consciousness of transcendental apperception is really a kind of non-representational pre-thetic awareness of agency.(54)
Second, with this consciousness (of) spontaneity(55) comes an immediate awareness of my existence, which can thus be called a perception in Kant's sense, since it indicates an intuitive grasp of actuality--but in this case, it is not a true perception, because it specifies nothing about what is thought, i.e. the object. We might compare it to Duns Scotus's `confused' perception of the individuated dasein of an entity without grasping its sosein. Kant clarifies this point in a crucial footnote to the Refutation of Mendelssohn's Proof of the Permanence of the Soul in the Paralogisms (B):
The 'I think' expresses an indeterminate empirical intuition, i.e. perception (and thus shows that sensation, which as such belongs to sensibility, lies at the basis of this existential proposition)....An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real that is given, given indeed to thought in general, and so not as appearance, nor as thing in itself (noumenon) but as something which actually exists....When I have called the proposition 'I think' an empirical proposition, I do not mean to say thereby, that the 'I' in this proposition is an empirical representation. On the contrary, it is purely intellectual, because belonging to thought in general. Without some empirical representation to supply the material for thought, the actus, 'I think', would not, indeed, take place...(B423, p.378).
Here we already see the suggestion that the transcendental self-consciousness in apperception itself necessarily presupposes some determination of the self with reference to some range of empirical representations--a suggestion obviously related to the Refutation of Idealism. Similarly, in the (B) Deduction, Kant notes that "although my existence is not indeed mere appearance (still less mere illusion), the determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of inner sense..." (B157-8; p.168-9). Here Kant seems to assert that the 'I think' has no determination within itself, even though (as we just saw) it must be related to such a determination. Because my 'I think' is not an intellectual intuition (B159, p.169), it is not a knowledge of myself as I am in myself. Moreover, the very act of thought through which its existence is manifested to itself must be related to an object, but it has no real intuition of itself to supply the material, so it must pass over to the appearance of itself in inner sense.
Kant puts all these points about transcendental apperception together in one footnote in §25 of the (B) Deduction, where he says,
Now since I do not have another self-intuition which gives the determining in me (I am conscious only of the spontaneity of it) prior to the act of determination, as time does in the case of the determinable, I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being; all that I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought, that is, of the determination; and my existence is still only determinable sensibly, that is, as the existence of an appearance (B158, p.169).
Thus the very same reason that my self-consciousness in apperception does not give knowledge that I am a free being in itself--namely, the fact that I have no self-intuition of whatever it is in me that thinks--also means that my thinking and even awareness of my own existence must seek an object outside itself, the first of which is itself as an appearance of inner sense. My objective awareness of my endurance in time thus serves as something like the Fichtean "Anstoß" for my transcendental apperception of my 'I'-ness.(56) That 'I'-ness consists in undifferentiated, pure freedom (of thought), and thus for any perception to be distinct from this 'I' (and thus not a direct intellectual intuition of itself), it must have an objective form independent of free imaginative recombination and association. The objective order of time is the most basic of all such forms, and the appearance of myself enduring under this objective form is thus the most basic of all perceptions that makes transcendental apperception possible in a way other than the idealized intellectual intuition.
RI-1 thus follows from RI-0, because the condition expressed by RI-1 is the most minimal grounds of possibility for the type of indirect and non-knowledge-bearing awareness of free agency expressed by RI-0. This also explains why in introducing the Paralogisms, Kant can claim that although the 'I think' of apperception is free of "empirical admixture," it "yet enables us to distinguish, through the nature of our faculty of representation, two kinds of objects. 'I' as thinking, am an object of inner sense and am called 'soul.' That which is an object of the outer senses is called body" (B400; p.329). The very nature of transcendental apperception determines that the spontaneous acts through which the 'I' is aware of its own existence must take place with respect to a self in inner sense. Thus objectivity of the 'I' presupposes the objectivity of the self-as-'soul.' Then the Refutation of Idealism can do its work, showing how we pass from 'soul' to 'body.' As we have seen, granted a key premise about the representation of time, RI shows that the objectivity of the representation of myself as 'soul' presupposes an objective endurance of objects in outer sense, namely bodies (presumably starting with my own).
Thus ultimately, if Kant's intentions for the Refutation of Idealism are to be fulfilled, it must have a basis in transcendental apperception of the kind that Fichte tried to devise for it. When we have a comprehension of the synthetic unity of apperception that yields the necessity of an objective awareness of one's endurance as an object of inner sense, then my objection to the Refutation of Idealism is overcome. Kant's rich thought about self-awareness, which is spread throughout the Critique of Pure Reason, thus leads him on a path that goes not from Descartes towards Husserlian certainty of outer objects, but rather from Berkeley towards a Fichtean conception of the transcendental 'I.'
1. All references to Kant will be given parenthetically, and derive (unsurprisingly) from The Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (St. Martin's Press, 1965). I will be using the abbreviations P4A, P4B, RI, and PF throughout the paper.
2. Or as much of an analysis as I have been able to muster in the time.
3. Peter F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (Routledge--University Paperbacks series, 1991; first published by Metheun & Co. Ltd., 1966).
4. Jonathan Vogel, "The Problem of Self-Knowledge in Kant's 'Refutation of Idealism:' Two Recent Views," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. LIII, No. 4 (December 1993). I should mention that Professor Vogel was my first teacher of philosophy (and of Kant), so my debt to him extends far beyond his interesting contribution to the debate in this article.
5. Strawson, p.170.
6. This will allow us to avoid being surprised by the common root of arguments found in both the Refutation of Idealism (which is part of the Transcendental Analytic) and the Fourth Paralogism (which is part of the Transcendental Dialectic).
7. Much as the Analogies had done for the modes of the category of Relation.
8. Kant adds that from some real perceptions of objects, we can know the existence of other unperceived things as well, if these latter are bound up with the former "in accordance with the principles of their empirical connection (the analogies)"--B273. So the power to know existence extends from actually perceived objects to others necessarily bound up with it.
9. Strawson is thus quite wrong to describe Kant's placement of the Refutation of Idealism as if it were a result of an ill-thought out effort to find a point of entrance for the new argument in the B-edition: "..the Refutation of Idealism, not very strategically placed in the middle of the Postulates of Empirical Thought" (Strawson, p.122). Kant's placement of the Refutation of Idealism is entirely strategic, and it indicates precisely his focus on the question of objective knowledge of the existence or actuality of objects of representation.
10. Notice the crucial, although unemphasized, assumption that my existence really is given to me in apperception. As we will eventually see, this will be the ultimate basis for the argument in RI.
11. Kant even trivializes this 'identical' inference: "for other things are such as I think to be distinct from myself."
12. The P4A argues not that immortality cannot be inferred, but that the mind-body problem cannot be inferred.
13. For 'Idealist thesis 1'
14. For 'Idealist Thesis 2'
15. For 'Transcendental Idealist's thesis 1'--prime, because it is not exactly the inverse of IT1.
16. For 'Transcendental Idealist's thesis 2'
17. Which he will later call "material" idealism in the Refutation of Idealism.
18. The reference to "clear" consciousness of our representations suggests to me that there is every reason to think that Kant understood his transcendental idealism, with its extension of the purely phenomenological status of modes in inner sense to objects in space, to be the right way of preserving Descartes's 'clear and distinct' perception as the measure of actuality. This solution is in essence the same as Husserl's phenomenological reduction: the outer world is reduced to a series of appearances, and so the perception of them just are these phenomenological objects.
19. As Kant says, "The expression 'outside us' is thus unavoidably ambiguous" sometimes meaning what exists in itself, sometimes meaning "outer appearance" (i.e. thing in space). By interpreting noumena as not in space at all, and space as an ideal manifold in us, Kant thus distinguishes that which is 'outside' in the sense of being only problematically accessible as the 'cause' of sensations from the objects in space which, no longer forced to play this 'realist role,' becomes objectively accessible to representations.
20. In the sense of "objective," which contrasts with merely being a product of imagination or the accidental association of representations.
21. Kant strictly distinguishes the imagination by which we actively recombine representations and build up associations that are 'arbitrary' in Locke's sense, from the transcendental imagination which works by a passive synthesis wholly unknown to us in forming the manifolds of space and time, which are therefore 'objective' in contrast to the representations of creative imagination.
22. From The Real and the Ideal, ed. R. Walker (Garland Publishing, 1989). Professor Ameriks was kind enough to provide me with this translation of the Review, which begins with the amusing sentence: "This work, which always exercises, even if it does not always instruct, its reader's understanding, often strains his attention to the point of weariness, but sometimes comes to its aid with the help of felicitous images, or rewards it with unexpected conclusions which are of general utility."
23. ibid, p.xvii.
24. ibid, p.xviii.
25. Although, in fairness, it should be said that the reviewer seems roughly on the mark when he analyzes the argument in the fourth paralogism as follows: "Thus the ordinary, or as the author calls it empirical, idealism is meant to be refuted, not through the proven existence of bodies, but through the disappearance of the advantage that the conviction of our own existence is supposed to have over the belief in bodies" (p.xix-xx).
26. The claim that perception reveals the objective existence of the outer appearances, or objects in space, thus does not mean that we are not subject to mirages, dreams, and elisions in our representations. It means, rather, that these errors are only possible based on our more primordial correct perceptions of how things are in an objective order really independent of our representations. This is the point of Kant's "Note 3" to the Refutation of Idealism (B278; p.247).
27. Professor Ameriks was a little doubtful of this comparison, since Berkeley also claims that on his theory, we can still distinguish illusions from true perceptions. In response, I would say that to make this distinction, Berkeley has to take as the measure of the 'objective' the consistent 'habits' established by God's perceptions. But the view that all regularities in nature are due to God's contingent and arbitrary decision to maintain them is precisely the Ockhamist view, which comes originally from Alfarabi and the Ash'arite line of Islamic philosophical thought.
28. Yet it is remarkable how many people misunderstand this gross Ockamism as Kant's view. Kant is essentially a Scotusian: the relation between noumena and phenomena which best captures 'transcendental idealism' as he understood it is Scotusian "formal distinction" without metaphysical individuation. As such, Kant could not be farther from Ockham's view.
29. Vogel, p.875: "The purpose of the Refutation is to demonstrate the untenability of a kind of skepticism about the external world, which Kant calls 'problematic idealism'."
30. Strawson, p.125.
31. "I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time" (B275; p.245).
32. As Kant explains in the First Analogy, "Only through the permanent does existence in different parts of the time-series acquire a magnitude which can be entitled duration. For in bare succession existence is always vanishing and recommencing." Something permanent in perception is therefore needed, but since time itself (although certainly permanent) cannot be directly perceived, "the permanent in the appearances [in time] is therefore the substratum of all determination of time" (B226; p.214). See also B58, p.82: alteration cannot come from the Aesthetic a priori but depends on the Transcendental Analytic, being shown ultimately from the synthetic unity of apperception.
33. The rephrasing of a crucial passage in RI which Kant orders in the Preface is related to this point: "representations themselves require a permanent distinct from them, in relation to which their change, and so my existence in the time wherein they change, may be determined" (Bxl; p.34). On grounds that will be spelled out, I interpret Kant to be referring here to the objective change of representations, i.e. to change of representations which reflects real change in the objects of the representations. My objective endurance in time thus can only be known if I presuppose objective endurance at the level of the objects, to which the representations must conform, rather than the other way around.
34. Kant means the reproductive imagination here, of course, not the passive synthesis of manifolds in schematized pure intuitions (see B152; p.165).
35. I am indebted to Karl Ameriks for pointing out to me that this argument could be used as a Kantian response to Husserl's contention that in the intuition of a single unwavering tone, we have an immediate and 'primordial' awareness of time-passage without alteration.
36. Strawson, p.126-7.
37. Vogel, p.875.
38. Vogel, p.876.
39. Vogel, p.877.
40. Vogel, p.878.
41. Vogel, p.878.
42. Hence my qualification of the RI-5 premise: objects of inner sense as appearances of inner sense contain only representations of my own mental states.
43. Vogel, p.877.
44. Vogel, p.884.
45. Vogel, p.884.
46. Vogel, p.885.
47. ibid.
48. Strawson, p.129.
49. Strawson, p.128.
50. Vogel, quoting Allison, p.877.
51. Strawson, footnote 1, p.127.
52. To put this in Husserlian terms, my reading suggests that if the intuitions of inner sense are taken as indubitible because they are by nature already purified or 'phenomenologically reduced,' then Kant would say that in this pure set of intuitions there is no constitution of temporal alteration and endurance. This also suggests that the dangerous 'circle' towards which the intuition in Vogel's objection pushes us is largely a result of thinking of RI as purely a reductio of Descartes.
53. Moreover, we have already seen that only on the assumption that RI-1 has a basis in the transcendental unity of apperception would RI also generate an proof of TI1 which refutes the rational psychologist's conclusion in P4A.
54. Note that in his argument for "the ideality of both outer and inner sense," Kant excludes both feelings and the will from "our knowledge which belongs to intuition:" hence that knowledge "contains nothing but mere relations" (B66-8; p.87).
55. I am using Jean-Paul Sartre's phrase for pre-thetic self-awareness here, because the type of self-consciousness which we have in transcendental apperception according to Kant seems to fit Sartre's notion exactly--in fact, it is probably Sartre's model.
56. See Daniel Breazeale's new essay on this subject, "Check or Checkmate? On the Finitude of the Fichtean Self," in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (State University of New York Press, forthcoming fall 1995/spring 1996).