Personal Identity and Resurrection by Gasser Georg;

Author:Gasser, Georg;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

The Necessity of Bodily Self-Ascription: No Determination of Space without Positioning of Ourselves in Space as Corporeal Beings

If Kant restricted his own analysis to the dependence of mental predicates on determination of space, this would present a difficulty for my own project: we would lack a way to argue from the necessity of spatial predication as predication of bodies in space, which we just have shown to be a part of his theory, to the necessity of ascribing corporeal predicates to ourselves as subjects of experience.

In this context it is helpful to notice an element in the Kantian system which is systematically important and which is implicit in his published writings yet which is recognizable only in a few places: the fact that Kant conceives of space as an a priori form of intuition which structures our representations of objects different from us has the important consequence that we always perceive external objects from a certain perspective. We perceive objects to our right or our left, in front of us or behind us, see their front or their back, from a wide or narrow angle, and so on.

If these objects were only front or back—if they had the objective properties of being on our left or our right—then the world would not be objective or exist independently in the required sense. It would instead be essentially related to the perspective of the perceiving subject—and therefore subjective!

But this is not possible, as Kant’s answer to the question of the subject has already shown. The perspectival nature of our perceptual representation stands in sharp contrast to the essential non-perspectival nature of the objects so perceived, that is, objects which we must conceive as existing independently.

To bridge this contrast we must reflect on what it means to regard an object from a certain perspective. It means relating oneself as oneself to this object by positioning both oneself and the perceived object in one and the same framework of reference.33 In relating our own position in space to the position of the perceived object we conceive the perception of perspective as a result of a relation between objects that are part of the same spatial world.

The mediation between subjective perception and objectively existing objects of this perception, therefore, is only possible if we as perceiving subjects position ourselves in the spatial framework of the objective world.

It has probably become clear that this taking into account of the perspectival nature of our perception is essentially connected with what we already have encountered in Gareth Evans’s talk about positioning and orientation in space: without positioning à la Evans, there would be no differentiating between subjective perspective and objective being.

From this observation we can therefore return to Evans’s discussion of Strawson’s questions. But I hope that we now understand better what Evans did not provide, namely, an explanation for why we must transcend the temporal, purely internal determination of our states of consciousness at all and must orient and thereby position ourselves in space.

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