Kant: A Very Short Introduction by Roger Scruton

Author:Roger Scruton [Scruton, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Political, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780192801999
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 1983-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The soul

Kant’s discussion of the soul, and of the concept of the ‘self’ from which it gains its initial description, is among the most subtle parts of his philosophy. The account is given in two complex arguments: the first at the beginning of the Dialectic, in which he attacks the rationalist doctrines of the soul; the second in the third antinomy, and in the Critique of Practical Reason, in which he describes the nature of morality.

The ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’, which deal with the rationalist doctrines of the soul, were substantially revised for the second edition, perhaps because this aspect of the critical philosophy forms part of the multifaceted argument of the transcendental deduction, with which Kant had remained so dissatisfied. Kant’s argument in the Analytic had begun by recognizing the peculiar reality of self-consciousness. I have a privileged awareness of my states of mind, and this is an ‘original’ or ‘transcendental’ act of understanding. The rationalists had sought to deduce from this privileged knowledge a specific theory of its object. They had thought that, because of the immediacy of self-awareness, the self must be a genuine object of consciousness. In the act of self-awareness I am presented with the ‘I’ that is aware. I can maintain this self-awareness even while doubting every other thing. Moreover, I am necessarily aware of my unity. Finally, I have an intuitive sense of my continuity through time: this cannot be derived from the observation of my body, or from any other external source. It therefore seems natural to conclude that I know myself to be substantial, indivisible, enduring, perhaps even immortal, on the basis of self-awareness alone. Such, Kant thought, was Descartes’s argument. Nor is the conclusion an eccentricity of the ‘Cartesian’ view of consciousness. Like all the illusions of reason, it is one into which we are tempted just as soon as we begin to reflect on the datum before us. Every rational being must be tempted to think that the peculiar immediacy and inviolability of self-awareness guarantee its content. In the midst of every doubt, I may yet know this thing that is me, and, reason assures me, this intimate acquaintance with my own nature gives grounds for the belief in the immateriality of the soul. Furthermore, I cannot conceive of my own non-existence, since every attempt to do so postulates the ‘I’ as conceiver.

The reasoning is erroneous, since it moves from the purely formal unity of apperception to the substantial unity affirmed in the doctrine of the soul. ‘The unity of consciousness which underlies the categories is … mistaken for an intuition of the subject as object, and the category of substance is then applied to it’ (B. 421). Although the transcendental unity of apperception assures me that there is a unity in my present consciousness, it tells me nothing else about the kind of thing that bears it. It does not tell me that I am a substance (that is, an independently existing object) as opposed to an ‘accident’ or property.

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