Kant Lecture 7

Now, last week, I gave you two supreme principles, and I want to begin today’s lecture with the supreme principle in relation to the understanding. This is a good starting point, for the issue before us today is the synthetic unity of our perception. It’s a very difficult part of the first Critique; we want to be systematic in exploring it. The supreme principle in relation to understanding is, to quote Kant, that “all the manifold of intuition should be subject to conditions of the original synthetic unity of our perception.” That’s one of those wonderful passages in the first Critique that has eyes roll up. People read it a second and third time, consulted it in German, consulted it in Japanese, and tried to get through it. But he does lay out the argument that clarifies what he means by this, and he attaches central importance to what is claimed regarding the synthetic unity of our perception. In fact, he goes so far as to say that the synthetic unity of our perception is, quote, “the highest point to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding.” It’s the pinnacle. I continue with the quote: “even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy itself.” The quote continues: “indeed, this faculty of apperception is the understanding itself.” You’ll find that at B134.

So, how does he wish to have this synthetic unity understood? It’s not subjective; it’s not some psychological state. Kant says this: the synthetic unity of consciousness is an objective condition of all knowledge. It is not merely a condition that I myself require in knowing an object, but a condition under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me. Now, this is addressed to the question of how various sensations become integrated and unified in consciousness, and then how it is that it inheres in my or your consciousness, and how all of this should be understood as distinct from mere subjectivity or psychological states.

Well, step back for a moment and consider what has been established so far. If there are to be concepts at all, there must be some means by which to fashion them out of representations. Thus, some sort of categorical framework is necessary if entities are to be cognized as objects at all. Kant’s table of categories, therefore, must match up with the properties that enter into anything standing as intersubjective, stable identifications—things that are universally agreed to by percipients of a certain kind. For it’s only by way of these categories that objects can be conceptualized at all. And recall that additional resources are required if there is to be knowledge, for understanding is grounded in rules, in an innate faculty that benefits from practice but is, at base, the gift of mother wit. Yes, she’s back.

Well, so far, so good. But just when this seems to be the last word, as progress is tracked from sensation to objective knowledge, something new and seemingly psychological enters into the equation: if there are to be concepts at all, namely, apperception and its shadowy relatives, which Kant identifies as the empirical ego, a transcendental ego, and a self. This matter of selves has whiskers, as Professor Wiggins was among the first to remind all of us a number of years ago. We can go back, certainly, to the Ship of Theseus. I don’t know whether you are in the mood for a legend in this kind of weather, particularly legends drawn from the sunny islands of the Mediterranean and the Midland coast, but Theseus is the one who was sent to Crete to liberate the Athenians from a burden that had been imposed by King Minos. And that burden was sacrifice—sacrificing Athenian youth to the king by putting them in the pit of a labyrinth where they would be devoured by a Minotaur.

So, Theseus had to go off and do something about this. You know the story: he gets there, Minos’s daughter falls in love with him, she shows him the best way to get out of the labyrinth just in case he’s successful in getting down to the Minotaur, killing the Minotaur, and then has to get out. She gives him a golden thread that he can lay behind him as he works his way through this maze-like structure, and then all he has to do is follow that thread. Some of you will recall in Plato’s Republic that we are as puppets on a string; we are acted upon by the gods in ways we cannot fathom, but there is one string we can pull back on, which is the golden thread of reason. And this, of course, is a gloss on that myth, isn’t it? Must be.

So, he does it; he kills the thing. He even promises to meet Ariadne and take her back to the Greek mainland. He says, “I shall fetch you, on all this, wait for me,” and he abandons her. You know the opera, Ariadne auf Naxos? He’s supposed to be picking her up, and he abandons her. There’s a myth surrounding that too, you know. He’s a great, great hero; he’s done heroic deeds, and therefore, the gods need a special place for him. According to one myth, he is installed eternally in the heavens, where he sits on the stool of oblivion, so that he has a kind of immortality but can’t quite figure out how it was he got it. Well, crazy Greeks.

Now, the debate begins because, as Theseus’s ship goes from island to island and place and port to port, celebrating his triumph year in and year out, pretty soon the ship’s old boards have to be replaced by new boards. You see where this is going? At what point have you so replaced the original boards that it really isn’t the Ship of Theseus any longer? Or if you had all of those old boards in a pile and constituted yet another ship out of them, would you now have the original, though the original in some sense had disappeared and now has reappeared? And before you know it, the philosophers are just mucking up what is otherwise a very good story. And it’s a story that we get mucked up the minute we begin to consider ourselves, because even in your tragic youth, you have a bunch of old cells that are being replaced even as you sit here. Your taste buds are going to be all brand new in less than a week. How on earth do you remember what a bad hot dog tasted like, do you see that sort of thing? It’s all brand new.

I don’t want you to smoke, but when Mommy tries to frighten you by saying that you’ll lose your taste for food, tell Mommy those buds are replaced all the time. You just have to have a pause between cigars, that sort of thing. So, with a body that’s constantly undergoing change, the question arises: how is there a continuity of self, a continuity of the ego? Now, the scholastic philosophers were more or less content, following either Plato or Aristotle, on this. But there is an essential self; there is an essential being that undergoes alteration but not change. But unless there is some enduring substance that just is the self, there really wouldn’t be anything for the engines of change to be working on. And so, an essentialism comes out of this. When Aristotle says, famously, that the sense in which Callias is musical is different from the sense in which Callias is a man, he’s pointing to the difference between some accidental properties that we acquire in the course of a lifetime and some essential properties in virtue of which we are the kinds of things that we are.

The medieval part of the story—well, the scholastic part of this story—is itself a very interesting part of the story, but we’ve got to move on, regrettably. And we move to Locke. Now, when you read Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding and are told in 40 secondary sources that this is his broadside against Descartes’s theory of innate ideas, keep two things in mind. The theory of innate ideas ascribed to Descartes—Descartes publicly denied in print; he never attached himself to any such notion as that. And secondly, Descartes isn’t discussed by Locke, though we have every reason to believe that, during his period of self-exile, Locke surely read what Descartes had to say. I believe the right target here is probably the Cambridge Platonists, surely more than Descartes. And the Cambridge Platonists—Cudworth, More, and company—were actually gainfully employed in reviving Platonic thought in philosophy in the Anglophone world, very much in opposition to the sorts of things that we would identify with the Baconian perspective on reality and on knowledge.

So, Locke has a project when it comes to this, and the project is, at a certain point, we’ll focus on this notion of a substantial or essential self and on essences more generally. And that’s when we find Locke declaring that you must make a distinction between real essences and nominal essences. You don’t know the real essence of anything; the real essence is going to be at some Newtonian corpuscular level to which you do not have perceptual access. And as far as nominal essences go, these are entirely the gift of convention. That one chooses to call this “tissue” is a fact that arises in a given cultural context, historical context. We can imagine cultures and settings and people and languages where whatever it is we’re trying to get at with the word “tissue” would not be what they were trying to get at with an entirely different word.

As Locke points out, you could constitute something physically indistinguishable from Locke but much cleverer than Locke, and you might go about describing that entity in terms quite different from the ones you’d use for Locke. And to illustrate the point, he gives us the famous instance of the prince and the cobbler. What, after all, goes into one’s selfhood, personal identity, continuing ego, etc.? Well, simply all of the things present in your consciousness. And since nothing now present in your consciousness is actually based on something happening now, we can say that consciousness is just the repository of all the things that you remember, from milliseconds ago to hours and days and years and months ago.

Well, do this as a thought experiment. On a given night, a prince and a cobbler go to sleep. In the course of the night, the contents of the prince’s consciousness are transferred to the cobbler, the contents of the cobbler’s consciousness are transferred to the prince, and Locke says, quite persuasively, that on their arising—I grant you, quote, “they are the same man, but not the same person.” And you, you, you can—here’s this shoe cobbler who expects you to be very decorous in his presence and bowing and scraping and all that sort of thing, and that princely fellow, whom you know to be the prince, wants to know if you need a new pair of heels, you see? As far as Locke’s concerned, that’s it. The contents of consciousness exhaust the self.

Now, we are fortunate always—and, by the way, it’s one of the great tragedies today that we don’t have this group around. You always need acute philosophers to keep your thinking clear and challenged, and you always need great wits to rein in the pretensions of philosophy. Unfortunately, in the late 17th, early 18th century, the English-speaking world did have great wits, and they had a lot of fun with what science and philosophy happened to be producing in recent years. They actually formed a club; they knew each other. They formed a club named after Dr. Scriblerus. How many of you have ever read the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus? Who wrote these memoirs? Oh, come on—John Arbuthnot. Do you not know that? Do you know the name of the club they formed? The Scriblerians. And the Scriblerians had a field day with things like the productions of the Royal Society and John Locke’s famous Essay and so forth.

Well, on this business of the prince and cobbler, you can get—oh, by the way, you know the names of some Scriblerians: Swift, Pope—ringing bells now? Lila, touch what they’re trying to—what they’re trying to do on Willowpot, this scientific community. They’re trying to get sunshine from cucumbers. They’re persuaded that if the authorities will give them just some more funding, they might be able to produce so much of the stuff as to sell it cheaply. You get the picture here, don’t you? There’s a wonderful book by Christopher Fox, which I’d recommend to you, called Locke and the Scriblerians. It’s a good summer read; you’ll—if you’re philosophy students, you’ll like it quite a bit. They do a lot on metaphysics and relata; you’d enjoy it.

But for the first serious philosophical critique of the thesis, we turn to George Berkeley and to Berkeley’s Alciphron, and Berkeley’s Alciphron, along with Thomas Reid’s Inquiry, puts to the test the notion that you have exhausted this concept of an enduring self by consulting no more than what the empiricists offer by way of the contents of consciousness. The argument is fairly straightforward; it’s sometimes called the Brave Officer Argument. And the Brave Officer Argument is of the following form: imagine a brave officer, call him B, who recalls vividly having been a boy once, punished for stealing fruit from the orchard, called the young boy A. Now consider, many years hence, a decorated general reflecting on the day he was decorated as a young officer, called the agent General C, who has a vivid recollection of being the young officer B and no recollection whatever of being the boy A. On the Lockean account, it would seem that A equals B, B equals C, but A does not equal C. The principle of associativity is not honored, and the alleged identity collapses.

Now, just in case you think that what Locke was offering was some sort of identity argument, that would be a successful challenge too. Reid, as you might guess, has that challenge and then another one. The other one is quintessentially Reidian, and the other one is that someone remembering having done something no more makes him the one who did it. You have lunatics seven days a week vividly recalling having lost a battle in Belgium. They stand there with their hands inside their waistcoats; they affect a French accent; they wonder why the supplies came so late. They’re from Portsmouth, let me see. So, Reid simply—he says that this is what happens. There’s a wonderful line of Reid’s that conjectures and theories are the creatures of men, and nature seldom mimics these things, do you see?

So, when I say that my epitaph shall read, “He died without a theory,” I’m simply showing a very strong sympathy for a Scottish common sense philosophy that thinks we’re generally, generally safe when we stick to systematic observation when possible, measurement, and framing very modest propositions based on what is available to a person’s ordinary perception. And the further we get from that, the more turbid and turbulent waters of metaphysics rush over us. It’s a wonderful line of Edmund Burke’s about her, but I will keep getting about certain things until the steely tomb heaps its mold on our proud quality. Those of us closer to that mold, I think, probably find that a more chilling statement than you do.

So, now, the other thing, though, is that the other disappointment with Locke is that you still have this entity reflecting on the contents of its consciousness. So, in addition to certain logical problems with the thesis and common-sense or counterintuitive problems with the thesis, it doesn’t really do the job it set out to do, because you still have some sort of enduring “X” that must be the entity reflecting on the contents of consciousness. So, predictably, enter Hume, quote—I think this is word for word—“I must own that when I search for myself, I can find nothing but a bundle of perceptions.” He can find nothing but a bundle of perceptions.

Now, this is a predictable empiricist position on the question, but do follow what Hume is saying. Try to give some thought about anything that isn’t finally reducible to thought about something that figures at the level of perception, even if it’s some sort of rearrangement of former percepts. To be thinking is to be thinking about something. Now, you might just be thinking about relations of ideas—you know, that every number is equal to itself—but if you’re conducting, if you’re thinking about something you’re granting a physical reality to, call it yourself, then you’re thinking in property terms. You’re thinking that you’re sitting; you’re thinking that you’re tired; you’re thinking that it was cold about a half hour ago till you got in this lecture, et cetera, et cetera.

So, what you’ve got, then, is a bundle of perceptions. Now, you might ask the question: well, don’t we need a percipient now observing the bundle of perceptions? After all, what constitutes the ground of the continuity of the entity in question? And there, Hume offers this interesting reply. He says, look, think of a parade formation. Now, everyone marching in the parade is replaceable, and as long as, when one party drops out, he is replaced by another one, the continuity of the formation is preserved, even though you have these otherwise incessant changes. So, this is almost a kind of Jamesian stream-of-consciousness argument, this continuous flow of experiences, what William James referred to, rather poetically, as the ever-passing present thought, do you see?

So, the bundle of perceptions—what might Reid have to say about the bundle of perceptions and Hume’s skeptical position on his own self and Descartes with the cogito and so forth? You know how Reid’s going to misbehave when it comes to these philosophical productions, don’t you? He says, “It seems to be a particular strain of humor in this man”—he’s referring to Hume—“a particular strain of humor in this man, this author of deathless prose, admired the world over by many, that he has nonetheless not only doubtful about his own existence but about the very readership on whom his authority depends,” do you see? As for Descartes, Reid says, “A man who disbelieves his own existence is no more fit to be reasoned with than one that thinks he’s made of glass.” As for the bundle of perceptions, Reid says that it has always been his view that, “for there to be treason, there must be a traitor.” And so, if in fact there is this bundle of perceptions, presumably it’s inhering in Hume.

Now, you’ll find Reid so playful in these regards that you might think this is philosophy light. Read the whole Inquiry. These are asides; I think they’re very much in the Scriblerian tradition, by the way. I mean, they’re much later—the Memoirs of Dr. Scriblerus, I think, show up first in 1714; Reid’s Inquiry is published in 1764. But there’s already a great respect for what Pope and Swift and company had produced.

Now, Kant’s position is, predictably, entirely different from either the empiricist side of the equation or the Scottish common-sense side of the equation, though, as I’ve said repeatedly—but the longer I stay with this literature, the more convinced I am that Reid’s Inquiry, in redacted, translated form, mightily influenced Kant’s thought. I’m joined in this judgment by Carl Ameriks, who, in my estimation, is perhaps the best of our contemporary Kant scholars, now at Notre Dame.

For Kant, it is a necessary feature of the human mind that experiences are unified in a single consciousness. It’s only when there is consciousness of the result of the synthesis of the manifold that it, in a sense, can rise to the level of a comprehended state or condition with content. The transcendental unity of apperception refers, then, to what are, finally, the necessary conditions for the unification of elements of empirical apperception—these things that are gleaned by the senses and give rise to sensations, and these sensations, then, are in the form of perceptions becoming subsumed under general categories. All this must be unified. You understand why it must be unified. If Jack is the one who senses the blue, and Jill is the one who senses the tree, and Frank is the—you get the picture—there’s no way any of this can be merged into a scene.

At the same time, there isn’t anything in the stimulus itself that supplies the means of unification. This has to be an a priori power, common to minds of a certain kind, namely, minds of our kind. So, the transcendental unity of apperception refers to what are, finally, necessary conditions for the unification of the various elements of empirical apperception. But this must operate a priori, as established by the fact that nothing at the level of appearances themselves contains within it the means by which to establish such unification. It’s not in the stimulus. What is required is what Kant refers to as an act of the imagination. This is at B154, and that section will repay close reading on your part.

What’s required is what Kant refers to as an act of the imagination, which is known not as a representation but directly by way of the act itself. To quote Kant at B153: “It is conscious to itself, even without sensibility,” do you say? That you, as a conscious entity, are aware of these powers that you have is not something engaged by or triggered by sensibility itself. This is something that would be there whether there were sensibility or not. As this is a necessary and universal condition of experience itself, it is grounded in an a priori substrate, which Kant calls the transcendental ego.

Now, save me from saying anything contemporary, please, because it all begins to sound like the Telegraph or something. But I do think it would be useful for persons taking on the very difficult task of the self, writing on the self, to make a distinction between Kant’s transcendental ego and Kant’s empirical ego. Most of the literature I’m familiar with has to do with what might be called the psychological dimensions of selfhood. The transcendental dimension is the necessary dimension; it’s what can be argued into place. If no one were ever aware of oneself, it’s not the fact that you’re aware of yourself that these things happen. In fact, were there not the a priori conditions of the unification of empirical apperceptions, there wouldn’t be any awareness at all, do you know why? Because there wouldn’t be any thought at all. That’s what he meant when he said that the transcendental unity of apperception, finally understood, just is thought, do you see?

As this is a necessary and universal condition, it’s grounded in an a priori substrate, and that’s the one that Kant refers to as the transcendental ego. James Van Cleve has summarized Kant’s concept of this transcendental ego, contrasting it with the empirical ego. I want to read you a passage from Van Cleve, but I also want you to note that I—not strongly disagree, that almost sounds like dyspepsia—I’d be quite reserved about the last sentence in this passage, quote: “In the philosophy of Kant, the transcendental ego is the thinker of our thoughts, the subject of our experiences, the willer of our actions, and the agent of the various activities of synthesis that help to constitute the world we experience.” With hesitation, I say that that’s a decent enough quick summary. Now, then, he says: “It is probably to be identified with our real or noumenal self.” We know that we don’t know things like that. This is where you want to engage in that exercise of Thomas Reid’s of laying your hands across your lips, see? Every time you’re on the verge of saying, “Well, you know what it is noumenally,” you want to say, “Well, you know what it is,” mustn’t do it.

At A492/B520, the transcendental subject is equated by Kant with the self proper as it exists in itself, and that, I think, is what led Van Cleve to say, well, you know, it’s this—it’s the noumenal self. Kant is suggesting something that’s equated with, not something that’s known as. Now, this is contrasted with an empirical ego, which is reached by way of introspection, the “I,” the self that accompanies all experience and consciousness as a subjective feature of perception. It distinguishes one person from another. When you say things like, “Let me tell you something about myself,” that’s what you’re referring to. You’re not—that’s not the transcendental ego; that’s the café ego, do you say? Self-disclosure is a very effective form of ingratiation. Unfortunately, we learned this at a very early age, and so we become gabby for the next 70 years. “Well, let me tell you about myself,” to which the polite reply is, “Oh, please don’t.”

So, against Hume, Kant offers this as a conclusion: it is absolutely necessary that in my knowledge, all consciousness should belong to a single consciousness, that of myself, you see? Hume doesn’t give us the belonging. He has a kind of mechanism by which some—what?—psychic stuff, perceptual stuff, bundled stuff gets held together, but not in a way that could be known, because there isn’t a knower. Hume knows there’s a knower, goodness sake; he’s writing this, you see? When Kant says this, he is not offering a factual claim based on introspection; rather, it pertains to the logical form of all knowledge as necessarily relating to a faculty or power by which unification becomes possible. And this just is the faculty of apperception.

So, Kant is here to explain how a bundle of perceptions might rise to the level of human understanding. And, in the end, how might we best summarize that explanation? I should tell you that he is respectful of Hume in these regards—not just the fellow who awakened him from dogmatic slumber, but he sees Hume as the culmination, in Kant’s day anyway, of an empirical tradition that, in important respects, includes Newton. You’ve got to be very careful about what part of this project you’re going to jettison, because you do not want the scientific productions growing out of systematic observation, measurement, etc.—you don’t want those to be casualties in a war of metaphysics. And, in fact, Reid is also very respectful of Hume.

I shall give you a gloss on this, an aside on this, because I think these exchanges amuse you, and the weather is cold; you should be repaid for your diligence and so forth. When Reid completed his Inquiry, he did not want to publish it until Hume read it, just in case he grossly misrepresented Hume’s position. But Reid didn’t know Hume; Reid was not a party. He was a Presbyterian minister, actually, in Aberdeen. Hume was down there in Edinburgh, bothering the bishops. But they did have a friend in common, Hugh Blair, and Reid asked Blair to intercede to have Hume read the thing. Blair sends it to Hume; Hume returns it, unwrapped, with a note saying that it has always been his view that Presbyterian divines should spend their time troubling each other and should leave philosophy to philosophers—very high-handed, indeed. Blair persisted, sent it back, and said, “Davey boy, I think you better read this.”

So, Hume did read it, and he wrote back to Reid, glowingly and revealingly. He said, “I must say, if there was one part of this quite remarkable work that I did not fully understand, it was a section in your chapter on seeing, which you refer to as the geometry of visibles.” Ah, well, that’s the thing that explodes the whole ideal theory. That’s the part you want to understand. I don’t think Hume was big on geometry, by the way, but that’s something else again. And then, Reid replies, and if you want the spirit of the Enlightenment, I think you’ll find it in the manner in which Reid closes the correspondence with Hume: “And although we here at Aberdeen are all good Christian men, we would prefer your company to that of St. Athanasius, and we fear that if he were to write no further in metaphysics, we would have nothing to talk about at all.”

So, well, how does Kant finally explain how you get a bundle to rise to the level of understanding and thought? The explanation just is that transcendental argument that establishes the a priori basis on which objective knowledge depends, and the necessary and universal a priori basis on which such knowledge is possessed by a single consciousness.