Philosophy 224
A Failure of Recognition
Pt. 2
• Immanuel Kant is the thinker who is often
characterized as the culmination of modern
philosophy.
• His work can reasonably be described as a synthesis
of the rationalist and empiricist strains of modern
philosophy.
• His account of the person or self, like much else in
his philosophy, is a response to the challenge of
Hume.
• The basic tenor of this response: empirical realism
and transcendental idealism.
Immanuel Kant (1724-
1804)
• As Kant reports it, Hume, “woke me from my
dogmatic slumber.”
• Hume’s arguments against causation (like the
similar ones against the concept of the person)
seemed to Kant to both hit the mark and to be
absolutely destructive in their implications.
• They were particularly destructive, as we’ve
already noted, of accounts of moral
responsibility.
Kant and Hume
• In the selection from Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, Kant begins with an essentially Humean
critique of the tradition of rational psychology.
• Rational psychologists like Descartes and
Leibniz (and Locke in a sense too), all make the
same mistake according to Kant: attempting to
derive conclusions about the nature of the person
from an analysis of the activity of thinking.
A Humean Starting Point
• As Kant explains it, a paralogism is a “syllogism
in which one is constrained, by a transcendental
ground, to draw a formally invalid conclusion”
(A341/B399).
• All the paralogisms are based on the same
fallacious move: Fallacy of Equivocation.
• The Third paralogism concerns the tendency we
have to attribute enduring identity to the unity of
our conscious experience.
Paralogisms
• Central to Kant's criticisms in this third paralogism is
the Kantian doctrine of apperception.
• Kant denies that the metaphysician is entitled to
conclude that the self is identical based on the fact of
self-awareness on the grounds that the activity of
self-consciousness does not yield any object for
thought.
• “The identity of the consciousness of Myself in different times is
therefore only a formal condition of my thoughts and their
connection, but it does not prove at all the numerical identity of
my subject…” (117c2).
Apperception
• Thus, the identical self is for Kant, like it is for Hume, a
kind of hypostatization.
• The idea of the person, although it is one to which we are
naturally led in our quest for the unconditioned ground of
thought, does not correspond to any object that is (or
could be) actually given to us in experience.
Hypostatization, not
Hypostasis
• While the self is not a possible object of
experience, Kant does not join Hume in
relegating the idea of the person to the realm of
fiction.
• Instead, he insists that though the self
established by the unity of apperception is a
merely functional self, it is nonetheless
“…necessary and sufficient for practical use…”
(118c2).
• That is, it is essential and available for morality.
A distinctly Non-Humean
Conclusion
• The concept of person is for Kant a practical requirement,
that is, it is necessary for any account of responsibility or
moral goodness.
• One argument for this necessity is seen in his book
Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Why do we need the
Person?
• One of the issues Kant addresses in the book is
the old Platonic/Christian idea that the world of
experience is evil.
• Kant denies this, arguing instead that the world
and human beings are neither good nor evil.
• In the case of human beings, freedom precludes any
such designation.
• Human beings are, however, predisposed to
good.
Is the world Evil?
• This predisposition can be seen in three
different features of our natural being.
1. Animality, in which Kant locates our drives for
self-preservation, reproduction, and sociality.
2. Humanity, which is essentially comparative in
nature and where Kant locates our desires for honor
and various forms of the regard of others (jealousy).
3. Personality, which is where Kant locates the
capacity to take moral law as incentive for action.
What makes us good?
• This account of personality as the capacity to act
morally is the ground for a distinction which
seem familiar, but which for Kant motivates and
develops in a unique way: moral vs.
psychological personality.
• The person as a psychological fact is the self of
apperception.
• The person as a moral fact is “…a subject whose
actions can be imputed to him…” which is just
“…the freedom of a rational being under moral
laws…” (121c2).
Moral vs. Psychological
Personality
• The significance of this distinction plays a large
role in Kant’s Doctrine of Virtue.
• Taken as a natural kind, humans are just one
more piece of nature, different in capacity, but
not different in value from other animals.
• Taken as a moral person, however, humans are
absolutely valued, are ends in themselves, and
thus possessed of an absolute dignity which is the
source and object of our moral requirements.
“exalted above any
price”
• The dignity that comports with our moral
personality is the source of the only appropriate
motive for right action: respect.
• Our dignity as human beings is grounded in our
capacity to choose actions predicated on our
respect for the moral law, and by extension, for
the moral personality of our fellow humans.
• Kant’s deontological ethics can be captured by the
principle: Act always in such a way that you treat
yourself and others always as ends in themselves and
never as means.
Achtung, Baby.
• The account of the psychological person that
Kant offers us remains extremely influential up
to the present day.
• It is, by and large, the model that dominates
cognitive science.
• The account includes:
1. A faculty theory of the mind (functionalism).
2. Insistence on the fundamental interplay of concepts
and sensation.
3. The faculties’ activities are essentially synthetic.
Kant’s Enduring (Non-
Moral) Legacy