Having critiqued the rationalist argument for the simplicity of the soul, Kant now turns his attention to the rationalist notion of “personality” as an additional attribute of the “I” that thinks. Kant writes that, according to the rationalist view of the soul, a sense of personhood begins to develop when
I refer each and all of my successive determinations to the numerically identical self, and do so throughout time, that is, in the form of the inner intuition of myself. “
A362
That is, the self begins to develop a sense of itself as a person and its “personality” when it relates each of its experiences to itself as the foundation for its experiences.
It may be noticed that this account of personhood is based upon the substance-accident model, with the self playing the part of substance in relation to its accidental determinations effected by its experiences. It may be recalled for the sake of contrast that Hume, an empiricist, denied that there was any basis for asserting that the soul was a substance. Hume’s view of the self was rather that it was a bundle of passing experiences without an underlying substrate. Kant’s aim was to test whether personality and the development of personhood really can be supported by the notion of soul as it is found in the Cartesian tradition.
Consciousness and Personhood in Locke’s Essay
As was the case in our discussion of simplicity, the concept of personality is descended from a philosophical lineage. In this case, Locke is the most important antecedent, who discussed “personal identity,” in terms of consciousness.
Like Descartes, Locke argued that material and spiritual substances must both have distinct substrates. He describes spiritual substratum in terms of consciousness. Much like consciousness, “spirit,” he writes, is that wherein “thinking, knowing, doubting, and a power of moving, etc., do subsist” (2.23.5). As a substrate for our mental activity, spiritual substance is that within which and by which they are united into a whole. For instance, in 2.23.6 he goes on to write,
Whatever therefore be the secret abstract nature of substance in general, all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself.”
2.23.6
The general idea of substance therefore connotes the following ontological structure: (a) multiple combinations of simple ideas that (b) exist in the unknown cause of their union.
Bringing all these points together, spiritual substance is (I) composed of our inner mental experiences conceived as (II) existing in (and thus supported by) a substrate that furthermore (III) brings unity to them.
Functional Similarity with Kant’s “I” of Apperception
These points hopefully suffice for a brief sketch of Locke’s doctrine of spiritual substance. A functional similarity between Kant’s conception of the I that thinks and Locke’s spiritual substrate may now be seen. There is a parallel between Kant’s concept of a “unity of apperception“ that belongs to “I that thinks” and Locke’s sense of our spiritual substrate as the cause of the unity of our mental activity. As the phrase “unity of apperception” suggests, the I (the I of self awareness) is that whereby everything we perceive comes to belong to one thing. Furthermore, the notion of personality Kant discusses is based, as can be seen in the quote from a 362, upon a similar way of distinguishing the ontological constituents of the soul.
With this framework in place, we may begin discussing Kant’s critique of the notion of personhood as he finds it in the philosophical tradition. As was the case in the prior two critiques of substantiality and simplicity, it will be seen that it is the formal (propositional) concept of the I that, on the one hand, allows for a concept of personality, but on the other, limits what we may know about it to the contemplation of a purely conceptual reality. Yet, in contrast to the prior discussions, the present one will focus more attention upon the transcendental aspect of his account. Thus the primary goal of what follows will be to unpack Kant’s notion of a transcendental self.
The Transcendental “I” of Human Consciousness
Let’s begin by discussing the term “transcendental.” What does Kant mean by the expression, “transcendental self”? To answer this question, let’s begin by returning to the idea of a subject that acts to unify the accidents it supports – in this case, the inner experience of our mental activity. As was mentioned in the introduction, substratum as the cause of unity has its precedent in Locke’s account of spiritual substance. We can now turn to the third Paralogism to see how the notion of a transcendental self is linked to the unity self and personhood:
Meanwhile we may still retain the concept of personality – just as we have retained the concept of substance and of the simple – in so far as it is merely transcendental, that is, concerns the unity of the subject, otherwise unknown to us, in the determinations of which there is a thoroughgoing connection through apperception.“
A365
In the first part of the quote, Kant removes the mystery of what he will decide regarding personality. As might have been expected by readers of the prior to paralogisms, he adjudicates the matter by reminding us that personality has to be understood noumenally in the negative sense, i.e. apart from any “objective“ experience of the soul and its qualities.
Kant tells us (adhering to the quotation above) that these representations take us no further than a transcendental concept, one that “concerns the unity of the subject.“ This unity becomes known to us by and through the passing inner experiences that arise in us, within our inner awareness of the thoughts and perceptions that come and go. But we are also aware of a “something” that persists through those changes, and an “I” of awareness that, by connecting one moment of awareness to the next, yields us a consciousness of a unity of the self and thus, its personhood.
It is this underlying “I“ of pure awareness that is the basis for Kant’s notion of a purely transcendental concept of the soul. As an unchanging substrate of our mental activity, it is the correlate of the purely general notion of a “something” in which its successive determinations/affects/accidental attributes (a) find their unity (i.e. it acts as something “in“ which they are brought together as one) and (b) come to be united by thought. Finally, it might be noticed that (a) involves a receptivity on the part of the substrate while (b) involves activity upon the object(s) of thought.
In the Transcendental Deduction, (a) shows up as corresponding to the original prior unity of apperception (self awareness). Kant writes,
I call it pure apperception, to distinguish it from empirical apperception, or, again, original apperception, because it is that self-consciousness which, while generating the representation ‘I think’…, cannot itself be accompanied by any further representation. The unity of this apperception I likewise entitle the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, in order to indicate the possibility of a priori knowledge arising from it. For the manifold representations, which are given in an intuition, would not be one and all my representations, if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. As my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must conform to the condition under which alone they can stand together in one universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not all without exception belong to me.
B132
To sum up, the weight of the term “Transcendental“ in this context is such that it indicates that the substrate to which it corresponds should be thought of in purely general terms, as a “something,” in a sense, that persists as such so that it is, in its transcendental purity, always “prior” to any qualifying attribute, i.e. to any object of its thinking that might serve to determine its mode of being (the thing thinking about x).
When it contemplates itself, it applies the categories of understanding to its inner experience just as it does to its outer experience, so that it comes to think of itself in its pure subjectivity (as just an I) as a substance because it experiences itself as the subject of successive determinations. As long as nothing from our experience of the I as thinking any particular object is added to our concept of it, we may contemplate it in its purely transcendental aspect. A transcendental concept does not proceed beyond the application of the categories. If any empirical experience were added to it, it could not be considered purely transcendental.
The “transcendentality” of the concept lies in its pure generality, its pure universality, so that it ranges over the items that logically fall under its pure concept (e.g. “substance“ extends to individual substances by virtue of the application of our understanding of the concept to our experience of particular substances). And when the concept of substance is applied to the substrate of all thought, our pure conscious awareness, since we have no way of encountering it empirically, “objectively,“ we are led to have a purely transcendental concept of it whenever we consider it purely as a substrate.
