stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

practical philosophy does not start out from a fact but from an act that it ought not to surprise us
that Kant associates freedom with das Selbstbewusstsein.
“This is a suitable place for explaining the paradox which must have been obvious to
everyone in our exposition of the form of inner sense ($6): namely, that this sense represents to
consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves.
For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected, and this would seem to be
contradictory, since we should then have to be in a passive relation [of active affection] to
ourselves. It is to avoid this contradiction that in systems of psychology inner sense, which we
have carefully distinguished from the faculty of apperception, is commonly regarded as being
identical with it” (CPR B153). I know myself as some objective self. However, Kant argues, this
objective self is not the only self there is. Clearly, there must also me some other self that knows
the objective self. But what other self is that? At the danger of infinite regress, that other self
cannot itself be just another objective self. Instead, that other self has to be the subject of that
knowledge. But what is that subject? “What determines inner sense is the understanding and its
original power of combining the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under an
apperception, upon which the possibility of understanding itself rest” (CPR B153). The subject
of that knowledge is nothing other than the power of combining. The question is what kind of
knowledge knows that power of combining? Such knowledge cannot itself be representational to
the extent that representational knowledge uses the very power that it is attempting to represent.
Instead, Kant suggests, such knowledge of the power of combining would have to be das
Selbstbewusstsein. “Consequently, this subject cannot be known. The subject of the categories
cannot by thinking the categories acquire a concept of itself as an object of the categories. For in
order to think them, its pure self-consciousness, which is what was to be explained, must itself be
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