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

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

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kind <strong>of</strong> thing that it cannot know. The transcendental subject is just not the transcendental object<br />

no matter how much representational self-knowledge tries to make it be one. Representational<br />

self-knowledge fails because that which it tries to know is qualitatively different from what it<br />

projects into it.<br />

That representational self-knowledge turns the transcendental subject into the<br />

transcendental object means that it can only know it as an appearance. “Even the inner and<br />

sensible intuition <strong>of</strong> our mind (as object <strong>of</strong> consciousness) which is represented as being<br />

determined by the succession <strong>of</strong> different states in time, is not the self proper, as it exists in<br />

itself—that is, is not the transcendental subject—but only an appearance that has been given to<br />

the sensibility <strong>of</strong> this, to us unknown, being” (CPR B521). Kant never tires <strong>of</strong> making this point.<br />

“Everything that is represented through a sense is so far always appearance, and consequently we<br />

must either refuse to admit that there is inner sense, or we must recognize that the subject, which<br />

is the object <strong>of</strong> sense, can be represented through it only as appearance, not as that subject would<br />

judge <strong>of</strong> itself if its intuition were self-activity only, that is, were intellectual” (CPR B68). We<br />

can only know the transcendental subject in the form <strong>of</strong> the transcendental object which is to say<br />

as an appearance. “Although my existence is not indeed appearance (still less mere illusion), the<br />

determination <strong>of</strong> my existence can take place only in conformity with the form <strong>of</strong> inner sense,<br />

according to the special mode in which the manifold, which I combine, is given in inner<br />

intuition. Accordingly I have no knowledge <strong>of</strong> myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself”<br />

(CPR B158). However, that we can only know the transcendental subject as an appearance is a<br />

problem. Hermann Andreas Pistorius was first to point out the problem. “I found nothing that<br />

would have explained to me how, according to the author’s system, appearance could be possible<br />

at all, if that through which all appearing becomes possible (which must, accordingly, be<br />

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