BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

THE BODY AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL 219
consciousness, it is an a priori condition of the possibility of experience (A
108).
7.3 The temptations of self-consciousness
What can we learn about ourselves from the fact that we have this
specific kind of self-consciousness called transcendental apperception? If
we return to rational psychology, as Kant deals with it in the paralogism
chapter, from the fact that we are self-conscious, rational psychology has
thought it possible to infer a number of conclusions regarding what it
calls ‘the soul’, Kant writes. Not only is the soul taken to be the most
essential part of us, but according to rational psychology it is a substance,
single, without parts and numerically identical through time. From this
rational psychology has further inferred its immortality.
In all these arguments rational psychology has used the sentence ‘I
think’ as its only premise, Kant claims.
I think is thus the sole text of rational psychology, from which it is to
develop its entire wisdom. (A 343/B 401)
But are the deductions of rational psychology tenable? As readers of
Kant are well aware, he firmly denies this. His official strategy is to show
that the arguments of rational psychology involve a misuse of logic (A
341/B 399). It is, however, also possible to extract another argument
from the paralogism chapter: the error of rational psychology is due to a
transcendental transgression. The argument is that rational psychology
has regarded human self-consciousness as a privileged source of
knowledge about what we really are as human beings. Using Kant’s
terminology, we may say that it claims to have access to knowledge of
what a human being is, considered as a thing in itself. But, human selfconsciousness
is no such source. It is a representation, and as such, it tells
us nothing about ourselves considered as a thing in itself. Rational
psychology has failed to see this and so is guilty of the charge of
transcendental transgression.
Kant supports this point in various ways. Sometimes he argues that in
analyzing self-consciousness we find nothing but the structure of our
representations, or as he puts it, the form our representations necessarily
must have in order to belong to our consciousness (A 363). At other times
he refers to the ‘I think’, or more specifically, the ‘I’ of ‘I think’, as a
representation, for instance here: