The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

on the possibility of attaching the representation ―I think‖ to this very expression ―I
think.‖ Thus, the resulting perpetual circle which Kant speaks of in the ―Paralogisms‖
reveals that, within the sphere of the understanding alone, the most basic requirement for
the logical act of self-consciousness (understood here as described in the previous
paragraph, i.e., as a form of self-objectification) is that this self-consciousness be possible
(understood here as it was described in the previous section, i.e., as the necessity of the
possibility of a synthetic unity of apperception for there to be an analytic identity). It is
the latter sense of self-consciousness or apperception that brings forth the extent to which
it is that ―wodurch‖ or ―through which‖ this making itself into an object is possible. Thus
this image of the back and forth or vicious circle created by the subject knower‘s self
consciousness of its involvement in all thinking brings some schematic clarity to what
Kant means in the above passage when he writes that self-consciousness, which is a
logical act, is that ―through which‖ the subject makes itself object.
A second way of elucidating the significance of the ―wodurch‖ is Kant's
description of the ―I think‖ as a ―vehicle‖ of all concepts and judgments. 172 This
description takes place in the opening of section of Kant's account of the paralogisms in
traditional metaphysical arguments. Kant remarks that the reader must find curious that
the ―concept‖ or ―judgment‖ of the ―I think‖ does not appear in the table of the categories
that were deduced in the ―Analytic‖ section of the ―Doctrine of Elements‖ in the KrV.
This is because, even if just as necessary for cognition as the categories of the
understanding, it is in fact presupposed by all of them, both analytically (as a priori
legitimacy of Rational Metaphysics and the common conflation between apperception
and inner experience.
172 KrV, A341/B399; A348/B406.
117