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

y Descartes description that any time my thinking ceases so does any possibility of
knowing if the ―I‖ exists. The recognition is also immediate because the evidence of my
thinking, which assumes an ―I‖ to which all awareness is attributed, is one and the same
as my awareness of this evidence. In other words, this awareness of the ―I think,‖ which
is an awareness of all this ―I‖ is conscious, is also the recognition of something that
belongs to it and with which it cannot be parted.
Without entering the greater debate of the success or failure of this proof on its
own terms, here is one suggestion as to how this proof may be legitimate. The key would
reside in the first person character of ―I am.‖ Because the result of this intuitive
reasoning is in the first person, there is no need to verify outside itself if it is in fact the
case. In other words, that ―I am‖ cannot be falsified in light of my thinking the intuition
of ―I am‖ is both evident and certain. 198 This first person relation is what would make the
cogito the ideal candidate for arriving at a necessary truth.
The reason for introducing feeling as a form of instantiation of intuition here is to
be able to make the thinking activity through which the proof takes place somewhat
concrete. Appealing to the absence of a referent—the actual movement of the body as
one walks—for the possibility of asserting the truth of these feelings as conceived here as
thought exemplifies in what way one‘s thinking in general is itself self-referential. This
self-referentiality together with the idea that all thought or awareness is possible only as
mine is what allows for the intuition of the existence of myself. There are no other
representational, conceptual, creative tools at play in this form of thinking. Once
Descartes takes away the referent in his explanation of the way in which ―I walk‖ can be
198 This is an idea taken from a much more complex argument in Bernard Williams‘ ―The
Certainty of the Cogito.‖ The discussion here is not meant to represent that complexity.
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