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

introduction of both the two level structure and manifold of elements that are at play in
the doctrine of self-positing.
Already present at the inception of his critical philosophy, Kant‘s dualistic model
of the subject breaks with the initial framework of the Cartesian subjectivist turn in the
history of Western philosophy. 96 Both of these frameworks shift away from a tradition
that in its primary concern with a science of being assumes a simple identity between
thought and being, and in its stead introduce the ―I‖ (cogito) as that which functions as
the locus of any identity relationship between thought and being. However, while in
Descartes the self-conscious ―I‖ exhibits an immediate self-referential relationship
between thinking and itself as the being that is performing this thinking (cogito, sum), in
Kant the ―I‖ contains an irreducible split that denies the possibility for such immediacy.
In Kant‘s critical theory of subjectivity, the ―I‖ that is conscious of itself is a thought that
is always already a ―twofold I;‖ echoing the earlier cited schematic in the doctrine of self-
positing, Kant notes in the Preischrift über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik (henceforth
Fort) (1974) that this ―I‖ contains ―the I as subject, and the I as Object.‖ While Kant
affirms there that this is a ―fact‖ that cannot be explained, he describes the former ―I as
subject‖ in terms of a ―logical I as a priori representation‖ and the latter ―I as Object‖ in
terms of a ―psychological I as empirical consciousness.‖ 97 Self-consciousness within this
96 Baum, M. ―Subjekt und Person bei Kant,‖ in Transzendenz und Existenz. Idealistische
Grndlagen und modern Perspektiven des transzendentalen Gedankens. Wolfgang Janke
zum 70. Geburstag, ed. Manfred Baum and Klaus Hammacher, Amnsterdam/Atlanta, GA
2001, 3. Presented as Hegel‘s interpretation of the Cartesian turn in the history of
philosophy, while simultaneously arguing that Kant's subjectivism must not be easily
conflated the latter. Hegel appears to do this as he mentions Fichte, a purported follower
of Kant, as a more developed instantiation of the Cartesian tradition.
97 Ak: 20:270. Heath, 362 (translation modified). Allison translates ―Ich‖ as ―self‖ and
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