Me, Myself, and 'I': On Three Notions of Self-Identity

In a most interesting recent essay on Derrida and French philosophy, written by Peter Salmon, a well-known contemporary critique of Enlightenment conceptions of subjectivity was rehearsed, namely as being biased towards a Eurocentric male perspective, which presumes to present a ‘neutral’ view of subjective identity, valid for everyone, always, and universally, without regard for particular personalities, histories, cultural backgrounds, sex or privilege:

Descartes was certain of only one thing, ‘I think’—therefore I can posit that I exist. Later, John Locke introduced the idea of consciousness absent in Descartes, so ‘I think that’. And in the late 19th century, Franz Brentano, one of Husserl’s teachers, noted that consciousness always has a content—‘I think about’. In each case, the thinker is trying to get at what ‘identity’ is, as was Kant, as was Husserl.

But in the tradition, at least until recently, the unquestioned assumption of all these theories is that the self is ‘neutral’—a floating consciousness that is, once you peel away everything, the same as it ever was. It is genderless, has no political identity, no body. Basically, it is a heterosexual (European) white man (of the sort who may be given to argue against ‘wokeness’). Other identities are then deviations, to be studied from the outside, like scientific specimens.

There are a couple of assumptions in that quotation that reveal a persistent mistaken understanding of what is at stake in the ‘identity’ that Kant, Descartes, Locke and others are said to have been after.

First, it is suggested that the self about which the aforementioned thinkers talk is a construct that is abstracted from a putatively more original concrete, empirical, political, and personal self, and that the universal self thus constructed is therefore neutral with respect to, and effectively indifferent to, the particularities of gender, political and social context, even one’s own embodiment, or more problematically, relegates these aspects to irrelevance.

Second, it ignores the specific role the self, in its various denominations (cogito, consciousness, conscience, aperception, ‘Ich denke’, Apperzeption etc.) is supposed to play in the accounts of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Kant and others.

These two aspects are related. Concentrating on Kant’s notion of apperception, crucial to his general theory of knowledge, it is important to realise that Kant distinguishes between two types of apperception: empirical apperception and transcendental apperception. While empirical apperception is a necessary condition for self-consciousness, it is not a sufficient condition for it. Only transcendental apperception establishes the self-identity of some person who is conscious of herself as herself. Important here is the relational aspect conveyed by the phrase ‘of herself as herself’. Transcendental apperception, or the ‘I think’ which the above-linked essay mentioned, constitutes that relation. It is that consciousness that one has when one relates to oneself as the one doing, representing or thinking something, whatever that something is. It constitutes the form of reflexiveness that accompanies any act of doing, representing or thinking of which one is aware that it is an act that one does oneself.

This last italicised phrase is significant because transcendental apperception is not just any form of accompaniment of a single episode of consciousness or of any arbitrary representation that one happens to have. Rather, it establishes a genuine identity relation between, on the one hand, the act of apperceiving some representation of x as one’s own representation as belonging to a set of representations that share that same indexical marking them out as one’s own, and the content or ‘object’ of my apperceiving, on the other; the object being the set of representations that share the same indexical which makes them my own representations, regardless of the content of those representations. Transcendental apperception thus establishes an identity relation between the self and its object. This identity relation is what Kant calls self-consciousness in the strict sense, namely transcendental consciousness.

This is the first, most important, sense of self-identity, and as such it represents a merely intellectual operation reflective of the act of thinking one does (cogitare) when representing or knowing something. This might give the impression—a wrong one as it happens—that it is somehow a purified sense of self that is derivative of a more authentic, a more full-blown sense of self.

However, what is relevant here to note is, first, that transcendental apperception does not affect the empirical content of one’s representations, of what one represents through these representations. It is not even a condition on this content qua empirical content. Nor is it dependent on empirical content for its functional operation as such. Without going into exegetical details, in general Kant’s term empirical apperception expresses the type of conscious accompaniment of consecutive representations that are in constant flux and exhibit no necessary combination of their own, that is, the type of minimal consciousness or awareness that one has in performing certain tasks without reflecting on what one is doing—driving one’s car for example, which would be a dangerous undertaking if you were constantly reflecting on what you’re doing—or the kind of awareness that a small child has or an animal may have. Transcendental apperception is not a necessary condition on this type of consciousness, i.e. empirical apperception, despite what many Kant scholars may make you believe.

Secondly, for transcendental apperception to take place, that is, for there to be self-consciousness strictius dicta, empirical apperception is, as said, a necessary condition: no transcendental consciousness obtains without empirical consciousness. If there weren’t empirical consciousness there wouldn’t be the possibility of accompanying one’s representations with a formal kind of consciousness such as transcendental apperception is. For transcendental apperception itself is empty in the sense that it has no content for itself in abstraction from the representations that it accompanies. Furthermore, there is simply no instantiation of an ‘I think’ possible without there being an empirical, embodied person that does the actual thinking, and in which this ‘I think’ is necessarily existentially instantiated. A human thinker is always an embodied thinker. Transcendental apperception as a form of intellectual consciousness may be pure, i.e. formal, but it would effectively amount to nothing without a concrete, actual conscious living person performing the act of apperception.

But the fact that empirical consciousness—and by implication embodiment, etc.—is required for there to be a thinker doesn’t imply that the sui generis status of transcendental consciousness, the ‘I think’, is somehow compromised, or that its so-called purity is made impure. Believing that it does, as is suggested in the article by Salmon, would be to confuse two formally separable and irreducible levels of analysis. It would amount to a conflation of form and content.

It is important to see that transcendental consciousness is the necessary form in which one is potentially aware of oneself having particular conscious representations of something, which reveals the three-place relation between self, representer and represented (self—representing—object). Robert Pippin has in the past, in an important paper on the spontaneity of the ‘I think’, pointed out that this form is adverbial to the empirical consciousness of some object; it does not replace it, rather it accompanies it, just as Kant says about the ‘I think’ which ‘must be able to accompany all my representations’ (B131–2).

So this is one aspect of Kant’s ‘I think’ which shows it is non-reductive, gainsaying the claim that it ‘peels away everything’. It just has another function than any other, more concrete empirical function consciousness has.

Thirdly, though transcendental consciousness constitutes self-consciousness in a substantial sense, per se, in its essence, the kind of identity that is the intellectual, formal component of any act of doing and thinking, it doesn’t constitute self-consciousness or self-identity in a more loaded sense, as it would be understood in a more colloquial sense, in the more biographical sense one associates normally with self-identity and the accompanying self-consciousness. In other words, it does not constitute or even involve self-knowledge, in two different senses.

The first of these two senses of self-knowledge has to do with Kant’s denial of metaphysical, essentialist knowledge of the soul. Kant’s rationalist predecessors believed that one’s inner sense of oneself provided knowledge of oneself as a soul with a continuous numerical identity. Self-knowledge coincided with inner sense, which for Kant’s predecessors such as Wolff and Baumgarten was the term Kant later labelled apperception. But Kant differentiated between apperception strictly speaking and inner sense, precisely because he denied the possibility of having knowledge, by means of an act of apperception, of one’s self in the strict sense, namely as a substantial, personal, and enduring soul-identity.

But even in inner sense, as a separate faculty of sensibility in distinction from transcendental apperception as a function of the understanding, we do not have a determinate sense of ourselves as we really are; at most we have an indeterminate ‘feeling’ of our existence as noumenal beings, as the eminent German Kant scholar Heinz Heimsoeth once wrote, though this may strike some interpreters of Kant as even beyond the bounds of the speculative. To have a determinate awareness of one’s soul-self would be to have knowledge of one’s self-identity in a second sense, i.e. it amounts to a second notion of self-identity. But the possibility of this kind of knowledge of one’s self-identity, self-identity in a deep metaphysical sense, is denied by Kant.

It cannot therefore be true that, as Salmon suggests in his article, that the self-consciousness at issue in Kant’s thought—and not even in Descartes or Locke, but let’s bracket these off here—is ‘the same as it ever was’, referring to the idea of an enduring soul-self, which persists through time (diachronic personal identity). Of course, Kant does speak of a ‘durchgängige Identität’ of the self in the context of the Transcendental Deduction, but identity there is purely a functional term in order to indicate that for any instantiation of the ‘I think’, necessary for the cognition of an object, the representations that together constitute the cognition must be taken together, synthesised, by the apperceiving self as belonging to that self in a ‘thoroughgoing’ way, that is, as a synthetic whole of representations. This synthetic whole of representations is not a static set of representations, referring to an a priori knowable diachronically stable and identical self existing independently of the act of synthesis. Rather, the identity of this set explicitly depends on the act of apperception, is first established in virtue of the act of apperception, and exists only in that act. It will thus have to be established ever anew for any actual act of apperception that accompanies our representations. Put differently, the self-identity of apperception only ever exists insofar as the act of apperception takes place. It is thus far from the ‘same [self] as it ever was’ unless the same formal identity structure is meant in the way self-consciousness functions in any case of cognition.

So, this is the one sense in which, for Kant (unlike his rationalist predecessors), we do not have knowledge of self-identity over above the awareness of an intellectual activity in cognition. But there is another sense which does amount to a form of self-knowledge that is more than the awareness of the nominal identity of an act of cognition. And it is probably this kind of consciousness or knowledge of self-identity that is implicitly meant when Enlightenment conceptions of the self are criticised for presenting supposedly reductive, anodyne notions of the self. Call it a biographical sense of self-identity. It is the kind of self-identity most are more familiar with. It constitutes the third notion of self-identity referred to in the title of this essay.

Kant considers this third sense of self-identity a psychological notion of self-knowledge of oneself. There is an illuminating passage in the draft for his Anthropology book (which was left out for the published version) that throws light on the difference of self-identity at play in transcendental apperception and inner sense. The difficulty that Kant points to is the difficulty that arises from the idea that he proposes that we know ourselves only as we appear to ourselves but not as we are in ourselves (as things in themselves) and how this comports with a still singular sense of the self. He writes:

This difficulty rests entirely on a confusing of inner sense (and of empirical self-consciousness) with apperception (intellectual self-consciousness), which are usually taken to be one and the same. The ‘I’ in every judgment is neither an intuition nor a concept, and not at all a determination of an object, but an act of understanding by the determining subject as such, and the consciousness of oneself; pure apperception itself therefore belongs merely to logic (without any matter and content). On the other hand, the ‘I’ of inner sense, that is, of the perception and observation of oneself, is not the subject of judgment, but an object. Consciousness of the one who observes himself is an entirely simple representation of the subject in judgment as such, of which one knows everything if one merely thinks it. But the ‘I’ which has been observed by itself is a sum total of so many objects of inner perception that psychology has plenty to do in tracing everything that lies hidden in it. And psychology may not ever hope to complete this task and answer satisfactorily the question: ‘What is the human being?’ (Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007, p. 253, emphasis added)

Kant treats the self in the biographical sense in the same way he treats objects in general. As he writes, ‘the “I” of inner sense is ‘not the subject of judgment, but an object’. Unlike the ‘I’ of judgement, that is, the thinking ‘I’, the observed ‘I’, or the objective ‘me’ of which I have an awareness in virtue of empirical apperception, ‘is a sum total of so many objects of inner perception that psychology has plenty to do in tracing everything that lies hidden in it’. Unlike the simple, intellectual, pure ‘I’ of thinking, of transcendental apperception, the ‘me’ of inner perception, of one’s biographical self, is composed of a multiplicity of variant objects, respectively always and continuingly subject to historical and cultural context and diachronic change. Importantly, the sense of identity here is only relative, not the kind that were determinable as such if we had cognitive access to a self-same soul-substance, which we don’t as we have seen. The observed ‘identity’ of one’s biographical self is for its identity per se wholly dependent on the functional identity of the act of apperception, namely insofar as determining one’s inner sense as the observed ‘me’ requires the intellectual ‘I’ as ‘the determining subject’ in the same way as the determination of the identity of objects in general requires the ‘I’ as the determining subject. But these two senses of the self are not in conflict and refer to the same self in different ways.

To get a sense of how the psychological or biographical and intellectual senses of self are intertwined, whilst not being reducible to each other, notice that the ‘I’ of the act of determining, the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’, does not as such refer to the biographical self. In an act of transcendental apperception, I am not aware of myself as this particular person, ‘Dennis Schulting’; I am just aware of myself as φ-ing, where ‘myself ’ rigidly refers to me, that is, to the person that φ-s, but at the same time does not thereby rigidly designate me as this particular person, ‘Dennis Schulting’.

To be able to determine myself as the person with a particular name, history, background etc. an additional act of self-affection would be required, as Kant calls it, which determines a certain manifold in my sensibility that identifies me, objectively, as this particular person, ‘Dennis Schulting’, with my particular background. The information that identifies me as ‘Dennis Schulting’ is objectively available information, hence my biographical self is a kind of object. But isn’t this strange, to regard one’s innermost self, linked to one’s most individual history and biography, as an object?

In a sense it is, but what seems one’s most individual nature, one’s biographical self, is as much part of the objective world as any other object insofar as it concerns those aspects of oneself that can be communicated outwardly, the observable ‘me’. There is of course the purely subjective realm of one’s most private feelings inaccessible to the outer world, but oddly enough, apart from this privacy of one’s inner life, it’s not the biographical self that is the subjective par excellence, but the ‘I think’ of apperception. What identifies me as my biographical self doesn’t even play a central role, or even a role, in identifying myself as myself, subjectively. I could identify myself as myself even if I did not know who I was strictly speaking, or what name I had (bar cognitive malfunctioning or if I had even lost my apperceptive powers); or indeed if I were thoroughly mistaken about who I was. Indexicals such as ‘myself ’, ‘mine’, ‘my’, and ‘I’ are instantiated by any and all subjects of acts of φ-ing who are apperceptively aware of themselves as φ-ing, regardless of their particular names, histories, personalities, and so on. The purest subject qua subject is the ‘I’ of oneself as thinker. And it is this aspect of the self that is central to the Enlightenment conception of the self.

But one should also acknowledge that this transcendental view of self-consciousness is by design more limited in its scope than any psychological or biographical senses of the self, for it merely concerns the subject qua subject of thinking. Moreover, in that it is merely concerned with the a priori constraints under which both self-consciousness and self-knowledge can take place, the conditions namely that first define what it means to be able, in the strictest sense, to have consciousness or indeed knowledge of oneself as a self-identical self at all, the self-identity thus established doesn’t amount to any deep sense of a metaphysically substantial self, as we saw above.

However, to deny the centrality of this conception of self for knowledge of subjective identities of whatever kind is to risk a performative contradiction in the very critique of that conception. This brings us back to the confusion that lies at the root of the aforementioned critique.

The fact that, as Georg Lukács had it in his Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, the Kantian subject is a typically bourgeois invention does not mean that it thereby loses its philosophical validity, or forfeits its universality. Similarly, as much as it is true that the Cartesian cogito is linked to the man famous for first presenting it, in the context of a privileged set of conditions, living as a gentilhomme in the tranquil surroundings of provincial North-Holland, that enabled him to meditate on metaphysical issues completely sundered from the life of toil of most of his contemporaries, the philosophical validity of Descartes’s argument is not in the least compromised by this background.

The cogito isn’t a ‘heterosexual (European) white man’ any more than the operator of the Italian made espresso machine must be an Italian: any operator of whichever background can be coached to perform the same daily task that any Italian does, with some basic instructions and assuming one’s fingers aren’t all thumbs, in the same way that Descartes encouraged his readers, by nature potential self-reflexive agents, to engage in the same kind of meditations or reflections that he engaged in in the Meditations. The cogito can be instantiated by any particular ‘I’ that goes on and reflects about the same issues with which Descartes was preoccupied (or any other pressing matters, of course).

To return to Kant’s ‘I think’. It is of course undeniably true that the theory of transcendental apperception was invented by a white northern European male (in fact its roots lie earlier in Leibniz and Wolff, and possibly Merian). However—and to this extent the critique to which Salmon points is correct—the use of transcendental apperception is indeed necessarily genderless, and has no regard for race or privilege, ‘neutral’ if you will, so much so that even those who utter the critique that the ‘I’ in ‘I think’ is nothing but a white European male, and are themselves a non-male and/or non-white and/or non-European person, must make use of that very same ‘I think’, which points to the necessary circle in which one finds oneself if one wants to determine its validity. Critiquing its validity paradoxically presupposes its use. The circularity here is not innocuous: it amounts to a performative contradiction.

The use of transcendental apperception is not just an issue of performative necessity, it also points to the universality of this most intimate notion, the ‘I think’, which is neither a true universal concept nor simply an exclusively private intuition: it holds for all and every human being, regardless of sex, gender, race or background and it signals the inalienable and ineradicable freedom and spontaneous agency of human beings, the freedom to think, inherent to each individual, the freedom even to contradict oneself.

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© Dennis Schulting, 2022.