- subjectivity in descartes and kant

SUBJECTIVITY IN DESCARTES AND KANT

By Hubert Schwyzer

I

Kants critique of Cartesian scepticism is often characterized in the follow-ing sort of way. Descartes represents our inner life, our subjectivity, as if itwere something independent and unsupported, as if our (my) consciousstates, our thoughts and experiences, could somehow be the whole of what isreal without requiring the reality of anything else, and in particular with-out requiring the reality of the objects of our thoughts and experiences. AndKant argues, we are told, that the one reality presupposes the other, thatsubjectivity is impossible without objectivity, that a necessary condition ofour having thoughts and experiences at all is that the objects of thosethoughts and experiences actually have a certain character. And it is pointedout that Kant argues, in the Principles, that experience would be impossibleif its objects were not in their own right quantifiable, substantial, causallyinter-related, and so on.

I think this picture of Kants response to Descartes is widely held. I shallcall it the standard picture. I know of no one who has spelt it out morecarefully and worked out its consequences and difficulties more powerfullythan Barry Stroud.1 In this paper I shall for the most part focus on Stroudsversion of the picture.

I do not, of course, wish to reject the picture entirely. It is surely correctto say that Kant means to argue that experience would be impossible if itsobjects were not really thus and so. My objection to the picture is that itpresents Kant as subscribing, or coming very close to subscribing, to

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1997

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1 Originally in Transcendental Arguments, Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968); later in TheSignificance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford UP, 1984); and most recently in KantianArgument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability (KACCI), in Paolo Parrini (ed.), Kantand Contemporary Epistemology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 23151.

The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 188 July 1997ISSN 00318094

The Editors of The Philosophical Quarterly, 1997. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford ox4 1jf, UK, and 350Main Street, Malden, ma 02148, USA.

Descartes dichotomy of the inner and the outer, the subjective and theobjective, and, above all, to Descartes view of the nature of subjectivity.

We have, on that view, two discrete realities. The first is the purely sub-jective inner world, containing only our conscious states, and, for some whosubscribe to the view, ourselves qua conscious beings. This reality is knownonly from within, and there can be no doubt about what it is really like: it isas it seems to its possessor (that is its subjectivity). The other reality containsprecisely what the first does not; most notably, it contains things in space,with their characteristics. It is not known, directly, from within; only the firstreality can be known that way. But it is known, if it is known at all, only viawhat is known from within. For the Descartes of the first two Meditations,this second reality is, as Kant puts it, problematic: there seems to be novalid path to it from the first, from which the only possible path to it mustlead. For Kant, according to the picture at issue, the second reality can beknown if the first is known, for the first depends on the second; if there wereno spatial world there could be no inner world, no thoughts or experiences.The difference seems to be that whereas Descartes, initially, disallows a validinference from the inner to the outer, Kant insists on it. What the Kant ofthis picture shares with Descartes is the view that consciousness per se de-lineates a world of objects complete unto itself, inner objects to be sure, butobjects (of awareness) none the less. The only question is whether that worldneeds the support of another world.

I shall argue in this paper that there is for Kant no such inner world ofobjects initially (or directly) apprehended by us, as there is for Descartes.There is no such inner world from which an objective outer world is to beinferred or out of which an allegedly objective world is to be constructed orconstituted. Moreover, as I hope to show, Kant has a powerful argumentagainst the possibility of taking ones inner states as any sort of starting-pointfor metaphysical theorizing. So Kants critique of Descartes is considerablymore radical than the standard picture allows. This does not mean that forKant there is no such thing as subjectivity, if that means no such thing as afirst-person point of view on ones experience. What it does mean is that forKant the first-person point of view does not itself determine a domain ofobjects of awareness. We shall examine later what the implications of thismight be for Cartesian scepticism.

But first it will be helpful to look further at what Stroud has to say aboutKant. He claims (KACCI p. 233), perhaps rightly, that the demonstrationthat certain principles of nature (like that of causation) are necessary con-ditions of the possibility of experience is what Kant himself saw as thedistinctive and most important payoff of his transcendental philosophy. But,Stroud asks (p. 234), how is this demonstration supposed to work?


343SUBJECTIVITY IN DESCARTES AND KANT

... how can truths about the world which appear to say or imply nothing about humanthought or experience be shown to be genuinely necessary conditions of such psycho-logical facts as that we think and experience things in certain ways, from which theproofs begin? It would seem that we must find, and cross, a bridge of necessity fromthe one to the other. That would be a truly remarkable feat, and some convincingexplanation would surely be needed of how the whole thing is possible.

Kants answer, Stroud tells us (KACCI p. 235), is transcendental idealism.And that means at least this: that the real, non-psychological, world

is not really a world which is in every sense fully independent of all thought and ex-perience. It is a world which, transcendentally speaking, depends on or is constitutedby the possibility of our thinking and experiencing things as we do.

So Kant, on Strouds view, has paid a heavy price for the licence to buildhis bridge of necessity, and that is that the bridge does not really reach theother side; all of it, when the last span is lowered into place and the last bolttightened, remains within the realm of subjectivity. Not that nothing philo-sophically important has been accomplished. The bridge, in Kants ablehands, may well take us to places we have never before seen, or even dreamtof to ever deeper levels of the nature of our thinking. We might even cometo see what any possible conception of reality would have to be like. But thatwill still be, in the last analysis, about conceptions, and so on the psycho-logical side of the divide. And Kants bridge might also have importantconsequences for how philosophers can intelligibly theorize. It may be thatwe can no longer follow Descartes in playing the devils advocate andsupposing that all the things which I see are false ... that body, figure,extension, motion, and place are merely figments of my mind (SecondMeditation). For if it is true, as Stroud allows that Kant may have shown,that we have to think in terms of extended bodies if we are to be able to thinkat all, then we are incapable of any such supposing. In that case, belief in theouter world which is not the same as there actually being an outer world is a necessary condition of the very possibility of thought and experience.And this leads, in Stroud, to a subtle and interesting enquiry into whetherand how our sceptical urges can be appeased by these sorts of findings.

II

Let us turn now more directly to Kant. We might start by noting thatwhereas Stroud constantly conjoins thought and experience in his formulations(as in necessary conditions of thought and experience) and lumps themtogether as our psychology, Kant typically separates them. The conditions


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of thought, that is, of all possible judgements, are worked out early in theAnalytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, in The Clue to the Discovery of allPure Concepts of the Understanding,2 before the question of whether ourthinking is true of the real world so much as arises. The argument of theClue is, in outline, as follows. Since, as logic has shown, all thoughts orjudgements must have a certain form (subject/predicate, conditional, quant-ified, etc.), it follows that all thought about anything (about objects) wouldhave to conceive those things in certain ways (as substances and attributes,causes and effects, singularities and pluralities, etc.). This means that Kanttakes himself already to have established that we have to think about theworld, about any world that can be thought about at all, in certain specificways. We cannot conceive of things without conceiving them under thecategories of the understanding, as substances, as causally inter-related, etc.That, if you like, is our conceptual scheme. That we have to think in thesecategorial ways is, as we shall see Kant fully recognizing, simply a fact aboutus. It tells us nothing about what the things that we have to think about inthose ways are really like.

But there is, for Kant, that further question, which he takes up in theTranscendental Deduction of the Categories, the question, as he puts it, ofthe objective validity of how we think about the world. That question is notsettled by what he takes to be an established fact, that we have to thinkabout it in those ways. This distinction, between the argument of the Clueand that of the Transcendental Deduction, is crucial. It shows that Kant isnot content with a descriptive metaphysics, a metaphysics that does nomore than lay out how we think, or even have to think, about the world.Nor is he reducing metaphysics to psychology, as if the worlds being thusand so were itself to be a function of how we think. The TranscendentalDeduction is meant to do something quite different from the Clue. We needto see what this new argument, for the objective validity of how we thinkabout the world, actually amounts to.

But it might well be thought that that argument in Kant, however it mayin fact proceed, is doomed in advance. For either, surely, it will try to showthat the world as it is in itself, quite independently of our psychology, mustbe thus and so, somehow because our psychology is thus and so in whichcase we have, in Strouds politely restrained phrase, the truly remarkablebridge of necessity. Or it is only appearances, and not things as they are inthemselves, that must be thus and so, as necessary conditions of ourpsychology, in which case the importance of the distinction we have been


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2 Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. Kemp Smith (New York: St Martins Press, 1965), a70/b95ff.(All references to Kant in this paper are to this work.) Commentators often call the Clue theMetaphysical Deduction, following a remark by Kant (b159).


talking about is radically undermined. The allegedly objective validity ofhow we think will not really be objective after all; we shall only have learnedabout the world-as-it-appears-to-us, not as it really is. This is a world relativ-ized to our psychology. So the Transcendental Deduction will either makeimpossible claims (the remarkable bridge), or it will add nothing substantiveto the conclusion of the Clue (the world as we think it conforms to the con-ditions of thinking).

But this is all prejudgement. We have not even begun to see what Kantsargument about objective validity, the argument of the TranscendentalDeduction, actually amounts to.

But when we turn to the opening pages of the Deduction, our firstimpression might well confirm our suspicions. For the way Kant sets up theproblem makes it look as if he means to equate the objective validity ofthe ways in which we have to think about the world (the categories) withtheir being necessary ways of conceiving what we experience. He begins bynoting that we have, with the categories, a problem which we did not havewith the forms of sensibility (space and time), viz., the problem of howsubjective conditions of thought can have objective validity (a89/b122, italics orig-inal). The categories, as introduced in the Clue, are after all nothing butsubjective necessities (this is how we have to think); it still needs to be shownthat they are valid of objects which presumably means true of real things.So far, so good. But the continuation of the very same sentence seemsalready to relativize objectivity to us: ... can have objective validity, that is, canfurnish conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects. And a littlelater he explains that what needs to be shown is that only as thus presup-posing them [the categories] is anything possible as object of experience....The objective validity of the categories ... rests, therefore, on the fact that, sofar as the form of thought is concerned, through them alone does experiencebecome possible (a93/b126). This certainly has the appearance of reducingobjectivity to what is essentially psychological. But we should not jump tothat conclusion before seeing the actual argument.

How can Kant have supposed that if something is necessary for thought,it is, for all that, only subjectively necessary, whereas if it is necessary forexperience it is objectively valid? Well, there is this difference between ex-perience and thought in Kant: experience is defined in terms of objects;thought is not. To think is merely to connect thought-elements (represent-ations) with one another according to rules of judgement; you are thinkingif your representations are combined thus and so (see Table of Judgements,a70/b95). Experience, on the other hand, is always of something. (This is ofcourse an artificial distinction. Thought too is of something, or has objects: itis representational. Kants point is that one can abstract that feature from it,


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and consider it purely formally, as one does in logic.) Kant defines experi-ence as empirical knowledge of objects. Now it does not follow from thisdefinition (nor does Kant think it follows) that the mere having of an experi-ence is proof of any kind of mind-independent reality of its object. Theobject of experience might, for all that, be something that is itself subjective,like an inner state. But though the definition does not of itself solve a pro-blem, it does bring into focus a question central to the argument of theTranscendental Deduction, that of what can be meant by an object of ex-perience. And one of the chief lessons of the Deduction, as I understand it,is that it is wrong to take it as a given that a representation (that which ispresented to consciousness in experience) has an (intentional) object at all,or that it represents something to its possessor. Kant disputes Descartesbelief that the fact that my representations represent something to me, thatmy ideas mean something to me, is epistemologically fundamental and un-conditioned. This representational capacity of our representations itselfneeds to be explained; the Transcendental Deduction sets out to explain it.

Whether such an explanation succeeds in bestowing objective validity onanything remains to be seen. And that question amounts to this: if Kant hassucceeded in showing that without the categories there could be no suchthing as mental representation at all that in their absence nothing what-ever could be represented to me, even something inner or subjective willthat have shown that the categories are objectively valid, in a sufficientlyrobust sense of that phrase? Or will things still seem to be objectionablyrelativized to us?

III

The opening premise of the main argument of the Transcendental De-duction (2nd edition) lays down (b1312) a condition for the possibility of arepresentations representing anything to me:

It must be possible for the I think to accompany all my representations; for otherwisesomething would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that isequivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would benothing to me.

Kant is saying here that there is a condition, the accompanyability of the Ithink (which we have yet to examine), on the possibility of any representa-tion, or datum of consciousness, being anything to me. And this means, workingbackwards through the quoted passage, on the possibility of its being arepresentation at all, i.e., on its representing anything to me (Kant clearlytakes it, rightly, it seems to me, that for an item to represent something is for



it to represent something to someone); or, to put it another way, there is thiscondition on anythings entering my thought. Let us pause on this not yeton the condition, but on what the condition is a condition on. Kants claimis completely general. It means that I cannot represent something as, say,cheese, unless the condition is met; but it also means that I cannot representthis as a (or my) sensation of cheese unless the condition is met. I cannot re-present myself as walking or as thinking that I am walking, or even simply asthinking, or for that matter as being in any state whatever.

But this seems odd. Does not Kants formulation of the condition clearlyexempt the representation of myself as thinking from being itself subject tothe condition? If it must be possible for the I think to accompany all myrepresentations, then that representation of myself as thinking mentioned inthe condition surely will not need further such accompaniment. If theaccompanyability of the I think is to be a condition on anythings beingrepresented to me, my own thinking must already, independently of thecondition, be capable of being represented to me. But there is a trap here.The I think that is here at issue is not, as we shall soon see, the representa-tion of myself as thinking; it does not, as it does in Descartes, express theproposition that I am thinking. So the I think is not really a representationat all; it does not represent anything as anything. On the other hand, theproposition I am thinking is a bona fide representation of myself as thinking,and, as a bona fide representation, is subject to the condition at issue, theaccompanyability of the I think.

At first blush it looks as if Kants claim about the I think is nothing but aweakened form of Descartes doctrine that all thinking makes implicit refer-ence to oneself, the thinker. Descartes seems to have held that if I have thethought that there is a book on the table, what is really in my consciousnessis not there being a book on the table, but rather that I think there is a book on thetable. When I see you across the room, what I am really aware of is not youacross the room, but that I see (i.e., think I see) you there. So I am the true subjectof all my thoughts. And by that is meant not merely that I am their agent (asI am also the agent of all my eating and walking), but that my thoughts arereally about me. The first-person singular pronoun, I, is the proper gram-matical subject of every proposition that expresses a thought; every assertedproposition p is, when fully articulated, of the form I think p.

The sceptical doubts of the First Meditation must surely have confirmedDescartes in this doctrine, but the doctrine does not really depend on thosedoubts. It seems to be philosophically puzzling in any case how I could haveanything like this book, a real solid object, in my consciousness or present tothe mind. Must it not instead be the thought, or the idea, of the book that isreally there? And indeed my thought, my idea? It is worth remembering in


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this connection that Locke, who had no time at all for Descartes doubts,also held that all thought is, initially in any case, about ones own ideas.However, the relationship between this doctrine of Descartes and thedoubts of the First Meditation is an interesting one; I shall talk about it later.

This doctrine is at the heart of Descartes subjectivism: the objects ofconsciousness, or in any case its direct objects, are ones own inner states. Itmight look as if Kants remark about the I think is simply a weaker, orperhaps more careful, version of this doctrine. Instead of wherever there isa thought, there must be an I think too, he is saying wherever there is athought, it must be possible for there to be an I think too. And this seemsto be a negligible difference especially when one notes that Descartescould well have used Kants formulation. It seems that there is no reasonwhy Descartes should not have allowed that I do not have to make explicit tomyself, on each occasion of thinking, the fact that my thought is mine; it isenough that I be capable of doing so that suffices to show that I am awareof it as my thought. And so it will appear that Kant, whatever his final aimsand arguments may be, must initially be endorsing Descartes subjectivism:consciousness fully articulated has the form I think p; the immediate objectof consciousness is ones own thought. And from this point the standardpicture of Kants response to Descartes will seem inevitable. Since we know,or have good reason to believe, that Kant means to argue for further con-ditions of thought-and-experience, conditions that go beyond the I thinkcondition and point to an allegedly objective realm, we shall anticipate thathe will be arguing that things must really be thus and so if our thought andexperience about them are to be what they are; that is, he will be building ametaphysical bridge from the subjective to the objective. But, as I shall try tomake clear, the I think is, for Kant, no starting-point for such a bridge; andin particular it is not, as it was for Descartes, my recognition of myself asbeing in a conscious state. So what is it? And what role is it playing in Kantsargument for the objective validity of the categories?

There is no difficulty in supposing that Descartes and Kant will agree onthis: that if I am to think of or be aware of something, if something is to berepresented to me, if there is to be an (intentional) object of my conscious-ness, then I must be capable of noting that fact. Any thought of mine to theeffect p that I can phrase as p to myself I must be able to rephrase as I thinkp. Consciousness has that sort of reflexivity about it. If it did not, the datastriking my retinae, or otherwise at work on me or in me, would, as Kantsays, be nothing to me; I would be no better than a camera or a computer,affected by stimuli or going through otherwise relevant motions but to whichthese stimulations or motions meant nothing whatever; I would have nounderstanding. Intentional consciousness, understanding, is a situation for



someone, or to someone, it is not merely a situation in someone. And that for-someone factor marks something essentially first-personal. It is what Kantcalls pure apperception.

Up to this point Descartes and Kant are together. But from here on theydiverge. For whereas Descartes sees the essential first-person involvement inconsciousness as bedrock, as defining, or exhibiting to ones inner self, thevery nature of consciousness, and so, as it were, as solving the problem ofwhat it is to represent something to oneself, Kant sees that involvement ascalling for an explanation, and so as posing that problem.

Descartes regards the I think, the involvement of the self in conscious-ness, as itself an object, indeed the ultimate object, of consciousness (viz., thatI am thinking, cogito). It is the only item whose presence to consciousness isunmediated. Every other item, e.g., cheese, or you across the room, needsmediating: it needs to be explained how such an item can be present toconsciousness. And the explanation is that such items are present to my con-sciousness precisely by being represented, cast in the form of ideas, and thus bybecoming the content of my thinking where my thinkings presence to myconsciousness is presumed to need no explanation.

Kant has arguments against taking the I think to be any kind of object ofconsciousness, something of which one is aware. First, what is given to con-sciousness lacks the requisite unity: I should have as many-coloured anddiverse a self as I have representations of which I am conscious to myself (b134). This to myself , the for-someone factor, as I called it above, mustbe one and the same thing in all my consciousness. Moreover, and muchmore importantly, my thinking, taken as object of my consciousness, even ifit were universally and univocally present, could not in any case capture theto myself , the I think of pure apperception. For if I am conscious that Iam thinking, then that I am thinking is a situation for me. If it were not, thenI would not be conscious of it and that would be the end of it. But if it is,then that for me factor remains, unreduced and unaccounted for. It hasnot been, and cannot be, cashed in for I am thinking, or for any otherthought. One cannot eliminate the to myself that must qualify every objectof consciousness in favour of some further and ultimate object of conscious-ness that as it were speaks for itself, spelling out its own that-it-is-for-me.Neither my thinking nor any other item of which I am conscious canaccount for the to myself ; any attempt to locate this condition of conscious-ness in the contents or among the objects of consciousness has alwaysalready, as Kant says, made use of its representation (a346/b404). So withthe I think of pure apperception we have not, pace Descartes, reached thebedrock of consciousness. Far from exhibiting the very nature of conscious-ness to the one who is conscious, the I think does no more than mark the


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fact that consciousness is a situation for one. We still have the question ofwhat it is that accounts for that fact. In virtue of what is anything a situationfor one? And this is the question of what makes it possible that a datum, saysomething striking the sense-receptors, should represent something to me.That it does so does not, after all, follow from the fact that the sense-receptors are stimulated (see esp. a90/b1223). To say that something isinflicted on someones sensibility is to say one thing, to say that that meanssomething to that person is to say another thing. We still need an explana-tion of the for-me factor; it cannot, as Descartes thought it was, be a brutedatum of consciousness.

But this raises another question, on a higher level. What sort of explana-tion of the for-me factor is Kant looking for? Is it to be an external ex-planation, in terms of ones physical make-up or environment, etc.? Or is itto be an internal one, in terms of first-person access to the contents of onesconsciousness? Well, we know it cannot be the latter; that has been preciselyKants argument against Descartes. Any internal explanation will have toemploy the for-me factor, and will therefore be unable to account for it. Buton the other hand Kant is hardly likely to be interested in external, causal,factors, like neural or environmental conditions. These are empirical andcontingent factors, and not relevant to these kinds of philosophical concerns.

There is a short-cut, if not fool-proof, procedure for determining whatkind of explanation of the for-me factor Kant is after, and that is to jumpahead and see what explanation he in fact gives. Let us then look, briefly, atthe outcome of the Transcendental Deduction. What makes the for-me factorpossible, Kant claims, is a kind of action that we perform, viz., the act ofjudgement. And judgement, or judging, as has been shown earlier, in the Clue,is a matter of synthesizing, or bringing together, the data of intuition, bymeans of certain conceptual operations, the categories. By judging (as itwere forming mental sentences) we create a unity (a sense, a meaning). Thisis the (synthetic) unity of consciousness itself. Without it, there can be no for-me factor, nothing can mean anything to me, there is no representation ofanything, no intentional object for my consciousness.

A brief example might be of help here. Someone, in daylight, with eyesopen, and with cheese in front of him, is being sensorily affected, that is,there is a cheese-image on his retina, his brain is functioning appropriately,etc. In virtue of what is this a situation for him such that he can say tohimself Im seeing cheese? What is the process or state of affairs that makesit clear and intelligible to us as philosophers, a priori enquirers, that this is asituation for him? This much internality is needed. It will not be enough tobe told that nature and the organism in question are simply such thatwhen circumstances (light, oxygen, retina, brain, etc.) are thus and so,



representation occurs. Kant would not doubt that; but it does not address thephilosophical question. What we need is to make the nature of the for-mefactor, the first-person perspective, perspicuous. This is something which, forquite different reasons, neither an external causal story, nor a story likeDescartes, from the first-person perspective, can accomplish.

Kants answer to our present question (what makes it clear and intel-ligible to us that this is a situation for him?) is not in the end a recondite one.It is because, and only because, the subject sees that there is cheese in front of himthat he can say, reflectively, Im seeing cheese. And that means that heforms the thought, makes the judgement, that there is cheese here. The for-me factor is possible not because one is conscious of oneself, but because onecan make judgements about objects. And to do that is to conceive themunder the categories, to see them as substances, causes, totalities, etc. If onecould not do that, one would lack the for-me factor.

Now whether or not this explanation of Kants is plausible in detail, it isclear that some explanation of the for-me factor along the general linesindicated is called for. For the for-me factor is not, as Descartes thought,somehow self-explanatory. We need to come to understand, and to arti-culate, from a non-first-person point of view, what it is in virtue of whichsomething is a situation for one.

IV

But now, to return to Descartes, someone might be wondering whether thecogito needs to be understood in the way we have proposed, as nothing morethan pure apperception, the non-propositional for-me factor, paradingillegitimately as a thought. Perhaps Kant is wrong, not in arguing that thefor-me factor is non-propositional, but in believing that the cogito exemplifiesthe error he is pointing out. We need to come to terms with this question,especially so if Kants argument is to have any repercussions for what I havecalled Descartes subjectivism, the view that the (direct) objects of conscious-ness are always and only ones own inner states. Cannot the cogito, as itfunctions in Descartes, and despite Kants insistence to the contrary, beunderstood straightforwardly as the thought that I am thinking, and not asthe for-me factor? And to this we might add a further question: even if thecogito has to be understood as nothing more than the for-me factor, cannotDescartes subjectivism be seen to stand independently of it?

Could Cogito, as it functions in Descartes, be understood as simplyregistering what happens to be the present content of consciousness, likeIm looking out of the window, or Im hungry? Well, one wants to say,


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unlike these, whose truth depends on circumstances that might or might notobtain, Cogito, I am thinking, is always true. But of course it is not. I amfrequently not thinking. What is always true, as Descartes indeed recognizes,is only I am thinking when I think it. But then it, the actual content ofthought, becomes irrelevant; I am thinking will equally be true whenmy thought is that the refrigerator is empty, or anything else for it is notwhat I think but that I am thinking it that is at issue. Cogito does not record thecontent of a particular thought, but only of any of my thoughts you please,its being my thought. But this means that it records precisely the for-me factorthat all my thoughts must possess if they are to be my thoughts. For nothingelse but the for-me factor is present in all my thoughts simply in virtue of theirbeing my thoughts. So Cogito, if it is to play the role that Descartes intends it toplay, can be nothing more than the I think of pure apperception.

It is, then, precisely Descartes insistence that Cogito is always true, what-ever the content of ones thinking, that unmasks it as the for-me factor. AndDescartes great mistake surely one of the most interesting and influentialmistakes ever committed in philosophy was to suppose that the for-mefactor could itself be captured in the content of ones thinking as if therecould be that primal thought, I am thinking, that, unlike all other thoughts,does not have to represent how things are for one, precisely because itsucceeds in absorbing into its own articulation what it is for anything to berepresented to one. I have tried to spell out Kants reasons for supposingthat this cannot be done. I believe they are good reasons. The I think thatit must be possible to append to all my representations if they are to beanything to me cannot itself be caught in a thought.

V

Two major points have emerged from our discussion. First, the I think, thefor-me factor, is essentially something non-propositional. Hence the prefer-ability of calling it for-me, rather than I think; the first persons necessary pre-sence in consciousness is grammmatically dative, not nominative. Thatpresence is not itself a thought at all, and so it is not something true, and notsomething that can be known to be true, and therefore not something fromwhich other truths can be derived. (This is not to deny that when the for-mefactor obtains something is thereby true. It will be true, always true, that theperson in question, who might happen to be me, is thinking. But the pro-position that is always true here is the trivial If something is a situation p forsomeone, then that person is thinking p. This has none of the other featuresthat Descartes needs in the cogito; it is not essentially first-personal, it is not



even singular, it is not categorical. And its being true does not in any wayimply that the for-me factor is itself a truth.)

Second, and connectedly, the I think is in another way non-basic: ratherthan being the foundation of explanations of consciousness, it itself stands inneed of an explanation in terms of a genuine act of consciousness (the Ithink is itself no such act).

The first of these two points has consequences for Cartesian subjectivism.While the fact that the I think of pure apperception is not itself a thoughtdoes not directly refute the view that one is immediately aware only of onessubjective states, it does succeed in undermining Descartes justification forsubjectivism. For Descartes grounds for subjectivism consist precisely intaking the for-me factor to be itself the thought that one is thinking. And sothe very nature of consciousness that it is a situation for one makes itinevitable that one should be directly aware only of ones own states. Theformula that expresses consciousness is not p (e.g., This is cheese), but Iam thinking p (e.g., I am having sensations of cheese). The I think isalways present where consciousness is present, and since it is understoodpropositionally, as asserting that I am thinking, it is therefore invariably thatof which I am conscious in so far as I am conscious at all. Other items (e.g.,cheese) are possible as objects of consciousness only in so far as they arecollected under the mantle of the I think, that is, as ideas. To take away thepropositionality of the I think, as Kant has done, is to take away Descartesreason for subjectivism. There is nothing in the nature of consciousness, asDescartes thought there was, to prevent cheese, or the presence of cheese,from being what I am directly aware of. There is no longer that principledobjection to unmediated awareness of outer things. And so we need not betroubled by the thought that the very nature of consciousness makes it thecase that we have to provide a special argument (perhaps a metaphysicalbridge) to lead us from the inner to the outer. There is no such original con-finement to the inner.

I can imagine someone not being persuaded by what I have been argu-ing, and objecting as follows. Surely Descartes subjectivism has a sourcethat is independent of the cogito, since that doctrine is already established inthe First Meditation (as a result of the sceptical doubts) before there is anymention of the cogito. If this is so, it will not be right to attribute thesubjectivism to a misreading of the for-me factor, as I have argued.

So now we have three items in the air to juggle with: (a) the scepticism ofthe First Meditation; (b) the misrendering of the for-me factor in the cogito;and (c) the subjectivism. I have claimed that (b) is the source of (c); I havenot yet talked much about (a). The objection claims that one can movestraight from (a) to (c) without going via (b).


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I do not think this objection succeeds. It seems to me that to the extentthat the doubts of the First Meditation entail subjectivism, they will alsoentail a misrendering of the for-me factor. So, in so far as subjectivism ispresent in the First Meditation, the cogito is also prefigured there.

This is because merely raising philosophical doubts about reality, orseeing such doubts as intelligible, probably does not of itself commit one tosubjectivism at all. But Descartes doubts take the form of a thought-experiment in which one compares ones experience (how things are for one) inthe case where one supposes there to be external objects producing it withones experience in the case where one supposes there not to be suchobjects. And the result of that thought-experiment is that there is no crucialdifference between the two cases that the experiencer can detect. All thatI am really aware of in experience, the thought-experiment reminds us, isthe experience itself that I am having. This is certainly (an instance of )subjectivism. So the objector is right in claiming that subjectivism is presentin the First Meditation. And it is also true that the cogito has not yet beenmentioned.

But this is not the end of the matter. While the thought-experiment of theFirst Meditation, in which one compares experiences, might explain whyone would want to say that all I am aware of, if I am aware of anything, inexperiencing something is the experience itself, it does not explain but takesfor granted that, in experiencing something, I am, and indeed inevitably am,aware of the experience itself. Where does this thought come from? Whysuppose that, whatever the content of my experience might be, I am alwaysconscious that I am having the experience? Well, one might say, that is justwhat experience is like; it is reflexive, self-aware, that is its whole essence.But what shows that this is so? And to this question the only possible answer,it seems to me, is in terms of the for-me factor. Experience is indeedsomething for me. What has happened here is that, once again (or rather,already), the for-me factor has been recast as the object of ones awareness.It is as if because this or that state of affairs, e.g., my sitting at the computer inmy dressing gown, is a situation for me, one of the things I am thereforeaware of, i.e., that is therefore thus and so for me, is that it is thus and so forme. In the absence of this transformation of the for-me factor into aproposition I make about myself there is, as far as I can see, no plausibilityat all in the claim that in experiencing anything I am always aware of havingthe experience. If this is so, then the cogitos dark work is already under wayin the First Meditation; and that means that Descartes misrendering of thefor-me factor infects his scepticism as well as being responsible for hissubjectivism.



VI

Let us now draw some threads together. We have seen that Kant renouncesthe Cartesian view that the I think is a fundamental truth, and with it thedoctrine that only what is subjective can form the starting-point of know-ledge (the near side of any cognitive bridge). So it should be clear thatwhatever Kants philosophical enterprise amounts to, it will not be a matterof arguing from how things are with us to how they are in reality, from thesubjective to the objective, from inside consciousness to what is outside it. Ihave rejected the standard picture of Kants response to Descartes. And ofcourse I have argued for more than this: I have argued that Kants repudi-ation of Descartes picture of consciousness is actually justified.

But how are we to assess this victory over Cartesian subjectivism assum-ing it to be a victory? It is perhaps unclear just what has been achieved. AndStrouds question might look as if it can be raised again: have I not simplyargued, someone might ask, that if we are to represent anything to ourselves,we must do so in objective terms that is, we must make judgements of theform this is cheese, where that does not reduce to I think this is cheese? Isthat not still about what our thinking must be like? And is it not really muchthe same as saying that if we are to represent anything, be conscious ofanything, we have to believe in objective states of affairs?

I do not know whether this suspicion can be finally laid to rest by what Ihave been arguing. But, first, if what is being said is on the following lines,then I think I have answered it: So you are saying that we must representthings in objective terms if we are to be conscious of anything, that we mustjudge p, not I think p. But this is still a statement about us as judging, itis not about how things are apart from us. And that matters because, afterall, all that we are really aware of in judging p is that we are judging that p, notthat p itself. If this is the suspicion, then I have answered it. It is the familiartwist on the I think. But, you will say, all that has been established byKant is that we have to represent things in certain ways; and is that not simply afact about us?. Certainly, but that does not mean that in representing thosethings in those ways we are not directly aware of them. The fact that werepresent things does not itself sentence us to being directly aware only ofour representations.

But this is not enough, it will be thought, to put aside the Stroudiansuspicion. The fact that we have to represent things as thus and so, it will besaid, does not, after all, mean that the things represented must themselves bethus and so. For all we know they might in actual fact be quite otherwise. So


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the fact that we have to represent them as thus and so can still only meanthat they have to be thus and so in our minds, which is surely the same assaying that they have to seem to us, or that we have to believe them to be, thatway.

Again this could, in another context, be harmless. There is nothingintrinsically threatening to our knowledge of real things in the thought thatwe must represent those things as this or that; or even, if one insists on thetendentious terminology, that we must believe them, or that they must seemto us, to be this or that. That thought will not be threatening unless we takethe fact of representation, or of believing or seeming, to block our access tohow things actually are. But it can surely only do that if we take the fact ofrepresentation, by contrast with what is represented to us, to be what we arereally (or directly) aware of in representing anything.

A footnote in Werner Pluhars new translation of the Critique illustratesthe continuing influence of the standard picture.3 Pluhar explains thatrepresentations (he calls them presentations) are such objects of our directawareness as sensations, intuitions, perceptions, concepts, cognitions, ideas,and schemata. The implication seems clear: things in space are not objectsof our direct awareness.

But it is only if we suppose that its seeming to us that p is what we arereally aware of when it seems to us that p, that its seeming to us that p willstand in the way of our being aware that p when it seems to us that p. If wedo not suppose that it is our representation that p that we are really aware ofwhen p is represented to us, then there will be no temptation to say that inso far as p is represented to us we are not directly aware of p. But this iswhere we were before, with Descartes trick of transforming the fact ofrepresentation into what is represented thereby, the manuvre of convert-ing intentional consciousness into its own intentional object. If we resist thismanuvre then there will be nothing restrictive, or ominously merelypsychological or purely subjective, about the fact that we represent thingsto ourselves, or about the fact that we do it, or have to do it, in this or thatway. The fact, then, that Kant is telling us about the conditions of represent-ing objects to ourselves does not have the consequence that he cannotconsistently maintain that we are directly aware of those objects.4

University of California at Santa Barbara


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3 Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996, p. 22. 4 I am grateful to Tony Brueckner and Rudy Winnaker for many helpful comments on an

earlier draft of this paper.


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