Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation by Katharina T. Kraus

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation by Katharina T. Kraus Stefanie Buchenau Katharina T. Kraus. Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xiii + 306. Hardback, $96.06. According to conventional wisdom, Kant demolished the traditional idea of the soul in his Critique of Pure Reason. By denying the human mind any theoretical or intuitive knowledge of the soul as an immaterial substance and referring this idea to an illusory tendency of the mind, he efficiently tore down a longstanding metaphysical discipline called rational psychology. Katherina Kraus’s aim is to challenge this conventional reading. In her new book Kant on Self-Knowledge and Self-Formation, she claims that Kant’s true intention was to transform rather than demolish the idea of the immaterial soul. Her main argument, nourished by a close reading of the Critique of Pure Reason, is that despite this transformation, the idea of the soul does retain a positive function, serving as a regulative idea of reason and providing a “guiding thread” of inner experience. Such an idea, she states, offers the wider context for the acquisition of empirical self-knowledge and for self-formation, as a presentation or projection (Darstellung) of a mental whole in relation to which we can first determine inner experiences, without cognizing the whole as such. This regulative principle allows the soul to unfold its function, “as if the mind [Gemüth] were a simple substance that, with personal identity, persistently exists,” as Kant himself puts it in his Critique of Pure Reason (A 672/B 700). Kraus explores the manifold dimensions of this idea in three parts, rising from the level of inner perception to concepts and ideas. In the first part, on self-perception, reflexivity, and referentiality, she outlines an “interactional” model of the soul, self-knowledge, and self-feeling, which is based on the correlation between object-consciousness and self-consciousness. According to Kraus, some kind of inward-directed consciousness is constitutive of the empirical consciousness of objects. Consciousness depends on the [End Page 515] direction of the mind’s attention to itself, and its capacity to distinguish itself from the external world (30). Drawing on Wolffian psychology, Kant develops a novel account of this interactional model. He comes back to a hylomorphic pattern where sensibility, in its twofold empirical and transcendental dimension, is a receptivity to matter in analogy with outer sense, and transcendental self-affection is the a priori determination of the form of sense through the understanding. In part 2, Kraus moves from sensibility and self-perception to the level of understanding and consciousness. Against the psychological and the logical views mostly defended in the existing literature, she argues that the apperceptive “I think” should not be understood as a judgment or as a representation that is about something—neither about an empirical thinker nor about a logical subject (84). Instead, transcendental apperception is the capacity for reflexive consciousness in general. The phrase ‘I think’ is an expression of self-presence. Chapter 4 enquires into the conditions of self-reference. It proposes a novel reading of the Paralogisms, showing in what sense they offer a positive contribution to defining a set of legitimate logical and psychological modes of self-representation. While both sets are distinct and while the category of persistence cannot be applied to inner intuitions, the logical “I” remains relevant for the way in which I refer to myself in experience (148) and in which I represent myself as a psychological “I” and as the same person throughout time (160). This mode of reference appeals to the faculty of reason rather than to the understanding. According to the third part, on reason as the faculty of ideas, the mind here relies on a regulative idea of the soul projecting a totality that is not yet given. This important claim offers the framework for a better understanding of inner experience as being an empirical self-cognition. According to chapter 6, such self-cognition requires some attitude of assent and an epistemic ground for holding such a cognition to be true. Within this paradigm, one can distinguish various levels of self-knowledge, where the highest level (i...