2. Second Lecture: The Nature of ‘Double I’
In this lecture, we explore the idea of the "Double I" in the context of Kant, largely based on The Critique of Pure Reason(and some earlier works). We then analyze it in the context of the evolutionary truth model, which leads us to recognizing the "Third Self." Many students have noted that the content of this lecture is much like Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan—it becomes much clearer and more self-evident when viewed in hindsight.
Kant and the nature of “Double I”
When approaching Kant in this manner, we first must understand the irresolvable contradiction between empiricists and rationalists of his day. Kant saw the rationalists and empiricists, the dogmatists and skeptics, as presenting two halves of a puzzle. On the one hand, the rationalists (dogmatists), like Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, emphasized the role of reason in gaining knowledge, often downplaying or even effectively dismissing the role of empirical experience. On the other hand, empiricists (skeptics), such as Hume, Locke, and Berkeley, stressed the primacy of experience as the source of knowledge and were skeptical of claims to knowledge derived purely from reason.
An important part of Kant's project in the Critique of Pure Reason was to reconcile these two sides, to show how pure reason and empirical experience have essential roles in our cognition. He acknowledged that "science must always be dogmatic," however, he argued for the need to have enough "critique of its own capacity," stressing the inevitable role of experience in gaining new knowledge. Thus he aimed for nothing less than establishing a "critical" middle path, maintaining that while knowledge begins with experience, it doesn't necessarily arise from it.
However, it is important to understand that the real aim of Kant was to go deeper, beyond just the synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. His key insight is that the mind actively structures experience according to certain fundamental, a priori concepts (substance, cause, etc.), which are not derived from experience but make experience possible in the first place. In this sense, he had to depart from both (traditional rationalism and empiricism), and thus, to understand the core arguments of Kant, we have to move closer to the primordial subjectivity and the nature of self-consciousness that can be the grounds for the consciousness of any other sort.
Now, the stage is set for approaching “the self” apropo Kant, that, as we come to see, is the centre both of his critical and moral philosophy. Long before David Chalmers coins the term “hard problem” of consciousness, Kant tackled the issue. His approach was deeper than of conventional idalist, and thus we can talk about more than just one “I,” when it comes to Kant, or rather, in order to analyse the essence of consciousness, we have to use different forms throgh which to measure its “matter,” and those can be seen as diffrent selves. Kant himself posits: “The human ‘‘I’’ is indeed twofold according to form (manner of representation), but not according to matter (content).”
That two-fold structure, is not an attempt to complicate matters, it is rather the only way to explain our existence, possibility of freedom and human form.
Consciousness itself per Kant, can not be divided as its essence is noumenal (or even if we saw it partly noumenal, it makes it not-phenomenal). The crucial aspect here (especially when it comes to Kants moral philosophy) is obviously if and to what extent rules can be applied to such a noumena. Here one might want to see Kant allowing the possibility of applying categories to noumena (with the caveat, of course, that no empirical knowldege whatsoever can be deducted from that endevour), and Kant does make statements of that sort, which allow such interpretations to be cultivated, stating, for example, that “categories are not restricted in thinking by the conditions of our sensible intuition, but have an unbounded field” However, it is important to acknowledge, that Kant does not talk about our ability to apply categories to noumena per se, but rather posits that we can think of them [noumena] through the categories. Such thinking, of course, results in “problematic concepts”, as Kant states: “I call a concept problematic that contains no contradiction but that is also, as a boundary for given concepts, connected with other cognitions, the objective reality of which can in no way be cognized.” Thus when we take a noumena (let us say free will, God, or immortality of the soul), we can no by any means apply categories to them, but by thinking of them through categories we can reach problematic concepts that are not contradictory but serve as boundaries for our given concepts. They are connected with other cognitions, although their objective reality cannot be recognized. In other words, these concepts allow us to entertain possibilities or hypotheses about noumena, but we cannot assert their actual existence or determine their specific characteristics.
When it comes to extending rules to our noumenal self, additionally the question raises: who or what exactly would be the issuer (subject applying) of the rules to my transcendental apperception, as there is a principle difference between (even in the most abstract sense) applying rules to other noumena and my own noumenal consciousness. This would imply a paradoxical situation where the transcendental apperception would need to step outside of itself to use the categories, which is not possible according to Kant (as the transcendental apperception, as the unifying self-consciousness, has to be on the side of the subject and not an object of any such experience.)
Therefore seeing one’s “two selves” (transendental and empirical) is very much need for further analyses (also for Kant), and an attempt to see Kant wishing to interpret “I” as one self only, is hard to defend. Statements of sort, that he makes, require seeing them in context, where there is also the conceptualization of “I” as two fold consciousness near by. For example, when Kant says that “It is true that I as a thinking being am one and the same subject with myself as a sensing being.”, he has posited before that “the ‘‘I’’ appears to us to be double”.
As soon as we try to deny the dual aspects of the “I”, we encounter serious difficulties in conceptualizing ourselves as entities in the world. If we were to view ourselves solely as the noumenal "I," we would be left with an atemporal self, beyond space and time, and thus incapable of experiencing itself in the flow of consciousness or of conceptualizing itself in the past or future. It means we would be nothing more than a mere idea (whose idea?), which renders further self-analyses impossible. Thus, Kant also remarks that the appearance of our true self is not to be taken as an illusion.
To keep things as clear and basic as possible, let us make a brief synopsis about the “I” -s in as basic a sense as possible. The first “I” is our constructed identity (“S1” in the model of the Evolutionary truth). It is what the “I” we perceive ourselves in any sort of situation as a participant, and that Kant refers to as the empirical, phenomenal apperception (consciousness). That is the “I” that the self-help industry wishes to improve (rather gullibly, and receiving criticism from many thinkers). So basically the empirical I is what can be considered the “me” when we visualize (memorize or fantasize) ourselves in any sort of situation in life (acting, feeling pain, love, or anger, signaling contempt, or experiencing happiness).According to Kant, our empirical self is the ever-changing appearance of our true self that we ourselves can intuit in space and time. The crucial difference lies in the "placement" of the empirical self in time, as opposed to the atemporal noumenal self. Kant famously said, that “time is nothing other than the form of inner sense, i.e., of the intuition of our self and our inner state.” This statement refers to both how we experience our empirical selves and the necessity of the empirical self as a format for our consciousness to experience time (In other words, our empirical self serves also as a vessel through which we can experience and comprehend the passage of time.)
The second 'I' is our transcendental and noumenal apperception, which serves as the grounding consciousness. Kant states that this pure apperception is "'the source of all combination," and it "applies to all sensible intuition of objects in general, to the manifold of intuitions in general, under the name of the categories." It means that our basic, primordial, noumenal subjectivity, or our true self, remains forever inaccessible to us. Yet, it is the source and the ground which allows us to intuit space and time a priori, that is, prior to our experience. Owing to this transcendental self, we first perceive the forms of the physical world, and then we fill, cover, and furnish those forms with sensations. Our true self is atemporal and "pure, original, unchanging." It is our consciousness as the source of reason and the ability to make judgments. In terms of analytic logic, it is a "very simple idea.”
In the simplest terms, it is reasonable to acknowledge the possibility of at least two "selves" of our "I," with the caveat that there can be no absolute certainty about the shared essence of those, except that (when those selves exist) they reside in different realms (noumenal and phenomenal).
Introduction to the “third self”
Now things get interesting as we move on to the “third self” - the transcendental ego, which is one of the most important topics Kant deals with in his philosophy. Basically, the only way for us to formulate a cognition of something is through the synthesis of intuitions, by sorting our perceptions so that we could understand those. In order to conceptualize something (anything) we need to formulate an idea (thought), which for Kant is always a cognition combined of both: an intuition and a concept - if one of those is missing, there can be no conceptualized experience. Therefore, we always need both: something to receive with our mind (as a sensation, intuition, an affection of our mind) and something we can cognize that which we receive (as understanding, concept, thinking). This implies that pure concepts, as well as the a priori principles or 'rules' that govern our mind's operation, must exist before the experience. That allows us to get the sensation and use our imagination to connect it with existing concepts.
In that process, our transcendental ego, which Kant calls the synthetic unity of apperception has the central and irreplaceable role - namely that is the function of our pure apperception that makes any experience meaningful for us, in other words, it allows uniting the sensations through synthesizing those inside one consciousness, namely our own. Kant formulates that by saying: “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations”. Here we can see the crucial importance of subjective unity of experience. It is not nearly enough, that we sense (or imagine) things in space and time, the supreme principle that governs the possibility of experiencing (and understanding anything, whether based on sense data or logical analyses), is syntheses of representation in our consciousness, making those “ours,” or as Kant puts it “The synthetic unity of consciousness is, therefore, an objective condition of all cognition, /…/ something under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me.”
Here, we have arrived at a fascinating fact in Kant's philosophy: our entire understanding of the world, its origin, history, objects, and other minds is made possible by the synthesizing function of the 'transcendental self'. Without this function, we would not be able to differentiate ourselves from the world. The transcendental apperception grounds and makes possible our experience of reality, which can only be conceptualized with the help of the transcendental self. This understanding of the “transcendental self” as the transcendental unity of apperception characterizes it as actively synthesizing perceptions. Thus, it could be argued that there are essentially just two selves: the phenomenal self (previously referred to as the "first self"), and the noumenal self (the "second self"), with the "transcendental self" serving as a synthesizing function of the noumenal self.
In the simplest terms, describing the true I as transcendental self and rational I as the empirical self, allows Kant to construct his rule-governed philosophy of the self and makes his moral philiosophi possible. For Kant those are two different forms of the same consciousness.
