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Assess the arguments concerning the self in the

Paralogisms of Pure Reason.

In this essay I shall be discussing Immanuel Kants arguments

concerning the self in the Paralogisms of pure reason. Kant is often
regarded as one of the most influential philosophers in history. In his
book, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant is responsible for what he
himself calls a Copernican revolution. In short, Kant was
responsible for changing the way we think of our minds relation to
the world around us, or in other words, the subject-object
relationship. Within The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant shows that
the mind does not simply receive information but rather also shapes
that information through its faculties. It is on this foundation that
Kant builds his doctrine of transcendental idealism. Kant names the
faculties of the mind sensibility, understanding and reason. He
wants to find what can be known purely from the faculty of reason
alone, in order to create a unity of knowledge. It is in the third
section of the critique of pure reason, namely the dialectic, in which
Kant is developing his ideas on the faculty of reason that the
Paralogisms can be found. The Paralogisms can be seen as a
refutation of rational psychology, such as that of Descartes.
As mentioned previously, it is the dialectic that Kant is
developing his idea of reason. He develops it in such a way that it
entitled to employ its ideas in order to direct or regulate the
understanding(Gardner, 1999, 221). What this means is that
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reason gives the understanding maxims which unify, simplify and

systematise the understanding (Gardner, 1999, 221). The goal of
this is for reason to be able to create an apriori whole of knowledge.
It is in doing this that Kant notes that reason creates its self a
unique kind of problem. This is that in trying to create a whole of
knowledge reason creates Transcendental illusions for its self,
which is to take a subjective necessity of a connection of our
conceptsfor an objective necessity in the determination of things
in themselves (Kant, 2007, A297/B354). It is in the four Paralogisms
that Kant shows how these illusions are contained within the ideas
on the self, or the soul that rational psychology proposes.
The main claim of rational psychology is that it is able to know
that the self is an indivisible and immaterial substance, which
therefore means that it claims to know the self as a thing in its self.
It makes its claims for an a priori basis as it bases its self on
apperception alone; meaning that it does not use any empirically
gathered information in its arguments. In is within the Paralogisms
that Kant splits up the claims of the rational psychologists in to four
parts and shows how the are invalid syllogisms, and have fallen to
transcendental illusion.
In the Paralogisms, Kant shows how the lines of reasoning
followed by the rational psychologists in their arguments are invalid
due to their equivocation of the of thought to subject. In the first
Paralogism, Kant follows a line of reasoning made by the rational

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psychologists and shows how it is not valid. The reasoning that the
rational psychologists follow is that:
1 That which is the subject of judgment and cannot be predicated
of anything else is substance.
2 I as a thinking being am always the subject of my thoughts.
3 Therefore I am a substance (in which my thoughts inhere)
(Gardner, 1999, 225)

Kant argues that this line of reasoning is not valid because it has
equivocated the logical sense of the subject with the extra-logical
sense of the subject. What Kant means by this is that while he
agrees I as a thinking being am always the subject of my
thoughts, he does not agree that this I then means anything
about the I in the sense of a substance. Rather it merely means
that I in the sense of a representation am always the subject of
my thoughts. This therefore makes the conclusion of the rational
psychologists argument invalid, as they can no longer assume that
the I is a substance in which my thoughts can inhere, but rather a
representation.
It could be said that a weakness to Kants argument in the first
paralogism is that it relies on his own definition of substance
through the use of his concepts. To Kant the purpose of the idea of a
substance is an idea of something permanent, however there is
nothing that is permanent in the experience of the self as the only
experience of the self we have is through inner sense, which to Kant
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means that only time and so succession is part of our experience,

and not space which allows for permanence, while time and space
being the necessary conditions of our intuitions, as he explains in
the first section of the critique, The Transcendental Aesthetic.
However if one accepts Kants requirements for the concept of a
substance then his argument that the rational psychologist
reasoning between their second premise, that I is a subject, to the
conclusion that the I is a substance and subsequently has
permanence is therefore invalid as this is not a valid application of
the concept of substance. This is due to the fact in synthesising the
self the rational psychologist does not include the concept of
substance, but instead only includes I think, which does not
contain the concept of substance, but instead on a representation,
and so cannot lead to the conclusion of there being a self that has
substance.
Kant wrote two editions of the Critique of Pure reason. In the
second of these editions, Kant reformulates this original criticism of
rational psychology. In this reformulation, rational psychology is
charged with a confusion of analytic with synthetic
judgements(Gardner, 1999, 227). Kant points out that in their line
of reasoning on the self as mentioned before, the rational
psychologists are making a move from an analytic proposition (The
I that thinks must be regarded always as a subject) to a synthetic
proposition (I as an object am substance) (Gardner, 1999, 227).
Kant then goes on to explain that this line of reasoning is invalid on
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the grounds that a synthetic judgement cannot follow from analytic

judgements as their root. As this line of argument is central to the
doctrine of the rational psychologists, it can be said that their thesis
collapses without the move from an analytic judgement to a
synthetic judgement being possible. Subsequently it can be said
that Kant collapsed the rational psychologists arguments in just one
of his Paralogisms. However in order to make his case stronger he
also writes three more paralogisms on the rational psychologist
reasonings on the self that all follow the same flawed equivocations
making them invalid.
The second of the Paralogisms concerns the rational
psychologists claim that the self is an indivisible substance. Kant
follows the same line of attack as he does in the first paralogism
that they have committed equivocation, namely the equivocation of
logical self with extra logical self. Kant permits that it is true that the
thinking self cannot be made up of multiple parts, and so must have
unity, however says that this does not then give it the same unity as
that of an indivisible object as the rational psychologists suggest.
This is because, Kant proposes, that the unity of thought does not
imply the unity of the thinker, except in the tautologous (analytic)
sense that a being that thinks must not be composite in a way that
is inconsistent with the unity of thought (Gardner, 1999, 227).
What this means is that, as in the first paralogism, the equivocation
of I has been committed in that in the rational psychologist
argument that I am simple. This is that although it can be shown
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that the logical or representational I is simple, this does not reflect

that the transcendentally real I is also simple. The reason that
logical I can be said be simple is because the representation of I is
empty, and so can be called simple although really we know nothing
more of it than its existence.
The third paralogism concerns the claim of the rational
psychologists that the self also refers to a substance that is aware of
its identity. The rational psychologist infers the personality of the I
from the fact that I am conscious of anything at all(Gardner, 1999,
228). Kant once again argues against this by saying, as he did in the
previous Paralogisms that there has been an equivocation. This time
the equivocation is of logical and extra logical uses of the concept of
identity. Kant argues that it is possible that a conscious being could
in fact have a changing identity over time, and that the rational
psychologists have confused consciousness with identity. Kant
states that it is fully possible for consciousness to remain the same
over time while in fact the identity of substance it relates to has in
fact changed. This would therefore show that the rational
psychologists claim that the self also refers to a substance that is
awake of its identity is false when following Kants reasoning.
The fourth paralogism is a direct attack on Cartesian Dualism.
It concerns the differentiation Descartes makes when he
distinguishes his own existence as a thinker, or self, to the things
outside of himself, and so concluding that his is existence is
independent from his body. Kant criticises this with much the same
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method as he used in the other Paralogisms. This is to say that there

has been a mistake in that his argument commits the fallacy of a
synthetic judgment following the analytic judgements. This is
because things outside of me in space are ones that I think of as
distinct of myself is an analytic matter; it is a further, synthetic
matter that I might exist without them(Gardner, 1999, 229). This
subsequently means that his argument for the existence of mind
being separate existence to that of body is invalid because of the
fact that an analytic judgement cannot lead to a synthetic
judgement.
To conclude, the aim of Kants arguments concerning the self
in the Paralogisms of pure reason is to show how the dictum of
rational psychology is flawed in the sense that their arguments are
not valid. This is because of the rational psychologists main line of
argument being based on the statement I think. The arguments
are flawed in the sense that they fall to transcendental illusion. This
means that they make the mistake of equivocating logical and extra
logical idea of the self, and make movements of reason that they
rely on for their conclusions based on this, which then lead to false
conclusions. In other words, they make jumps from the concept of
subject to substance that are not logically possible when following
Kants ideas on what a concept of an substance is. This is because
the base line of argument for the rational psychologist is I think,
and this contains nothing of the concept of substance, and instead
simply representation. It follows that the rational psychologists are
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not answering the question of what the self is in its self, but can only
instead attempt to talk of our representations of the self. As this
then denies them the concluding line of their underpinning
argument as stated in paragraph 4, it then denies them the entirety
of their thesis. It follows that Kant is successful in arguing against
the doctrine of rational psychology while Kants ideas on concepts
are taken as a given.

Bibliography

Kant, I. (2007). The Critique of Pure Reason. Second Edition.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gardner, S. (1999). Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Oxon:

Routledge.