The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 31. No. 125. (Oct., 1981), pp. 348-351.

348
DESCARTES, KANT, AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
BY STEPHEN PRIEST

In this paper two of Terence Wilkerson's conclusions concerning the

Cartesian and Kantian accounts of the self are contested.1
He claims that Descartes did not hold the ("Lookean") view that the
self is a substance ontologically distinct from thoughts, and therefore Kant's
criticism of the rationalist doctrine of the self in the Paralogisms "misses
its mark". Wilkerson also attributes to Kant the view "that consciousness
entails self-consciousness", an attribution shared in various forms by several
Kantian commentators including Strawson and Bennett.
Taking Descartes first, even if it were true that "Kant and Hume are
guilty of a serious muddle, for they attribute to Descartes a Lockean account
of substance which he neither needs nor desires' \ this might be an interesting
point about the History of Ideas but not necessarily a report of a philosophical muddle. Hume in the Treatise section Of Personal Identity, and
Kant in the Paralogisms, would still be saying something coherent in criticism
of any possible philosopher who held that the self was an entity "over and
above" in the sense of "ontologically distinct from" a set of thoughts, even
if Descartes was not such a philosopher. There is, though, clear textual
evidence that Descartes was such a philosopher.
In the Second Meditation he says "I am . . . precisely speaking a thing
which thinks" and then repeats the claim "I am . . . a real thing, and really
existing; but what thing? I have already said it; a thing which thinks".8
Descartes does not say that he is a thought or a series of thoughts but a
1
'thing". His claim to be "speaking precisely" should be taken seriously.
Descartes' conclusions on substances and properties can be correctly extended
to apply to his theory of the self. There is no danger of "confounding the
ideas of mode and substance" in the case of selves and their experiences as
there is in the case of objects and their properties.9 Anthony Kenny understands this point when he says,
A thing is not to be identified with its essence. When Descartes says
that his essence is thinking he does not mean that he can use 'I' and
'thought' as synonyms. The essence of a substance is something that
substance Ao*,4
and quotes the following from a letter from Descartes to Burman:
Besides the attribute which specifies a substance we must recognise
the substance itself beneath the attribute; for instance the soul, being
a thinking thing, is, in addition to thought, a substance which thinks.
(Kenny, p. 66)
So Wilkerson is wrong to claim (p. 50) that "I can talk of myself thinking
or of my thoughts but must bo wary of talking of myself and my thoughts' .
Nor are Descartes' arguments consistent with a view of the self as a set of
1

T. E. Wilkerson, "Kant on Self-Consciousness", The Philosophical Quarterly, 30

(1980), 47-60.
'Descartes, Meditations (Harmondsworth, 1970), p. 105.
,
See Wilkerson, p. 50, quoting from Descartes* Principles I.
A. Kenny, Descartes (New York, 1968), p. 64.

DESCARTES, KANT, AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

349

experiences that can be referred to either by verbal and adjectival phrases

or by noun phrases, without any corresponding difference in ontological
commitment. There is sometimes a choice between a verb phrase and a
noun phrase without there being a corresponding change of meaning. Bennett
provides a useful example; 'they fought for four hours' and 'the fight
lasted for four hours' do not differ in meaning and can be used to mention
one and the same occurrence.6 But this is not the case with the Cartesian
self. Descriptions or mentions of selves and of thoughts (or experiences) are
not alternative means of designating one and the same entity. Not only are
names and experiential predicates grammatically distinct but on Descartes'
view selves and thoughts are not identical, even though they are logically
and ontologically interdependent. The notion of falling under a description
is an interesting and valuable one, but different descriptions sometimes
exhibit different ontological commitments. Although for Descartes there
cannot be thoughts without a self to think them, the distinction is clear;
c
souT, "thinking thing', T , and 'myBelf ' are different expressions used to
refer to one and the same non-material substance. His use of the spatial
metaphors 'besides' and 'beneath' and the phrase 'in addition to' in the
letter to Burman quoted above presupposes a further commitment to
thoughts. These relational concepts require two terms; a substance which
thinks, not just thoughts.
In his Reply to Third Objections Descartes emphasises this doctrine:
No thought can exist apart from a thing that thinks, and in general
no activity or accident can be without a substance in which to exist.
. . . There are activities which we call intellectual. . . . The substance
in which they reside we call a thinking thing or a mind.6
The doctrine that the existence of a self is a necessary condition for mental
activity must be carefully distinguished from the doctrine that the self is
nothing over and above mental activity. Logical dependence must not be
confused with identity. To credit Descartes with the latter view rather than
the former would be to attribute to him a Humean "bundle of perceptions"
doctrine of the self which he would have rejected.
It follows from this clarification of Descartes' position that Kant was
perfectly correct to hold in the First Paralogism that it was a doctrine of
Rational Psychology that "the soul is substance" and it has not been shown
that his attack, or that of Hume, "misses its mark".7
I turn now to Wilkerson's attribution to Kant of this belief: ". . . it is
a necessary truth that if I have an experience I am conscious of it as mine"
(p. 51). Kant did not hold this view, which is in any case false. What is
necessarily true is that if I have an experience it is mine, not that I am
conscious of it as mine. This is a consequence of the trivial analytic truth
that all my experiences are mine. It would be self-contradictory to assert
that I had an experience that was not my own, but it would not be selfcontradictory to say that I had an experience but was not conscious of it
as my own.
'Being conscious of having an experience' is not to be confused with
'having a conscious experience' nor can the former be logically derived from
the latter. When I am having a conscious experience I am conscious, but
J. Bennett, KanVa Dialectic (Cambridge, 1974), p. 73.
*Beply to Third Objections in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. S. Haldane
and O. R. T. Ross (Cambridge, 1911), p. 64.
7
Kant, Critique, A344, B402 (p. 330 in Kemp Smith's edition).

350

STEPHEN PBEBST

when I am conscious of having an experience I am self-conscious. In the

first case I am just conscious, in the second I am conscious of being conscious.
This distinction must not be confused with that between conscious and unconscious mental events (with which it may indeed be compatible). The
distinction is between being conscious and being self-conscious, not between
being conscious and being unconscious.
A failure to make the distinction between ownership and self-consciousness has led to misinterpretation of Kant's famous passage in the B-version
of the Transcendental Deduction:
It must be possible for the "I think" to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which
could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the
representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to
me. (Critique, B 131-2, pp. 162-3)
These remarks do not commit Kant to the view that being conscious entails
being self-conscious. Kant is making two different points. He is saying that
there are no unowned experiences all my experiences are necessarily mine
and he is saying that it must be possible in principle for me to be conscious
of my experiences as mine. The 'must be possible' above does not commit
Kant to 'all the time'.
Wilkerson is not the first commentator mistakenly to think that the 'I
think' of apperception accompanies, or has to accompany all our experiences.
Jonathan Bennett says:
Kant says that every representation must occur not just in some
mind but specifically in the mind of a self-conscious or self-aware
being. Sometimes he concedes that a representation might exist unaccompanied by self-consciousness, but insists that such a representation would "be nothing" to its owner.8
Bennett implies that every representation must be accompanied by selfconsciousness, not just capable of being accompanied by self-consciousness.
Wilkereon and Bennett tacitly assimilate two sets of views that need to be
carefully separated. First, there are at least two interpretations of the
expression 'self-conscious mind' that are possible here. A self-conscious
mind could be one that was capable of self-consciousness or one that was
perpetually self-conscious. All Kant needs for his argument is potential
self-consciousness, not actual or oocurrent self-consciousness. Similarly,
Straw8on's phrase, 'self-conscious awareness of the succession of experience
in time', is open to either interpretation until he makes it clear that he has
the "potential" view of apperception:
It is not necessary in order for different experiences to belong to a
single consciousness, that the subject of those experiences should be
constantly thinking of them as his experiences.9
The second distinction needed is in the reasons why an experience not
capable of being accompanied by self-consciousness would not be possible,
or at least Would be nothing to its owner. Part of the ambiguity lies in the
Kantian text. At least prima facie, 'not possible' is incompatible with
'nothing to'. The disjunction between there either being no experience or
there being an experience of which the owner is not conscious seems clear
on one reading. But there is another reading which renders compatible 'not
'J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge, 1966), p. 104.
P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966), pp. 20, 98.

DESCABTES, KANT, AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS

351

possible' and 'nothing t o \ This second reading concerns the necessary conditions for an event's being an experience. All experiences are events but
not all events are experiences. It is a necessary condition for an event to
be an experience that it be "had" or "owned" by a person, not that a person
should be conscious of its occurrence. When I am conscious of x, I am having
an experience. It is not necessary for me to be conscious of being conscious
of x for me to be conscious of x, although this would indeed be sufficient.
Bearing this in mind, Kant's passage can be taken in this way: the representation would be impossible because the "owned" element in the meaning
of 'experience' and 'representation' would be lacking. A representation that
was "nothing" to a person would be precisely an experience that was not
had, that is at most, a mere event. There logically could not be an experience
that was "nothing" to its owner in this sense.
Finally, once we have seen that pure apperception is a potentiality or
capacity for self-consciousness, we must not lose sight of the tact that Kant
distinguishes this from "empirical apperception" with which it is easily
confused. 'Empirical apperception' is Kant's term for everyday introspection
which is simply our occasional and discontinuous awareness of our own
mental states. "Pure apperception" is the relation between a subject and
his experiences that is expressed by saying that the "I think" must be capable
of accompanying them. This is a purely formal relation between a person
and his experiences and not a sort of introspection. It ensures that certain
sets of mental events are events in a single mind and are thus experiences,
rather than discontinuous and unrelated occurrences.
Expressions like 'consciousness entails self-consciousness', 'self-aware being' and 'self-conscious awareness of the succession of experience' should be
avoided in explaining the transcendental unity of apperception unless it is
remembered that Kant is concerned only with the capacity of the "I think"
to accompany all our experiences.10
Manchester Polytechnic

l0
I am grateful to Professor Graham Bird and Mr. Michael Smith of tho University
of Manchester for several useful discussions about the issues raised in this paper.