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one The Ideas of Reason I. The Subject of Critique What, in the end, does Kant have to say about the self, the subject as the locus of both cognition and action, the I whose reason tends toward both theoretical and practical pursuits? Such a question is more elusive than one might expect from a writer who so carefully addresses the intricacies of our cognitive faculties. The difficulty of such a task, as well as Kant’s ambivalence toward it, is summed up in the opening pages of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht), where he explains: He who ponders natural phenomena, for example, what the causes of the faculty of memory [Erinnerungsvermögen] rest on, can speculate back and forth (like Descartes) over the traces of impressions remaining in the brain, but in doing so he must admit that in this play of his representations he is a mere spectator [bloßer Zuschauer] and must let nature run its course, for he does not know the cranial nerves and fibers, nor does he understand how to put them to use for his purposes.1 Even after the exhaustive analysis of the cognitive faculties undertaken in the three critiques, the workings of the mind remain elusive. Kant explains that we cannot trace our sensory experience to its source, offering the example of the faculty of memory, but his point is intended more generally: the attempt to examine our thought is confounded by the problem that we can only speculate on the sources of that which appears, and doing so, Kant concludes, is a “pure waste of time.”2 More than two hundred years after Kant offered this criticism of what he calls “physiological anthropology” in his Anthropology, corresponding to empirical psychology in the Critique of Pure Reason,3 there has no doubt been progress made in the way that we are able to investigate the mind and so map its varied powers.4 Yet Kant’s criticism of empirical psychology is not that he found himself in the unfortunate position of lacking some data or tool that could at some later point be found, offering a solution for the vexing difficulties concerning self-knowledge; rather, Kant addresses self-knowledge in the same way that he THE IDEAS OF REASON฀฀฀•฀฀฀13 addresses knowledge of objects outside us. What philosophy lacks is any criteria that could offer us proof that our claims about the world, however seemingly well founded, however much progress they may appear to offer, actually correspond to the truth of the world. And the truths that transcendental philosophy calls into question include that of the self. Kant’s Copernican turn famously begins his transcendental undertaking by setting aside all question of things in themselves, as they would exist apart from us, and investigates instead the way that objects appear (Bxvi). Like Copernicus, who conceived of the motion of the earth from the apparent motion of the solar system, Kant distinguishes the cognitive faculties that are required for the manner in which objects appear. In this way Kant can be seen to have embraced rather than responded to Hume’s skepticism, accepting that causal necessity is not to be found apart from human thought. Hume famously describes the mind as a theater, offering ever more discrete impressions.5 Kant, in his Anthropology, calls us, in a like way, “mere spectator[s]” when we attempt to offer an account of the mind solely from our representations. This is a Humean insight: we are but spectators in the theater of the mind, forever removed from not only the truth of that which appears, but also from the manner of its presentation. The Critique of Pure Reason is written from such a theoretically skeptical perspective , from, that is to say, the recognition that we cannot conceive of the mind in its actual workings, and that if we are to avoid limiting ourselves to a Humean investigation of our habits, which is to say to a “pragmatic anthropology,” if we are to say something about our faculties, including the elusive imagination, in an a priori fashion, then we must embrace the experiment of transcendental inquiry.6 And yet, within the “turn” that initiates Kant’s transcendental inquiry, he retains the distinction between the perceiving subject and the objects such a subject perceives, importing into this inside the very confidence in the distinction between subject and object that the Copernican turn would have us reject. To explain that such...

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