62 Self and Subject

(e.g., spatiotemporal proximity, or "connection" with a particular body), such

that, once one finds that marker present, one can suddenly identify the experi-
ences as one's own.
There is another irony here. Henrich thinks that it is an improvement on
Kant to replace, the Reflexion Theory with a doctrine of "self-familiarity," that
is, the idea that there are (perhaps throughout all one's mental life) representa-
tions that are "one's own" prior to any explicit reflection.
22
The irony is that, as
Sturrna notes, this doctrine can be regarded as exploiting a point central to
Kant's own famous claim that the transcendental "I think" expresses a special
representation that it is possible to attach to all "our" representations,23 for this
stress on the "possible" shows that Kant sees there are representations that do
not become "ours" by means of an actual ever-present act of reflection. This
Kantian point can be expressed in terms of Henrich's own notion of "self-
familiarity"; in Sturma's provocative terminology, the point is that there is at
least one level of our awareness that is primitively "self-referential" but not
"cognitive," that is, it is not originally obtained by a reflective use of any
objective criteria, and it does not "locate" the self in any specific empirical
way.24 Consider what happens, for example, when a person says. "I think some-
thing is going on here." This can be said quite properly even when the person
uses no "criterion" to "identify" him- or herself.
It turns out by a further irony that, except for some incidental termino-
logical complications, this view can be brought quite close to the "Fichtean"
theory that Henrich advocates and expresses in terms of a "self-less con-
sciousness belonging to the self."25 That is, not only are the "improvements" to
be made on Kant already in Kant himself, but the inspiration for these
"improvements," the valid Fichtean ideas to which Henrich calls attention, are
(as Sturma argues) also already present in Kant. What Fichte proposed is that
the I be understood as "positing itself absolutely as self-positing."26 I believe
that the valid kernel in this difficult claim can be broken down into two plau-
sible ideas, namely that self-representation is primitive (hence the I "posits
itself," i.e., its representation can't be derived from the observation of some-
thing else, as in the "classical non=Kantian theories"), and that the self that is
represented understands this and sees itself as spontaneous (hence "as self-
positing").27
Both these points surely appear to be central to Kant's own theory. Why
then do Fichte and Henrich present them as challenges to Kant? A clue may
come from Fichte' s expression of his dissatisfaction (which also lies behind
Henrich's analysis) with Kant. Fichte says: "But again this consciousness of our
[prior] consciousness we are [according to Kant] conscious of only by making
it into an object, and thereby we attain a consciousness of the consciousness of
our consciousness, and so forth into infinity.-But our consciousness is not
explained thereby."28