Chapter 1: Self

Consciousness and the Self:

From Descartes to Kant
Credits to:
Introducing Philosophy, 10th edition
Robert C. Solomon, Kathleen Higgins, and
Clancy Martin
 Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
• French philosopher who is usually considered
the “father of modern philosophy”
• Raised in the French aristocracy and
educated at the Jesuit College of La Fléche
• Became skilled in the classics, law, and
medicine but decided these fell far short of
proper knowledge, and so he turned to
modern science and mathematics
• First book was a defense of Copernicus,
which he prudently did not publish
• Discovered, while still young, what we now
call “analytic geometry” and used this
discovery as a model for the rest of his
career
• Basing the principles of philosophy and
theology on a similar mathematical basis,
he was able to develop a method in
philosophy that could be carried through
according to individual reason and that no
longer depended upon appeal to
authorities whose insights and methods
were questionable
• In Discourse on Method (1637), he set out
these basic principles, which he had
already used in Meditations on First
Philosophy (not published until 1641), to
reexamine the foundations of philosophy
• He sought a basic premise from which, as
in a geometrical proof, he could deduce all
those principles that could be known with
certainty
But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What
is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which
doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills,
refuses, which also imagines and feels
—Descartes,
Meditations on First Philosophy

•Descartes knows that he exists and continues to

exist as long as he is a “thing that thinks”
•This consciousness that allows us to know that
we exist composes our soul, which is a substance
•For Descartes, self-identity depends on
consciousness
 John Locke
• Spent early life in the English countryside
• Taught philosophy and the classics at
Oxford until he earned a medical degree
and turned to medicine
• Much of his mature life was spent in
politics; joined a group that was fighting for
the overthrow of the government
• Forced to flee England in 1683; lived in
Holland until the Glorious Revolution of
1688
• Received a government position but spent
most of his time writing his two Treatises
on Government (1689) to justify the
revolution and its political principles and
defending his Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (1690), which he had
written while in exile
• Generally credited as not only the founder
of British empiricism but also the father of
modern political liberalism
• Self-identity depends on our having the
same consciousness and memories
• He distinguishes between a substance (the
soul) and consciousness
• Memory provides an infallible link
between what we might call different
stages of a person
• Two objections:
1) We forget much of what we experience
2) Our memories are not always accurate
 David Hume (1711-1776)
• Often admired as the outstanding genius of
British philosophy
• Born in Scotland (Edinburgh), where he spent
much of his life; he often traveled to London and
Paris
• After a vacation in France, wrote the Treatise of
Human Nature (1739)
• Achieved notoriety as well as literary fame in his
lifetime, was involved in scandals, and was
proscribed by the Church
• Was refused professorships at the leading
universities for his “heresies” and yet was, by
all accounts, an utterly delightful man who
never lost his sense of humor
• Was “the life of the party” in London,
Edinburgh, and Paris, and he had long set the
standard of the ideal thinker for British
philosophers
• Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles
of Morals (1751) created as much of a stir in
the intellectual world as his Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
• Like the book on human understanding, the
book on morality was a rewriting of his
youthful Treatise, which never received the
attention it deserved
• Hume’s thesis in moral philosophy was as
skeptical and shocking as his thesis in
epistemology:
– There is no knowledge of right and wrong
and no rational defense of moral principles
– These are based upon sentiment or feeling
and, as such, cannot be defended by
argument
. . . I may venture to affirm of the rest of
mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle
or collection of different perceptions, which
succeed each other with an inconceivable
rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and
movement
—David Hume,
A Treatise of Human Nature
• The self is a fiction. When we are self-
conscious we are aware of only fleeting
thoughts, feelings, and perceptions; we do
not have an impression of the self or a
thinking substance
• We are accustomed to the spatiotemporal
continuity of an object and rely on
resemblance as a criterion of identity. We
cannot even establish the identity of objects
on this account
• The argument “I can never catch myself”
relies on a presupposition: that there is a
“myself” to be caught
 Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Life is the subjective condition of all our

possible experience; consequently we can
only infer the permanence of the soul in life,
for the death of a man is the end of all
experience
—Immanuel Kant
• German philosopher, probably the greatest
philosopher since Plato and Aristotle, who lived
in a small town in East Prussia (Konigsburg)
• Was a professor at the university there for more
than thirty years; never married; his neighbors
said that his habits were so regular that they
could set their watches by him (a later German
poet said, “It is hard to write about Kant’s life,
for he had no life”)
• Yet, from a safe distance, he was one of the most
persistent defenders of the French Revolution
and, in philosophy, created no less a revolution
himself
• His philosophical system was embodied in three
huge volumes: Critique of Pure Reason (1781),
Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and
Critique of Judgment (1790)
• He changed the thinking of philosophers as
much as the revolution changed France
• His central thesis was the defense of what he
called synthetic a priori judgments (and their
moral and religious equivalents) by showing
their necessity for all human experience
• In this way, he escaped from Hume’s skepticism
and avoided the dead-end intuitionism of his
rational predecessors
 Kant’s Transcendental Ego
• Kant agrees with Hume:
– Identity is not found in self-
consciousness
– The enduring self is not an object of
experience; it is transcendental
• If there was a different self at each
moment of consciousness, we would not
be able to perceive anything
• Because we do experience objects, we
must assume that we have a unified
consciousness that combines all of these
impressions into the perception of these
objects
• This is Kant’s self; the “I” that had the
experience can always be found
• The self, for Kant, is also the activity of
applying the rules by which we organize
our experience.
• We must “synthesize” our experiences into
a unity, for we could not come to have any
knowledge otherwise
• He calls this the transcendental unity of
apperception
• The transcendental ego is basic and
necessary for all human experience
 Kant versus Descartes: Two
Conceptions of the Self
Kant objects to Descartes on three grounds:
1. Our concern with self-consciousness is given
impetus because we are not often self-
conscious
2. Kant does not believe that the thinking self is
a thinking thing because the self is not in our
experience but rather responsible for it. The
self is an activity, which undermines the
traditional concept of the soul
3. Kant believes that we need two very
different conceptions of self. The first is that
the transcendental self is essential to being a
self, and the second is the idea of the
empirical ego, which includes all of those
particular things that make us different
people. This allows us to differentiate
between particular selves