<i>Kant on Mind, Action, and Ethics</i>

As Wuerth himself makes clear in chapter 5, the last chapter of the first part of his big book, much of the value of the work he has done to that point lies in the light it sheds on Kant's notoriously obscure chapter on the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR, Kant 1926 [1781/1787]; all quotations from Kant are from this work1). I will focus on Wuerth's treatment of the Paralogisms chapter. First, however, a few more general comments.Wuerth's book is really two books (he must have had tenure when he wrote it!): one of 186 pages, mostly on the topic of Kant on the soul as simple substance, and one of 145 pages, on the implications of Kant's account of the soul for his ethics. Here I will focus on the first “book,” indeed on the final chapter of the first book; I may turn to the second in another work.The most distinctive contribution of the first book is the survey it mounts of vast sweeps of Kant's writings, from Kant's earliest philosophical works to works written near the end of his life, and not just his professional philosophical works but also popular lectures and notes that Kant wrote to himself that have come to be called Reflexionen.The massive and extremely informative overview that results raises three important exegetical questions:(1) Wuerth argues for more continuity in Kant's thinking on the soul from the 1760s to the 1790s than anyone else—so much so that one wants to ask, “Did the man never change his mind about anything?” I will urge that he did. Indeed, in the chapter on the Paralogisms, and under great pressure, he clawed his way to original thoughts on the soul better than any of his earlier ones, thoughts from which he then may well have backslid later.(2) Wuerth draws heavily on Kant's lectures on metaphysics and anthropology. But how reliable a guide are these lectures to Kant's own deepest thinking? After all, Kant wrote the lectures “down” to fit the audience.(3) Wuerth also draws heavily on the Reflexionen. And the same question arises even more acutely. Philosophers’ notes to themselves are all over the map—at least mine are. We know that some of Kant's Reflexionen do not reflect the way things finally ended up. Wuerth gives a nice example (112): a Reflexionen on the relationship of Amphibolies to Paralogisms that situates them very differently from the final relationship that Kant gave them in CPR. How many more are like this? I suspect that Kant would not be happy if he knew how his jottings and trial thoughts are now being used by many commentators.A commentary steeped in the history of a philosopher's writings runs risks. For Wuerth, two important ones are that it might miss or underplay requirements internal to, and ideas new to, in this case, the Critique of Pure Reason. The Paralogisms chapter was written to meet at least three important internal requirements:To protect the doctrine that we can know nothing about anything as it is in itself from Rationalist claims that we know more than that about the mind at least.To beat back temptations to overinterpret the functional claims about the mind of the Transcendental Deduction as having implications for the structure of the mind. (Because the claims about how the mind functions are claims about the mind as it is, they already push requirement (B) above fairly hard.)To “deny knowledge so as to make room for faith” (Bxxx). Kant thought that if argument and evidence can touch the questions of “God, freedom, and immortality” at all, then they would be deadly. So the only way to keep the three available to us is to insulate them from argument and evidence and leave us free to accept them on faith. (If so, the chapter on the Paralogisms will not be advancing positive claims about the nature of the soul, a point that will become salient shortly.)As to new ideas, connect (A) to another important contribution of Wuerth's book. As he shows convincingly, Kant held that when one refers to oneself as subject (using ‘I think’ or a cognate), one is aware of one's self, one's noumenal self, not just an appearance of it. This claim is consistent with (A) because such reference yields a “bare consciousness of self that is far from being knowledge of it” (B158). Wuerth argues for this distinction repeatedly—but he does not avail himself of what strikes me as Kant's best way of making the point, transcendental designation (TrDes). TrDes is an act of referring to oneself “without noting the least property of it” (A355). Thus the self's awareness of itself is empty, has no content. Wuerth quotes the passage on B158 (177) but seems not to see the implications of what we now call reference without attribution, reference to things without using their properties, for his project. (Nor is TrDes the only highly original anticipation of later claims about reference to self. I do not have space to pursue the others here: see Brook 2001.)The history that Wuerth provides of the idea in Kant's work that the soul is simple (not a composite of parts) and immaterial is particularly penetrating and helpful. Wuerth focuses throughout the first five chapters on Kant's claims about the substantiality of the soul, the topic of the first Paralogism, but makes many forays into its simplicity, the topic of the second Paralogism, and persistence over time, the topic of the third. Since I largely agree with Wuerth about Kant on the soul's substantiality, I will focus on Kant on the soul's simplicity and persistence, where I disagree with him. In my view, in the chapter on the Paralogisms (whatever he may have said elsewhere), Kant is insisting that no argument for either simplicity or for a special, distinctively personal form of persistence works—no argument whatsoever.Kant looks at two or maybe three kinds of argument for simplicity. The first is the famous Achilles argument, which for some reason Wuerth calls the Virgil argument. He shows that Kant used it repeatedly, and he presents it as one of Kant's main reasons for holding that the soul is simple. But does Kant take the argument to support simplicity? Whatever Kant does with it elsewhere, in the Paralogisms chapter he does not. Here is the argument: “Suppose it be the composite that thinks: then every part of it would be a part of the thought, and only all of them together would constitute the whole thought. But this cannot be consistently maintained. For because representations (say, the single words of a verse), distributed among different things, never make up a whole thought (a verse), the thought can never inhere in something composite as composite” (A352). Kant, of course, accepts that the consciousness of a verse unifies all the words of it into a single experience. He merely denies the implication that this shows that the soul is simple. Indeed, Kant himself dispatches the Achilles/Virgil argument quite swiftly: “The unity of a thought, which consists of many representations, is collective and, as far as mere concepts can show, may relate just as well to the collective unity of different substances acting together . . . as to the absolute unity [Kant means simplicity] of the subject” (A353). Wuerth actually quotes this passage (176)—but seems not to see that it renders the Achilles/Virgil argument powerless.Wuerth, following Kant, then turns to arguments from how we appear and must appear to ourselves. (As Wuerth shows, there are important differences between ‘appears’ and ‘must appear’, but I will ignore them.) To show that how we appear to ourselves does not entail that we are simple, Kant invokes TrDes: “In attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designate the subject of inherence only transcendentally . . . without noting in it any quality whatsoever” (A355).Kant then dispatches the argument from self-awareness as swiftly as he had dispatched the Achilles/Virgil argument: In such consciousness of self, “the simplicity of the representation of the subject is not knowledge of the simplicity of the subject itself” (A355). In short, neither argument-strategy gives us any reason to believe that the soul actually is simple, however it might appear to itself—and whatever Kant may have said before or after.TrDes, it seems to me, lays out ideas about reference to self that next saw the light of day only some two hundred years later in the work of philosophers such as Sydney Shoemaker and John Perry (Brook 2001).Wuerth's treatment of Kant's critique of the third Paralogism in chapter 5 is short. He distinguishes between “our identity in our own thoughts” (my sense, when I remember having had an earlier experience or having done an early act, that it was me who had or did the earlier thing) and “our persistence . . . as an external object” (181). A perfectly good distinction, but I wonder whether Kant thought that any real persistence need correspond even to our sense of “our identity in our own thoughts.” Such a belief would violate constraint (C) and there is reason to doubt that Kant held such a view, at any rate in CPR.The idea is that I am identical throughout all the times in which I remember having had experiences, having done actions, and the like. My only sensuous access to earlier times is in memories. This is what “our identity in our own thoughts” and the “consciousness of the numerical identity of myself in different times” consists in. When I remember having had an earlier experience, having done an earlier act, it will indeed appear to be me who had the experience or did the action. However, “the identity of the consciousness of myself at different times is . . . only a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence, and in no way proves the numerical identity of my subject [subject, not empirical appearance]. Despite the logical identity of the ‘I’, such a change may have occurred as does not allow the retention of . . . identity, and yet we may ascribe to it the same-sounding [gleichlautende, homonymous] ‘I’.” (Kant 1926 [1781/1787], A363, my emphases).Same-sounding I. The earlier subject could appear to have been me—and yet not have been me. As Kant put it in the famous footnote to A363, even if the earlier experience had been had, or the earlier action had been done by, someone else, the person who is now remembering them would “be conscious of the states of the previous substances [subjects of experience] as being its own states [so long as] they . . . have been transferred to it together with the consciousness of them” (A364, my emphases). In the same way as we appear to ourselves to be simple (A354), we appear to ourselves to go back as far as the earliest experience that we remember having had, or action that we remember having done. What Kant shows in the Paralogisms chapter is that such appearances hold no implications whatsoever for what we are actually like. In short, I see no positive claims in Kant's critique of the second and third Paralogisms.Moreover, and this reconciles the skeptical argument about identity across time with the unity demands of the Deduction: someone else appearing in a memory of mine as though he or she were me would be just as good for synthesizing the earlier experience or action with my current experience as the earlier person actually having been me. All that is needed for me to synthesize earlier with current experience is that I remember earlier experiences and actions as though they had been mine (A672 = B700).

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