THE PROBLEM OF SOCIALITY IN GERMAN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY: BETWEEN FREEDOM AND NECESSITY

The article argues that the contradiction between mathematical necessity and the philosophical concept of freedom becomes a real road stone of idealist philosophy. Based on the inherent German classical philosophy of the absolutization of the subject, extends to the internalization of universal concepts of culture as the social nature of reason and rationality. It is proved the understanding of culture as an explication of activity, which based on ethical and axiological norms, and is consolidated in a single human community. The author argues that in the dialectic of the abstract and the concrete, the essence and the existing beginning of life is completed in the forms of thinking, and this is specifically the human, cultural way of being. That is, the personification of culture in the face of the subject is a process of forming a culture of personal thinking, and universal heritage (historical memory) in the communicative space of society is extrapolated to individual consciousness, which in turn becomes the driving force of the cultural process.Key words: culture, sociality, freedom, necessity, subjectivity, thinking, transcendental apperception.

Problem „świadomości w ogóle” u Kanta i Jaspersa

In his book on Kant, Jaspers equates consciousness-as-such with transcenden- tal apperception. Within the framework of Kantian philosophy, consciousness as transcendental apperception is treated as: (1) original synthetic unity, and (2) a form of consciousness or form of presentation. I first consider the con- nections between consciousness-as-such and the transcendental subject, the transcendental I and the noumenal I. I then turn to an analysis of Jaspers’ treatment of consciousness-as-such. He understands this term to mean “the encompassing that is the entity that I am (self)”. Consciousness-as-such is considered in two ways, i.e. through a description of (1) what it is in itself, and (2) its relationship with other kinds of encompassing. I limit my discussion to the relationship between consciousness and two main kinds of encompassing, that is Existenz and reason. I focus on the concept of consciousness from the following perspectives: (1) as a form, (2) the role of Existenz as a factor filling in the empty form of consciousness, and (3) as illuminating consciousness through reason.

The New Philosophy

Kant’s transcendental revolution temporarily cut through debates between Humian skeptics and rationalists of a Leibniz-Wolffian stripe. It established reason as an immanent tribunal, judging its possibilities and errors. Through an analysis of the structure of intuition and the deduction of the categories intrinsic to judgement, largely scientific, the edifice of the first Critique raised epistemology out of metaphysics and psychologism. Together, the Antimonies and Paralogisms of pure reason indicated the contradictions and misuse of concepts into which rational speculation had hitherto fallen. The paralogisms of the erstwhile rational psychology had argued in favor of the simplicity, substantiality, and the personality of the soul, thereby following a logic of substance and accidents where passions and affects were the latter, attaching to that soul. By showing the errors of the paralogisms, Kant effectively “dispatched” virtually all affects to his “science of man and the world,” the anthropology of human practice. However, the solution to Kant’s Paralogisms of the soul opened a new circle, such that our inner sense and its logical condition, transcendental apperception preceded, but could only be thought thanks to, the categories of understanding. At stake was the intrinsic unity of consciousness within the transcendental project. Although the Critique of Practical Reason retained a crucial intellectual affect, Achtung (attention and respect), Kant’s epistemology required clear distinctions between understanding, reason, and affects. In a sense, ontology and epistemology bifurcate into the domains of a transcendental approach to experience as representation and what lays outside it (including pre-reflective sensibility and affects).

Conceptual issues on Kant’s theory of inner experience

this paper discusses the use of certain terms associated to I. Kant’s account of inner experience. Inner experience is a subject matter relevant in Kant’s thought, which encompasses metaphysical and anthropological issues worthy of consideration. By examining the Critique of Pure Reason and the Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, one can see the confused use of the terms: inner sense, empirical, pure, and transcendental apperception, discursive and intuitive self-consciousness, consciousness of oneself divided into reflection and apprehension, intellectual and empirical consciousness of one’s existence. Therefore, I focus on the philosophical meaning of the previous terms and their relation to the problem of inner experience, which depends upon the outer experience. Finally, I deal with the problem of the content of inner sense, suggesting that its content does not correspond to a single, simple thing, but rather to a flux of inner representations.

Apperception and Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness in Kant

Kant points to two forms of self-consciousness: the inner sense (empirical apperception) grounded in a sensory form of self-awareness and transcendental apperception. The aim of this paper is to show that a sophisticated notion of basic self-consciousness, which contains a pre-reflective self-consciousness as its first level, is provided by the notion of transcendental apperception. The necessity for a pre-reflective self-consciousness has been pointed out in phenomenological literature. According to this account, every self-ascription of any property implies a more fundamental form of self-consciousness, i.e., a kind of immediate familiarity with oneself. This pre-reflective self-consciousness is a non-relational and non-identificational form of self-consciousness and concerns an immediate acquaintance of the subject with itself. In the specific terms of transcendentalism every thought contains an implicit reference to a first-personal “givenness” or a sense of “mineness” that articulates a non-relational and non-identificational form of a pre-reflective model of self-consciousness.

Kant, the transcendental designation of I, and the direct reference theory

The aim of this paper is to address the semantic issue of the nature of the representation I and of the transcendental designation, i.e., the self-referential apparatus involved in transcendental apperception. The I think, the bare or empty representation I, is the representational vehicle of the concept of transcendental subject; as such, it is a simple representation. The awareness of oneself as thinking is only expressed by the I: the intellectual representation which performs a referential function of the spontaneity of a thinking subject. To begin with, what exactly does Kant mean when he states that I is a simple and empty representation? Secondly, can the features of the representation I and the correlative transcendental designation explain the indexical nature of the I? Thirdly, do the Kantian considerations on indexicality anticipate any of the semantic elements or, if nothing else, the spirit of the direct reference theory?

The ‘I think’. What it is all about

Kant distinguishes two kinds of knowledge of one-self: empirical self-knowledge due to inner sense and a priori self-knowledge achieved by transcendental apperception. This conception encounters a host of problems. I try to solve these problems from the perspective of today’s phenomenology and analytical philosophy. I first introduce a new conception of inner sense and time-consciousness and argue that empirical self-knowledge must be based on the category of person, a category Kant did not list in his table of categories. I explain how the schematism of this category works. Then I introduce the a priori notion of the subject which corresponds to Kant’s ‘I think’. However, unlike Kant I hold that the notion of the subject is the notion of a being which has certain a priori capacities. Kant did not see that the term ‘I’ must be conceived of as an indexical. I argue that this indexical refers to both, the subject who does the thinking and the person who is thought. On this basis I give an answer to the question how genuine de-se knowledge is possible. I further defend—against Wittgenstein and others—the use of a private thought language. Finally, I show that what I have developed is—notwithstanding the refutation of important elements of Kant’s theory—still essentially a Kantian approach.