Brilliant and idiosyncratic, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant* helped create the conceptual scaffolding of modern consciousness in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Kant was alarmed by David Hume’s notion that the mind is simply a container for fleeting sensations and disconnected ideas, and our reasoning ability is merely “a slave to the passions.” If Hume’s views proved true, then humans would never be able to achieve genuine knowledge in any area of experience: scientific, ethical, religious, or metaphysical, including questions such as the nature of our selves. For Kant, Hume’s devastating conclusions served as a Socratic “gadfly” to his spirit of inquiry, awakening him from his intellectual sleep and galvanizing him to action:
I admit it was David Hume’s remark that first, many years ago, interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave a completely different direction to my inquiries in the field of speculative philosophy.
Kant was convinced that philosophers and scientists of the time did not fully appreciate the potential destructiveness of Hume’s views, and that it was up to him (Kant) to meet and dismantle this threat to human knowledge.
How did Hume’s empirical investigations lead him to the unsatisfying conclusion that genuine knowledge—and the self—do not exist? Kant begins his analysis at Hume’s starting point—examining immediate sense experience—and he acknowledges Hume’s point that all knowledge of the world begins with sensations: sounds, shapes, colors, tastes, feels, smells. For Hume, these sensations are the basic data of experience, and they flow through our consciousness in a torrential rushing stream:
(The sensations in our senses) succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. . . . The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance, pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.
But in reflecting on his experience, Kant observes an obvious fact that Hume seems to have overlooked, namely, that our primary experience of the world is not in terms of a disconnected stream of sensations. Instead, we perceive and experience an organized world of objects, relationships, and ideas, all existing within a fairly stable framework of space and time. True, at times discreet and randomly related sensations dominate our experience: for example, when we are startled out of a deep sleep and “don’t know where we are,” or when a high fever creates bizarre hallucinations, or the instant when an unexpected thunderous noise or blinding light suddenly dominates our awareness. But in general, we live in a fairly stable and orderly world in which sensations are woven together into a fabric that is familiar to us. And integrated throughout this fabric is our conscious self who is the knowing subject at the center of our universe. Hume’s problem wasn’t his starting point—empirical experience—it was the fact that he remained fixated on the starting point, refusing to move to the next, intelligible level of experience. Here’s how Kant explains the situation:
Where does the order and organization of our world come from? According to Kant, it comes in large measure from us. Our minds actively sort, organize, relate, and synthesize the fragmented, fluctuating collection of sense data that our sense organs take in. For example, imagine that someone dumped a pile of puzzle pieces on the table in front of you. They would initially appear to be a random collection of items, unrelated to one another and containing no meaning for you, much like the basic sensations of immediate unreflective experience. However, as you began to assemble the pieces, these fragmentary items would gradually begin to form a coherent image that would have significance for you. According to Kant, this meaning-constructing activity is precisely what our minds are doing all of the time: taking the raw data of experience and actively synthesizing it into the familiar, orderly, meaningful world in which we live. As you might imagine, this mental process is astonishing in its power and complexity, and it is going on all of the time.
How do our minds know the best way to construct an intelligible world out of a never-ending avalanche of sensations? We each have fundamental organizing rules or principles built into the architecture of our minds. These dynamic principles naturally order, categorize, organize, and synthesize sense data into the familiar fabric of our lives, bounded by space and time. These organizing rules are a priori in the sense that they precede the sensations of experience and they exist independently of these sensations. We didn’t have to “learn” these a priori ways of organizing and relating the world—they came as software already installed in our intellectual operating systems.
Kant referred to his approach to perception and knowledge as representing a “Copernican Revolution” in metaphysics and epistemology, derived from the breakthrough of the Polish astronomer Copernicus (1473–1543), who was one of the first and most definitive voices asserting that instead of the Sun orbiting around Earth, it’s actually the reverse—Earth orbits the Sun.
In a similar fashion, empiricists like Hume had assumed that the mind was a passive receptacle of sensations, a “theatre” in which the raw data of experience moved across without our influence. According to Hume, our minds conform to the world of which we are merely passive observers. Kant, playing the role of Copernicus, asserted that this is a wrongheaded perspective. The sensations of experience are necessary for knowledge, but they are in reality the “grist” for our mental “mills.” Our minds actively synthesize and relate these sensations in the process of creating an intelligible world. As a result, the sensations of immediate experience conform to our minds, rather than the reverse. We construct our world through these conceptual operations; and, as a result, this is a world of which we can gain insight and knowledge.
This is a brief overview of Kant’s epistemological framework, which we will examine in more depth in Chapter 6. For now we are interested in how this framework influences Kant’s conception of the self. Actually, from Kant’s standpoint, it’s our self that makes experiencing an intelligible world possible because it’s the self that is responsible for synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience into a meaningful whole. Metaphorically, our self is the weaver who, using the loom of the mind, weaves together the fabric of experience into a unified whole so that it becomes my experience, my world, my universe. Without our self to perform this synthesizing function, our experience would be unknowable, a chaotic collection of sensations without coherence or significance.
The unity of consciousness is a phrase invented by Kant to describe the fact that the thoughts and perceptions of any given mind are bound together in a unity by being all contained in one consciousness—my consciousness. That’s precisely what makes your world intelligible to you: It’s your self that is actively organizing all of your sensations and thoughts into a picture that makes sense to you. This picture is uniquely your picture. You are at the center of your world, and you view everything in the world from your perspective. For example, think about a time in which you shared an experience with someone but each of you had radically different experiences: attending a party, watching a movie, having a communication misunderstanding. Reflect on the way each person instinctively describes the entire situation from his or her perspective. That’s the unity of consciousness that Kant is describing.
Your self is able to perform this synthesizing, unifying function because it transcends sense experience. Your self isn’t an object located in your consciousness with other objects—your self is a subject, an organizing principle that makes a unified and intelligible experience possible. It is, metaphorically, “above” or “behind” sense experience, and it uses the categories of your mind to filter, order, relate, organize, and synthesize sensations into a unified whole. That’s why Kant accords the self “transcendental” status: It exists independently of experience. The self is the product of reason, a regulative principle because the self “regulates” experience by making unified experience possible. Other such “transcendental regulative ideas” include the ideas of cosmos and God.
So where did Hume go wrong, from Kant’s standpoint? How could Hume examine his mind’s contents and not find his self, particularly because, in Kant’s view, the self is required to have intelligible experience? Hume’s problem (according to Kant) was that he looked for his self in the wrong place! Contrary to what Hume assumed, the self is not an object of consciousness, one of the contents of the mind. Instead, the self is the transcendental activity that synthesizes the contents of consciousness into an intelligible whole. Because the self is not a “content” of consciousness but rather the invisible “thread” that ties the contents of consciousness together, it’s no wonder that Hume couldn’t find it. It would be analogous to going to a sporting event and looking in vain to see the “team,” when all you see are a collection of players. The “team” is the network of relationships between the individuals that is not visible to simple perception. The “team” is the synthesizing activity that creates a unity among the individuals, much like the self creates a unity in experience by synthesizing its contents into an intelligible whole. And because experience is continually changing, this intelligible picture of the world is being updated on an instantaneous basis.
We can also see Kant’s refinement of Descartes’s concept of the self, which he interprets as a simple, self-evident fact: “I think, therefore I am.” Kant was interested in developing a more complex, analytical, and sophisticated understanding of the self as a thinking identity. To begin with, Descartes was focusing on one dimension of the thinking process: our ability to reflect, to become aware of our self, to be self-conscious. But from Kant’s standpoint, the thinking self—consciousness—has a more complex structure than simple self-reflection. The self is a dynamic entity/activity, continually synthesizing sensations and ideas into an integrated, meaningful whole. The self, in the form of consciousness, utilizes conceptual categories (or “transcendental rules”) such as substance, cause and effect, unity, plurality, possibility, necessity, and reality to construct an orderly and “objective” world that is stable and can be investigated scientifically. It is in this sense that the self constructs its own reality, actively creating a world that is familiar, predictable, and, most significantly, mine.
Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” accompanied by his comprehensive and penetrating analysis of the central themes of philosophy helped usher in a modern consciousness. In fact, many of his foundational premises have been supported by research in the sciences and social sciences. For example, the renowned developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) conducted painstaking empirical research on the way the human mind develops, an interactive process involving both sensory experience and innate cognitive structures. His seminal book Construction of Reality in the Child (1950) (published almost 150 years after Kant’s death) could very easily have been written by Kant had he been a modern developmental psychologist. Similarly, work in language development by linguists such as Noam Chomsky (B. 1928) have also supported the Kantian idea that human experience—such as language abilities—are the product of both exposure to a specific language and innate, a priori intellectual rules or categories that are “hardwired” into each human being.
Kant’s dominant influence on Western philosophy and the intellectual framework of modern consciousness was in sharp contrast to his quiet, limited life. Never traveling more than sixty miles from his birthplace in Germany, Kant never married and lived a life of such precise habits that it was said the citizens of his hometown could set their watches based on his daily walks. He was a popular university professor, and his passion for understanding both the universe and human nature is reflected in the inscription he wrote for his tombstone: “The starry heavens above me; the moral law within me.”
Analyzing Kant’s Unity of Consciousness
Here’s an opportunity for you to be a philosophy detective engaged in a “missing person” investigation—looking for your self. If Kant is right, you should not be able to find your self among the contents of your consciousness. Instead, your self should be revealed as the synthesizing principle that unites your experience. Launch a reflective investigation into your self and then describe as clearly as you can what you find. Did you discover your self? How would you describe the qualities of your self? In what ways is your self similar to all other selves? In what ways is your self different from all other selves?