Kant and the Self 63

The mistake here-which Fichte is imputing and which I do not believe

Kant is committing-is to presume that, because we may get cognitive access
to our consciousness only by making a reflective object out of it, this is what
makes it "our" consciousness in the fITst place. I propose that the mistake can be
corrected by seeing that it can be true of a state of awareness that, without any
objective ref1ection on the self having taken place, the state is structured by the
form "I think that X,"29 and therefore is already in a personal, even if implicit,
sense an instance of "our" consciousness. In that sense it is an instance of a kind
of "self-consciousness" even if it is not expressly consciousness directed to
"a self' or explicitly a "consciousness of consciousness."30 Rather than working
as a point against Kant, all this just recalls his notion of "first-level" represen-
tations that are specifically "one's own," that is, not "nothing to me." One
could also draw upon SAT here, and argue that such a first-level state is struc-
tured by an "I think" because there appears to be no point in calling the original
state "one's own" if it could not be connected with other similar states that
can be (even if they need not actually be) reflectively, that is, "transcendentally"
represented. However, even without insisting on SAT-that is, without assum-
ing that all such "I think" states must be "really" accessible-I believe we
could fall back on the mere idea of "self-familiarity" that Henrich introduces as
if it were a corrective to Kant and that Sturma develops as just an explication of
Kant.
31
Either way, one can give a sense to regarding a simple "I think that x"
(for example, "I think that it is warm"32) state as something that is already a
kind of self-consciousness, even if it is precisely not a reflection on a distinct
"object-self."33
A related but distinct line of thought can be found in Neuhouser's impres-
sive reconstruction of Fichte's discussion of apperception. Like Henrich, Neu-
houser attempts to isolate a nonpractical sense
34
in which, for at least a while,
Fichte takes the representation of the I and its "self-positing" to be "absolute."
Neuhouser, however, goes far beyond what I have called the "valid kernel" of
Fichte's discussion, and focuses on passages where Fichte says "The I exists
only insofar as it is conscious of itself. "35 This surely appears to say more than
that the representation of the self is not derivable from other representations, or
that it involves some grasp of this nonderivability. It rather appears to be an
ontological claim, a claim that the I and self-consciousness are necessarily
coexistent. If this is not taken as a mere stipulation, it is a controversial claim,
one which does not follow directly even from SAT. SAT, after all, is a claim
about how one kind of awareness involves another kind; it does not entail that
an I could not exist when there is not the first kind of awareness.
36
Neuhouser himself concedes that if Fichte did at first intend the doc-
trine of self-positing to express an ontological thesis about the theoretical sub-
ject, he also appears to have backed off from this kind of argument to empha-
size practical or broadly moral senses in which the subject is self-positing.
37