1. Transparency accounts of pure apperception

There are two broad approaches to the transparency of pure apperception – one of which I will call ‘Evansian’ after Gareth Evans, the other ‘Sartrean’. The Evansian approach assumes that there are particular beings in the objective, spatio-temporal order that are able to refer to objects, including to themselves. We can ask how it is that they are able to refer to themselves when they self-ascribe mental states in such thoughts as <I think p >.Footnote ³ Transparency characterizes the peculiar ‘procedure’ that they employ in such self-ascriptions, distinct from the methods they use to become aware of properties ascribed to objects other than themselves (or to objects that just happen to be themselves) (Evans Reference Evans1982, 225).Footnote ⁴ On the Sartrean approach, by contrast, the transparent I does not refer to itself or identify itself with a being in the world, but distinguishes itself from all beings in the world. Transparency thus is not a method used in self-ascriptions of mental states, but characterizes self-consciousness without self-reference. Whereas on the Evansian approach, the transparent I presupposes an empirical I that is in the world, the Sartrean approach reverses this: the empirical ego, as an object of what he calls ‘thetic consciousness’, presupposes the transparent I (the I of non-thetic self-consciousness).

It is not my intention in this paper to settle exegetical questions about Evans'sor Sartre'sown accounts of self-consciousness. My main purpose is to discuss their appeals to Kant, and to assess whether their transparency approaches to Kantian pure apperception are compatible with the sameness of the transcendental and empirical I’s.

The Evansian approach, which has come to dominate much of the literature on Kant, assumes a distinction between two standpoints: one, external, from which I think of an objective world (Evans calls this the ‘fundamental level of thought’ (Evans Reference Evans1982, 105f., 152, 210)); the other, internal, from which a being within this world thinks of herself first-personally, or from a first-person perspective.Footnote ⁵

Evans notes that in thinking about myself from within, I ascribe thoughts to myself in a manner very different from the way that I ascribe properties to outer objects. It is not by observing myself thinking <p>, or by using criteria for identifying myself as the one who thinks <p>, that I know I think p. It makes no sense to be aware of the thought <p> without being aware that I am the one thinking it; I don’t have to identify myself as the thinker of this thought in order to know that it is mine. I am aware of <p> as mine by directing my attention solely at p itself. The thinker of <p> can thus be said to be transparent to the world: for in consciousness of thinking p, it is not conscious of itself as an object of thought at all, but recedes behind what it thinks. It is in this context that Evans says ‘I believe we may have here an interpretation of Kant'sremark about the transcendental “I think”’ (Evans Reference Evans1982, 228). The transparent or transcendental I is not an object of reference and so does not enter the content of my thoughts, but is, as Evans says, ‘purely formal’ (Evans Reference Evans1982, 226).

However, Evans thinks that this formal self-consciousness is not sufficient to ‘constitute a full understanding of the content of the judgment “I believe that p”’, since the content of that judgment involves the use of I as a referring expression (Evans Reference Evans1982, 226). To think that transparency is sufficient to secure the referential significance of ‘I’ would be to make the Cartesian mistake of inferring from thinking alone to an object or substance that thinks. Evans follows Strawson in reading Kant'score insight (against the rationalists) to be that self-conscious thought is inseparable from a conception of oneself as an embodied being located within an objective world: transcendental apperception is inseparable from empirical apperception or inner sense. For if we could not situate ourselves within an objective world-order that is there independently of our perspective from within it, we would not have a capacity to refer to ourselves in self-ascriptions of thoughts or beliefs.Footnote ⁶ It is in the self-locating thought of empirical apperception, through which I become conscious of my spatio-temporal position, that Evans thinks I identify myself with a being in the world. Empirical apperception thus establishes self-reference.Footnote ⁷

Notice that the transparency method for ascribing particular thoughts to myself will only work if the I that thinks <p> is conscious of itself as the same as the I in the self-ascription <I think p >. This is often overlooked, as though the puzzle of transparency that Evans'saccount raises could be that of how I can go from a mind-independent fact about the world, <p>, to a fact about my mind, <I think p >.Footnote ⁸ The real puzzle does not concern the relation between these thought-contents (whether inferential or not), but rather between the I that disappears – the transcendental I that thinks <p> – and the I that appears or that becomes the object of self-ascription – the empirical I of <I think p >. How am I conscious that the I of <I think p> is the same as the I that thinks <p>? Evans tries to avoid this difficulty by assuming an empirical I and by thinking of the transcendental, transparent I as a merely abstract aspect of it.Footnote ⁹ The transcendental I of <I think>, he says, is embedded in, or conceivable only against the ‘background’ of, the use of I in self-locating thought (Evans Reference Evans1982, 226). For instance, in thinking <I think p>, I am ascribing the thought <p> to myself, as an empirical being in the world, distinct from others. The point of the transparency method is that I can do this in abstraction from any consideration of that which distinguishes my thinking <p> from your thinking <p >. I can do it simply by focusing my attention on p. It is thus by abstracting from the empirical foundation of I-thoughts that I form the idea of an entirely empty or formal I, a ‘consciousness in general’ that is impersonal and universal.

But once we take this abstractive approach, it emerges that the transcendental I is not transparent as the account purports it to be. To borrow Sartre'swords from a different context, the empirical I cuts through the transcendental I like an ‘opaque blade’ (Sartre TE, 40).Footnote ¹⁰ For the subject of thinking – properly understood – now just is the empirical subject, and its acts of thinking, which were operative in thinking <p>, are psychological acts ascribed to this individual subject as its properties. Thus, these mental acts were already there, cutting through my consciousness of p, even though I was abstracting away from them. The subject therefore always thinks the outer world through its subjective, limited perspective, from a place within it. It thinks what is from the perspective of how things seem to be to it. One cannot think of the objective world (what is) as an abstraction out of the subjective world (what seems to be). If the objective world is thought of as an abstraction, as, for instance, what all ‘seemings’ share in common, it is not truly objective. Likewise, if the I that thinks the world is an abstraction out of the empirical I, it is not truly transparent to the objective world. Evans wants to be able to say that the objective world-order is already there, independent of perspectives of subjects within it. But by placing the subject within an objective context, he has placed it in a jail from which the subject cannot free itself by simply trying to ‘abstract away’ from the fetters of its confinement. The subject is not in a position, from within the confinement of its subjective perspective, to distinguish how things seem to be to it from how they objectively are.

In readings of Kant, this approach to transcendental apperception would have the disastrous consequence that transcendental idealism is a subjective idealism. The first Critique adopts the first-person standpoint of the thinker in determining ways in which it thinks about or gains cognitive access to the world. But on this reading, the transcendental structure of the world would be the formal structures discovered from within an externally limited, subjective perspective of a being in the world. One might say that subjects within the world have objective knowledge of the world around themselves – but one cannot entitle oneself to that claim if one has already confined the subject to a perspective from within it.Footnote ¹¹

The Sartrean approach is more Kantian in that it does not dogmatically assume a distinction between external and internal viewpoints, or between the objective world-order and the first-person perspective of a being within that world-order, but allows philosophical reflection to begin from within a standpoint that transcends this distinction and first makes it possible.Footnote ¹² Sartre notices that thought about an objective world-order is inseparable from self-consciousness in thinking it. All consciousness is consciousness of something other than itself (it is characterized by intentionality); in Sartre'swords, it is thetic, for it posits an object beyond itself. But it is also (non-thetically) conscious of itself as of something other, and thus of itself as distinct from the object of consciousness.Footnote ¹³ But in non-thetic consciousness of itself it is not conscious of itself as having any given characteristics, or of being limited in any way. Rather, consciousness is conscious of itself as nothing in contrast to the ‘something’ it thetically posits or is conscious of: consciousness is, as Sartre puts it, ‘all-lightness, all transparency’ (toute légèreté, toute translucidité) (Sartre TE Reference Sartre, Williams and Kirkpatrick1960, 42; altered translation; BN, Reference Sartre and Barnes1956, 78).Footnote ¹⁴ So self-consciousness is completely transparent to the world because to be self-conscious is to be conscious of escaping ourselves (going outside ourselves, transcending ourselves) in being intentionally directed at outer objects or at states of affairs.Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, transparency is a poor metaphor for characterizing the subject on this view, insofar as it leaves in place the idea of a medium through which we look outwards, at the world.Footnote ¹⁶ When we go outside, there is nothing, not even a medium, left inside (there is no opaque blade that cuts through its consciousness of the world).Footnote ¹⁷ Everything, on the Sartrean view, including mental states, is external to the non-thetic ‘I’, because everything transcends our consciousness of it: ‘everything is finally outside, everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others’ (Sartre Reference Sartre1970, 5).

The I of non-thetic self-consciousness, according to the Sartrean approach, is not a thing (spatio-temporal object) that I am conscious of in a special way. Non-thetic self-consciousness is not a peculiar kind of thought about myself (with a special Fregean sense), but is the entirely empty form of all thinking (indeed, of all consciousness) in general. Insofar, then, as the ‘I think’ is an expression of non-thetic self-consciousness, <I think p> means just the same as <p>: the <I think> does not add any additional content to that which I think, namely, to <p> – the <I think> expresses nothing. Thus, the non-thetic <I think p> is not a self-ascription in Evans'ssense, but accompanies any thought in general (not just thoughts about myself).Footnote ¹⁸ Contrary to the Evansian approach, Sartre maintains that ‘consciousness … can be limited only by itself’ (Sartre TE Reference Sartre, Williams and Kirkpatrick1960, 39). So the limits of the empirical ego are inside consciousness; only within consciousness can we draw a distinction among the objects of thought, between an ego that is a being in the world and others outside it, or between the way things appear to me, as a particular in the world, and the way they are outside that perspective.Footnote ¹⁹

In the Transcendence of the Ego Sartre suggests that this nothingness of consciousness in relation to its object is the proper way to understand Kant'sthesis that the ‘I think’ is an empty representation. Insofar as general and transcendental logic are concerned with mere empty forms of thinking and judging, they must be concerned with the merely ‘logical conditions’ that are ‘necessary for the existence of an empirical consciousness’, i.e. conditions for intentional relations to objects (Sartre, TE 33). These are not psychological conditions or given characteristics of the subject; the ‘transcendental field’, as Sartre says, is ‘impersonal; or if you like, pre-personal, without an I’ (Sartre, TE 36). On Sartre'sreading, they can be understood as the formal structures of intentionality, i.e. ways in which consciousness (or thinking) is directed at the world (or being).

Notice that Sartre does not face the difficulty of explaining how the I that thinks is the same as the I that perceives or the I that runs, since all acts of consciousness – whether in thinking, perceiving, or (practical) intention, are intentional acts, and thus have the same ‘nothingness’ – the same non-thetic I – at their core. But on Sartre'sview the non-thetic I cannot become an object of experience: the I that is nothing is not the same as the posited ego that appears and is something. Sartre says that the latter is a transcendent object just like any other object of consciousness, and so is distinct from consciousness of it: the transparent I can always say ‘I am not what I am’ (Sartre BN, 260). Indeed, Sartre suggests that this ability to step back from, or to negate, the object-ego, constitutes our freedom. The sense in which I can identify myself with the object-ego, as when Sartre says ‘I am what I am not’, is very different from the sense in which I am not identical with it (‘I am not what I am’, ibid.). In Being and Nothingness, he suggests that I identify myself with an object-ego in the way that the craftsman identifies himself with the tool in his employment of it. The tool is not given to him as an alien object, but is the instrument of his engagement with the world (Sartre, BN 303ff.).Footnote ²⁰ (This is the kind of self-identification that Korsgaard appeals to when she says that I can identify myself with my vacuum cleaner (Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard2009, 37)). In the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre puts this by saying that I can become ‘intimate’ or familiar with an ego-object as my own (Sartre TE, 86). But notice that this still leaves us with two I’s: one, which is truly a subject-I and transparent to the world, and another, which provides a familiar dwelling for it within the world. Intimacy is not sameness.

As a reading of Kant, the Sartrean approach thus leaves us without resources to interpret Kant'sclaim that there is no ‘doubling’ of I’s. According to Kant, there are not two I'shere, but one. It is I who am affected in sensory perception, not merely a body that I occupy. Indeed, my actions would be unintelligible as mine if I could not say that I am this individual, particular self that exists in the world, but could only say that I am intimate with this individual. For surely it is I, not a person I occupy, who acts in the world.Footnote ²¹

We have seen with Sartre, against Evans, that the transcendental I cannot be a mere abstraction out of the empirical I and be fully transparent; on the contrary, the empirical I only comes into view for a transcendental I, and thus presupposes the latter. But the Sartrean approach makes it seem that any attempt to identify the transcendental and empirical I'sas the same I would be a confusion. For, on this approach, the transcendental I is the empty subject of an act of intentionality, which is universal and formal, while the empirical I is one of the many particular objects that it can become conscious of. In what sense of identity, then, can Kant claim without confusion that they are identical? I shall return to this question in Section 3.

2. Kant on transcendental apperception

First, we would be well advised to turn to Kant'sown reflections on transcendental apperception in the first Critique, since the above accounts may have been led astray by assuming that transparency plays any role in it. My remarks here will be brief, as my main goal is to articulate the relation between transcendental and empirical apperception (in the next section). We saw that transparency accounts of pure apperception characterize thinking primarily through intentionality: to think is to be conscious of something distinct from the thinking of it. I am conscious that I think <p> by going outside myself and focusing my attention on p. Since, by thus going outside, I leave nothing inside myself, the I could be said to be transparent to the world.

However, Kant'sfundamental conception of thought doesn’t involve thinking of thought as an act of intentionality. This is especially evident in his general logic, where thinking is understood as a (formal) act or function of synthesis, in abstraction from the relation it bears to any object. But even in transcendental or material logic (as expounded in the B-edition of the first Critique), which I will focus on here, Kant does not originally think of the relation that thought bears to its object as one of intentionality. It is not in the pure self-consciousness of judging, but in the empirical awareness of a temporally extended act of judging, that Kant discusses judgment'sintentional relation to an object that is ‘outside’ of it. One should not confuse the relation that judgment originally bears to an object at the transcendental level (of pure apperception) with the intentional relation that representations in inner sense bear to the objects of outer sense at the empirical level, or so I shall argue. In the former relation, the act of judging does not go ‘outside’ itself, but remains entirely immanent to itself.

In the B-edition Transcendental Deduction, Kant glosses the ‘relation of representations to an object’ as their ‘objective validity’ (B137). Objective validity is what is expressed by the ‘copula is’ in a judgment (B141f.). A judgment thus ‘relates to an object’ insofar as it is objectively valid. Kant later clarifies that if a judgment is objectively valid, we can infer that it is true (A125, A788/B816, cf. A131/B170, A202/B247). For a judgment is objectively valid only if it accords with the laws of the understanding (both logical and transcendental), and no lawful exercise of the understanding (as a capacity for knowledge) can be false (A293-4/B350). The relation to the object therefore must include ‘the agreement of cognition with its object’, which is Kant'snominal definition of truth (A58/B82).Footnote ²²

When a judgment is objectively valid, the representations within it are related to ‘the original apperception and its necessary unity’ (B142); i.e. it is not accidental or haphazard that I combine representations in this manner, rather I combine them from a consciousness that they belong together necessarily, not just for me, but for any subject of judgment. Judgment thus involves a consciousness of itself as not just true, but non-accidentally true, i.e., as knowledge. When Kant says that false cognition ‘does not agree with the object to which it is related’ (A58/B83, my emphasis), this does not mean that a cognition relates to an object (or is objectively valid) insofar as it is false, but that it relates to an object insofar as it is true: ‘in every erroneous judgment there must always lie something true’ (JL 9:54). For instance, the false judgment that the table is brown may contain the truth that the object is a table, and thus may still contain relation to an object (objective validity).Footnote ²³

Some interpreters have rejected this interpretation of ‘objective validity’, since Kant says that all judgments have objective validity (B142); it would thus have the absurd consequence that all judgments are true.Footnote ²⁴ However, it should come as no surprise that the analytic of transcendental logic (‘analytic of truth’) considers all judgments to be true, if we read it as taking a first-person standpoint on judgment. Within the self-consciousness of an act of judging, as an act of the capacity to know and thus to judge truly, I cannot think of my judgment as false or even as possibly false. For to judge is to make a claim about the way things are; it is to think of one'sjudgment as true.Footnote ²⁵ I cannot judge <S is P> and, in that same act, think that <S is P is false> or even <S is P may be false>. It is only when I step back and consider whether I should make a judgment, or when I reflect on how I have judged in the past, and thus take an external perspective on judging, that I can think of a judgment as possibly false.Footnote ²⁶

Indeed, the reason Kant takes this first-person standpoint on judgment is that there is no external or sideways-on perspective on the truth of cognition at all: this is what Kant suggests by identifying the objective validity of a cognition with ‘objective unity of the apperception of the concepts contained therein’ (my emphasis; B140f.). Agreement with the object is not a relation that acts of judging bear to an external object, a relation that can somehow be viewed from outside of apperceptive acts of judging: for ‘I can compare the object with my cognition […] only by cognizing it’ (JL 9:50; cf. A57-58/B82-83). My judgments of the object can only be corrected by other judgments of it. The relation of agreement with the object is thus internal to the relation of acts of judging (cognizing) amongst themselves, and so is internal to the apperception or self-consciousness of such acts.Footnote ²⁷

There are two ways to read this internality: either truth is internal to apperceptive acts of judging because the primary bearers of truth are the contents of these acts, or because the primary bearers of truth are the acts of judging themselves. Along the lines of the first interpretation, John McDowell has suggested that for Kant, as for Wittgenstein, truth is internal to the act of judging because when I judge truly, my mind does not stop anywhere short of the world. What I judge – the content of my judgment – is identical with what is the case. Thus, there is ‘no gap between thought, as such, and the world’, understood as ‘everything that is the case’, and hence no need for an external relation of correspondence between what is inside of my judgment (its content) and an object external to it (McDowell Reference McDowell1994, 27). Rather, there is an identity of what I judge and what is the case in the world.Footnote ²⁸ Although this eliminates the ‘sideways-on’ conception of truth as an external relation between contents inside the mind and objects outside of it, it still retains a distinction between the act of judging (force) and the content judged. The truth-bearers, on McDowell'sreading, are the contents of judging, not the acts of judging them. Acts of judging can be said to be true in the sense of correct only insofar as the contents of judgments are true, i.e., are identical with states of affairs. This is in line with transparency views of transcendental apperception, since it is by focusing on something distinct from acts of the mind – namely on their true contents – that I become conscious of these acts as my own.

However, there is scant textual evidence that Kant, like his Fregean successors, distinguishes the act of judging from the content judged.Footnote ²⁹ Moreover, when Kant says that objective validity is expressed by the ‘copula is’ in a judgment, this means that it is expressed by an act of judging (B142). For unlike the Fregean conception of judging as an act external to the content judged, Kant views the act of judging as an act of synthesis of representations internal to what is judged – precisely that act of synthesis that is logically expressed by the copula ‘is’. The primary truth-bearers are acts of judging (of synthesis), not act-independent contents of judgment, since truth in the primary sense is objective validity, and it is the act of judging (internal to what is judged) that is true in the sense of valid or correct.

To be conscious of the truth of my judgment thus is not to direct one'smind towards an act-independent fact in the world, rather it is to be conscious of the act of combining representations in one necessary unity of consciousness, one judgment. A judgment <S is P> is true when the predicate <P> agrees with the object thought through the subject-concept <S> – i.e., when there is a necessary agreement among the representations combined within a judgment, in accordance with the logical and transcendental principles of possible experience. Agreement with the object is thus internal to agreement of the representations in a judgment amongst themselves, in the act of their synthesis.

Thus far we have focused on Kant'sclaim, from the first half of the B-deduction, that cognition's‘relation to an object’ consists in its objective validity. Contrary to interpretations that read ‘objective validity’ as intentionality or objective purport, I have argued that objective validity is the non-accidental truth expressed by the copula ‘is’ in judgment, and that consciousness of being (‘is’) in the sense of being true (veritative being) and consciousness of thinking (or judging, synthesis) are the same.Footnote ³⁰ Such acts of thinking (as objectively valid acts of synthesis) are only possible under conditions of a manifold given from elsewhere, but this does not entail that consciousness of the truth of the thought is consciousness of something given from elsewhere. To be conscious of truth is not to reach out beyond the act of thinking or judging to an independent object that it is true of, rather truth (objective validity) is internal to the act itself (i.e. to the copula). Thus, to be conscious that my cognition ‘relates to an object’ in the sense of being ‘objectively valid’ just is to be self-conscious in the act of judging.

Now, the I of <I think> in such acts is formal or empty, but not because it is nothing in contrast with something (the truths) thought about; rather, it is empty because it is consciousness of truth in general (or of an ‘object in general’), which is not actually, but is only potentially, all particular truths (about particular objects).Footnote ³¹ The formal concept <I think> is the logical concept of the functions of thinking in judging (functions of logical synthesis) that are the bearers of truth.Footnote ³² To relate this concept to objects is not to go outside it, but to fill it with transcendental and empirical content.Footnote ³³ For contentful knowledge of objects does not require directing our attention away from logical functions and towards an external object, but becoming conscious of these same logical functions in their role of determining a sensible manifold, i.e. in their role of making particular, empirical truths (experience), and the objects of these truths (objects of experience), possible (KrV A158/B197).

Moreover, consciousness of the objective unity of various representations through <I think> is an impersonal, universal, and merely formal act of self-consciousness (see Engstrom Reference Engstrom2013). It is not, as such, consciousness of a particular agent or thing that performs an act of combining, as this would restrict the truth (in the above sense) to what holds merely for me. As Kant emphasizes in the Paralogisms chapter, the <I think> expresses the formal logical unity of consciousness of subject and predicate concepts, i.e., the copula unifying the thought <S is P> – it does not add a substance or underlying subject to the thought itself (B406f.). The thought <S is P> and the thought <I think S is P> thus are the same thought; the latter does not bring attention to myself as an individual distinct from others. The <I think> merely expresses the logical, objective unity of the thought (objective synthetic unity of apperception), which is common to, or identical in, the elements in the thought, both in me, and in any other rational thinker (this sameness or identity Kant calls an ‘analytic unity’ of apperception). For I am conscious, in judging, that the judgment holds not just for me, but for any rational subject.Footnote ³⁴ The logical or transcendental ‘I’ thus is not an expression used to refer to a particular individual, but is the common ‘consciousness in general’ that is shared by all possible (identical) acts of knowing, and thus by all truths (B143).

Although transparency views are right to emphasize that I am conscious of my judgments in transcendental apperception in an impersonal manner, merely through consciousness of what is true, this does not mean that I am conscious of something outside of the act of judging itself – an act-independent content, for instance, or a mind-independent world-fact. Indeed, nothing at all – nothing, at least, that is anything ‘for me’ – is outside the transcendental I, understood as the ‘original-synthetic unity’ of all my representations in one consciousness (B132). The transcendental I is conscious only of itself and its own activity, and thus is non-transparent to any world-facts distinct from or external to itself and its activity.Footnote ³⁵

3. Empirical apperception

What the above elucidation of Kant'saccount shares with transparency views of self-consciousness is that in transcendental apperception of my thoughts and judgments, I am not conscious of any given character of myself, as the individual subject of thought.Footnote ³⁶ I am conscious of thinking <S is P> just in thinking S is P, without at all thinking about myself as the individual thinking it. Indeed, I can also become conscious of what others think (nameless others) by abstracting entirely from the differences between them and myself, and focusing only on what I understand them to say. The experience of disagreement or error may direct our attention at these empirical differences, but within a setting where we are jointly determining what to think and we refrain from errors, it does not matter who says what: reason (consciousness in general) is determining what it thinks. It is not the transcendental subject, but empirical subjects – both myself and others – that are transparent, since reason (the transcendental I) ‘sees through’ them to itself alone in becoming conscious of what it thinks.Footnote ³⁷

Contrary to logical and transcendental apperception, empirical apperception introduces an ‘inner’ realm of subjectivity distinct from the ‘outer’ realm of objects given to me in space (the form of ‘outer sense’). For Kant says that inner sense provides us with an ‘intuition of our self and our inner state’ (A33/B49; cf. A22/B37), while outer sense provides intuitions of outer objects. Whereas all being is immanent to the transcendental I, inner sense distinguishes my thoughts and perceptions, my being, from the being both of outer objects and of other subjects. As Plato and many classical philosophers noticed, the further we descend into our particular, empirical selves, the more distanced we become from what is. We should not cherish the false hope that we will establish contact with what truly is through our senses: truth is to be found ‘only in judgments’ (A293, B350).

Since we have identified being (what is) or truth with what is judgeable, we are now in a position to understand the division, within the concept of being (the object in general), between my being and the being of outer objects, as a division internal to judgment. Like all divisions in thought, this division is only possible under sensible conditions of a manifold given from elsewhere. But it is nevertheless an act of dividing (separating), an act of thinking; hence the members of the division are not external to that act. Kant calls the empirical I an ‘object’ of experience because it is an object of thought (empirical judgment), like any other. Thought does not encounter particular objects of thought and the distinctions among them but is itself the source of these distinctions, insofar as it thinks not only the objects but also their differences. That is, the <I think> specifies itself into the thoughts <I think x> and <I think y >. As an object of thought, I am contained in this way under the universal, formal concept <I think>, just like any other object of thought.

In what sense, then, is the transcendental I identical only with me? How is my empirical I, which is not identical with the being of the outer object which it thinks, identical with the transcendental I, which is identical with the being of what it thinks? To understand this we must distinguish two senses of identity or sameness. First, there is the sameness of the I with anything it thinks. Just as anything that falls under a concept F must be ‘homogeneous with’ or at least partially the same as that concept F (since ‘the concept must contain that which is represented in the object’), anything that is an object of <I think> – i.e., anything that is an object of thought at all – must contain the <I think> within it and thus be the same as it (A137/B176). Kant does not call this sameness with the <I think> homogeneity, but instead calls it an ‘analytic unity of apperception’, because the <I think> is not a genus common to a determinate sphere of objects, distinct from other genera. Rather, as we have seen, the <I think> is indeterminate or without limit in its extension: there is nothing outside of its realm (indeed, even a ‘table of nothing’ is inside its realm – cf. A292/B348). My empirical I, like all other empirical I'sand all other objects of thought, is in this sense the same as the transcendental I.Footnote ³⁸

But in the second sense of sameness or identity, only my empirical I is the same as the transcendental I. The key to understanding this identity is to see that my empirical I is not just thought by the transcendental I, but is also self-consciously affected by it. The empirical I becomes an object of thought through an act of self-affection – which is how the transcendental I situates itself within its own thought of an objective world. Whereas outer objects are given to me from elsewhere (in outer sense), only I am capable of being given to myself by myself (in inner sense). Rather than encountering myself as an already given particular existing in the world, I particularize myself, and, in inner sense, am able to become conscious of myself as an appearance in the world, in relation to others.

This approach can help us understand why Kant argues, in the Refutation of Idealism, that I do not have direct access to myself as an inner object that I encounter, but that I am conscious of myself in inner sense only through my active engagement with objects of outer experience. Very briefly, the argument proceeds as follows. I am conscious of my own representations only in their temporally determined relations to one another. But according to the First Analogy, ‘all determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception’ – that is, it presupposes a substance (B275). This abiding substance cannot be ‘something in me’, since Kant shares Hume'sinsight (against the rationalists) that we do not experience ourselves as permanent in time; there is no intuition of ourselves as substances – everything in inner sense is ‘in constant flux’ (B291). Hence, the permanent substance underlying inner time-determinations must be an outer appearance: ‘the determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of actual things which I perceive outside of me’ (B275-6). I am temporally conscious of my own representations only by directing my attention outwards, at the objects of outer sense: ‘The consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me’ (B276).

Thus, although inner sense is a kind of self-affection, it does not involve being affected by myself qua outer object (qua something other).Footnote ³⁹ The objects of outer perception must be given to me, i.e. I must receive sensations or impressions from them by being affected by them, and there is no way to know that the object that affects me is the same as the subject affected (although the critical philosopher leaves this sameness an open possibility). As Wittgenstein suggests, although it makes sense to say, after a car crash: ‘Here is a limb, but is it mine?’, it does not make sense to say: ‘These are representations, but are they mine?’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein1958, 67f.). My access to my inner states is not like access to outer things, or to a body that just happens to be mine, but is first-personal self-awareness: I am aware of my representations qua non-accidentally mine – for instance, I’m aware of temporally extended acts of thinking as non-accidentally the same as the non-temporal, logical act of thinking.

Kant can acknowledge this first-personal character of empirical apperception because whereas sensations make up the materials of outer sense, ‘the representations of outer sense make up the proper material with which we occupy our mind’ (B67). That is, there aren’t any special materials of inner sense. It'snot that first, we are affected by the object in representations of outer sense, and then, in a separate act, we are affected again, now by the representations of these objects. In addition to outer sensations, there aren’t any inner sensations.Footnote ⁴⁰ I don’t need to receive impressions from my inner states (perceptions, thoughts, etc.) in order to be aware of them as such. I can become conscious of intuiting and perceiving simply by intuiting and perceiving. In the case of thought, I am empirically aware of my thoughts by thinking them, not by stepping back from them and observing myself think them.Footnote ⁴¹ And in perceiving a line, I am aware of perceiving it by ‘drawing it in thought’, not by stepping back and observing myself as I draw it.Footnote ⁴² It'sjust that these activities through which I am empirically self-aware are temporally extended, which is on Kant'sview the same as saying that they’re acts of self-affection.Footnote ⁴³

In order to make sense of temporally extended acts of the mind (‘motion [Bewegung]’ of the mind, kinesis: B155), Kant thinks that we need to think of these acts as performed under the condition of an object affecting me (or having affected me) in outer sense. Temporal relations cannot arise ex nihilo, or from logical relations alone; that is, time is not a form of mere spontaneity, but of receptivity: temporal intuition rests on affection by objects outside of me. Therefore, I am conscious of my inner states in inner sense only by directing my attention outwards, at objects of outer sense.

We are now in a position to ask whether the transparency of empirical apperception is Evansian or Sartrean. That is, in directing my attention at objects of outer sense, am I a particular spatio-temporal perspective on the object, distinct from other perspectives (Evansian), or is my empirical I entirely empty – am I nothing at all, not even a particular perspective alongside others (Sartrean)? Sartre says ‘all consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing. All that there is of intention in my actual consciousness is directed toward the outside’ (Sartre BN Reference Sartre and Barnes1956, 11). This seems to be precisely the case for temporal consciousness: it is always escaping itself, constantly going from one moment to the next, and from one object to the next. I can say of myself (originally) only that I am, but not that I am anything in particular (B157n.).

On a Sartrean approach to Kantian inner sense, empirical self-awareness would be an awareness of its own ‘emptiness’. But contrary to Sartre, we can now characterize this emptiness (or nothingness) as the emptiness of the empirical I and distinguish it from the emptiness of the transcendental I. Whereas the transcendental I is the emptiness of ‘consciousness in general’ that remains within itself, even in its acts of self-division and self-specification, the empirical I is the emptiness of temporal consciousness, which is constantly escaping itself. In transcendental apperception, I am not conscious of myself as distinct from others, or even from the objects of thought, whereas in empirical apperception I constantly distinguish myself (as existence) from anything that I am conscious of. Whereas the ‘nothing’ of transcendental apperception is the emptiness of universality, since the transcendental I can be shared by any thinker, the ‘nothing’ of empirical apperception is the emptiness of radical singularity, since the empirical I cannot be shared by any other thinker.Footnote ⁴⁴ Transcendental apperception is empty as the capacity to (spontaneously) determine any object, whereas empirical apperception is the emptiness of the passive capacity to be determined by any such acts of determination.

The Evansian approach to the transparency of empirical apperception, by contrast, would identify my empirical I with a particular, determined spatio-temporal perspective in the world. In an influential paper, Markos Valaris adopts this approach in his interpretation of Kantian inner sense: it provides us, he argues, with an awareness that ‘representations disclose a part of the objective world as seen from the subject'spoint of view’; and, since the subject ‘is aware of its own perspective on things, then by the same token, it is aware of itself as having a determinate location in the same space and time as the things it perceives’ (Valaris Reference Valaris2008, 6). The problem with this approach is that it is not clear why I should not be able to imagine others occupying the same spatio-temporal location or perspective that I occupy. Since I cannot imagine others sharing my empirical I, the empirical I cannot be simply identified with a spatio-temporal perspective. Rather, there must be an original Sartrean awareness of myself in inner sense as radically singular and irreplaceable, underlying my awareness of the perspective on the world that I occupy. This radically singular self-awareness is precisely the kind of self-awareness that original consciousness of my existence in time provides: for to be aware of myself as existing in time is not ipso facto to be aware of the shareable, particular position in the objective time-order that I occupy. The empirical I is originally aware of itself as having no position, but as constantly fleeing any position, as time itself does. My being in time escapes all objectification.Footnote ⁴⁵

The Sartrean approach to the transparency of the empirical I is suggested by some of Kant'sremarks about awareness of myself as existing. Kant says that the category of existence applies to outer objects, presumably because we can subsume them under this concept: we can think of them as particular things that exist. This requires a distinction between the existences (the objects) and the existence of these existences (the category). Outer objects are particulars that have being, implying a distinction between particular beings and their being.Footnote ⁴⁶ By contrast, when I am conscious of myself existing, I do not employ the category of existence (‘here existence is not yet a category’ B423n.). Presumably this is because I am not given to myself as a particular thing that can be subsumed under this concept. I am aware of existing, but not of being a particular thing that exists. All that I am, qua existence, is a realm of possibilities of what I can become; I am nothing determinate, not even a self-determining being, but am sheer determinability: ‘I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-active being, rather […] my existence always remains only sensibly determinable, i.e., determinable as the existence of an appearance’ (B158n.). We should thus say not that I am a thinking thing that exists, but that ‘I exist thinking’ (B420).Footnote ⁴⁷ My existence

I am conscious of my existence in indeterminate, temporal intuition in a way that precedes the application of the category of existence to outer objects. My existence is not that of an intentional object of thought, but it is the possibility of standing-out (ex-istere), or of the emergence in time of thinking itself.Footnote ⁴⁸ My existence is thus the openness (determinability) of being in time. One wants to know whether there is a thing – an object in the spatial order – that has this being (an object ‘posited outside this concept’), but one cannot know this at all, since one cannot know that the object given to me in outer sense is non-accidentally I (i.e. is non-accidentally identical with the existing act of thinking).

Thus, the ‘I’ of empirical apperception is not originally a referring expression used in self-ascriptions, because it does not refer to a given particular being, or even a particular perspective, in the world, but, like Sartre'snon-thetic I, is radically singular by distinguishing itself from all particulars. The transition from the universal I of <I think> to the radically singular I of indeterminate intuition in <I exist> is not the transition to a particular being encountered at a location in a spatio-temporal framework.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, it is the transition to an I that can be situated as a particular in the world, because I can, through syntheses of the imagination under concepts of the understanding, determine my existence in relation to other objects.Footnote ⁵⁰ As a determinate perspective in the objective spatio-temporal order, I am an object of thought (or cognition), not just an object of indeterminate empirical intuition. But since this self-determination is downstream of an originally indeterminate intuition of myself, the I that is determined is originally nothing – not even a particular position or perspective alongside others.Footnote ⁵¹ Like Aristotle says of the passive intellect, the empirical I is nothing at all before it thinks (Aristotle DA, 429a23).

In thinking, the empirical I becomes something, because its existence acquires determination (KrV B157-8n.). I become aware of my thoughts’ position in a temporal order by (myself) ordering them in time. The empirical I thus is not already, as an object of (indeterminate) empirical intuition, confined within an objective, spatio-temporal framework (it is not already at a temporal location, already something), as on an Evansian account of the self-conscious subject. Rather, the transcendental I determines its temporal position itself through syntheses of the imagination (syntheses of ordering in time), in accordance with the transcendental principles of objective thought in general. There are not two acts here, but one: the empirical I'sbeing-determined is the same activity as the transcendental I'sact of determination. In the same way, being kicked and kicking are not two acts, but a single one, seen either from the side of agency or from the side of the patient. But in the case of kicking, the agent who kicks is distinct from the patient who is being kicked (or they are, per accidens, the same). By contrast, the patient or ‘empirical I’ is nothing at all before it is determined. Hence, the identity of determining and being determined reveals the (non-accidental) identity of transcendental and empirical I’s.

4. Conclusion

On the reading I have developed, we are able to say that the transcendental I is the same as the empirical I, since it is the same act of thinking of which I am conscious non-temporally in transcendental apperception, and temporally in empirical apperception. This sameness can be expressed, not by saying that the empirical I can be subsumed as an already given particular under the universal, transcendental I, but by saying that the empirical I is the self-particularizing and self-concretizing universal I. I am originally not a being, but am thinking or being (truth) itself, insofar as it is capable of emerging in time. Transparency accounts of pure apperception, by contrast, conceive of the transcendental self as originally escaping itself, leaving itself behind, in its engagement with the world. They can only understand the empirical self to be one of the objects it encounters, and thus to be distinct from it.

Although it would exceed the limits of this paper to discuss this in more detail, I think this reading of the relation between transcendental and empirical apperception puts us in a better position to understand our community with other empirical subjects. For now we can say that consciousness in general is common to, or the same across, the first-person singular, the second person, and the third person (in the first sense of ‘sameness’ articulated above). Reason sees itself in the other, and at the level of pure apperception, when it grasps being in the sense of being-true, sees through the other. But it is also, in its descent into a spatio-temporal world, conscious of itself as dividing into a community of empirical subjects and as the ‘same as’ each of them (in the second sense of sameness distinguished above). Thus we can say not only that there is a plurality of first persons, but that there is a first-person plurality – not only a collection of I’s, but a we: for the division of consciousness in general into individual, singular consciousnesses is internal to the transcendental I. However, I cannot say more about this here: this is a difficult topic that will have to await further study.