self-consciousness, self-activity and the agency of the thinking subject

‘Since one's becoming human in the world is first and foremost ‘self-activity,’ the process of determining one's existence or in being oneself in every existence, and since, on the other hand, this self-being is only made possible by rendering objectivity passive as a being-with-others and for others, laboring upon objectivity is essentially burdensome.’
— Herbert Marcuse On the Philosophical Foundation of the Concept of Labor in Economics

Self-Consciousness, Self-Activity, and the Agency of the Thinking Subject

‘The consciousness of myself in the representation I is no intuition at all, but a merely intellectual representation of the self-activity of a thinking subject’ (Immanuel Kant The Critique of Pure Reason. (1781: B228).[FN 1]

Kant’s notion of ‘the self-activity of the thinking subject’ (Kant 1781: B228)— is an important concept in Kantian philosophy of mind and action, but unfortunately it has not been central in interpretation of Kant’s work. I argue that getting clear about self-activity can help resolve a twofold demand in Kant’s philosophy of mind and action, one interpretive demand and one philosophical demand. The interpretive demand is that Kant creates a bifurcation between the subject of theoretical reason (the thinker) and the subject of practical reason (the agent). The philosophical demand is that Kant’s account of self-consciousness and spontaneity [FN 2] needs an analysis that accounts for both of these central and related concepts.

The interpretive demand is that self-consciousness and spontaneity both play pivotal roles in Kant’s critical philosophy, specifically in the transcendental deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason. However, self-consciousness and spontaneity also play a role in Kant’s practical philosophy, especially since being a rational agent requires being a self-conscious and spontaneous being. However, Kant’s transition from the theoretical subject (the thinker) to practical subject (the agent) present us with a lacuna which makes it seem as if there are two Kantian selves. On the one hand, there is the noumenal self, which is unknown and unknowable, but which is active and whose experience is subject to the categories and the moral laws. On the other hand, there is the phenomenal self, which is passive and whose experience is subject to both the forms of space and time and to natural laws. Kant’s account of the theoretical subject can make it difficult to make sense of how a thinking subject can be a practical subject, since the thinker and the agent inhabit two independent realms. I call this the problem of the bifurcation of the subject. To employ a guiding metaphor, my resolution of this problem attempts to straddle the theoretical/practical bifurcation by focusing on the centrality of the self-activity of the subject.

The philosophical demand is that contemporary philosophy of mind (whether Kantian or not) still awaits a general account of self-consciousness.[FN 3] Further, there has been a resurgence of interest in Kant’s notion of self-consciousness and spontaneity given the recent work of John McDowell (1994, 1994a, 1998). To address the philosophical demand, I argue that self-activity is a pure practical activity that is hypothesized to account for self-consciousness and spontaneity. In order to provide an analysis of self-activity, I account for the agency implicit in the concept in four ways (neither exhaustive nor exclusive): the act-object model: self-consciousness is a spontaneous act; the action model: self-consciousness is an intentional action; the activated capacity model: self-consciousness is an innate concept of self that is activated; the practical activity model: self-consciousness is a type of practical activity. It is suggested that self-activity is a constructive process that constitutes oneself as a subject; self-consciousness and spontaneity are active faculties of synthesizing one’s own representations.

Once I have addressed the interpretative and philosophical demands, I consider two contemporary positions on the relation between self-consciousness and agency: on the one hand, McDowell’s position on self-consciousness, spontaneity and agency, viz., that agency is constitutive of self-consciousness and the self (1994a: Ch. 5; 1998: 141) and on the other hand, Galen Strawson’s position on self-consciousness, spontaneity and agency, viz., that agency is not (entirely) relevant to elucidating self-consciousness and the self (1999: 492–3). I mediate between McDowell and Strawson by focusing on the notion of self-activity.

Before I go any further, I provide some background concerning self-consciousness, spontaneity, and self-activity.

Self-consciousness is usually understood in terms of ‘I’-thoughts. We are not interested in all thoughts, actions or perceptions that an individual might entertain concerning himself, but instead only ‘I’-thoughts— self-conscious thoughts, actions or perceptions. For instance, Oedipus was thinking about himself when he thought that the Slayer of Laius should be killed, but not thinking about himself as himself, or thinking about himself self-consciously, for Oedipus might not realize that he himself was the slayer of Laius.[FN 4] If he were to hold a self-conscious attitude towards himself, then he might think, act and perceive in different ways, namely self-consciously. Self-consciousness is being aware of oneself as oneself through a reflexive mode of presentation.

In Kant’s work, spontaneity may be construed to mean any of the following: (1) if aligned with the understanding, spontaneity is a theoretical concept for thoughts’ active (as opposed to passive) contribution in experience (A51/B75; A68/B93; A126; B130; B132; B150); (2) where aligned with the productive synthesis of the imagination, spontaneity is an active and constructive capacity that generates and aligns representations (B152); (3) where aligned with freedom, spontaneity is robust thought-willing that is tied to the freedom of the will or autonomy (Allison (2004) and Pippin (1987)); (4) where aligned with the reason as a faculty, it means the rational necessitation of thinking (i.e., not being constrained by external empirical factors but by the principles of reason alone).

What exactly is self-activity? Self-activity is a constructive process that is governed by rules or principles of synthesis. Kant suggests, ‘we can represent nothing as combined in the object without having previously combined it ourselves, and that among all representations combination is the only one that is not given through objects but can be executed only by the subject itself, since it is an act of its self-activity’ (B130). Self-activity is a function (as opposed to an affection) that begins with a definite input, e.g., an already synthesized proposition, enacts a procedure, and produces an output.
We might provide the rules or principles that govern the process of self-activity, which might be called self-synthesis. The input rule governs self-synthesis by the following principle: In order for self-activity to occur, the input must be a synthesized representation, a unitary representation— the object— which is a proposition, a fact or state of affairs (which suggests that Kant’s three-fold synthesis is already in operation). The procedural rule governs self-synthesis by the following principle: In order for self-synthesis to occur, the procedure must be a synthesizing activity, which involves the distinguishing and relating of the subject to the proposition, such that it determines ‘I think that P.’ In this sense, Kant’s I-think is the process of distinguishing and relating the subject’s thought that P to the subject and distinguishing and relating the subject to the subject’s thought that P. The output rule governs self-synthesis by the following principle: In order for self-synthesis to occur, the output must represent the experience as the subject’s own, such that ‘P’ is an experience for the subject. ‘I think that P’ determines that ‘P’ appears as the subject’s own experience.[FN 5]

We now turn to the problem of the bifurcation of the subject. I will discuss self-consciousness in terms of the I-think. The key text that I will consider is in the following: ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing to me’ (B131-2).[FN 6] One way to approach the problem of the bifurcation of the subject, is to inquire into the logical status of the I-think proposition and ask whether it is analytic or synthetic, and then show how the bifurcation problem makes the argument for the I-think proposition difficult.

If the proposition ‘In order for a representation to be mine, then the I-think must be able to accompany it’ is analytic, then this is because the concept my representation includes the predicate I can think it. That I can think a proposition, therefore, derives from or is explicated from its being a representation that is mine. But, this leaves unexplained what makes it possible that I can think a proposition. And, if the principle were merely analytic, then its truth would be trivial and inconsequential. Thus, the I-think principle is synthetic and depends upon a synthetic activity (A79/B105), which I am suggesting is accounted for in terms of the procedural rule of self-activity. The possibility that I can think a proposition requires that the subject synthesize its thinking with the proposition.

So, if I am right that the synthetic formulation of the principle is prior, then Kant needs to argue that there is a theoretical requirement that we posit or postulate the subject of self-activity. If positing or postulating self-activity as a synthetic activity is what makes self-consciousness possible, what is Kant’s argument for this synthetic activity? The argument is a constructive argument from the I-think proposition in order for a representation to be mine, then the I-think must be able to accompany it to a conclusion about the consequent of that principle the I-think is able to accompany a representation because I posit or postulate the I-think as the self-activity of the thinking subject.

Now that I have made clear what Kant must argue, I want to show that the bifurcation problem of the Kantian subject makes this argument quite difficult for Kant. On the one hand, if the I-think is merely formal or theoretical, then we cannot construe the self-activity of the subject as a process that a material and practical subject undertakes, since a formal or theoretical subject is merely a diaphanous thinker, while a material and practical subject of self-activity needs to be understood in terms of being ‘a substantial presence in the world’ (McDowell (1994)). On the other hand, if the I-think is merely material, then we cannot construe the self-activity of the subject as anything but the upshot of a epiphenomenal process— something that merely happens to a subject— rather than something that a subject undertakes as an expression of its practical rational agency. The Kantian subject straddles this theoretical/practical bifurcation, awaiting a means to bridge the gap.

It might be suggested that if we provide an analysis of self-activity in terms of the basic Kantian taxonomy, then we can make sense of how self-activity resolves this bifurcation without bridging the gap. One place that may offer a theoretical resolution is where Kant suggests, ‘consciousness of itself (apperception) is the simple representation of the I, and if all of the manifold in the subject were given self-actively through that alone, then the inner intuition would be intellectual’ (my italicized emphasis). But, Kant argues that the I-think is not an in intuition, intellectual or empirical (B422-423). Further, he argues that neither is it represented intellectually (B406), however, that if it were represented, then it would be represented as an intellectual intuition.

I take this to suggest that self-activity is something that is posited or postulated to occur as a pure (i.e., non-empirical) practical activity— in more everyday language, self-activity is something that we cannot observe that we do. When we claim there is a process of self-activity, we are making a theoretical claim about a ground of self-consciousness— the consequent of which is empirical self-consciousness, something that we can and do observe. To drive this point home, it should be noticed that self-activity does not fit in the taxonomy of mental states in CPR (A320/B376). Instead, it is a special type of pure practical activity independent of Kant’s taxonomy of the mind.

Further, it should be noticed that the dispositional couching of the I-think— that it ‘must be able to accompany’ as a dispositional addition to the categories— provides evidence for the self-activity interpretation. If self-activity is a constructive process, a skill or ability, then rather than being accounted for in representational terms, it is accounted for in dispositional terms. Self-activity is not something that is thought about, but rather something that is an activity; it is not a descriptive representation, but instead a procedural representation. And, as such an activity, the Kantian subject would exist as a subject by engaging in the self-activity of the thinking subject, what Fichte later called the self-positing of the subject. This suggests that the logical subject of the I-think is an existential category, not a conceptual or intuitional category. But, assuming that self-activity is something that we do, then what type of mental agency is implicit in this activity? I approach this question by considering 4 models of mental agency.

Suppose we take the example, ‘I am thinking about Meteora’ as the self-conscious representation in question. The interpretation of self-consciousness as self-activity suggests that being able to entertain that thought is something that a subject does— in order for a representation to be mine, I have to make it mine. And, the self-activity of the thinking subject is what is posited or postulated as what makes it mine.
The mental agency of self-consciousness might be understood in terms of an act-object model. The model of mental acts would suggest that when I entertain the thought ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ then the ‘I’ engages in a spontaneous act, such as a judgment that unites the ‘I think’, on the one hand, and the ‘thinking about Meteora,’ on the other hand. The act, then is a discrete performance that determines that a representation (in this case, a thought) is a self-conscious representation. The act itself distinguishes and relates the subject to the thought about Meteora, which is the object and thus allows for self-consciousness. Kant suggests this interpretation when he writes that combination or synthesis is ‘an act of the spontaneity of the power of representation’ (B130). But, this raises two problems for the act-object model, since the concept of an act implies an act of X in two ways.

First, an act of X implies that there are special subjects of mental acts, such as inner agents of thought. Descartes suggests something similar in the Fourth Meditation when we says that thoughts are acts or accidents of a thinking thing. Descartes suggests that we might avoid error by restraining the will, which offers a separable contribution to judgment than the content of thoughts. However, to assimilate Kant to Descartes on this account would be a grave mistake, since such an assimilation would ignore Kant’s injunctions in the Paralogisms against inferring a substantial subject— in this case, a subject of spontaneous acts— from the representation I-think.

Second, an act of X implies that there is an act of doing such and such, e.g., act of attending or focusing upon a mental object, e.g., ‘thinking about Meteora.’ But experiences are not always experienced as objects, unless they are introspected; and Kant’s I-think does not entail introspection, but rather is more basic or primitive. The act-object model entails that the awareness of one’s experiences as one’s own involve a subject which relates the subject— the synthesizer— to the object— the experiential input as a subjective object of attention and focus. However, the Kantian notion of experience does not allow for the idea that experiencings are the intentional objects of subjects of experience. Experiencings are not the objects of experiencers, but instead are the determinations of experiencers. Experience, for Kant, is not something that merely happens in us or to us, but instead, insofar as it is our own, it is something that we engage or enact— experience is something that we do.

The mental agency of self-consciousness might be understood in terms of a type of mental action. Peacocke (2007) suggests that self-consciousness should be construed as a type of mental action. When one thinks ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ then one is trying to think about oneself and one’s experiences. And, since trying is basic to action, self-consciousness should be understood in terms of a special type of mental action. Often, Peacocke suggests, one has a sense of one’s mental action, e.g., when one is trying to solve a logic problem.

The first objection to the action model is that it merely puts off the account of self-consciousness to an account of intentional description. In order to explain how the I-think operates in ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ it does not help to describe the I-think as requiring an independent specification of the intention to I-think. Self-consciousness cannot be understood under an intentional description of an action, because specifying the intention would also involve an I-think, e.g., ‘I am trying to self-consciously think about Meteora’; and thus appeal to intentions would presuppose self-consciousness, not elucidate it.

The second objection suggests that the action model misrepresents the phenomenology, because self-consciousness sometimes seems to merely happen, e.g., when I find myself thinking, ‘I never booked the hotel!’ In this case, I have not tried or intended to think that thought, but instead it merely strikes me as a self-conscious thought. It seems that Peacocke has taken the phenomenology of hard philosophical thinking and applied it to self-conscious thinking.[FN 7]

The mental agency of self-consciousness might be understood in terms of the activation of a mental capacity, i.e., an innate concept that enables one to become aware of one’s experiences as one’s own. This is sometimes how Kant’s I-think is interpreted, since the categories must be presupposed for experience is sometimes taken to suggest that the pure concepts are innate (in spite of his rejection of the innateness of concepts). If the I-think is affixed to the categories and is couched in dispositional terms (‘must be able to accompany’), then it is inferred, the I-think must be an innate capacity. According to the activated capacity model, when we consider ‘I am thinking about Meteora’, then that the I-think ‘must be able to accompany all of my representations’ suggests that I must have the mental resources— the innate concepts— of the I-think that enables me to entertain such self-conscious thoughts.

However, this inference harbors a confusion. That the I-think requires a dispositional analysis should not be taken to entail that the capacity for self-consciousness is an innate mental capacity. This argument confuses a logical precondition with a genetic precondition, but the latter does not necessarily follow from the former. The inquiry into what makes X possible (in this case, the logic of X or the necessary conditions of self-consciousness) is not always answered by way of the inquiry into what makes the development of X possible (in this case, the genesis of X or the enabling conditions of self-consciousness). It should, however, be granted that there are genetic preconditions of self-consciousness, but the point is that these cannot be assumed to be available as a means to articulate the structure of self-consciousness.

The best model for analyzing self-consciousness is the self-activity of the thinking subject. This view becomes explicit in Fichte’s account of self-positing— ‘the I posits itself, and it exists by virtue of this mere self-positing’ (1964 (I): 96). Self-positing is a type of intransitive self-consciousness— or consciousness of self which does not entail a particular object— that presupposes nothing but a type of activity, i.e., the activity of self-positing. The historical upshot of the interpretation of the I-think as self-activity is that Fichte’s notion of self-positing is already alive in the Kantian notion of self-activity.

This might be taken to suggest that we must be aware of such self-activity in order to posit or postulate it. However, we are not aware of self-activity, but instead, we are aware of the need or requirement of self-activity. Susan Hurley makes this claim when she suggests that Kant’s notion of self-consciousness is the ‘consciousness of the generic requirement of spontaneous synthesizing activity’ (1998: 65). We need to presuppose self-activity in order to account for how our experiences are our own.
I have suggested, then that self-consciousness qua the I-think is the spontaneous activity that accompanies representations which makes them one’s own. In experience one becomes a subject of experience by engaging in self-activity, which involves the practical activity of self-positing oneself as a thinking subject. Such self-activity is neither a static event in a time-series (an act), nor a trying or intending (an action), nor an activation or triggering (an activated capacity), but instead, it is a synthetic procedure which is an activity.

This account of self-consciousness and spontaneity as a type of mental agency raises a further problem, one that has played out in a recent debate between John McDowell (1994a; 1994b; 1998) and Galen Strawson (2003). Instead of discussing their specific positions, I want to gesture towards two positions on spontaneity and illustrate how self-activity can resolve the conflict between such positions.

On the one hand, there is the position that spontaneity is absolute and voluntary. As Pippin suggests, Kant argues for an ‘absolute spontaneity of apperception’(1987: 466), in which the self-active agent of thought is a transcendental and noumenal being whose determinations— whether theoretical, practical and aesthetic— are not relative to any constraint. Further, as McDowell suggests, ‘judging, making up our minds what to think, is something for which we are, in principle responsible— something we freely do, as opposed to something that merely happens in our lives’ (1998: 434). An absolutist/voluntarist about spontaneity would suggest that the judgment of an agent is an absolutely free and voluntary activity in which a subject engages.

On the other hand, there is the position that spontaneity is relative and involuntary. As McDowell suggests in a different context, ‘When Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity, that reflects his view of the relation between reason and freedom: rational necessitation is not just compatible with freedom but constitutive of it’ (1994a: 5), and in this sense spontaneity is relative to spontaneity-at-large, or what Sellarsians call the logical space of reasons— the realm of norm-governed linguistic activity. And, as Strawson (2003) argues, ‘most of our thoughts— our thought-contents— just happen...in this sense they are spontaneous or ‘instinctive’, as the Oxford English Dictionary has it, ‘involuntary, not due to conscious volition.’ A relativist/involuntarist about spontaneity would suggest that the judgment of an agent is a relative and involuntary happening to which a subject is largely passive.

These two positions place us in an oscillation between two poles of interpretation of spontaneity: on the one hand, the idea that spontaneity is absolute and voluntary and, on the other hand, the idea that spontaneity is relative and involuntary. However, self-activity provides a resolution because if self-consciousness and spontaneity are understood in terms of self-activity, then we can make clear how spontaneity is not absolute and not involuntary, while at the same time allowing for an interpretation of how spontaneity is relative, while nevertheless being voluntary. I provide here an outline of such a view.

If we conceive of self-activity as the mental agency exercised in self-consciousness— self-positing— and account for spontaneity in terms of self-activity, then we can resolve the oscillation between these two positions. The absolutist/voluntarist position makes the inference from spontaneity as a type of absolute agency, to the robust implications that some notions of agency entail. But, there is reason to think that Kant’s notion of spontaneity is not absolute. According to Kant, all practical agents are subject to the moral law, since this is what guides action in general. We act autonomously when we follow the moral law, or act from duty; and we act heteronomously when we do not. A similar analysis can be provided for spontaneity. If we do not act on the principle of practical reason, then we are heteronomous, and we would become what Kant calls an ‘it (the thing) which thinks’ (A346/B404). This might suggest that self-activity is an achievement of practical reason, and is therefore not absolute.[FN 8]

The key passage in Kant’s practical philosophy for understanding the relation between rational laws and freedom is found in the second critique (1788: 5). Transformed to illuminate spontaneity, it might have read: spontaneity is the ratio essendi of the laws of Thought; the laws of thinking are the ratio cognoscendi of spontaneity. We learn to become aware of ourselves through practical engagement within the form of life which initiates us into spontaneity-at-large, or the laws of thought as embodied in the logical space of reasons— the realm of norm-governed linguistic activity. It is only by being constrained by such laws of thought that we become aware of ourselves as relatively spontaneous thinkers.

It might be supposed that if our spontaneity is relative, then it therefore must also be involuntary. However, that our spontaneity is relative does not mean that, as Strawson suggests, our thought is merely born out of ‘our natural inner working’ (2003: 252).[FN 9] Simply because spontaneity is relative does not mean it is relative to the causes beyond our control, for this would make our self-consciousness and spontaneity a mere epiphenomenon. When I think ‘I am thinking about Meteora,’ it is not the upshot of a passive inner self, since such a view would suggest that self-conscious thought is generated in what McDowell calls ‘a specially conceived interior realm’ (1994a: 90).

So, if we can construe self-activity as a type of self-positing that is rationally constrained and relative to the space of reasons, then we do not have to be committed to absolutism about spontaneity. But, neither do we have to infer from the idea that spontaneity is relative, that it is therefore involuntary. The freedom of self-consciousness and spontaneity are ultimately a form of rational constraint— the rational constraint upon one’s self-activity.

I have argued that self-activity helps us to resolve the problem of the bifurcation of the Kantian subject by elucidating how self-consciousness and spontaneity are practical activities. I mediated the debate between the absolutist/voluntarist and relativist/involuntarist conceptions of spontaneity. I argued that agency of the thinking subject— the self-activity of the thinking subject— is a pure practical activity of positing or postulating the subject in the world.

FOOTNOTES
[FN 1:] I use the Guyer/Wood translation (1998) of the Critique of Pure Reason. When quoting Kant I use the original publication date and refer to the section with the academy edition numbers.
[FN 2:] Spontaneity is used sometimes to translate Spontaneität; sometimes, Selbsttätigkeit; and other times, von Selbst. Sometimes Kant’s passages suggest that spontaneity means the free willing of actions, and sometimes a more relative spontaneity, i.e., as defined in the OED as ‘occurring without external cause or stimulus.’
[FN 3:] Uriah Kriegel (2008) suggests this in a recent encyclopedia article.
[FN 4:] Cf. Gareth Evans (1982: Ch. 7). For other elucidations of self-consciousness in terms of a reflexive mode of presentation see Casteneda (1999), and Perry (1979).
[FN 5:] Saying ‘appears’ might suggest that the I-think is understood by reflection in inner sense. However, the inner sense hypothesis is misguided because, as Sellars suggests, we gain the I-think not ‘by reflecting on the self as object, but by reflecting on its conceptual activities’ (1971: 11§20), i.e., the central activity of which is self-activity.
[FN 6:] There are other quotes that illuminate Kant’s notions of apperception, the I-think and self-consciousness, but this quote is usually taken to be central to Kant’s account, and I follow this trend. Other central quotes include B138 (the identity version of the I-think) and B422-3 (the I-think footnote).
[FN 7:] From the fact that we do not seem to be intending or trying to self-consciously think should not be taken to suggest that mental action is not involved, but it does rule out a premise that appeals to the sense that we are intending or trying which plays a role in an argument that self-consciousness is a type of mental action.
[FN 8:] It could also be argued that if Kant had a notion of absolute spontaneity in the First Critique, then the problem of making reason practical in the Groundwork and Second Critique would have already been solved.
[FN 9:] Patricia Kitcher (1990: 253) also suggests that Kant’s notion of spontaneity is best understood as relative spontaneity in this way, i.e., that its being relative is its being relative to the context of the mind.


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