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Kant
Kant had a very singular understanding of the human being. We may only think of ourselves through the categories, and ourselves as we are independently of the categories are irremedially beyond thought. Nevertheless, because he failed to keep silent of that which he thought one could not speak, his notion of the noumenal self spawned a great slew of writing which identified his 'noumenal' self with something called the 'will' and proceeded to make this the central concern of their thought: Fichte, Schelling, Schiller, Schopenhaur and Hegel to begin with, and then the writers of mainstream 19th Century European thought: Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Nietsche, Marx.
If we (wisely) remain reluctant to talk of Kant's 'noumenal self', we can nevertheless identify the terms in which he considered the human being was to be thought of. For if we are to think of the human being, it is the phenomenal self we are to think of, and from the arguments about thought which constitute the bulk of the first Critique give us those terms. Note first that they are arguments clearly premised on the tenet that the phenomenal human being is essentially a thinker. Kant thought we constructed a world beyond thought, indeed that we had to think of ourselves as belonging to such if we were to recognise any of our experience as ours (and thus to have anything that could be counted as experience at all): but agreed with the Modern sceptical insight that we had no grounds at all for thinking that such a world existed. What does exist however is the thinking of the phenomenal self. That is to say, we have to think of the phenomenal self as essentially a mind. ____________ What is it for Kant that makes experience possible? What is it that subsumes intuitions under concepts? The answer is the mind - faculties of the mind. The sensibility gives 'objects' to us and the understanding makes them thinkable. (Strawson, BoS, p.48). How are we to think of these faculties of the mind? Kant seems to to think of them as quasi-structural. They belong to the 'cognitive constitution' of the mind. (Strawson, BoS, p.15) (It is on this question that Strawson prefers an 'austere' alternative: that Kant's thesis is most fruitfully to be understood as a claim about what concepts presuppose in the the way of other concepts. The Kantian Strawson wishes to avoid the project of studying the mind's 'cognitive constitution', while admitting that this is a project to which Kant himself is inextricably committed (Strawson, BoS, p.15,16).) Strawson is here urging that the aspect of Kant's thought which anchors him in the 18th Century be disregarded, namely his structural view of the mind. 'Cognition' has a 'constitution', the mind comprises a number of 'faculties'. But what is it about this way of thinking (constitution, faculties) which commits Kant to structure? Strawson explains it as follows: "It is a commonplace of casual, and of scientific, observation, that the character of our experience, the way things appear to us, is partly determined by our human constitution, by the nature of our sense organs and nervous system. The workings of the human perceptual mechanism, the ways in which our experience is causally dependent on those workings, are matters for empirical, or scientific ... investigation." Kant was fully aware that his philosophical project was not a scientific one. Yet he conceived of it 'on some kind of strained analogy' with the latter. (Strawson, BoS, p.15.)
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Created 02:01:05 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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