Consciousness of Identity, the Concept of Judgment, and Personal Identity

In the Transcendental Deduction, in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, while discussing the question of the objective validity of the categories, Kant claims that the necessary possibility of accompanying all representations with the representation “I think” is the supreme condition of all objective cognition. He calls this self-consciousness the “transcendental unity of self-consciousness.” Kant distinguishes here between the analytic unity and the synthetic unity of self-consciousness. He claims that the former is possible only if one presupposes the latter, that is, only if one is conscious of the synthesis of a manifold of representations. Kant attributes the “identity” involved in the synthetic unity of self-consciousness to apperception. That is, the identity one is conscious of when one is conscious of the synthetic unity is the identity of apperception. In the chapters dealing with the Paralogisms of Pure Reason Kant explicitly distinguishes between the identity of apperception and the identity of the thinking individual.

 But why does Kant attribute the identity involved in the synthetic unity to apperception rather than to the thinking individual? How is this feature of his view connected to his claim that the consciousness of identity that pertains to the “I think” contains a synthesis of representations and is possible only through awareness of this synthesis? In this article I answer these questions. I show that an answer is possible if one recognizes that objective judgment is inherently conscious. 

It should first be noted that the conscious aspect of objective judgment has an independent status in Kant’s account of objective knowledge. In particular, the fact that judgment is necessarily conscious is not related to any property of the object of judgment. Second, judgment is a function of conceptual unity, and its being necessarily conscious is equivalent to the fact that it must involve consciousness of the unity. As many commentators have noted, consciousness of unity would not be possible if the judging subject were not conscious of her being the identical subject of all the unified representations. What has generally been overlooked, however, is that consciousness of identity is an internal feature of an act of judgment. There is a reciprocal conditioning relation between the consciousness of the identity of apperception and the consciousness of the synthetic unity that involves it. I clarify why this interpretation fits Kant’s claim that the principle of apperception is analytic, and why the locution “I think” in Kant’s critical philosophy expresses a concept that is the logical form of all judgment.

In the final part, I explain why the consciousness of self-identity associated with the “I think” is limited to real acts of judging. I point to the relevance of this constraint for the distinction Kant draws in the Third Paralogism between consciousness of my identity as a thinking subject and of myself as an individual whose identity is determined according to empirical criteria of identity.