Part of Kant’s explicit agenda in the Critique of Pure Reason is to criticize a traditional way of thinking about the substantial soul and its pretensions to immortality. But, equally, he wants to offer a satisfying account of how we are present to ourselves, of what we are aware of when are aware of ourselves as subjects. Ironically, given its context, Kant’s treatment of self-awareness has long been found, by critics friendly and unfriendly, to reflect a religious, and in particular, a Protestant bias. Thus, Ernst Troeltsch finds in Kant an “individualized and spiritualized Protestantism,” and places him in an Augustinian tradition according to which “the mind’s logical certainty of itself, which overcomes skepticism, is the most elementary expression of religion.” More recently, McDowell connects Kant’s views on self-awareness with “the rise of Protestant individualism”—that is, “the loss or devaluation of the idea that immersion in a tradition might be a respectable mode of access to the real. Instead it comes to seem incumbent on each individual thinker to check everything for herself.” Looking at Kant in this way allows us to align him with a familiar story about modernity and what Charles Taylor calls “modern inwardness,” and Massimo Rosati terms “the introspective conscience”1—a story beginning with Paul’s substitution of faith for law, internal states for external actions, continuing through Augustine’s stress on the inner ascent to God and Calvin’s on self-examination.
No doubt a number of distinct issues underlie these various characterizations. The one that most interests me is not so much a claim about Kant and Protestantism. Rather, it is the claim that Kant’s account of self-awareness enacts or at least encourages a false isolation of the mental from social phenomena. It is this assessment that leads Michalson to speak of “the Cartesian-Kantian model of private selfhood.”2 Thus, in this chapter I want to ask in what sense Kant’s “turn to the subject” leaves room for viewing the self as at the same time a social product. This question is particularly urgent for those of us who think religion is most usefully understood as a deeply social phenomenon and who are attracted to a broadly Kantian stance in epistemology. Is it, for example, open to Kant to take the content of much of what goes by “religious experience” as the outcome or even the byproduct of ritual processes? Let us, then, consider the charge of Protestant bias under the deeper rubric of a false isolation of the subjective from the social and institutional.
In brief: With the critics I find that Kant is committed to a sense of self divorced, as Seligman puts it, “from all communal referents.”3 It is indeed an “immunized subject”—one who needs support from neither God nor community.4 But I want to argue that it has no genealogical or other substantive connection with Protestantism or with religion of any kind, and none with the Enlightenment or even the West. It is not the sort of thing on which social theory could have any purchase. It is a self, to borrow a figure from Taylor, with no sources. The issue turns on a standard if disputed Kantian distinction: that between awareness of one’s self as a subject of thought and awareness of one’s self as an object among others. We know ourselves both as epistemological subjects and as subjects elements of whose experience are traceable to a variety of thoroughly material sources—social, historical, biological, and other. A successful deployment of this distinction would allow us to endorse large portions of Taylor’s story—that is, to take the rise of modern inwardness as in some sense a social precipitant. At the same time, it would require us to take the epistemological subject as a primary datum; that is, as unanalyzable in material terms.
Besides setting out a version of this distinction I want to defend it against two objections. First, on my reading, there is a sense in which Kant’s epistemological subject is unseen and not a further object in the world, and that may seem to reinstate something uncomfortably close to the soul—Kant’s original target. Second, there are powerful interpretations of Kant that make the epistemological subject itself eminently social. Thus, Brandom, standing in the Hegelian tradition, has lately argued that “reciprocal recognition” between agents standing in social relationships lies at the heart even of the unity of apperception. The first objection threatens to put our distinction to work on behalf of its intended target. The second threatens to erase it altogether.
I. James, the subjective, and the social
I have said that I am with the critics in taking Kant to be committed to a sense of self isolated from all material sources, including the social and institutional. As Kant sees it, this isolation is invited by the thought that the “I” in my recognition that “I think” has no empirical properties—that is stands only for such formal properties as the unity and continuity of my thinking. We will come in a moment to the details, but the underlying contention is that, if I cannot claim each of my inner states as mine they, as Kant puts it, “would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing to me” (B131–32)—and such an ability is indifferent to such properties as gender or political affiliation or point of national origin. But right away this makes for an obvious tension: the more Kant strips away empirical properties from the “I” the more he seems to invite a disembodied Cartesian ego. In Mind and World, McDowell understands Kant in just this way:
The subjective continuity he appeals to, as part of what it is for experience to bear on objective reality, cannot be equated with the continuing life of a perceiving animal. It shrinks . . . to the continuity of a mere point of view: something that need not have anything to do with a body.5
McDowell’s criticism has a venerable history. In The Varieties of Religious Experience James remarks that
the basis of all modern idealism is Kant’s doctrine of the Transcendental Ego of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the Consciousness “I think” must (potentially or actually) accompany all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the “I” in question had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental ego had no theological implications.6
Now James is often criticized for underplaying the social basis of religious experience—a narrower version of the criticism levied at Kant. As it does with Kant, this criticism sometimes appears as the accusation of a Protestant bias and sometimes as that of a residual Cartesianism. It will be useful to measure Kant’s prospects against James’s.
In Varieties, James relies heavily on introspection—his own and others’. This puts the spotlight on awareness; that is, on the ability to recognize and report on one’s own feelings, emotions, moods, attitudes, impulses, impressions, and thoughts. It is in this context that Rorty accuses James of sometimes using “experience” “in the bad old Lockean way—as a name for entities strutting their stuff on the stage of the Cartesian inner theater, entities that can be studied closely in order to determine what description fits them best.”7 My own feeling is that Rorty is reading James uncharitably—but that is not my present interest. I think what he says about James can advance our understanding of the underlying Kantian issues.
Rorty advocates what he calls a “pragmatic” approach; one which
reduces the experience of seeing something red, or of the presence of God, to the behavior that is induced by that experience. It asks about the effect on conduct of such experiences rather than the intrinsic, phenomenological character of the experiences themselves. It thinks of “experiential content” of a belief not as something that may or may not correspond to something real but rather as consisting entirely in the inferences that a particular linguistic community permits to be drawn from and to it.
In chapters one and two I portrayed the closing thought—that empirical concepts acquire determinate content from the inferential connections we make between them—as a central plank in Kant’s spatial theory of concepts. Rorty adds the claim that our ability to make these connections depends on our embeddedness in particular linguistic communities. We will shortly return to that thesis. But in the body of the quoted paragraph Rorty is apparently out to undermine something of fundamental importance to both James and Kant; namely, our ability to observe and report on a variety of our own mental states. Without this ability James is in some difficulty. Without it, he cannot help himself to the fruits of ordinary introspection. Throughout Varieties he proceeds on the assumption that, in attending to objects in the world, we sometimes become aware of the fact that we are attending to objects in the world.
It is not clear to me what is preventing Rorty from distinguishing between ordinary introspection and a Cartesian commitment to the independence of mind-stuff from the material world. Perhaps at this point his pragmatism is shading into behaviorism. In any case, even in what passes for simple “seeing” (that the light is red) I am making a judgment about how things are, and so I can become aware that I am looking at something red, or at least that I am looking at what appears to be something red (it seems to me that the light is red). As is evident in his discussion of the “full fact,” James is sensitive to much of this:
A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought of plus an attitude toward the object plus the sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts.8
Here we see James opposed to such views as Rorty’s which threaten to make awareness no more than what is attested to by the conditions of one’s stimulation and behavior. Rather, on this point (as on few others), James is with Kant in embracing what would count today as a mentalistic stance in epistemology, one on which awareness is “a determinate mental grasp of objects in the world.”9 Note that nothing in this picture has us inferring that x on the basis of “sense data” or “the given.” The point is simply that creatures such as ourselves can turn our attention from perceiving that x to the fact that we are, or seem to be, perceiving that x. A commitment to introspection and the awareness it requires neither implies nor invites a Cartesian mental substance or veil of ideas.
Nevertheless, Varieties does contain what looks very much like a Cartesian error. Immediately after his famous definition of religion—“the feelings, acts, and experiences of men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”—James continues, “Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastic organizations may grow.”10 The definition itself is often criticized as in effect defining away the social; Proudfoot writes that it reflects an “almost comical Protestant bias.”11 Our interest lies with the continuation, which positively invites such verdicts as Taylor’s: “What James can’t seem to accommodate is the phenomenon of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection.”12 I think that is exactly right. It is not enough to say that James underestimates the role of ritual and institutions in shaping the content of the “feelings, acts, and experiences” that interest him.13 Neither is it enough to say that he and Taylor are using “religion” in different senses. The problem, and what gives his discussion a Cartesian cast, is the kind of mistake he makes in describing the relationship between the contents of the mind and its social, ritual, and institutional context. In giving blanket explanatory priority to feelings, acts, and experiences he gives the impression that we are better acquainted with them than with the social phenomena they are said to produce.14 In this way James invites Rorty’s talk of the Cartesian inner theater.
But of course the feelings, acts, and experiences that interest James are saturated with the social world. Whether, disregarding Rorty’s advice, we adopt a Jamesean introspective stance, or whether we adopt the detached point of view of the social scientist and find that communal life somehow constitutes religious feeling, or that religious experience reflects the local mode of economic production, or that it is tied to a resurgence of charisma—adopting any such stance will require us to attribute some determinate content to the mental state that interests us. Only by so doing can we correctly identify the experience (as Proudfoot points out). But the last point Rorty makes in the passage quoted above is that this content is bestowed partly by “the inferences that a particular linguistic community permits.” That is, inner states are simply not available absent their connection to the social world.
I would like to see Rorty’s and Taylor’s criticisms of James as setting the problem for Kant: How is it possible to turn inward and leave behind the social world? Is there a sense of self which can be taken as a primary datum in the sense that its analysis need not appeal to social phenomena? Taylor puts this challenge in vivid terms. Against James’s definition of religion, he wants to
question the sense in which one can really have an individual experience. All experiences require some vocabulary, and these are inevitably in large part handed to us in the first place by our society, whatever transformations we may ring on them later. The ideas, the understanding with which we live our lives, shape directly what we could call religious experience; and these languages, these vocabularies, are never those simply of an individual.15
This is of course broadly in line with what Rorty says about James and what Proudfoot says about both James and Schleiermacher. If experience requires some vocabulary and if social transactions are somehow involved in its formation then the prospects for a sense of self “with no communal referents or with any sources” would seem remote.
What most comes through in the passage from Taylor is, to borrow a phrase from McDowell, the unboundedness of the conceptual. Taylor’s doubt about the possibility of “an individual experience” is of a piece with the conceptualist stance we reviewed in chapter four according to which our grasp of the world is exhausted by our conceptual capacities. This suggests that any adequate line of reply will have to be some form of non-conceptualism. That is, we will have to argue that our grasp of the self is not exhausted by our conceptual capacities. Whether James might reply to Taylor along these lines is difficult to say; in any event, it is not my question. (Taylor imagines James conceding that some conceptualization may be necessary, but that theology at least is not.16) I have placed Kant in the non-conceptualist ranks, but it is not clear how his non-conceptualism can be brought to bear on our present question. As I portrayed it in chapter four, it centers on receptivity—the form in which we are affected by objects—whereas here we are apparently wanting to construe an object, the self, in non-conceptual terms.
In the next section we will see that Kant’s non-conceptualism does, in fact, extend to what he says about my awareness of myself qua subject. We have already gathered several clues to the way forward. One lies in James’s portrayal of a “full fact,” which includes the “sense of a self to whom the attitude belongs”—where the suggestion may be that general concepts will somehow be inadequate to the task of describing the object in question. Another is Rorty’s willingness to reduce self-awareness to the conditions of one’s stimulation and behavior. By contrast, for James (at least in Varieties) and certainly for Kant awareness involves grasping or at least seeming to grasp objects in the world, and, at times, the recognition that we are grasping or seeming to grasp such objects. The question is whether and in what sense we can give a conceptual characterization of the one doing the grasping.
Like James, Kant starts with a psychological subject reflecting on the nature of his or her experience. But whereas James is engaged in empirical inquiry, helping himself along the way to data from a variety of introspective reports, Kant asks about the necessary conditions of any such reflection. Thus, in order for James to reap his introspective harvest or to perceive (and potentially to be aware that he is perceiving) objects outside him they must be one and all his, and that requires more than he admits in his brief remarks, above, on apperception. He apparently gives verbal assent to Kant’s claim that “the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations” (B132)—but for Kant this point carries a heavy commitment. It requires that the “I” in the “I think” must carry out the unifying activity. That is, it cannot be that I just find that all objects of experience are one and all mine; I must be responsible for making them one and all mine. The reason is that cognition of objects requires applying concepts—indeed, experience, as we have repeatedly seen, just is the activity of applying concepts to what strikes me in sensation. Thus, the new thought here is that in becoming aware of this or that mood or thought or object I must also recognize a more basic unifying activity, more basic in the sense that it makes possible the awareness of any particular bit of experience. Kant puts the point this way:
All empirical consciousness . . . has a necessary relation to a transcendental consciousness (preceding all particular experience), namely, the consciousness of myself, as original apperception. (A117)
Jamesean introspection, as a species of empirical consciousness, requires recognition of a higher-order transcendental unity.
We spent, in chapter three (section III), some time on the meaning of “transcendental”; let us turn again for a moment to that term. In chapter three the moral was that, even though regulative principles comprise a priori synthetic rules to which our empirical cognition must conform—even though they “make experience possible”—they have no claim to objective validity and so no claim to transcendental status. That is because, as Kant says, “Not every a priori cognition must be called transcendental but only that by means of which we cognize that and how certain representations (intuitions or concepts) are applied entirely a priori or are possible” (A56/B80). So, when Kant appeals in the above passage to “transcendental consciousness” he had better have the term on a very short leash. It had better mark a piece of a priori knowledge that itself makes possible further a priori knowledge. Arguably, it does. For example, the unity of consciousness requires no temporal gaps, and so no gaps between events in time. But the root notion of causation is just succession in time according to a rule. Thus, the Second Analogy purports to deliver a piece of a priori knowledge (that events are causally connected) made possible by a further piece of a priori knowledge (that consciousness must be unified).
The question of the separate existence of the soul, and so the topic of personal immortality, arises partly in the context of Kant’s discussion of the transcendental unity of apperception. Those arguing for a soul get a lot right. Thus, Kant says the Paralogisms chapter deals not so much with an error as with a Verwechslung, a misunderstanding. I must regard myself as a substance (B407), as simple (B419), and as a unity (B421). But of these three only the last turns out to be, in the way just discussed, not merely subjectively but objectively necessary: If I cannot unify all my representations into a whole then experience is not possible. The Verwechslung occurs over the question of existence—and here we return once again to the spatial theory of concepts. In chapters two and three we saw that no concept is meaningful absent some intuitive content. Thus, if “The subject exists as a simple substance” is meaningful it requires intuitive content, a contribution from sensation—which in the case at hand I do not have. When it comes to the self, as Kant puts it, “no object is given” (B422–23). But when he makes his own suggestion, he has seemed to many critics to move beyond a merely formal or epistemological requirement of unity. Thus, early in the Critique, Kant says of apperception that it is “consciousness of oneself” (B68). As Galen Strawson observes, it is hard to read such passages as having no “experiential aspect.”17 Kant says we have no intuition of the self, but then on what basis are we to use the term in a meaningful way?
One of the central issues is in what sense I may be said to be aware of my own existence. When Kant comes to criticize Descartes’s treatment of self-awareness, it is on the matter of self-affection that Kant lays the most stress:
The “I think” is, as already stated, an empirical proposition, and contains within itself the proposition “I exist”. But I cannot say “Everything which thinks, exists”. For in that case the property of thought would render all beings which possess it necessary beings. My existence cannot, therefore, be regarded as an inference from the proposition “I think”, as Descartes sought to contend . . . The “I think” expresses an indeterminate empirical proposition, i.e. perception (and thus shows that sensation, which as such belongs to sensibility, lies at the basis of this existential proposition). (B423)
No doubt Kant’s reading of Descartes’s cogito is tendentious. Descartes says explicitly that he neither intends nor does the argument require the syllogistic form18—but these issues need not detain us. The key point is Kant’s claim that the cogito is an empirical proposition, albeit of an indeterminate variety. Now, the notion of a determinate empirical proposition is familiar to us from our discussion throughout of the spatial theory of concepts. In the standard case, I apply a general term to what strikes me in sensation. I am affected and react, “apple.” The term is general in the sense that it can legitimately be applied elsewhere should I find myself in a similar position. That is, it can be applied to other apples. As we have seen, Kant emphasizes that, even when the object in question seems to be the only one of its kind, still, we cannot rule out finding another answering to the same description (A657/B685).
But in my own case, when I react to being affected by, let us say, the activity of my own thinking, I am in a peculiar position. Kant continues:
An indeterminate perception here signifies only something real that is given, given indeed to thought in general, and so not as appearance, nor as thing in itself (noumenon), but as something which actually exists, and which, in the proposition, “I think”, is denoted as such.
So the peculiarity is not in the kind of existence—there is no parallel distinction in Kant to Descartes’s res cogitans and res extensa. I “actually exist” in the same sense as any object of possible experience. The peculiarity lies in the account of perception adequate to characterize a judgment in which I am both subject and object. To start, Kant wants to rule out any account of perception which implicates some kind of noumenal existence; that is the point of his insistence that my existence is given in the same sense as it is in ordinary empirical judgment. In either context existence is forced on me, as he says, in sensation. But neither can my own existence be characterized as a standard-issue appearance—for then generality appears not as a requirement but as a threat. That is, I could not rule out one day legitimately reacting “mine” to the thinking of someone else. Put differently, I would then have to endorse the incoherent thought that I might one day encounter in experience other instances of my own thinking—“other” in the sense that I require the activity of thought in order to cognize what, by hypothesis, is supposed already to be mine. This, again, is why “I exist” expresses an indeterminate rather than a determinate empirical proposition. It resists the test of generality.
Why “resists” rather than “fails”? Kant’s thought seems to be that an exception to the generality requirement is unproblematic—is not a true exception—if we can see how it arises and if our account of what makes it non-standard fits with our broader account of empirical knowledge. I take it that Kant is trying to provide just this kind of diagnosis with the remark that my own existence is “given to thought in general.” If my existence were given to thought “in particular” I would be able to form a general concept of it, and I would be forced to embrace, as above, an incoherent prospect. Instead, the fact that my existence is given in sensation allows Kant to preserve his fundamental claim that sensation is required for the meaningful use of any empirical concept, even as he points out that, in this instance, we have to do with a concept whose legitimate conditions of application can be satisfied by at most one object.
Let us now return to McDowell’s charge that the “I” in the Paralogisms “need not have anything to do with a body.” On McDowell’s reading, Kant is driven to this result from a desire to avoid just the Cartesian dualism the chapter is supposed to overcome:
Kant has a reason for the thesis of the Paralogisms, that only a formal idea of persistence through time is available for the “I” in the “I think” that can “accompany all my representations”. He thinks anything else would commit him to a Cartesian conception of the ego.19
Obviously McDowell and I are taking different routes through the text. He takes no notice of what strikes me as central, namely Kant’s emphasis on receptivity, sensation, and intuition as, for example, at B423 and the existence claim they are evidently meant to support. As evidence for Kant’s inability to escape Descartes’s orbit McDowell cites Kant’s claim that keeping track of my own thinking “does not involve keeping track of a persisting thing”—a claim he attributes to Kant’s confining such keeping track to “within the flow of consciousness.”20 He then points out that such a view would make trouble for Kant, for a commitment to the flow of consciousness detached from the body would as much as reinstate the Cartesian ego or soul. But if, as I am urging, we take the “I think” to include an existence claim then we must look elsewhere to explain both the ease we have in keeping track of our existence through time and Kant’s explanation of it.
A more promising line of thought draws, once again, on the theory of concepts. Keeping track of a persisting thing requires applying and reapplying general concepts. But Kant says that, in being affected by my own thinking, we have to do with existence in the absence of general concepts. James gives elegant if metaphorical expression to the underlying phenomenology: “There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late.”21 If “catching” myself thinking requires applying and reapplying general concepts then James is right—reflection in this instance will always come too late. This is the truth behind McDowell’s remark that keeping track of my own existence requires “no effort,” and also behind G. H. Mead’s well-known comment that “I cannot turn around quick enough to catch myself.”22 As I am reading Kant, supporting all of these formulations is the fact that self-awareness comes without the question of (general) concept-application even arising. I am affected by my thinking; thus I know that I am in some inner state, but I am not in a position to take myself as a further object in the world.
Now to say that I cannot be aware of myself as a further object in the world may seem to implicate a non-phenomenal sense of self—perhaps something not so different from a soul, perhaps something in the vicinity of what James says in Varieties about the “more.” When James goes to distill the “common nucleus” behind “all the discrepancies of the creeds,” he finds it in the claim that we can “become conscious” that
the higher part [of ourselves] is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get onboard of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.23
Sympathetic critics have sometimes tried to make naturalistic sense of parts of this. For Proudfoot, the MORE “is the product of the desires, imaginations, and actions of men and women . . . The order consists of ideas, social practices and institutions, many of which may be unseen in the sense that we are not conscious of the ways in which they shape actions and the world.”24 Rorty, too, wants to construe the “wider self” in social terms, as the Deweyian “community of causes and consequences in which we, together with those not born, are enmeshed.”25 What Kant can offer James on the self is parallel to what he could offer Schleiermacher on experience; that is, a way to transcend a bare naturalism but one that stops short of dualistic theism. But for James this would of course be intolerably thin gruel. Awareness of myself as subject involves no new or in any way mysterious sense of existence, no promise or even intimation of salvation, and no sense of activity other than one’s own.
III. The social construction of apperception
What, then, of the charge with which we began this chapter—that Kant’s account of self-awareness falsely isolates our subjective lives from the social world? Brandom has recently turned this charge on its head by arguing that the unity of apperception itself is partly a social construction.
As Brandom sees it, Kant’s main advance over Descartes lies in his “normative characterization of the mental.”
For Descartes, the question was how to think about our grip on our concepts, thoughts, or ideas (Is it clear? Is it distinct?) For Kant the question is rather how to understand their grip on us: the conditions of the intelligibility of our being bound by conceptual norms.26
The central idea, first articulated in detail in Making It Explicit, is that, in using concepts to form judgments, we accept a certain kind of responsibility. Brandom asks us to notice how our use of concepts is governed by such terms as “oblige,” “preclude,” and “permit.” This general picture is familiar to us from chapter one. We saw that Doniger thinks we are obliged to include “caste” and “karma” as parts of the concept “Hinduism,” just as Lincoln precludes us from speaking of a religion of unconnected individuals. According to Tweed, while we are obliged to find suprahuman forces in all religions, presumably we are permitted to be flexible about their gender, but precluded from finding religions that have no bearing on joy and suffering. Furthermore, we saw that for each of them this is not just a matter of how we use our words. Rather, it is a matter of doing justice to the aspect of the world we are describing. And in chapter two we traced Kant’s attempts to give a nominal definition of religion—that is, one that contains only what we are obliged to include and none of what is merely permitted. Brandom emphasizes that the normative element in all of this is reflected in “our critical responsibility” to “integrate,” to “weed out,” to “amplify,” and to “justify” our way of proceeding. It is, I think, a persuasive reading of Kant’s handling of empirical concepts—consistent, as far as it goes, with my own portrayal in chapter one.
Now, as Brandom tells the story, it fell to Hegel to recognize that none of these normative commitments make sense apart from a social context.27 Earlier in this chapter we saw Rorty and (more informally) Taylor make the point that those among our mental states with some determinate content depend on the pattern of inferences licensed by the relevant linguistic community. (This claim formed the basis of their complaint against James’s subordination of social to psychological phenomena.) Other writers with theoretical commitments as disparate as Gadamer and Davidson have written of the social basis of meaning. But, to my knowledge, Brandom has done as much as anyone to tease out the way in which our interactions with other language users constrain the inferences available to us. Here again this strikes me as a natural extension of Kant’s treatment of empirical concepts.
But what sets Brandom’s treatment of Kant apart from others of which I am aware is his claim that the normative characterization of the mental is not confined to Kant’s account of empirical concepts and judgment, but that it extends all the way through his epistemology—that it applies to the unity of apperception itself. Brandom writes that “the responsibility one undertakes in judging”
is generically a kind of task responsibility: the responsibility to do something. Specifically, it is the responsibility to integrate the judgment into a unity of apperception. Synthesizing a unity of apperception is the activity that provides the background and the context in which episodes can have the significance of judgings. Engaging in that activity produces, sustains, and develops a synthetic unity of apperception: a self or subject. What must one do to be doing that? One must integrate new endorsements into the whole that comprises one’s previous endorsements.28
It appears that Brandom is giving the same fundamental treatment to the “task” of constructing a unity of apperception as he does to the task of giving content to our empirical concepts and judgments. This is because he takes both tasks to be bound by normative rules:
The subjective form of judgment is the “I think,” which, we are told, can accompany all our judgings, and so, in its pure formality, is the emptiest of all representations. Thought of in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment, it is the mark of who is responsible for the judgment. . . . It indicates the relation of a judging to the “original synthetic unity of apperception” to which it belongs.29
Let us put aside the question whether Brandom intends this portrayal of apperception in terms of the normative pragmatics of judgment as a reading of what Kant means to say in the Critique of Pure Reason. (He says it is one of Kant’s “big ideas,” but he later comments that, “The way I have told this bit of the story perhaps owes more to what Hegel makes of Kant’s thought than to Kant’s own understanding of it.”30) It is enough to bring out the contrast with the treatment I put forward in the previous section.
Brandom has the “I think” “accompany all our judgings.” Recall that James had it “accompany all our objects.” It would be out of place to make too much of James’s formulation; he is writing informally and for a general audience. But clearly Brandom and James are starting well downstream from Kant’s own point of entry. The “I think” cannot accompany all our judgings for the reason that, if a judgment is to be mine—if, to modify Brandom, it bears my “subjective form”—I must presuppose the unity of apperception and so cannot create it. Nor can the “I think” accompany all our objects for, to be an object for me, I must already have claimed it—but that too presupposes having been brought under the unity of apperception. Put in terms of Brandom’s normative pragmatics of judgment, we are always already too late to undertake its construction. Presumably this is why Kant says “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations” (B131–32). In the Stufenleiter passage Kant is clear that a repraesentatio is not a cognitive product, reserving that distinction for the term that stands immediately under it, perceptio, or “representation with consciousness” (A320/B276). The comparison with Schleiermacher may be helpful: In Kantian terms, when Schleiermacher tries to help himself to justification on the basis of mere sensation—that is, without incorporation under the unity of apperception—he errs on the side of sensibility. I am saying that Brandom and James err from the other direction, from the side of understanding. Brandom and James write as though we can help ourselves to judgment and objects as accompanied the unity of apperception—whereas in fact it makes no sense to ascribe to either one of these even this much independence.
If the unity of apperception must be presupposed in this way we may wonder whether we are in the realm of normativity at all or whether the conception of normativity at stake has been stretched to the breaking point.
One way to approach this question is to ask about the nature and possibility of success and failure.31 In Making It Explicit and in Reason in Philosophy, Brandom ties the notion of normativity directly to this issue:
Only insofar as regularities are brought about and sustained by effective assessments of propriety, in the form of responsive classifications of performances as correct or incorrect, are regularities taken to have specifically normative force. The possibility of incorrect, inappropriate, or mistaken performances—those that do not accord with the norm—is explicitly allowed for.
This does seem to capture an important part of what we mean when we say of a norm that it requires certain behavior. It is a norm to drive on the legally mandated side of the street. It is a norm to segregate the sexes at most orthodox synagogues.32 Here we know what it would be to classify a performance as correct or incorrect. Similarly, as we saw in chapter two, in putting forward his definition of religion Kant had to respect certain of the prevailing linguistic norms. Expressed in Brandomian terms, he had to respect certain of the determinate-content-bestowing logical and material inferences licensed by his linguistic community. Since in this case “respect” is more obviously a matter of degree, assessing success and failure will be harder than in the previous examples. But I think we can agree—as apparently his contemporaries did—that his usage of the German Religion did not represent so serious a departure from standard practice as to be a “mistaken performance.”
Can we make sense of failing to abide by the unity of consciousness? Stated in the form of a rule, the imperative would be: “Incorporate all your representations into a single consciousness.” Can we make sense of the idea of a failed or mistaken performance? On Kant’s view, as I understand it, if I do not incorporate a representation into a single consciousness I do not make a faulty judgment or cognize an in-some-way nonstandard object (recall that Brandom and James have the “I think” accompany all our judgings and objects, respectively). Rather, I do not judge or cognize at all. If I flout a dress code or drive on the wrong side of the street I am still dressed and still driving. If Kant departs so far from communal standards as to use “religion” as a term of art, still, he means something. But if a representation stands outside the unity of consciousness it is, as Kant says, nothing to me.
On this portrayal it appears we cannot extend Brandom’s normative characterization of the mental from Kant’s account of empirical concepts and judgment to the unity of apperception, for, as applied to it, we cannot understand the very idea of an incorrect, inappropriate, or mistaken performance.33
IV. Varieties of conformity today: social, religious, epistemic
In the last section I argued that Brandom does not take seriously enough the methodological advance over Descartes he finds in Kant. That is, he does not take seriously enough the grip our concepts have on us. We have all along been encountering examples of the kind of bindingness Kant tries to exhibit. In chapter one we saw that, for Doniger, to say of a Hindu that he or she is a member of no caste is not just odd or in some way non-standard. It is self-contradictory, a notion which, in chapter two, rests on the principle of non-contradiction, a rule the following of which makes thinking possible. In chapter three the objectivity of encompassing generalizations about such things as “world religions” turns out to depend on the notion of conformity to regulative principles (rules again) which principles lapse on pain of incoherence. In chapter four, what introduces a non-conceptual element into Kant’s epistemology—and what makes the conversation with Schleiermacher of interest—is the unavoidability of spatializing and temporizing (rule-following) behavior. And in the present chapter we have been asking whether the rule that requires a unity of apperception is too primitive to be understood in normative terms. In fact Kant’s claim is that all of these rules are too basic to be placed within the sphere of normativity—too basic in the sense that we cannot make sense of the idea of failing to observe them. To turn Brandom’s formulation back on itself, they are “conditions of the intelligibility of our being bound by conceptual norms.”
Let us now return once again to the question whether Kant’s account of self-awareness requires a false isolation of the subjective from the social. The key distinction is that between awareness of one’s self as a subject of thought (Kant’s “transcendental consciousness”) and awareness of one’s self as an object among others (“empirical consciousness”). The issue is whether we are now in a position to see in this distinction a natural division of labor. On the empirical side will fall all the events and objects capable of being claimed by me or by subjects like me; that is to say, all the events and objects in the full reach of space and time. At the same time, on the subjective side, we require a subject (actually or potentially) capable of so claiming. Applied to the case at hand, the empirical side will encompass the full range of social phenomena implicated in the study of religion—for example, Taylor on the development of “modern inwardness,” Rosati on Durkheim on the turn from collective ritual to the introspective conscience, and Seligman on the internalization of the cult under Calvin. At the same time, all these accounts must presuppose a subject able to claim each element of each story as his or hers.
Taylor’s use of Durkheim in A Secular Age makes an especially illuminating example. Taylor charts the gradual weakening of social bonds from “paleo” to “neo” to our own (mainly North Atlantic) “post-Durkheimian dispensation.” The paleo phase is marked by the identification of the unitary God with the unitary state, a church with a kingdom; Taylor cites medieval France. At such a time and place people felt “that they had to obey the command to abandon their own religious instincts, because these being at variance with orthodoxy must be heretical or at least inferior.” The neo phase preserves a link between political society and divine providence, but now—paradigmatically, says Taylor, in the early United States—citizens feel they must choose between denominations but are still able to identify with a single, divinely ordained state.
In the post-Durkheimian dispensation the bond between religion and society is finally severed:
In the post-Durkheimian age many people are uncomprehending in face [sic] of the demand to conform. Just as in the neo-Durkheimian world, joining a church you don’t believe in seems not just wrong, but absurd, contradictory, so in the post-Durkheimian age seems the idea of adhering to spirituality which doesn’t present itself as your path. . . . The injunction is, in the words of a speaker at a New Age festival: “Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self.”34
This is an artful deployment of Durkheim’s tracing of religious representation to social density. Taylor intends no connection whatever to Kant—but his tripartite division provides a convenient way to display the division of labor between conformity to social rules and to Kantian-style epistemic ones. I will comment briefly on each of the three phases.
1. The paleo-Durkheimian phase: Here people feel that they must “obey the command to abandon their own religious instincts”; they feel a “demand to conform.” For his part, Durkheim argues that the social forces at work here explain and replace the Kantian sense of necessity. (He was an early advocate of the Haugeland-Brandom slogan that “transcendental constitution is social institution.”) I have argued elsewhere that Durkheim is mistaken about this.35 But the underlying issue applies to any attempt, whether from Durkheim, Brandom or elsewhere, to construe epistemic rules in social terms. In order to experience something (a remark, a thought, a sentence) as a command one must already have incorporated it into the unity of consciousness. To think that one could be presented with a bit of “unincorporated” content was Brandom’s mistake. We know quite well what it would be to resist the paleo-Durkheimian “demand to conform”—as of course many people did resist. Not so the Kantian one.
2. The neo-Durkheimian phase: As Taylor has it, in the neo-Durkheimian phase, “joining a church you don’t believe in seems not just wrong . . . but contradictory.” Durkheim held that social forces underpin both morality and logic—that moral and logical transgressions are backed up, as above, by nothing more basic than social strictures36—so that, for him, the movement from wrong to contradictory occurs on a single scale. By contrast, and as we have seen, Kant holds that a self-contradictory representation, whether in the moral or the logical realm, cannot be thought at all. It is not eligible for inclusion under the unity of apperception. Put differently, it must be nothing to me. Here again is the Kantian segregation of the unity of apperception from social phenomena.
3. The post-Durkheimian phase: Here we reject the very prospect of conformity to social norms as illegitimate infringements on the “inner Self.” In this connection one thinks of Stendahl’s focus on Western Christianity’s preoccupation with “how God is working in the innermost individual soul”—or of Rosati’s emphasis on the Protestant “expulsion of ritual” as having removed “the mainstream frame of our experience.”37 We needn’t linger over what might be meant by such locutions as “inner Self” or “innermost individual soul.” Neither is so primitive as not to presuppose a subject capable of accepting or rejecting elements of his or her experience. With Rosati we may regret the loss of ritual cohesion in modern life, but the rules of ritual conformity are themselves framed by the requirement of integration into the unity of apperception—a requirement that cannot be construed in social terms.38
I have been writing, in the active voice, of subjects following a non-normative rule which requires incorporating representations under the unity of apperception. But this may seem to ignore the extent to which we are shaped by what happens to us. More than a century after Marx, Durkheim, and Weber we are used to viewing a wide range of human activity, including some religious activity, as undertaken for purely non-rational, causal reasons—as the effects of, say, the means of economic production or social density or a charismatic leader. Randall Collins reminds us that
In the Durkheimian tradition, the individual emerges by an apportioning out of collective energies and representations. When a particular human body walks away from a social encounter, he or she carries a residue of emotions and symbols, and what he or she does in those moments alone come from their interplay, whether reflecting backward in time, forward to future encounters, or into an inner space of thought, mind, or subjectivity.39
But the passive voice is quite consistent with the division of labor I am now sketching. Nothing in the requirement of the unity of consciousness implies that I must be conscious of all that happens to me. The requirement is rather that, if a representation is to be anything to me, it must be possible for the “I think” to accompany it. Probably some “residue” from every social encounter remains unaccompanied. That story, the story of the interplay between the elements of what happens to me in a social encounter, will play out at the empirical level. Those elements may push and pull me in ways that do not draw on the space of reasons—say, at a subliminal or neurological level. But none of this threatens the distinction between awareness of one’s self as a subject of thought and as an object among others. On the contrary, the recognition that I am pushed and pulled is impossible without it.
When we turn to the question of Protestant bias and the charge on which it rests—the false isolation of our inner lives from their social contexts—the same considerations support the same verdict. These stories, too, will play out at the level of empirical consciousness. This is not to minimize their importance. On the contrary, in order to take them seriously or at all we must presuppose a subject who can claim the details as his or hers. That in turn requires a subject whose thoughts are constrained by rules that resist construal in either normative or causal terms, that—Beck again—seem “to be suspended by nothing in heaven and supported by nothing on earth.” They are a priori in the strict Kantian sense of the term: absolutely independent of all experience. We may want to join Taylor in marking the rise of modern inwardness and in taking it, as I put it earlier, as in some sense a social precipitant. The point is at the same time to preserve a sense of self “realized,” as Seligman puts it, “beyond the rules and regulations that structure, order, and organize the division of labor itself. It is in fact a vision of radical autonomy that would seem to divorce the self from all communal referents.”40 Seligman offers this characterization of the self as a reductio—but in fact it makes possible all that matters or could matter to us.