Keeping Our Selves Together: Kant's Metaphysics of Selves and Objects

My dissertation argues that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason contains a priori metaphysical views of the self and of objects of experience, and that these views are not confined to the realm of appearances. On the contrary, I contend that Kant upholds the commonsense belief that selves and objects underlie our experiences, even while he views their existence as dependent on experience. By seeing how Kant can coherently advance such a position, I conclude, we not only find several unexplored metaphysical proposals, but also find a way of maintaining some of our core everyday beliefs that is compatible with agnosticism about the fundamental nature of reality.

I begin with the topic of the self. Many interpreters claim that in the Critique Kant warns against claiming any a priori knowledge of the self's nature, especially knowledge of its identity across changes of state. I argue against such a reading in three steps. In the first step, I consider the passage that has most directly motivated it (the Third Paralogism) and argue that a close reading of the text actually motivates the opposite view. In the second step, I argue that Kant needs some a priori metaphysical doctrine of the self, since he relies on substantive claims about the self's identity and nature in the central argument of the Critique (the Transcendental Deduction).

With this background, the third step of the argument identifies Kant's positive view, which is at once epistemological and metaphysical. On that view, we know a priori that a self is constituted by whatever thing or things jointly produce a unified course of experience. The view's power lies in the fact that it provides us with knowledge of the basic structure of the self without requiring that we know what its ultimate metaphysical basis is (neurons? an immaterial soul? 11-dimensional strings?).

I reinforce this interpretive proposal by locating a structurally similar view in Kant's theory of the objects of experience. On this latter view, the components of an object are whatever thing or things produce the sensations involved in certain mutually coherent experiences. But it is only in virtue of these experiences that these things stand in a relation of composition. This view takes the composed object to be ontologically dependent on experiences, even while being constituted by some thing or things that exist independently of experience.

As a whole, the interpretation I defend allows us to see Kant as an idealist, while respecting his insistence that his position differs fundamentally from that of a phenomenalist like Berkeley. According to this version of idealism, selves and objects do have a mind-dependent existence, but not because they are constituted by representations. Rather, their mind-dependence is a result of the fact that the things from which they are composed only constitute objects or selves in virtue of their producing representations, just as the people who make up a film's production team only constitute a team in virtue of their creating the film.