Lecture: Kant

NCTU Graduate

IMMANUEL KANT

Life and Thought


Born in 1724 and died in 1804. His demise recorded in an excellent piece by Thomas DeQuincey entitled "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant" (which is a translation and enhancement of Ehregott Andreas's Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren publishe in 1804; republished in Immauel Kant, ein Lebensbild, ed. Alfons Hoffmann--Halle: Peter, 1902]) He lived through and admired the French revolution for its ideals. His life was uneventful and was so routine that his neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. His entire life was devoted to study and to teaching. He never married and never entered politics. After an early career of philosophical training he read Hume and it is said that then he awakened from his "dogmatic slumber." His goal as a thinker was to preserve the autonomy of morals from the threat posed by Newtonian determinism. The task was gigantic and when his long awaited magnum opus, Kritik der Reinen Vernuft [The Critique of Pure Reason or CPR, often referred to as “the first critique”], came out in 1781 no one understood it. Later, philosophers Fichte and Schelling would charge that even Kant himself got lost in it. He then wrote the Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysic to clarify the thinking in the first critique. 1790 saw the publication of the Kritik der Practishe Vernuft [Critique of Practical Reason or CPrR, the “second critique”] the book on morals. Between Reason and Morality (between theory and practice) however there was produced a gulf and, as a result, quite late in life he wrote the Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgment or CJ, the “third critique”] as the attempt to bridge the two realms of thought, and not unify them, importantly. Instead, theory and practice were to, are to, indeed should remain in a state of tension.

His importance cannot be any more underestimated than can Plato's. With the first critique a revolution is affected that is sometimes called his “Copernican revolution”: Thought would no longer conform well or badly to the real; the real would conform to thought. At the end of his life, in his last writings, he said that the “final end of all knowledge is to know oneself in the highest practical reason” [OP 255].

For Immanuel Kant, all human knowing is finite and constitutive. The "manifold of sensation" of David Hume is, for Kant, organized prior to experience. And in this organizing, the imagination plays a key role. In a way that still remains mysterious and that Kant himself described as "an art hidden in the soul" the imaginative and the conceptual combine, or work in harmony, to secure a object of knowledge by way of a schema-image. The Kantian object is a thing-that-appears and not the thing as it is in itself (in German ding-an-sich). This seems like the old Platonic problem of appearances and reality. But in Kant, the issue is efficiently resolved because the mind actually "makes" the thing appear-able and "makes" it experience-able. That is to say, in Kant the phenomenon acquires an autonomy; or, the phenomenon no longer refers to a reality.



Summary of the Transcendental Schema from The Critique of Pure Reason

The human knower does not create the being-to-be-known. That which is known is always objective in character, is outside the knower, and is not the knower. As finite, human knowing must begin in intuition, sensation, reception, affect, passivity. This is what Kant inherits from the empiricists. The "passive" side of knowing is ontologically anterior and primary. But for Kant, as is well known, receptivity is not sufficient for knowledge. The immediate presentation of a singular must be determined to be such or such. As determined, the immediately intuited is then re-presented as what it is in general, in light of universality. Here he joins empiricism with both classical philosophy and rationality. This side of knowing is thought. It is active and "spontaneous." From the raw data of intuition the contents of universality are re-contituted and re-presented. Thought, in general is a presentation (in concepts) of a presentation (an intuition), and it is even more finite than intuition since it is ontologically dependent on "raw data." On the other hand, thought is "more" presentative than intuition since it provides a unity that holds good for more than one particular. It can go beyond, or transcend, the given reality, as in Humean human nature. Human knowing is the intimacy of these profoundly diverse slopes: passive and multiple intuitions and active and unifying thought. Kant's task is to make clear how they can possibly be synthesized. We notice straight-away that, although diverse, the two sides have something in common: each presents, and we know that in Kant the power of presentation in general belongs to the transcendental imagination as it functions in the mystery of schematizing.

But, what can be known? Kant's answer is famous. We know only the being-that-appears, an ob-ject ob-posed [Gegenstand] to a knower. We know appearances and, crucially, an appearance "can be nothing by itself, outside our mode of representation [CPR 269]" But knowing is not ontically creative. We do not create that which we know. There is an essential distance between the knower and the known because the finite knower does not create the being-to-be-known. A human knower is not God. Distinct from finite knowing, an infinite knower, God, does not know objects at all! God knows the Ent-stand, the e-ject (i.e., the thing insofar as it takes its origin in God). God does not know things-that-appear (i.e., objects) but things as they are, as such, in-themselves [an sich]. Infinite knowing is therefore not so much better than human knowing as it is profoundly different because no objects are even given to God to be known. To put it differently, unlike the finite knower, God does not have to anticipate a being-to-be-known since God is its origin. Finite knowing, in contrast, is essentially temporal, anticipatory, ahead-of-itself. The Ent-stand is profoundly inaccessible to finite knowing. If the Ent-stand is "behind" appearances this does not mean that it dimly, continually, obliquely, and distortedly faces the inferior human knower. It is not knowable at all. The Ent-stand is simply not an object and hence not available to be known. Importantly, however, the Ent-stand is the same thing as the thing that appears. It is the same thing as the object: the thing-in-itself is not another object but another aspect (respectus) of representation with regard to the same ens (or, ontological item). The Ent-stand is the same essent as the object. Insofar as the Ent-stand stands out from God, it appears as ob-posed to the finite knower and it appears as such formally: that is, in conformity with the categories of thought. God does not know anything except insofar as he creates everything; man is not ontologically creative but is instead constitutive of formalities called “objects” or phenomena. Indeed, insofar as the thing appears at all, it insists upon an essential non-knowledge. For, the Ent-stand is altogether (and not just partially) inaccessible to human knowing. Our relation, human relation, to the Ent-stand is not a relation of knowledge at all. Finite knowing—beginning from finitude, intuition, receptivity, passivity—does not give us access to things-in-themselves. Nevertheless, that which is known (the object, the thing that appears) is nothing other than the Ent-stand. Kant, of course, in the First Critique, is concerned less with beings per se than with our way of knowing them as objects. Human knowing is always a ‘knowing-as’. He concerns himself with investigating and defining the a priori structures by which and through which that which stands out from God appears and is accessible to human knowing as objective and ob-posed. Such knowing would then simultaneously be a barring of access to the Ent-stand. He is not so much concerned with mutual presence and self-presence, or, ontic comportment (the presence of objects to subjects) as he is interested in that anterior structuring that makes the comportment possible because, as he says, "[i]n the world of sense, however deeply we enquire into its objects, we have to do with nothing but appearances [CPR 84]." Humean senstion and Cartesian senses (which only deceive or are obscure) are in fact, after Kant, apparitions, phenomena—they are not deceptive at all because they are human things, purely formal constructions.

By Kant's account then, human knowing will constitute only that which makes beings into objects and allows us experience them such that that which so constitutes objects will also constitute experience. Our encounter with beings will not create beings nor seize them as God does and know them as they are in-themselves. Anterior (a priori) access is a "fashioning," a "making," an "instituting" of things-as-objects. Anterior contact will combine the two sides of knowing, intuition and thought, into a unity. And since, for Kant, this is a "power" of the knower, it will come from the knower and thus must simultaneously fashion, make, institute and experience itself. In short, that which ob-jectifies also sub-jectifies. Neither intuition alone nor thought alone can do this and claim to be the "foundation." Each, taken independently, is always prior to any experience (i.e., is pure).

Prior to all experience, the immediate, receptive encounter with a singular results in two types of presentations: space and time. Space and time are not categories and are not are not objects but are instead the conditions of any possible experience of anything at all. They are not explicitly apprehended. Clearly, therefore, that which pure intuition intuits must come from intuition itself. Non-objects and non-categories, space and time (outer and inner) are not knowable. Intuiting them, intuition is hence not affected by any object. It is affected by that which it gives to itself. Something is intuited, but not an object. It is not nothing at all, but neither is it anything thematic. Martin Heidegger, without whose help I simply cannot understand Kant (and vice versa) says simply that in its pure passivity, intuition intuits itself. That is, intuition is that which it intuits. It gives itself that which it is able to intuit. Space and time are not "outside" intuition. Intuition is always already in that which it receives. Space and time, in short, are pure images. (On this, see Kant’s Opus Postuum in which he declares that time is nothing other that form by which the subject affects itself [get citation].)

On the other hand, pure thought, prior to all experience, is the discerning of a unity that more than one individual possesses in common: a concept. But pure concepts (causality, e.g.) have no empirical content (which led Hume, of course, to deny their reality). For Kant, the pure concept (or "notion") is simply a function of unification itself. The "contents" of pure concepts are "rules" (i.e., not empirical intuitions). These rules are not a product of reflection but are the very working of reflection. The rule is an antecedent presentation of unity that guides the concept. As pure, the rules constitute that which they rule; and they are nothing outside of what they rule—i.e. they have no substantiality. They "disappear" into that which they rule and are nothing outside their work. They inscribe themselves in a something-to-be-ruled (i.e., a something-to-be-unified). The totality of these rules is the categories. A category is a way a rule rules and the Understanding is simply the closed totality of the ways by which intuitive data can be unified, inscribed, ruled. And, a category is a pure concept; that is, it is prior to any experience. The Verstand (the Understanding) is a "power of rules" or a power of ways or manners of presentation. Furthermore, since every act of knowing implies a consciousness, the pure concept is the consciousness of a unity and implies a pure self-consciousness. Thus, for Kant, all conceptual unities have the character of an "I think." This "I think" is a thinking and not simply an act; it is a "power" (a potentia) he calls transcendental apperception. That is, transcendental apperception is not an act that comes and goes but is a potentia that remains in reserve even as it works. It is a stable unity without which there would be no knowledge because otherwise there would be no common point to serve for multiple data. Thus the transcendental apperception (the Kantian “I”) is the ground of the possibility of the categories.

Now, since properly Kantian experience must be made, there must be a power that unites pure intuition and pure thought such that a knower can experience an object. Since both intuition and thought present, Heidegger will look for their root in what they share and, as was said earlier, the faculty of presentation in general is the imagination. Einbildungskraft is precisely and only the ability to "fashion," "image," institute," "establish," "set up," etc. This kraft (power) is not an established fact but a continual process—the process of sharing that which pure intuition and pure thought have in common. The imagination integrates the raw data of pure intuition with the syntheses of conceptualization. This process is an activity called schematizing and it is an activity that is at the same time sensible and intellectual; it is a fusing of sensation with intellection (of empiricism and rationality: the sensible and the thinkable). By means of the transcendental (or imaginary) schema, the thing is able to appear as an object and be experienced as what it is. It is Kant's famous:



third thing which is homogenous on the one hand with the category, and on the other hand with appearance, and which makes the application of the former to the latter possible. This mediating representation must be pure, that is, void of all empirical content, and yet at the same time while it must in one respect be intellectual, it must in another be sensible. Such a representation is the transcendental schema [CPR 181].



With regard to empirical concepts, the schema "produce" or "pre-scribe" a non-thematic view, or, as Heidegger calls it, a schema-image such that any particular can appear as what it is without being confined to any actual particularities of appearance. Giorgio Agamben, quite appropriately, calls this an "example." I borrow an example from William Richardson to explanation of how the schema-image work:



Across the street is a house. I know it to be a house, for it is presented to me by an act of knowledge. By reason of this presentation, the house offers me a view of itself as an individual existing object encountered in my experience, but more than that, it offers a view of what a house (any house) looks like. This does not mean, of course, that the house has no individuality, but only that, in addition to its own individuality the house as presented offers a view of what a house can look like, sc. the "how" of any house at all. It opens up for me a sphere [Umkreis] of possible houses. To be sure, one of these possibilities has been actualized by the house that I see, but it need not have been so.



With Richardson, we must emphasize the "can" here for it indicates a potentia and an activity by which a thing is able to appear as what it is (i.e., to "reveal itself," in Heideggerian language). Importantly for Richardson, Kant, Heidegger, and Agamben, this pre-scription or "rule-for-a-house" is not a determinate catalogue of characteristics proper to a house. It is, in Richardson's words, a "full sketch [Auszeichen] of the totality of what is meant by such a thing as 'house' "[emphasis mine]. This "view" by which a thing can appear as what it is called is, in Agamben's analysis, "purely linguistic": "the name, insofar as it names a thing, is nothing but the thing, insofar as it is named by the name” [Coming Community 77]. Furthermore, Richardson adds, "the view of which we are speaking here is as such neither the immediate (empirical) intuition of an actual singular object (for it connotes a genuine plurality), nor a view of the concept itself in its unity. The view we are speaking of is not thematized at all."



By way of the schema the unity of the empirical concept (ultimately, a word (Agamben)) is referred to the intuited plurality of possibilities it unifies without, however, being restricted to any one or any set of them. In contrast to this, the pure intuition—time—is already unified. It is instead the pure concepts (the categories) that are many. The schematism of the categories must, therefore, require special kinds of schemata or schemata of a character different from those of empirical intuition. As the pure intuition of time is the presentation of any object-in-general, the schemata must unite the categories to time so that ontological predicates may be applicable to objects in general. That is, the profound unity of time must be vulnerable to various modes ("ways") of presentation while remaining one time (for, "all times are one time", as Kant says [CPR 75]).

Richardson reminds us that this is the most difficult and ambiguous aspect of Heidegger's entire analysis of the Critique of Pure Reason. Does he want to say both that time is the root of the transcendental imagination and that the transcendental imagination is the root of time? Richardson explains it as follows: since time is already unified, the schema (the "power" to unify) have nothing to unify. But, as time is already unified, it is always already schematized, or is the (pure) image of any schema whatsoever. Time is the very pattern of the schema-image and as the schema are several, each is already temporalized. Thus the schema "determine time" (or, articulate it, formalize it) and time in-forms that which it is articulated by. Time, as unified, "makes possible" that which articulates it and time is only as articulated (i.e., fused with categories such that ontological predicates can be applied to any object whatever). That is to say, quite obviously, the terms form and content are inadequate to capturing this conundrum of activity and passivity.



Now, if the transcendental schemata make possible the application of ontological categories to "any being whatever," then we must look into the ontological status of this "whatever" for it is precisely the ontologically known. In short, what is an object in general?



Kant's answer is simple and disarming. It isn't anything:



Now we are in a position to determine more adequately our concept of an object in general. All our representations have, as representations, their object, and can in turn become objects of other representations. Appearances are the sole objects which can be given to us immediately, and that in them which relates immediately to the object is called intuition. But these appearances are not things-in-themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object—an object which cannot itself be intuited by us, and which may, therefore, be named the non-empirical, that is, transcendental object=x.

The pure concept of this transcendental object, which in reality throughout all our knowledge is always one and the same, is what alone can confer upon all our empirical concepts in general relations to an object, that is, an objective reality" [CPR 137; latter emphasis mine].



Heidegger will say that the mysterious object=x is a "something of which we know nothing." As an object in general, the x is not any particular object and, like the Umkreis 'house', it is not determinable. It is the Umkreis of any possible object. It is the so-called object, or any object purely insofar as it is called an object. It is what all objects share, but it is in-itself a no-thing, non-being, non-object. It is, in Agamben's language again, "the pure being-in-language of the non-linguistic." It is that which, in any object, objectifies it, formalizes it for experience, envisions it as such, as an object. The object-in-general is purely imaginary because it is schematized par excellence, yet it is that which is not presented in any presentation. Heidegger will call it a "pure horizon" within which any object can be rendered present-to-us. Kant will say it is a "pure correlate" to transcendental apperception insofar as it is a unity waiting for something to unify, a like that precedes anything to liken. In that sense it is more objective than any object, more being than any being so that Heidegger will be able to re-christen it as Being. In the "Brief über den Humanismus" he says (in my own translation which I leave crudely literal in order to emphasize the point): "Thus Being is being-er than any being [Gleichwohl ist das Sein seiender als jegliches seiende] [Wegmarken 359]."



The object=x is not a being, not an object, hence its relation to the knower will not be cognitive. It is not present. It is more than present, more present than any presentation. It is the sheer "can appear" of any appearance whatever. Not absolutely nothing at all, nor just anything at all, it is the disjunction of something and nothing. “This =x," Kant says, "is only the concept of absolute position, not itself a self-subsisting object but only an idea of relation, to posit an object corresponding to the form of intuition" [OP 172]. Alien to all substance (i.e., not "self-subsisting"), the object=x is fragility itself. Empty of all content, the x is the sheer "that there is" [il y a, es gibt] something rather than nothing, just as Da-sein, or the transcendental imagination, or, unified apperception, or the Kantian “I” is the sheer "that there is" someone rather than no one. Infinitely fragile and transcendental, the x is arche-relation, arche-obligation that there be such a thing as imagination (forming, presentation) itself.

This presentation, needless to say, is ambiguous. Nothing, or the Nothing, is presented. Nothing is "beyond" the presentation; no thing-in-itself arises ghostlike beyond the objectively (phenomenologically) known. The x, the sheer presentation, is suspended, delayed, retarded, interrupted—coming but never arriving. The essential distance between the knower and what is preeminently ontologically known erodes in such a way that the two sides cannot but fuse together. Nothing definitive is presented. No figure, no outline, no border, nothing framed. What "happens" is (only) that the transcendental imagination feels itself obliged to (or constrained to) present. That is to say, it feels itself and thus submits to itself as if it came from outside itself--as if it was itself an exterior force. This auto/hetero-affection is profoundly temporal, moreover, in the sense of an extreme tens(e)-ion, or anticipation, not unlike Hume’s involuntary and naturally human association of ‘tick’ with ‘tock’. (We must recall from the preceding analysis that, unlike God's knowing, human knowing is temporal.) The "power" of Einbildungskraft is here fused with an essential impotence. The object=x shares with the Entstand the characteristic of unknowability, but, as a presentation in extremis, it turns away from God back toward objects, back toward its proper domain. The object=x is the irreparable consignment to things, to objects, to formalized profanity, but only via a detour through the Nothing, through non-being.

We do not then, suddenly and unexpectedly confront the thing-in-itself, the sacred thing, the Entstand as it is directly offered from out of the Most Ineffable [God]. To the contrary, we suddenly and unexpectedly confront nothing, non-being, that is to say, ourselves: ourselves as the no-thing itself: or, the Kantian transcendental ‘I’. That which all that is has in common is no-thing, that is to say ‘I’. We confront a limit without ever confronting it for the limit was nothing, was always already "in" things, erased in its approach and suspended en deçà du temps like a paralyzed and paralyzing force. For, that which is presented is the sheer "there," and this pure "there" is the pure position of the Kantian "subject" or, the knower, the transcendental imagination, the Da-sein.

The object=x is the very turning away from the sacred for it is the pre-presentation of things, of objects (i.e., of that which is never presented to God). If you like, the x "shows" the ungodliness of the world. It shows the irreparable profanity of the world. Via this paralyzed presentation the world is presented precisely such as it is: it (the world) is precisely phenomenal and nothing more. Appearances conceal (only the) nothing. No proper nature is revealed to us, no coming-from-out-of-Ineffability is unveiled. Only the irreducible "thusness" of things is revealed. Thought, then, before it thinks any thing, is able to think (or is not able not to think) pure profanity, or pure ordinariness, as its only extra-ontic thought.

This means then that (pure) thought is naïveté par excellence. Turning at once to objects, it has always already forgotten God. Irreducibly lost among things, thought--pure being-in-language--is abandoned, undestined, scrupulously (formally) thing-ish. Thought is constrained to think nothing beyond objects. This is its "extreme youth"—to have always already evacuated itself of any Platonic latency. Thought is originally purely exposed, purely presented, purely there, and it is "able" to hold itself in suspense just prior to its "work" of figuration. Thought, in short, before it is captured in the world, "thinks" the place of art, the space of poetry. It is "able" to think, before there is any thing, "relation in general" in the pure "there". This "ability" is a passivity. It is a pure passion. A passion, however, that is never present like a state-of-mind: It is not a psychology except in Kant’s purely rational sense. It is the pure finding-myself-there, or being-the-there. It cannot not be-the-there (without purely and simply ceasing to be). That is to say, for a paralyzed moment, purely exposed to all its possibilities (all its predicates) it is un-destined to any one or any set of them. But this paralyzed moment does not belong to a past, a "was." The Kantian "subject," is its there incessantly, without, however, being able to bring itself before itself. What does this mean for the notion of subjectivity in terms of our course?



We have seen that, for Kant, the transcendental apperception cannot grasp an object in particular. The sole “content” of its knowing is always the same: the object=x; a “something of which we know nothing” (Heidegger). Deprived of any actual object, transcendental apperception can only think a pure ‘there’ or a “pure position”, which, in fact, it (the transcendental apperception) itself is. Deprived even of intellectual content (or intellectual intuition—something Kant declares strictly impossible), this “perfectly contentless representation [i.e. the transcendental apperception],” he says:



Cannot even be called a conception, but merely a consciousness which accompanies all conceptions. By this I, or It, who or which thinks, nothing more is represented that a transcendental subject of thought = x, which is cognized only by means of thoughts that are predicates, and of which, apart from these, we cannot form the least conception. Hence we are obliged to go round this representation in a perpetual circle, inasmuch as we must always employ it, in order to frame any judgment respecting it. And this inconvenience we find impossible to rid ourselves of, because consciousness is not so much a representation governing a particular object as a form of representation in general…[find citation]



Like the object = x, the subject = x is inconceivable outside its predications. It is nothing other than its predications yet it is itself not purely and simply its predications. It resembles the object = x which is no thing, nothing. The I resembles nothing. It is pure resemblance, likeness itself. A mere x, this transcendental subject is not knowable or experienceable in itself. Per consciousness it is itself unconscious of itself. The transcendental subject is a nothing that can grasp nothing. It is that which accompanies all experience but is itself never experienced (confirming Hume). It is exactly a consciousness: I, He, She, or It makes no difference. That which unites all experience and makes any experience “mine” is anonymous: an interiority exterior to itself: it frames itself and hence at the same time eludes itself. And so on, and so on…The Kantian subject is an inconvenience we cannot so without, without falling purely and simply into Humean flux on the one hand and Cartesian solipcism on the other…

(In the Critique of Judgment the mind frees itself of the paralyzing harmony (or accord, or mood) of imagination and understanding by feeling in itself the beauty of schematizing but without a concept; whereas in the sublime aesthetics is suspended and the imagination yields to something unexpected--not truth, as we would classically expect--but the presentation of freedom.)

Kant: Conclusion

It may be worthwhile to consider the entire Kantian philosophical apparatus as a massive and intricate defense mechanism.



The noumena is radically outside the Subject, radically exterior, radically Not-I. It is the given which is unknowable in-itself and which I did not create and whose reality is such that my finite mind cannot tolerate it in consciousness. The phenomena are representations of a radically irreducible exteriority; that is, they are “determinations”: reductions, limits, boundaries, or condensations and displacements in such a way that the exteriority of the noumena is repressed, and so the work of the Kantian faculties resembles in a remarkable way Freudian Dream-Work, Primal Repression, and Anxiety.



In Kant, the originary—or primal—act of mind (Subject, consciousness) is determination; in Freud it is Repression. All acts of consciousness afterwards refer back to a primary defining and positing whose latent contents (the noumenal contents) are denied. (I will try to argue below that the “content” is merely exteriority, or Not-I-ness, and not some thing.) In doing so, Kantian and Freudian mind produce objects admissible to consciousness (either waking or dreaming) and also a semblance of an object: the famous psychoanalytic lost object. (Remember that in Lecture II I said that the representations of Kantian mind are analgous to noumena. This means that phenomenona or representations are like/similar to noumena but not like noumenal objects. There are no noumenal objects; noumema are stubbornly not objects.) In Kantian terms we may call this originarily repressed, lost object the Lost Object = x. Every determination, every framing, bordering, limiting of any object only “hides” the Lost Object = x more securely. The Lost Object = x is the repulsed object and thus the repulsive object. Every framing or determination is both an exclusion, repression, repulsion of the Lost Object = x and also a contact with it (via analogy, condensation, and displacement). Every Kantian Object = x ultimately and latently refers to the repulsed and repulsive Lost Object = x. It is not a question of whatever particular content but of the process of determination/repression itself.





Now, the ego is able to experience (feel) the work of imagination and understanding in unison as they determine an object; and it is able to think (via Reason) the noumena but not experience the noumena. At the same time, the ego and the I are distinguished from each other by the form of time, as we have discussed, or if we prefer, by the movement of difference. The subject is split but not dialectically. There is an irreducible ambivalence and ambiguity that is the same as the structure of anxiety. (Of course, of course, Hegel and the Idealists will deny this and say that the ambivalence I refer to here is actually a dialectic and the power of the Aufhebung can overcome this structural anxiety. I leave that possibility aside for now.)



The ego is determined (passive); the I determines (active). The I determines, represses, limits, etc. and the ego benefits from this activity and is brought into being, is able to experience this or that, understand this or that. But the ego does not experience the I per se, only the work of the I (the work of the faculties) in its “inner sense” as we have discussed. Hence the I itself escapes the ego and produces time in that new way that Deleuze discusses: time is liberated from spatiality. This liberated time is also the movement of the difference called ‘I’ and ‘ego’. The Kantian subject in short is not a numerical 1, nor a dialectical division or alienation but a movement, an oscillation. From the standpoint of critique, we (philosophers) either identify with the I or with the ego but not both at once because they are non-contemporary to/with each other as in an Escher paradox-drawing).



In his final theory of repression (Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, SE XX 108-9) Freud recognizes that “it was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety”. Anxiety is a movement of mind (or soul or whatever), an inner movement implicated with an exteriority. But, this is the important point: there is no specific, manifest, content to this exteriority (even though the imagination cannot but fashion schemas for it and offer them to the understanding): the movement itself produces both interiority and exteriority. For example: I fall in love and as I do I want to know more and more about my beloved in order to reduce her exteriority and be with her more intimately. But, precisely as I do learn more, she becomes ever more exterior (ah! she has had lovers before; ah! she has had thought of me long ago; ah! she once wanted to do this or that. (This is what all of Proust is about: the anxiety of jealousy as the cause of thought for both Swann and the narrator)). She becomes ever more radically Not-I, but, at the same time, I have all that much more of her to contemplate, hence an interiority is produced and complicated. The obsessive feels that there is a something in her—a lost object—which must be recovered, but this obsession is a result of the pre-originary movement of difference and is merely an epiphenomenon of knowing someone—or something—intimately. The more intimate the knowing the more exterior the known becomes.



The Kantian subject is irreducibly an alteration, an alterity, a movement of difference that cannot but repress, determine, experience latent anxiety. Cutting to the point: The question is whether this is irreducible or whether it can/should be ‘overcome’. The former would require something like a reconciliation (like marriage; as in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell or Songs of Innocence and Experience)); the latter requires the dialect of Hegel, or the protracted process of psychotherapy. For another alternative see the great new book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx by Japanese scholar Kojin Karatani.



The Kantian subject, the ‘I’ is neither noumenal nor phenomenal. It is merely an empty representation that accompanies all my representations, that accompanies the work in unison of imagination and understanding in the ‘art’ of schematizing. The ‘I’ is perfectly symmetrical between noumena and phenomena. The ‘I’ and the Kantian categories—which initially frame and procure for the understand a something-to-understand (an object=x) —are themselves outside (or in excess of either) the noumenal or the phenomenal. On the other hand, they are nothing outside of the representation and the prior contact or intuition. The ‘I’ and its categories are rigorously not either the representation nor its noumenal ‘past’. The ‘I’ is that other exteriority that remains when the Imagination-Understanding-Reason have all been accounted for.