Kant and the Self 67

awareness. This claim could be affmned as a matter of definition, but that would
seem to rob it of significance. The motivation behind the claim appears to be to
counter the idea that a self involves a cluster of very different properties, such that
in some sense the self could persist as long as just some of those properties
remained-that is, even in the absence of self-awareness (e.g., in deep sleep).
There may well be something important about why this idea strikes us as
odd. Perhaps a "nutritive" or "vegetative" being without any thought has been
called a soul or self by some, but we can see that this is a strained idea. Simi-
larly, it is not clear that there is a self even with a being that has many repre-
sentations but none that are "something to" the being. Nonetheless, it must be
kept in mind that (as was remarked earlier at note 42) the kind of self-aware!.
that the Fichtean affirms as necessary is stronger than mere empirical apper-
ception or even the mere "real potential" central to SAT. And for just this rea-
son his version of the self-positing thesis is especially questionable, for it is all
too easy to imagine that even if all our states are states that are "something to
us," this need not involve the kind of "dual awareness" that the Fichtean insists
on. Hence a self-constitution theory of the subject becomes plausible only to the
extent that one retreats from what is distinctive about the Fichtean doctrine of
apperception. That is, the more reflexive one makes the kind of awareness that
is claimed to be distinctive of us, the less ground there is for insisting that we
could not exist for a moment without such complexity. And this is to say that
the distinctively Fichtean aspects of self-positing that Neuhouser distinguishes
still do not point to a convincing need to revise Kant's own account of apper-
ception. Hence, with respect to at least this aspect of his theory of the self, we
can conclude that here, as throughout our study of current resuscitations of
early criticisms of Kant, the old call "back to Kant" still deserves a hearing.
NOTES
1. My work on this topic owes much to the participants of the "Figuring the
Self' Conference at the University of Iowa, April 1992, and also to audiences later at
Florence and Notre Dame. On a number of specific points I am indebted to R. Aquila,
W. Carl, R. Fumerton, 1. Hoover, 1. Kneller, W. Ramsey, R. Velkley, and G. Zoller.
2. See my Kant's Theory of Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), and my
"The Critique of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology," in The Cambridge
Companion to Kant, ed. P. Guyer (Carrlbridge: Cambridge Dniv. Press, 1992), 249-79.
Cf. James van Cleve, Problemsfrom Kant (forthcoming), and the survey by M. 1. Scott-
Taggart, "Recent Work on the Philosophy of Kant," American Philosophical Quar-
terly, 3(1966), 171-209.
3. See especially Dieter Henrich, Fichtes urspriingliche Einsicht (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1967); Identitiit und Objektivitiit (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1976) [trans-