Dennis Schulting’s informative book focuses on the centrality of self-consciousness for the philosophical systems of Kant, Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel. This focus is broad in scope in the positive sense of including a discussion of Reinhold, an important but often neglected early post-Kantian philosopher. However, it is sufficiently limited in scope because Schulting concentrates on the twofold claim that these thinkers are ‘Kantians in the systematic sense of being centred on the principle of transcendental apperception, and that absent an understanding of the centrality of apperception their philosophical systems cannot be really understood’ (p. 5). His twofold claim is, thus, (i) that these thinkers are ‘Kantians’ because their systems are centred on ‘apperception, as developed by Kant’, and (ii) that we cannot understand their systems without appreciating (i).
In order to grasp Schulting’s twofold claim, we must see how he interprets Kant’s principle of transcendental apperception. According to him, this principle is best expressed by the following biconditional: ‘a representation r is accompanied by subject S if and only if r is analytically united with all representations that have the same relation to S and S accompanies these representations conjointly, for which a certain condition of combining must be fulfilled’ (p. 83). We can interpret this principle to mean that a representation is accompanied by subject S iff this representation is a member of the set of representations that are accompanied by S, where these representations are brought together by a spontaneous and a priori synthesis, namely, the transcendental unity of self-consciousness (pp. 83–4). Readers of Schulting’s earlier books will be familiar with this interpretation of the Kantian principle.
Schulting begins to argue for his twofold claim by examining steps that Kant himself takes in the Critique of Pure Reason. In chapter 2, Schulting considers the analogy between Copernicus’ revolution in calculating the planetary cycles and Kant’s revolution in philosophy. Against commentators who interpret this analogy merely to be about a change in perspective, Schulting argues that it has a more specific meaning, namely, that Kant imports the experimental method of the empirical sciences into philosophy (p. 25). According to Schulting, he does so by presupposing (i) a change in perspective, which (ii) ‘yields more rationality in terms of explaining pressing problems in a particular field of inquiry’, whereby (ii) justifies the acceptance of (i) (p. 42). However, unlike the method used in the empirical sciences, which works with empirical facts and can never prove its hypotheses, Schulting argues that Kant is able to prove his by remaining on the level of reason and employing the progressive, synthetic method (p. 45).
The Copernican hypothesis, which posits that ‘objects conform … to the forms of our sensibility and our understanding’, as Schulting puts it, for him, implies the centrality of self-consciousness (p. 3). For this reason, in chapter 3, he discusses various takes on self-consciousness, beginning with those of Kant’s rationalist predecessors and those presented in Kant’s pre-Critical writings. Here Schulting presents Wolff’s concept of self-consciousness, namely, that ‘consciousness is not just consciousness of things but also, and at the same time, a consciousness of self’, and emphasizes that it influences Kant’s concept of the same (p. 48). In chapter 4, he provides a detailed examination of self-consciousness in Kant, which he expresses as ‘I apperceptively know that I ϕ while ϕ-ing’, where ‘ϕ’ and ‘ϕ-ing’ refer to an act of thinking (pp. 80–1). In chapter 5, Schulting draws out the implications of the principle of self-consciousness, better known as the principle of transcendental apperception, namely, that it allows us to derive objectivity from thought. He makes this point as follows: ‘if we parse … the characteristics of the capacity to think, expressed in the ability to attach an “I think” to all of one’s representations that one may ascribe to oneself, then we see, in a dense step-by-step argument, that the concept of an object is analytically derived from the unity that lies at the root of our self-consciousness’ (p. 94). It also allows us to distinguish, as Schulting further argues, specifically human discursive understanding from any non-discursive types of understanding, for example, Fichtean understanding by means of intellectual intuition as well as animal understanding (p. 95).
Thus far, we have seen that, for Schulting, the Copernican hypothesis implies the centrality of self-consciousness for systems of philosophy. In chapter 6 we see that, for him, the centrality of self-consciousness in turn implies transcendental idealism, which Schulting explains as ‘the doctrine that the objects of our knowledge are in fact nothing but representations, and not things outside these representations, namely, not things in themselves’ (p. 4). Schulting discusses the thing in itself in detail in this chapter, arguing that, for Kant, ‘whilst things in themselves must logically be presupposed as the unconditioned or more fundamental ground underlying appearances … (1) objects as appearances are not properties of things in themselves, and (2) things in themselves or the thing in itself cannot properly be represented or even thought’ (p. 121). Within this context, Schulting takes up Reinhold’s Kant-loyal system of philosophy, namely, the Elementarphilosophie, as it is presented in Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (1789). In this work, Reinhold strives to supply Kant’s critical philosophy with a solid foundation by focusing on the representation as the central concept of critical philosophy. As Schulting interprets Reinhold’s efforts here, Reinhold upholds the two features of Kant’s concept of the thing in itself in his concept of the same (p. 122).
In the chapters discussed thus far, Schulting focuses on what he takes to be the correct account of the centrality of self-consciousness for philosophy, that is, as we see in Kant and Reinhold. In the remaining chapters, Schulting uses this account as the benchmark against which he measures Fichte’s and Hegel’s systems of philosophy so that he can point out where they go awry. For example, in chapter 7, he argues that Hegel’s ‘strong conceptualism’, as described by Robert Pippin, has its roots in a misinterpretation of a passage in the so-called ‘second step’ of the B-Deduction, a misinterpretation that he claims weakens the strict Kantian distinction between intuition and concept. In this chapter, Schulting likewise assesses the strength of the criticisms that Pippin’s Hegel raises against what he views as Kant’s version of conceptualism. In chapter 8, Schulting continues his exchange with Pippin on Hegel, this time with respect to the proximity of Hegel’s absolute idealism to Kant’s transcendental idealism. While Schulting views Pippin’s Hegel as a transcendental philosopher in that Hegel, like Kant, asserts ‘the identity of Being and intelligibility’ with respect to the objectivity of objects (pp. 167–8), Schulting argues that Pippin’s Hegel gets Kant wrong when he argues that self-consciousness implies that ‘transcendental content’, that is, ‘the combined set of the categories that make up the synthetic a priori unity of representations’ (p. 175), need not be related to pure intuition in order to be related to real objects (p. 181). Finally, in chapter 9, Schulting counters the interpretations of Hegel, espoused by Paul Giladi, Stephen Houlgate and Sally Sedgwick, that claim that Hegel is a naturalist in the sense of returning to a pre-Critical view of reality. Instead, he argues for an interpretation of Hegel that places Hegel firmly within the Kantian tradition along with Reinhold and Fichte.
So much for my outline of Schulting’s book. The nuanced discussions provided in it, to which my outline cannot do justice, naturally give rise to further questions. Schulting’s main claim, as we saw above, is that Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel are Kantians in the sense that their philosophical systems are centred on the principle of transcendental apperception as Kant conceived of it. However, this claim is problematic because it assumes that Reinhold’s, Fichte’s and Hegel’s principles of self-consciousness are the same as Kant’s principle of transcendental apperception. Yet each of these thinkers reconceives this Kantian principle. Reinhold, for example, reconceives it as what he calls ‘the principle of consciousness’, which is ‘in consciousness, the representation is differentiated from the object and subject by the subject and is referred to both’ (Reinhold Reference Reinhold2003: 168). Since these principles are not obviously the same as Kant’s, a detailed comparison of them to Kant’s principle of transcendental apperception is directly relevant to the main claim of the book.
Although Schulting does not discuss Reinhold’s and Hegel’s accounts of self-consciousness in detail, he makes an exception for Fichte. In section 4.2 called ‘Self-Consciousness and Identity’, he rejects Fichte’s concept of self-consciousness and favours Kant’s when he says that ‘I am not aware of myself as my own object (as in the quasi-tautological proposition “I s =I o ”), but I am aware of myself as doing something, namely thinking this or that’ (p. 80). However, Schulting does not show us how he arrives at this interpretation of self-consciousness in Fichte by means of the same careful exegesis to which we are accustomed from his discussions of Kant. Furthermore, this interpretation does not cohere with Fichte’s descriptions of self-consciousness in Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794). In this text, Fichte tells us that self-consciousness, which he calls ‘intellectual intuition’, is ‘the immediate consciousness that I act, and what I enact’ (Fichte Reference Fichte1982: 38). That is, it is our awareness of thinking something, for example, the proposition ‘A=A’. More specifically, it is the awareness of our mode of connecting the second ‘A’ to the first by means of a concept (see, for example, Fichte’s discussion of the category of reality, Fichte Reference Fichte1982: 99–100). From this brief overview, we see that Fichte’s intellectual intuition, in contrast to Schulting’s account of it, appears to have a lot in common with Kant’s pure self-consciousness (a claim that Fichte himself makes at Fichte Reference Fichte1982: 46). Not only are these commonalities deserving of further analysis, but they lead to further questions. For example, if Kant’s and Fichte’s accounts of self-consciousness are indeed similar, then why does Schulting reject the latter in favour of the former and why does Fichte nonetheless choose to turn from Kant by calling self-consciousness ‘intellectual intuition’, a kind of intuition that Kant claims humans cannot have? Answers to such questions are also relevant to the main claim of Schulting’s book.
Finally, recall that part of Schulting’s main claim is that we must grasp the centrality of Kant’s principle of transcendental apperception in order to properly understand the philosophical systems of Reinhold, Fichte and Hegel. He seems to then use this claim, as we saw, as grounds to argue that these thinkers go astray when their systems of philosophy diverge from Kant’s. However, before such an argument can be made, we must ask: what are the accounts of self-consciousness put forth by these thinkers, as I have already mentioned, and how do their respective systems follow from these accounts? For example, Hegel’s version of self-consciousness, namely, the concept, is not only consciousness of the I that conceptualizes and judges, as we see with Kant’s self-consciousness, but it is also consciousness of the I that syllogizes (Hegel Reference Hegel2010: 528). This conception of self-consciousness has important repercussions for Hegel’s philosophical system, repurcussions that are directly relevant to understanding what Schulting calls Hegel’s ‘strong conceptualism’. Furthermore, since Hegel’s version of self-consciousness includes the activity proper to reason, I wonder how it builds on his criticism of Kant’s view that the ideas of reason are merely regulative (Hegel Reference Hegel2010: 520–1), especially since, for Kant, we must nonetheless presuppose that the way ideas shape our experience of the world is objectively valid (A651/B679). That said, the fact that Schulting’s book generates further questions and paths of investigation underscores its value for the scholarly debate.
