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S34 A. Heinz et al. / European Psychiatry 27 (2012) / supplement n°2 / S32-S43
these ideas or impressions? And how can you avoid that “the
series goes on to infi nity”, i.e. an infi nite regress, in which the
entity that perceives an impression, is itself unconscious and in
order to become conscious in turn, becomes again the object of
a higher entity which experiences it?
3. Classical theories of self- consciousness:
Hume versus Kant
In his “Treatise of human nature”, Hume avoided the infi nite
regress by suggesting that there is no inner self or entity which
perceives an impression. For Hume (1978), there was no identical
self but only a stream of ever changing impression: “I can never
catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can
observe anything but the perception” [27]. He thus suggested
that there is no independent observer outside of this “bundle of
perceptions”. Hume compared the mind with a theatre scene
without spectators. He suggested that different impressions fl ow
into each other without clear boundaries and this may be the
reason why we attribute an identity to this ever changing stream
and miss the truth – that there is nothing but the perceptions:
“Thus we feign the continued existence of the perception of our
senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of
a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation” [27].
Hume suggested that we feel an association between the different
perceptions when our thinking focuses on one after the other.
However, since there is no link that can be perceived between
the different ideas and impressions, Hume remained a sceptic
with respect to personal identity. He criticised that personal
identity requires a “unity of consciousness”, a concept which
Hume did not accept: “I cannot explain the principles that unite
our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness” [27].
Kant (1966) proposed a different solution of this problem.
He suggested that there is a kind of personal ownership of one’s
own thoughts, which is not refl ected in a (separate) perceptive
act. Instead, this ownership rather resembles a disposition: “The:
I think, must be able/poised to accompany all my ideas… This
idea [of a thinking self] in itself is an act of spontaneity, i.e. it can
not be understood as belonging to sense perception” [31, §16].
Kant suggested that my ideas would not be “my” ideas, if they
could not stand together in a “common self- consciousness” and
thus belong to me. Kant agreed with Hume that the empirical
consciousness that accompanies different ideas is in itself dispersed
and without a clear relation to the identity of the subject.
Nevertheless, Kant assumed that the association between the
ideas is created by the subject, who places one idea to the other
and who is aware of the “synthesis” of these ideas. The association
would not be in the objects itself and cannot be perceived
by the senses and thus be transferred into the mind; instead,
according to Kant, the association is a capacity of the intellect
(Verstand), which in itself is nothing but the ability to associate
‘a priori’. In other words, Kant may ask the question: if one of
my perceptions is not “my” perception, how could I refl ect on
it? Ownership of ideas is thus a capacity of the intellect, not a
quality to be perceived. For Kant, the identity of consciousness
is a necessary precondition for the association of perceptions (a
priori), and not, as suggested by Hume, a misconception arising
a posteriori from the stream of ideas and impressions.
However triumphant Kant may be considered to have been
over Hume, he turned out to be unable to deliver a clear analysis
of what the structure of selfhood actually consists in and how
our mind can come to cognize itself. In the Critique of Pure Reason
he wrote: ‘Now it is, indeed, very evident that what I must
presuppose in order to cognize an object at all, cannot itself be
cognized as an object [….]` [31, A, 402]. In the paralogism chapter
of the Critique Kant had repeatedly described the diffi culty of
apperception, of grasping oneself not via objectual representation,
but as such, roughly as follows: In trying to say who I am, I
must self- ascribe some, for example perceptual, properties. As
soon as I question about the legitimacy of these attributions,
however, it becomes clear that I could only make them if I was
previously already familiar with the meanings of ‘I’or ‘my’. So I
feel compelled to choose myself (or the concept ‘I’) as the ‘correlate
of my comparisons’, which should resolve for me which
property defi nes me. Yet, in this way I presuppose exactly that
which I had laid claim to bring to knowledge [31, A, 366, 345ff].
Elsewhere Kant stresses that ‘I’ is in fact not a concept but rather
a perception or even a feeling (e.g. [32], further references and
an interpretation of this confl ict see [15].
The fi rst to have not only clearly articulated but also proposed
a solution to Kant’s problem was Johann Gottlieb Fichte
in 1797. He fi rst spotted the failure of what henceforth has been
called the refl ection- model of self- consciousness. This model
implies that self- consciousness comes about either through
“direct” consciousness of the I as an object (egological version), or
through a kind of higher- order consciousness which is directed
towards a fi rst order consciousness (non- egological version).
In this way consciousness discovers itself in the position of an
object. And since, according to this model, all knowledge consists
of knowledge of objects (whether of individuals, universals
or facts), self- knowledge too is explained as knowledge of a
particular type of object.
Let us fi rst consider the egological version of this refl ectiontheory.
According to it the “I” obtains knowledge of itself through
refl ection – through entering into a refl ective relation with itself,
and thereby, as it were, “setting its eyes on itself”. However,
if it holds that there is knowledge only of phenomena which
occupy an object- position in relation to a knower, and if what
we are after is the I as a subject, not as an object, then there
seems to be no way for the I to have knowledge of itself. In fact,
the refl ection- theory, as Kant takes it over from Descartes and
Leibniz (but also from numerous thinkers of British empiricism,
see Frank [15]), must then presuppose the phenomenon whose
structure it assumes to explain. It was for this reason that Fichte
accused it of ‘sophistry’ in his lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre
nova methodo [12].
What about the non- egological version of the refl ection
theory? If self- consciousness only came about through a ‘piling
up’ of consciousnesses, where a lower- order consciousness was
attested to by a higher- order consciousness, then there would be
no self- consciousness at all. This is because for the “top” of the
chain of refl ected consciousnesses, the same condition would
once again apply whereby in order for it to become conscious
of itself, it would have to be made into an object by a successive
consciousness, which again would be non- self- conscious, and so
on ad infi nitum (see also Sartre [51]). Thus we arrive back at the
infi nite teatess Aristoteles identifi ed and tried to avoid.
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