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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 101 my experience. So in order for the concept of an event in the world to be rationally intelligible to me, it must instantiate the concept of an object of my experience, and not the other way around. And similarly with all such concepts. So the concept of the self-consciousness property is of a higher order than any other in an agent's perspective. The highest-order concept of the self-consciousness property terminates the holistic regress by rendering it innocuous. For this regress is then just the familiar regress of self-consciousness: For any object of my experience E, there is an object E1 of my experience of E, and an object E2 of my experience of E1 of E, and so forth. That the holistic regress resolves into the infinite regress of self-consciousness just means that ultimately, we must be able to make everything, including objects of our experience, and objects of objects of our experience, and so on, rationally intelligible to ourselves as objects of our experience - i.e. in terms of the highest-order concept of the selfconsciousness property. And of course this is not to say that we cannot make these things rationally intelligible at all. Compare this innocuous regress of Kantian self-consciousness with the rather more vicious regress of orders of Humean desire implied by Frankfurt's notion of higher-order desires that evaluate rationally the first29 order desires of the self. I critiqued Frankfurt's view in Volume I, Chapter VIII. 2. There I argued that this notion is unsuccessful in providing terminating criteria of rational self-evaluation because we make a commitment to any such n-order desire as authoritative arbitrarily, by fiat. By contrast, the regress of Kantian self-consciousness successfully provides authoritative terminating criteria of rationality intelligibility for all our experiences, including our desires - not by fiat, however, but rather by definition: If something is not recognizable to me as an object of my experience, then however else, and to whomever else it is identifiable, it cannot be rationally intelligible to me. Second, that we must be able to make things rationally intelligible as objects of our experience explains why no concept other than that of the selfconsciousness property could be the highest-order one within an agent's perspective - as we have just seen with the supposedly higher-order concept of an event in the world. Recall that Kant thought that the holistic regress necessarily terminated in three highest-order concepts, those of God, freedom, and immortality. He thought these concepts were determined by the most basic categories in terms of which we make anything rationally intelligible to ourselves (1C, A 643/B 671 - A 644/B 672, and especially 1C, A 651/B 679); and that these, in turn, were derived from, respectively, the disjunctive, 29 This notion is developed in Harry Frankfurt's "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," The Journal of Philosophy LXVIII, 1 (January 1971), 5-20. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
