Freedom qua Spontaneity:
The Lacanian Subject in the Critique of Pure Reason
WILLIAM J. URBAN
Third Paralogism of Personality
What is conscious of the numerical identity of its Self in different times, is to that extent a person.
Now the soul is etc.
Thus it is a person. [A361]
What is introduced here is a time element which distinguishes itself from the First Paralogism, but less so from the Second. If in the Third an attempt is made to demonstrate the diachronic dimension of consciousness or personal identity (ie, the self’s consciousness of its identity through time), we can similarly view simplicity as synchronic identity or identity of something with itself at one time, which has Humean overtones, as Allison notes (Allison 2004: 343, 500n.28) Since this Third syllogism has a similar form to those already examined – ie, with a nominal definition (of personality) in the major premise and the minor premise subsuming the soul under this definition – we will limit ourselves to discussing those features that distinguish this Paralogism. In particular, we shall see how its corresponding transcendental idea, which has a parallel with Lacan’s framework of the Ego-ideal, allows a further development of our understanding of Cartesian subjectivity to better confront today’s critics of cogito.
In the first paragraph of his analysis, Kant contrasts between the identity or sameness of those objects of outer sense the subject acquires and how it sees self as object of inner sense in time, which introduces the distinction between first-person and third-person perspectives. He concludes that ‘the self cannot fail to find itself the same self throughout the time in which it is conscious of itself as object.’ (Allison 2004: 344) So Kant would certainly agree with Descartes and the rational psychologists in asserting a certainty to first-person judgments of identity, but not because of any supposed unique access to the self qua object, as they would argue. Rather, there is certainty here only because the identity of self-consciousness at different times is a mere formal, a priori condition of thought and their coherence (ie, the TUA). In no way does personal identity follow from this purely logical identity of the I.
How, exactly, does Kant arrive at this conclusion? In a word, he denies the possibility that the judgment of identity can be legitimately raised and answered from the first-person perspective as the rational psychologist implicitly holds. He thus sets out to demonstrate their error by contrasting the first- and third-person standpoints on the identity of the self. Kant illustrates each perspective via two complimentary thought experiments. He concludes that from the first-person standpoint, it is quite ‘natural’ to raise the question (and then answer it positively) regarding the nature of identity of the self, but because it is only a formal condition of thinking, the identical I is always-already presupposed and therefore the question cannot really be legitimately raised. He also concludes that while the question raised is perfectly legitimate in the third-person standpoint since it treats the numerical identity of the self as a question about the identity of an object as if it were one of outer sense (albeit one given in inner sense), Kant points out the obvious fact that the ‘I think’ is no longer available to answer that question. Thus, the error of this syllogism is that it treats the question of the numerical identity of self as a third-person type question while attempting to answer it solely by the first-person perspective. Again, rational psychologists are guilty of a ‘subreption of hypostatized consciousness,’ which is based on an underlying transcendental illusion. (Allison 2004: 345–6)
Kant’s argument against the claim that we can logically arrive at a ‘person’ from the purely formal nature of the identity of self-consciousness at different times may be clarified through a more psychoanalytic approach. As Zupančič points out, the notion of transcendental illusion is quite similar to Lacan’s notion of le semblant and from here we can begin to re-interpret Kant’s overall critique of the Third Paralogism, as well as some of the key terms he employs in doing so, in Lacanian terms. (Zupančič 2000: 67) Above we intimated that the transcendental illusion has to do with a certain ‘something’ coming into the place of that ‘nothingness’ which is characteristic of the merely formal, logical structure of the transcendental unity of consciousness (TUA). What this means is that, properly speaking, the illusion is not of something; it is not a distorted representation of a real object. Rather, this deception deceives at the level of being, by the simple fact that it is. The manner in which Kant treats the term ‘person’ in the Paralogisms seems to fit this description and evidence that this is a good interpretation is given by the fact that, in the section dealing with the transcendental ideas of Kant’s Opus postumum, Kant writes that ‘[p]erson also means mask.’6 (quoted in Zupančič 2000: 68) So if the syllogistic conclusion that the ‘soul is a person’ is rejected by Kant as being illusory, it seems as if Kant is holding that the transcendental idea of the soul, which he defines as ‘the absolute (unconditioned) unity of the thinking subject,’ [A334/B391] is a concept that embodies a unity that seems as if it really exists as a being in the world.
We begin to see this by noting that in his analysis, Kant is pointing to the fact that in order to observe the I among the flux of many (other) representations, the subject can ultimately refer to no one other than himself.7 By way of mental experiment, we could introduce another person and this second person could view the subject as an object of his outer intuition, but of course this would not allow the first subject to draw any conclusions about his own identity. The problem is ‘solved,’ however, if the subject were somehow able to place himself ‘over there’, in the very ‘place’ a second person might occupy, from which he could then observe himself as subject – ie, if he were able to observe himself simultaneously as an object of inner sense (in time) and as an object of outer sense (in space). The implied conceptual framework for such a scenario is precisely what the transcendental idea of soul (personality) provides8, which has its parallel with the Lacanian Ego-ideal. (Zupančič 2000: 70) In both cases, the ‘subject’ is what designates such a virtual point of self-relating, itself producing a symbolic point the identification with which allows the subject to see himself the way the Other sees him.
Lacan famously depicts this framework via his ‘optical tableau’ which makes use of a highly complex visual schema of (curved) mirrors to draw a clear distinction between the Freudian ideal-ego from the Ego-ideal (which Freud failed to consistently do), against the background of the associated passage from the Imaginary to the Symbolic register. (Lacan 2006: 565) The parallel is striking here with Kant’s ‘mere idea’ of a point he calls a focus imaginarius. Kant’s discussion of this point is found later in the Critique in a section entitled the ‘Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason’ [A644/B672] and we should also note that whenever he discusses transcendental ideas, Kant almost always makes use of visual metaphors. Both these schemes of Lacan and Kant are used to visually illustrate an illusory conceptual unity. Zupančič develops in detail the mechanics of how this occurs by modifying Lacan’s optical tableau to account for how the self represents itself to itself, arguing that this configuration underlies the very foundation of cogito. (Zupančič 2000: 71–3) Essentially, the pure form of the ‘I think’ of transcendental apperception transforms itself, through the notion of personality implied by this configuration, into an identity which appears as if it really existed in the realm of what is. The subject does so by positioning himself just so between the mirrors (which represent the imaginary dyad) such that he is able to visually discern what impact he has on a final mirror, which – otherwise not directly accessible – reflects back to him a coherent unity of self. What should be understood here is that the transcendental idea of personality (the soul) provides a ‘frame’ of sorts to this configuration9, or in other words, embodies the virtual point from which the subject would see himself as he is seen by the other, much like the functioning of the Ego-ideal as the symbolic point of identification in psychoanalysis. Moreover, the subject does not have direct, immediate access to such a point, since this point is the a priori framework of every attempt by the subject to gain access to his ‘person.’ In other words, we can never attain a ‘meta-position’ or ‘God’s eye-view’ which would allow direct access to this logical framework, since every attempt to do so already finds us acting within such a framework. Nevertheless, we do gain access to an (ultimately fantasmatic) unity of self through the regulative idea of reason. To better understand this, we could conceive this activity as involving a ‘collapse’ of the merely logical framework into a virtual point, with which the subject must then identify with as a necessary condition of perceiving this unity. Or alternatively, to paraphrase Zupančič, if the transcendental idea (soul) is the ‘form’ of the representation and not its ‘content,’ we should conceive the soul as concerning the very act of representation of the self as a person, which adds a certain ‘nothing’ to that content. In other words, if the pure concepts of the understanding (eg, the category of substance) provide us with a certain non-schematized content (of self), the ideas of reason have this same content, but show it in a new light. This means that the soul’s only content is the mode or act of representation of the content which is already given by the category of substance. (Zupančič 2000: 74) In this way, the ‘nothingness’ of the void of the subject appears to become ‘something’ identical over time.
A paradox results from this analysis: the identification with this virtual point, which results in the experience of ‘personhood,’ already presupposes the subject as split or alienated because he is always-already subject to the regulative framework of a transcendental idea, a framework which a priori clears the space within which this activity occurs. In Lacanian terms, if the subject perceives himself as identical in time (ie, as a person), this must mean that his personhood is already marked by the point of view of the Other. As the early Lacan of the 1940s simply remarks, ‘I is an Other,’ to indicate that the person we intimately experience as an immediate ‘I’ is always-already mediated. (Lacan 2006: 96) As is well known, the later Lacan goes further than this, famously remarking that the ‘Other does not exist,’ that is, the ‘person’ presumably existing in-itself (yet always out of phenomenal reach) must ultimately be rejected and this is exactly what Kant implicitly does in his critique of the Paralogisms.
Since the illusion of substantial personhood is unavoidable, we necessarily fall into the error of believing that we are simply faced with an epistemological limitation of our capacity to grasp this person in-itself. The proper reflective reversal to reach Kant’s notion of cogito would involve rejecting, as a paralogism, the presupposition of a substantial self that supposedly dwells beyond our finite, temporal standpoint and further, to conceive this epistemological limitation as the positive ontological condition of human self-experience. Again, as was pointed out above, Kant’s overall tendency was to posit the cogito as noumenal and thus, at times, to secretly offer up this epistemological failure to grasp the noumenal self as a sort of ‘negative representation’ or proof of the existence of the (forever ungraspable) noumenal dimension. However, as was argued regarding the first two Paralogisms, likewise here Kant’s logic calls for the need of a radical re-conceptualization of self-consciousness to overcome the error made by Descartes and other rational psychologists who conflate the introspective perceptions of inner life with those perceptions of objects in external reality, thereby illegitimately positing the direct identity of the observer with the observed. The constitutive gap between the two must be maintained since this is where cogito dwells or, more precisely, is.
Lacanian-themed puzzles
