“I Think” and the Problem of Transcendental Subjectivity

The article examines the status of the apperceptive “I think” in Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The central issue is that the “I think”, on the one hand, functions as a condition of the possibility of cognition, while, on the other hand, it is not itself an object of self-knowledge. This leaves open the question of the sense in which the “I think” can nevertheless be understood positively. Accordingly, the aim of the study is to distinguish the different meanings of the “I think” in the Critique of Pure Reason and, on this basis, to outline the contours of a transcendental theory of subjectivity. The relation between the synthetic and analytical unities of apperception in the transcendental deduction of the categories is made clear together with the analysis of the logical sense of the subject in the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason”. Here the possibility of understanding transcendental self-consciousness as a pre-reflective self-relation is considered. It is argued that the logical I and the metaphysical subject, understood as a hypostatised logical I, are derivative of the original synthetic activity of self-consciousness. The transcendental “I think” is interpreted neither as an object of cognition nor as a substance, but as a non-objectifying form of self-relation that constitutes the perspectival structure of experience. It is concluded that the positive meaning of transcendental self-consciousness consists in a pre-reflective “consciousness” of synthetic activity: it expresses the self-relation inherent in the very structure of experience, by virtue of which every experience is given as mine (as belonging to me).