This exercise concerns the thinking Kant associates with the idea of the soul (in his sense of ‘idea’). He says in §46 that “pure reason requires us to seek for every predicate of a thing its own subject, and for this subject, which is itself necessarily nothing but a predicate, its subject, and so on indefinitely (or as far as we can reach).”

In the case of the soul, the predicates are what Kant calls “predicates of an internal sense,” and these amount roughly to what Descartes would call thoughts and Locke would see as ideas whose source is reflection. Hume makes something like Kant’s point in a more concrete way when he says, “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception” (Treatise of Human Nature, bk. I, pt. 4, §6).

Assignment. Give an example of the first 4-6 steps of the sort of unending series of predicates Kant seems to have in mind in §46, and briefly describe the problem it points to.

Unlike the first two exercises, there is no example in Kant to use as a model, so I’ll offer one.

I think, “I’m imagining a soft armchair,” and then ask myself, “What is this ‘I’ like?.” I might answer, “Well, I feel tired.” But I ask again, “What is the ‘I’ like who feels that way?” Maybe I’d say, “I’m pushing my legs on the last flight of stairs,” and if I’m asked to describe this “I,” answer, “I want to get to class.” But I can still ask, “What is that self like?,” and answer ….

In effect, I have stated a series of sentences each of which predicates, of “I” as subject, a predicate intended to capture the way I think of “I” in the sentence above it:

I [who feel tired] imagine a soft armchair
I [who push my legs on the last flight of stairs] feel tired
I [who want to get to class] push my legs on the last flight of stairs
I [who …] want to get to class
⋮

This series might be described as a case of me imaging something in response to feeling something as I will something in order to reach something I desire. But there are many different sorts of thoughts that might appear in such a list and even these thoughts might appear in a different order and be connected in other ways. Kant’s point does not concern the specific relation between the predicates of the successive sentences but rather that subject of any one of them will always be expressed as the predicate of a further sentence, so we never reach a subject that is not also a predicate.

As with the papers, I’ll be willing to accept these exercises on paper, but I’d prefer that you send a copy by e-mail. My address is helmang@wabash.edu.