Kant's Theory of the Self, by Arthur Melnick. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, viii + 186 pp. ISBN...

Reviews

German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment, by Jean-Christophe Merle, trans.Joseph J. Kominkiewicz with Jean-Christophe Merle and Frances Brown. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2009, xv + 207 pp.ISBN 978 0 521 88684 0 hb

German Idealism was a philosophical movement that offers us not merely great advancesin how we might think about epistemology and ethics among other areas; the idealistsalso offer us a fresh approach to how we might justify and understand punishment. Thetraditional reading of Kant and Hegel on punishment holds that both were staunchretributivists. For both, our punishment should be determined by the criminal’s desertand not by external factors such as whether his punishment may help deter potentialcriminals. Thus, Kant says that punishment can only be justified because a crime has beencommitted and ‘never . . . inflicted merely as a means to promote some other good’ (Ak.6:331). Furthermore, Hegel is often quoted arguing that deterrence should not justifypunishment because it is ‘like raising one’s stick at a dog; it means treating a human beinglike a dog instead of respecting his honour and freedom’ (1991: 125–6). In the book underreview, this traditional reading is subjected to a sustained, rich critique with a view tooverturning orthodoxy.

Merle offers us a radical new interpretation of the penal theories held by Kant,Fichte, and Hegel in what is a stimulating work. I suspect that many readers may findit highly controversial given how different Merle’s readings are from orthodox tradi-tional readings. For example, Merle rejects the view that any one of these philosopherswere retributivists in any substantive sense or that any of them held a mixed viewincorporating some aspect of retributivism. On the contrary, he argues that they cameto endorse punishment as a deterrent in favour of resocialization. This work gets manythings correct and I enjoyed its analyses very much, although its reinterpretation of thetheories of punishment it claims were held by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel breaks withmuch that has been said on the topic and I fear that it is problematic in certain aspectsthat I will address shortly.

German Idealism and the Concept of Punishment is divided into three parts. The first partfocuses on ‘desert as the sole justification’ and centres on Kant’s justification of punish-ment. The second part concerns ‘punishment as a means of rehabilitation’ with adiscussion of Fichte and Hegel on punishment. The book concludes with a look atNietzsche and ‘retributivist inhumanity’. Some aspects of this work may be less contro-versial than others. For example, Fichte was clearly a proponent of deterrence: indeed, Iknow of no work that claims that he was a retributivist (nor does Merle which is why Ifound it somewhat surprising he would argue at length that Fichte was not a retributivist,although I found this discussion very helpful). More controversial is Merle’s readings ofKant and Hegel and my review will focus on certain worries.

European Journal of Philosophy 20:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 179–192 © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Merle begins his discussion of Kant in what many will find familiar terms: ‘Kant is notonly a central figure in retributivism, but also its founding father’ (p. 21). Later, however,Merle claims that Kant, in fact, was not a retributivist (p. 83). Merle argues that Kant’sretributivism is impure. For example, it is noted that Kant provides several exceptions tohis retributivist rule. One illustration is the shipwrecked men. In this case, shipwreckedmen at sea can only live by clinging onto a floating plank. The plank will only hold oneof them. For either to survive, he must keep the plank for himself causing the other manto drown. Kant argues that saving our lives in this way is not ‘inculpable’, but‘unpunishable’ (p. 52, Ak. 6:235–6).

I am unsure that this case speaks against Kant’s commitment to retributivism. After all,such a case should be understood within a larger context. Relevant here is Kant the naturallawyer. Indeed, Merle shares this view of Kant’s position (p. 38). A natural law explanationfor exceptions would be not that these exceptions are morally best, but only permissiblegiven current conditions. Thus, duelling may appear to violate the categorical imperative,but it should be retained for now only because declaring it illegal would bring citizens to(wrongly) lose respect for and hence disobey the law. Ultimately, we should aspire tocriminalize such acts in time where possible. Such cases do not render Kant’s retributivismimpure, but only show that the project of uniting law and justice is incomplete.

Merle offers a unique reading of a famous passage by Kant on punishment:

Whatever undeserved evil you inflict upon another within the people, that youinflict upon yourself. If you insult him, you insult yourself; if you steal from him,you steal from yourself; if you strike him, you strike yourself; if you kill him, youkill yourself. (p. 52, citing Ak. 6:332)

Traditionally, this passage has been widely cited as clear evidence of Kant’s commitmentto retributivism. Merle disagrees. He says that ‘[t]he first sentence cites an “undeservedevil” and therefore does not base itself on degree of punishment; thus it cannot concernretaliation, that is, equality in retribution’ (p. 52). Why this cannot be so is left unclear.Merle says that criminals ‘throw society back to the state of nature in which you are notprotected against undeserved evils that are committed against you. In this condition,there is no retribution, not even “mere” retribution’ (p. 52). There is not as muchexplanation of this argument as we might like, but the idea seems to be as follows. Kantspeaks of an ‘undeserved evil’ between two individuals within society. Retributivepunishment must always be deserved and undeserved evils fall outside its domain.Rather, a criminal removes himself in some sense from society with such actions and wemust find a new basis upon which we might understand the justification of anypunishment. However, if this interpretation is true, then the argument does not makesense. The evil I inflict upon another is undeserved: this is entirely within the domain ofretribution. This is not a possibility of return to a state of nature because, as Kant says,my evil act was inflicted upon another ‘within the people’ (e.g., within my society andits legal system). Finally, Merle is wrong to claim that Kant’s utterances, such as ‘if youkill him, you kill yourself’, do not speak to a ‘ “like-for-like” principle of punishment’(p. 52, Ak. 6:332). It may be accurate to say that Kant is not offering a view ofretributivism as based upon a strict equality of desert such as like-for-like, but nonethelessclearly on his view in cases such as murder I am to be executed.

Merle also offers a new reading of Hegel. Merle is correct to argue that while there hasbeen some controversy about Hegel’s theory of punishment the overwhelming majorityhave considered it to be retributivist. Merle is also correct that Hegel’s theory ofpunishment rejects strict equality in value between crime and punishment. However,

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© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Merle enters more problematic territory when he claims that ‘the theory of rehabilitation. . . is expressly found in “Ethical life” ’ (p. 135). His evidence is that Hegel contrasts‘[r]etribution through revenge’ with the ‘genuine reconciliation of right’ whereby thecriminal understands that the law is his, it is valid for him, and it is for his protection’(p. 135). Merle does not offer any further substantive evidence for this position.

I believe this view may rest upon a mistake. Merle’s analysis of Hegel’s theory ofpunishment is almost exclusively focused on ‘Abstract Right’ even though he recognizesthat Hegel offers much discussion later in ‘Ethical Life’. One of the few passages citedfrom Hegel’s discussion of punishment in ‘Ethical Life’ is the passage cited defendingpunishment as a reconciliation of right against retribution as revenge. A differentinterpretation might be that the consideration of punishment is very different in eachsphere. ‘Abstract Right’ offers us the general structure and guiding principles of punish-ment within the context of my relation with you. Punishment takes the appearance ofrevenge because this basic framework is merely that: it is not a fleshed out theory ofpunishment. This makes sense when we consider that in ‘Abstract Right’ there is nolegislature, no laws, no executive, and no judiciary where a ‘crime’ is really not a crimeat all. However, this structure is fleshed out in greater detail in ‘Ethical Life’ wherepunishment moves from appearing as a private wrong between individuals to punish-ment’s truer character as a public wrong where right is defended.

I was very surprised to find no substantive engagement with Hegel’s discussion ofpunishment in ‘Ethical Life’, but even more surprised to find no references to his Scienceof Logic where he perhaps most clearly defends rehabilitation within his theory ofpunishment. He says:

Punishment, for example, has various determinations: it is retributive, a deter-rent example as well, a threat used by the law as a deterrent, and also it bringsthe criminal to his senses and reforms him. Each of these different determina-tions has been considered the ground of punishment, because each is an essentialdetermination, and therefore the others, as distinct from it, are determined asmerely contingent relatively to it. But the one which is taken as ground is stillnot the whole punishment itself. (Hegel 1999: 465)

Punishment is grounded by retributivism, but it is also preventative and rehabilitativewithin a coherent, unified theory of punishment. It is very difficult to square uncitedpassages like the above with Merle’s claim that ‘Hegel regards specific deterrence togetherwith rehabilitation as the primary aim and as the primary justification of punishment . . .Retributivism, on the contrary, delivers neither an aim nor a justification of punishment’(p. 145). It would have been helpful to know how we might understand this conclusionin light of passages like the above.

In any event and whatever these interpretive quibbles, this book will no doubt strikemany working in the area as highly controversial and its claims may be contested forsome time to come. Nevertheless, it is an engaging text that deserves close study andwhich offers an interesting addition to the existing literature that has many merits evenif it does not ultimately persuade the majority.

Thom BrooksDepartment of Politics

Newcastle UniversityUK

[email protected]

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REFERENCES

Hegel, G. W. F. (1991), Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, trans. H. Nisbet.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—— (1999), The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller. Amherst: Humanity Books.

Hegel and the Analytic Tradition, edited by Angelica Nuzzo. London: Continuum, 2009,224 pp.ISBN 9781441139504 hb £65.00

A book on the relation between so called ‘continental’ and so called ‘analytic’ philosophyshould be more than welcome, especially when it focuses on the interpretation of Hegel’schallenges to empiricism—with consequences for the ‘Anglo-American’ opposition to‘European’ rationalism and transcendentalism. As such, Angelica Nuzzo’s selection of nineessays on Hegel and the Analytic Tradition is overdue as an attempt to assess the newdevelopments in the debate not only between ‘movements’ of twentieth-century philoso-phy, but also between ‘camps’ of modern philosophy altogether. The new developmentstarted, in a sense, with W. V. Quine’s critique of some dogmas of empiricism in theHumean tradition of Russell or Carnap, and with Wilfrid Sellars’ attack on the myth ofthe given. In addition to this, Peter Strawson attempted to make sense, for ‘analytic’readers, of Kant’s presuppositional analysis of ‘senseful experience’, i.e. of the conditionsthat need to be satisfied for object-related or referential truths. Corresponding claims arealways already connected with conceptually informed perception, as Terry Pinkardrepeatedly says, and with normative commitments with respect to conceptual inferences,as Robert Brandom and John McDowell have pointed out also. After at least somemyths in the empiricist’s self-understanding began to falter, analytic philosophy seems tohave felt some need for reconstructing a bridge to ‘continental’ traditions of philosophy,starting rather with Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel than with Locke or Hume.This is so despite recurrent attempts to resume the fights of Bertrand Russell and G. E.Moore against British Hegelianism, or of Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach againstKant, as for example Alberto Coffa’s influential book The Semantic Tradition from Kant toCarnap: To the Vienna Station shows. Kenneth Westphal’s final paper deals with thishistorical and systematic background and with the traps into which a self-declaredstriving for clarity can fall. The corresponding maxim: ‘Obscurity is painful to the mind aswell as to the eye’ had already led Hume to forget the following possibility: It maynot be the fault of the philosophers, whose texts seem to be obscure, if, what they have tosay is more difficult to understand and judge than some fast and busy readers mightexpect or desire. It may be that the topics and problems need a language that does notallow for schematic criteria of inferences and differences—as we know them from puremathematics. With sufficient diligence, everyone could learn to master schematic rules inprinciple, independently of contingent experience. On the other hand, there is no questionthat it is not easy to read Hegel or to say in few words what his philosophy is about.‘Hegel’s language is hopelessly grand’ says Joseph Margolis (p. 28). Perhaps we shouldadd to this soft criticism ‘for our average level of education in philosophy and languagecompetence’.

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In his most interesting opening essay, Margolis focuses on Hegel’s dissatisfactionwith Kant’s ‘theory’—or rather transcendental, i.e. presuppostional analysis—of whatthere is and what we know of it. Unfortunately, he does not make sufficiently clear thatHegel shares with Kant the following crucial insights: Any statement with (inferential)meaning and (differential, i.e. non empty) sense (in Kant’s way of using Bedeutung andSinn respectively) already presupposes some relational forms of referring by words (ana-phorically) or deictically in corresponding situations (‘by intuition’) to actual things(or perhaps also kinds or types) in the real word. Therefore, an expression like ‘thing initself’ that wants to cut off the thing referred to from the referring relation, hence fromthe subjects who (want to) refer, cannot ‘refer’ at all—or only to an object of merely verbalthought, i.e. a mere ‘noumenon’. By its very definition, such a merely ‘intelligible’ entitynever can be perceived as such. Hegel’s dissatisfaction not only with Kant and theKantians but also with their empiricist critics therefore begins precisely at the pointwhere they abuse a merely negative definition of ‘things in themselves’ and talk‘positively’ about ‘them’ (even in the plural!), for example as ‘causes’ of perceptions oras ‘grounds’ for free actions. In doing so, they do not see that the expression ‘Ding ansich’ is and must stay for analytical reasons totally empty of any empirical content,including empirical consequences. In other words, a sentence like ‘we do not know whatthings in themselves are’ is logically an indefinite negation just like ‘we do not know whatcolourless green ideas are’. We only know what Kant’s expression ‘thing in itself’ shouldmean inferentially. But we know as well that and why it does not apply to anything in theworld. We always have to re-think dialectically what talking about being and truth,‘essence’ or ‘reality’ (and so on) ‘really can mean’.

According to Margolis, Hegel sees in this context that Kant fails to tell us what synthetica priori truths can be and how we can distinguish them from ‘opportunistic . . . conjecturesthat a later advance in the sciences might easily eliminate’ (p. 13)—and defends, therefore,a radical version of contingency, historicity and sociality in theory constructions and thedevelopment of (scientific) knowledge. ‘Hegel was championing a careful sort of historiedconstructivism’ (p. 15), which rivals Kant’s ‘impossible undertaking’ (p. 19), his ‘subjec-tivism and ill-conceived apriorism’ (cf. p. 21), and overcomes Kant’s impressive but‘pointless exertion’ (p. 22) of constructing things out of a manifold of ‘intuitions’ by‘categories’ as if they were ‘conceptual instruments’. Hegel is, indeed, a fairly robustrealist about the things we deal with in our present surroundings, just as Margolissuggests (in some contrast to Rockmore); but, perhaps, we better leave it open if Kantreally can be read as a Berkeleyan Idealist, especially since it is difficult to understandhow Margolis can say that ‘Kant’s transcendental strategy leads . . . to what we may . . .call pragmatism’—and why Hegel’s pragmatism is labelled as ‘inchoate’. Moreover, webetter get beyond the standard common-place about Kant’s alleged belief in the ‘finality’of Euclid’s geometry as ‘the’ theory of space’ (p. 24)—which Einstein’s relativity theoryhas allegedly shown as wrong. The development of non-Euclidean mathematical geometriesfrom Gauss and Riemann, Bolyai and Lobatchevskij to modern tensor analysis does notaffect at all Kant’s much more general question how to use ideal mathematical models in ourinterpretation of empirically real spatial and chronological measurements. Kant’s questionis invariant to any specialized (re)construction of pure geometrical structures, even thoughwe can indeed find some deep problems in Kant’s analysis of space and time as ‘formsof intuitions’. Nevertheless, we had better question the usual superficial readings of Kant:No-one at his time could have thought that we need to give up the idea of a neatseparation of our spatial and chronological order of things and events. We even mighthave to learn that the ‘logical status’ of (the framework of) Einstein’s relativity theories

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is itself ‘synthetic a priori’ for any empirical measurement of distances in precisely thesame sense as Kant detects and defends a priori features in Newton’s system. In otherwords, Kantians rightly insist that it is terminological blunder to say that theoreticalframeworks could be ‘empirically true’—which leads to much deeper obscurities or moresuperficial naiveties than Kant’s proposals for differentiation. This does not contradict,but enforces, what I count as a deep and important insight of Margolis, which heattributes to Hegel: Even though rules of conceptual inferences are expressed by ‘timeless’standing sentences and used in a ‘relatively a priori way’, our conceptualizing theories havea historical development. It is, however, misleading to say that Kant’s categories arehistoricized. For we have to understand them, with Hegel, as moments of the form ofreferring to a sortal domain of ‘concrete substantive things’.

Such a sortal domain D (as we know it, for example, from elementary arithmetic)fulfils the following definitional criteria: There is no entity d which is not distinguishedfrom all other entities d* in D. The very same principle is known to analytically educatedreaders under Quine’s famous formula ‘no entity without identity’. Hegel calls the corre-sponding relation ‘x � y’; in his logical prose, ‘being something else’ or Anderssein.Moreover, he realizes that the ‘relation’ of ‘being identical with itself’ or Fürsichsein(‘x = y’) always already presupposes the constitution of a whole (sortal) domain, a ‘genusof entities’ or Gattung D. This is so because x = y in D is defined via a negation of a negation,i.e. we must start with explaining D and the relation x � y, if we want to understandmethodically what we mean by equality or identity in D. If we replace Hegel’s difficultand clumsy prose by modern terminology and formal symbols, we can see that Hegelknows that x = y is always defined by ¬x � y, which just says that x and y are not different.Hegel’s ‘determinate negations’ are ‘proper distinctions’ A(x) in D that must not be ‘finer’than �, which means that we can infer x � y from A(x) and ¬A(y). This is nothing elsethan a formal reading of the famous principle of Leibniz, which says, in effect, that wecan infer A(y) from A(x) and x = y. But neither Leibniz nor subsequently Frege haverelativized this principle to a holistic but local sortal domain D. Only Hegel has seen thatit already presupposes such a well-constituted domain. The contributors of this volumedo not seem to know about these results of modern analytic philosophy, even though weurgently need them in order to understand Hegel’s analysis of how we project ourabstract idea of sortal domains (‘an sich’, now in Hegel’s sense) onto a rather continuousworld. Tom Rockmore in his paper (Chapter 8) believes that it is anachronistic to attributesuch insights to Hegel since they are already informed by Frege’s work (p. 161). But todismiss modern techniques for articulating problems and answers in a new way hasaltogether an unfortunate result: Merely ‘philological’ paraphrases of Hegel’s logicproduce an impression of it as a mystifying ‘ontology of the absolute’—with the resultthat the broad lack of interest in it on the analytical side would be vindicated.

Moreover, both sides do not have the slightest idea that it might be worthwhile tocriticize, with Hegel, the very starting point of Kant’s logical and transcendental analysis:Kant follows an age-old presumption with respect to the use of the sentence-form ‘N isP’ in a fairly naïve way. According to this presupposition, N either names a singular sortalobject which is somehow classified by the predicate, as in the case ‘the lion Jonathan iswild’, or N is a quantifier over an already well-established sortal domain D, such that thesentence ‘the lion is wild’ just means ‘every lion is wild’. ‘A lion is wild’ might also mean‘some lions are wild’. In any case, Kant presupposes that the only ‘things’ that ‘really’ or‘empirically’ exist are already sortals.

All this gets even more complicated when Hegel distinguishes in his logic of essencebetween our ways of talking about identity (in contrast to relevant differences) of ‘objects’

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on a level of (sortal) entities (‘as such’, which now marks an abstract and ideal way ofspeaking) and about equivalence or Gleichgültigkeit of equivalent symbolic or perceptualre-presentation (again in contrast to essential differences) on a level of signs or intuitions.The logic of essence thus turns into an entirely new field. It analyses the following twological levels: the level of (re)presentations and the level of what is (re)presented. And itshows the reason(s) why we need such a two-level approach, with ‘ground’ and the‘grounded’ as general, ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ as particular cases of level-distinction.We have to understand the constitution of these levels if we do not want to stay logicallynaïve—as anybody does if he only deals with a mere ‘one-level’ logic of being. If we donot reconstruct all this, we also cannot understand Hegel’s logical arguments againstKant’s ‘refutation’ of the ontological proof of the existence of God by pointing out thelogico-linguistic naivety in viewing ‘God’ as a name of a singular object in a sortal domainof objects, not to speak of many other, for example ‘materialist’, naiveties which assumea pre-given system of ‘repulsion’ and ‘attraction’ between things, perhaps as mystical‘forces’ or ‘powers’.

Margolis is right, however, to focus on Hegel’s insights into the development of ‘theconceptual’ which goes far beyond what Kant could have ever envisaged. For Hegel’sdialectical logic analyses, in fact, how we develop conceptual norms and truths—whichfunction at each time or epoch as a presupposed framework of making contentfulempirical statements about historically singular things and events. But Hegel’s dialecticallogic is far more than a mere heuristic (p. 31) or a merely narrative story of the main‘moments’ in conceptual shifts or the movements of the concepts (p. 32). Nevertheless, thecomparison with Hilary Putnam’s understanding of conceptual truth (p. 33) is veryilluminating: Putnam shares with Hegel the insight that the conceptual and the real are‘inseparably joined’. Hegel sees indeed that we have to distinguish between what ismerely empirically actual and what is real (wirklich) in a non-contingent way: The latteris settled by us in what I would like to call (with some allusions to Sellars and Brandom,despite some important differences) generic material truths and material norms of inference.Since they are ‘not merely formal’ (p. 33), the realm of what logic has to deal withsurpasses by far merely formal logic for sortal domains and mathematical systems. Thelater reduces, in a sense, to a technique of using three words (or symbols) ‘non’ (¬), ‘and’(&) and ‘for all’ ("x.A(x).) in definition of complex predicates and in formal deductiveinferences of propositions (sentences), along with the syntactic forms of written formulasthat represent a semantic deep structure, much in the way Wittgenstein has analysedin his Tractatus. As Burbidge also sees (p. 35), one of the points modern analyticphilosophy might learn from Hegel consists in a new understanding of conceptualnorms of differentiation and inference as expressed by generic sentences and rules that‘cannot be denied’, because they lie at the bottom of understanding the very content ofempirical claims. This system, though timeless in form, has a history just because weincessantly develop our theoretical frameworks. We do this hopefully with good reason.The basic form and norm of good reason is, as Hegel sees, dialectical: It consists not ina Popperian refutation of generic knowledge by singular exceptions, but in looking for thebest generic or conceptual frameworks available. Like Thomas Kuhn’s sociological historiesabout allegedly ‘incommensurable’ and ‘revolutionary’ changes of ‘theoretical paradigms’or conceptual frameworks (which belong, in a sense, to a ‘heroic’ way of writing thehistory of the sciences and of human knowledge altogether) Margolis, too, seems toconfuse historical contingency with results of joint cooperation when we solve generalproblems of efficient articulation in a holistic way, according to the dialectical method of‘sublation’, i.e. of keeping the good stuff of joint traditional experience (now in a very

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broad and generic sense) while dissolving particular problems (e.g. of quick and secureunderstanding) and omitting particular failures and mistakes. We do this in such a waythat in singular cases the speaker and hearer still have to use their own power of goodjudgement; i.e. the application of generic knowledge to the real empirical world is nevermerely schematic. Even Popper, who unknowingly copies many features of Hegel’sthinking via mediation through Peirce and James, should agree with this ‘fallibilism’(p. 38). The main fault of a Humean sceptic as well as a Popperian lies in theirunderestimation of the fact that generic conceptual norms are never universal quantifi-cations, as Dulckeit’s paper also shows, such that they are neither refuted nor proven bysome or many singular cases. Rather, we always still need to rely on cooperative goodjudgement in projecting them to the empirical world, a point which Hegel takes up fromKant’s Third Critique.

All in all, I endorse Margolis’ diagnosis that taking Hegel’s critique of Kant seriouslyopens up new and interesting ‘possibilities of Eurocentric and global philosophy’ (p. 36),where his ambivalent expression ‘Eurocentric pragmatism’ (p. 33) most probably refers tophilosophical phenomenology from Hegel via Husserl, Heidegger and Wittgenstein toFrench philosophy.

Not all chapters of the book strictly follow its title. David Kolb tries to use theobservation of variants in Hegel’s ordering of the paragraphs in the different versions ofhis logic against Stephen Houlgate’s claim concerning ‘Hegel’s idea of necessary self-development’ of logical categories (p. 48); but Kolb does not tell us what it might meanto say that logic ‘should proceed without using any thought-determinations not alreadyderived in the sequence’ (p. 49), or what a ‘flaw of a category’ (p. 42), or ‘a more modestHegel’ and an impure access to pure thought (p. 49) is.

Angelica Nuzzo’s Chapter 3 tries to bring Hegel’s logic closer to linguistic analysis byshowing how meaning variance and vagueness can ‘move’ our conceptual developmentof normative inference licences (hopefully in harmony to corresponding definite dis-tinctions). In fact, ‘language and conceptual content cannot be separated’ (p. 70) and weshould distinguish de Saussure’s langue from its use in parole or concrete speech acts.Unfortunately, the following claims remain vague: ‘Logical forms are . . . a historicalreality’, they ‘precede subjectivity’ and have ‘sceptical arguments as integral parts’ (p. 64).It is an important observation to say that in ‘divine language’ we are talking aboutconcepts (p. 65), but we get lost when Nuzzo wants to show us that pure being and purenothing coincide and become both empty—perhaps she ‘forgets’ to add, as almost allcommentators on Hegel’s logic do: if we do not understand being and not-being only asmoments in a relative and relational context in which we distinguish what is here and nowfrom what is then and there. Instead of a concrete discussion of the relations betweenHegel and Sellars, Rorty, McDowell, or Brandom we find thetic results that say, forexample, that Brandom’s ‘attempt to integrate a historical dimension to his model ofinferentialist reason’ is ‘ultimately non-Hegelian’ (p. 78).

In his reflection in Chapter 4 on how ‘natural languages’ evolve, John McCumbernicely distinguishes between nature and culture (or ‘Spirit’) and sees that by habituationor formation of an unconscious ‘second nature’ we develop our individual competence ofUnderstanding, even though mere habits also may endanger authentic Spiritual life. Themain achievement of the text is a sketch of how, according to Hegel, ‘linguistic signs’might have developed in a mostly ‘unrecoverable’ historical ‘deformation’ out of origi-nally perhaps onomatopoetic ‘symbols’ (p. 88). But how can we understand that ‘therelation between symbol and sign, signifier and signified’ is ‘a necessary, not an arbitraryrelation’, as Angelica Nuzzo writes in her introduction (p. 7)? Which steps could lead

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from picture-like symbols to a differential and inferential use of words in whole sentencesand contexts? By the way, the re-creation of languages like modern Hebrew or modernCzech would be much better paradigms for McCumber’s case than to say that ‘modernGerman . . . was more or less consciously created by Martin Luther’ (p. 83).

Katharina Dulckeit shows in Chapter 6 that Hegel already has developed an Aristo-telian logic for dealing with natural kinds, species, and types as it was much laterre-developed in part by Putnam. Franca D’Agostini asks in Chapter 7 how we can classifyHegel’s attitude to abstract, fictitious or other non-existing objects or ‘entities’ of merelyverbal talk by using ‘isms’ that were developed by David Lewis: A ‘noneist’ loves to saythat no such things ‘exist’, an ‘allist’ like Meinong insists that all of these things somehow‘exist’, and a ‘someist’ does not want to say that all non-existing or even all ‘impossible’things like square circles exist—but picks out some, of which he wishes to say that theyexist. All these problems arise if we do not differentiate between formal quantification inabstract domains (for example over numbers or over characters in novels) and realexistence in a world—in which we obviously also have to deal with continuous matter (asin chemistry) or phenomena of electrodynamics, just to name some examples that wereimportant for Hegel’s criticism of what he calls ‘atomism’ and ‘mechanism’ and I wouldprefer to call ‘sortalism’.

Terry Pinkard’s grand picture of Hegel’s thinking in Chapter 5 leads us from thecriticism of the myth of the given in the Phenomenology of Spirit to the question of whatcould be a foundation of normative criteria for proper distinction or ‘recognition’ ofclassified things, events, and actions, together with the corresponding inferences—if notan overall social form of life with its implicitly learned or practically accepted ways todeal jointly with the things around us and to talk about them. The only point that remainsunclear is why such a Wittgensteinian reading of Hegel should be a ‘nonanalytic’ option.Hegel’s attempt to put philosophical reflection on the ‘foundations’ of mindedness,(self)consciousness, autonomy, understanding, reason, and Spirit (or human sapiencealtogether) on a new level might not turn out to have been so unsuccessful as Pinkardsuggests, at least if we somehow circumvent an all too narrow province of merely formalanalytic philosophy. He is certainly right to say that it is never ‘too late to correct ourmistakes in this regard’ (p. 109).

Pirmin Stekeler-WeithoferInstitute for Philosophy

University of LeipzigGermany

[email protected]

Kant’s Theory of the Self, by Arthur Melnick. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, viii + 186 pp.ISBN 978-0-415-99479-5 hb £72

The self, the ‘I think’, my existence as an intelligence, the thinking subject, apperception,the person—all of these and the relationships between them form the subject matter ofArthur Melnick’s brilliant new book on Kant. Indeed, every one of these notions isbrought into play by the end of the very first paragraph of the preface. This is a difficult

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book, primarily suited to the specialist, yet its difficulty only rarely lies in unclarity orconfusion. The theory of the self that it outlines and explores is as subtle, intricate andforcefully argued for as it is original, stimulating and highly controversial.

The book is split into five parts and twelve chapters. Part I is a preliminary overviewin which Melnick sets out what he takes to be Kant’s basic view of the self (Chapter 1) andhow it relates to transcendental idealism and the accompanying issues of spatial andtemporal existence (Chapter 2). After this, two interweaved themes structure the rest ofthe book. The first is that of an incremental thickening of the notion of the subject that isunder consideration, from the thinking subject and its attendant transcendental self-consciousness (Part II), to the cognizing subject and its apperception (Part III), to theperson (Part IV) and finally to the embodied subject (Part V). Melnick moves from pureto empirical concerns, then from issues concerning single thought-episodes in isolation tothose concerning a connected series of such episodes, and finally to the question of howall this relates to the organism and its place within the world in which it resides. In manyways this gradual thickening takes us some distance towards the self of practicalphilosophy, and this book will most certainly reward attention by Kant scholars of any ilk.Yet Melnick is restricted to a study of the self as it functions in the Critique of Pure Reason.Hence the second organizing theme of the book, running parallel to the first, is that of adetailed textual analysis of the sections of this work that are key to our understanding ofKant’s theory of the self as it concerns philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Namely: thefour A-edition paralogisms of substance, simplicity, personality and outer existence(Chapters 3, 4, 10 and 12 respectively); the A-edition doctrine of threefold synthesis as itconnects to empirical apperception and schemata (Chapter 7); the B-edition doctrine offigurative synthesis as it connects to pure apperception and schemata (Chapter 8); and theso-called paradox of inner sense and its relation to the ontological status of the self as dealtwith in Sections 24 to 25 of the B-edition transcendental deduction (Chapter 9). Melnick’saim in his exegeses is not only to colour in the picture of Kant’s view of the self that wassketched in Part I. His method is one of indirect support for this picture, to show that itis the only one that makes good sense of the text and the arguments therein. Other inter-pretations simply do not stand up to scrutiny (Chapter 6 especially, but also throughout).

Melnick’s central claims are these: Kant’s reflection on the cogito yields conclusions ofa distinctly ontological flavour, albeit not those reached by the rational psychologiststhemselves. The self for Kant is neither a thing in itself nor an appearance. In fact, it isnot an entity at all. Nor, however, is it merely an abstraction. Rather it enjoys realexistence, but as an abiding intellectual marshalling action for the unification of innerintuition. Thus the thinking self exists as an intellectual action exists. After Part I, the restof the book is concerned to deepen, expand and apply these claims. Unfortunately, thefirst question that strikes one at this point is also a question that is never fully answered:What exactly is the kind of real existence that is enjoyed by an intellectual action?

We are told that it is not the same kind of real existence as that enjoyed either by thingsin themselves or appearances, and this negative aspect of the position is dealt withconsummately. Kant’s thinking self is not a thing in itself because it is temporal (contra,for example, Sartre’s reading). But it is temporal only in the sense that it unfolds with oraccompanies time, which for Melnick is the sheer progressivity manifested in the shiftingof inner and outer attention. Yet for this very reason, the thinking self is likewise not anappearance. For unfolding with or accompanying time is not the same as arising in time,and only that which arises in time is intuitable, and only that which is intuitable is anappearance. So far, so good. But then this negative aspect of Melnick’s position is its lessoriginal aspect. His explanation of what Kant denies (and why he denies it) at places like

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B157 and the footnote to B422 is both lucid and plausible. But surely some positivecharacterization of the supposed alternative is called for, some explanation of just whatit means to affirm that the self as an intellectual action is ‘flat-out real’ (p. 62). After all,a clarification of this ‘third status’ is the professed aim of the book (p. vii).

Strange, then, that one finds virtually no clues until Part V and the very last chapter,where Melnick gives an excellent account of the relational, irreducibly transactionalnature that phenomenal reality has for Kant. Here Melnick deepens considerably hisconception of existence as it functions in the context of transcendental idealism, which inturn contributes implicitly but significantly to explaining the precise nature of theexistential status of the intellectual marshalling action that is the thinking self. Accordingto Melnick’s strong metaphysical interpretation of transcendental idealism, space, asnothing but the form of intuition, exists solely in the outer shifting of attention. Thus whatexists in space—material reality—is just what possibly or actually arises in the course ofouter attending. In Melnick’s terminology, then, material reality is a sheer or thin (i.e. notnecessarily activated) potency or capacity for affecting us. In this way Melnick arguespersuasively (against Langton) that the relational conception of reality is one that isentailed by transcendental idealism. Despite there being good reasons to leave thiscontent until the end of the book—because it is closely connected to the final paralogismand because with a dispositional account of material reality it compliments and builds onthe dispositional account of personhood given in Part IV—I cannot help feeling that someof it should have been at least mooted in Part I.

But even here things are not made altogether clear, for much of what Melnick explainsabout Kant’s conception of existence seems only to pertain to physical action—after all, hisdiscussion focuses on space and material reality. I take it that the thinking self cannot enjoythe same kind of real existence as that had by a physical action. The self is not anappearance because it cannot be intuited, but presumably we can simply intuit physicalactions. Physical actions, like physical objects and events, are spatiotemporally located, canendure and interact unobserved, and might be deposable into parts that are themselvesactions, objects, or events. So the problematic is specifically intellectual action. Perhaps,then, it is not so surprising that there is some obscurity here, for it looks very much likethe question of the ontological status of Kant’s self when it is seen as an intellectualmarshalling action is none other than the question of the ontological status of the mental.

And, inevitably, obscurity regarding this central issue has repercussions. Melnick setsup his reading of Kant’s theory of the self as falling between two extremes that are bothcommonly seen in the literature. On the one hand there are those who think Kant isforced, whether knowingly or otherwise, into noumenalizing the self. On the contrary,argues Melnick, Kant does not violate his doctrine of transcendental idealism and itsattendant epistemological humility, for he in no way sanctions or unwittingly requiresthe idea of the self as a noumenal underpinning to space and time. The second chapteris for several reasons less exhilarating than the first. The discussion of the transcendentalideality of space and time is all too brief, although this is understandable given thatMelnick has dealt with it at considerable length in earlier works. Similarly for theomission of any mention whatsoever of the problems of internal coherence that tradi-tionally dog strongly idealist interpretations such as his. But in general, and insofar asI understand it, I agree that his reading of Kant’s theory of the self renders it consistentwith his reading of transcendental idealism, which fact I likewise agree is crucial. Mydissatisfaction arises with his treatment of the interpretations at the other extreme, ofthose who think that in one way or another Kant empties the thinking self of anysubstantial content whatsoever, of those who argue it is an abstraction, merely logical,

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formal, intentional, semantic, representational, or functional. Given that the kind of realexistence had by an intellectual marshalling action goes unexplained, it is not at all clearthat Melnick’s view of Kant’s self as just such an action is not compatible with one orother of the austere interpretations he purportedly rejects. In particular, take functionalistaccounts. Functionalists about a kind of action need not deny that it is real, and wouldit not be plausible to give the much needed constructive side of the explanation ofintellectual action in terms of the role it plays in mediating between sensory stimulationand behaviour or judgemental disposition? If not, Melnick does not say why not. Ofcourse doing so would not automatically solve our ontological question, but it would atleast shift it to more familiar, indeed safer, ground.

Despite this problem with the positive aspect of Melnick’s account of Kant’s basicviews on the self, Part I is exciting and sets the tone for the remainder of the book.Melnick’s is a descriptive phenomenological account that evidently owes much to thephenomenological tradition and in particular to Heidegger. Yet it is in fact a particularlyengaging feature of the book that citations from and discussions of such thinkers appearalongside and are given equal weight to citations from and discussions of more analyticalfigures like Sellars, Strawson, McDowell, Cassam and Aquila, to name just a few. Here istestament to the trenchant but somewhat unfashionable idea that the fundamentalphilosophical issues that herald from the Continent are quite simply the same as those ofthe Anglo-American world, and also that Kant, as part of our common heritage, is partof the reason for this. Moreover, I suspect it is the influence of the phenomenologicaltradition that has caused Melnick to so liberally sprinkle his text with such thoroughlyconcrete examples. This is so rare in books on Kant, perhaps because it is so rare in Kant,but the effect confirms that it really should not be. Of course the first Critique is avowedlyabstract, and necessarily so, but chess games, baking cakes, marking time, perusing dogs,semantic Gettier cases, sugar dissolving in water, protons, electrons and billiard balls,all help to ground the discussion and ultimately prove extremely useful in aidingreader-comprehension. Although that is not to say that there are not moments when onesuspects that too much in the argument is relying on certain details of an inevitablydistorting example.

It is largely by way of phenomenological description that Melnick fills out his accountof the intellectual marshalling action that constitutes the thinking self throughout a giventhought-episode. Such description is invariably supposed to be, and most often is, bothintuitive and informative. For example, he talks of a certain coalescence of an inchoatemass of peripheral thoughts, in varying degrees of readiness and with variously similarcontent, around a single focused thought as it is settled on, which coalescence signifies theholding or concentrating or focalizing action that I am in my thinking. Melnick’sintellectual marshalling action, then, constitutes neither the self in isolation from what itthinks nor the thought in isolation from what thinks it. The distinction between thinkerand thought is rather to be sought within the intellectual marshalling action as a whole.One cannot, as it were, separate them out and make them face each other. This is animportant and attractive aspect of Melnick’s view, not least because it paves the way fora novel account of transcendental self-consciousness and its contrast to inner intuition(in Chapters 5 and 9).

It is true that for Melnick the self is always, at the very least, the thinking self, but thisis not to say that one cannot reflect on what one is thinking or indeed on the manner inwhich one is thinking. Transcendental self-consciousness, on Melnick’s phenomenologicalaccount, is only an occasionally present facet of acts of thought such as ours, one thatnevertheless exists entirely within intellectual marshalling action. Melnick’s picture is of

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an added reportative element that is dynamically coupled to the ever-present focalizingelement that is the thinker within the thinking self as a whole. But it is important to seethat although this coupling is only ever contingently actual—we are not, as a straight-forward matter of fact, always self-conscious—it is necessarily possible. Thus self-consciousness is reflective only in the sense that it involves a representation of (a reporton) the very spontaneity of the thinking it accompanies. Transcendental self-consciousnessis not reflective in the sense that it involves any kind of inner noticing, for only in theformer sense is reflectivity always possible.

But what of that with which transcendental self-consciousness is contrasted? Melnickalso gives a phenomenologist’s account of inner intuition, and it is here that I think hisexamples cause confusion. Inner intuition—or as Melnick calls it, presumably to empha-size its dynamic character, inner attending—involves no additional manifold to thatalready involved in outer attending. Rather it consists solely in retracting one’s attentioninward while outer attending. Inner attending, precisely unlike transcendental self-consciousness, is a kind of inner noticing, a noticing of the character of one’s own states.Again this view has its attractions, particularly in the context of Melnick’s overallposition. It fits perfectly with the description of a thought-episode as a more or lessgradual coalescing of several more or less distinct thoughts around a single focal point.When one is engaged purely in outer attending, both one’s focal and peripheral thoughtsconcern what is outer-perceived. When one is at the same time inner attending, one’s focalpoint is the act of outer attending itself, whereas that which is outer-perceived nowfeatures at the periphery only.

However, I am not at all sure what it is to retract one’s attention in such a way,or rather, I am not sure that doing so can really constitute Kantian inner intuition. By wayof explication Melnick gives examples of attending to how one is looking at things, tothe straining of our eyes, to how one is listening, to the tilting of the head upward(pp. 112–13). But surely such examples are all irreducibly bodily and thereby spatial, yetthe form of inner attending is supposed to be time. What’s more, it is not obvious thatsuch cases give us a flavour of what is unique about inner attending. Presumably I canlikewise attend to my manner of outer attending without inner attending at all. Forexample, am I not outer attending to the straining of my eyes if I look in the mirror andwatch my pupils dilate? Melnick fully admits to relaxing the level of abstraction with hisexamples, but it is just not clear what would be left of the account if he did not do so.On the one hand, Melnick’s account of inner attending as dependent on outer attendingseems attractive for the very reason that it seems a promising place to find an explanationof Kant’s notoriously problematic assertions to the effect that spatial and temporalexperience are somehow interdependent (as opposed to the former relying on the latterbut not so conversely). On the other hand, relaxing the level of abstraction as he doesseems to blur the distinction too much. Melnick’s apparent reliance on such examplesmakes one suspect that his account surreptitiously conflates Kant’s conception of the linebetween inner and outer with the contemporary philosopher of mind’s conception of thatline, according to which it lies, say, at the skin. The latter is a line drawn within space andtime, the former between space and time.

I have focused in this review on some points in Melnick’s book where his accountseems incomplete or unclear. This has meant that I have neglected a large amount ofincredibly valuable material that is both controversial and clear. In particular, Melnickdeftly explains the place of Kant’s views in notable modern debates. To take twoexamples, with regard to the role of reality in perception (in Chapter 12) he suggests how,in the context of transcendental idealism, the immediacy of intuition amounts to a form

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of naïve realism (although I would be as happy to align it to externalism about mentalstates); with regard to persons he discusses (in Chapter 10) Parfit’s psychologicalcontinuity view, and both fission and fusion and how they relate to the thorny matter ofintellectual intuition.

There is also much of value that is more internal to Kant scholarship. With regard tothe paralogisms that help structure the book, Melnick’s readings are at the same timehighly sensitive to the text yet innovative, ambitious yet persuasive. Each of theparalogisms follows the same pattern. They are syllogistic inferences that are renderedformally invalid on account of an equivocation that need not be tracked down to a singleterm—after all, ‘sophisma figurae dictionis’ (B411) does sound rather general. In each case,disambiguation reveals two distinct conclusions, both of which are of ontic significance,but only one of which is accepted by Kant as a conclusion that it is legitimate to drawfrom the cogito alone. Nevertheless the other, illegitimate conclusion is accepted, with atightly circumscribed humility, as a noumenal possibility (particularly fascinating in thisvein is Melnick’s brief allusions to Spinoza’s God and Leibniz’s monads). And along theway, Melnick provides uncounted insights into issues such as Kant’s conception ofmodality—a normative account of necessity and a non-counterfactual account of possi-bility; schemata—a kind of regulatory mental rehearsal of the conceptual rules with whichthey are coactive in thoughts; the difference between concepts and judgements—adeceptively simple issue that exercised Kant and his contemporary J. S. Beck, essentiallya mere matter of positive assessment; and Kant’s relation to Berkeley—both metaphysicalidealists and relationalists about reality, but only the latter a phenomenalist to boot.

In short, there is far more to this admirable book than can even be hinted at in a shortreview like this, and it deserves to play a central role in the ongoing debate on Kant’stheory of the self.

Andrew StephensonDepartment of Philosophy

University of OxfordUK

[email protected]

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Kant's Theory of the Self, by Arthur Melnick. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009, viii + 186 pp. ISBN...

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