the depths and shallows of experience 75weconceivethem. But—long before modern psychology—Kant questioned the
coherence of such a dichotomy. We do not experience familiar objects and
events—a cat drinking milk, a tree swaying in the wind, someone hammering
a nail into a wall—as collections of color points on a spatial grid. As James put
it (in the case of a “presented and recognized material object”), “sensations
and apperceptive idea fuse...sointimately that you can no more tell where
one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning circular
panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the
painted canvas join together.”^10 To employ Kant’s language, in the sort of per-
ception James described (or—an example Kant himself uses—in the case of
experiencing something as a boat sailing down a river), we have not mere
unconceptualized sensations, whatever those might be, but asynthesisof ex-
periences and conceptual ideas, the ideas of space, time, and causation. This
is something that the phenomenological school, beginning with Husserl, like-
wise emphasized: I see a building as something whichhasa back, Husserl
pointed out, even when I don’t see the back. Such perception is fallible, to be
sure; but so is the perception that something is red or circular. And the retreat
to “sense data” in the hope thattherewe can find something “incorrigible” has
long been recognized to be a “loser.”
A second issue that plays a large role inThe Critique of Pure Reason, and
one that figures into contemporary attacks on what postmodernists consider
to be the metaphysical illusion of the “ego,” is the issue of right and wrong
ways to think about what it means to be or have aself. (As Nicholas Boyle has
observed, postmodernist doubts about whether there is such a thing as a self,
or an “author,” never stop the postmodernist from cashing a royalty check.)
Here again, paying more attention to Kant would help to clear our heads.
For Kant, rational thought itself depends on the fact that I regard my
thoughts, experiences, memories, and so on, asmine. To illustrate Kant’s point,
imagine yourself going through a very simple form of reasoning, say, “Boiling
water hurts if you stick your finger in it; this is boiling water; so it will hurt if
I stick my finger in this.” If the time-slice of me that thought “Boiling water
hurts if you stick your finger in it” was one person, person A, and the time-
slice that thought the minor premise, “This is boiling water,” was a different
person, person B, and the person that thought the conclusion, “It will hurt if
I stick my finger in this,” was yet a third person, person C, then that conclusion
was not warranted, indeed, the sequence of thoughts was not an argument at
all, since the thoughts were thoughts of different thinkers, none of whom had
any reason to be bound by what the others thought or had thought. We are
responsiblefor what we have thought and done in the past, responsiblenow,
intellectually and practically, and that is what makes usthinkers, rational agents
in a world, at all. Kant, like Locke before him, can be seen as making the point
that the thinking of my thoughts and actions at different times asminedoes