The term 'Self,' as thus employed by Kant, Dewey says, is the
correlative of the intelligible world. "It is the transcendental self
looked at as 'there,' as a product, instead of as an activity or
process."[45] This, however, by no means exhausts what Kant means by the
self, for while he proceeds in the 'Deduction' as if the manifold of
sense and the synthetic unity of the self were strictly correlative, he
assumes a different attitude elsewhere. The manifold of sense is
something in relation to the thing-in-itself, and the forms of thought
have a reference beyond their mere application to the manifold. In the
other connections the self appears as something purely formal; something
apart from its manifestation in experience. In view of the wider meaning
of the self, Dewey asks, "Can the result of the transcendental deduction
stand without further interpretation?" It would appear that the content
of the self is not the same as the content of the known world. The self
is too great to exhaust itself in relation to sensation. "Sense is, as
it were, inadequate to the relations which constitute
self-consciousness, and thus there must also remain a surplusage in the
self, not entering into the make-up of the known world."[46] This
follows from the fact that, while the self is unconditioned, the
manifold of sensation is conditioned, as given, by the forms of space
and time. "Experience can never be complete enough to have a content
equal to that of self-consciousness, for experience can never escape its
limitation through space and time. Self-consciousness is real, and not
merely logical; it is the ground of the reality of experience; it is
wider than experience, and yet is unknown except so far as it is
reflected through its own determinations in experience,--this is the
result of our analysis of Kant, the _Ding-an-Sich_ being eliminated but
the Kantian method and all presuppositions not involved in the notion of
the _Ding-an-Sich_ being retained."[47]
Dewey's interpretation of Kant's doctrine as presented in the
'Deductions' is no doubt essentially correct. But granting that Kant
found it necessary to introduce a synthesis in imagination to account
for the unity of experience and justify our knowledge of its relations,
it must not be forgotten that this necessity followed from the nature of
his presuppositions. If the primal reality is a 'manifold of
sensations,' proceeding from a noumenal source, and lacking meaning and
relations, it follows that the manifold must be gathered up into a unity
before the experience which we actually apprehend can be accounted for.
But if reality is experience, possessing order and coherence in its own
nature, the productive imagination is rendered superfluous. Dewey,
however, clings to the notion that thought is a "synthetic activity"
which makes experience, and draws support from Kant for his doctrine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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