Kant and the Self 65

controversial), at other times the I is said to be a perpetual theme: "every con-

sciousness of an object x involves ... an outward, object directed consciousness
(a consciousness of x), and an inward, self-referential awareness (a conscious-
ness that I am conscious of X)."42 Note that this passage is not an expression of
SAT, for it is speaking of an actual consciousness of consciousness, not merely
of a "real potential." The claim of such an actual consciousness seems unnec-
essary, inaccurate, and encourages an absurd regress. Yet the claim is made
repeat.edly, for example, "When I say that I represent something, this is equiv-
alent to the following: "I am aware that I have a representation of this object."43
But surely, absurdities result if "equivalent" is taken literally in the above; one
needs only to begin to make the called for substitutions.
Here again there is an abundance of ironies, for not only does this posi-
tion appear to take us back into a kind of complexity that the attack on the
Reflexion Theory was meant to liberate us from, but it also seems that the way
out of this complexity is ready at hand in Neuhouser's own stress on the idea
that we have "easy and immediate access" to our own awarenesses.
44
This
access can be explained simply by the structure of those awarenesses; since they
are awarenesses of the form "I think that x," no wonder they can be and will be
called up that way on reflection. But this does not mean that they always have
to be already of the form "I think that I think that x."
Unfortunately, this "constant" form is affirmed on the Fichtean analysis.
But how could Anti-Reflexion-Theorists, of all people, make such an odd affir-
mation? The Fichteans defend themselves by emphasizing two ideas: first that
here the initial "think"-in "I think that I think that x"-is "nondiscursive,"
and, second, that the theme of this thinking is not an "object" but an "activity."
So, the claim is that there is an "ever present" "intellectual intuition" here,
whereby I know something (namely, that "I think that x") "because I do it,"45
and what I know is not a thing but something else, my activity.46 But the former
idea, that doing is knowing-is mysterious, since doing by itself is not tanta-
mount to theoretical knowing (only the latter can be epistemically evaluated;
and Fichte himself argues that even the impression of action isn't a theoretical
proof that one is really acting), and the latter idea-that it is an activity that is
known-is irrelevant, since what we know are correlates of that-clauses, states
of affairs, and not things or activities simpliciter.
So much for the fITst sense in which Neuhauser elaborates Fichte's notion
of the I as "self-positing." The second sense concerns the idea of self-positing
as a "transcendental condition of consciousness," that is, of empirical knowl-
edge. Neuhouser discusses several Fichtean texts which develop a line of argu-
ment close to what was earlier called Henrich Claim I, namely that a special
sort of (actual and not just potential) self-awareness is required to make sense
of the subject's knowledge of its identity over time, which in tum is supposedly
necessary for its knowledge of external objects. Neuhauser does an excellent