58 Self and Subject

I propose that the simplest way to understand this "personal" quality is to

presume that the individual representations in question are already at least
implicitly of the fonn, "I think that so and so ..." It might at first seem that this
would make redundant the "transcendental" "I think," the "I think" that neces-
sarily can accompany all the representations that are "something to" one. How-
ever, a transcendental "I think" is worth introducing because it has a special col-
lective function, for even if in fact the same "I" is distributively involved in the
set:
(E) I think that x, I think that y, I think that z, etc.... ;
nevertheless, (E) is not the same as:
(T) I think that (I think that x, I think that y, I think that z, etc....).
The difference here is not merely that (T) is more complex than any part
of (E) or even the whole set (E). There are at least two extra features of (T) that
are noteworthy. The first is that it implicitly includes the claim (which mayor
may not be a correct claim) that all the uses of "I" within it are coreferential;
that is, I believe Kant understands (T) to include the claim that the I which
thinks that x, is the same as the I which thinks that y, and so on, as well as the
thought that this is the very the same I that thinks that I think that x, and so
forth. A second, and ll10re controversial point is that, given the a priori status of
transcendental apperception, it seems that Kant understands the possibility of
(T) to be a truth condition of the components of (E).13 This may be because of
the meaning of "I" in these contexts; for Kant nlay be reasoning, what could it
mean to be an I that is a correlate of any of the "first-level" thoughts, "I think
that x," and so on, if that I could not be identical with other I's, such as those
referred to in (T)? But if the full meaning of (T) is used here, then this amounts
to what suddenly appears to be a fairly substantive claim, namely, that a "real
subject" of thought could not be such that it could have only one instantia-
tion, or even such that its multiple instantiations could not be recognized by it
as such, that is, as instantiations of one and the same subject. The latter part of
this claim is striking because, if one allows, as it has just been noted that Kant
does, that there are representations in beings incapable of thoughts, then it can
well seem (with a little sympathy for something like the old idea of a "chain of
being") that there also are or could be thoughts in beings incapable of thoughts
of thoughts. In Kant's terms, such beings could be said to have "empirical" but
not "transcendental" apperception (hence the designations "E" and "T").
It can sound sadly dogmatic to insist that such beings are impossible, or
to ascribe such an insistence to Kant, but can one avoid such dogmatism and
still hold on to Kant's doctrine of apperception? One response would be to
concede the remote possibility of such beings and to stress that Kant's doctrine
is meant primarily as a doctrine for us; we know that we (at least) do in fact