66 Self and Subject

job of retracing Fichte' s thoughts along this line, but he concludes, quite prop-
erly, that this line "can be shown to rest on a serious misconception of the
[Transcendental] Deduction's strategy."47 The misconception involves failing to
see that for Kant the transcendental role of the "I think" in the Deduction (cf.
19) has to do with its being the correlate of representations that are related to it
as objective and category-governed-and not with any direct relation between
a constant intellectual intuition and individual representations.
Neuhouser is right in arguing that although Kant speaks of representa-
tions that must be able to be taken as "my own," Kant does not mean to account
. for them in Fichte's way. However, Neuhouser goes too far in explaining the
difference this way: "What makes this condition possible for Kant [that repre-
sentations count as mine] is not an original awareness of each of them as my
own, but the joining together of these representations in accord with the cate-
gories."48 Here, unfortunately, Neuhouser is implying that Kant is proposing
sufficient rather than necessary conditions for the warranted ascription of states
to a particular subject.
49
But if Kant were proposing such sufficient conditions,
he would after all be offering what was called earlier a "classical non-Kantian
theory" that is subject to the objections to the Reflexion Theory. Fortunately,
we need not ascribe this strange view to Kant, and yet we can still accept Neu-
houser's own conclusion that the "transcendental" role that Fichte may envision .
for his doctrine of a "self-positing" theoretical subject does nothing to force a
revision of Kant's doctrine of apperception.
Fichte's third sense of self-positing concerns the subject as "self-consti-
tuting existence." The main idea here is that if the I is thought of not as a thing
that acts or has a power to act, but just as the activity of self-positing itself, then
at least one need not postulate a "preexisting noumenal ground" for one's
states of consciousness.
5o
As in other issues, one can understand the motivation
for this Fichtean point as a response to obscurities in the metaphysics of quasi-
Kantians such as Reinhold.
51
But the basic issue here can be discussed inde-
pendently of any invocation of "noumenal grounds." The issue is whether it is
true that "what does not exist for itself is not an 1,"52 and that this I cannot
have any kind of ground outside itself.
Both claims are mysterious and appear to conflate epistemic and meta-
physical issues. This seems especially clear for the second claim, that the self can
have no ground outside it. It may be true that the conception of any ground that
the self invokes to explain itself must be part of the selfs epistemic state; but this
hardly means that such a ground, anymore than the correlate of any other con-
ception we have, could not exist on its own and have an effect on us. The first
claim involves the old issue of whether the self and its self-awareness are neces-
sarily coextensive. Obviously, a being with no representations at all would hardly
deserve the title of a subject or self, but Fichte' s claim must be more than that, it
must be the claim that there is no state of a self that does not actually involve self-