“The I think must be able to accompany all my representations.”

What does it mean?

The usual reading takes the sentence as a claim about the unity of consciousness: representations count as mine only if they can be combined under one self-consciousness, expressed as the ability of the apperception formula to accompany them. It is a condition of experience, not a sighting of a soul-substance. A rival reading hears Descartes's cogito repeated as a metaphysical discovery of a thinking thing, which is what the paralogisms will later criticise. The sentence opens the discussion of transcendental apperception in the second-edition deduction.

Did Immanuel Kant really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Guyer and Wood's English of the transcendental deduction in the second edition, B 131 to B 132. The apperception formula is the form of apperception, not a discovery of an inner soul by introspection. This wording is a translation.

Where it comes from

Critique of Pure Reason, B 131–132

Approximate date: 1787.

How to use it

A scattered morning in a kitchen in Sheffield, school bags, a news alert, a memory of a bill, is one person's morning only if those items can be held as belonging to one awareness. Kant's point is that formal requirement, not a feeling of having a deep self. The morning can still feel fragmented; The claim is that experience of a world of objects already depends on a possible unity, not that one feels unified before breakfast.

A mindset reading

The sentence is not an invitation to preface every thought with a performance of selfhood. Must be able to accompany is weaker than does constantly announce. He is describing a structural possibility, and he is not offering introspection as a method that finds the thinker behind the thoughts; Confusing this with Hume's bundle, or with Descartes's substance, is the usual way the line gets sorted into the wrong argument.

Understand the philosophy

The key term is transcendental apperception, the original self-consciousness that unifies representations, as distinct from an empirical look inward at one's moods. The apperception formula is that unity's expression. The deduction argues that the categories apply to objects of experience because objects have to be thinkable by such a unified consciousness. Guyer and Wood's English is the standard for this passage; The paralogisms then warn against turning the apperception formula into knowledge of an immortal soul.

Related

• “Have the courage to use your own understanding! — that is the motto of enlightenment.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

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