Kant and the Demands of Self-Consciousness

So far, we have seen that an impersonal consciousness of self can be regarded as a necessary condition for experience in as much as an impersonal perspective is built into our ability to interpret the world in terms of concepts. And, in a very general way, Kant has connected the possibility of such impersonal self-consciousness with the existence of categories. The task of this chapter is to explain how the categories can serve as enabling conditions of experience. Carrying out this task involves an explanation of the link between self-consciousness and the kind of time-consciousness that is necessary to any experience that is intelligible to us. For the sake of brevity, I shall restrict my discussion to the arguments Kant develops in the Analogies of Experience for the enabling role in experience of the most significant set of categories: the relational categories of substance, causation, and interaction.

In contrast to the categories of quantity and quality, the so-called mathematical categories, Kant does not regard the dynamic categories in general, or the relational categories in particular, as constitutive of intuition. Kant insists that there cannot be intuitions that do not have some kind of extensive magnitude or metric, or some kind of intensive magnitude, or magnitude corresponding to the intensity of sensation involved in them.