This is a great question, for me at least, because it highlights one of the parts of the Critique of Pure Reason that I really struggled with. To understand it, you have to understand the distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal, and Kant’s understanding of sensuous intuition, and you have to apply these understandings to introspection.
This is going to be an answer to the question that doubles as a crash-course in Kant, so hang on tight!
It’s good to start with the senses because that’s where Kant gets his phenomenal and noumenal distinction. “Sensuous intuition,” for Kant, is the ultimate material of all thought, all cognition: there is nothing you can think, see, hear, experience, understand, or do without some kind of sensuous intuition. If you want a definition in simpler terms, the best I can do is to say that sensuous intuition is the impact that things have on us. We do not know the objects that cause our sensations, only how they affect us.
Try this: do that trick you probably did as a child where you poke your eyeball through your eyelid and cause everything to look like it’s slanted. Did the room move? No. Only your picture of the room. Now, this by itself is now enough to disprove some kind of direct naive realism (there are easy replies to it) where we see the things in front of us just as they are, but it should at least give you the basic idea: we have internal representations, and those representations are what we really know.
The wrong way to take this is to assume that we’re all locked inside of our minds and staring at some screen, and that the whole external world is projected onto that screen, as if a camera were relaying the external world to us. That’s not quite how it works for Kant, and it’s easy to be misled into that picture because of the visual metaphor. A better way to put it might be to use an analogy to feeling: suppose you’re floating in a dark void, and something brushes by you. You don’t know what the object was, only the tactile sensations where it touched you. This, again, is a metaphor, and it’s more abstract than that, but it gives you the basic idea. Everything you experience is merely the impact that something else had on you, the manner in which you were affected. It all comes down to the idea that you have perception, and you can think of your perception as a passive thing that is affected by something outside of it, and the manner in which the perception is affected is what you really know, not anything outside of that.
I’m going to take a little detour here and characterize Kant’s philosophy as a response to Hume. Hume was an empiricist who thought all of our knowledge came from sensation, or sense-data. Empiricism here doesn’t just mean “science” the way people sometimes use that word. Empiricism means that everything that is in your mind was first in your senses, that everything you think or do is built up from sensation without any “batteries included” stuff going on, without any a priori features in your mind that were there to begin with. Kant thinks our sensuous intuitions have to be structured by certain things that are inherent in our minds (Kant’s term is a priori) such as space and time, but you cannot even reflect on space and time unless you’re a creature that has experiences.
Kant’s dictum, that all knowledge begins with experience but does not arise from experience, is precisely this: you need some material to reflect on before you can discover your a priori categories. Take space, for example. Space has to be a priori, that is, prior to experience, for the simple reason that you cannot sense objects in space unless you already have a “built in” faculty for perceiving space. How can I possibly have any experience at all, any experience of, for example, playing catch in a field or walking down a hallway, unless that experience is spatial? And how can I experience space if I don’t have some means of organizing things spatially to begin with? That’s the issue. Space has to be a priori, and not derived from experience, because I need to understand space on some basic level to have any experiences to begin with. Remember, though, Kant’s dictum that I just alluded to: all knowledge does not arise from experience, but it does begin with experience. It’s true that I have to have some innate sense of space to even begin having experiences, but I cannot reflect on my a priori concept of space until I have experiences. To wit, I needed the a priori concept of space in order to have spatial experiences, but I could not become aware of my concept of space until I had those experiences. You start off with a built-in concept of space, and then use that to have experiences; then, if you reflect on your experiences, you realize that you must have a concept of space.
This little dialectic in the last paragraph, by the way, is a good way to explain Kant’s idea of a transcendental argument. A transcendental argument takes things as they are, and then deduces what must be the case for things to be as they are. “In order for things to be thus-and-so, such-and-such must be the case; things are thus-and-so, so such-and-such is the case.” Kant’s argument for the a priori nature of space is based on this kind of argument, and much of the CPR uses this kind of reasoning. If you can understand the preceding paragraph, you can understand how a transcendental argument works, because that’s exactly what that paragraph is.
This would be a good place to mention spontaneity. Spontaneity is basically the structuring of the data of our sensuous intuition by our inborn a priori faculties. Our a priori concepts of space and time structure and situate things in our awareness by giving them a spatiotemporal location, and we have to have those concepts to even have experiences. But those concepts of space and time are spontaneous, in that they originate entirely in us. Our minds make a big contribution to constructing the world we perceive, even though we don’t get the data from ourselves, because we “choose” how to structure the world we see.
This raises another question: where do we get the data?
Remember that we can only know how we are affected, not necessarily the whatever-it-is that affects us. That which affects us is the noumenon, the something-out-there that gives us the impressions. We cannot know the noumena, only the impressions that the noumena make on us. Now, Kant is saying stuff about the noumena, and the noumena are supposed to be the stuff we can’t talk about, so it’s very natural to ask, “Wait, isn’t Kant contradicting himself?” Not quite. Whenever Kant talks about the noumena, he does so in a strictly negative way; he never says what the noumenon is, only what it is not. It’s completely okay to say that the noumena are not the same thing as our impressions, and it’s perfectly okay to characterize them as somehow being the source of our impressions, but you can’t go any further than that. It’s a bit like a sign at the edge of a hallway that says “this far and no further.” Kant treats the noumena as a limit; if you try to go beyond that limit, you fall into illusions.
Now, when it comes to the self, we run into a very tangled issue indeed, one that a lot of philosophers don’t really have the stomach for. In brief, Kant thinks that we cannot sense ourselves, but only the manner in which we are affected by ourselves.
Here’s the relevant passage from the CPR:
The difficulty here lies wholly in this, how a subject can have an internal intuition of itself: but this difficulty is common to every theory. The consciousness of self (apperception) is the simple representation of the ego, and if by it alone all the manifold (representations) in the subject were given spontaneously, the inner intuition would be intellectual. In man this consciousness requires internal perception of the manifold, which is previously given in the subject, and the manner in which this is given in the mind without spontaneity, must, on account of this difference, be called sensibility. If the faculty of self-consciousness is to seek for, that is, to apprehend, what lies in the mind, it must affect the mind, and can thus only produce an intuition of itself. The form of this, which lay antecedently in the mind, determines the manner in which the manifold exists together in the mind, namely, in the representation of time. The intuition of self, therefore, is not, as if it could represent itself immediately and as spontaneously and independently active, but according to the manner in which it is internally affected, consequently as it appears to itself, not as it is.
Now, our spontaneity can only structure the data of sensuous intuition: it cannot produce them. The data which my faculties structure into a representation of, say, a cigarette, are given by sensuous intuition, which come from the impact on me of a something-or-another outside of me, which is the noumenon. If my spontaneity could give its own data, that would allow me to do stuff like spontaneously conjuring a cigarette out of nothing, because my spontaneity could just provide the data and then structure it however it wants. This would be, effectively, an intellectual intuition, or an intuition of the abstract intellect that can provide and structure its own data.
Accordingly, when I have an intuition of myself, I cannot be the one providing it, because I would otherwise be causa sui. I would, effectively, be God. The intuition of myself must be given as effects on me, and the thing effecting me must be my own faculty of self-consciousness.
The problem is, though, that the faculty of self-consciousness, the introspective sense, affects the subject (the self) and then gets an intuition of what it did, but this intuition is, in turn, represented through the faculty of self-consciousness itself. So introspection “digs down” into the self, as it were, which affects the self; the introspective sense then represents this affection of the self, to itself. To tease all this apart, you can think of self-consciousness as a lense that shows images of the self, but whenever it shows the image, it changes the object it’s looking at, changing it by observing it, and this changed object cannot be given directly, so it has to be filtered through the self-consciousness; once it is so filtered, the self-consciousness finally perceives it! The language I used in that last bit is very crude, using inaccurate and misleading terms like “filtered,” but it should give you the gist.
Recall, now, that time is a transcendental form of our perceptions. Time is the form of the internal sense, by which all the other representations are ordered, being connected through causality; we order events in time within our representations by seeing the causal connections between them. Remember that our experience of our world, what Kant calls the manifold, exists in one state at one time, and a change in its state can only happen through time. This means that, for the introspective process to occur, the whole thing must be situated temporally.
It follows that my intuition of myself, my self-representation, is constrained by the form of time, which means that my subjective experience of time just is the form that governs my introspective sense, the a priori structure that makes that sense possible. I cannot perceive myself directly, only as I appear to myself when I change under the force of my own introspection.
This sounds very limiting, and in some ways, it is. It means that we can’t see ourselves directly. However, it is this absence of direct access to time, this very absence of intellectual intuition, that makes it possible for us to be “subjects,” to have subjectivity. All of the strange things that subjectivity does — including free will, if there is such a thing — are possible because we lack direct access to ourselves and the noumenal realm. And our spontaneous faculties take a part in structuring this. We are bound by the intuitive data we get, but we are, in some sense, causa sui, insofar as we assemble the world around us, and ourselves, through our faculties of spontaneity. Our limitation, our tragic flaw, as it were, is also what makes it possible for us to be subjects at all.
Perhaps that’s what drove Tolkien to write this:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.
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