Self-Consciousness and the Priority Question: A Critique of the “Sensibility First” Reading of Kant

Abstract

This essay presents a critique of what Robert Hanna has recently called the “sensibility first” reading of Kant. I first spell out, in agreement with Hanna, why the contemporary debate among Kant scholars over conceptualism and non-conceptualism must be understood only from within the perspective of what I dub the “priority question”—that is, the question whether one or the other of our “two stems” of cognition may ground the objectivity and normativity of the other. I then spell out why the priority question may be asked only from within the perspective of self- consciousness. Specifically, the central issue to be dealt with is how what Kant calls the original combination of understanding and sensibility is a synthesis internal to an act of self-consciousness. Only then can we ask what that original synthesis might tell us about the possibility of prioritizing one capacity over another in a story of cognition generally. Once we see the central issue more clearly, then I will look at the “sensibility first” view in its most general form and propose that it should be criticized for its failure to account for Kant’s notion of an objective unity of self-consciousness.