Kant ve Benlik

In this paper I try to look closely at Kant’s concept of self. As it seems, Kant has three notions of self, namely the self as the thing in itself, the transcendental self, and the empirical self. According to Kant, we cannot have any knowledge of the nature of the self as it is in itself. But we can surely have knowledge of the empirical self. As to the transcendental self, Kant says that we cannot know what its nature is but we can have a pure consciousness of it. This pure selfconsciousness is neither an intuition nor even a concept, but rather an empty ‘thought’. The transcendental self which is characterized by Kant as the formal or the logical subject of thought, functions as the source of the categories and a priori principles of experience. On the other hand, our empirical consciousness of the phenomenal self is possible because we can intuit ourselves in time and think it under the categories.