Consciousness as Inner Sensation: Crusius and Kant

Abstract

What is it that makes a mental state conscious?Recent commentators have proposed that for Kant, consciousness results from differentiation: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is distinguished, by means of our conceptual capacities, from other states or things.I argue instead that Kant's conception of state consciousness is sensory: A mental state is conscious insofar as it is accompanied by an inner sensation.Interpreting state consciousness as inner sensation reveals an underappreciated influence of Crusius on Kant's view, solves some long-standing puzzles concerning Kant's difficult doctrine of self-affection, and sheds light on his theory of inner experience.1. See Rosefeldt (2000: 213), Wunderlich (2005), Sturm and Wunderlich (2010), Dyck (2011). Wolff and Crusius on ConsciousnessKant's account of state consciousness does not come in the form of an explicitly presented theory.In piecing together an interpretation from his various interspersed remarks, some background knowledge of the accounts prevalent in Kant's time will be helpful, and this section presents what I take to be the two main competing strands: The Leibnizian approach, represented by Christian Wolff; and the Thomasian-Pietist approach, represented by Christian August Crusius.2. See Paton (1936/1976), Collins (1999), Allison (2004), Schmitz (2015).3. References to Kant's works give Kant (1900-) volume and page, except the Kritik der reinen Vernunft where I use the standard A/B edition pagination.Translations are from Kant (1992-), or, where unavailable, my own.Abbreviations are indicated in a section at the end of the paper.4. Frierson's (2014) otherwise comprehensive book on Kant's empirical psychology contains no explicit discussion of empirical consciousness.