Abstract

I argue that Anil Gomes’s The Practical Self contains a conflict between its intended starting point and Gomes’s professed notions of self-consciousness and objectivity: The starting point demands that I make no assumptions that are not, at least initially, immediately available to me qua self-conscious subject; but Gomes’s notion of self-consciousness, by referring to myself as a self, amongst other possible things, implies the assumption that there is a manifold of things, which is not, at least initially, immediately available to me qua self-conscious subject. I contend that Kant notes this conflict in Descartes and avoids it by conceiving of self-consciousness as consciousness that is consciousness of itself as determining itself, thus assuming no self. I show that the source of the described conflict is Gomes’s ontological notion of objectivity, which, contrary to the demand of his starting point, assumes that there is a manifold of things, of which I might want to convince myself that it is not of my making, thereby enabling the assumption of a self. I argue that, if we take seriously Gomes’s intended starting point, our aim must be, at least initially, the vindication of the possibility of the independence of our self-conscious ways of representing from our idiosyncratic perspective on what is represented, that is, an argument from Kantian self-consciousness to the perspectival notion of objectivity that Gomes considers but sets aside.