ABSTRACT
In my interpretation, the fundamental issue of the Paralogisms is an ontological one. We are not self-subsistent simple entities or substances. Rather we are actions of intellectual marshaling within which there indivisibly exists the subject (that to which a thought belongs) as well as his thought (with the thought emerging from the subject, the subject converging or coalescing about the thought, holding onto it, or leaving it). I have claimed that for Kant this is the positive conclusion that is revealed in the cogito. Any substantial reality we are is noumenal (in the negative sense) and no part of the positive conclusion of the Paralogisms, as it is no part of what is revealed in the cogito. I argued in Chapter 2 that this ontological claim is crucial for the consistency of the ‘I think’ with Kant’s doctrine of the ideality of space and time. If we were indeed self-subsistent entities to which thoughts belong, we as thinking subjects would have to be atemporal noumenal beings since time exists only in (intellectual accompanying and unifying) pure intuition. An entity with its own intrinsic nature beyond such action could only be temporal by being itself intuited within such action (which we aren’t for Kant) or by being in a time that corresponds to, and so is other than, pure intuition. The latter time simply doesn’t exist for Kant,
and so the entity would have to be atemporal. In my interpretation the Paralogisms precisely make clear how the thinking subject whose intuiting constitutes time is not an atemporal noumenal entity. It makes clear, that is, that the subject which is the source of time and to which everything appears is not noumenal. Nor, however, is the subject appearance, as it is not intuited. It is, rather that intellectual action that accompanies or conceptually unifi es intuiting (analogous to intellectual action accompanying counting), temporal only in that it shifts with the progression of pure intuition. The thinking subject then is neither appearance (intuited) nor thing in itself (atemporal). That it has such a third ontological status is stated by Kant as shown in footnote (a) to B423 where the ‘I think’
signifi es only something real that is given . . . not as appearance, nor as thing in itself (noumenon) but as something that actually exists, and
which in the proposition “I think” is denoted as such. (italics mine; see also B157)
I believe that in part it is ignoring, or at least failing to come to grips with, this third ontological status that leads to all the interpretations according to which the positive doctrine of the Paralogisms is that the thinking subject is somehow not fully and concretely real at all.
