Kant on Animal Consciousness

McLear, Colin

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Kant on Animal Consciousness

Colin McLear

November 2011, Volume 11, No. 15, pp. 1-16

Permalink: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3521354.0011.015

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Abstract

Kant is often considered to have argued that perceptual awareness of objects in one's environment depends on the subject's possession of conceptual capacities. This conceptualist interpretation raises an immediate problem concerning the nature of perceptual awareness in non-rational, non-concept using animals. In this paper I argue that Kant’s claims concerning animal representation and consciousness do not foreclose the possibility of attributing to animals the capacity for objective perceptual consciousness, and that a non-conceptualist interpretation of Kant’s position concerning perceptual awareness can actively endorse this attribution. Kant can consistently allow that animals have a point of view on the objective world which possesses a distinctive phenomenal character while denying what seems most important to him – viz. that animals have the capacity to take cognitive attitudes towards, and thus self-ascribe, their own representational states.

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There remains a worry concerning Kant’s expressed views regarding consciousness, apperception and inner sense. We might grant that Kant allows that animals possess a variety of forms of consciousness, so long as these are distinguished from apperceptive self-consciousness, but this would seem to require granting animals the capacity for inner sense. Granting animals an inner sense means granting them inner intuitions. But does Kant really allow animals intuitive awareness? Intuition suggests a cognitive relation to an object (A19/B33; A20/B34; A108–9; A320/B376–7). We’ve seen reasons for thinking that he must allow them inner intuitions – viz. temporally ordered representational states. But if animals have inner intuitions then aren’t they aware of themselves, and so self-conscious? Moreover, if animals have inner intuitions might they not also have outer? In the next section I argue that attributing to animals the capacity for both forms of inner and outer intuition, and thus genuine spatio-temporal conscious awareness, does not require attributing to animals self-consciousness.

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