Kant & The Human Subject
Brian Morris compares the ways Kant’s question “What is the human being?” has been answered by philosophers and anthropologists.
Okay, you’re a serious philosopher. Do these distinctions seem reasonable to you? If so, in regard to an experience you had that was of particular importance to you, how would you describe it insofar as to the best of your ability you focus in on distinguishing these three categories of “I”, “I” and “i”.
My point would be that there are biological/demographic facts about you. Facts that all rational men and women would accept because they can be reasonably demonstrated to be facts. The first because you are in fact a member of the human species given the evolution of life on planet Earth. The second because there are any number of facts that can be established in regard to our “specific familial and biological setting”. The third because there are as well numerous facts that can be shared with others regarding the demographic parameters of the life we live.
The self here is an objective entity interacting with other objective entities such that actual truths can be exchanged in which all reasonable can come to agree regarding. Thus allowing us to, among other things, go about the business of interacting with others from day to day without everything being brought into question.
Here I can only keep coming back to what I deem to be the most important distinction of all: the extent to which, however one comes up with categories from which one approaches any particular sense of identity, one is able demonstrate that what he or she believes “in my head” is in fact true. Now we don’t have many “tribal” folks among us but for them they embodied a culture in which, by and large, there was a place for everyone in the tribe/village and everyone had damn well better be in their place. Things were only as they could ever be given one or another collection of Gods.
For the rest of us though in the “modern world” there are considerably more options. Socially, politically and economically. But my distinction still holds. To what extent as one of the three “selves” above are you able to demonstrate that what you think is true is in fact true.
Shifting back and forth between and intertwining the either/or world and the is/ought world.
Given a particular context.