Am I An Individual? Part 2

A Philosophical History of the Question

Read Part 1: Ancient to Early Modern Philosophy

Part 2: Kant to the Present Times

Kant and the 19th Century

The question of what is an individual took a significant turn with Immanuel Kant. Kant’s philosophical revolution is his realization that the mind contributes to experience. Kant’s schema explained how the mind contained categories of understanding that enabled sense data to be experienced as objects. The mind must impose a rational structure on the sense experiences, otherwise we’d have nothing but an endless jumble of unconnected impressions. So the mind is not purely passive as earlier philosophers had assumed.

You may think that of course our learning, past experiences, and feelings all structure how we perceive what happens to us. Today, we take for granted that our different circumstances and experiences makes us each an individual. This was not the case in Kant’s time. That today we understand that our individual experiences and thoughts help create who we uniquely are has to do with Kant’s discussion of the active mind and what freedom is.

We are each free individuals, Kant says, because our practical reason enables us to know ourselves as a free person…