MIND AND SOUL In the Critique of Judgement Kant divides the faculties of the human mind into: (a) cognitive powers; (b) powers of feeling pleasure and pain; and (c) powers of desire By ‘cognitive powers’ are meant, in this context, intellectual powers, and here Kant makes a threefold distinction between understanding (Verstand), reason (Vernunft), and judgement (Urteil) Understanding is the legitimate operation of the intellect in the conceptualization of experience That is something that we know from the Wrst critique, where too ‘Reason’ is used as a technical term for the illegitimate operation of the intellect in transcendental speculation In the second critique a positive role is given to reason as the arbiter of ethical behaviour The function of judgement, however, is not clear from the earlier critiques Previous philosophers had used the word (as Kant himself often does) to mean an assent to a proposition of any kind In the third critique Kant concentrates on judgements of aesthetic taste We thus arrive at a trinity of faculties: one (the understanding) which has truth as its object; one (the practical reason) which has goodness as its object; and one (the judgement) which has as its object the beautiful and the sublime (M, 31V.) All the operations of the intellect are accompanied by self-consciousness Kant spells this out most fully in the case of the understanding The conceptualization of experience involves the union of all the items of awareness in a single consciousness In a diYcult, but original and profound, section of the Wrst critique entitled ‘The original synthetic unity of apperception’ Kant analyses what is meant by speaking of the unity of selfconsciousness (B, 132–43) It is not possible for me to discover that something is an item of my consciousness It is absurd to think of me as being faced with an item of consciousness, then going on to wonder to whom it belongs, and then concluding upon inquiry that it belongs to none other than myself Through reXection I may become aware of many features of my conscious experience (is it painful? is it clear? etc.) but I cannot become aware that it is mine The self-conscious discoveries that one can make about one’s perceptions are called by Kant ‘apperceptions’ The point that one does not rely on experience to recognize one’s consciousness as one’s own is stated thus by Kant: one’s ownership of one’s own consciousness is not an empirical apperception, but a ‘transcendental apperception’ What unites my experiences in a single consciousness is not experience itself; in themselves my experiences are, as Kant says ‘many coloured and 241