The paper argues that Kant's distinction between pure and empirical apperception cannot be interpreted as distinguishing two self-standing types of self-knowledge. For Kant, empirical and pure apperception need to cooperate to yield substantive self-knowledge. What makes Kant's account interesting is his acknowledgment that there is a deep tension between the way I become conscious of myself as subject through pure apperception and the way I am given to myself as an object of inner sense. This tension remains problematic in the realm of theoretical cognition, but can be put to work and made productive in terms of practical self-knowledge.

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This paper revisits the concept of autonomy and tries to elucidate the fundamental insight that freedom and law cannot be understood through their opposition, but rather have to be conceived of as conditions of one another. The paper investigates the paradigmatic Kantian formulation of this insight and discusses the diagnosis that the Kantian idea might give rise to a paradox in which autonomy reverts to arbitrariness or heteronomy. The paper argues that the fatal version of the paradox can be defused if we avoid the legalistic model of autonomy and rather turn to the model of participation in a practice. This leads to a dialectical understanding of the idea of autonomy that preserves the insight that freedom and law are mutually conditioning and simultaneously reveals that they remain in irresolvable tension with one another. ! (1) The first problem concerns the question of how to understand the specificity of normative bindingness (Verbindlichkeit). It seems obvious that the way in which we are bound by norms has to be distinguished from the way in which we are bound by laws of nature. To be guided in our actions by a norm is not the same thing as to be subject to laws of nature-say, to the law of gravity that keeps us on the ground. One way of understanding this difference and explaining what it is to be guided by a norm is to understand the norm as a "command of a superior," as Pufendorf proposes in his On the Duty of Man 2 : if we are guided by a norm it is as if we are following an order from a superior. On first inspection, such an account seems to succeed in distinguishing the normative force of a rule from the brute force of a natural law: a norm is something I not only fall under, but something under which I bring myself in obeying it. However, as Leibniz made clear in his critique of Pufendorf, the account faces a serious problem if we direct our attention to the ultimate source of the normative. If we grant Pufendorf's definition of norms, a duty always amounts to obedience to a given directive. This however means that we cannot conceive of an act of duty as spontaneous, not caused by an external, superior instance, but produced by the obligated instance itself. This in turn implies that the ultimate command cannot be understood as an act of duty. Whenever there is no superior-whether accidentally or essentially, as in the case of the highest being, which is defined by not having a superior-duty vanishes completely. This seems "paradoxical" to Leibniz 3 , because it seems to imply that we cannot speak in normative terms about the highest being, even though the highest being is the very source of all normative constraints: this ultimate source would appear as non-normative. Whatever this highest being does, it can never be said to be either in accord or in discord with duty. This does not concur, as Leibniz points out, with our inclination to praise God for being just (rather than taking him for a mere fact: merely regarding him as the highest force). If we praise God, we allude to a form of justice no...