Contents:
- The Function of Mind: Bringing Unity to its Objects
- Transcendental Deduction A
- Unification as the Bridge
- Adequation vs. Assimilation
- Assimilation vs. Association
- In Conclusion…
- A Word on the Term “Transcendental Apperception”
- Application
The Transcendental Deduction
Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is considered to be one of the more difficult chapters of the Critique. Let’s start with the title itself. In B116 Kant begins with a distinction between two questions, quid iuris and quid facti, which concern two kinds of justification. In some cases, the justification required to make a case will be a matter of fact; in others, it will be a matter of the law itself. These two forms of justification can be related to the two opposing directions explored thus far in the Critique, toward the empirical and toward the categorical concepts. They both have a kind of priority in this own domain. The categories and sensible appearances might be said to form the two endpoints on a line of the things we may know, with all things lying between them being some synthesis of the two. Only the categories as pure concepts can be conceived as uncombined; only “pure” appearances are conceived of as uncombined with the categories. The first step in our knowledge of experience, what makes “experience” as such possible, is the synthesis of appearances with the categories in the act of intuition that gives them structure and intelligibility.
The Transcendental deduction attempts to provide a basis for thinking that this must be the case, i.e. that our perception of the world is structured by the mind itself rather than simply given. Kant has thus far been making his case by showing us how this structure takes place given the elements of cognition he has laid out on the table in the sections on the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Logic. He will now attempt to supplement his description with a fuller justification than he has yet provided.
In a prior post, Kant’s explanation of our power of understanding was discussed in terms of the intentional relationship the mind has to its objects. It was said that the “I,” an ancestor of the Cartesian I, underlies all our cognitive acts that lead to understanding any potential mental objects. The foundation for the intentionality of our mental acts, their directedness toward an object, is consciousness itself. Only by supposing consciousness as involved in its directedness upon its objects can our capacity to understand begin to form a broader picture of knowledge that we call experience. Only by the consciousness of them as belonging to some one thing, the “I,” can our experience attain any unity as “our” experience.
In what follows, it will be seen that the prior unity of the I is the foundation for the possible unity of experience. This is, furthermore, the basis for the entire deduction, which begins with two fundamental features of our cognition, (a) the structuring of the object by means of the categories and forms of perception and (b) the prior unity of the I that thinks. Kant’s deductive argument makes the claim that unless these are presupposed, it will be impossible to account for the mind’s capacity to understand its objects such as we find it. Thus, for Kant, if the argument is successful, there is a real bifurcation between his approach and his predecessors: if we side with Locke and Hume in the empiricist tradition, we cannot reach high enough to understand our own capacity to understand. Kant’s argument in the Critique, on the other hand, shows us the “way out” of the predicament left to us as the legacy of empiricism.
This is, at any rate, what Kant will argue. The key to Kant’s argument is the harmonizing of the mind’s capacity for a priori and a posteriori reasoning, hence, our capacity for sensation and understanding that the Empiricist tradition holds apart. His claim is that beyond the categories and forms of perception, there is the further assumption that their synthesis is already present in the objects of our potential understanding. The objects of our understanding are, in another way of speaking, structured before the mind comes to understand the very structure it gives them. The task Kant sets before himself in the Transcendental Deduction is to show that unless this is the case, the synthesis of sensation and understanding will not be possible. With the synthesis goes the possibility off knowledge as the empiricists themselves were ultimately led to see.
Approaching Kant’s Deduction by Way of his Predecessors
Most of Kant’s discussion in this part of the Critique of Pure Reason takes for granted that the reader will be familiar with the arguments of his predecessors. He does not go into any thorough discussion of them, but the scattered remarks he does make about them point us in the direction of his thought with his characteristic mix of economy and reiteration. A reader who understands Kant’s, strategy as explained briefly above, may be able to see its lineaments and thus be able to see how it anticipates the broader argument itself.
Let’s consider first what he has to say about “The illustrious Locke” in the second edition:
The illustrious Locke, failing to take account of these considerations, and meeting with pure concepts of the understanding in experience, deduced them also from experience, and yet proceeded so inconsequently that he attempted with their aid to obtain knowledge which far transcends all limits of experience.
B127
The “considerations” Kant refers to here concern the possibility of experience itself, in the broad sense of the term, as involving a progressively expansive knowledge of our environment. Locke’s presumption (as stated above) was that our sensory apprehension of the world makes its own comprehension possible through an inductive process that involves an innate capacity to find similarities among things and form general ideas. But as Kant argues in his Introduction and elsewhere, inductive reasoning of the sort the empiricists relied upon cannot account for a priori concepts, i.e. that by our sensory experience alone we could have any basis for deductive knowledge at all apart from mere (analytic) relations among ideas. Commenting upon this approach as common to both Locke and Hume, he writes,
Now this empirical derivation, in which both philosophers agree, cannot be reconciled with the scientific a priori knowledge which we do actually possess, namely, pure mathematics and general science of nature; and this fact therefore suffices to disprove such derivation.
Kant’s move is to say that if we want to retain any deductive knowledge, which must begin with a priori concepts (with features like strict universality and deductive necessity), then we must assume that some source of a priori knowledge lies within us rather than in our apprehension of the world. An implicit conclusion may be drawn that Kant hoped to establish a disjunction between essentially a disjunction between the empirical method and his transcendental one. “Only if” one follows the transcendental path can we be assured of any justification for a priori deductive claims about the physical world.
Let’s pause for a moment to consider whether this argument does, in fact, make sense by creating a “steel man” version of Locke’s argument. Locke’s concept of knowledge was that it consists in the perception of a connection or agreement among ideas, among ideas that can be related to each other by necessity. Thus far, the two are in agreement. One can find the ground, for example, of mathematics and for deductive necessity in the relationships between the concepts represented by numbers and shapes. They need not be related to things. In Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding he writes,
Knowledge then seems to me to be nothing but the perception of the connexion and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy, of any of our ideas. In this alone it consists. Where this perception is, there is knowledge; and where it is not, there, though we may fancy, guess, or believe, yet we always come short of knowledge. For when we know that white is not black, what do we else but perceive that these two ideas do not agree? When we possess ourselves with the utmost security of the demonstration, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones, what do we more but perceive, that equality to two right ones does necessarily agree to, and is inseparable from the three angles of a triangle?”
Locke’s Essay, 4.1.2
Locke (as does Hume, for that matter) actually does have a way of accounting for a priori knowledge–namely by way of the analyticity of concepts. Thus, he has a way of accounting for our mathematical deductions. This raises the question of whether Locke actually did have an adequate account of knowledge.
Kant does of course argue that mathematical knowledge is synthetic rather than analytic knowledge. But is such a critique decisive? The empiricists no more argued that our knowledge of the empirical world yields any necessary, or strictly universal claims than Kant himself. Any yet, when we arrive at the picture of the world left to us by empiricism, we find that we have reason to be skeptical about things such as the unity of the self, hence whether the idea of a self or soul holds any ground or the idea that reason can provide any basis for a belief in God. Kant takes up the reasonableness of a belief in God as part of his account of the Ens Realissimum in his chapter on the Ideal of Reason and discusses the unity of the self if the present chapter on the Transcendental Deduction as a necessary presupposition of experience itself. Both arguments involve some degree of nuance, but the move Kant makes is always in the direction of agreeing with the Empiricists that no necessity can be drawn from empirical claims.
What is different in Kant is the attempt to identify and utilize the concepts that underlie these Empirical claims as the basis for making a priori claims about experience. This is the core strategy that underlies his claim that synthetic a priori claims are possible. For example, causal relationships were considered to be based upon experience for the empiricists because an inference based upon a relationship between facts can always conceivably lead to a contradiction, leading to global skepticism about any reasoning about the physical world. In any causal inference, the implicit assumption is that the future will resemble the past. A statement about the supposed necessity of a causal relationship, such as, “if water is heated to 212 deg. Fahrenheit, it will boil” cannot be considered to follow by virtue of logical necessity, as is the case with a proposition such as “All bachelors are unmarried.”1
Kant, by contrast, “extracts” the logical structure of cause-effect reasoning and places it among the categories of thought. In other words, he considers the claim “everything that happens must have a cause,” formally rather than materially by considering it apart from any particular circumstance. In fact, he goes so far in B5 as write that “the very concept of a cause so manifestly contains the concept of a necessity of connection with an effect and of the strict universality of the rule, that we would be altogether lost if we attempted to derive it, as Hume has done, from a repeated association of that which happens with that which precedes….” Here we have the basis for the claim that our notion of causality is an a priori one.
But, of course, this account of causality as a principle of the understanding omits an account of its role in the synthesis of our representations. In fact, Kant appears to treat it as an axiom that would relate to the synthesis of our experience in the same way that the axioms of geometry relate to what we consider to be geometrical objects. Let’s consider what he writes in B123:
Everything might be in such confusion that, for instance, in the series of appearances that, for instance, in the series of appearances nothing presented itself which might yield a rule of synthesis and so answer to the concept of cause and effect. This concept would then be altogether empty, null, and meaningless.”
To bring out the full import of the quote, let’s consider, to continue the analogy, what Kant has to say about Geometry. In B120 he writes that Geometry proceeds with “security in knowledge that is completely a priori” that is based upon our “fundamental concept of space.” In other words, it so happens that the conditions under which sensible objects are given to us forms the basis for the application of the categories of our understanding to them. In the case of Geometry, its objects are rendered more readily accessible to our understanding by considering their pure forms, whereby we intuit them a priori.2
If we take this as our model for thinking about the application of what might be called the “axiom” of cause and effect, we can see that Kant brings its immediate application to what are in fact the formal features of our experience, features that depend more or less immediately upon the a priori forms of space and time themselves that can be “intuited” as he phrases it, “a priori” (in the case of geometry, for example, ideal circles, squares, etc.). A priori principles that are based upon the categories are necessarily understood only in relation to such such a priori intuitions (again, consider that things might have been otherwise, making the categorical concepts “empty, null, and meaningless” as in the quote immediately above). Space and time then, as in the case of Geometry, provide us with the conditions necessary for the possibility of making a priori propositions meaningful at all.
Thus, inasmuch as the rule of cause and effect is a “rule of synthesis” (as the quote immediately above states the matter) we might look for its legitimate application to our experience in cases that involve abstraction from the immediate conditions of experience. We do, certainly, find such cases. They are among the most important in the Critique. Consider the concept of the I that thinks, for example. The primary justification for supposing that it must exist in us is that something must account for the unified experience that we actually do have. Something, in other words, must be supposed as a cause to account for the observed effects, based upon the rule of synthesis that every effect must have a cause. In a similar way, things in themselves are supposed in order to account for the receptions of sensible objects, and finally the ens realissimum, Kant’s first principle of being itself, is contemplated as a necessary first cause. This type of reasoning might be compared to the more recent search for Pluto, which was discovered because it was supposed that something must account for irregularities in Neptune’s orbit. In each case, we do not “automatically” apply the access to a priori that the categories enable, but are nonetheless compelled in a certain way by a desire to understand the phenomena themselves and make them intelligible to us.
Despite the way in which Kant’s reasoning approaches empirical reasoning about phenomena, it is nevertheless deductive and not inductive. This helps to maintain the disjunct between Kant’s way of reasoning about phenomena and the empiricist model. At its core, the Kantian strategy is all about synthesis, not according to an inductive process based upon forming generalizations from the available phenomena (since inductive generalizations cannot, of themselves, lead to deductive certainty), but upon the hypothetical structuring of phenomena based upon a priori principles that are latent within us. Such principles are the ground of the a priori synthesis that Kant wants to establish in the Transcendental Deduction.
The Three Transcendental Unifying Acts of the Mind
In his introduction to the Transcendental Deduction (b116ff.), Kant introduces what might be called the “three transcendental acts” of the mind. He has moved on from discussing the basic conditions necessary for a priori synthesis in his chapters on the tables of judgment and forms of sensibility, but now presents us with a fuller picture of the cognitive side of the development of knowledge and experience in his “Transcendental Deduction A.”
The three acts of the mind (corresponding to three successive sections in the TA) are formulated as follows (see A97-A98 and A115):
- The Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition (sense perception)
- The Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination (imaginative synthesis)
- The Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept (the synthesis of concepts)
Each of these “acts” of the mind has its own special object: (1) Intuition: of our immediate experience of the world; (2) Imagination: reproduction of the manifold of our perceptual experiences of the world; and (3) Conceptualization: of the manifold of imaginative representations. In each case, the synthesis carried out is the synthesis of a manifold into a new unity. In each case, the act of synthesis carried out by each higher faculty is enacted according to a priori principles native to our own intellect.
It is the unification of our representations into a conceptual scheme that is the ultimate “that for the sake of which” of each successive act. It is the categories that enable understanding. But no understanding of them would be possible without the forms of sensibility that structure them in such a way that the categories are applicable to them. It might be considered, for instance, that unless objects were presented to us as unified, the category of unity, to say nothing of plurality, totality and, in fact, all the other categories, would be, as was said above, “empty, null, and meaningless.” It is, then, only because we possess the a priori forms of sensible representation that make any consistent structuring of the objects of our thought possible. As Kant writes in the opening chapter of the Transcendental Logic,
Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. It is, therefore,just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts.”
B75
Thus, for Kant, cognition is ultimately a goal-directed activity, which is primarily accomplished by the synthesis of representations and concepts. It is, furthermore, only by way of the unity of concepts that knowledge becomes possible. Ultimately, “experience” as that synthesis is only possible given the conditions Kant has laid out as necessary, but particularly the categories since they make the kind of deductive knowledge possible that is not possible if we take up Empiricist’s account. This is, at any rate, what Kant argues.
<to be continued>
Finally, there are two sides of Kant’s account of our mental activity that echo Aristotle’s active/passive distinction: spontaneity and receptivity (A97). It is this spontaneity that makes possible not only the threefold synthesis that results in knowledge, but also the possibility of synopsis whereby, when the mind has received its objects, it is able to compare them and consider how they are connected (A97). Kant writes that “to such a synopsis a synthesis must always correspond; receptivity can make knowledge possible only when combined with spontaneity” (A97) suggesting that whereas receptivity belongs to the “comprehension” of a manifold, spontaneity is what brings about its synthesis so that it may be considered by a higher faculty. In each case, consciousness necessarily attends our experience so that our experience can become meaningfully connected. It is this underlying unity that makes possible the conversion of our experience into knowledge (A103).
Association According to a Rule
The mind, in its acts of synthesis, acts according to a “rule” of some kind. This rule of association need not be consciously articulated or recognized as such (A100). It may even be the unrecognized cause of associations of which we are unaware. In the Critique, Kant describes the process of forming a rule in terms of association
representations which have often followed or accompanied one another finally become associated, and so are set in a relation whereby, even in the absence of the object, one of these representations can, in accordance with a fixed rule, bring about a transition of the mind to the other.”
(A100)
Finally, in A126 Kant clarifies that rule formation is especially the work of the understanding. He writes,
We have already defined the understanding in various different ways: as a spontaneity of knowledge (in distinction from the receptivity of sensibility), as a power of thought, as a faculty of concepts, or again of judgments. All these definitions, when they are adequately understood, are identical. We may now characterize it as the faculty of rules…. Sensibility gives us forms (of intuition), but understanding gives us rules. The latter is always occupied in investigating appearances, in order to detect some rule in them.
A126
Hume’s discussion of association may well arise in the reader’s mind after considering the first quotation and fittingly so, especially where the notion of causality is concerned: i.e., as a rule that simply arises, perhaps even unconsciously in some cases, from our customary habit of attributing such a relationship to events that regularly follow one another. However, as is so often the case, Humean skepticism is Kant’s target. As elsewhere, his strategy is to attempt to overcome skepticism by justifying the introduction of transcendental ideas grounded in our own cognitive processes. In this case, Kant wishes to argue that the notion of causality is one that is native to our intellect rather than one arising from the world of our experience, from which it could never find any true validation.
Consciousness as the Underlying Necessary Condition for Any Unifying Act of the Mind
In A103 Kant introduces the factor that underlies all the acts of unification that lead up to conceptualization and make each act possible: consciousness. He writes,
“If we were not conscious that what we think is the same as what we thought a moment before, all reproduction in the series of representations would be useless…. The manifold of the representation would never…form a whole, since it would lack that unity which only consciousness can impart to it.”
It appears from the quote that consciousness for Kant is a certain activity of the mind that involves both a recognition of personal identity and memory. What follows in the Critique merits particular attention, since it illustrates well the role consciousness plays in relation to concept building. Kant writes,
“If, in counting, I forget that the units, which now hover before me, have been added to one another in succession, I should never know that a total is being produced through this successive addition of unit to unit, and so would remain ignorant of number. For the concept of number is nothing but the consciousness of this unity of synthesis.”
The final sentence illuminates the connection between concept building and consciousness. It shows that consciousness need not be taken to be that which does the unifying itself, but is what must necessarily accompany it, in much the same way that space acts as a necessary background condition for our recognition of the spatial properties of objects, that makes possible the existence of their other attendant attributes (for how could a square object, for example, have a color or weight if it lacked any extension in space?).
Counting as a Paradigm for Understanding Concept Building
Consider the act of counting (discussed in B104/A97 and A102-103) in this same way: unless the individual units in a line (let’s say they are counting beans) could be related to one another in memory and as belonging to the same consciousness, the furthest the mind could reach in its association of them together would be to simply mark each as 1, 1, 1, etc. Only if there is consciousness present of the sort Kant describes can the mind pass from 1 to 1 to the concept of 2 and so make possible the act of counting. Perhaps this passage is also the key to understanding Kant’s statement early on in the Critique, that 7 + 5 = 12 is a synthetic a priori judgment. How could it be otherwise (Kant might argue), if the numbers themselves can only be arrived at by experience, yet experience itself is not sufficient to account for their association together? Something native to the mind itself must be brought in to explain the synthetic aspect of concept formation that cannot be acquired from experience, justifiable only from within the framework of the activity of the mind itself, yet justified whenever our mental activity is assumed as the only framework for our understanding of reality and truth.
The Transcendental Object = x
Lastly, what is Kant Transcendental object=x? Simply put, it is the general idea of objective correlate corresponding to our sensory apprehension. On the one hand, we have representations of the world; on the other there is an unknown something corresponding to those representations. Kant writes that we cannot have any direct intuition, any direct perception of such an object, so we are left with the general idea of a something that in any case ought to correspond to it if it is to be an object at all (A109). Kant writes,
“these appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object–an object that which cannot itself be intuited by us, and which may therefore, be named the non-empirical, that is, transcendental object=x.”
A109
This yields us the “pure concept” of an object. Because it carries with it the conditions for any object to be an object (inasmuch as it corresponds to the idea of “an object in general”) that do not themselves arise from experience, the pure concept of an object may be considered transcendental.
A final point: the outstanding characteristic of this object is its necessary unity (A109), which provides a link to Kant’s understanding of consciousness as a unity. Kant expresses the nature of the link between the object=x and consciousness as follows:
This relation is nothing but the necessary unity of consciousness, and therefore also of the synthesis of the manifold, through a common function of the mind, which combines it in one representation. Since this unity must be necessary a priori…the relation to a transcendental object, that is, the objective reality of our empirical knowledge, rests on the transcendental law, that all appearances, in so far as through them objects are to be given to us, must stand under those a priori rules of synthetical unity whereby the interrelating of these appearances in empirical intuition is alone possible.
(A109-A110)
The unity of consciousness is the prior condition as the first sentence in the quotation above indicates. From this point follows the set of synthesizing activities that belong to an object whenever it is contemplated by the mind.
The Basis for a “Deduction”
Kant argues that the empirical fact of the unity of consciousness must logically precede any further unifying acts of the mind. He adds to this the thesis that there is for us a “transcendental law” that in order for any object to be unified out of the manifold of the representations that present themselves to us, it must fall under, be susceptible of being determined by, the a priori principles according to which the mind is able to do its work of unifying and synthesizing its objects. As discussed above in the context of the counting example, the empirical fact of the unity of consciousness necessitates that the mind’s intentional objects present themselves as unified since the unity of consciousness itself implies the unification of the manifold presented to us in experience. If that were not the case, our experience of the world would be as discontinuous as the series of 1’s discussed above. As such, the unity of consciousness provides a basis for a “deduction” (i.e. a deductive proof) of the necessity of further transcendental concepts that may become the basis for the unification of the mind’s objects. As was seen above, these objects are unified according to a rule of association that may even be “unconscious” in the modern sense of the term.
Unification as the Bridge
Unification might be considered the “bridge” between what is given us in experience, the content sensation provides us for our thought, and what belongs strictly to the mind as its way of acting upon objects. In the Thomistic tradition of realist thinking about our mental processes, the suggestion that the mind operates upon its objects at all would be to depart from the possibility of knowing objects as they really are; it would be to suggest that we cannot, because of the very way in which the mind interacts with the world, experience reality as such. The light of the mind simply illuminates the forms of objects that are already present within them; the receptive intellect merely perceives these forms and in its mode of intellectual perception, understands them. For Kant, such an account would amount to an attempt to understand objects as they are in themselves, which he regards as being impossible. He does, however, wish to make genuine knowledge possible, knowledge Humean skepticism left in doubt and does so by now suggesting that the mind not only acts upon its objects, it forms them, in a sense, into intelligible objects out of otherwise unintelligible masses of what we might call “raw data” in a colloquial sense of the term.
Terra Firma: Adequation vs. Assimilation
The mind does its work, in other words, through a process of assimilation to its own way of understanding the world rather than by way of adequation to the world of objects as they really are, or as they are in themselves. The text of the deduction, considered by many readers to be quite diffcult, may achieve a greater measure of intelligibility by returning to this point as a place to stand apart from the sea of Kant’s attempts to carry forward his point. The entire question of how to overcome the barrier our perception poses to reality as it is in itself is resolved (or dissolved) once it is admitted that the mind has no access to such a world, nor can such a world even be speculated upon. We perceive and understand through a process of assimilation that makes the world we encounter both the only world we may know and a world that is subject to certain governing conditions imposed upon it by the mind itself. Such conditions are the basis for a the possiblity of a priori knowledge in us, inasmuch as they are the general conditions for the acts of perception or understanding to occur in us at all.
Assimilation and Association
In more concrete terms, its assimilation of its objects arises first of all in the way our perception imposes certain conditions upon the possibility of representing its objects to us (their representation in space and time); and later, by the acts of association carried out initially by the imagination and then by the understanding. In the prior article on this topic, it was said that association, as well as the unification that comes with it, arises according to a rule of some sort. In the immediately following fourth section of Transcendental Deduction A, Kant makes explicit that the rules he has in mind when it comes to our capacity to understand its objects are none other than the categories of the understanding discussed earlier:
The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience. Now I maintain that the categories, above cited, are nothing but the conditions of thought in a possible experience, just as space and time are the conditions of intuition for that same experience. They are fundamental concepts by which we think objects in general for appearances and therefore have a priori objective validity. This is exactly what we desired to prove.”
A111
The fact that the mind perceives, imagines, and understands not by adequation to the world about us, but by assimilation to principles latent within us is what Kant is trying to prove. He believes he can make his case by pointing out that the a priori knowledge we do in fact possess and experience within ourselves is only possible if such principles are latent within the mind itself rather than somehow present in objects as they are “in reality.”
In Conclusion…
Not only do we not have any access to such a reality, but reality as we do perceive it, being a reality of manifolds not themselves associated in any way, must be assimilated by some principle of association that only the mind itself may be considered to provide. For Kant, this latter point follows from the fact that while it is manifestly capable of associating its ideas, the world of sensations without the work of the mind would be just that: simply a bare manifold of unassociated and uncomprehended presentations of the senses.
But of course, all this work of unification and synthesis for the purpose of understanding would itself have no underlying basis if there were not something in us that was not itself the underlying ground of all unification. That ground, as discussed at the end of the prior article, is consciousness itself. The unified character of consciousness is a fundamental fact for Kant, a point whose evidence appears in the bare fact that we are able to string any of our individual experiences together into associations of any sort.
A Word on the Term “Transcendental Apperception”
The additional point should now be made clear that Kant regards this consciousness as something that persists unchanging through time in a way that recalls Aristotelian substance (A109). It is not something unified by experience, or only following upon a train of experiences through which its unity is eventually discovered, but is a fact of its very existence. Kant writes,
There can be in us no modes of knowledge, no connection of unity of one mode of knowledge with another, without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception.”
A107
So it is that Kant introduces the term “transcendental apperception,” a buzzword for readers of Kant both great and small. What I personally regard as noteworthy is the link between the term and its true object, something like the substance of the self, which closely resembles Locke’s description of it (a topic that seems better discussed elsewhere). That substance-self-soul-consciousness is a unity, or better, an already-unified substantial something, whose unity is the basis for the unity of its objects. Kant himself makes the same point (albeit somewhat less expansively) as follows:
“The numerical unity of this apperception is thus the a priori ground of all concepts, just as the manifoldness of space and time is the a priori ground of the intuitions of sensibility.”
A107
As such, in terms of its unbounded potentiality, its potentiality to act as the basis for the unification of any objects it encounters, it may recall the Platonic receptacle of the Timaeus. In any case, it may be seen that the term “transcendental apperception” is a descriptive one referring to this state of potentiality belonging to the Kantian self-soul-substance. As above, it is a potentiality that comes with its own terms of fulfillment, which the other faculties of the mind, its imagination and sensibility, are capable of producing.
The “oneness” of consciousness is the necessary basis for any unity of perceptions into associated unities of their own.
The counting example again suggests itself and perhaps a bit more expansiveness for the sake of greater comprehension will not be out of order if it fulfills that end. Consider the oneness of consciousness as the one that underlies any association of numbers. For example, the association of 1’s into a 2 or 2’s or 10’s. Just as the basis for the assimilation or synthesis of numbers into further unities (2’s or 10’s as the case may be) is 1, so consciousness is the basis for the assimilation of concepts of any sort into further conceptual unities. The analogy works as far as consciousness may be considered the necessary ground for assimilation and must attend the recognition of any further unities.
Notes
- For further discussion, see Hume and the A Priori in Kant’s Philosophical Method and the a Priori ↩︎
- See B120 in the Introduction to the Transcendental Deduction: “But the concept [of space] is employed in this science only in its reference to the outer sensible world — of the intuition of which space is the pure form — where all geometrical knowledge, grounded as it is in a priori intuition, possesses immediate evidence. The objects, so far as their form is concerned, are given, through the very knowledge of them, a priori in intuition.” ↩︎
References
Locke, John. The Works, vol. 2 An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 2 and Other Writings. London: Rivington, 1689.
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