Having already established the innate concepts of understanding, i.e., quantity, quality, relation and modality, Kant now provides us with the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of understanding. In this section, he further elaborates on how our a priori understanding works in conjunction with our intuition so that we can synthesize experience. He also emphasizes the importance of the original synthetic unity of apperception as the fulcrum of our understanding in general.
As we all know, our sense data would be “unruly heaps” of representations if we did not have a means of synthesizing our experience (CPR 239). In fact, experience would not even be possible without the unity of given concepts that precede the combination of representations (246). As humans, we almost automatically combine the representations that experience gives us. Thus, I think Kant is right to point out that we must have some way of consistently shaping our experience. However, this shaping is not arbitrary because it must be deduced from these concepts that we have all been given. In other words, we must inherently have a coherent way of filtering through our experiences that are only possible within space in time. But the question remains, how does Kant’s notion of the understanding surpass the boundaries of merely rational and empirical claims, and seal the bond between the immaterial world of thought and the physical world that exists in space and time?
Well, the answer to this question is still somewhat unclear, though Kant is certainly making strides. Specifically, he claims that the original synthetic unity of apperception, or the act of combining what is intuited in one consciousness, is the “supreme principle of all intuition in relation to the understanding” (248). The significance of this claim rests on the fact that our minds are what give order to nature, as he mentions earlier in the Analytic (242). Thus, he continues along the tradition of relating everything abstracted from nature back to the subject. Kant’s tendency to focus on the subject in relation to the objects seems counterintuitive at first, but in this section he gives us glimpses of objectivity that show us that he is gradually closing in on truth.
Kant distinguishes the transcendental unity of apperception from the subjective unity of consciousness. He does this by grouping objectivity with the former and the inner sense, or time, with the latter (250). Here we find a sliver of separation between what is intuited and what can be considered truthful. Thus, after bringing sensibility and understanding together through the unity of apperception, he reveals to us, our very own ability to sift through reality in an objectively a priori manner. At the moment, it seems that our ability to conceptualize the relation of representations is our only hope of ever knowing the ever so elusive "things in themselves."
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In a sense I'm inclined to both agree and disagree with you about knowing the objective consciousness of the apperception. Kant says that in apperception, "I am conscious of myself not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am" (CPR 259). Because the subject is not conscious of itself, I would say that there is no knowledge of the consciousness, only a sense of its presence. So this seems to be something of an indication of a thing in itself, perhaps not much of one, though.
On a completely unrelated note, section 23 completely blew my mind.
Michael: in your quote Kant seems to state that we can never know more about ourselves than the fact that we exist, although in my notebook I have written down that we can be conscious of ourselves as appearances not of us as we truly are. Does this mean that we can never know anything as they really are but we are limited to only experiencing them as they appear to be to us?
Michael, I must agree with your keen observation. It seems that the significant role that the unity of apperception plays is not quite synonymous with objectivity, as I had initially thought it was; although, it does seem that by providing unity over time to our experience, our apperception does allow us to arrive at some "transcendental object=x" (CPR 233). This object may pertain to something in itself but it can only be considered transcendental in regard to the subject, which, of course, is also an appearance itself, as JT pointed out. And so, even with this connection that apperception provides between object and subject, I suppose that we simply have to settle for a transcendental perception of the world...
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