by Robert Wicks
Appreciating at this point how the process of synthesis is fundamental to constructing our experience, Kant reaches a crucial point: he now seeks the ultimate origin within ourselves of these stabilizing projections or ‘syntheses’. In this search for the ultimate ground of synthesis, he seeks an aspect of our mind which is (1) unchanging, since the various syntheses introduce stability and the source of these syntheses must therefore itself be stable and abiding, (2) active, since the syntheses are productive by introducing stability into what otherwise would be a constant and incomprehensible flux, (3) non-sensory and knowable a priori, since the syntheses need initially to produce pure concepts of the understanding as well as the intuitions of space and time, all of which are knowable a priori, (4) an expression of pure unity, since in the activity of synthesis of whatever kind, this is the feature that our mind is projecting.
It takes some penetrating philosophical insight on Kant’s part to discern what aspect of the mind fits the above description. According to Kant, the ultimate source of synthesis is revealed by the very awareness we have of being the same person over time. The foundation of all knowledge is expressed in our self-awareness. Today, for instance, when I think about the last several hours, it is clear to me that it was ‘me’ who did this or that a few hours ago. Thinking of my longer term past, it was still ‘me’ who played in the schoolyard many years ago. It has been one and the same person all along, namely ‘me’, who has had these experiences over the years. It has been no one else. I do not experience your experience, and you do not experience my experience.
The formal structure underlying one’s self-awareness is exactly the same in everyone. It can be expressed by saying that for any thought one has, it is always possible to say to oneself, ‘that is “my” thought’. This deeper, formal dimension of the self is independent of any particular experience and is knowable a priori. Kant refers to it as a ‘pure unchangeable consciousness’ and in technical terms, as ‘transcendental apperception’. In one respect, although it is not passive, it is nonetheless like an empty container into which all of one’s experience is comprehended, just as space and time are like empty containers. As the source of all synthesis, and hence, of all stability in our experience, Kant maintains that this transcendental apperception, or basic awareness of oneself as being ‘me’ throughout, ‘is the a priori ground of all concepts’ (A 107).
As the ground of all concepts, it is the source of both pure concepts of the understanding and empirical concepts. Kant maintains that this fundamental sense of self is the most basic unity of all, regarding all other unities as the projection of this self. These projections include all concepts and intuitions, since each has an integrity of its own. All objects of awareness are thereby regarded as projections of one’s own integrity as a fundamentally unified consciousness. In the history of philosophy, this thought is revolutionary.
Key idea: Transcendental unity of apperception
This is the fundamental unity of the mind which, in everyone, underlies the awareness that one’s experience is of ‘me’ or is ‘mine’. It is the source of all synthesis, and hence, that which ultimately gives each of the objects of perception their individual, stable identity.
To appreciate further the meaning of Kant’s notion of the transcendental unity of consciousness, we can consider the thought of an ‘object in general’. If we think of what this phrase could mean, there is a reference to some integrated entity, but not much else besides. An ‘object in general’ is a kind of blank, although it is not nothing at all. We are thinking of a ‘something’, but of a ‘something’ completely unspecified. Keeping this in mind, let us consider ordinary experience to fill out this idea of an ‘object in general’.
Several people are in a room, all looking at a large clock on the wall. Each person sees the clock from a different angle. A few leave the room and then later return. The ‘clock’ remains on the wall throughout each person’s experience as the ‘same’ object. In this sense of ‘object’, there is the thought of a thing in space and time to which each person’s perceptions refer when looking at or talking about the clock. This is all a matter of common sense, and when Kant talks about the meaning of the term ‘object’, he has this familiar idea in mind of a thing that remains stable throughout a series of various perceptions.
One of Kant’s repeated lessons from his examination of British empiricism is that what is given to us in sensory experience carries no necessity with it. It is possible, he muses, that the objects around us could change their colour suddenly, that water might boil at different temperatures every other hour, that our foods could nourish us one day, but not the next. The world could be, or could become, an incomprehensible chaos, if all we had to rely upon philosophically were that which is given through sensation. The British empiricists, believing that the mind is initially blank, and that our experience both begins and arises from what is given in sensation, arrived at precisely this sceptical position, the very position against which Kant is reacting. The sheer fact that the water keeps boiling at the same temperature each day, that our food continues to nourish us, and that the air continues to sustain us, is enough to motivate opposition to the sceptical view.
Kant was sure that empiricism and its associated scepticism are mistaken, since he showed that geometry and mathematics are not derived from the contingencies of experience, but are disciplines constituted by propositions knowable a priori, universally applicable and necessarily true. With this inspiration, and having seen how to derive the universality and necessity of geometry and mathematics from the subjective forms of space and time, Kant sought further for subjective sources of other universal and necessary structures within our experience. These he found in the pure concepts of the understanding. A central feature of the transcendental deduction is to show that as well, the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories – and perhaps the clearest examples of categories are the concepts of substance and causality – are rules that determine very generally, the structures of objects within our experience. As ‘rules’ they organize and thereby unify, or bind together, the various sensory presentations that occur in space and time.
The crux of the transcendental deduction, then, is in Kant’s observation that raw sensations do not present any unity by themselves, and that for us to know anything, we need to organize the raw sensations into discernable objects, as done through the synthesis of apprehension and the synthesis of reproduction. Despite these syntheses, which might still leave us with a set of objects without any predictable organization between them, Kant asks further, how is it possible that experience contains any necessary connections between the various objects we construct, and that we are not nonetheless facing an unpredictable chaos, as the empiricist view implies?
His answer refers us to the formal structure that underlies our fundamental sense of self, the transcendental unity of consciousness. His view is that at the core, this unity of consciousness is the source of all stability and synthesis. The pure concepts of the understanding then follow as the more determinate, logical expressions of this unity, which express specific kinds of necessary connection (e.g., as in causality). The application of these pure concepts of the understanding to the sensory objects that are presented to us in space and time, organizes those objects into an elaborate system that we call and appreciate securely as nature. The imagination, as the general principle of synthesis, connects the understanding and the sensibility. Kant summarizes the situation as follows:
We have therefore a pure imagination as one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul, on which all knowledge a priori depends. Through it we bring the manifold of intuition on one side in connection with the condition of the necessary unity of pure apperception on the other. These two extreme ends, sense and understanding, must be brought into contact with each other by means of the transcendental function of imagination, because, without it, the senses might give us appearances, but no objects of empirical knowledge, therefore no experie
nce.
(A124)
The result of the transcendental deduction is the recognition that all relationships of necessity in experience ultimately derive from our own understanding, as it organizes the sensory presentations that are given to us through the categories and the forms of space and time. The ‘laws of nature’ are the reflections of our own understanding. As Kant says accordingly:
It is we therefore who introduce into the phenomena which we call nature, order and regularity. Nay, we should never find them in nature, if we ourselves, or the nature of our mind, had not originally placed them there.
(A125)
In the end, there is little within our experience for whose appearance we are not ourselves responsible. The sensory qualities that we experience (red, blue, green, etc.) are invoked by the interaction of what exists independently of us with our receptivity, the space and time in which those qualities are situated, are themselves forms of our own mind, the necessary interconnections between the sensory objects that we call ‘nature’, is a product of our understanding, and the very concept of an ‘object in general’, is a projection of the unity of our consciousness and sense of abiding self. There is a distinct sense in Kant’s view, that when one apprehends a table, or chair, or a star, one can say, ‘that is me’.
Spotlight: One of Kant’s few jokes
As consistently serious as Kant’s writings happen to be – the discussion in the transcendental deduction is typical – he does entertain us with the following joke in setting out his theory of laughter in the third Critique (Section 54):
An Indian, at the table of an Englishman in Surat, seeing a bottle of ale being opened and all the beer spill out, changing then into foam, displayed his great amazement with many exclamations, and in reply to the Englishman’s question ‘What is so amazing here?’ answered, ‘I’m not surprised that it’s coming out, but by how you were able to get it all in there [!]’
Kant characterizes laughter as ‘an affect resulting from the sudden transformation of a tension-filled expectation into nothing’. We can read the above joke and perhaps consider some of our own, and think about whether Kant’s ‘relief theory’ of laughter is on the right track. In contemporary literature, two other theories of humour compete with the relief theory, namely, the ‘incongruency theory’ and the ‘superiority theory’. The first locates the causes of laughter in the perception of certain kinds of mismatches or irrationalities. The second is inspired by the experience of laughing ‘at’ something, rather than laughing ‘with’ it.
2 The transcendental deduction: second edition, ‘B’ version
Returning now to Kant’s more serious side, the second edition version of the transcendental deduction modifies and sharpens the first edition version, as well as enhances it with some additional perspective. Kant begins with the assertion that ‘all combination [i.e., synthesis] … is an act of the understanding’ and that ‘we cannot represent to ourselves anything as combined in the object, without having previously combined it ourselves’ (B130).
This retains the idea from the first edition version that all synthesis is a product of the subject’s activity, but shifts the central activity of synthesis over to the understanding from the imagination, which now plays a subordinate role. By locating synthesis primarily in the understanding, the synthetic activity becomes more of an immediate manifestation within the understanding itself, of the fundamental ground of all synthesis, the transcendental unity of consciousness. Kant refers to the transcendental unity of consciousness as the ‘original combination’ (B133), thus rendering the understanding and its categories into a direct expression of our self-awareness.
The centre of attention in the second edition is the elementary relationship – one of necessity – between the unity of consciousness and the objects of which consciousness is aware. For us to have knowledge, the objects of which we are aware must be related to our unity of consciousness. Otherwise we could not be aware that we were aware of any objects. So rather than speak of the transcendental unity of consciousness, Kant emphasizes in the second edition that the unity under consideration is a transcendental unity of self-consciousness. From the notion of necessity involved in the relation between this self-consciousness and anything of which it is aware, Kant extracts the implications that he requires for the transcendental deduction, for he seeks an account of how the pure concepts of the understanding relate necessarily to sensory intuitions.
As in the first edition version, Kant focuses on the origin of ‘objectivity’. This notion is marked by the difference between saying that some body, say, a large stone, is heavy, and saying merely as a personal report, that if I lift the body, it feels heavy to me. The notion of objectivity, along with that of an ‘object’, locates the heavy quality in the stone itself, and not in my subjective impressions of the stone. Objectivity involves thinking that ‘stone’ and ‘heaviness’ are ‘combined in the object, no matter what the state of the subject may be’ (B 142). Objectivity is thereby expressed in the judgement ‘the body is heavy’.
In the second edition, Kant explores this idea more explicitly, looking for the source of all judgements that express objectivity. Such judgements express stability and ultimately, necessity, so the answer to the question of how objectively valid judgements are possible returns Kant quickly to the forms of logical judgement and the pure concepts of the understanding which express those forms.
This all establishes a much tighter connection between (a) the transcendental unity of self-consciousness as the original source of combination, (b) the understanding as the faculty of combination, (c) the table of logical judgements and the categories as expressions of various kinds of necessary connection, and (d) the manifold of given sensation that is organized according to the forms of space and time, which for any knowledge to be possible, must be in necessary connection with one’s sense of self. The core of Kant’s argument is given in Section 20:
The manifold which is given to us in a sensuous intuition is necessarily subject to the original synthetic unity of apperception, because by it alone the unity of intuition becomes possible (§ 7). That act of the understanding, further, by which the manifold of given representations (whether intuitions or concepts) is brought under one apperception in general, is the logical function of a judgement (§ 19). All the manifold, therefore, so far as it is given in an empirical intuition, is determined with regard to one of the logical functions of judgement, by which, indeed, it is brought into one consciousness in general. Now the categories are nothing but these functions of judgement, so far as the manifold of a given intuition is determined with respect to them (§ 13). Therefore the manifold in any given intuition is naturally subject to the categories.
(B143)
Kant adds that the above statement establishes a ‘beginning’ for the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding. This could be puzzling, since he already seems to provide here a solid and sequential explanation of how the categories apply to sensory intuitions. What Kant believes that he has only done so far, though, is explain how the categories apply generally and validly to the forms of space and time, as they stand as manifolds of empty points, without any further determination or added sensory content.
His next step, then, is to explain how the categories apply to space and time when these forms are filled with actual sensory content. Within this richer context, the categories will be functioning to establish necessary relationships between sensory objects, such as causal relationships between them. This sets the parameters for the laws of nature, or as Kant says, for ‘making nature possible’ (Section 26). To complete the transcendental deduction along these lines, Kant now adds some further nuance to his argument.
Let us return to the baton twirling example to see this. Initially, the synthesis of apprehension presents us with an integrated linear form (the baton) within the structures of space and time. Without the forms of space and time originally in place, one could not synthesize the image of
the baton to begin with, since there would be no place or time for the baton to be.
Reflecting now at a higher level of generality on the very nature of space and time, Kant notes that insofar as we are aware of space and time as single individuals that are filled with empty points, we must also have integrated, or synthesized, space and time into such individuals. This reveals a process of synthesis more fundamental than the integration of the small, localized bits of sensory information into the baton, as in the example. This more fundamental process of synthesis is none other than that described in the excerpt from Section 20 above, namely, that all manifolds are integrated ultimately by the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, which expresses itself in terms of the logical forms of judgement and subsequently, the categories of the understanding.
In the first edition version, the faculty of imagination plays a leading, close to central, role. In the second edition, its role remains essential, but it is more circumscribed. Kant here characterizes the imagination as being involved mainly in sensibility insofar as it synthesizes raw sensations into sensory individuals in space and time. As an active, productive function, it is not a merely receptive capacity, though, as is true for sensibility in general. As an active function, imagination is also associated with the understanding and with the fundamental processes of syntheses that derive from the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, as noted above. Kant speaks of the productive imagination as ‘an effect of the understanding on the sensibility’ (B152), thus retaining the idea that the imagination serves importantly as an intermediary between the understanding and sensibility.
