The Kantian Unity of Pure Apperception

THE KANTIAN UNITY OF PURE APPERCEPTION* T HERE is in common use in ordinary conversation, the expression "I think," whose meaning is as difficult to analyze as its uses are manifold. We propose to examine one of the meanings of this phrase, namely, that assigned to it by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant claims that it can refer to the synthetic unity of pure apperception. Our task is to discover what he means by that impressive concatenation of words. Since Kant is by no means as clear on this point as could be desired, we shall have to choose between several possible meanings. Our guide will be the necessity of an interpretation that is consistent with the relevant texts, with the entire Kantian philosophy, and with what we conceive to be the purpose of introducing a " synthetic unity of apperception " as a necessary condition of knowledge. The Transcendental Analytic of the Critique commences· with a plan for the discovery of the Categories, a priori concepts which not only are applicable to experience, but without which objective experience, as distinguished from a purely subjective welter of unconnected sensations and impressions, would be impossible. The Categories are defined as "concepts of an object in general by means of which the intuition of an object is regarded as determined by one of the logical functions of judgment." 1 Each Category is a mode or manner according to * (Editor's Note): The exposition here presented by Fr. Wassmer may be complemented with previous articles published in THE THOMIST which offer a Thomistic critique of Kantian theory. See "Kantian Theory of Sense Intuition: A Critique," by Sister Mary Aloysius, S. S. J., XIX, Oct. 1956, 506-515; "Kant and Aquinas," by Germain G. Grisez, XXI, Jan. 1958, 44-78. 1 Ewing, A. C., A Short Commentary on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), p. IS~. 90 THE KANTIAN UNITY OF PURE APPERCEPTION 91 which passively received sensations are ordered into a system. a network of connected, related elements. Unless sensations were so ordered, there could be no experience of an intersubjective , predicable sort. Kant believes that to each different way of arranging data in space and time there corresponds some Category, and this correspondence is specified by the schemata, referential rules governing the application of the Categories to the sensory manifold. The Categories are also logical features of judgments. The connection between the two apparently different functions served by the Categories will be made clear by a brief look at Kant's views on the nature of the mind. The only cognitive faculties of the mind are, according to the Critique, sensibility and understanding. Sensibility is the faculty of receiving sensations in a passive manner. About the understanding, Kant says: Independently of sensibility, we cannot possibly have any intuition, consequently, the understanding is no faculty of intuition.... But we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments, so that understanding can be represented as the faculty of judging. ... All the functions of the understanding therefore can be discovered, when we can completely exhibit the functions of unity in judgments .2 These functions of unity in judgments are the Categories. And when we see just how broad are the tasks performed by the versatile Kantian understanding, we shall grasp why Kant considers the Categories to be equally versatile. They are both the logical features· of judgments and the a priori conditions to which objective experience must conform. The following selection of knarred prose shows just how protean the Kantian understanding is. The same function which gives unity to the different representations in a judgment, gives also unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition; and this unity we call the pure conception of the understanding. Thus the same understanding, • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1934, 2nd ed.), p. 79. 92 THOMAS A. WASSMER and by the same operations, whereby in conceptions, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a judgment, introduces , by means of the synthetical unity of the manifold in intuition , a transcendental content into its representations, on which...