Reciprocity Thesis, Hegel, Quine: Some Cursory Reflections on Transcendental Deduction

Transcendental argument: starts with a easily-granted (and in that sense “transcendental”?) and then proceeds to a necessary consequence which is then the necessary condition of this premise. There are two famous transcendental arguments in the first critique. First, the Transcendental Deduction with the transcendental premise of identity of the self-consciousness in experience, i.e. the transcendental unity of apperception, and proceeds to its necessary condition, i.e. that synthesis must play a part in apperception which then entails that the categories have objective validity and must apply to objective experience. A second transcendental argument is the Refutation of Idealism, which starts with the premise that we all experience the succession of temporality, whose necessary condition is the actual existence of external objects. My focus, as usual, is the Transcendental Deduction.

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The principle of the necessary unity of apperception (B131-2) has 4 aspects of meanings (from p.7). (1). it is not a collection of representations: Kant is quite clear that we have no inner intuition or inner sense of this kind of subject (B157). If apperception were by inner intuition, it would be also at odds with the claim that by apperception no manifold would be given, since intuition by definition gives manifold. (2). That apperception is pure: which means that apperception is not by means of any empirical faculty: neither the Humean inner perception, nor the Kantian inner intuition. Cf. Fichte’s pure-I. (3) It is original, so that while it accompanies any representations, it itself is not accompanied by another kind of the representation of myself. (4) by apperception I can have a propositional grasp of the apperceptive subject, in which I am conscious that I exist as subject. (Note that in the note on B131-12, Kant merely asserts that I “can be” conscious of the apperception; what matter is the identity, where I can be not explicitly conscious of this identity.)

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The account of apperception invokes debates. Robert Howell (1992) and James van Cleve (1999) claims that in order for apperception to function at all, I must be simultaneously conscious of multiple elements of representations, since only so can I bring these elements, of which I am co-conscious, under a unity of apperception. This interpretation is based on B133 (see SEP 10). But I agree with Pereboom that this needs not be the case. What matter is really the identity, not really the consciousness. I could be, at one time, conscious of merely one thing, and at another moment conscious of another without being so simultaneously. And yet even in this case, it must be the case that it is the identical subject being asynchronously conscious of two things, otherwise the cognizing I would be “dispersed (B133).”

On this latter point, Kant is perhaps in conversation with Hume’s associationalism which accounts for a certain kind of “empirical consciousness”. According to this latter view, perception of the external objects is intrinsically conscious, so that the proposed self-same consciousness in experiences are either the direct results of the perceptions, or the perception of these perceptions. Kant argues that Hume in this way simply could not account for the identity and self-sameness of consciousnesses, since there would be as many I’s as there are perceptions. Rather than an direct way of having an empirical consciousness, then, there must be an indirect way by which to represent the self-same identity of apperception. Since this way is not perception, according to Kant, the only left option is synthesis (by elimination? See SEP 13), which then must invoke the use of the categories, since synthesis is a function of the faculty of understanding.

Summary of the Transcendental Argument (Apperception)

What bugs me is Pereboom’s unsubstantiated assertion that “This consciousness (apperception) is profitably interpreted as conscious awareness not of the act or process of synthesis itself, but rather of the unity that is its outcome (SEP 13).” So that there must be a process which brings out a unity, and I can be conscious of my identity only by apprehending this unity? Then what accounts for this apprehension? Shouldn’t it be a self-conscious act attributable to the selfsame subject? Why it can’t be the case that I am simply conscious of the process of synthesizing, which reduces this gap that needs another mysterious way of apprehension?

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Allison’s reciprocity thesis. The thesis that apperceptions both the necessary and sufficient condition of our representing the objects (Allision 1983: 144 ff; 2015: 352-55). While the former (necessary) is easy to establish – after all Kant proposes this presumption that is easily acknowledge by the skeptics, the latter (sufficient) is hard to establish: I could be self-conscious, without really representing an object. It is precisely this gap between apperception and experience of objects that creates the dilemma for Fichte, who cannot bridge pure-I and the actual experience, inasmuch as the experience depends on/entails/necessitates pure-I. Hegel concretizes this and establish the identity of apperception and experience (self-consciousness and consciousness).

As for the textual evidence: Kant asserts on B133 that “It is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity and the fact that they are cognitions.” Alone, which means unity of consciousness is sufficient.

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What also bugs me is Kant’s claim that judgment can be either analysis or synthesis. In analysis judgment is executed by the pure understanding: subsuming various intuited objects under a higher unity. In synthesis, it unifies the manifold under one intuition, so that the two faculties work torgether. But ultimately, “The same function that gives unity to concepts in judgment [analysis], also gives unity to the mere synthesis of representations in intuition (A79/B104-05).”

The issue is whether there is a distinction between analysis and synthesis at all (cf. Quine), or whether or not their difference is merely nominal. Hegel seems to eliminate this difference at the end of the greater Logic. For him, precisely there is no separate step of intuition and “mere synthesis”: the moment of the singular (synthesis) is immediately mediated by the universals (analysis).