カントの先驗的統覺

Abstract

By defining Kant's transcendental apperception as an act, or rather as the self-consciousness of such an act, I want to make clear in this short treatise that it anticipates the Ich-Poilosophie of Fichte. According to Kant, the sensibility is already "a unique act of mind", in which, however, there is neither consciousness of the subject of the act nor that of the intuitive representation, on account of the passivity and directness of the act. Of course, such a matter is a contradiction in itself. In order to solve this contradiction, the mind should act as imagination, but this act is in itself only a series of successive synthesis in which there is no rule of act synthetically unifing the whole of the act. The synthesis of imagination is only a sensational spontaneity. Over against such a figurative synthesis Kant sets the intellectual synthesis formed in the pure apperception. The pure apperception is a sort of an independent agent who by his thoughtaction specializes his own unity into the unities of categories. In other words, it makes possible the synthetical unity of thinking in the category, while making clear its own universal self-identity in the intellectual synthesis. By itself this synthesis is only abstract, however; for without the sensational manifoldness there is nothing to be thought so that the pure apperception is nothing more than the abstract function of thinking. Thus the figurative synthesis of imagination and the intellectual synthesis of pure apperception must be synthesized with each other. Kant called this higher synthesis the transcendental synthesis of imagination, in which, he says, the understanding realizes itself in being restricted by the sense. But in fact Kant formed this transcendental synthesis of imagination on the basis of the thesis that the understanding was superior to the sensibility; and therein we can find his intellectualism (die Verstandmässigkeit). But the intellectualism of Kant has its own reason. He was concerned with the problem of synthesis between understanding and sensibility for the sake of providing of physics with its foundation; therefore, he had to emphasize the unities of categories more than the mere passive sensation, for such categorical unities would give a unity to the whole nature which was essentially blank without any unity in itself. So we can see how in Kant's philosophy intellectualism was inevitable. But in such an intellectualism Kant remained without giving solutions to many problems which he had himself presented. The first of such problems concerns the formality of selfconsciousness. If the highest ground of knowledge (Erkenntnis) is essentially the transcendental apperception, it must act as the transcendental synthesis of imagination, and therefore it must be more than the pure apperception. But Kant did not separate clearly the transcendental apperception from the pure apperception. The transcendental apperception must be a concrete self-consciousness which is conscious of its own act truly as its own in the formation of an object and so it must be a concrete reason setting up (Vernunft) the Unconditioned (das Unbedingte) as its own idea or ideal. But Kant did not fully discuss this problem of the concrete reason. Nevertheless, we may regard the transcendental self-consciousness as a self-consciousness of act, in so far as it is a self-consciousness which is formed through the act. So own interpretation is that Kant practically meant by the transcendental self-consciousness a concrete self-consciousness, although he himself did not fully develop the point.