I’m reading the Transcendental Deduction in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and realized that I didn’t have an exact grasp on the concept of apperception in a specific way, only in a general sense, and more specifically as Kant uses it rather synonymously to self-consciousness. I’m not sure I’m right on this, but it helps me think it through.
Kant uses apperception to denote, roughly, the concept of consciousness. At times, he will use the term consciousness as a loose synonym for cognition or the unity of all acts of thought; or merely the being-aware of the subject of itself; the projection of the subject outside itself (or outside the immediate content of its empirical intuitions, abstracting from them in a synthesizing act the immediate contents of its intuitions); or the transcendental unity of the subject. This last definition – of transcendental unity – is what Kant defines as apperception, or more correctly, the “Transcendental Unity of Apperception.” The term denotes, more so than consciousness, which could signify a thing, a substance, the homunculus cozying up inside our heads; a state, or an action, of the Ego [das Ich, or "the I"]. This is particularly appropriate, because this transcendental apperception is always spontaneous; it is always acting upon a representation, which is, by the understanding, determined and conjoined by the synthesis of intuitions and concepts. This synthesis (conceptualization) is always accompanied by the I think, which is always the same, and always necessarily an act of possession by the subject, who has an awareness of his or her understanding’s operations – thus they have the same affirmation of the I think over and over again. This is what Kant means when he writes:
“The I think must accompany all my representations, for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought; in other words, the representation would either be impossible, or at least be, in relation to me, nothing. That representation which can be given previously to all thought, is called intuition. All the diversity of the manifold content of intuition, has, therefore, a necessary relation to the I think, in the subject in which this diversity is found. But this representation, I think, is an act of spontaneity; that is to say, it cannot be regarded as belonging to mere sensibility…It is in all acts of consciousness one and the same, and unaccompanied by it, no representation can exist for me. The unity of this apperception…[indicates] the possibility of a priori cognition in general.”
It’s interesting, then, since Kant is discussing apperception transcendentally, that it must always possess, not just similitude or resemblance to itself in all its action, but sameness. We could think of it like a mechanism, this I think, which always, situated at some transcendental space within our heads, grasps in the same motion at a whole series of objects passing by it. If it wants to pick up an apple, or a pen, or a phone, or a book, the movements of its fingers, the tense of the muscles in its palm, always operate in the same manner. This is because its hand grasps at representations, which are different from objects, but which are the content, resulting from a determination, or synthesis, of a manifold given in intuition. That is, it is a re-presentation, or a constitution, of the object by the subject, the object itself being the thing-in-itself.
It’s almost a terrifying thought. Not so much that we are constituted by this unity of apperception, but the fact that, in Kant, it’s motion never changes. It’s important to note that the unity of apperception is the foundation of my Ego, of my calling myself me – and so we are transitioned from the possibility of affirming ourselves in differing ways. We are never allowed the possibility of affirming myself as not me, because of apperception’s greed.
