3. Third Lecture: Transcendental Unity of Apperception and A Priori Rules
This is not a difficult lecture, especially if students have some familiarity with Kant and have read at least some of the course materials I suggest, such as those by Rob Wolff and others. The goal is to ensure we grasp the fundamental principles and understand the logic of a priori rules. Once this is understood, I usually provide a broad and bold analysis, connecting Žižek, Kant, Lacan, biblical topics, evolutionary biology, German Romantics, Heidegger, AI, and even postmodernists. I approach the same idea from many completely different perspectives, with the sole aim of demonstrating—hopefully convincingly, and most often successfully—that the way students used to think about the world is suboptimal.
Robert Paul Wolff, in his description of “The Four Selves in Kant’s Philosophy,” highlights, there are potential issues that arise from Kant's approach to the self, particularly his depiction of the "transcendental self" as a function of the noumenal self. To understand these issues, we must grasp the power Kant attributes to our “transcendental self.” For Kant, this self is not simply a function that enables the understanding of the world; it is, for our true subjectivity (noumenal apperception), the source of all understanding. This includes our perception of space and time and even the laws of nature! Kant acknowledges this claim—that understanding itself is the source of the laws of nature—might seem "exaggerated and contradictory," but he sees it as necessary to prevent his philosophical system from collapsing. He contends that the fundamental principles of cognition and reality, i.e., the laws of nature, must be "located" somewhere. Given his understanding of our subjectivity and the world, these principles cannot be situated in the objects themselves in the external world. Therefore, they must arise from our understanding, specifically from our transcendental unity of apperception as our "transcendental self."
To explore this perspective further, one might be led to interpret Kant's transcendental idealism as idealistic in the classical sense or even solipsistic, which Kant himself would reject. To understand why, we need to examine more closely how Kant proposes we shape reality and ourselves. As we know, Kant posits that we experience reality through our a priori intuitions (space and time) and categories of understanding. However, when we analyze the process of understanding the world and the core of our conscious existence, we see that the categories of understanding result from our experience (and do not always precede it). Thus, the profound significance of our transcendental apperception becomes clear once we recognize that our mind, in order to apply categories and synthesize objects in the world, first prepares the realm of phenomena to be perceived and experienced. Kant asserts that “the first thing that it [understanding] does for this is not to make the representation of the objects distinct, but rather to make the representation of an object possible at all.”
The creation of this phenomenal world happens only as our transcendental apperception applies a priori rules to our existence, structuring the flow of appearances received by our mind. Kant illustrates this with numerous examples in the Second Analogy (under Analogies of Experience), demonstrating how our mind rearranges and even contradicts the subjective order of appearances before conceptualizing them. For example, Kant refers to seeing a ship being driven downstream, in which case we get the appearance of a ship downstream after getting the appearance of the ship upstream. However, due to the a priori rules our transcendental apperception applies to our understanding, we "position the ship back upstream again," understanding its movement.
To understand the way a ship moves (or the connection of cause and effect in general), we do not have to store the sequences of events and compare those to preceding appearances to conceptualize causality, because our transcendental apperception already operates based on that a priori rule. This implies that our conscious existence comprises a two-stage process: our transcendental apperception structures our experience of reality, which we then interpret and understand through our empirical self using the categories of understanding. That, in turn, means the totality of the objective order of nature is synthesized by our noumenal self before we have a subjective experience of it. Figuratively, our transcendental self is the creator of the “order of reality” (as the structure for experiencing the noumenal world) according to a priori rules as meta-rules (rules for the rules), and also the author of our empirical (phenomenal) self, which becomes aware of that reality by employing categories of understanding (as rules which follow the meta-rules).
In the simplest terms, our categories of understanding (that are our inherent way of making sense of the world), pure forms of intuition, and pure concepts deal with making sense of the “objective order of nature,” which has been constructed by following the a priori rules that act as meta-rules for categories.
Order of nature per Kant
Let us imagine that world for a moment. Kant does not posit, that all of the reality would exist “just in our heads,” rather he acknowledges the existence of the noumenal realm as forms of objects in space and time to which we add the “qualia” (the experience of taste, color, etc). Thus per Kant, Kant physical reality exists, however, the properties of objects in the outside world are limited to their form (how they "stretch in space"). In contrast, all sensations, like taste, color, and so on (as qualia), are entirely subjective - resulting from our representational capabilities and not inherent to the things themselves. Kant states, that ”no one can have a priori representation of either color or taste". Kant’s approach, therefore, is somewhat similar to what Jean Baudrillard described in his Simulacra and Simulation, where we as humans have “the privilege” of experiencing the “hyperreal,” the world where the distinction between reality and simulation has become blurred. There should be some sort of physical “real” reality grounding that all, however, it probably is very much different (and more modest) compared to our experience, because our experience of that “real world” is not immediate but mediated (distorted, modified, re-arranged, enhanced, numbed) by the simulacra - the environment we experience instead of the “desert of the real.” (It should be noted, still, that that sort of experience of the world differs in a principle way from the one depicted in Matrix, where the totality of the world was virtual and humans experiencing that in capsules not inside it).
It is also interesting to note that such approach (of adding qualia to physical reality) is not unreasonable from the scientific and anthropologic point of view. Our scientific understanding of the rules according to which nature is organized is largerly based on our ability to deduct those rules from nature using mathematics. Richard P. Feynman posited that if one is interested in the ultimate character of the physical world, at the present time the only way to understand that is through a mathematical type of reasoning. When it comes to the interplay of our consciousness an the physical world to this day many aspects become “objective” only after being “translated” to mathematics. That approach renders understanding physical reality always framed and limited by how we are able to understand the underlying rules. The same objects may have completely different conceptualization based on the rules of our perception.
Consider the following example from Feynman referring to the “Cargo Cult people,” living in the South seas. He explains: “During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas - he’s the controller - and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land.” Ridiculous as it may seem, that is also the way our future generations may see us conceptualizing physical reality.
The question at the heart of all metaphysical and ontological thought, as well as our conceptualization of consciousness, is this: what is the origin of these meta-rules? For Feynman, these rules are discerned through empirical observation and mathematical reasoning and are thus considered integral to the physical world itself. For Kant, however, these rules are a priori, meaning they not only precede our experience of the world but also structure it, even though they might not directly reflect the noumenal world as it is in itself. The crucial idea here is that our entire understanding of ourselves and nature is derived from these rules, and thus our subjective reasoning about their true source fundamentally shapes our comprehension of reality.
In the simplest terms, Kant did not deny the existence of physical reality or our capacity to perceive the form of objects in an "objective" manner (as the perception of noumena), however, he believed that qualia - our subjective experiences of phenomena like color, taste, and so on - resulted from the synthesis of intuition in our imagination.
