stankovic, sasa thesis.pdf - Atrium - University of Guelph

object. “Although to the question, what is the constitution of a transcendental object, no answer
can be given stating what it is, we can yet reply that the question itself is nothing, because there
is no given object [corresponding] to it” (CPR A479/B507n). Thus we should really speak of
transcendental objectification. Things take the form of the transcendental object under the gaze
of representational knowledge. Representational knowledge projects the transcendental object.
Zupančič recognizes this point: “dialectical illusion is not really an illusion of something; it is not
a false or distorted representation of a real object. Behind this illusion there is no real object;
there is only nothing, the lack of an object” (Zupančič 66). Kant discusses the transcendental
objectification explicitly in relation to the transcendental subject. “Accordingly,” he continues
the paragraph already quoted, “all questions dealt with in the transcendental doctrine of the soul
are answerable in this latter manner, and have indeed been so answered; its questions refer to the
transcendental subject of all inner appearances, which is not itself appearance and consequently
not given as object, and in which none of the categories (and it is to them that the question is
really directed) meet with the conditions required for their application” (CPR A479/B507n). The
transcendental subject takes the form of the transcendental object in order to be known
representationally. For this reason, Kant never discusses what is to be known in representational
self-knowledge in terms of the transcendental subject. Here there is no transcendental subject to
speak of. There is only the transcendental object. Thus Kant insists that “we compare the
thinking ‘I’… with the intelligible that lies at the basis of the outer appearance which we call
matter” (CPR A360). In other words, Kant insists that “the thinking ‘I’, the soul [be] (a name for
the transcendental object of inner sense)” (CPR A361).
Representational self-knowledge does not really fail because it does not go far enough.
Representational self-knowledge goes as far as it can go. It is just that it does not go in the right
74