The Doctrine of Self-positing and Receptivity in Kant's Late ...

This connection between the single representation ―I think‖ to all other
representations assumes a source of unification, an act of connecting. 147 This means that
there is yet another sense in which representations are grounded by apperception. As
mentioned at the start of this section, unification can be thought of as concerning either
purely intellectual elements or intuition. However, regardless of which of these two
unities result, the function of unification is the same. In the early discussion of the
possibility of the deduction of the categories, in a section entitled ―On the Clue to the
Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding,‖ Kant writes:
The same function that gives unity to the different representations in a
judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of different
representations in an intuition, which, expressed generally, is called the
pure concept of the understanding. 148
Hence, from this shared function, the subject knower is capable of attaching the ―I think‖
to every conscious representation, first, in the logical form of the judgment, e.g., ―I think,
147 KrV, B133-4.
148 KrV, A79/B104-5. Italisized emphasis added. Original: ―Dieselbe Function, welche
den verschiedenen Vorstellungen in einem Urtheile Einheit giebt, die giebt auch | der
bloßen Synthesis verschiedener Vorstellungen in einer Anschauung Einheit, welche,
allgemein ausgedrückt, der reine Verstandesbegriff heißt.‖ This passage belongs to a
section of the KrV where the deduction proper has not yet been argued for and the
dependency of the analytic unity of apperception on the synthetic unity has not yet been
shown. Thus, it may appear that the content of the passage is superseded by what comes
later, especially with reference to Kant‘s footnote in §16 (B133). However, from the
perspective of the content of what is united in thought (merely logical predicates or
intuitions), the source for the function of unity is the same and grounded in the faculty of
the understanding. From the perspective of a supreme principle of all use of the
understanding, the analytic unity of apperception presupposes a synthetic unity of
apperception, in that the function of the latter is always already present in the former‘s
very constitution. Thus methodologically speaking, it is already available for it to be
found by reflecting upon what is shared by all representations of which the subject is
conscious as well as by an analytic or logical act. The very reason for it to be found the
function of the synthetic unity of apperception.
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