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

and the section ―On the Paralogisms of Pure Reason.‖ In the former Kant addresses not
only the function of apperception as ground of all representations, but also, briefly, its
nature. In the latter, Kant addresses in what way it is legitimate to claim that one can
cognize the ―I‖ of apperception; it elucidates the extent to which it is possible to
legitimately take the ―I‖ as Object with the cognitive resources available to finite rational
beings.
The subject's act of making itself into an Object is identified explicitly in these
passages from the Op as self-consciousness (―conscientia sui ipsius,‖ ―Bewustseyn
meiner Selbst,‖ ―apperception,‖ or ―ich bin mir meiner selbst bewust‖). Following the
lead of what Kant writes in the ―Deduction,‖ one can take this to mean that in so far as
the subject is conscious of its own involvement as ground of all of its possible
representations, it is grasping itself or the ―I‖ in this conscious thought. In other words,
the subject's act of thinking itself as the source of the necessary unity between itself and
all its representations is congruent with an act of taking itself as ―Object,‖ even if what is
being taken as object of thought is ultimately nothing but a designation (―I‖) of its own
thinking as a unifying function (―gehört zur Logik,‖ ―Vorstellung durch Begriffe oder das
Denken,‖ or ―blos logischer Act ist‖).
This account turns on the distinction discussed in the previous section between
discursive understanding and intuition; since for a finite rational being cognition is
possible only if intuition is given to it, the subject is limited at the level of apperception
alone to a mere thinking of itself by means of the understanding, which means that the
thought of this ―I‖ is itself empty of all intuition. In §25, Kant writes: ―...in the synthetic
original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as
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