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

possibility, while the reflection and comparison of the contents of actual consciousness is
the source of a complex concept of representation.
From this brief sketch it is possible to grasp one of Reinhold's basic criticism and
answer to Kant's KrV; in the latter there are some points of intersection with the
Selbstsetzungslehre. What is apparent is that Reinhold attempts to provide a first ground
for the unification of the different faculties of cognition by means of his ―principle of
consciousness;‖ the concept of representation found therein and as the intermediary
between subject and object functions as the unified basis from which to begin to construct
how experience is made possible; the determined nature of representation can only be
found from within the realm of actual consciousness; and the method of analysis takes
place by starting from the most general concept of representation to the most specific. As
will be seen below, all of these points can be said to be touched upon in the
Selbstsetzungslehre (there is a further development of the interactions and constructed
nature of experience; the ―I think‖ is articulated from the perspective of its actuality; and
it too begins from the most abstract conditions of experience to the most concrete ones).
And yet, in the Selbstsetzungslehre Kant does not move upwards to a common
concept of representation. Instead, while in the doctrine he too articulates further the
relationship between sensibility and understanding in the making of experience and
begins from consciousness, Kant nonetheless remains focused on a notion of
consciousness understood first in terms of thought – ―I think‖ – arriving immediately to
the necessary possibility of self-consciousness from there (first analytic and then
synthetic). It is only then that he descends to unfold in more detail the cognitive
conditions, not in terms of the different kinds of representations qua representation, but
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