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Kant's Apperception and Consciousness Revisited

Working Paper · July 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.15606.70722

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Kant’s Apperception and Consciousness
Revisited
Abstract

Thinking at the service of intuition is considered by this study as the foundation whilst
apperception becomes the back bone of Kant’s philosophical edifice that enables Kant to frame
and build up his rigorous metaphysics. In order to achieve this, the synthesis of empirical
sensibility and a priori faculty of mind necessarily happens within the framework of receptive
consciousness for recollection of experience, stimulated action of duty, and appreciation of
disinterested delight. The purpose of this study is to prepare the engagement of philosophy with
the contemporary world. This study argues that the concept of apperception is necessarily
revisited, reexamined, and reinterpreted in respect to the whole architectonic Kant’s philosophy.
Accordingly, the essential and structurally underlying foundation of Kant’s metaphysical legacy
is thinking in the service of sensibility. The three Critiques have been constructed and
established on this foundation that intuition is indispensable and necessary. From this point, this
study departs its investigation into Kant’s texts and attempt to rebuilding the relationship
between the concept of apperception and other Kant’s concepts: understanding, categorical
imperative, and disinterested, which are pivotal for knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics.

Apperception Revisited

Kant’s concept of apperception is handed over from Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) that is to
recognize the mental states and events after having encountered the happenings of the world. The
concept was introduced by Leibniz in his 1707 Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement humain
(McRae, 1976, p. 46). This mental process is to recognize what has happened in term of
recollection, which is reflective in the context of being aware of experience. The purpose of this
recollection is the search for reality by reconstruction of what has happened with the help of
memory. All this mental process is roughly identified by Leibniz with the concept of apperception.
This is to say that it is not mere sensory receptivity of senses or perception, but a reflective
knowledge from inner sensibility. Leibniz speaks of l’apperception in the context of la conscience
in the section four of 1714 Principes de la nature et de la Grâce fondés en raison (Thiel, 2006, pp.
292-3).

Undoubtedly, apperception is a controversial and theoretically unresolved concept in Kant’s

Critique of Pure Reason. Philosophical studies on Kant’s apperception have been presented by
number of scholars (Bossart, 1994; Keller, 1998; Schulting, 2012; Michaelis, 1989; Ameriks,
2000, pp. 238-243; Guyer, 1987, pp. 131-154). Most scholars and commentators of Kant’s
philosophy broadly agree with the fact that this concept is necessarily redefined, reworked, and
reformulated again, if it is a slippery disappointment or mishap or flaw of Kant’s philosophical
edifice. Unfortunately, criticism on this concept does not bring new things but leads Kant’s main
findings for philosophy to fall into oblivion. This study is intended neither to deliver critical
comments nor to discuss Kant’s scholars’ positions on the concept. Rather, the study is focused
to present the implicit and less-unfolded aspects of Kant’s concept on apperception.
Methodologically speaking, this study is an attempt to revisit and reconstruct what Kant possibly
does with the concept of apperception with the help of new developments in cognitive sciences
and longstanding practice of meditation in Zen Buddhism. The purpose is in order to be in
alignment with the whole architectonic structure and form of his philosophy. This effort is
neither new nor original. Martin Heidegger’s studies on Kant’s philosophy have initiated,
reinterpreted, and reworked the concepts and traces of the Critiques within the framework of
thinking at the service of intuition. This Kant’s approach to reality is considered a pivotal point
of departure for this study.

Consciousness and Reality

Philosophy is useless if its business does not deal with and work on the fundamental question of
existence; what is reality? The question leads us to the next; what is the relationship between
consciousness and the world? Most recent findings in quantum physics confirms that the
question mentioned earlier are unattainable without thinking of the wholeness of beings; the
relationship between mind and the world is pivotal for what reality is (Bohm & Hiley, 1993).
Zen Buddhism has been intensively dealing with and training of consciousness for the world of
oneness with no-mind approach of sensibility since ancient times (Suzuki, 1972; Dumoulin,
World Wisdom, p. 254). Accordingly, the Zen’s approach to reality is nothing but giving up the
sense of self and doing so without reservation (Austin, 2006, p. 97).

What is the relationship between consciousness and reality? The problem concerning
consciousness lies in its transcendental nature that this concept is not quite definable (Steinberg,
2006, pp. 24-5) and associated with the unknown but its phenomenon is experienced as inner
sense of awareness with spontaneously directing capacity of mind in connection to body and the
worldly affairs. Reality is understood as it is as what it is experienced at its presence. However,
reality is not objective actuality, but it is something inclusive that builds and conjoins events,
things, persons, and all other entities together as a purposeful wholeness: the world. In reality,
everything for Kant is in the nexus of purposiveness. Moreover, Kant claims reality as
categorical concept that qualifies things or persons regarding their actual happening in the world.
Reality is only grasped through sensibility with affirmative proposition. Regarding this sensible
quality, reality contains the intensive magnitude of the possible. In other words, reality is about
the quality of presence that is not subject of sensation but that of sensibility in terms of the
empirical system of facts. In this system, facts are interconnected to each other that build and
establish the sense of unity and identity of beings as a whole.
What is the relation of reality to consciousness? In Buddhist tradition, there are spontaneously
sensuous and mindful consciousness (Thrangu, 2002). The first relies on intuition whilst the
second depends on cognition. Intuition is the faculty of mind that enable one to see, hear, smell,
touch, and taste spontaneously and directly devoid any thought; in other words, intuition is
consciousness of unbroken progression of reality as it is (Kitaro, 1987, p. 1). Kant holds
sensuous intuition as the faculty of mind of sensibility that enables one to access the reality
purely and continuously. Kant has already distinguished this representatio sensitiva from
cognatio sensualis, as well as affective sensibility from pure intuition in his 1770 dissertation
(Heidegger, 1997, p. 60). For Kant, the relationship between reality and consciousness is
constrained by the finitude of sensibility that provides the faculty of mind for understanding and
imagination with empirical data. In doing so, experience is made possible.

Apperception and Consciousness

Consciousness as a general notion is not always and necessary condition about the sense of self.
Consciousness is necessarily understood as the mental states or events that enable sentient being
to deal with the world. However, the mindful consciousness is the mental awareness of
something from and through manifold thoughts. Since existence is being engaged and projected
in the worldly affairs for alignment and growth, which is navigated by sensibility, the mental
states or events of consciousness is potentially to receive the vibrations of mood and thought as
well as memories of past experience. The alignment and growth of identity for beings as a whole
is the nature of human existence; Heidegger speaks of Befindlichkeit and mood in relation to this
alignment in the context of Stimmung (Heidegger, 1927/2010, pp. 182-7; Ferber, 2015). This
existential identity entails freedom that is free from any mental fixation and attachment based on
memory. This alignment is a constant and necessary condition of existence of humankind and for
the sustainability of other beings because reality is ever changing process of regeneration and
growth. This phenomenon has been well known in philosophy since Heraclitus (540 – 480 BC);
there is nothing permanence except change (Engel, 2002, p. 32; Heidegger, 2013).

The emergence the sense of self is triggered by the thought and feeling of lack because of the
fear of being thrown or projection into the unknown and uncertainty. Rene Descartes (1596–
1650) in his second Meditationes de prima Philosophia recognizes this projection as doubt that is
necessarily overcome with a rigorous method of separation between mind and body so that “I”
exist. The existential condition of humankind into the world is constantly characterized by the
mood that potentially creates the states of being uncertain. This moody related engagement is
able to create the gap between person and the world because of fear, distrust, and unfamiliarity.
This existential gap potentially leads and projects the mental states and events into juggling
circumstances for the necessity of control and dominance, instead of just going into the flow of
what happens. This subjective kind of consciousness potentially builds and establishes the sense
of self and otherness. This is the awareness of separation between the sense of me and otherness
in the form of and relation to mental image, judgment, opinion and beliefs. The separation of the
self from the world is the absence of worldly temporality for what is thought. The separation is
considered as disengagement from the worldly affairs. In other words, the subject comes into the
awareness of reflective existence of the “I” that controls others because of fear of being projected
into the unknown and uncertainty.

The concept of apperception is introduced by Kant in the section of Transcendental Deduction,

first version of Critique of Pure Reason from 1781. Kant associates the concept of apperception
with self-consciousness. Most English-speaking commentators consider this association is
crucially structural for the architectonic edifice of the whole Critiques with less critical to the
concept of self-consciousness (Allison, 1996; Brook, 1994; Kicher, 1990; Schulting, 2012).
Indeed, Kant’s understanding on self-consciousness is considerably less elaborated than one can
find in Fichte (Frank, 1991) and in current studies in neuroscience (Cavanna & Nani, 2014; Bob,
2011; Menon, 2014) and Zen Buddhism (Austin, 2006; Blackmore, 2009; Sears, 2016). Today,
apperception is a concept in use for psychological tests concerning the capacity of individual
minds; the essential content of the apperception test is how agency is able to read, listen, and
retrieve his/her experience in oral or written presentation (Aronow, et al., 2013). This test, which
was developed in Harvard Psychological Clinic by Christiana Morgan and Henry A. Murray in
1935 (Morgan & Murray, 1935), is to demonstrates how accurate and logical the agencies are
able to recollect the facts from their experience and construct and describe them into narrative
and drawing. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus describes this kind of mental construction of the facts
as the world (Wittgenstein, 1922/2013).

In the context of apperception, Kant entails consciousness in terms of self-awareness of

experience; this kind of consciousness is reflective in reconstructing past events through
retrieving memory. This process belongs to the unsaid matter of Kant’s concept of apperception.
Kant just underlies the importance of the unity of manifold representation from experience in
reflexive manner through the mental states and events of apperception. During this mental
process, the thinking agency is necessarily to filter out phenomena of the case from illusion,
impression, opinion, and sensation. This is also the mental process to transform phenomena into
facts that matter for the case. Facts of the case include things, persons, events, traces, prints, and
other audio-visual footages. What Kant wants to say about knowledge that is based on
experience should be understood as the reconstruction of things from what have been captured
by our sensory intuition, as well as things, which are logically constructed by categorical
structures of understanding with the help of memory. Current studies in cognitive sciences since
the mid of 1980-s have shown that experience is not solely constructed as explicit memory on the
basis of self-awareness, but also encoded with non-self-awareness that builds implicit memory
(Chloitre, 1997, p. 56); studies demonstrate that both explicit and implicit memory are relatively
dissociable or independent. The explicit memory is constructed with reference to purposive
events and categorically structured within the framework of concepts from previous experience.
On the other hand, the implicit memory works within the pattern of behavior or other habitual
and motoric activities. In order to build knowledge of things, experience is necessarily
recollected, reconstructed, and encoded from explicit and implicit memory. All this mental
process is reflective in terms of self-awareness in the context of beings as a whole. In this
process. The mind performs the stage or platform for the facts to show themselves and their
interplay within the network of purposeful system, episode by episode toward a whole story of
what it is. Kant points out this process as the consciousness that enables the faculty of mind to
achieve the unity of manifold representations.

For Kant, apperception is a mental process for synthetic unity of data from sensuous intuition; he
claims that the necessity for the unity of apperception is essential for knowledge. Knowledge is
necessarily constructed by recollection from experience. Kant does not mention how to build and
establish knowledge, but he entails the qualification of judgments that work within the
framework of knowledge, namely the affirmative propositions because knowledge is about
reality. As pure category, Kant’s reality is the mere form of affirmative predicate (Longuenesse,
1998, p. 298); this is the predicate of presence. The mental states and events of presence are
primarily experienced as the awareness of whereabout in space and time. This awareness enables
the faculty of mind for synthetic unity of apperception. Kant entails consciousness to hold
apperception. This is supposedly not understood in the way of Cartesian self-consciousness. Kant
points out the consciousness for this mental process in terms of self-awareness of what has
happened. Kant’s consciousness is closely related to the receptive mode of cognition in Zen
Buddhist meditation. Interpreting Kant’s text concerning consciousness needs to think out of the
historical context and framework. This necessity lies in the fact that research and studies on
consciousness in cognitive and neuroscience have been significantly beginning in the end of the
20th century, especially with the help of technologically imaging devices and instruments such as
PET, MRI and EEG (Solso, 1999, p. 311).

There are two modes of intuitive sensibility: attentive and affective way. Attentive receptivity is
the basic and intentionally focused manner of intuitive activities whilst affective mode is
sensually related experience. Either attentive or affective intuition is experienced as sensibility.
Attentive sensibility works for observation, watching, listening, massaging, remembering, and
reading. The attentive receptivity is mostly achieved with physically relaxed concentration.
Whilst affective sensibility is something that moves and stimulates mind, body, and soul in terms
of emotional empathy or sympathy, and intentional engagement, such as participation in sport
games. In other words, sensibility spontaneously navigates our existence in the world; all this
belongs to our presence that is prior to language use and action and our daily experienced life
takes place. Studies on sensibility in the context of spontaneous engagement and involvement in
the world have been explored by numerous scholars and thinkers such as: Frederick Tilney
(1919), Erwin Strauss (1930), Merleau-Ponti (1962, p. Part 1 & 2), and Jan Patočka (1998, pp.
135-42).
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