Apperception, Objectivity, and Idealism

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© Dennis Schulting, 2020

In a key passage in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the A-edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, Kant poses the following question:

What does one mean ... if one speaks of an object corresponding to and therefore also distinct
from the cognition? (KrV, A104)1

One would think that it is obvious to suppose that the object of which we claim knowledge, which
corresponds to it, exists independently and regardless of that claim. The being of the object does not
depend on our knowledge and must therefore be strictly distinguished from it. But Kant’s question
goes beyond distinguishing between the necessary conditions under which we can claim knowledge
of an object and the ostensibly quite separate question concerning the constitutive or ontological
conditions for the independent existence of the object. This distinction reflects the traditional
distinction between an epistemological question, which concerns knowledge, and a metaphysical
question, which concerns the being or existence of things. Kant asks a more fundamental question:
What do we actually mean by ‘object’? This question goes beyond both a purely metaphysical and a
purely epistemological question because it is precisely about determining what we mean by the
notion ‘object’ before we can even formulate any specific knowledge claims about an arbitrary
object and assess their truth conditions.
In his analysis in the Deduction, Kant wants to make visible something more formal that
would remain implicit if we were to take the object too concretely, as merely an empirically given
thing that presents itself to us. If we were to consider the object merely as an empirically given
thing we would never be able to gather more than random information about it. This formal aspect
concerns the way in which we relate to an object at all. To make this element visible, we must take

1 All translations from the KrV are from Kant (1998).

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a certain reflective distance from the concrete object we experience. The concept of ‘object’ itself
already expresses a certain reflexiveness, as Kant suggests (cf. KrV, A103–4). In his analysis in the
Deduction Kant highlights this reflexive element, in order to be able to elucidate what it actually
means to talk about an object and, in a more concrete sense, in fact first to be able to have
experience of it and make judgements about it.
What is revealed in such a formal analysis is what Kant understands by the so-called
transcendental conditions of possibility for both the experience of an object and the object of
experience, namely the conditions that govern the domain of possible experience. He links this to
the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, judgements that are neither purely analytical, and
whose truth can be deduced from the analysis of the concepts contained therein, nor a posteriori
empirical judgements. These synthetic a priori judgements are not concrete judgements in the usual
sense of the word, but express the fundamental principles that make it possible to speak of an object
of experience in the first place, to judge about it. They are principles that play in the background of
our ordinary judgements of experience. These synthetic a priori judgements declare that under
certain rules that Kant names categories objects can be known as objects, and at the same time these
categories are constitutive of the object itself, qua object. Kant writes at the beginning of the
Analytic of Principles:

In this way synthetic a priori judgments are possible, if we relate the formal conditions of a
priori intuition, the synthesis of imagination, and its necessary unity in a transcendental
apperception to a possible cognition of experience in general, and say: The conditions of the
possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the
objects of experience, and on this account have objective validity in a synthetic judgment a
priori. (KrV, B197/A158)

To return to the above-cited passage from the A-Deduction, Kant answers the question as follows:

It is easy to see that this object must be thought of only as something in general = X, since
outside of our cognition we have nothing that we could set over against this cognition as
corresponding to it. (KrV, A104)

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Kant denies here that the object of which we claim knowledge is given outside of our cognition.
Instead, the object of knowledge is only ‘something in general = X’. In a sense, the object of
knowledge is internalised in thought, that is, it is a function of thought. In the following passage,
Kant indeed repeats that we are dealing only with our representations and that the ‘X which
corresponds to them (the object)—because it [i.e. the object] is something that should be distinct
from our representations—is nothing for us [and] the unity that the object makes necessary can be
nothing other than the formal unity of the consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of the
representations’ (KrV, A105, translation emended). He continues: ‘Hence we say that we cognize
the object if we have effected synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition.’ The questions that arise
are: What is correspondence? How is distinction taken account of? To what extent does a
correspondence theory of truth still play a role in Kant? I cannot deal with these questions here, but
it seems clear that for Kant correspondence between representation and object should not be
understood as a relation of some sort between an absolutely inner self and an absolutely externally
given object.
The claim that an object is when we have effected a unity among our representations does
not mean to say, however, that the thing that we know something objective about is also ‘generated’
by our thinking, by the unity of consciousness, in terms of its existence. The thing that, insofar as it
is an object of experience, is as an object for the knower and is ‘something in general = X’, is itself,
qua existing in itself, of course not internalised. As is well-known, Kant makes a distinction
between the appearance of a thing and the thing in itself. It is the appearance of a thing that Kant
identifies with the object of knowledge. We can know only the appearance of a thing, and not the
thing in itself, which remains independent of the knowing subject (I shall come back to this
distinction later on). Objects are therefore in some very specific sense distinct—at least
conceptually, if not numerically—from things in themselves. The traditional conception of true
knowledge is that our true judgements about things actually correspond to the things that are
independent of our judgements, therefore have an itself-nature independently and regardless of our
judgements (which is expressed in the correspondence theory of truth). How else could our
judgements be true of things if they did not correspond to the things as they are in themselves?
Importantly, Kant is not so much interested in the question of truth per se, that is to say, the
standard question of the logical conditions under which a certain judgement a is F is true or false, or
what the truth value of our judgements is, nor in the question about which other necessary but non-
logical conditions must be met so that a certain judgement is true. He is rather interested in a deeper

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aspect of the relation between judgement and the object of judgement, whereby judgement should
be interpreted here as a synthetic judgement.2 He therefore speaks of the question of transcendental
truth. What makes it possible for me to attribute, truly or falsely, a predicate a to an underlying
object, the ‘X’ that Kant speaks of in the above-quoted passage in A104 (and by means of a also
another predicate F, G, etc.)? What is at issue here is the primordial relation to the object as such in
any arbitrary judgement about an arbitrary given object or objective event, namely the original
orientation to the object or object-directedness—regardless of the question whether attributing any
arbitrary predicates a and F to any object leads to a true or false judgement about same object. This
deeper relation to the object, which is indicated by the adjective ‘transcendental’, expresses the
objective validity of an arbitrary empirical judgement about a given object. Objective validity is the
fundamental ground that enables us first to make a (true or false) judgement about a given object at
all. For Kant, therefore, objective validity is the characteristic of judgement as such.3
But what exactly is it that determines objective validity? How does objective validity come
about if it does not lie in the correspondence per se between, on the one hand, judgement or our
understanding, and, on the other hand, the thing that is to be distinguished from it and that has an
independent existence in itself, let alone that the object or thing itself is the so-called truthmaker?
And does the uncoupling of objective validity as the fundamental orientation to the object from the
traditionally conceived correspondence relation between intellect and thing not precisely lead to a
gap between our conceptuality and reality? Does Kant’s approach to the question of truth as
representation-internal not run the risk of a hopeless idealism, whereby we are locked into our own
ideas and our own mental ‘reality’? In other words, isn’t there the risk of an epistemological
relativism, whereby only our own ideas and judgements are objective, and the ‘really real’ cannot
be reached?
In Schulting (2017), against the background of current discussions in contemporary
analytical Kant research, I argued that Kant is a radical subjectivist in the sense that the objective
application rules for our concepts are purely a function of the capacity to judge, given the fact that
we are sensory beings who receive impressions from the outside, from the things themselves. Our
sensibility is of course a necessary condition of possible empirical knowledge of objects, but

2 With analytic judgements the relation to an object, an underlying x, is otiose because irrelevant for assessing whether
the judgement is true or false.
3 Kant provides the definition for judgement in KrV, B142; there he explicitly connects objective validity with the
nature of judgement. But it should be noted that this concerns determinative judgements, not non-determinative,
merely-reflective judgements, such as aesthetic judgements, of which Kant speaks in the third Critique, nor analytic
judgements, for which reference to an underlying object is irrelevant to the understanding of their truth.

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sensibility is not determinative in the sense Kant means; only our capacity to judge determines what
knowledge and an object of knowledge is. The radical-subjective element lies, more specifically, in
the fact that our capacity to judge is defined by what Kant calls transcendental apperception.
Apperception is the principle of self-awareness and makes it possible for me to be aware of myself
as the person who has certain representations. But apperception is not merely the principle of self-
awareness, as if this should be seen in contrast to the consciousness of objects.
The radical claim that Kant makes—and which I explain in detail in my books (Schulting
2017, 2018a, 2021)—is the claim that the act of transcendental apperception, which is an act of the
synthesis of all my representations, does not concern the apprehension of a random series of
representations that I happen to have (more accurately, which are occurrent in the mind). Rather,
transcendental apperception establishes the objective unity among those representations that I
regard as mine. The rules for a priori synthesis that enable such an objective unity among my
representations are the categories. The categories are the various, very general modes—twelve to be
exact—in which that unity among my representations obtains, in such a way that these
representations are identical to each other insofar as they count as all my representations qua
combined, namely those representations that I apprehend as mine. Kant calls this unity the original
synthetic unity of apperception, which is the unity of the thinking subject that takes a series of
representations together as his own. Kant speaks of this act of apperception as an act of
accompanying by the ‘I think’. The unity of the act of apperception is the original ground of unity
among representations that are accompanied by this ‘I think’.
The identity of this thinking subject, the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’ that unites its representations, is
at the same time the identity of the whole of unified representations accompanied by the same
subject. This unified whole of representations forms a something, an object in general, for that
subject. What is termed ‘object’ thus lies in the way in which the thinking subject takes his
representations as an identical whole that is as an object for that same subject. That is why Kant
calls the transcendental unity of apperception an objective unity of apperception, and why he
defines object as ‘that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united’ (KrV,
B137): the unity of apperception maps exactly onto the unity of the manifold in the intuition. There
is an element of necessity or invariance in the act of apperception that is not already contained in
the flow of the separate representations as such (cf. KrV, A107). This element ensures that the
representations are not merely subjectively valid representations of an arbitrary representer. Because
it is a necessary connection between representations, the objective unity of apperception, which

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expresses the unity of the twelve categories of experience, is always the unity of a thinking subject’s
judgement, which has the basic character of a is F—in contrast to a contingent sequence of variant,
separate representations that any representer might have. For Kant, the thinking subject is always
the judging, cognising, self-conscious subject. The objective unity of apperception is therefore the
definition of judgement, and expresses the unity of the predicates a and F in relation to the
underlying object that the judgement a is F is about. In short, the objective unity of apperception in
a judgement in fact defines what an object is, qua that in which predicates a and F are united. This
expresses the fundamental, intimate identity relation between thought and object, between
judgement and object, without there having to be an inexplicable relation that is external to an
object outside of its representation.
But how can an identity relation between thought and object in a judgement establish the
relation to a real empirical object? Kant makes a fundamental distinction between the intuition of an
object, which expresses the immediate relationship to the given object, and the concept which
relates to the object only by means of such a intuition. But as we have seen, in Kant’s view, the
relation to the object is representation-internal; the object is nothing outside of our knowledge to
which that knowledge should correspond. Yet the objective unity of apperception is the condition of
possibility only for the object qua object, that is, it constitutes its objectivity. It does not constitute
the object with respect to its existence (cf. KrV, A92/B125). That would in fact be impossible
because it would mean that thinking would generate the reality of an object in an existential or
factual sense. The condition of real possibility for knowledge, that which makes knowledge true
empirical knowledge, experience (KrV, B147), lies in sensibility, because only empirical intuition
provides a direct sensory relation to the really existing object.
On the other hand, the intuition itself is also only a representation, or a bundle of
representations (sensory impressions), which, although having a direct relation to the real thing of
which we have a representation (the x of a judgement), are not identical to that thing. We must
differentiate between, on the one hand, the distinction between representation and represented and,
on the other hand, the distinction between representation/represented and the thing in itself, namely
the thing with all its possible predicates (in a judgement we can attribute only a limited amount
thereof to the thing judged about). Kant’s Copernican turn—which states that in order to analyse the
possibility of knowledge we no longer take the correspondence relation to be directed from mind to
thing, but instead must take things as they conform to us, to our forms of knowledge—applies both
to the intuition, the form of our sensibility, and to the concept, the form with which our mind works.

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Although the intuition thus establishes the immediate, as yet indeterminate relation to the real
existing thing, the determined relation remains representation-internal.
Here it is important to see that transcendental apperception works both ways: it establishes
unity among concepts, on the one hand, and among representations in intuition, on the other, and
this happens simultaneously in judgement in virtue of one and the same determining act of synthesis
(the act of apperception) that is performed by the judging agent, for example in the judgement This
armchair is Prussian-blue-coloured. The predicates <this armchair> and <Prussian-blue-coloured>
are connected in this judgement by the ‘copula’ (Verhältniswörtchen)—as Kant calls it—‘is’. But
the copula ‘is’ says more than just stating that predicates are linked to each other. For a judgement
always also has a modal element; it is not just a proposition. The copula says something about the
existence of the object about which a judgement is made. The predicates <this armchair> and
<Prussian-blue-coloured> are also connected with an intuition of a particular existing thing that
falls under the subject concept which, just in case the judgement is true, has the characteristics of
being an armchair and being Prussian-blue-coloured. In the judgement I thus perceive the existing
thing as the object with the objective properties that I attribute to it in the judgement. That object is,
of course, from a purely empirical point of view the thing that exists independently and regardless
of the judgement. But the object qua object, or qua the determined thing with such and such
properties, is purely a function of judgement.
As we have seen, what is characteristic of Kant’s position is that our knowledge does not
consist in a direct correspondence relation between concepts/intuition and thing. Whereas it is true
that in Kant’s view empirically speaking a thing existing independently of the perceiving subject is
presupposed as given for any true judgement—contrary to what many commentators think, Kant is
not concerned with proving that such things or objects exist de re; he just takes their de re existence
for granted—from a transcendental point of view there is nothing beyond the judgement, that is to
say, beyond the relation between concepts and the underlying intuition to which the judgement
corresponds that determines the truth of my cognition. The objective validity of a judgement about a
given object o is established only in virtue of the objective unity of apperception that connects
concepts and intuition in the judgement about o; as Kant says, ‘we say that we cognize the object if
we have effected synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition’ (KrV, A105), confirming that the unity
of apperception defines the object in the way that we know it. This is the thesis that I have called
Kant’s radical subjectivism, referring to what Kant himself says, in the A-Deduction, where he
speaks about nature as a ‘whole of appearances’ (Inbegriff von Erscheinungen), namely all possible

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objects of experience that can be found only ‘in the radical faculty [dem Radikalvermögen] of all
our cognition, namely, transcendental apperception’, in ‘that unity on account of which alone it can
be called object of all possible experience, i.e., nature’ (KrV, A114).
The objective validity of an arbitrary judgement about an empirical object is wholly
constituted by the determining power of the judging, apperceiving subject that apprehends and
synthesises his representations. This applies not only to the concepts in the judgement but also to
the sensory representations in the underlying intuition. The same subject that combines the
predicates <this armchair> and <Prussian-blue-coloured> at the same time combines the sensory
perceptions of a particular thing, the armchair, to which these predicates are attributed in the
judgement. Kant expresses this in such a way that the synthesis of the intuition must be seen as ‘the
transcendental synthesis of the imagination’, whose faculty ‘is an effect of the understanding on
sensibility and its first application ... to objects of the intuition that is possible for us’ (KrV, B152)—
so the understanding itself, that is to say, the thinking subject that apperceives his representations,
has, ‘under the designation [unter der Benennung] of a transcendental synthesis of the
imagination’ (KrV, B153), an effect on sensibility, and thus it acts as a synthesis of the apprehension
of representations in sensible intuition itself. In this way the identity relation between thought and
object manifests itself as a relation that refers to an empirically perceived object, without it having
to go beyond our representations.
It should be emphasised that what is, as it were, generated here by the judging subject is
only the necessary form of the empirical judgement, namely the synthetic unity that combines both
the concepts and the empirical intuitions—not the content of the judgement, namely the predicates
themselves (in this case <this armchair> and <Prussian-blue-coloured>) and the sensory material
as such that underlies the judgement and provides it real possibility; these are wholly contingent and
dependent on all sorts of non-transcendental conditions.4 The form of judgement—the objective
unity of apperception—is necessary in the sense that it is the necessary transcendental condition for
the essential nature of a judgement as an objectively valid statement about an object or objective
event. But it is also the sufficient condition for objective validity because the object is, in terms of
its objectivity, a function of that form; or more precisely, the form, namely the objective unity of
apperception, defines the object. Transcendental-logically speaking, the object does not exist

4 This should not be misunderstood as suggesting that the sensible material is not also determined in terms of its
intensive magnitude, by the understanding, in judgement. But this still concerns the form of matter, i.e. matter qua
matter, which is being determined as the necessary element of all objective knowledge, not the factuality or the
characteristics of this or that particular sense impression, or this or that particular conceptual trait.

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outside the judgement, outside apperception. This is what is radically subjective about Kant’s
position.
However, that does not mean, again, that the object depends on the judgement for its actual
existence. As I indicated earlier, Kant makes a distinction between appearances and things in
themselves. Appearances are things insofar as we can know them as an object of our knowledge, of
our judgements. An appearance is, as Kant says, the indeterminate object of a sensible intuition (the
‘x’ which I mentioned earlier), and is identical to the object as a function of judgement insofar as
that appearance is determined by the categories (also ‘existence’ is of course a category, but here a
distinction must be made between the fact that something exists and establishing, in a judgement, in
virtue of applying the category ‘existence’, the fact that something exists).
Kant’s radical subjectivism thus implies an idealism with respect to the object as being in
some sense dependent on our judging, but this is not the idealism of Berkeley, say, which denies the
mind-independent existence of things in themselves. Kant’s radical subjectivism ensures that we
can explain the intimate correspondence between knowledge and object as a function of our own
capacity to judge, namely the objective unity of apperception, and that at the same time things
insofar as their existence is concerned are not reduced to being a function of our representations.
Whereas Kant’s subjectivism is thus characterised by both a metaphysical and epistemological
component—metaphysical because not only the knowledge or experience of an object but also the
knowable object itself is a function of transcendental apperception—the thing in itself retains its
existential independence.
This in no way implies that our knowledge of objective reality is only relative because
supposedly it would not reach the things in themselves—an oft-heard criticism, especially from
Hegelians reading Kant.5 Such a conclusion ignores the fact that the object determined by the
judging subject is the appearance of the thing itself, for that judging subject. Although the judging
subject does not know the thing as such, namely independently of judgement, i.e. in itself, he does
know the thing in the way in which it appears to him as an object. The fact that he does not know
the thing as a thing in itself follows logically from the fact that knowledge of something is not
possible apart from the necessary conditions under which such knowledge is first possible: For how
can I judge of something that it is so and so independently of judgement? Things are therefore
knowable if and only if they are subject to the necessary conditions for knowledge, and they are

5 Schulting (2021), ch. 9.

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subject to those conditions only if and when they appear to us qua objects, not as things in
themselves.
Knowledge of objects is thus possible only if the necessary a priori conditions for
knowledge of objects are met; outside of those necessary a priori conditions knowledge is ex
hypothesi not possible, nor are objects of knowledge, that is, objects for us, possible outside of
those conditions. This means that things in themselves, that is, things as they are independently of
the conditions under which alone they (as objects) can be known, cannot be known as such (as
things in themselves) under the conditions under which alone objects can be known.6 Or, as Kant
says in the foreword to the B-edition of the Critique, ‘we can cognize of things a priori only what
we ourselves have put into them’ (KrV, Bxviii). This Copernican principle ensures that things in
themselves retain their absolute independence. Does this mean that Kant’s theory of knowledge is
relativist? Not at all. Such a question betrays a misunderstanding with regard to the transcendental
question of how knowledge of an object is possible at all, how ‘object’ is defined, and what it means
to make a judgement about an object.7

References:
Kant, Immanuel (1998), Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. and ed. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schulting, Dennis (2017), Kant’s Radical Subjectivism. Perspectives on the Transcendental
Deduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schulting, Dennis (2018a), Kant’s Deduction From Apperception. An Essay on the Transcendental
Deduction. Revised Edition. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.
Schulting, Dennis (2018b), ‘Zelfbewustzijn, idealisme en objectiviteit—over Kant’s Radical
Subjectivism’. In: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 80 no. 2, 313–22.
Schulting, Dennis (2021), Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism.
London: Bloomsbury.

6 Of course, I can form a notion of the necessary characteristics of a thing in itself and make a synthetic a priori
judgement about it—e.g. that a thing in itself cannot be spatiotemporal. Such a judgement, however, does not relate to
an actual particular object, that is, the x of an empirical intuition that underlies the subject-concept of a synthetic a
posteriori judgement. It does not yield knowledge in the sense of the claims made in the Deduction. Further, such a
judgement would still be bound by the constraints of transcendental apperception, under which an object in general can
be thought, and so does not reach things in themselves as such (but just explains the concept of them). See Schulting
(2017), ch. 9.
7 This paper is based on an earlier version published in Dutch as Schulting (2018b).

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