At this point, Kant has proven that the first step of the synthesis in experience requires the subject to combine its representations to form a whole. But the unity of this whole is merely contingent, and its various parts lack any meaningful relationship to one another aside from
75 Again, the issue of whether an intuition is formed in this way is a contentious one in Kant scholarship. 76 This point, however, also reveals how the synthetic unity of apperception is also dependent on those
that follow it. Where they not present, there would be no unified subject to refer the sensations to.
77 At the same time, as will be shown in what follows, the various sensations could not all be collected in a
their ordering in space and/or time. And even this ordering is merely a contingent result of how the subject happened to receive its representations, and lacks any necessity. But, as we have seen above, the transcendental unity of apperception requires that the various representations form a necessary whole, and not an arbitrary collection. After all, the subject’s unity is not some
contingent fact about it, but a necessary feature of it. Accordingly, the subject’s representations, too, must be necessarily unified, and not merely arbitrarily collected.
As things stand, however, the synthesis of sensations into a single mass does not alter that fact that these sensations lack any generality, and hence any connection to one another beyond their merely contingent relationships in space and time. As noted above, sensations alone are not sufficient to account for experience, since they lack the generality distinctive of human thought. So, in order to think its representations, the subject must move from individual sensations to form more general representations that can be used to classify multiple sensations at once. In other words, it needs to form concepts. Based on the prior synthesis of its
representations, the subject is able to group sensations together to form intuitions. From these intuitions, it is able to abstract out common features, thereby forming empirical concepts. ‘The analytic unity of apperception’ is the name given to this stage. Here, thanks to the preceding synthesis, it becomes possible to abstract out empirical concepts from the various collections of sensations, and use these concepts to classify them. 78
Since the ‘I’ in ‘I think’ lacks any empirical content, it is nothing over and above the unity of its representations. Accordingly, to come closer to establishing the necessary unity among its representations is at the same to come closer to establishing the necessary unity in the reflective representation of the subject itself. Conceptualizing our representations is a key step in
78 Important to note, however, is that it is only because of the previous synthesis of various
representations that it is possible to abstract out of them a common concept. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , B133-134n.
establishing the necessary unity in the subject’s representation of itself. At the same time, the 79
formation of concepts is also an important part of bringing sensations up to the level of experience of objects; without concepts, sensations would be a mere blur of color and sound, and would lack the element of generality Kant takes to be an essential part of experience. 80
But the analytic unity of apperception, though it results in the formation of concepts, is insufficient to establish either the necessary unity of the subject or the experience of an object. This is for two reasons. First, at this stage, although concepts have been formed, they have not been employed in the actual act of ordering representations. For this, concepts need to be combined in judgments.
Second and more importantly, at this point the various representations and concepts that the subject has are combined in a purely subjective manner. They are combined as the subject sees fit and with no reference to other subjects or the object they aim to represent. Kant describes this as a “subjective unity of consciousness”, to be distinguished from an “objective unity of consciousness.” The former is simply the subject’s associations of ideas, but the latter 81
involves a kind of normative prescription, wherein the subject asserts that this combination is a necessary one, one that should hold for all other subjects as well. What is missing then, is this 82
element of necessary unity that both objects and subjects have. Neither we, nor the objects of our experience, are merely contingently unified - the subject is necessarily one and the same in all of its experiences, and just as the object is one and the same in all our experiences of it. 83
79 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , A112. 80 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , A112. 81 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , B139-140. 82 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , B139-143.
83 Interestingly, however, the necessity at work in these cases is of a subtly different sort. The the unity of
the subject’s experiences is a necessary condition on the possibility of there being any experience whatsoever. The necessary unity of the object, on the other hand, is the kind of normative necessity outlined above - it involves taking a unity of representations to be correct, and requiring others to unify them in a similar way. But at the same time, the act of taking any particular set of representations to be necessarily unified in that way is not itself necessary, and different subjects could unify their