Kant's Threefold Synthesis Essay

Kant’s Threefold Synthesis and Transcendental Unity of Apperception

A large portion of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason concerns itself with explaining how humans are able to attain knowledge, especially empirical knowledge of the world. Addressing this question, Kant wrote: “We must enquire what are the a priori conditions on which the possibility of existence rests” (A95-96). After problematically deducing that all cognition of objects is limited by the objects’ physical appearances (A95), Kant managed to escape this trouble by claiming the necessity of a non-empirical, synthetic unity presupposed in all human cognition (A97). In attempt to logically support his presupposed ‘synthetic unity’, Kant’s A Deduction explains that 1) through
Beginning with the ‘preparatory’ account, the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition is the process in which impressions are moved to the province of imagination. By ‘imagination’, Kant likely means the sector of the mind that concerns itself with images. In the A Deduction Kant states that humans can differentiate between impressions “in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another” (A99). To better explain this, the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition is the means through which humans can combine individual perceptions into temporally fluid strings of perceived events. Kant starts his defense of this principle by observing that humans are only capable of being truly aware of one thing at a time: “the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another” (A99). Kant supports this claim with the quote: “For each representation, in so far as it is contained in a single moment, can never be anything but absolute unity” (Kant A99). Here Kant is explaining that without synthesis and therefore without arrangement in time, the manifold of impressions being received at one time would be incomprehensible for any human. The term ‘absolute unity’ is ambiguous in this usage, but it can be said to represent the infinitely indistinguishable nature of the manifold of intuitions.
This is the part of the threefold synthesis in which intuitions are classified as being something the observer has previous knowledge of, or being classified as an entirely new entity. Like the Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition requires the Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination, Synthesis of Recognition as a Concept also requires reproduction in imagination as a means to first recognize an object. Kant begins his description of the Synthesis of Recognition as a Concept by stating that experience of an object must first take into account its constitutive properties’ spatial and temporal locations relative to one another. Through this point, Kant further explains that an object cannot be known to a human unless through ‘concepts’ – an object cannot present itself as it is into the human mind, only the human perceptions of its properties can exist. The imagination’s role is evident in that it is required in recognition of an object, but in A103, Kant also notes that memory is required. From past experiences with objects, humans use the imagination in comparing impressions, but a memory of past events is required for this synthesis. Kant again notes that to know an object, concepts, specifically concepts of number, modality, and quality, must be applied. In summary, for experience to contain objects, concepts are needed to analyze spatio-temporal arrangement of a given material. From this