Kant's Transcendental Deduction Essay

The proof that categories of the understanding and a transcendental unity of apperception are necessary condition for the possibility of experience is what Immanuel Kant claims to be the “Transcendental Deduction”. By this, Kant intends to address and attack one main problem: how we, as humans, can know that the categories apply to experience. From logic, we can easily conclude that empirical concepts are applicable to experience due to the simple fact that they are derived from experience in the first place. Kant is attempting to discover how we can determine that experience must conform to the categories. In doing so, he provides us with twelve categories which are then split into four more specific sections: the categories of Modality, the
Put more blatantly, our experience is unified. Kant believes that universal judgments provide us insight to the category of unity. More precisely, the synthetic nature of human understanding is derived from the unity of pure apperception which Kant names “The Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition”. Kant describes this synthesis as, “Every intuition contains in itself a manifold which can be represented as a manifold only in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in the sequence of one impression upon another; for each representation, in so far as it is contained in a single moment, can never be anything but absolute unity” (Kant, 131). Kant insists that the unification of experience has no concern with anything empirical in the experience itself. Also, he disputes Descartes by claiming that not all of our representations are attributes or characteristics of a thinking substance. It is concluded that there is no logical reason why the same substance could fail to support multiple identities, or why multiple substances could fail to support a single identity. This leads Kant to suggest that the unification of experience is directly related to us being able to reason that each of our representations could be our own. Kant refers to this theory as “The Synthesis of Reproduction in
“The Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination”. It is vital to recognize the vast differences between the Synthesis of Reproduction and memory. It requires us to store previous intuitions so that certain other representations can lead our minds to make a transition back to our previous representations. Essentially, the Synthesis of Reproduction allows our mind to relate past representations to future representations in a rational fashion. It its’ absence, our minds would encounter many worldly understandings in which we would be unable to cognate, thus quite possibly preventing us from formulating reasonable thoughts. Kant states the importance of possessing this unique blend of representations, “For if we can show that even our purest a priori intuitions yield no knowledge, save in so far as they contain a combination of the manifold such as renders a thoroughgoing synthesis of reproduction possible, then this synthesis of imagination is likewise grounded, antecedently to all experience, upon a priori principles” (Kant,133). Even if something, such as an object, appears to be very cut-and-dry and related outside of our perception, we must still apply our personal representations in order to firmly grasp an understanding of that object. This is why Kant insists that we only know appearances, not things in themselves. He claims that by tying an object to a thing in itself you would