We now turn to the final part of our task which is to explicate the idea of objective judgment for Kant in order to show that the knowledge that results from an objective judgment cannot be knowledge of an object as it is in itself and further explicate the central role of the person in the production of knowledge. Within what we have covered already, we have touched quite heavily upon the arguments that Kant sets forth in his objectivity thesis; namely, that the appearances of objects are correlated to objects outside of intuition, but these objects, “can serve only as a correlate of the unity of apperception for the unity of the manifold in sensible intuition, by means of which the understanding unifies that in the concept of an object.”[1] We shall now examine the steps in Kant’s argument for this thesis, so we may see the function of the thing-in-itself in relation to objective judgment.

Kant begins from what he calls the transcendental unity of apperception—the ‘I’ that thinks. He writes, “The I think must be able to accompany all my representation; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me” (B132).[2] The manifold of intuition (prior to any proposed application of the categories) must have a relation to the I think. This is a pure self-consciousness. It cannot be given in experience, nor is it an a priori intuition. It is rather “an act of spontaneity, i.e., it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (B132), and it must be regarded as a unity so that we may say the representations that correspond to it belong to only that I think.[3] That is to say, the manifold of the intuition must be synthesized in one consciousness that I call “my representations.” The categories which Kant proved in the Metaphysical Deduction are the rules by which this synthesis takes place. It follows, then, that “The synthetic unity of consciousness is therefore an objective condition of all cognition, not merely something I myself need in order to cognize an object but rather something under which every intuition must stand in order to become an object for me, since in any other way, and without this synthesis, the manifold would not be united in one consciousness” (B138).[4] The categories are, therefore, objectively valid, meaning they apply to objects, and they allow us to make objective judgments, which give us knowledge about objects.

Kant makes his “object argument” in the third part of the A Deduction (A104-105) in order to show what an objective judgment is and how they are possible. He begins by reminding us that when we say our representations are appearances in objects, we mean that our appearances “must not be regarded in themselves, in the same way, as objects (outside the power of representation)” which raises the following question: “What does one mean, then, if one speaks of an object corresponding to and therefore also distinct from cognition?”[5] One might think that we simply have nothing to say at all about the object as distinct from cognition, and indeed, we cannot say anything about it; however, we do know that there is necessity in the relationship between our representation and the object outside of our cognition. Kant writes, “[I]nsofar as they are to relate to an object our cognitions must also necessarily agree with each other in relation to it, i.e., they must have that unity that constitutes the concept of an object.”[6] Kant has already established that our intuitions are necessarily intuitions of objects as they appear to us and that the categories apply to objects because we have a transcendental unity of our apperception, which is only possibly through the application of the categories to the manifold. But this has only demonstrated that the manifold of our intuition is a unity in our self-consciousness.

What Kant is adding in the object argument is our ability to make objective judgments about the objects found in our representations. We must remember, Kant writes in the third step of this argument, “that since we have to do only with the manifold of our representations, and that X which corresponds to them (the object), because it should be something distinct from all of our representations, is nothing for us, 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.”[7] We might worry, therefore, that even though there is a correlation between representation and object (outside of representation), we might only be able to have subjective judgments about those representations since they are not the objects as they are. These would be judgments of perception only.[8] However, we must also remember that the categories are rules that apply to objects, and, therefore, the above worry is “impossible if the intuition could not have been produced through a function of synthesis in accordance with a rule that makes the reproduction of the manifold necessary a priori and a concept in which this manifold is united possible.”[9] In other words, the synthesis of the manifold into the unity of transcendental apperception is not possible without the categorical rules by which this synthesis takes place. The categories are universal, necessary, and known a priori. Therefore, if we think objects according to the categories, we have the means by which we can have objective judgments about objects of appearance that produce objective knowledge that is also universal and necessary.[10]

Here’s where we are now: objective judgments that produce universal knowledge about objects cannot be equivalent to knowledge of the thing-in-itself, but they are related. The conditions of possible experience that make the manifold of our intuition possible also produce a necessary methodological distinction between intuition and objects as they are outside it. But this methodological distinction also produces a necessary correlation between object outside of intuition and the appearance of the object within it since the distinction is merely two ways of considering the same object. But the manifold of intuition alone is not enough to make coherent judgments—it is a chaos of sense impressions.

We know, however, that the manifold is transcendentally unified in our self-consciousness; it is our manifold. What gives the objects of the manifold unity is the synthesis of them according to the rules of the a priori universal categories. Therefore, when we examine these objects of intuition, which are correlated to how the objects really are outside of it, according to the categories of the understanding, we can make objective judgments which produce knowledge about the objects of intuition, but not about the objects as they really are. The worry that what Kant gives us in his explanation of objective judgments is knowledge about things in themselves cannot be the case since Kant demonstrates quite clearly that objective judgments are confined to the conditions of possible experience which cannot apply to things in themselves but because the manifold of our intuition is unified by a priori categories, both transcendentally ideal and empirically real, we can make universal judgments about objects that are necessarily correlated with things in themselves but cannot apply to them.

What this study has hopefully done is given us an important starting point for the constitution of the person in critical discourse. I would encourage readers not to get too caught up on words like “correlation,” “necessity,” and “universal” right now. The important take aways from this study:

1) Intuition belongs to a subject.

2) “Objectivity” is not removed from subjective intuition but is rather an integral part of it.

3) Correlation here is not 1:1 between objects of intuition and objects as they really are.

The demand of these conclusions for contemporary critical discourse is that we employ more care when we talk about the problems that terms like “objectivity” and “correlation” pose. As I mentioned in the first post, continuing through the history of critical discourse, we’ll see how the role of the subject in the production of knowledge and the articulation of the limits of knowledge becomes reconfigured and contested such that, eventually, words like “correlation,” “necessity,” and “universal” become immensely problematic. For right now, I hope readers will find it useful to think through these issues with figures like Kant (and later, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Husserl, and others) in order to arrive at a more robust understanding of one’s own place in the larger tradition of critical discourse.

[1] Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 347-8. [2] Kant, 246, his emphasis. [3] Kant, 246-7. [4].Kant, 249, his emphasis. [5] Kant, 231. [6] Kant, 231. [7] Kant, 231. [8] Hume thought that outside of mathematical knowledge, these were the only sorts of judgments we could make, i.e. “The sun is out, and the ground is warm.” There is no necessary connection between these events, only a series of perceptions. [9] Kant, 231. [10] In contrast to the example in the previous note regarding judgments of perception, an objective judgment is one of experience. That is, given the categories of the understanding, one could examine a series of perceptions (“The sun is out, and the ground is warm”) and produce a necessary connection between them, i.e. “The sun caused the ground to be warm.” This is an objective judgment that produces necessarily true knowledge about the objects in question.