Abstract
If permanence or abiding presence is a common quality shared by transcendental apperception and pure time, this does not imply that one should identify them, in accordance with Heidegger’s daimon, as connatural structures; instead, it might be more illuminating to uncover the underlying mediation that surpasses their original heterogeneity. This mediating role can be assigned to substance, conceived by Kant himself in a quite Leibnizian vein, as a self-founded force and, hence, an autonomous centre of ever-lasting activity. In a Kantian perspective, however, substance appears to be a fragile mediation, especially as one moves from the Lectures on Metaphysics of the 1770’s to the first Critique, in so far as an essential asymmetry emerges within this triadic community. Thus, whereas pure time and substance remain consistently linked—though space will tend to relate more immediately to substance than time—, the thinking self and its activity no longer signify the paradigmatic expression of real substantiality and real duration but “only a substance in Idea”. Located beyond time and substance, the I think comes to a sort of inner instability oscillating between static timelessness and dynamic production of time, pure self-representation and pure self-(re) presenting activity, logical form and logical act, transcendental unity and actual unification. Indeed, how can Myself “function as if” I were a substance without being so and, consequently, without being incorporated into a mere form? In other terms, how is one to grasp “activity” without using the idiom of substance and, at the same time, without inactivating it? Form and act must be envisaged, respectively, as the reduced and realized states of the same process, that is, mind or self in its determining motion.
Highlights
The qualitative determination of the relationships between time, substance and transcendental apperception reveals a complex labyrinth of trajectories
By enjoying a state of exception, as the originating condition of the unity of all experience – that is, the common quality of all representations which consists in their being mine or being unified by and in myself, transcendental apperception seems to be on the brink of becoming an unstable centre
Pure self is the permanence of the active unity of all intellectual functions of unity, the permanence of the synthetic act that accompanies every representation; secondly, pure time shows the permanence of a substratum as permanent form of inner sense, the unchanging form in which every sensible change appears; substance in the phenomenon is presupposed as an existing permanent substratum of which all phenomena must be the variable attributes
Summary
The qualitative determination of the relationships between time, substance and transcendental apperception reveals a complex labyrinth of trajectories. In the first Critique the three concepts circulate through one another without showing a perfect dialectical totality in which each of them could constitute a moment of mediation between the others It appears that, instead of a stable dynamic triangle emerging, a double structural instability unfolds, specially if the triangle is observed from the vertex of transcendental apperception. Instead of a stable dynamic triangle emerging, a double structural instability unfolds, specially if the triangle is observed from the vertex of transcendental apperception This is due to the fact that does pure self break its traditionally strong ties with substance, but it posits itself outside the sphere of time. As respectus, force presents substance from the outside, from the phenomenal field of its actions, and substance is not the interior oneness of a force, but only the “general subject” of predicates19 – by the same token, the metaphysics of substance will progressively give way to the causal legality of experience
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