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Chapter Four: Synthesis, Apperception and the Opacity of Consciousness: A Nietzschean Reading of Kant's A Deduction and Prelude to a Theoretical Account of the Relation between the Two Systems of Reason

This essay comprises Chapter Four of Richard Louis Lara’s 2004 doctoral dissertation, “Reason, Values and the Cultivation of Body and Life” at the Freie Universitat zu Berlin. The chapter presents an interpretation of Kant’s A Deduction of the pure, a priori deduction of the categories of the understanding, which Kant presents in his Critique of Pure Reason. One of the goals of this interpretation is to lay the foundation for the discussion, presented in subsequent chapters, of the relation between Kant’s theoretical philosophy and the views of reason that Nietzsche presents in his writings, especially his Also Sprach Zarathustra. Indeed, the reading is influenced by Nietzsche’s own views on reason, which are, the dissertation argues, decidedly Neo-Kantian. The interpretation adopts a novel approach to the deductions in that it does not proceed on the assumption that Kant intended to offer formal logical proofs for his claims – an assumption that, as applied to Kant and other thinkers of his time, arguably constitutes the fallacy of anachronism and thus leads to more confusion than understanding. Instead, Kant’s deductions are viewed as explanations as to how knowledge is possible on his “revolutionary” assumption that the objects of our knowledge and experience conform to and are determined by our a priori knowledge. The analysis that is presented in these explanations proceeds by examining experience and thought as we know them and by lifting out therefrom the a priori content that they contain in order to discern the role that this content plays therein. This analysis led Kant to draw the radical conclusion that our a priori knowledge determines all of the objects of our experience and thinking and thus makes our experience and knowledge possible. Thus, the method of the deductions is rightly likened to archeology, for the goal is to lift, as it were, the understanding up out of experience and thought in order to see how it relates to them – just as the archeologist lifts the artifacts that he finds up out of the site under investigation in order to understand them in terms of that site. Some of the sections of this essay concern the relationship between Nietzsche’s philosophy and Kant’s A Deduction of the categories, but the overall concern of the essay is to offer a clear and comprehensive interpretation of that deduction. To this end, Section Ten of the essay provides clear and vivid illustrations of the various points of transcendental philosophy that Kant makes in deducing, or articulating, his claims regarding the categories and their role in making possible our experience and thinking.