Abstract

The article analyses the peculiarities of Kant’s interpretation of the transcendental unity of apperception as a condition for the formation of human experience in the «Critique of Pure Reason», with this condition appearing as a result in the process of analysis. It is emphasized that this concept determines the essence of Kant’s gnoseological searches and is closely intertwined with the concepts of the transcendental subject, a priori synthetic judgments, consciousness, metaphysics of time, and the essence of sensory contemplation. The transcendental unity of apperception, which defines our consciousness as such, is defined as a condition for theoretical knowledge and the formation of experience given the fact that without the presence of such a transcendental basis, no person could construct objects of creative activity and concepts, as well as formulate judgments about the reality. It has been established that Kant does not equate sense and understanding at all, since understanding is not capable of creating objects based on its own ideas, on the contrary, its activity is determined by the totality of those objects that a person is able to perceive and comprehend in the process of cognition. It has been demonstrated that solving the problem of the synthesis of sensibility and understanding as heterogeneous in nature and not reducible to one another is possible due to the presence of such a mediating link as a transcendental scheme, which is determined by time as an a priori form of our perception and the basis of the schematism of our thinking. It is this form of inner sense that is homogeneous to categories and phenomena, and therefore the former can be used to characterise the latter. Imagination is considered separately as a condition of the transcendental ability to judge, which ensures the unity of understanding and sensibility and does not simply grasp data, but constructs it. The fact that the schematism of the understanding is due to the unity of apperception is emphasized, and the formulation of the general principles of experience is the final deductive link of the justification of knowledge of nature. And therefore, it is also a condition for the possibility of objects of experience, which a person perceives and is able to further systematize and thus come to understand the essence of the concepts obtained with the help of theoretical knowledge. Subsequently, Kant’s theory of experience and the idea of the transcendental unity of apperception defined the foundations of the philosophy of J. G. Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel, accordingly influencing the entire further development of both the philosophy of German idealists and Western philosophical thought.