On Kant 's Concept Of "Einheit"

This paper interprets Kant’s "Critique Of Pure Reason" by the new perspective of "unity", in order to reveal that Kant has made great contributions on awakening of human self-consciousness and profound influence on his subjective philosophy. The concept of "unity" is the main line that runs through Kant’s philosophy which has important theoretical value and practical significance for the study of Kant’s philosophy. The paper takes "Critique Of Pure Reason" as the research book, and takes the sixteenth title "Of the Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception" of the second section "Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding" of first division "Transcendental Analytic" as a starting point, arounding the genealogical tree of "unity" to deeply analyze the idea of "unity" on aesthetic, understanding, reason and systematically sort out the thoughts of "the first critique" of Kant.This paper is divided into five chapters. The first chapter explains the origin of the concept of "unity", its generation and development in the history of western philosophy and the main factors of the formation of Kant’s thought of "unity". The second chapter is mainly about the unity of the perceptual intuition. Kant argues that innate intuitive unity belongs to the space and time, they as the intuitive form supply only a syntheticity to our representation, but this form of intuitive itself give out a unity of representation that based on some synthesis, the synthetic unity is showed as the following four aspects:first, in space, all the external objects are representation for mutually external and parallel, they were in a collaborative relationship, space of unity is the precondition of collaboration; second, in time, all phenomena appearances before and after the succession, and coexist at the same time, this two relations are the rules of unity of time; third, only by following the unified rules can we understand and be perceived as the representation of the object; the fourth, the transcendental schema of the time through the synthesis of imagination make form a unity of complex of all intuition in inner sense.The main content of the third chapter is understanding as the ability of a rule that forms a unity of all the manifold in phenomenon. Kant believes that all the manifold in intuition is subject to the conditions of the original synthetic unity of apperception, which is the supreme principle of the use of understanding, the understanding gives the logical form of a judge to unity, and at the same time it combines the manifold of representation a priori through the category and brings the manifold of given representations under the unity of apperception, so the category as rule of understanding is established on the function of the unity of understanding. However, for Kant, the category of understanding can only make empirical use but not any transcendental use, because all our knowledge begins with the experience, although an object can be thought only through the category, but it is impossible to become a knowledge without the relationship between the category and the object of experience, that is to say, the category is only through experience to get an objective reality, so that all the experience of the object can only be used as a phenomenon which we recognize. In Kant’s view, the form of experience is the synthetic unity of appearances according to concepts, and all possible appearances belongs, as representations, to the transcendental apperception, so the essential form of experience is nothing more than all the appearances of the synthetic unity of apperception.The fourth chapter elaborates the central content is the unity of reason. The ability of reason is more advanced than understanding, which determines, through the concept of pure reason, the use of the understanding within the whole realm of experience, the purely rational concept is never allowed to a congruent object in experience, thus it is a transcendental ideas, which contains a unity, by means of these ideas the reason brings all its knowledge into one system, and as far as possible to the unity of understanding to advance to the highest unconditional existence there, this is the ultimate goal of reason and the highest ideal, it shows us a unified system of the natural world, in which all things are the purposive arrangement of the most rational. But in Kant’s view, the highest existence ideal can never as regulative principle of reason and infinitely close to it is the ideal of "the highest good" in practical use, that is the virtue of every rational existence should be worthiness to enjoy happiness, so as to achieve the unity of the moral world, this is the fundamental basis for everyone in the world to settle down.The last chapter is mainly to clarify the significance of Kant’s idea of "unity" in modern philosophy. Kant’s philosophy is a kind of "understanding cosmopolitanism" concerns, he believes that human beings should across ethnic and cultural to jointly establish a "knowledge community", understanding the community feature is understanding of a single world has a "unity", the force is of self affirmation and recognition, but "modernity" has brought serious alienation and the problems that human for self identity and sense of belonging gradually disappear, so the subject of self re-examine should begin with "the core of the understanding of the world".