Chapter 22 The Unity of Consciousness

We have seen that the term Object denotes both the representation and the object represented as a unity. The Critical Philosophy begins with the Copernican hypothesis: objects conform to our knowledge rather than the other way around. What the Copernican hypothesis states is an epistemological principle: What we know and believe to be true of the world can only be known to us in a particular fashion, namely in the manner by which the data of the senses is processed and shaped by the peculiar functions that characterize the phenomenon of mind. There is no copy of reality mechanism, no tabula rasa upon which a noumenal ‘reality’ stamps its impress. What each of us knows of the world is the representation we make of it, and this is called Nature. When one tries to divorce a thing-in-the-world from the Organized Being who knows of this thing, that divorced entity is the thing-regarded-as-it-is-in-itself or Ding an sich selbst. This Ding an sich selbst is a transcendent noumenon and whatever might be beyond the reach of our sensuous capacities for experience must remain forever dark to us; we cannot know the nature of what cannot be phenomenon. One might adopt an extreme attitude toward noumena of Nature, such as the solipsist position or the ‘mind of God’ positions of a Berkeley or a Spinoza, except for one case. For each of us, the noumenal I of transcendental apperception is the one noumenon the reality of which as a thing no one doubts (as the substratum of one’s own Self). The transcendental I is known only as Dasein without known pre-determined Existenz. The determination of the latter in my representations is my Self as phenomenon, i.e. the appearances I represent of ‘me’ to ‘me’ concerning my own Existenz. Some call the transcendental I ‘soul’ and speculate of its separateness from the corporeal reality of the body. To some, like Descartes, it is res cogitans, thinking substance for which the body is a vessel. Some hold that there is no ‘I’