Kant’s Reflections on the Unity of Consciousness, Time-Consciousness, and the Unconscious

n what follows, I shall address the question concerning the ultimate premise of the Transcendental Analytic in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I believe the candidates can be reduced to two dominant but opposing principles, one grounded in immanent time-consciousness and the other in the unity of consciousness. In pursuing this goal, I intend to view consciousness through Leibnizian lenses by focusing on its dynamic activity, continuity, unity, and unconscious aspects. Thus, in the first edition Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant declares that the complexities of the Subjective Deduction “have cost me the greatest labour” in formulating the foundation for his entire epistemological edifice, for his transcendental Deduction of the Categories.1 As he presents it in these early passages, the principle is grounded in the indubitability of (individual) temporal consciousness.2 Nevertheless, half a dozen years later, in rethinking the critical and substantive starting point of his system, he then announces instead that it is rather the transcendental unity of self-consciousness or apperception upon which he will base his entire epistemic foundation.3 In what follows, I wish to support his initial reflections concerning the epistemological status of the temporal nature of consciousness and conclude with what I consider to be a critical psychological consequence about the irredeemable quality of human loneliness, which I believe follows directly from subjective and immanent time-consciousness.4 But allow me first to start with the key Kantian concept of the synthetic a priori5 and to draw a distinction between its “logical” use versus its epistemological status as it functions in temporal consciousness. For Kant, the