A companion piece to the Photo 51 project. It tests whether a cinema, and finally a zoetrope, can give Kant's most disputed faculty a working image, in place of the motor and mechanic first tried out.
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher who spent nearly his entire life as an academic in a small town called Königsberg. Famously he declared one day that Hume had woken him from his dogmatic slumbers. As an expert in logic, Kant would go on to create a curious hybrid of Imagination similar to that envisaged by Hume, but at the same time overseen by a new faculty of his own invention called apperception. The name itself is worth pausing on. As a Latin composite — ad, towards; per, some sense of intensification; capio, to seize — apperception reads as a natural piece of language, fluent and self-explanatory. But that fluency is no proof of the phenomenon it names; a coinage this comfortable risks naturalising, by sound alone, something Kant still has an entire Critique left to argue for.
Essentially this was a faculty of government which applied laws to the ideas to determine how they should coalesce and relate to each other, much like the laws that govern individual people in society. Kant was troubled by the type of fragmented consciousness he believed would result from ideas arbitrarily triggering other ideas in the Imagination. He did not believe that this matched up to his own experience of a coherent consciousness wherein he could say “this is who I am”. He felt he was more than merely a product of the ideas that he had acquired.
For Hume the word “dog” would trigger ideas of particular dogs, all with dog-like properties, drawn together only by association. Hume himself reached for a political image for this looseness: he compared the soul to a republic or commonwealth, “in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts.” It is a republic without a permanent ruler, where authority passes from member to member as the association holds. Here there is no single office standing outside and above the rest to legislate. Kant's apperception is closer to a monarchy: one faculty positioned above the ideas, applying laws to them from a seat the ideas themselves never occupy.
Instead Kant believed that these ideas should unite to form a concept of dog as an abstract idea. In addition laws would then be applied to the dog unconsciously to ensure it had properties such as persistence in time and a general coherence of dog-like properties that would allow the owner to experience this object in a coherent and unified way. So the same dog is recognised across every separate glimpse it is built from. Kant himself reaches for exactly this example in the Schematism, describing the concept of dog as resting on “a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience…actually presents” (A141/B180). It is not a picture stored and replayed, but a rule for producing one.
Of course, this coherence can suddenly be shattered, and here Kant is more forthcoming than I first gave him credit for. In the Deduction he runs the thought experiment directly: if cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, with no rule to say which, no concept of cinnabar could ever form, no reproduction in imagination would find its object twice in the same place, and appearances would be nothing but a play of representations bearing no relation to any object at all.
It is worth asking what a modern instance of this looks like. Astronomy and the microscopic domain now show us objects behaving in ways that unsettle exactly the solid foundation Kant assumed instrumentation would only ever confirm. Bodies, being observed, are, by turns, sometimes here, sometimes smeared across many places, sometimes wave, sometimes particle, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, depending on nothing more than how or whether they are measured. Kant's cinnabar was meant as a limit case, a rule broken to show what depends on the rule holding. It is less clear that our instruments have only ever shown us limit cases. Not every instrument, though, tells the same story.
Nevertheless, there is an image worth setting, drawn from a cinematic metaphor, where a succession of stills in the imagination is actually handled frame by frame. Take a strip of film. Each still frame is a bare intuition, a single glimpse of cinnabar or of dog, mute and disconnected until something links it to its neighbours. The strip itself, sprocketed, sequential, with one frame's edge butted against the next, is Hume's imagination doing its reproductive work. It is an association running images together in a determinate order, exactly as the republic holds itself together without needing a ruler. But a strip of linked frames, however faithfully sequenced, is not yet a picture of anything continuous. Left in a box it shows nothing; run through the fingers too fast or slow it shows only stills. It needs a projector: a lamp to throw light through the inert frames, and a mechanism turning at the one rate. Here Kant sets forth the schema, the rule of time, at which discrete stills stop flickering and start persisting as a single dog, recognised as the same dog, running.
This regulated imagination finds just such a fit with much of our experience. The conclusion then was that we would mould our own experiences through our own laws and regulations in a shift matched only in magnitude to that effected by Copernicus in his re-evaluation of planetary orbits. But in a final twist of brilliance Kant was able to use his system to explain that if we speculate on matters beyond experience we would no longer have the contents of imagination to guide our reasoning, this malignant and ultimately futile form of enquiry Kant called the transcendental dialectic.
But a projector, for all that, is not the whole of apperception, whatever the fluency of that word promises, and this is where the metaphor should be pushed rather than admired. A projector unwatched throws light at a wall; something still has to be watching it, and recognising the running dog on the eleventh reel as the same dog it recognised on the first. If that watcher is a second, separate thing, an audience sitting apart from the machine, the problem has only been moved back a seat! It is now the audience that needs its own unifying “I” to explain how it recognises itself, across the whole screening, as the one who has been watching throughout. The metaphor has collapsed. Instead, picture the projector rebuilt, then, as something closer to a zoetrope than a reel run past a fixed lamp. This is the illustration that you clicked on. The frames no longer pass the light; they turn with it, each one glimpsed in its own moment around the green, spinning rim. Only once the wheel recognises its own turning as one continuous act, and not a sequence of separate glimpses, do the small lights set into its structure switch on. These lightbulbs of self-recognition are the device's own signal that it has gained “Consciousness of Self”. Kant's apperception cannot be the projector alone; it has to be a projector that is also its own audience, a single act that both throws the light and knows, at every frame, that it is the same “I” doing the throwing and the same “I” doing the watching. That reflexive doubling back on itself — not just uniting the frames, but uniting them for the very thing doing the uniting — is the harder trick the word apperception was coined to name, and it is also the one place the film strip, on its own, cannot show you how it's done.
Say the doubt stands, unresolved, as a genuine demand rather than a quibble: a word this fluent — ad, per, capio, a natural-sounding composite for an unnatural claim — buys Kant nothing. Naming a faculty is not finding one, and no amount of etymological comfort should be mistaken for an argument that it exists. If that's true, then the Critique cannot be allowed to coast on the word; apperception has to be earned, not assumed, somewhere in the text, or the doubt wins outright. This is exactly the pressure the Deduction is built to survive. It doesn't define apperception and move on. It stages the cinnabar case, forces the question of what happens to experience without a rule uniting appearances, and only then claims the unity has to be supplied from somewhere the senses can't supply it from. Read that way, the doubt about the word isn't answered by the word at all; it's answered, if it's answered, by watching Kant do the work the name alone was never entitled to assume.