appearance

an object of experience, when viewed from the transcendental perspective. Though often used as a synonym for phenomenon, it technically refers to an object considered to be conditioned by space and time, but not by the categories. (Cf. thing in itself.)

[A20/B34] Kant's appearances are a kind of representation which, as empirically real but transcendentally ideal, are also empirical objects, and are the objects of empirical knowledge and the objects of experience. The matter of all sensible thought is sensation, and our "receptivity" to sensation causes intuitions, which are representations of appearances. Appearances themselves contain both intuitive matter (corresponding to sensation) and discursive or conceptual form (which "determines the manifold" of sensation); we know them as "determined objects"--as empirically real objects, the only kind of objects and only kind of reality which we can experience--only after sensation has been synthesized through the transcendental unity of apperception and judgment. An obvious question: if appearances are representations, what are they meant to represent? Clearly, for Kant they do not represent things in themselves (or, at least, we cannot know that they do). [B164] On the one hand, there are certain "laws of appearances" which must agree with the conditions of understanding and sensibility (e.g., with the conditions of space and time and with the categories). On the other hand, "things in themselves would necessarily...conform to laws of their own" and since we cannot know these laws (or anything about things in themselves), we cannot assert that appearances represent things in themselves. It seems better to say that for Kant appearances are empirical objects and that, in the final analysis, empirical objects for Kant turn out to be a strange species of representation. As determined in empirical knowledge, there is no further question as to what appearances are or represent; they simply are empirically real objects. (However, it takes discursive judgment to determine the appearance as an empirical object; as given through intuition, appearances are (represented in intuition as) [A20/B34] "the undetermined object of an empirical intuition".)