object

a general term for any 'thing' which is conditioned by the subject's representation, and so is capable of being known. The thing in itself is a thing which cannot become an object. (Cf. subject; see thing in itself.)

[A46/B63] Kant distinguishes empirical from transcendental objects, and he also speaks of the self as an object. On the one hand, appearances are empirical objects. The question of whether an appearance also "represents" an object in itself, "the question...at once becomes transcendental" and remains unanswered; since space and time are transcendentally ideal, all appearances are "merely modifications of fundamental forms of our sensible intuition" and it follows that "the transcendental object remains unknown to us". [A92/B125] Of appearances, Kant later writes that "the representation alone...makes the object possible". Knowledge of empirical objects (appearances) requires the synthesis of both intuitions and concepts (in judgment): "there are two conditions under which alone the knowledge of an object is possible, first, intuition, through which it is given, though only as appearance; secondly, concept, through which an object is thought corresponding to this intuition"--again suggesting that we can have no knowledge of transcendental objects, things in themselves, and that as "only" appearance our knowledge is therefore less than ideal. [A104] Here (in the Deduction in A) Kant argues that our knowledge of (empirical) objects is grounded by the transcendental unity of apperception. [B137] Later, in the Deduction in B, he writes that "an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united", suggesting that empirical objects are "constructed" in the synthesis which unifies a manifold of intuition. [A190/B235] In the Second Analogy, Kant argues against the claim that appearances (empirical objects) are also objects in themselves (transcendental objects), on the grounds that if they were we would be unable to "determine from the succession of the representations how their manifold may be connected in the object". [A197/B242] Near the end of the Analogy he claims that we could not represent something as an object if we did not "subject our representations to a rule", i.e. represent them as causally determined, again suggesting that empirical objects, as appearances, are constructed through synthesis--leaving mysterious (against a dual-aspect interpretation) their relationship to transcendental objects. [A109] Kant suggests again (this time in the Deduction in A) that there is a question of whether appearances represent things in themselves. Again, it is unclear whether he means to suggest that transcendental objects are things in themselves; it is also unclear how he could consistently make such a judgment. He writes: "these appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object--an object which cannot itself be intuited by us, and which may, therefore, by named the non-empirical, that is, transcendental object=x". (In the Deduction in B, at B155, Kant suggests that "I...as thinking subject" am a thing in itself, a transcendental object but that I know myself only as an appearance, as "an object that is thought, in so far as I am given to myself...in intuition".)