I want to try to capture, in broad strokes, what Kant is intending in his CPR.

When K looks at our knowledge of the world, which he sees as judgments on

the world based on experience, he sees "experience" as a synthesis, or

bringing together, of two, possibly three, necessary elements. Here's how he

looks at experience: We have the experience -- example, "I am sitting in a

stifling room reading an old magazine" -- and K's question is -- first, what

must be going on for us to be able to make this statement, that is, what

elements must be operating in us, as experiences, so that we can issue

sentences like that one above? Second, given that we can figure out how

this experience happens, that is, what is involved in its happening, we must

then a second order question: given that we have the experience and can

explain its key elements, on a deeper level what has to be assumed about

how we must operate in order for us to operate in a way that produces this

kind of experience, and our ability to utter sentences about it?

On the first level we can say that for there to be experience for humans at all

there must on one hand be a sensible manifold -- lots of sensory 'stuff' - think

colors and smells and textures and looks, etc. - and, on the other hand,

organizing tools to pull all this stuff together into a single unitary object or

objects, and the relationships these objects have to each other and to us.

Let's look at the sentence above:

"I am sitting in a stifling room reading an old magazine."

In K's view, this experience in a "raw" sense (which we never experience as

such) is heat and the feel of the magazine and how things look and how the

chair feels and so forth, on and on. In its 'natural', sensory state it is just a

meaningless jumble of sensation. My openness to the senses, what he calls

my "sensibility", is my tendencies to just take stuff in, all that I can, all the

time.

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But how does all this stuff become the experience of a stifling room and

reading an old magazine?

This description presupposes all sorts of things that are for K not part of what

I directly sense.

The room itself is an object, that is, something with a distinctive ongoing

separate identity, and is the kind of object into which things can enter, the

kind of thing other things can be in, and the kind of thing that other things

can leave.

Rooms as objects have limits, generally, but not necessarily, some sort of

partition or wall, something that makes the room be a room by creating its

dimensions. For K we do not directly sense rooms, but we do experience

rooms.

What does this mean? It means that we sense a distinctive bunch of stuff that

reason can and does organize as a room, by applying sorting rules like

walledness, flooredness, ceilingness, entranc-yness, and so forth. We apply a

bunch of ideas we have from previous experience and judge that this bunch

of sense-stuff is experiencable as a room because it can be thought as a

room.

The idea is that reason as an operation, the operation of gathering things

together and establishing relations among them, is always already in

operation, assessing whether this bunch of stuff is enough like other bunches

of stuff encountered in the past to pass the 'this is a room test.

Notice that this ordering of stuff is not highfalutin or very abstract, but quite

mundane and flexible. We might stumble into a breakfast nook, or an

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ambiguous open area where we see a dining table, and say to ourselves,

"This is kind of a dining room, but it's really not a room but a 'space', made

into a dining area because someone put what looks like a dining table into it.

So, we use past experience but also reason to make rough and ready

judgments. If whoever owns the space insists on calling it their dining room

we might think it a little strange but we will not object because nothing much

depends on this -- but in our heart of hearts we might still say, 'Yeah, call it

what you will, Viktor, but it's still just a space'.

We have the concept 'room' because we have found ourselves in a lot of

bunches of stuff that seem to get organized usefully as what we mean by

"room". If we never encountered rooms we would not have the concept -- but

-- and this matters -- we always have the capacity to conceptualize rooms

should we ever encounter them, and, second, there are bunches of sensory

stuff that should get thought of as "room".

NOTE: Here we use more abstract ideas or rules on concrete material to

produce empirical concepts, concepts based in sensing.

This is the first level of what Mr. K wants to say but it isn’t all.

Having established that experience itself is always already something in

which reason and judgment are involved -- 'objects' are not natural kinds in

the sense that we ever sense them -- K is then interested in something else:

what kind of being must we be that we can have such ordering experiences,

and what kind of being must we be to get bunches of unprocessed sensory

material to organize?

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His key hunches are these: You cannot get into space or time from the

outside; that is, you cannot erupt into space and time if you are not always

already in them, and so in order to have bunches of sensations, which are all

spatio-temporal, we must always already be in space and time; but to be

immediately aware of this, rather than an outside spectator, space and time

cannot be something in which we find ourselves unless, and this is a little

tricky, we are already "in" the space and time in which we find ourselves.

Translated this means that we cannot be in space and timer unless and until

space and time are already in us. We are the point of insertion into space

and time. No prior being-in means we never get in.

In a similar way that we have not emphasized, we cannot be reasonable,

have reason, unless we are always already reasonable. This means, really,

that we could never think any of the things K thought, or write them down,

unless we could already think of them and this means that in order to

understand thinking we already have to be thinking and we must always

already have been thinking. We did not start at some point. To be what we

are, that is, to have awareness, we must always already have awareness and

for K this means that we are always already thinking, just as we are always

already in space and time. We can never be outside of either thinking or

spacing and therefore everything we experience, and thus everything we are,

is limned by thinking and spacing/timing.

K's question: can we say what this thinking and spacing have to be in order

for us to be what we are?

This is the problematic.

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He approaches the question of how reason makes experience possible by

digging deeper; K's instinct is always to go deeper rather than farther. He

does not go out, but down. The truth is not "there" but underneath the

surface.

So, when K says that we have concepts that we apply to the manifold of the

senses it is not enough to say that there are such concepts. We have to

derive them, that is, we have to explain them in the sense of justifying them.

How come we have such rules at our disposal? Why do we just apply ideas to

data?

For K it is insufficient to say that we develop such concepts in the course of

experience. For K this is just as inadequate as saying that we just experience

things in space and time. Where do these concepts come from? There is for K

nothing in the jumble of sensory stuff to suggest for example the persistent

unity that makes for an object. Where then does the unity-function come

from?

For K it has to come from an inborn, that is purely a priori idea with which we

come already equipped. Unity is how we think, not something we learn, just

as space is how we sense, not something we acquire while sensing.

So at the base of experience is a set of pure abstract ideas, rules for ordering

any diverse material, whatever it might be. There are 12 of these ideas, and

they are divided as K divides them, which we will examine briefly. Their exact

number and character can be debated but the thing is, for K there have to be

these pre-existent ordering devices to shape the stuff given by sensation.

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But there is more. These 12 rules cannot by themselves offer coherent

experience because a mere or simple application of such rules to stuff would

not possess the one factor that all such applications of rules to stuff requires:

namely, whatever/whoever applies the rules has to know that the rules are

being applied and that he/she is applying them. There must, that is, be a

unity of reason, and of experience, which precedes (logically, not temporally),

the application of rules to stuff and unifies it into a single coherent pattern of

experience.

K calls this "TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY OF APPERCEPTION", or, a unity of

perceiving in which, beyond immediate experience, in a metaphorical sense

behind experience, that is, as a pre-condition for experience, there is a

unifying function, which K calls the "I think", that accompanies every

judgment and makes it into a judgment. This is true because unless we know

that we are experiencing, and know that we are judging ('This is a stifling

room'), we are not experiencing at all. So, K postulates that there must be,

has to be, cannot not be, a unifying reason or intelligence that is applying all

the categories and for whom all the unifying and intuiting takes place. It is

this purely formal "I think" that must precede and accompany all experience

and serve as its ground. Without the always accompanying "I think" there is

simply no experience.