Quotes from Kant's "Critique on Pure Reason":
"the proper principle of reason in general (in its logical use) is to find the unconditioned for conditioned cognitions of the under standing, with which its unity will be completed"
"[the unconditioned is] something under which all experience belongs, but that is never itself an object of experience"
"in everything the concern of reason is to ascend from the conditioned synthesis, to which the understanding always remains bound, toward the unconditioned, which the understanding can never reach"
"Self-consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity, and yet is itself unconditioned"
"the unconditioned is never met with in experience, but only in the idea
Now this unconditioned is always contained in the absolute totality of the series if one represents it in imagination. Yet this absolutely complete synthesis is once again only an idea; for with appearances one cannot know, at least not beforehand, whether such a synthesis is even possible."
"every conditioned that is given presupposes, in respect of its existence, a complete series of conditions up to the unconditioned, which alone is absolutely necessary"
"the idea of reason will only prescribe a rule to the regressive synthesis in the series, a rule in accordance with which it proceeds from the conditioned, by means of all the conditions subordinated one to another, to the unconditioned, even though the latter will never be reached. For the absolutely unconditioned is not encountered in experience at all"
"since everything in the sum total of appearances is alterable, hence conditioned in its existence, there could not be any unconditioned member anywhere in the series of dependent existences whose existence would be absolutely necessary"
"either reason, in demanding the unconditioned, must remain in conflict with itself, or else this unconditioned must be posited outside the series in the intelligible realm, where necessity is neither demanded nor permitted by any empirical condition, and thus in respect of appearances it is unconditionally necessary."
"if one searches for the unconditioned among conditioned things, then one will seek forever and always in vain, since no law of any empirical synthesis will ever give an example of such a thing, or even the least guidance in looking for it."
"But that the being that thinks in us supposes that it cognizes itself through pure categories, and indeed through those under each heading that express absolute unity, follows from this: Apperception is itself the ground of the possibility of the categories, which for their part represent nothing other than the synthesis of the manifold of intuition, insofar as that manifold has unity in apperception. Self-consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity, and yet is itself unconditioned. Hence of the thinking I (the soul), which [thus represents] itself as substance, simple, numerically identical in all time, and the correlate of all existence from which all other existence must be inferred, one can say not so much that is cognizes itself through the categories, but that it cognizes the categories, and through them all objects, in the absolute unity of apperception, and hence cognizes them through itself. Now it is indeed very illuminating that I can not cognize as an object itself that which I must presuppose in order to cognize an object at all; and that the determining Self (the thinking) is different from the determinable Self (the thinking subject) as cognition is different from its object. Nevertheless, nothing is more natural and seductive than the illusion of taking the unity in the synthesis of thoughts for a perceived unity in the subject of these thoughts. One could call it the subreption of hypostatized consciousness (apperceptionis substantiate)."
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