The Unification of Sensibility and the Transcendental Unity of Apperception

Abstract

Immanuel Kant argued that the object does not represent the state of the thing-in-itself, but becomes a phenomenon constructed by human subjectivity in general, and this is called the Copernican revolution. Kant is a philosopher representing German Idealism, followed by Bradley and Bergson. In the meantime, it has been assumed that Eliot’s core poetics developed from the cognitive framework of Bergson or Bradley: the concept of flux that grasps the time of the past, present, and future as an indivisible continuum in mutually organic relationships, immediate experience, historical consciousness, Impersonality, and unification of sensitivity, etc. in “Tradition and Individual Talent,” “Hamlet,” and “Metaphysical Poets.” However, in the “Report on Kant’s Categories” submitted by Eliot to a philosophy class at Harvard University in Mar. 2013, it can be confirmed that Eliot was already aware of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Eliot’s unification of sensibility, which represents an experience in which, intellect and sensibility are unified, is nothing other than Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception.