Kant and the world

I wasn't exactly clear or even exactly right in my post below on Kant, when I said that the unity of the perspective from which the manifold is represented as connected is the real place where apperceptive synthesis is at work:

...we have to understand that, for Kant, this is really where the power of representation, the whole process of eventual synthesis and connection of representation, originates and is at work--but not yet as itself. In other words, connection as an act is really located here, in the unity: connection itself just issues forth from this act of unifying that is not yet action, not yet reducible to the power of representation as such.

This is generally in the right ballpark, and that is indeed where I was trying to get us in that post, but this problem, the unity of the manifold prior to representation in apperception, gets complicated and indeed is buttressed by the entire third Critique. 

Do we have reason to believe that this connection is unified simply by the existence of one perspective (speaking loosely, of course) upon the manifold? Or is this unity essentially issuing forth from the nature of the assumption we must make in order to do anything about the nature of the objective world itself? That is, the unity of the manifold must be assumed in an act of judgement regarding it: the unity of our perspective on it is thus dependent on this judgement itself being consistent. It is there that the Transcendental Deduction must find its completion and apperception really find itself issuing forth from a coherent point of view on the world. To support this reading, let's just refer to the famous introduction to the third critique where it specifically mentions the unity of the manifold in apperception with respect to reflecting judgement:

...There is such a manifold of forms in nature, as it were so man modifications of the universal transcendental concepts of nature that are left undetermined by those laws that the pure understanding gives a priori, since these pertain only to the possibility of nature (as object of the senses) in general, that there must nevertheless also be laws for it which, as empirical, may indeed be contingent in accordance with the insight of OUR understanding, but which, if they are to be called laws (as is also required by the concept of nature), must be regarded as necessary on a principle of the unity of the manifold, even if that principle is unknown to us.

-Critique of the Power of Judgement, Guyer and Matthews translation, 67 (5: 179-80), my italics.

The validity of the principle here is what is primarily in question. Indeed, Husserl notes this quite thoroughly in his The Crisis of the European Sciences. We should remark that it is actually quite useful to go there after the third critique, because it is really this problem that leads Husserl to posit the existence of a "life-world." He does not think that the third critique is able to answer this question sufficiently and still posits something about the world apart from any judgement. He must therefore look at the third critique to justify this, and out of it cull a pre-assumed "life world" that Kant fails to address. However, he does not do this to the extent we would wish it to be done. The question gets recasted, in a sense, but never explicitly read back into the place in which it originated, the third critique. Merleau-Ponty is a bit better about this, actually, and addresses specifically Kantian concerns often--turning to him next would be useful. But, frankly, all of phenomenology's concern with worldhood or the life world stems from this basic problem in the third critique. Indeed, Heidegger's assumption of the individuality of Dasein that gets given to me in being-to-death--its mine-ness, that brings Dasein away from a world at the same time as it involves Dasein in it authentically--could be said to stem from this problem, at least in the way it is carried out (and Heidegger indeed refers to the transcendental deduction in Being and Time, and his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is, after all is said and done, primarily concerned with the role of the third critique in this problem relating to the deduction). Anyway, all I'm trying to do here is redirect some musings earlier: I hope they were not that misleading (and I don't think they were).