why does he project his own shadow outside himself?

At the café in the lobby of the central library there is a TCBY. There was a man sitting near the door with a laptop wearing a black t-shirt. His hair had flecks of grey in its wooly cut. He was wearing round wire-rimmed glasses like he had been raised in an orphanage abroad. A full page of writing was on the screen largely illegible from a distance. As I passed, I tried to read the last sentence, which was the beginning of a new paragraph. It read, full stop, the world is for peanuts.

The man sitting across from me is quite old, and wears the silence of a mad priest. He is reading intently in a chair by the information desk, where two dark haired librarians are chatting in the obscene tones of frustrated coworkers. One is in her fifties, and the other is just beginning her thirties. When I came in the room, the younger one was on the phone, clearly patient in the face of an un-spooled tangle of requests. The calls that public libraries receive from that infinite portal of the telephone are beyond the pale. Who out there finds the number of the public library, in what book, from what garden? The older man is still reading. He has one, and only one part, on his otherwise smooth rosy head. One wave of fronds like weeds clutched on a mountain bald, a part perfectly aligned in the middle, turned to one side like a flag in the wind, one perfect square shaved into the void. He is not wearing socks and his corduroy pants are frayed at the cuffs of a cut hem above his black, well-laced athletic shoes, the kind of shoes one used to find at a large department store. There were brands like Voit and Cuga, and they often featured Velcro straps. The children who wore these were marked by poverty—that is until such stores began re-branding these lines with updated, more derivative features. This shift is most likely the result of manufacturing lines being consolidated, and higher niche players such as Nike moving overseas. A cheap, Nike-like sneaker was available for retail manufacture. Yet, in what only appears as irony, the children who had always worn Nike shoes discovered a melancholy kitsch value in these Velcro shoes, which were called bobo shoes, and they bought them to wear to themed frat parties or to go fishing. If anything, Sketchers is the vanishing mediator here, despite whatever new york writers have to say about tipping points.

The empirical/finite I depends on external objectivity, on the non-I opposed to him, yet the absolute I is defined by the very fact that he transcends this opposition. Kant’s problem, on the contrary, is how and why the transcendental object qua intelligible entity is a necessary correlative not to the empirical I but to the I of pure apperception.

The transcendental object—this empty form of the object’s unity, a reference to which converts the multitude of sensible affections into a determinate and self-identical object—is possible only against the background of the unity of apperception of the pure-I: the transcendental object is identical to the I, it is the I itself—the primordial synthesis that ‘is’ the I—in its externality, in the guise of the objectivity opposed to the I, or as Hegel would put it, in its otherness.

Why does the I oppose himself to himself in the guise of an external object, why does he project his own shadow outside himself?