Kant’s Introduction to the Critique

Kant’s saying that “though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience,” which appears in the opening paragraphs of the introduction, is as foundational as it is enigmatic. It is possible to read the entire Critique as a clarification of this remark. Certainly, it leads directly into themes that are central to the entire Critique: the question of innate ideas, how we acquire a priori knowledge, and whether we can have any genuine a priori knowledge of what Hume considered absolutely contingent “matters of fact.” What follows will be an attempt to introduce a way of reading the Critique as an attempt to clarify what it means to say that some of our knowledge arises from within us and does not originate from our experience of the world.

Besides the issue of Kant’s position on innate ideas and their relationship to a priori knowledge, one aspect of Critique that hasn’t been addressed is its rhetorical strategy. Another is the issue of how Kant regards our perceptual faculties as interacting with our understanding. Both of these will be addressed in what follows in a way that builds toward a sense of how Kant responds to the problem of innate ideas. As part of the process, we will gain a better sense of the role of our faculty of understanding in relation to concepts.

Table of Contents

• The Rhetorical strategy of the Introduction
• Innate Ideas, Concepts & “Scientific” Knowledge
• Locke, Descartes, and Innatism
• Kant’s Pure Concepts
• References

The Rhetorical strategy of the Introduction

From the very outset of the Introduction (B) Kant has a rhetorical strategy. That is to say, he is not only trying to convey some important ideas that will be covered later in the Critique, but has a deliberate way of doing so. His first move in B1 is to bring us nearer to an understanding of the difference between pure and empirical knowledge. But in doing so, he first turns to address his predecessors.

The touchstone for rhetorical strategy in classical philosophy has very often been Aristotle’s treatises, which present a somewhat regular pattern: state the problem, give a sense of why it is important, and discuss one’s predecessors before presenting one’s own thesis. Along the way, he refines the topic (e.g. “What is rhetoric?”), demarcating it by giving an initial sense of how it might be understood, before finally arriving at a sense of what truly belongs to its essence or necessarily central, structuring ideas. He does the latter very explicitly in his introductory chapter on Rhetoric (I.1) where he begins by giving us a general sense of what rhetoric is (“the counterpart of dialectic”) before going on to say that the technical study of rhetoric deals with the “modes of persuasion” that make up the core of the subject (1355a4-5).

A secondary question serves to motivate the study and provide a way (one among others) for Aristotle to respond to his predecessors, presented as: “why do some speakers succeed through practice and others spontaneously?”, which is clearly meant to recall Plato’s Meno in which Socrates asks whether virtue can be taught, bringing on the further question of whether it is an art (techne) or an incidental gift from the gods. In the case of rhetoric, Aristotle presents what he describes as a “technical study” (1355a4) of the ways and means of persuasion based upon the central idea that while rhetoric is fundamentally concerned with persuasion, persuasion itself is a “sort of demonstration.” The sort of demonstration he has in mind is an enthymeme, a type of argument in which one or more of the premises are hidden. For Aristotle, then all rhetoric has an enthymematic character. With this conclusion Aristotle’s response to Plato can be seen as rather pragmatic: inasmuch as one can become more skilled in the art of producing demonstrations and/or enthymemes, one can increase, if not assure one’s chances of persuasion (1355a5-12).¹

Returning to Kant, we find the same elements in play. In the first paragraph, he begins by presenting us with what might be called the central problem of the Critique. He first tells us that all knowledge begins with experience and concludes the same paragraph by saying “we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins.” But this is immediately followed by the following crucial distinction in the next paragraph: although all our knowledge begins with experience, “it does not follow that it all arises from experience” (B1). The first part of the distinction, that all knowledge begins with experience, looks back to Kant’s skeptical empiricist predecessors, inviting us to reflect on their arguments; the second looks forward to a central claim of the Critique. It announces something new that is to be considered:the claim that we have a faculty within us (he refers to it in B7 as “our faculty of knowledge”) that is capable of producing in us knowledge that would not be possible on the basis of experience alone: a priori knowledge that cannot come from experience alone and therefore must be present in us prior to the sensible impressions that cause them to come forth. The motivating question for the reader is how it might manage to do so in a way that does not presuppose any experience of any kind.

Innate Ideas, Concepts, & “Scientific” Knowledge

As was said, Kant’s distinction looks back to his predecessors. It does so as a way of contextualizing his remarks. Specifically, it looks back to the debate over innatism, which has its roots in Plato’s Meno and Phaedo. The question in either case is whether and in what way we might have ideas within us when we come into the world that may be elicited by our experience. For Kant, such “ideas” amount to a set of innate category-concepts, that come to be concepts only in relation to our experience. Once they have been elicited by experience, they come to play an active role in relation to our faculty of understanding, which plays the part of relating concepts to other concepts and to objects.

When it does so, a unity begins to emerge: conceptual unity gives rise to the capacity to form unifying judgments; and when a sufficient number of concepts have been connected together according to the clear and distinct judgments of our understanding, we have the materials necessary to reach the ideal of a unified body of knowledge; and when certain judgments have been arranged in order of their logical priority and those not grounded in sensory experience have been excluded, we may consider ourselves to have formed a scientific body of knowledge. Kant writes,

For these concepts spring, pure and unmixed, out of the understanding which is an absolute unity; and must therefore be connected with each other according to one concept or idea. Such a connection supplies us with a rule, by which we are enabled to assign its proper place to each pure concept of the understanding, and by which we can determine in an a priori manner their systematic completeness.

B92

Kant tells us in the Introduction (B1) that all our genuine knowledge arises from two sources: experience and a faculty within us that is capable of producing a priori knowledge. Ultimately, it is our understanding that structures our reality, but can only do so on the basis of its capacity for the synthesis of concepts in relation to its objects and its capacity to connect them in judgments (B103). The ultimate sources of such structuring are the highest, “pure” and “unmixed’ concepts, the categories, which make a priori knowledge possible.

It is not at all clear that Plato can be read as indicating that the Forms play a cognitive role in the active structuring of our knowledge. But they do make knowledge possible in an entirely different sense: since without the possibility of true knowledge as an ideal guiding the search for knowledge, it might be thought that no knowledge is possible at all. If we take the Timaeus into account, then it appears that knowledge is purely a matter of adequation of our thought to the ultimate reality of things. Plato’s model of cognition appears to be based upon classical realism. While there is certainly evidence that he distrusts the senses, it is not a global skepticism about the reality our senses convey to us of the Cartesian sort; rather, his point is that the “reality” the senses do reveal to us about the physical world is constantly shifting and, as such, is radically unknowable, but in an entirely different sense. It is tempting to say that Plato extrapolated his realism about the senses onto our mental “perception” of Ideas and perhaps could be considered “realist” about ideas should our soul ever regain its original communion with them.

Locke, Descartes and Innatism

Locke isn’t always given credit for what he introduced into the realm of philosophical discussion or the way in which some of his insights shaped the philosophical discussion that was to follow. In fact, in some passages, Locke sounds very much like Kant. Locke is, for example, critical of the capacities of reason itself and sees its limit in much the same terms:

When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to undertake with hopes of success: and when we have well surveyed the powers of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing any thing; or, on the other side, question every thing, and disclaim all knowledge, because some things are not to be understood. It is of great use to the sailor, to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows, that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him.

Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Introduction, sect. 6.

Or more clearly again ,

Thus men extending their enquiries beyond their capacities, and letting their thoughts wander into those depths, where they can find no sure footing; it is no wonder, that they raise questions, and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear resolution, are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism. 

Essay, Introduction, Section 7

The boundary between what we may productively investigate and what we should regard as the fathomless depths where our reasoning its footing is set for both philosophers by the touchstone of experience. Both philosophers regard experience, or more precisely, sensation as the beginning and ground of all our knowledge.

Descartes wrote in a similar critical spirit, but placed greater emphasis on the role of what he called “intuitive cognition,” which extended not only to propositions such as “cogito, ergo sum,” but also to mathematical propositions. Consider Rule VIII in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind:

If in matters to be examined we come to a step in the series of which our understanding is not sufficiently well able to have an intuitive cognition, we must stop short there. We must make no attempt to examine what follows; thus we shall spare ourselves superfluous labor.

Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Rule VIII

Thus, in a way that nicely parallels Locke’s position, Descartes advises us not to proceed further than our reason can discover principles to guide its steps. Descartes’ “clear and distinct” qualification for intuitive knowledge is based upon indubitability as a criterion for certainty. Kant’s criterion for a priori knowledge, universality and necessity, plays a similar role. Each finds a ground for pure reason in differing ways, but each begins from radically different starting points: Descartes from principles he regards as the only ground of deductively certain truth; Locke from what he regards as the only legitimate source of our ideas, the senses. Locke and Descartes also differ significantly in their views on innate ideas, which sets the stage nicely for Kant’s discussion. Descartes took our ideas of God, the self, and the axioms of mathematics to be innate. Locke, as will be discussed, doubted the innateness of all these, laying the groundwork for Hume’s more thorough skepticism.

The primary claim against which Locke directs his skepticism about innate ideas is given in the opening sentence of Essay 1.2.1. It is that any idea, to be properly innate, must stand as a “primary notion,” like “characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the word with it.” Locke, of course, argues that we come into the world with our mind free of any prior ideas, like a tabula rasa, a tablet upon which nothing has yet been written; to the contrary, all our ideas come to us by way of sensation or reflection.² The implicit claim, going back to Augustine and further back to Plato’s discussion of our memory of the forms prior to our embodied existence, is that innate ideas in us should both (i) act the cause of our universal assent to propositions that appear self-evident to us as well as (ii) act as general principles of knowledge.

This classical view can be traced out in a consistent line through Locke’s text. Throughout his attack upon innate ideas, Locke constantly applies (a.) the criterion of strict universality as a measuring stick to any would be candidates–a principle, it should be pointed out, that Kant will very explicitly try to meet. Moreover, there is the further condition (b.) that such ideas should not be universal in a derivative sense. Not just any and every self-evident proposition, e.g. all the basic propositions of arithmetic, such as 2+2=4, 2+3=5, etc., should be considered properly innate, but only those more general principles that in a sense “cause” those that are derivative to appear to be self-evidently true by virtue of their own more general self-evidence.³ There are many such principles and concepts in Kant’s text, some of them among the categories themselves: the ideas of God, substance, and identity; and of principles, such as that the whole is greater than the part and the principle of non-contradiction; and furthermore, of modalities such as possibility and impossibility.⁴

For Locke, the remoteness of such general ideas to our “first apprehensions” only serves to cast further doubt upon their supposed innateness. From their remoteness its results that they are discovered much later, if at all. If they are assented to immediately once they are introduced, it may well be because “whosoever” is in such a position

begins to know a proposition which he knew not before; and which from thenceforth, he never questions; not because it was innate but because the consideration of the nature of the things contained in those worlds would not suffer him to think otherwise, how or whensoever the is brought to reflect on them”

Essay 1.2.21

The derivative propositions that mark our way up to them, Locke objects, could just as well be the work of our “growing understanding” than of an innate principle and this is all Locke really needs to make his point that there is no necessity for us to admit innate ideas into our concept of the human intellect.³ In other cases, Locke attacks the universality of the claim that “all” members of the human race either readily assent to the purported innate ideas or that they have all in fact discovered them. He attacks the innateness of the idea of God for example, by arguing, that the idea of God could pass for innate “…were it to be found universally in all the tribes of mankind, as generally acknowledged by men grown to maturity in all countries.”⁶ Locke regards the existence of atheists, for example, as proof.⁷

But there is a second principle in play in Locke’s reasoning about what ideas might or might not count as innate: skepticism concerning the ground of our assent to any purported innate principle (such as the principle of identity, non-contradiction, etc.). Skepticism about the innateness of ideas is warranted, for example, when “those innate ideas are not clear and distinct, so as to be universally known and naturally agreed upon” so that “they cannot be subjects of universal and undoubted truths, but will be the unavoidable occasion of perpetual uncertainty.” If we have any innate ideas, surely they must be the ground of common understanding, one might say. Any truly innate ideas must pass the test of clarity and distinctness so that what follows from them may be assented to with an equal clarity. In this conception of innateness, we may find the basis for Kant’s other principle, necessity, that he introduced to define what may count as an a priori claim.

A final observation: mathematical principles have been discussed and reasoned about in different ways and indeed, such ideas do appear to be too far from the minds of infants for them to be born with them as such. Such ideas require careful framing in order to be understood properly and, as Locke observes, language itself is the source of a great many of our ideas that are not grounded immediately in our experience.⁸ Locke, in fact, argues that what we take for innateness as a result of immediate assent upon first hearing might be attributed to learning the meaning of words in relation to one another.⁹ The idea that our learning a language, our becoming competent users of a language, as the ground of our assent to self-evident statements rather than innate ideas, will be taken up in a future article, but deserves some attention here as part of a discussion of innatism.

Kant’s Pure Concepts

But, of course, Kant’s point is more subtle (as might have been expected). His concept of what is innate is reducible to what the mind must add to experience in order to make genuine knowledge possible. The way he draws the line between the two is in terms of form and matter. While sensation gives us the “matter” (content) of our sensible-intuitive experience, the mind supplies its formal aspect, organizing it and allowing it to stand in relation to other things in our immediate experience:

that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations, I term the form of appearance. That in which alone the sensations can be posited and ordered in a certain form, cannot itself be sensation;

B34 (Transcendental Aesthetic, sect. 1)

But furthermore, if the formal element or aspect of what we intuit sensibly cannot itself arise from our sensibility it must arise from within us:

…therefore, while the matter of all appearance is given to us a posteriori only, its form must lie ready for the sensations a priori in the mind, and so allow of being considered apart from all sensation.”

B34 (Ibid.)

It is this originative a priori feature of the formal elements of our experience that allows us to make a priori determinations about them in the sense discussed above.

What Kant is describing is a capacity within us for a priori knowledge. What is absolutely other than the “matter” of our sensations, its formal aspect, is the source in us of judgments that can be made according to the guidelines of strict universality and necessity. In proceeding thus far, Kant has provided a framework for innate ideas that meet Locke’s fundamental objections at least generally, if not all in their details. By originatively providing our intuitions with their formal aspect, Kant provides a basis for the discovery of the pure a priori principles that structure them through the work of our understanding. Thus far, we have provided a means for a fuller understanding of Kant’s saying, “though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience,” but more could be said to help develop the picture of the relationship between our supposedly pure, innate concepts and the things to which we relate them. This topic will be explored in the treatment of the Transcendental Aesthetic that follows.

1. The De Anima and Metaphysics may serve as further examples where Aristotle is more concerned about the contributions of his predecessors. Aquinas’ Commentary on the De Anima gives an excellent commentary on the rhetorical strategy behind Aristotle’s opening chapter there. A translation of the text may be accessed here: Thomas Aquinas: In Aristotelis De Anima Commentarium: English (isidore.co) ↩︎
2. See Essay 1.2 ↩︎
3. Essay 1.2.20-21 ↩︎
4. See the contents of 1.4 ↩︎
5. Essay 1.2.20-21 ↩︎
6. 1.4.11 ↩︎
7. 1.1.8 ↩︎
8. See 1.2.23 and 1.4.2-4. The objection that children are not born with ideas such as these might seem facile on the ground that they might be able to develop such ideas only because of innate principles that help them to discover them later in life. But, of course, as Locke mentions more than once, language is a source of our ideas (see 1.4.9 for example), and moreover their uncertain development in different civilizations might itself be a sign that they must be developed in us through teaching and experience. ↩︎
9. Again, see 1.2.23 ↩︎

References

• Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1929), trans. Norman Kemp Smith, (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, Boston: 1965). Available online here.
• Locke, John. The Works, vol. 1 An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1. (Rivington: 1689).
• Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri De anima, editum a Roberto Busa SJ (Taurini: 1959).