Before reading the Prolegomena we should first pause for a moment over the title and the
Translator’s Introduction.
The title of the work, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Present
Itself as a Science, gives us a good deal of information about Kant’s assumptions
regarding this project.
First, a prolegomena is a set of prefatory remarks to a systematic work, that generally
gives the framework and raises and answers methodological questions about the entire project.
Note also that this is a work about some possible future metaphysics which does not yet exist.
This invites us to contrast what Kant is describing with the present and past state of metaphysics.
So we should expect a fairly profound critique.
And it’s also about metaphysics that has been made “scientific,” that is, systematic
and scholarly.
And for point of comparison, we might think about the way in which the study of history
became scientific, wissenschaftlich, during the nineteenth century under the influence
of other German thinkers.
In his Introduction, Ellington notes that Kant here employs an analytical method, moving
from conditioned to condition.
So he begins with the conditioned knowledge of arithmetic and geometry, which we already possess.
Kant then asks, “How is it that we can have knowledge of arithmetic and geometry?”
And the answer is that we must possess the necessary conditions for these things, which
according to Kant are the pure intuitions of time and space.
Human consciousness, or the Transcendental Unity of Apperception, is Kant’s equivalent
of the Cartesian cogito. It is the beginning of all speculative philosophy.
But unlike Descartes, Kant holds that the self does not know itself by an act of rational intuition.
Rather, self-knowledge comes to us only through our reflecting on the intuitions that we receive
from the senses.
The senses play an important role in our knowing who and what we are.
Kant also differs from Descartes in the way he treats inner experience.
Descartes holds that inner experience is immediate and the existence of external objects must
be deduced from it.
Kant says on the contrary external experience is what is immediate for us; internal experience
is possible only through it.
Our perception of external objects, says Kant, is possible only by means of the categories
of time and space.
These are based on the nature of the human mind, not on the nature of things.
In other words, they are epistemological, not ontological, categories.
Geometry, says Kant, is based on our pure intuition of space, and mathematics on our
pure intuition of time.
We’ll see what this means as we read deeper into the work.
Kant’s disagreement with Hume is central to the Prolegomena.
Kant holds that the causal ordering of objects and concepts in our experience “is an act
of the intellect that is brought to experience (or, better still, makes experience) and is
not an ordering derived from experience (as Hume claimed).”
This is rather important: Kant says we do not find causality in the world; rather causality
is in the world because our experience is an artifact, is created by our minds using
these categories.
So experience is the result of our intellect in a synthetic act using the a priori concepts
of time, space, and causality to organize sense perceptions that are given to us in
time and space.
Applying these concepts to nonsensible objects, to things that cannot be objects of sensible
intuition, produces illusion.
And this is Kant’s critique of all past metaphysics.
That’s my quick overview of the title and the Translator’s Introduction of Kant’s Prolegomena.
Thanks for watching today; goodbye.