A Commentary to Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason'

by Norman Kemp Smith

It is by no means surprising that Kant’s first critics,[1020] puzzled and bewildered by the obscurer and more difficult portions of the Critique, should have based their interpretation of Kant’s general position largely upon the above passages; and that in combining the extreme subjective idealism which Kant there advocates with his doctrine that the inner life of ever-changing experiences is itself merely ideal, should have come to the conclusion that Kant’s position is an extension of that of Berkeley. Pistorius objected that in making outer appearances relative to an inner consciousness which is itself appearance, Kant is reducing everything to mere illusion. Hamann came to the somewhat similar conclusion, that Kant, notwithstanding his very different methods of argument, is “a Prussian Hume,” in substantial agreement with his Scotch predecessor.

II. “Prolegomena,” Section 13, Notes II and III.—In the Prolegomena Kant replies to the criticism which the first edition of the Critique had called forth, that his position is an extension of the idealism of Descartes, and even more thoroughgoing than that of Berkeley. Idealism he redefines in a much narrower sense, which makes it applicable only to Berkeley

“...as consisting in the assertion that there are none but thinking beings, and that all other things which we suppose ourselves to perceive in intuition are nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact.”[1021]

In reply Kant affirms his unwavering belief in the reality of Dinge an sich

“...which though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us.... Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary.”[1022]

Kant adds that his position is akin to that of Locke, differing only in his assertion of the subjectivity of the primary as well as of the secondary qualities.

“I should be glad to know what my assertions ought to have been in order to avoid all idealism. I suppose I ought to have said, not only that the representation of space is perfectly conformable to the relation which our sensibility has to objects (for that I have said), but also that it is completely similar to them—an assertion in which I can find as little meaning as if I said that the sensation of red has a similarity to the property of cinnabar which excites this sensation in me.”[1023]

Kant is here very evidently using the term idealism in the narrowest possible meaning, as representing only the position of Berkeley, and as excluding that of Descartes and Leibniz. Such employment of the term is at variance with his own previous usage. Though idealism here corresponds to the “dogmatic idealism” of A 377, it is now made to concern the assertion or denial of things in themselves, not as previously the problem of the reality of material objects and of space. Kant is also ignoring the fact, which he more than once points out in the Critique, that his philosophy cannot prove that the cause of our sensations is without and not within us. His use of “body”[1024] as a name for the thing in itself is likewise without justification. This passage is mainly polemical; it is hardly more helpful than the criticism to which it was designed to reply.

In Section 13, Note iii., Kant meets the still more extreme criticism (made by Pistorius), that his system turns all the things of the world into mere illusion (Schein). He distinguishes transcendental idealism from “the mystical and visionary idealism of Berkeley” on the one hand, and on the other from the Cartesian idealism which would convert mere representations into things in themselves. To obviate the ambiguities of the term transcendental, he declares that his own idealism may perhaps more fitly be entitled Critical. This distinction between mystical and Critical idealism connects with the contents of the second part of the Appendix, treated below.

III. “Prolegomena,” Section 49.—This is simply a repetition of the argument of the fourth Paralogism. The Cartesian idealism, now (as in B 274) named material idealism, is alone referred to. The Cartesian idealism does nothing, Kant says, but distinguish external experience from dreaming. There is here again the same confusing use of the term “corresponds.”