Silent Years 231He further claimed that the Critique of Pure Reason was "the execution
of Hume's problem in its widest extent."^157 Indeed, I take this to mean
that Hume did not just strike the first "spark" by which "light might have
been kindled," did not merely provide the suggestion that first inter¬
rupted Kant's dogmatic slumber and that gave his investigations in spec¬
ulative philosophy a quite new direction, but that Hume determined the
final outlook of the theoretical part of critical philosophy. It should be clear
in any case that the Critique was not the effect of a flash of brilliant insight,
conceived all in one piece during a few months of uninterrupted work.
Rather, it was the result of a long development, the outcome of many med¬
itations and much work over a period of more than eleven years. Some of
the delay can be blamed on interruptions by official duties and on ill health.
The most important cause for the Critique's delay, however, was the formu¬
lation of the very problem and its solution, and the problem's formulation
and solution were not separate events, but different aspects of the same
process.
This process had begun with the Inaugural Dissertation. Yet in 1770
Kant had no inkling that it would take him such a long time to deliver the
"more extended treatment" of the discussion of the Inaugural Dissertation.
Indeed, the treatment he envisaged then could not have gone far beyond
the dissertation itself. When he sent the work to Johann Heinrich Lam¬
bert, Moses Mendelssohn, and Johann Georg Sulzer in Berlin, hoping for
a reaction before he published the final version, he indicated very clearly
that he thought that not much more work was necessary. Writing to Lam¬
bert about the dissertation in September of 1770, he claimed that the
summary of the new science he proposed could be made in "a rather small
space," requiring only a "few letters." It would be easy, because Kant knew
precisely what was required. He told Lambert:
For perhaps a year now, I believe that I have arrived at a position that, I flatter myself,
I shall never have to change, even though extensions will be needed, a position from
which all sorts of metaphysical questions can be examined according to wholly certain
and easy criteria. The extent to which these questions can or cannot be resolved will
be decidable with certainty.
Indeed, Kant was confident that he could make this "propaedeutic discipline
... usefully explicit and evident without great strain."^158 Though he would
not be able to work on it during the summer, he would use the winter to
finish the practical part, or the "metaphysics of morals."