Kant: A Biography

Silent Years 235

At the beginning of the seventies, Kant was far from being clear on the

significance and implications of the doctrine that he put forward in the In¬

augural Dissertation. Even if the beginnings of the critical doctrine go back

to about 1769, this does not mean that the problem of the Critique in its

entirety was discovered all at once. Most of the contents ofthat work were

conceived and written later, in the late seventies.

In a logic tutorial he gave in 1792, Kant confessed to his students that

he had at first no clear idea about what should be the goal of his first Critique,

and that he had to think hard about it. Indeed, he used his initial confu¬

sion about the goal of the first Critique as an example to show his students

the importance of proper meditation. Thus he told them that anybody who

writes or thinks methodically must know (1) what precisely it is that he wants

to establish, and (2) what is decisive for establishing it. One student noted:

Now he mentioned as an example how much effort it had cost him to know what it was
that he really wanted [to establish] when he first had the idea to write the Critique of
Pure Reason, and that he finally found that it could be formulated in the question: are
synthetic a priori propositions possible? -Yes; but what is decisive here is that we can
give them corresponding intuitions. If this cannot be done, then they are not possible.
From this we can see how meditation is facilitated by this method.^173

So it was not only that the different parts of the Critique were conceived,
one by one, over a period of approximately eleven years, but also that the
"essential point" underwent some development and change during that
time. It took some time for Kant to realize what the point of his critical
philosophy really was. Kant may have been in possession of some of the
elements of the later critical philosophy already, but he had no clear idea
of what they meant, or of how they fitted into the larger picture that he
would draw in 1781. Indeed, he probably had a very different conception
of the larger context then. The development of the final critical view took
at the very least until late 1771. For, if we can believe his letter to Herz of
February 1772, he had achieved clarity about his "essential goal" only then.
However, it is likely that he was still much more confused than he knew
then. It is more likely that all the pieces fell into place only, in 1777, when
his "piecemeal" investigations into "varied" topics finally led him to "the
idea of the whole" of a merely propaedeutic discipline.^174
This view of the origin of Kant's Critique is indirectly supported by
Kant's public "Declaration Concerning the Authorship of von Hippel" of
December 1796. In it, he claimed that some fragments of his doctrines