FROM AENESIDEMUS, OR CONCERNING THE

FOUNDATIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF

“Where do the presentations that we possess originate, and how do they come to be in us?”
This has been for a long time one of the most important questions in philosophy. Common
opinion has rightly held that, since the representations in us are not the objects [Sachen]
themselves being represented, the connection between our representations and the things
outside us must be established above all by a careful and sound answer to this question. It is in
this way that certitude must be sought regarding the reality of the different components of our
knowledge. Now, it is the thesis of critical philosophy that a large portion of the determinations
and characteristics with which the representations of certain objects [Gegenstände] occur in
us are to be grounded in the essence of our faculty of representation. This claim combines the
opposite explanations that Locke and Leibniz gave for the origin of human representations,
and on its truth rest for the most part the soundness and the truth of what critical philosophy
says regarding the limits and the determinations of the various branches of the human faculty
of cognition. […]
In this examination, however, we must also pay special attention to the demands of Humean
skepticism. For it is not only a principal goal of the Critique of Reason to refute the Humean
doubt in its assessment of the human faculty of cognition; but also the adherents to the critical
system claim, indeed unanimously, that by deriving a certain part of human cognition from
the faculty of representation this system has in fact conquered all of David Hume’s doubts,
once and for all. […] A discussion of these questions, however, requires that we should draw a
careful comparison between Hume’s demands and Hume’s problem on the one hand, and the
principles of the critical system on the other, as well as the reasons by which the latter tries to
establish that certain a priori forms are present in human cognition. To my knowledge, neither
friend nor foe of this newest philosophy has so far engaged in such a comparison, even though
the admission, on the part of its originator, that it was Hume’s doubt that first interrupted his
dogmatic slumber and led him to the search for the principles of his system, provided occasion
enough for it.

*
From George di Giovanni & H.S. Harris (eds.), Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian
Idealism, Hackett Publishing, 2000, 105–33.
 From Aenesidemus, or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy

In the search for the sources of the components of our knowledge, the Philosophy of the
Elements has followed a course of its own, and appears at any rate to have been led to their
discovery by following an entirely different sign-post than the one followed by the Critique of
Pure Reason. We shall also have to enquire, therefore, to which of these two sign-posts we can
safely entrust ourselves, or with which the danger of being led astray is least great. Thus we
shall not only have to examine the proofs by which the Philosophy of the Elements establishes
that much of what is in a representation is determined by the mind, but also those advanced
for the same purpose by the Critique of Pure Reason.
Now, paragraphs v-viii [of the Philosophy of the Elements] state the following preliminaries
regarding the nature of the faculty of representation:

(a) The faculty of representation is the cause and ground of the actual presence of
representations;
(b) The faculty of representation is present prior to every representation, and is so in a
determinate form;
(c) The faculty of representation differs from representation as cause from effect;
(d) The concept of the faculty of representation may be inferred only from its effect,
i.e., the mere representation, and in order to obtain its inner characteristics, i.e., its
determinate concept, one must develop exhaustively the concept of representation
as such.

On the face of it, these propositions only concern the determination of the concept of the
faculty of representation. But since they imply that by this concept we also think an objectively
actual something which is the cause and condition of the actuality of representations, and is
present prior to any of them, the question we must raise, before any other indeed, is this: by
which means has the Philosophy of the Elements come to its extravagant cognition of the
objective existence of this something, and with which argument does it justify it, granted that
nothing at all is said about it in the principle of consciousness (for the latter, of course, is only
meant to express actual facts)? Nowhere do we find, in the latest exposition of its principal
tenets, a proof of the objective actuality of the faculty of representation.
[…]
The Philosophy of the Elements, by deriving actual representations from a faculty which it
takes to be something objectively actual, and by defining it as the cause of the representations,
contradicts its own principles as well as the results of the Critique of Reason. For according
to the latter the employment of the categories is to be restricted to empirical intuitions;
knowledge can only be realized in us inasmuch as the categories are applied to objects of
empirical intuition. Hence the extension of the pure concepts of the understanding beyond our
experiences to objects not immediately represented, but only thought, is totally inadmissible;
nor could such an extension instruct us in the least regarding the constitution of any object
whatever. And in his Theory of the Faculty of Representation, Mr. Reinhold has not only not
altered or otherwise defined the restrictions to the employment of the categories stipulated
by the Critique; on the contrary, he wants to establish with even more precision than Kant
that absolutely no other application of the categories is possible or conceivable than the
one just mentioned. It is, therefore, simply incomprehensible whence the Philosophy of the

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Elements obtains the right, in laying down its foundations, to apply the categories of cause
and actuality to a suprasensible object, viz., to a particular faculty of representations which
is neither intuitable nor given to any experience. Yet, in presuming this right arbitrarily and
counter to the results of its own speculations, it actually demonstrates—obviously by applying
the real principle of sufficient reason to things outside experience—that this principle can only
be applied to objects of empirical intuitions and to these alone. […]
Now, as regards the means which the Philosophy of the Elements prescribes and employs
to obtain the characteristics of the faculty of representations, they are of no account. In fact,
to try to derive the properties of that faculty from the properties of mere representation is
altogether unproductive. For, from the constitution of an effect, it is never possible to infer
with certainty the constitution of its cause or of the objective ground that supposedly had
produced it, or the nature of this ground. Causes even require that they be thought as different
from their effects; much can be present in them, therefore, (if there actually are any causes)
that belongs to them as property, yet does not occur in the effects at all and would never
be manifested through them. This applies also to the effects. How can one possibly hope to
discover, therefore, the characteristics of the faculty of representation, even if it were proved
that any such faculty actually exists, by an extrapolation of the characteristics of representation?
Would not this practice, moreover, consist in the transposition of the characteristics of a
thing to something entirely different from it? The definition of the faculty of representation
laid down in the Philosophy of the Elements is in fact nothing more than a definition of the
characteristics of the very representation which is supposed to be the effect of the defined
faculty, adorned however with the entirely empty title of power or faculty. […] The Philosophy
of the Elements does not really make the presence of representations in us, nor their nature,
any more comprehensible than they already are on their own. It arbitrarily assumes the being
of a faculty of representation, and attributes to it as its property and mode of operation what,
according to experience, ought to be found in representations instead. Moreover, the definition
of the faculty of representation laid down in the Philosophy of the Elements could only
make comprehensible those representations that “are referred to an object and subject and
are distinguished from both”, if indeed it explained anything at all; for it is drawn only from
this type of representations. It would not, however, establish the possibility of anything in us
which, even without being referred to an object or subject and being distinguished from both,
is nonetheless a representation and rightly deserves to be called so. […]

Has the Critique of Reason Really Refuted Hume’s Skepticism?

The deduction of the necessary synthetic judgements from the mind, and the determination
of their connection to the cognition of empirical objects, provide the main support in the
Kantian system for its specific doctrines and principles. If this deduction and determination
were beyond doubt, and grounded on decisively certain principles, the system of critical
philosophy would be unassailable. David Hume would then have been refuted once and
for all, and his doubts as to whether the concepts of cause and effect can be applied to
things would be groundless. The answer to the question posed in this section will above
all depend, therefore, on our enquiring whether David Hume could have found Mr. Kant’s
proof that the necessary synthetic judgements must originate in mind, in the inner source

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of representations, and that they are the form of experiential cognition, sufficient and
compelling; or, in general, whether Kant’s deduction of these judgements from the essential
determinations of the human mind, as well as his assessment of their value, are subject to
well-founded or reasonable objections.
Now, it is an undeniable conscious fact, and as such open to no doubt, that there are
in human knowledge necessary synthetic judgements and that they are an indispensable
component of it. It is no less indubitable that the necessity pertaining in these judgements
to the subject-predicate combination can be derived neither from the occurrence of these
judgments once in our mind, or even several times, nor from the agreement of a given number
of experiences. That is to say, our having joined certain representations together once, or
several times, does not produce the effect that we must, necessarily, so join them every time.
The necessity that attaches to certain synthetic judgements in our knowledge cannot be made
comprehensible to us on the basis of mere experience, or from our perception of the presence
of such judgements in us.
Without prejudice to the undeniable truth of this, however, I maintain all the same that
in fact the Critique of Pure Reason tries to refute Humean skepticisim by assuming as already
unquestionably certain the very propositions against whose legitimacy Hume directed all
his skeptical doubts. For the Critique claims that the original determinations of the human
mind are the real ground or source of the necessary synthetic judgements found in our
knowledge; but it does this by inferring, from the fact that we can only think of the faculty
of representation as the ground of these judgements, that the mind must be their ground in
actual fact too. With this claim, however, it has already assumed as indisputably certain [what
Hume doubted, viz.,] (1) that for anything present in our knowledge there is also objectively
present a real ground and cause differing from it realiter; and, in general, that the principle
of sufficient reason is valid not only for representation and their subjective combination, but
also for things-[Sachen] in-themselves and in their objective interconnections; (2) that we
are justified in inferring from the constitution of something as it is in our representations its
objective constitution outside us.
And to grasp the fairness of this judgement, one only has to compare impartially the highest
principles on which the Critique of Reason grounds its new system of philosophy with what
Hume subjected to doubt and declared to be uncertain. For if Hume is to be refuted, surely
it can be done only by establishing the contrary of his assertions regarding the concepts and
principles of causal connection from indisputably certain propositions; or alternatively, by
showing contradictions or non-sequiturs in his assertions about the problematic nature of the
use we make of our representations of the relationship of cause to effect. The Critique of Reason
has done neither.
[…] Hume’s skepticism takes its start from a single but supremely important concept
of theoretical reason, viz., the concept of the link between cause and effect (hence from
the derivative concepts of power, operation, etc. as well). He demanded that reason, which
pretended to have generated the concept in its womb, should give him an account of its right
to think that something can be so constituted that, upon being posited, something else would
also have to be posited necessarily—for this is precisely what the concept of cause and effect
says. And he argued quite consequentially that reason is totally incapable of thinking any
such combinations a priori, on the base of concepts. For the combination entails necessity,
yet it is quite impossible to see how, just because something is, something else must also be

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necessarily—how the concept, therefore, of any such link between one thing and another could
be introduced a priori. Hence he concluded that, as regards this concept, reason has completely
deceived itself; that it has wrongly claimed the concept as its own child; that, on the contrary, it
is nothing else but a bastard of the imagination which, made pregnant by experience, has given
birth to certain representations under the aegis of the law of association, but has substituted for
the subjective necessity that springs from this law (i.e., custom) the kind of objective necessity
that would spring from insight.
[…]
However important as a product of acumen and philosophical spirit the explanation given in
the Critique of Reason of how necessary principles are possible, it is nevertheless ineffective to
prove, or in any way establish, anything against David Hume.
For it is obvious indeed that the author of the Critique of Reason arrives at his answer to the
general problem, “How are necessary synthetic propositions possible in us?” simply by applying
the principle of causality to certain judgements that occur in us after experience. He subsumes
them under the concept ‘effect of something’, and in accordance with this subsumption he
assumes, and declares, that the mind is their effective cause. And with this move he believes
to have also definitively established the true function that these judgements have in our
knowledge, and their value. For from the fact that these necessary synthetic judgements derive
from the mind, in the inner source of representation, he concludes that they constitute only the
form of experiential cognition, and that they only gain reference by being applied to empirical
perception. He presupposes as established, therefore, that each segment of human knowledge
has a real ground that causes it. Without this presupposition all that is said in the Critique of
Reason concerning the origin of necessary synthetic judgements makes no sense at all.
[…]
From the fact, therefore, that we are incapable of representing to ourselves, or to think, how
the necessary synthetic judgements found in our knowledge are possible, except by deriving
them from the mind, the Critique of Reason proves that they must originate in it is actual fact
too, or realiter. It thus infers the objective and real constitution of what is to be found outside
our representations, from the constitution of the representations and thoughts present in us; or
again, it proves that something must be constituted realiter in such and such a way because it
cannot be thought otherwise. But it is precisely the validity of this kind of inference that Hume
questioned. And he declared it to be a sophism because we know of no principle by which we
can determine to what extent our representations and their characteristics agree with what is
objective and its characteristics, or to what extent something present in our thoughts refers
to anything outside them. This inference is also the foundation on which every dogmatism is
grounded. Philosophy has made use of it from time immemorial to determine the objective
nature of what lies outside our representations, or what is really true; by applying it thus, it
has justified the contradictory results of all the systems of theoretical metaphysics. In short, in
refuting Hume the Critique of Reason avails itself of an inference which, for him, was utterly
deceptive and misleading. And to show that we men cannot know anything about the things-
in-themselves, it employs a line of argument which could in fact lead us to the most important
discoveries in that immeasurable realm of things-in-themselves. Even less comprehensible,
however, is how the Critique of Reason could avail itself of the same inference as it lays down the
foundation of its system, considering how often and emphatically it urges on us the distinction
existing between representations and the objective things [Sachen] that are supposed to be

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there independent of them. And the Critique of Reason even justifies one of the most important
parts of its system, the Transcendental Dialectic, above all by assuming that in spite of long-
sanctioned practice, it will never be possible to infer, from the determinations that belong to
our representations and thinking, those to be found outside us. […]
The Critique of Reason has not shown that the a priori representations and judgements that
we assume to be present in us are just forms of empirical cognitions, and that they have validity
and meaning only with reference to empirical intuitions. It has not definitively established
this any more than it has demonstrated that anything necessary and universally valid in our
knowledge can only originate in the mind and in its mode of operation. In other words, the
Critique of Reason has not fathomed the full power, nor the lack of it, of the human faculty of
cognition.
[…]
Now in order to confirm our verdict, it is important that we examine whether, and to what
extent, that which the Critique of Reason itself states regarding the misuse of ideas and the
illusions to which this misuse gives rise, applies as well to the foundations of critical philosophy,
particularly to its derivation of the necessary synthetic judgements from the subject behind the
representing.
By the ‘mind’ which is alleged to be the source of what is necessary in our knowledge,
we are to understand according to critical philosophy a transcendental idea. This is apparent
from the most unequivocal statements of its most perceptive defenders. To my knowledge,
indeed, nowhere in the Critique of Pure Reason has Mr. Kant declared himself clearly and
expressly on this matter. […] From a few passages in the Critique of Reason and especially
from the Prolegomena (§46), we must nevertheless conclude that by ‘subject of representations’
(inasmuch, again, as this subject is presumed to be the source of what is necessary in our
knowledge), the author of the critical philosophy wants us to understand nothing else but a
merely transcendental idea. It is only in this sense, moreover, that he attributes the predicate
of logical causality to it with respect to the necessary synthetic judgements present in us. Mr.
Reinhold, on the other hand, has expressed himself on this matter with particular distinctness
and clarity in his Theory of the Faculty of Representation (see especially pp. 530ff.). And
according to his explanation, we may and can attribute to the representing subject the thought
predicate ‘ground of what is necessary and formal in our knowledge’ only qua idea.
[…]
The Critique of Reason has erected a new system of philosophy on its explanation of the
origin of the necessary synthetic principles. We can entertain no further doubt, now that
we have reviewed the essentials of that explanation, as to how much we have really gained
through it in true insight into the actual origin of these principles, as well as into the actual
limits of our knowledge. There is equally no doubt as to the value of the explanation by the
Critique’s own standards. For we can turn against it, against its grounds and the insights
gained through them concerning the origin of an element of our representations, everything
that the Critique of Reason says against the truth of the theses of rational psychology,
cosmology and theology, and against the validity of the proofs that dogmatism has so far
advanced on their behalf.
For to hope, first, that we would know more of an object than what pertains to its possible
experience, or to pretend that we can know a thing which is not the object of experience,
ought indeed to be in principle totally absurd now that the Critique of Reason has so carefully

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investigated, as it claims, the human faculty of cognition. However, neither the genesis of the
various components of man’s cognition, nor the mind and its mode of operation, are objects of
experience; neither is given to us in some single empirical intuition. According to the Critique
of Reason itself, therefore, it is totally absurd to pretend that we shall ever gain insight into
the actual origin of our knowledge, particularly its origin in the mind, or into its true mode
of operation and what it contributes to actual knowledge. Second, according to the Critique
of Reason the only function of all the transcendental ideas is to bring the knowledge that the
understanding gleans from experience as near to perfect completion as possible. These ideas
impart to us no knowledge at all of anything that does not belong to experience, or is not really
to be found there, provided, that is, that we do not misunderstand their function. Even by the
Critique’s own standards, it is therefore a misuse of the concepts of reason to apply the idea of
‘absolute subject’ to explain the origin of what is necessary in our knowledge. Moreover, again
according to the Critique of Reason, this explanation too would have to be relinquished to the
understanding whose proper function, however, does not include applying concepts to objects
outside experience. In this respect too, therefore, to apply the ideas of reason to actual facts to
make them comprehensible would constitute a misuse. Such ideas may only be used to bestow
absolute completeness on the knowledge of the understanding, and to use them otherwise is to
remove and restrict the employment of the latter.
And third, according to the Critique of Reason, the understanding is indeed only deceiving
itself if it imagines that it has reached objectively actual being through thought, and it infers
the properties of being from the determinations that pertain to thought. Even by the standards
of the Critique, therefore, it is only a deception originating in the understanding’s lack of self-
knowledge to believe that, since we can only think of the mind as containing the ground of what
is necessary in our knowledge, we have thereby discovered the proper and objective ground of
this necessary element. In a word: All that counts against the reality of the insights promised by
rational psychology, cosmology and theology, counts also against the truth of those promised
by [the attempt to] explain the origin of the necessary and synthetic propositions from the
subject of representation. This explanation, and all its proofs and foundations as laid down in
the Critique of Reason, is nothing but a sophism whose semblance of truth vanishes as soon as
we have duly learned from the Critique itself the only true determinations of the concepts of
understanding and reason.
And Hume’s skepticism is supposed to have been annulled and exploded by this sophism?
Surely we must have a very tenuous grasp of the problem raised by skepticism if we find
anything of the sort even likely. The first thing that Hume would have retorted to [the attempt
to] derive from the mind what is necessary in our knowledge, as the Critique of Reason has
done.
[…]
Another general point to be considered here is: the moment we declare that the real
principle of sufficient reason is merely subjective, and that it applies to the connection of
our representations only in experience, we can no longer speak of an actual ground of the
components of our cognition. Any enquiry about it becomes meaningless, for the principle
would not signify anything that pertains to things as they are ‘in-themselves’ outside our
representations. Before we can reasonably ask, “What is the genuinely ‘real ground’ and the
cause of this or that constituent of the insights we possess?”, we should establish beyond
doubt: (1) that ‘causality’ is an objective predicate of actuality, and (2) that the components

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of our knowledge are causally joined to something in itself, or realiter. We cannot assume
that ‘causality’ belongs only to our representations, or to our way of thinking, yet ask how in
actuality our knowledge originates in something different from it, or ask for some true cause
of it. As determined by the Critique of Reason, the function of the principle of causality thus
undercuts all philosophizing about the where or how of the origin of our cognitions.
[…]
As things now stand, the charge is not unfounded that its boast of victory over Hume’s
skepticism is unjustified and hence idle. And if the Critique has not won that victory, it has also
failed to establish any claim to lasting validity. Sooner or later it will be robbed of its reputation
at the hand of skepticism. Without fail it will be shaken at its foundation just as thoroughly as
it once shook many an old dogmatic system whose founder fancied he had constructed for all
eternity. Moreover, no deeper wound could have been inflicted on philosophy in its present
situation, than by Hume’s attacks on the employment of the concepts and laws of causality.
For since Locke and Leibniz, we have based every philosophy on a search for the origin of
representations. And so we have been left, after his attacks, with no materials with which to
build a system of philosophy. Until we have remedied this loss in full, therefore, we should not
presume to say or decide anything about the origin of human knowledge. We must either show
from universally valid and indisputable propositions that the principles and the categories of
causality also hold for the origin of our representations, or we must establish on some other
principle that there is a connection between our representations and something outside them.
Before this is done, we ought not to think that whatever we say in philosophy about the reality
of the components of man’s knowledge, or about anything that might or might not exist outside
the representations, amounts to more than a tissue of arbitrary opinions.

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