Kant’s Transcendental Method

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) started from the position of rationalism and natural science. He proclaimed that Hume had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumber,” ¹ by which he meant that he felt obliged by Hume’s criticism of causality to deal with the question of how causality could have objective validity. If causality remains a subjective belief, as Hume has stated, the law of cause and effect naturally loses its objective validity, and natural science, which is established on the basis of the law of cause and effect, ceases to be a system of truth with objective validity. , although everyone unconcernedly used these concepts (without asking on what their objective validity rested)” (Ibid., 46).” ²

Thus, Kant questioned how experience in general is possible, and how objective truth can be obtained. With his transcendental method he tried to solve these problems.

Kant reasoned that if, as Hume had said, cognition is wholly dependent on experience, we can never reach objective truth. So Kant, who pursued the question of how objective truth can be obtained, examined human reason critically and discovered that there exist a priori elements, or forms, within the subject. That is to say, Kant asserted that there exist a priori forms of cognition, common to every person, prior to experience. Those a priori forms are the intuitive forms of time and space and the pure concepts of understanding (categories). According to Kant, cognition is not achieved by grasping the actual object as it is, but the object of cognition is synthesized through the subject’s a priori forms.