5. On the Critique of Pure Reason

On the Possibility of Experience

Experience arises only through looking at and recognizing (that is, thinking in valid judgments - through understanding) what is given.

Everything that is ever to become the object of my thinking can only do so to the extent that it takes on those forms under which thinking is possible at all. Thus, anything that is not capable of taking on the forms of my thinking could not become the object of my experience at all. Therefore, everything that is ever to become experience must conform to the forms of my thinking.

These forms are therefore the conditions for all possible experience.

An object cannot simply be thought of as being, but must be in a certain way; being in general is substance, the way it is is its accident. Although both are strictly identical, strictly one and the same in reality, thinking separates them here and considers the thing insofar as it is and also insofar as it is somehow and then says that what is cannot perish or arise, only its accidents change. This is quite right, if only we do not think of a persisting thing in itself, because if an object ceases to exist in a certain way and begins to exist in a different way, I used to ascribe being to it and I still do so; it is therefore always being, that is, it persists in its being. To say that the existing ceases to exist is inconsistent and impossible precisely because it is inconsistent, for it means that the existing should not be at a time, which is roughly the same as saying that the beautiful should be ugly at a time.

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The ego is absolute in its form, therefore it cannot be asked about an authority to use the above listed forms, it is simply capable of doing so.

But insofar as it applies the forms, it is absolute identity with itself and everything else is only through the absolute ego, and therefore also the imagined ego.

A genuine theory of science, which is supposed to be a science of the pursuit of truth, must start from the absolute ego and tie in with the sentence: The absolute ego sets (i.e. makes into an entity) a conceived ego (relatively consistent with itself) and a conceived non-ego (relatively different from the ego) and sets both through each other.

The explanation and complete exposition of these propositions is a matter for a general theory of science. However, for the purpose of this essay, this proposition is justified insofar as the ego would be conceived as absolute and at the same time a matter determined by a form. This has been critically established as a fact.

If I now repeat the critical result found here, it is presented in the following sentences:

1. There is an absolute form that confronts us in the ego.
2. There is a matter that confronts us as opposed to the absolute ego.
3. The I determines matter through its forms and forms from its totality formed matter - the absolutely unconditional - as idea.
4. Matter is given to us only by observation of experience and there is no other source of experience than this.

Depending on the diversity of forms in which matter appears, it appears either as truth, as beauty or as goodness. The true, the beautiful and the good therefore lie in forms and only in forms.