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Volume 5, Issue 4 (2025)
3 2025, 5(4): 1001-1015 |
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Received: 2025/10/26 | Accepted: 2025/12/14 | Published: 2025/07/1
Received: 2025/10/26 | Accepted: 2025/12/14 | Published: 2025/07/1
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Roshani Payan M, Vaezi A. The ontology of causality in Kant's pre-critical philosophy. 3 2025; 5 (4) :1001-1015
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The problem of causality is one of the most central issues in Kant’s philosophical formulations during his critical period. Kant makes direct and explicit use of the concept of causality both in the epistemology derived from pure reason and in his discussions of moral philosophy. Nevertheless, Kant never wrote an independent treatise on causality, nor did he ever provide a detailed and foundational explanation of the concept. Instead, he consistently employs the notion of causality without extended clarification. As a result, Kant’s intended conception of causality has become the subject of a serious and deeply divided controversy among major Kant scholars. For example, when Kant writes under the heading of the second analogy of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason that “all alterations occur in accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect” [Kant, 1998: 304 B232], he does not further clarify whether this causal law—given his own account of the function of the category of relation in the understanding—should be regarded as a subjective law operative in the human mind, or rather as an objective law grounded in the universally necessary order of nature itself.
Prominent interpreters such as Buchdahl, Beck, Strawson, and Allison have endorsed the former interpretation, whereas scholars such as Guyer and Friedman have favored the latter. Watkins himself proposes a dual solution to this problem, suggesting a hybrid of epistemological and metaphysical elements [Watkins, 2005: 215]. It appears that part of this theoretical ambiguity in Kant’s critical philosophy arises from the fact that Kant had already discussed basic definitions and explanations of causality in his earlier writings, and in the critical period merely drew upon the results of those earlier investigations. Accordingly, the present article aims to show that a careful examination of Kant’s pre-critical texts allows for a more precise reconstruction of his conception of causality, one that can resolve at least some of these interpretive difficulties.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the problem of causation was one of the most prominent focal points of debate in German philosophy. Two particularly influential theories during this period were Malebranche’s occasionalism and Leibniz’s theory of Pre-Established Harmony. According to occasionalism, the soul and the body do not stand in any causal relation to one another but operate through the continual intervention of God’s will. According to the theory of Pre-Established Harmony, substances—including the soul and the body—never enter into causal relations with one another. Each substance acts solely in accordance with its own internal forces, yet within God’s perfect and pre-established plan, all substances appear to stand in causal relations with one another [Leibniz, 2014: 30].
Gradually, however, a competing theory emerged under the title of Physical Influx, which affirmed genuine physical causation between substances [O'Neill, 1989: 29-30]. Martin Knutzen, the teacher of the young Kant, was a proponent of Physical Influx and attempted to establish a connection between the theory of Pre-Established Harmony and Physical Influx [Dyck, forthcoming: 13]. Kant himself was deeply attracted to this theory and, in his earliest writings, sought to develop arguments in its favor by appealing to theories of action and physical force [Kant, 2012: 23].
Drawing on Physical Influx as well as on the limits of each substance’s sphere of activity, Kant argues that the mutual influence of substances cannot be understood solely within the narrow framework of motion (vis motrix), as the Wolffian–Leibnizian rationalists had maintained. According to Kant’s view, substance A exerts force on substance B only insofar as the agency of A alters the internal states or determinations of B [Carpenter, 2001: 3]. Although Kant never intended his position on the mechanization of the soul to be interpreted in light of materialism or physicalism [Kant, 1992a: 39-40 1: 412), he nevertheless concluded—on the basis of physical causation and the mechanization it entails—that any substance which affects another substance must itself be spatially determined. Since the soul affects the body, the soul must also be spatially determined [Laywine, 1993: 45].
For Kant, no change occurs in substances unless they stand in relations with other substances; it is their reciprocal dependence that determines the alterations of their states [Kant, 1992a: 37 1: 410]. Indeed, Kant holds that a substance always acts on the basis of an external cause [Langton, 2007: 108]. For a considerable period, Kant remained under the influence of monadology and sought to formulate a kind of physical monadology [Kant, 1992b: 57-58 1: 481]. Over time, however, he distanced himself from this approach and came to conceive of substances as the materials of the world existing within a universal structural form [Kant, 1992d: 380 §2: 390). This form possessed a principle which Kant called the determining Ground [Kant, 1992c: 239 2: 202].
Influenced by Hume’s critical insights, Kant then concluded that it was necessary to distinguish the real ground from what traditional rationalists had called the logical ground [Kant, 1992e: 356 2: 370]. Accordingly, in his critical period Kant maintains that particular instances of causation must be understood in accordance with Hume’s account, whereas the fundamental and a priori principle of causality must be grounded in the necessary and universal laws of nature [Kant, 1998: 656-657 A765/B793]. Kant’s most famous formulations of causality in the critical period appear in the second and third analogies of experience within the Empirical Analogies, which constitute some of the most influential chapters of the Analytic of Principles in the Critique of Pure Reason. In these sections, Kant explicitly states that the concept of causality arises when something like B necessarily follows something like A in accordance with an absolutely universal rule. He immediately emphasizes that such necessity can never be derived through empirical induction, that is, by extracting a general rule from particular empirical instances [Kant, 1998: 223 B124].
Interpreters have offered divergent accounts of the meaning of these Kantian claims. Watkins, for example, argues that they should be understood in terms of causal powers [Watkins, 2010: 99]. Tobias Henschen accepts Watkins’s account of causal power but maintains that causality nonetheless remains part of the categorial framework of the understanding [Henschen, 2014: 23]. James Hutton, by contrast, argues that particular instances of causation should not be separated from the general causal law. It appears that the core issue at stake is a reassessment of the bridge linking Kant’s pre-critical philosophy to his critical period. This issue can be clarified by examining Kant’s philosophical aim in shifting from ontology to epistemology—an aim he himself famously described as a Copernican Revolution. In Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the primary goal was not the elimination of ontology on the grounds that things in themselves are unknowable, but rather a methodological inversion aimed at discovering the laws of nature through the rules of the understanding. In effect, Kant’s project seeks to know what lies beyond our direct access by means of what we can know.
From this perspective, the rules of understanding are not merely subjective constructs but reflect what renders the external world law-governed. Although we never have access to things in themselves in the external world, this does not imply an ontological rupture between ourselves and the world. The external world is given in experience, and we cognize it through the forms of intuition, the faculties of the understanding, and the mediating role of imagination. Consequently, there must be something in the world that is compatible with our experience of it. If we were absolutely incapable of experiencing the external world, we could not meaningfully speak of experience at all.
While experience is structured by the rules of the understanding, including the analogies of experience, the very fact that such rules are compatible with appearances in the natural world indicates that the application of these laws—among them the law of causality—to nature possesses a deeply ontological dimension. The transcendental project of Kant can thus be pursued on ontological grounds without becoming entangled in the distinction between appearance and thing in itself. In this sense, causality operates in accordance with a universal law through the harmony between the laws of the understanding and the laws of nature. Accordingly, every event in the world has a cause, and although the specific character of that cause is discovered through empirical investigation, whatever that cause may be, it operates in accordance with a universal law.
Prominent interpreters such as Buchdahl, Beck, Strawson, and Allison have endorsed the former interpretation, whereas scholars such as Guyer and Friedman have favored the latter. Watkins himself proposes a dual solution to this problem, suggesting a hybrid of epistemological and metaphysical elements [Watkins, 2005: 215]. It appears that part of this theoretical ambiguity in Kant’s critical philosophy arises from the fact that Kant had already discussed basic definitions and explanations of causality in his earlier writings, and in the critical period merely drew upon the results of those earlier investigations. Accordingly, the present article aims to show that a careful examination of Kant’s pre-critical texts allows for a more precise reconstruction of his conception of causality, one that can resolve at least some of these interpretive difficulties.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the problem of causation was one of the most prominent focal points of debate in German philosophy. Two particularly influential theories during this period were Malebranche’s occasionalism and Leibniz’s theory of Pre-Established Harmony. According to occasionalism, the soul and the body do not stand in any causal relation to one another but operate through the continual intervention of God’s will. According to the theory of Pre-Established Harmony, substances—including the soul and the body—never enter into causal relations with one another. Each substance acts solely in accordance with its own internal forces, yet within God’s perfect and pre-established plan, all substances appear to stand in causal relations with one another [Leibniz, 2014: 30].
Gradually, however, a competing theory emerged under the title of Physical Influx, which affirmed genuine physical causation between substances [O'Neill, 1989: 29-30]. Martin Knutzen, the teacher of the young Kant, was a proponent of Physical Influx and attempted to establish a connection between the theory of Pre-Established Harmony and Physical Influx [Dyck, forthcoming: 13]. Kant himself was deeply attracted to this theory and, in his earliest writings, sought to develop arguments in its favor by appealing to theories of action and physical force [Kant, 2012: 23].
Drawing on Physical Influx as well as on the limits of each substance’s sphere of activity, Kant argues that the mutual influence of substances cannot be understood solely within the narrow framework of motion (vis motrix), as the Wolffian–Leibnizian rationalists had maintained. According to Kant’s view, substance A exerts force on substance B only insofar as the agency of A alters the internal states or determinations of B [Carpenter, 2001: 3]. Although Kant never intended his position on the mechanization of the soul to be interpreted in light of materialism or physicalism [Kant, 1992a: 39-40 1: 412), he nevertheless concluded—on the basis of physical causation and the mechanization it entails—that any substance which affects another substance must itself be spatially determined. Since the soul affects the body, the soul must also be spatially determined [Laywine, 1993: 45].
For Kant, no change occurs in substances unless they stand in relations with other substances; it is their reciprocal dependence that determines the alterations of their states [Kant, 1992a: 37 1: 410]. Indeed, Kant holds that a substance always acts on the basis of an external cause [Langton, 2007: 108]. For a considerable period, Kant remained under the influence of monadology and sought to formulate a kind of physical monadology [Kant, 1992b: 57-58 1: 481]. Over time, however, he distanced himself from this approach and came to conceive of substances as the materials of the world existing within a universal structural form [Kant, 1992d: 380 §2: 390). This form possessed a principle which Kant called the determining Ground [Kant, 1992c: 239 2: 202].
Influenced by Hume’s critical insights, Kant then concluded that it was necessary to distinguish the real ground from what traditional rationalists had called the logical ground [Kant, 1992e: 356 2: 370]. Accordingly, in his critical period Kant maintains that particular instances of causation must be understood in accordance with Hume’s account, whereas the fundamental and a priori principle of causality must be grounded in the necessary and universal laws of nature [Kant, 1998: 656-657 A765/B793]. Kant’s most famous formulations of causality in the critical period appear in the second and third analogies of experience within the Empirical Analogies, which constitute some of the most influential chapters of the Analytic of Principles in the Critique of Pure Reason. In these sections, Kant explicitly states that the concept of causality arises when something like B necessarily follows something like A in accordance with an absolutely universal rule. He immediately emphasizes that such necessity can never be derived through empirical induction, that is, by extracting a general rule from particular empirical instances [Kant, 1998: 223 B124].
Interpreters have offered divergent accounts of the meaning of these Kantian claims. Watkins, for example, argues that they should be understood in terms of causal powers [Watkins, 2010: 99]. Tobias Henschen accepts Watkins’s account of causal power but maintains that causality nonetheless remains part of the categorial framework of the understanding [Henschen, 2014: 23]. James Hutton, by contrast, argues that particular instances of causation should not be separated from the general causal law. It appears that the core issue at stake is a reassessment of the bridge linking Kant’s pre-critical philosophy to his critical period. This issue can be clarified by examining Kant’s philosophical aim in shifting from ontology to epistemology—an aim he himself famously described as a Copernican Revolution. In Kant’s Copernican Revolution, the primary goal was not the elimination of ontology on the grounds that things in themselves are unknowable, but rather a methodological inversion aimed at discovering the laws of nature through the rules of the understanding. In effect, Kant’s project seeks to know what lies beyond our direct access by means of what we can know.
From this perspective, the rules of understanding are not merely subjective constructs but reflect what renders the external world law-governed. Although we never have access to things in themselves in the external world, this does not imply an ontological rupture between ourselves and the world. The external world is given in experience, and we cognize it through the forms of intuition, the faculties of the understanding, and the mediating role of imagination. Consequently, there must be something in the world that is compatible with our experience of it. If we were absolutely incapable of experiencing the external world, we could not meaningfully speak of experience at all.
While experience is structured by the rules of the understanding, including the analogies of experience, the very fact that such rules are compatible with appearances in the natural world indicates that the application of these laws—among them the law of causality—to nature possesses a deeply ontological dimension. The transcendental project of Kant can thus be pursued on ontological grounds without becoming entangled in the distinction between appearance and thing in itself. In this sense, causality operates in accordance with a universal law through the harmony between the laws of the understanding and the laws of nature. Accordingly, every event in the world has a cause, and although the specific character of that cause is discovered through empirical investigation, whatever that cause may be, it operates in accordance with a universal law.
References
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