While Kants thinking came to dominate almost all those philosophers who came after him, it is interesting that almost no one, either his critics or his adherents, actually thought that he had a coherent, logically supported viewpoint.
Since Kant had accepted the primacy of consciousness(ie, that some content of consciousness is more fundamental to our knowledge than evidence from the external world), he could not refer to the identity of existents as the source of causality. Instead, he could only propose that causality is a simple sequence of events, with the sequence determined by our own consciousness. This view cannot be applied to reality, since it does not teach us how to recognize which events, in the multiplicity of our experience, are causally related. This problem was noted by Kant's colleagues, and was articulated by Salomon Maimon (1754-1800), who was considered to be one of Kants most astute critics. "According to Maimon, the central question behind the deduction - How do synthetic a priori concepts apply to experience? - could not be resolved on Kantian premises. Kant had created such an unbridgeable dualism between understanding and sensibility that it became impossible for synthetic a priori concepts to apply to experience." (The fate of Reason, Beiser, p286)
Reinhold, who was Kant's closest and most well renowned contemporary adherent, also rejected the artificial, unsupported divisions of consciousness that were introduced by Kant "axiomatically". After years of sympathetic study, Reinhold concludes that Kant fails to adhere to his project of demonstrating synthetic a priori judgments. "Reinhold charges...its method is not 'synthetic', that is, it does not begin with the ideal of the whole and then determine the necessary order of its parts through a rigorous a priori deduction. Rather, its method is 'analytic'; it begins from the parts and then arrives at the idea of the whole through a random induction." (Beiser p240) Kant's problem was that after he rejected existence and identity as the foundation for philosophy, and accepted the primacy of consciousness, he had no way to sensibly derive his view of knowledge. This is the problem that is shared by all of these philosophers, and they each seem to be able to observe this flaw in each other, but cannot work their way around it in their own system. Kant cannot follow through on his project of establishing synthetic a priori knowledge because such knowledge does not exist. Beiser summarizes this critique of Kant as presented by his protege Reinhold:
"Reinhold cites Kant's metaphysical deduction of the categories as a striking case in point of Kant's haphazard methodology. He complains that Kant fails to deduce the categories from a single principle, and that he simply picks them up from the various forms of judgment. There is nothing in the deduction, he alleges, to tell us why the table of categories is complete and why it must be organized into the forms of quality, quantity, and relation." (Beiser, p241)
"The most important un-examined pre-supposition of the critical philosophy, Reinhold believes, is Kant's concept of experience. This concept consists in the assumption that there are laws governing events, or that there are necessary connections between perceptions. According to Reinhold's reading, the transcendental deduction presupposes this concept but does not demonstrate it. It begins with the concept of experience and then shows that synthetic a priori concepts are a necessary condition of it; but it does not prove that there is such an experience. This argument is significant, Reinhold remarks, only if we accept the Kantian concept of experience in the first place. But it is just this concept that the skeptic denies." (Beiser, p241)
If Kants ideas were so unconvincing to his contemporaries, then why did they gain such wide acceptance over the following hundreds of years?
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