Appendix 33. - (366)
[Kant's system of innate forms]
Let us set aside any historical investigation about the way in which Kant conceived the innate forms. I have already expressed my opinion about this in the chapter where I examine his writings. The system of innate forms may however be conceived in two ways: 1. the spirit possesses the forms innately (as though they are universal and abstract ideas called forms because of the way they are used in understanding real entia) - this is how Descartes or Plato introduced innate ideas; 2. the mind possesses a radical power so determined that, when it conceives the entia given by sense experience, it extrudes from itself and gives existence to forms which did not previously exist by uniting them with the matter furnished by sensible experience. This power generates of itself, without any seed one might say, or rather creates its own intellectual knowledge and along with it the world itself. I would merely point out at this juncture that if forms were understood in this second way, much more would be introduced into our spirits than in the first way. In this second way, the system of forms would err more on the side of excess than it would in the first.
Here, I cannot refrain from quoting some reflections of Antonio Genovesi in one of his letters to Conti where he deals with the system of forms interpreted in the second way. We see that Kant's system was substantially conceived and refuted in Italy even before it was brought over the Alps. Genovesi says:
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I am perfectly willing to admit that this production of forms of merely possible things may be due solely to the nature of the spirit. Nevertheless, no one will ever hold the view that a mind which knows absolutely nothing of existing things, of which it can find no trace within itself, of which it does not receive any vestige from external causes, can produce images or forms corresponding to these things. Here, I am at sea. This power is even greater than the creative force; after all, the creative force only produces what it understands. This power produces forms which it does not understand; nor does it produce things as possible, but as existing. This seems odd to me. It is as though a painter claims to have made pictures of things of which he had no idea. In addition, this means turning to the darkest, imaginable scepticism about the existence of bodily things. It is a denial of all the evidence of the senses; it is a betrayal of the clear feeling of consciousness. |