But how is that understanding supposed to create, as if ex nihilo, concepts and principles that, by what they name and say, intend not an empty “something” but a very specific entity, namely nature? The venue of explanation in the present case is not the Aesthetic but the Logic, the science of the understanding and its activities. Formal logic has to do simply with thinking about something in general regardless of its content. It can tell us absolutely nothing about the origin of the concepts that are necessarily co-thought in the what-is-known of knowledge—concepts like “cause,” “consequence,” [318] reciprocal action, substance. These are a priori concepts, and yet they have a content. The same with the principles (they express something about the content-field of nature). So the question becomes: How are content-oriented statements about entities possible, when what is expressed in those statements does not and cannot come from experience and is not taken from the givens of experience? How can content-oriented statements come from the pure understanding? How can a statement express something about a specific entity not by drawing what it expresses from the entity but by remaining a pure act of understanding, one that does not admit of being given anything and yet remains object-oriented? That is the meaning of the question: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?—i.e., propositions of the understanding which, without being measured beforehand against things, are nonetheless in accord with them, i.e., “are true” (according to B 296). In this way we pose the problem of an explanation of the understanding, one that investigates it in terms of how a pure action of the understanding can be true, which is the problem of a “logic of truth” (B 87).

The problem is: How can thinking remain in and with itself in its action and, in so doing, also be related to objects, i.e., express something about content in its concepts and propositions? There is no problem in seeing how Descartes’s position shines through the problematic, viz., where in the first instance it is shown that within the known of natural-scientific knowledge there is some content with the character of being prior: basic concepts and principles. But according to the theory, this “prior,” the a priori content, resides first of all and fundamentally within the subject—which means that the a priori is understood as first of all and fundamentally subjective. And then one asks how in the final analysis this subjective feature of the understanding nonetheless can and does relate to objects. Here too we can see (although at a much higher level of the problematic) how Kant remained imprisoned in this way of posing the question: How does the subject in its knowledge get out to the object? Kant no longer asks the question [319] so primitively, but basically it is the same problematic.

So basic principles and basic concepts are already intended and expressed beforehand in the known. This gives rise to the first task: ascertaining