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Why did Kant believe causality is necessary for human experience?

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Immanuel Kant German philosopher Immanuel Kant surrounded by Ouroboros, an emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece, engraving by John Chapman, published in London, 1812.

Immanuel Kant argued that causality is necessary for human experience because it is a fundamental a priori category, or a "pure concept of the understanding," that the mind imposes on the world to make experience intelligible.12

In his transcendental idealism, Kant proposed that human knowledge does not merely conform to objects; rather, objects must conform to the requirements of human sensibility and rationality. Because the human mind is structured to organize sensory data through specific concepts, nothing can be an object of experience unless it is perceived as part of a system governed by cause and effect.23

Unlike David Hume, who viewed causality as a habit of expectation derived from observing constant conjunctions, Kant maintained that causality includes a necessary connection. This necessity is not derived from experience but is a condition imposed by the mind, allowing us to form synthetic a priori judgments, such as "every event has a cause," which are essential for structured, scientific knowledge of the phenomenal world.123