How far should Hegel�s philosophy be understood as a critique of Kant?

Greg Detre

Monday, February 19, 2001

post-Kantian VI - Dr Rosen, Lincoln

Hegel saw Kant as a precursor to his own philosophy, tracing a path through the historicised pattern of ideas to the apprehension of reality itself through the dialectic. Kant is an advance from the pre-Kantian metaphysicians Hegel terms, �dogmatists�. Their na� attempts to grasp reality were based on insufficient scepticism about their intellectual equipment, discussing the Soul, the World and God without questioning the sharp delineations of the finite and infinite that they employed. With Kant�s metaphysics of the understanding came consideration about the validity of the Dogmatists� �title to fixity and truth�, and ultimately ushered in the Hegelian speculative truth which holds opposing fomulae �in union as a totality�. Hegel commends Kant in terms which appear in direct contrast to Kant�s stated aims of combating scepticism and accepting certain forms of thinking uncritically.

On the face of it, Kant and Hegel are very different philosophers. Yet Hegel owes a very great deal to Kant, and indeed offers some very careful analysis of his writings, mainly contained in Faith and Knowledge, the Lesser Logic and the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. I am going to group these differences, and criticisms, into five major areas:

reason and the dialectic;

the world in-itself and subjectivism;

the categories;

morality; and

God.

Paul Guyere sees Kant�s indispensable contribution to the progress of philosophy in recognising that the most basic principles of human thought reflect the structure of our own minds. Hegel sees himself as adding the final step, which consisted in realising the identity between the nature of reality and human thought. Kant saw that we could not have both necessary and empirical knowledge, that we could either know what is necessary a priori, or learn contingent and particular truths through experience. His acceptance of this impassable gulf was based on Hume. Guyere accuses him of trying to avail himself of the Kantian claims to a priori knowledge in order to apply them beyond the scope of human representation to which Kant saw they are limited.

�Thought must investigate its own capacity for knowledge� (LL 67 z). The pre-Kantians failed to examine their presuppositions, and so were not �free thinkers�. The categories must be examined, which Kant attempts prior to or independently of their exercise. Rather, Hegel holds that their limitations will be revealed in their use, a much more pragmatic theory of knowledge. This revision and enrichment in use is what Hegel terms the �dialectic�, acculumating truth by reflecting on the inadequacy of concepts in their use. That Hegel thinks he can see much further than Kant rests on his use of the dialectic, or speculative reason. Hegel thinks that knowledge as Kant sets it out is not knowledge at all, not �truths�, but only �phenomena�, the world as it appears to us rather than as it is. The �only objectivity Kant allows is provided by the categories, but that these in turn are subjective because �psychological�� (Priest). Without dialectic, Kant�s reason can only produce the imaginary; reason for Kant is just the understanding considered in abstraction from its only legitimate subject matter (FK 80, W ii 317). By employing the dialectic, Hegel opens up an enormous vista of knowledge about reality that before could be accessed only a posteriori in the form of contingent, particular truths.

However, Hegel offers no explanation of how to justify necessary truth without controverting Kant�s analysis of the limitations of the intellect. Guyere concedes that Hegel may be correct in the basic point that the necessary truths Kant holds up may well themselves be radically contingent. While Kant goes some way towards recognising this as an inherent limitation of human cognition, Hegel sees it as a sign that Kant�s philosophy will ultimately become a superceded period in the history of philosophy.

In order to understand why else Hegel regards knowledge in a Kantian system as unnecessarily limited and narrow relative to his, we need to look at what Kant termed the �conditions for experience�:

The �transcendental unity of self-consciousness�

This is Kant�s means of identifying �I�, as having the condition of a set of experiences being episodes in the self-same consciousness that is �mine�. Hegel seems to reify this misleadingly as the Ego, despite Kant�s refusal to make any� ontological commitments

�Space and time�

Space and time are the way or manner in which persons perceive, the �universal type of perception�. However, they are a priori, since they are not derived or abstracted from experience so much as they contribute to and shape it.

The �manifold of sensation�

Hegel defines an object �x� in terms of how it can be differentiated from all that is not-x. This is what he means by things having their �being outside themselves�. This is contrasted with the Ego, which has no non-Ego or other-Ego, and so constitutes the undifferentiated �primary identity�, or Geist.

Because Kant defines �I� psychologistically as being just the �transcendental unity of self-consciousness� instead of Geist, he irretrievably divorces his metaphysics from Hegelian absolute knowledge.

Kant�s system can never yield Absolute Knowing for a further reason related to the categories. Hegel rejects Kant�s claim that the categories are empty when considered in abstraction from their empirical applications. Hegel argues that they have content even though it is undetectable in sense experience, since they can be discriminated between semantically, that is to say, non-empirically (Priest). However, Hegel allows that the categories could be seen as empty in a Hegelian sense, insofar as the Absolute is not given in perception so understanding by means of the categories cannot be of the things-in-themselves.

Hegel�s use of �categories� is different from Kant�s in three major ways:

There are many more than twelve

They are changing and developing, rather than ahistorically fixed

They apply directly to reality. They cannot be said to apply to things-in-themselves, because Hegel rejects the entire distinction between the worlds of appearances and in-itself on two grounds: incoherence and a psychological construct. He regards the idea of things-in-themselves as defined only by their existence as incoherent, since there is no sortal by which they can be described, i.e. no not-x against which they can be contrasted and thus defined. The in-itself is also a psychological construct insofar as it is a reality as shaped by us, by our concepts and categories. Hegel is ambiguous as to whether there are no things-in-themselves or whether there are things-in-themselves but we can have knowledge of them.

Although �Kant was the first definitely to signalise the distinction between reason and understanding� (LL 73 z), his �drastic underestimation of reason is partly due to an impoverished concept of infinity� (Priest). Kant considers infinity as contrasted with finitude, whereas Hegel sees true infinity as the synthesis of finitude and infinite, that is the whole. This whole is the �universal divine Idea�, the ground of the finite objects, and for and on which human subjects are finite points of view. This is Absolute, rather than subjective, idealism. To Hegel, there is no world as it appears-to-us and world as it is in-itself, but rather a whole of which both subjects and objects are manifestations.

This is why Hegel agrees with Kant�s disassembly of the �soul-thing� into the formal �I� as simply the �unity of self-consciousness�, though he doesn�t see this as a significant advance over Hume. Hegel�s own understanding of the self-conscious subject is as �reality�s points of view on itself� (Priest), as aspects of Geist�s consciousness.

The Antinomies are lauded insofar as they consider contradictions, but attacked for their limited employment. Hegel considers there to be far more than just four � indeed, �Antinomies appear in all objects of every kind, in all conceptions, notions and ideas� (LL 78). Indeed, �the world� (LL 77, der Welt) is itself paradoxical � it contains contradictions. �Contradictions� in this sense should not be taken in the sense of p and not-p, but as antithetical notions such as freedom and necessity, or subject and object.

Hegel attacks the Categorical Imperative as being an entirely formal principle of universalisation, and thus empty, since it can be satisfied by actions that would be consistent if everyone were to adopt them as their maxim, without their necessarily being good. Being �good� is defined vacuously in terms of duty, and so Kant�s ethics do not on their own tell us in any way how we ought to act.

Apparently, Kant would have asked himself the question �What is the final end of the whole�, had he thought through his teleology. The answer is �the Good�, requiring God for its realisation. This realisation is the Idea�s dialectical progress through history. While �Hegel�s God postulates the existence of God for the realisation of his cosmic ideals�, in contrast, Kant �postulates the existence of God for the realisation of human ethical goals� (Priest).

There are a number of ways in which Hegel sees that Kantian philosophy might be almost Hegelian.

Hegel identifies �reflecting judgement� with �intuitive understanding� in Kant�s system. This is the faculty by which �the particulars [are] � moulded and formed by the universal itself� (LL 88). Hegel sees this as a close anticipation of the Idea. �In exhibiting the reciprocal dependence of universal and particular, Kant�s philosophy shows itself capable of being genuinely speculative (LL 88).

Ultimately, Hegel�s discontent with Kant boils down to what he failed to do. By relying on the understanding without employing speculative reason, Kant made progress but did not discover the Hegelian system. In this sense, Hegel sees Kant as being a forerunner that stopped short, defining Kant in terms of the Hegelian rather than the other way round. Kant was forever trapped in his own unsynthesised opposites, perhaps most importantly in terms of the phenomenal-noumenal and a non-metaphysical world of appearances.

Hegel would certainly regard a large proportion of his philosophy as resting on, and therefore a critique of, Kant. There are also other influences who should not be forgotten, notably his contemporaries Fichte and Schelling, but an enormous amount of Hegel�s thinking can be described almost completely as a reaction to Kant.

Walsh concludes that the differences between Kant and Hegel lie largely in details, although admittedly details of considerable importance. For instance, Kant�s system of the categories is permanent, whereas Hegel�s is apparently richer and subject to change. But overall, though Kant lacked the imagination that Hegel applied boldly to his system, Kant might well have written Hegel�s philosophy, other than �nonsense� which Hegel occasionally lapses into. However, Walsh�s conclusion that Kant himself might have been a Hegelian if he had had a little more imagination seems far-fetched. Hegel�s critique of Kant does him so much violence that though Kant�s influence is enormous, their two philosophies are quite divergent.

Hegel never judges Kant on his own terms. He shies away from criticising Kant internally on the basis of unsound arguments, nor does he examine Kant�s own reasons for his subjectivism, but sees it almost as �a failure of nerve� (Guyer). We can understand why this is, since Hegel regards his system as the culmination of the history of philosophy to which Kant provides only the denouement. Kant�s philosophy is good in as much as it agrees with Hegel�s own, can be assimilated into it or provides one half of a thesis-antithesis pair. Methodologically, Hegel�s dependence on dialectic places him at odds with most Kantian conclusions, since Hegel finds an antithesis and synthesis in response to almost everything. Hegel pounces on anything in Kant which might be interpreted as dialectical as an anticipation of the future.