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To the memory of my teacher, Manley Thompson (1917–1994)

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to Manley Thompson, who directed my dissertation at the University of Chicago

and inspired my first study of Kant. Manley had little appetite for Hegel, but he very much valued the

philosophy of Charles Peirce. I like to think that he might have found something to admire in the Hegel I

portray here.

I am indebted to other Kantians who have supported and inspired my work for over twenty years, in

particular: Karl Ameriks, Manfred Baum, Graham Bird, Stephen Engstrom, Paul Guyer, and Allen Wood.

More recently, I have benefited from fruitful discussions with Béatrice Longuenesse, Hannah Ginsborg,

and Rachel Zuckert.

Back in the mid‐1980s, when I began visiting Germany on a regular basis, I had the good fortune to come

into contact with a number of impressive German Hegel scholars. The direction of my research changed

significantly, thanks in large part to Klaus Düsing, Friedrich Fulda, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Klaus Kaehler,

Ludwig Siep, Burkhard Tuschling, and Michael Wolff. Many years later (in 1996/7), Rolf Horstmann was

my official host during a year-long stay in Berlin; he has generously welcomed me back to Berlin on many

occasions since then. For a period of over twenty years, he and Burkhard Tuschling have been especially

constant sources of encouragement and direction.

My interest in Hegel received a further boost in the early 1990s when I discovered Robert Pippin’s

book, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, and shortly after that, Terry Pinkard’s

commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology. Readers familiar with the writings of these two philosophers will

readily discover their impact on the Hegel interpretation I defend here. Robert and Terry have, in addition,

repeatedly provided various concrete forms of support. My work has been enriched by exchanges with

other Hegel scholars as well, most especially Bill Bristow, Dina Emundts, Eckart Förster, Michael Forster,

Susan Hahn, Stephen Houlgate, the late Joseph McCarney, Francesca Menegoni, Frederick Neuhouser,

Angelica Nuzzo, Paul Redding, Robert Stern, and Jennifer Uleman.

I owe thanks to Bill Bristow and Terry Pinkard (again), who read drafts of parts of the manuscript at

various stages and offered valuable feedback. I am also indebted to two anonymous readers for Oxford

University Press for the comments and suggestions that have led, I believe, to improvements in some of

my discussions. I am grateful to Peter Momtchiloff for the patience and professionalism with which he has

encouraged this project since first discussing it with me years ago.

For institutional support, I am indebted to the Humanities Institute of the University of Illinois at Chicago

(UIC) for granting me a research fellowship in the fall of 2004, and to UIC for a sabbatical leave in the

spring semester of 2010. I also gratefully

acknowledge the generosity of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, which has financed a number of

research trips to Germany, including two lengthy stays (in 1988/9 and 1996/7).

I wish to thank my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy of the UIC for providing a stimulating and

unusually harmonious work environment. On a yet more personal note, I am deeply grateful both to my

brother Robert Sedgwick, who has encouraged my professional efforts every step of the way, and to my in-

house philosopher and closest collaborator in all things personal as well as professional, Peter Hylton.

Earlier versions of some of my discussions in this book have appeared in various venues.

Sections 2.1and 2.2 of Chapter Two draw from material from my essay, “Hegel on Kant’s Idea of Organic

Unity: The Jenaer Schriften,” in Metaphysik und Kritik: Festschrift für Manfred Baum zum 65.

Geburtstag, ed. Sabine Doyé, Marion Henz, and Udo Rameil (Berlin/New York: Verlag Walter de Gruyter,

2004), 285–98. In Chapter Three, I have revised and expanded material from three papers: “Hegel’s

Treatment of Transcendental Apperception in Kant,” The Owl of Minerva 23, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 151–63;

“ ‘Genuine’ versus ‘Subjective’ Idealism in Hegel’s Jenaer Schriften,” in Idealismus und

Repräsentationalismus, eds. R. Schumacher and O. Scholz (Mentis Verlag, 2001), 233–45; and “Hegel’s

Critique of Kant: An Overview,” for A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (Blackwell Publishing, 2006),

473–85. My Chapter Four borrows heavily from section IV of my paper, “Productive Imagination as

Original Identity: The Transcendental Deduction in Hegel’s Glauben und Wissen,” Akten des IX.

Internationalen Kant-Kongress, Bd. 5 (Berlin: Verlag Walter de Gruyter, 2001): 343–52. In Chapter Five,

I have revised and expanded material published in my essay, “Erkennen als ein Mittel: Hegels Kantkritik

in der Einleitung zur Phänomenologie,” in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes—Ein kooperativer

Kommentar zu einem Schlüsselwerk der Moderne, ed. Klaus Vieweg and Wolfgang Welsch (Suhrkamp

Verlag, 2008). I am grateful to the publishers of these works for permission to reproduce the above-

mentioned material.

Abbreviations

In the body of this work and in footnotes, I provide page references, first to the English and then to the

German editions of primary texts, and I separate pages of the two editions with an oblique (/). Below, I

indicate the abbreviations I use for the works of Kant and Hegel. I list the English translations I most

often consult (and occasionally modify).

Immanuel Kant

References to Kant’s works are to the Akademie edition [“Ak”], Kants gesammelte Schriften, Deutsche

Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1900–42). In the case of the Critique of Pure

Reason, I provide the pagination of the “A” and “B” Akademie editions, respectively.

CJ

Critique of Judgment, transl. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). Kritik der

Urteilskraft. In Ak volume V.

CPR

Critique of Pure Reason, transl. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998).Kritik der reinen Vernunft. “A” edition in Ak volume III; “B” edition in

Ak volume IV.

CPrR

Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, transl. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 133–271.Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. In Ak volume V.

G

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, transl. and ed. Mary J.

Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 37–108.Grundlegung zur

Metaphysik der Sitten. In Ak volume IV.

Proleg

Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward As Science, transl.

Paul Carus, revised by James W. Ellington (Indiana/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company,

1977).Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten

können. In Ak volume IV.

MFNS

Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, in The Philosophy of Material Nature, transl.

James W. Ellingon (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1985), pp. 3–

134. Metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft. In Ak volume IV.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

References to Hegel’s works in German are to the Werke in zwanzig Bänden, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and

Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970).

D

The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, transl. H. S. Harris, ed. H.

S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977).Differenz der

fichte’schen und schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie. In Werkevolume 2.

EL

The Encyclopaedia Logic, transl. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis

and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1991). This is a translation of the third edition

of Hegel’s Enzyklopädie (the Philosophische Bibliothek edition of 1830), an expanded version of

his first edition published in 1817.Enzyklopädie des philosophischen Wissenschaften, erster Teil:

Logik. In Werke volume 8.

FK

Faith and Knowledge, transl. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1977).

GW

Glauben und Wissen. In Werke volume 2.

LHP III

Lectures on the History of Philosophy III, transl. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul / NY: The Humanities Press, 1968).

VGP III

Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III. In Werke volume 20.

NL

Natural Law, transl. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975).Über die

wissenschaftlichen Behandlungen des Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie

und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven Rechtswissenschaften. InWerke volume 2.

PH

Introduction to the Philosophy of History, transl. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis and Cambridge:

Hackett Publishing Company, 1988).Einleitung zur Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der

Geschichte. In Werke volume 12.

PhG

Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. Terry Pinkard. Online draft:

http://web.mac.com/titpaul/Site/Phenomenology_of_Spirit_page.html Phänomenologie des

Geistes. In Werke volume 3.

PR

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, transl. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1991). Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und

Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. In Werke volume 7.

SL

Science of Logic, transl. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International,

Inc., 1991).

WL I

Wissenschaft der Logik I. In Werke volume 5.

WL II

Wissenschaft der Logik II. In Werke volume 6.

Introduction

This is a study of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Its main purpose is to defend the thesis

that Hegel offers us a compelling critique of and alternative to the conception of cognition Kant argues for

in his “Critical” period (from 1781 to 1790). It examines key features of what Kant identifies as the

“discursive” character of our mode of cognition, and considers Hegel’s reasons for arguing that these

features condemn Kant’s theoretical philosophy to skepticism as well as dualism. This study presents in a

sympathetic light Hegel’s claim to derive from certain Kantian doctrines clues to a superior form of

idealism, a form of idealism that better captures the nature of our cognitive powers and their relation to

objects.

In this Introduction, I indicate the overall shape of this work and of the arguments of its individual

chapters. I begin, however, with some remarks on the original motivation for this project. This project

came to be many years ago as part of an effort to understand Hegel’s critique of

Kant’s practicalphilosophy, in particular, his charge that Kant’s supreme practical law or categorical

imperative is an empty formalism. Hegel’s critique of the categorical imperative is perhaps his most well-

known criticism of Kant, but it is very poorly understood. One reason it is poorly understood, I now

believe, is that it is an expression or particular application of Hegel’s larger critique of Kant. In ways that

are by no means obvious, Hegel’s criticism of the categorical imperative is connected to his objections, for

example, to Kant’s restriction of our knowledge to appearances, to the “subjectivity” of Kant’s idealism,

and to the “emptiness” of the faculty Kant calls “transcendental apperception.”

Although I focus in this study on Hegel’s treatment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, I am going to begin—

in a somewhat roundabout way—with a brief discussion of some of his main objections to Kant’s practical

philosophy. I have a number of reasons for wanting to begin in this way. For one thing, this will enable me

to clarify the motivation for this project and therefore also foreground some of the problems we will be

setting out to solve. Of course, the particular way in which I frame those problems matters. It influences

the choices I make about the questions we will need to answer. It thereby also sets in place the general

course our investigation will follow. By beginning with Hegel’s critique of Kant’s practical philosophy, I

can furthermore convey some of this project’s broader implications. In particular, I can suggest how

Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy bears on his critique of Kant’s practical philosophy.

My discussion in the first part of this Introduction will proceed as follows: After providing a brief sketch of

Hegel’s criticism of the categorical imperative, I will consider typical Kantian lines of defense. I will

suggest that these efforts to defend Kant misrepresent the true target of Hegel’s objections. They do so

because they fail to appreciate that Hegel’s critique of the formalism of the categorical imperative is an

expression of his opposition to some of Kant’s most basic philosophical commitments—regarding the

nature and limits of human cognition, the objects we seek to know, and the activity we are engaged in

when we undertake a critique of our cognitive powers. Kant lays the ground for these commitments in the

context of his theoretical philosophy.

Hegel charges that the formalism of Kant’s practical philosophy is responsible for its deficiency in three

principal respects. First, the formalism of the supreme practical law renders it ineffective as a guide to the

derivation of specific duties. Kant argues that the supreme practical law or categorical imperative is the

rule by means of which we determine how we ought to act in particular circumstances. But in requiring

nothing more than that our intentions and actions conform to the form of universalizability, the law is too

“empty,” in Hegel’s view, to adequately perform this function. The categorical imperative can only guide

the derivation of specific duties, he claims, with the help of additional assumptions or “content.”1

Second, Hegel has doubts about the supreme practical law’s efficacy in motivating us to act. For Kant, we

earn moral credit (and thus can be said to possess a will that is good) only to the extent that we are

motivated by the categorical imperative. When we act from the categorical imperative, in his view, we

necessarily act from respect for universal ends or interests, that is, from ends or interests we share with all

rational natures. Strictly speaking, then, our will has no moral content if what ultimately determines it to

act are the ends that reflect our particular empirical natures, our unique histories and capacities, our

individual conceptions of happiness. But precisely because the ends that reflect our particularity are not

allowed to figure in what counts as moral agency on this system, Hegel doubts that the Kantian approach

has the resources to explain why any agent would ever be moved to act morally at all.2

Third, Hegel is troubled by the implications of Kant’s formalism for the prospects for realizing duty. Kant

holds that the categorical imperative and the particular practical

norms that derive from it must have their basis in our rational natures. We cannot derive practical norms

or duties from our empirical natures, because the ends and interests of our empirical natures, on his

definition, are not universally and necessarily valid. Expressed differently, the human will, as Kant says, is

not a “perfect” or “holy” will.3 While it is possible for us to bring the ends and interests that drive us as

creatures belonging to the realm of nature into conformity with duty, those natural or empirical ends and

interests are incapable of perfectly harmonizing with duty. For this reason, they are ill-suited to ground

either moral motivation or right action. The categorical imperative commands us to submit our empirical

natures to the governance of our practically rational natures, but our empirical natures can never provide

the basis for duty. Because of the kinds of beings we are, the Kantian “ought” can in this respect never

become for us an “is.”4

Kantians commonly respond to these criticisms by charging Hegel with misinterpretation. In response to

his worry about the adequacy of the supreme law in guiding the derivation of particular duties, they

suggest either that he was not interested in providing an accurate reading of Kant, or (more charitably)

that his preoccupation with the formal features of Kant’s theory blinded him to other features, including

the role Kant awards empirical content. They point out that Kant acknowledges that the adequate

application of the categorical imperative requires that we attend to the contingent circumstances of

individual cases. Kant, in other words, grants that we need to be sensitive to empirical particulars if we are

to properly formulate our maxims or intentions (in the realm of morality) and properly describe our

actions (in the realm of right). Kantians note, moreover, that facts about our empirical natures place

limits on the kinds of commands that issue from the supreme practical law. The categorical imperative

would not ground the specific command that we look after the welfare of ourselves and others were we not

in need of looking after—were we not in fact finite, vulnerable creatures. Nor would the supreme practical

law need to appear in the form of a commandwere we not responsive to our empirically derived passions

and desires. We must be commanded in morality, according to Kant, because unlike “perfect” or “holy”

wills, we are governed by passion as well as by reason.

As for the motivation issue: Kantians point out that although it is true that the will of the agent must be

motivated by duty if it is to have moral worth, we should not conclude from this that, in acting from duty,

the Kantian moral agent is a cold and unfeeling calculator. Kant argues that in acting from duty, we are

motivated by “respect” for the supreme practical law; and respect, he explicitly tells us, is a feeling.5

Respect is indeed a feeling of a special kind; it is awakened, on his account, only in response to ends that

are universal or rational. But respect is a feeling nonetheless.

Finally, in response to the worry about the impossibility of realizing of duty, Kantians argue that Kant’s

claim that we cannot expect to attain moral perfection in this life is evidence, not of a deficiency in his

theory, but of his sober realism. It is a virtue of his approach, they tell us, that it never loses sight of the

fact that we are not just rational creatures but also creatures of nature, creatures governed by unsocial as

well as social forces, capable of selfishness and destruction as well as of goodness. It is to Kant’s credit,

they insist, that rather than a starry-eyed utopian, he is sensitive to the reality of human finitude.

As I noted a moment ago, these responses share the conviction that Hegel was either unaware of, or

uninterested in, some of the finer nuances of Kantian theory. They assume that he overlooked the role

empirical features of human nature play in Kant’s practical philosophy. They assume, in addition, that he

failed to appreciate the virtues of Kant’s attention to the reality of human frailty and finitude. This latter

charge is particularly understandable in light of Hegel’s grandiose-sounding claims about our potential for

achieving “absolute” knowledge, and about the “identity” for us of the “rational” and the “actual.” Claims

such as these give the impression that he was not much moved by the fact of human finitude.6

But we should also note that the Hegelian objections outlined above admit of a more sympathetic reading.

On this more sympathetic interpretation of the criticisms, it is no consolation to be reminded of the

various ways in which Kant’s practical philosophy allows a role for empirical content. It is of no use to be

told, for example, that Kant recognizes that in properly applying the law, we need to bear in mind

empirical facts about human nature and about the unique contingencies of individual circumstances. Nor

is the worry about the practical law’s motivational efficacy put to rest once we acknowledge that Kant

classifies respect for the law as a feeling. These observations highlight some of the finer subtleties of

Kant’s theory, but they leave the basic architecture of the theory intact. They leave unchallenged Kant’s

assumption that a sharp line may be drawn between our empirical natures, on the one hand, and our

purely rational or “intelligible” natures, on the other. They preserve Kant’s view that as empirical

characters we are governed by one set of laws (deterministic laws of nature), and as intelligible characters

we are authors and legislators of another set (laws of freedom). They leave in place Kant’s claim that we

can be moved by two distinct kinds of feelings, those deriving from our empirical natures and that special

feeling of respect that is produced by pure practical reason.7

To express these points in more general terms, the defenses of Kant we have just reviewed preserve his

core philosophical commitments. Practical norms in his view must derive from pure practical reason; they

cannot be grounded in the needs and passions that drive us as creatures belonging to the realm of nature.

Practical norms must derive from pure practical reason, because only pure practical reason can supply

rules that are universally and necessarily valid and that thus have the status of law. Practical norms must

furthermore have their basis in pure practical reason, according to Kant, because only pure practical

reason can generate laws of freedom. Either human nature is a mere “appearance” and we are governed in

all that we think and do by deterministic forces of nature, or we in addition possess the capacity to rise

above laws of nature and act from laws of freedom, laws that we give ourselves as practically rational

natures. Although we cannot know that we are free, Kant argues, we nonetheless have legitimate grounds

for thinking of ourselves as free. In thinking of ourselves as free, we in effect attribute to ourselves the

faculty of pure practical reason. This faculty (which he also refers to as the “pure will”) is a special, non-

natural causal power. It is capable of initiating a causal series “spontaneously,” that is, “without needing

to be preceded by any other cause” (CPR A 533/B 561). Its free or spontaneous acts originate from a

standpoint outside time.8

On a more sympathetic reading of the above-outlined criticisms, these core commitments are precisely

what Hegel calls into question when he charges that the categorical imperative is an empty formalism.

Hegel charges the categorical imperative with emptiness, not because he ignores the role Kant awards

empirical content, but because he rejects the Kantian assumption that there could be a wholly formal law

deriving from a wholly “pure” faculty of practical reason—a law that has sufficient content or specificity to

guide action. Hegel aims to expose the fact that Kant’s own interpretation and applications of the supreme

practical law in fact rely on more than the formal requirement of universalizability. In his view, Kant

presupposes additional assumptions or content—assumptions, most notably, about rational nature and its

ends. Since Hegel is convinced that these additional assumptions are contingent rather than universally

and necessarily valid, he concludes that the categorical imperative is not the formalism Kant claims it to

be. As I shall be arguing in this work, Hegel indeed challenges Kant’s assumption that human reflection—

even of the most critical variety—is capable of yielding insight into the absolutely fixed and immutable

conditions of our various domains of inquiry. Hegel challenges this assumption, because he believes it

attributes to us powers of abstraction we do not possess.

As for Hegel’s worry about the motivational efficacy of the supreme practical principle, it is not that he

overlooks Kant’s classification of respect as a special kind of

feeling. Rather, he calls into question Kant’s classificatory scheme itself. For Kant, the feeling of respect is

awakened in us in response to the supreme moral law, a law of pure practical reason. Respect thus owes

its origin to a law that on Kant’s account is generated by a faculty belonging to our non-empirical or

“intelligible” character, a faculty that possesses extra-natural causal powers. Kant’s characterization of the

special feeling of respect therefore rests on the assumption that we can make a clean separation—even just

in thought—between who we are as creatures wholly determined by nature, and as pure wills capable of

initiating action from a standpoint outside nature. Since Hegel doubts that we can make this kind of

separation even in thought, he challenges the classificatory scheme Kant takes to follow from it.

Finally, Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian claim that moral perfection is unavailable to us is not evidence of

his insensitivity to the reality of human finitude. Hegel does not hold that our powers are unlimited and

that our wills are perfectly good. Like Kant, he calls attention to the weaknesses and darker side of human

nature (he describes human history, for instance, as a “slaughter bench [Schlachtbank]”).9Hegel resists

Kant’s claim that perfection is beyond our reach only because his estimation of the extent of human

weakness does not produce in him the level of pessimism he discovers in Kant. He does not share Kant’s

conviction that finite or merely empirical human nature is incapable of furnishing the ground for practical

obligation, and he has no patience with the implication of Kant’s system that moral perfection is an ideal

we can realize only in a life beyond this life.10

At the most basic level, Hegel’s objections to specific features and implications of Kant’s categorical

imperative reveal his resistance to Kant’s various dualisms. Hegel rejects Kant’s division of human nature

into an empirical form of subjectivity wholly governed by deterministic laws of nature and an “intelligible”

subjectivity belonging to the realm of freedom. He rejects the associated separation of our ends or

interests into those that derive from our empirical natures and those that have their basis in pure reason.

He is skeptical of the Kantian assumption that we can think of ourselves as governed by two separate

kinds of causality, a causality of nature and a causality of freedom. He has doubts as well about Kant’s

claim that, in addition to the merely contingent and empirical rules or norms that govern our behavior, we

are responsive to rules or norms that are universally and necessarily valid, thanks to their origin in pure

reason.

Of course, I have simply suggested, but not argued for, the thesis that this more charitable reading is truer

to the intention of Hegel’s criticisms. As I have already indicated, the argument in defense of this thesis

must in the end come from a consideration of his treatment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. The reason

for this is

that Hegel’s remarks on the categorical imperative are extremely sketchy and vague. Especially when

considered in abstraction from his larger critique of Kant, they are not clear or informative enough to

support reliable interpretation. Fortunately, the situation is different in the case of his discussions of

Kant’s theoretical philosophy. In a number of texts, Hegel offers us detailed and focused commentary on

central Kantian doctrines. The basis of his objections is obvious and accessible in a way that it is not in the

context of his discussions of Kant’s practical philosophy.

If we examine Hegel’s remarks on Kant’s theoretical philosophy, we discover parallels to the objections he

directs at Kant’s practical philosophy. As in the case of Kant’s practical philosophy, Hegel charges that

Kant’s theoretical philosophy suffers from empty formalism. He discovers empty formalism in the

concepts and principles Kant takes to ultimately govern our experience of nature, concepts and principles

that are supposed to originate a priori, that is, in pure reason. Hegel discovers empty formalism as well in

the “transcendental” form of subjectivity Kant identifies as performing the acts of synthesis at the basis of

all human cognition. And just as he complains about an unbridgeable gap between the “ought” of Kant’s

practical law and the “is” of finite empirical human nature, he is likewise troubled by a gap implied by

Kant’s theoretical system. He resists Kant’s thesis that we have no warrant for assuming that the a priori

norms or laws we bring to experience conform to the reality of things themselves.

There is a parallel, too, in the strategy Hegel deploys in challenging the formalism of Kant’s theoretical

philosophy. As in the case of his attack on Kant’s practical philosophy, Hegel sets out to convince us of the

various ways in which the purportedly formal arguments of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, revealing

purportedly universal and necessary conditions of cognition, presuppose content. Hegel directs this

charge at a number of key Kantian arguments—including, for example, Kant’s derivation of the categories

from the forms of judgment, his account of the nature of substance, and his treatment of the arguments of

the antinomies. In drawing attention to the content Kant presupposes, Hegel’s purpose is to persuade us

that the line between the purportedly formal or a priori conditions of the perceiving and knowing subject

and the objects it seeks to know cannot be neatly drawn. His aim, then, is to expose the fragility of Kant’s

various dualisms. Hegel hopes that in doing so, he can free us from supposing that we have to contend

with their implications. He can relieve us of the burden, for instance, of striving for forms of perfection we

can never achieve, in the realm of knowledge as well as action.

We learn from a careful study of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, then, that his attack on

the formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative is a specific instance of his general rejection of core

commitments of Kant’s Critical system, and that there can be no understanding the former without

understanding the latter. In all domains of Kant’s Critical philosophy, the culprit as far as Hegel is

concerned is dualism—a dualism that divides the human mind as a power of generating a priori concepts

and laws from the separate contribution of objects wholly outside the mind. If

we are to demystify any of Hegel’s particular objections to Kantian arguments, as well as his proposal for

an alternative form of idealism, we first have to grasp the basis of his opposition to Kant’s dualism. We

have to consider his treatment of Kant’s most fundamental assumptions about human cognition and its

relation to nature.

This, then, is where our story begins. In Chapter One, we examine the features of Kant’s theory of

cognition that lay the foundation for the various dualisms of his system. We consider implications that

follow from his thesis that our mode of knowing is “discursive.” Kant holds that, as discursive, it is not

possible for us to generate the objects or content of our empirical knowledge simply by exercising our

cognitive powers. Unlike a mode of cognition that is “intuitive,” we have to rely in our cognitions of nature

on a sense content that is independently given. Although we must, as a further condition of cognition,

unify that sense content by means of concepts, we cannot know that our concepts capture the nature of

that content. Precisely because we do not generate the content or matter of our cognition, we have no

grounds for assuming that a perfect harmony or fit obtains between our concepts and that given content.

In our consideration of Hegel’s reflections on these doctrines in his early Jena writings, we will learn that

he was fascinated by Kant’s idea of an intuitive mode of cognition. In that idea, he discovered clues to our

own cognitive capacities. Hegel argues that Kant was mistaken in insisting upon an “absolute opposition”

or “heterogeneity” between our concepts and the given sensible content. We indeed canknow that the

given sense content is in agreement with (and in this respect “identical” to) our concepts. We can know

this, according to Hegel, not because we literally possess the power of the intuitive intellect to generate

sensible content or intuitions, but because our concepts are related to that content in a way that Kant did

not appreciate.

Of course, the task of specifying precisely what Hegel thinks Kant failed to grasp about the “identity” of

concepts and sensible intuitions is no simple matter. Two lines of interpretation I will be

arguingagainst in this work charge that Hegel’s prescription for replacing dichotomy with identity

requires us to turn back the philosophical clock and revive one or the other of the following “pre-Critical”

positions: According to some interpreters, Hegel tells a quasi-Leibnizian story about the relation of our

concepts or ideas to intuitions or sensations. This story exaggerates the cognitive powers of our faculty of

thought. Although we of course experience sensations in our encounters with objects of nature, sensation

on this account is no more than a confused or imperfect species of conception. Sensation is “identical” to

conception, then, because it makes no genuinely independent contribution in the production of

knowledge. We know an object when we know its concept.11

Others attribute to Hegel the view that the identity of our concepts and intuitions follows from a reduction

that proceeds in the opposite direction. On this interpretation, Hegel is taken to revive the Lockean view

according to which all our ideas or concepts owe their origin to our passive reception of sensory input.

Concepts are “sensualized,” according to this theory; they are not considered to be genuinely independent

sources or conditions of human knowledge.12 All that we consider to be “rational” is ultimately a reflection

of, and in this respect “identical” to, what is “actual.”13

In Chapter Two, we consider evidence from Hegel’s early Jena period that he embraces neither of these

reductive approaches. Drawing inspiration once again from an idea he discovers in Kant—this time the

idea of natural purposes or organisms that Kant introduces in the Critique of Judgment—Hegel writes

in Faith and Knowledge that the “true unity” of the intuitive intellect is “organic unity” (FK 91/GW 327).

An organism on Kant’s description is a unity in which the relation between the whole and its parts is that

of reciprocal determination: parts depend for their form and existence on the whole, and the whole is in

turn sustained by its parts. In claiming that “organic unity” is the “true unity” of the intuitive intellect,

Hegel seems to propose that we should understand the relation of the concepts and intuitions of an

intuitive mode of cognition on analogy with the relation of parts and whole of an organism. Identity or

unity is achieved not because one component of cognition is either eliminated or discovered to be a mere

species of the other. The concepts and intuitions of an intuitive understanding are identical in that they

are separate but mutually determining components of its mode of cognition. Each component is somehow

necessary for the nature and existence of the other.

Although Hegel’s remarks in Faith and Knowledge do not explain precisely how he thinks concepts and

intuitions reciprocally determine or cause one another, they lend support to the conclusion that he is not

committed to a reductive account of the relation between these two components of cognition. Nowhere in

these remarks does

Hegel argue that given sensible intuitions are simply species or imperfect representations of concepts, and

nowhere does he claim that our ideas or concepts are nothing but products of the passive reception of

sense impressions. In urging us to dispense with the thesis of absolute opposition, Hegel instead wishes

us to appreciate that objects of nature are not, as they are for Kant, “only matter.” That is, they are not

indeterminate sense contents that must get their form “externally,” for instance, from a thinking subject.

Nor are our concepts products of a “pure” subjectivity that is not in some sense at the same time also

“objective.” As Hegel writes in his Differenceessay, we recognize the mutually determining relation, and

thus “identity,” of concepts and intuitions, of subject and object, when we appreciate that just as nature is

an “immanent ideality,” so is subjectivity an “immanent reality” (D 166/107).

The model of organic unity captures not just the “true unity” of the intuitive intellect, for Hegel; it also

contains clues to how we should understand the relation of concepts and intuitions for our mode of

cognition. For our mode of cognition, then, the identity of concepts and intuitions is achieved by means of

reciprocal determination, rather than reduction. Dualism of some kind is thus alive and well in Hegel’s

theory of human cognition. Hegel indeed praises Kant for insisting upon the separate contribution, in

cognition, of our faculty of intuitions (receptivity) and our faculty of concepts (spontaneity). He endorses

Kant’s insight that intuitions without concepts are blind, and concepts without intuitions are empty (FK

68/GW 303). Hegel nonetheless charges that, although Kant to some extent acknowledges the intimate

relation of these two components of cognition, he fails to fully appreciate the respect in which the two

components are identical rather than absolutely opposed or heterogeneous. In Chapter Three, we consider

Hegel’s claim that what prevents Kant from appreciating the identity of concepts and intuitions is his

commitment to a form of idealism that is “subjective.” In addition, we examine Hegel’s reasons for

charging that it is the “subjectivity” of Kant’s idealism that condemns it to a certain form of skepticism.

I begin Chapter Three by arguing that the skeptical implications Hegel discovers in Kant’s theoretical

philosophy indeed follow from Kant’s own observations in the Critique of Judgment that, in light of the

discursive nature of our mode of cognition, we have no grounds for assuming that the pure or a priori

concepts we bring to the independently given sense content capture the nature of that content itself. I go

on to suggest that Hegel was convinced that we can avoid this skeptical result and advance to a “genuine”

or “absolute” form of idealism by providing an alternative to the “subjectivity” of Kant’s theory of

conceptual form. Kant characterizes our pure concepts as “empty” and as such unable to perform their

function as conditions of condition if they are not applied to a particular kind of content, namely, to

objects given in space and time (“appearances”). For Hegel, however, there is a furthersense in which

Kantian pure concepts suffer from emptiness. Moreover, Hegel takes the emptiness of pure concepts in

this further sense to be responsible for their “subjectivity.” Pure concepts are empty, not just because they

are incapable of yielding cognitions independent of their application to appearances. They are in addition

empty because, as Kant defines

them, they are “external” or “absolutely opposed” to sensible intuitions. Kant is committed to the thesis of

the “externality” of conceptual form in so far as he assumes that we have concepts that are absolutely a

priori, concepts produced by a faculty of thought that is absolutely pure. As a priori, these pure concepts

or “categories” are pre-given and fixed; they owe nothing of their nature or origin to objects known. They

are wholly on the “other side” of content, as Hegel sometimes says. On the interpretation I defend here,

the remedy Hegel proposes for the subjectivity and skepticism of Kant’s idealism requires us to give up

this commitment to the externality of conceptual form. Our forms of thought are not mere products of our

receptivity to sense impressions, but they do not derive from acts of absolutely pure thinking or

spontaneity either. Their origin, that is, cannot be traced to a thinker who is capable of occupying a

standpoint wholly independent or on the “other side” of nature.

As we learn in Chapter Four, Hegel discovers in Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories

evidence that he was aware of the necessity of providing an alternative to the externality of conceptual

form. In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant introduces the idea of a faculty whose thought-forms or

concepts are not “absolutely opposed” or “external” to intuitions. Kant, in other words, seems to

acknowledge that human cognition ultimately depends on acts of synthesis performed by a faculty that is

neither a pure faculty of intuitions nor a pure faculty of concepts. But although he introduces the idea of a

faculty that on his own description is an “original synthetic unity,” he remains true in the end to his

commitment to dichotomy or heterogeneity. As Hegel points out, Kant claims that allcombination or

synthesis is an act of spontaneity performed by our faculty of concepts (the “understanding”). The faculty

he identifies as an original synthetic unity, then, turns out not to be a genuine synthetic unity after all.

In Chapter Five, I present further evidence in support of my suggestion that Hegel reject’s Kant’s

commitment to the externality of conceptual form, this time by exploring his remarks on the nature of

Kantian critique. Kant is convinced that by means of his critical investigations into the conditions of the

possibility of our various forms of inquiry, he can discover the laws and concepts that supply their

ultimate ground—laws and concepts that, as a priori, are universally and necessarily valid. Kant thus

assumes that critique affords him access to eternal truths about the conditions, not just of human

knowledge, but also of morality, right, and aesthetic judgment. He supposes that in performing critique,

he can successfully abstract away assumptions that are merely contingent, including assumptions that

reflect his own ties to a particular historical reality. Kant is in other words confident that he can access a

vantage point that is wholly “external.” Because Hegel denies that we can ever succeed in performing this

kind of abstraction, he challenges Kant’s understanding of what critique can achieve.

I conclude in Chapter Six by testing the explanatory resources of my interpretation. I argue that my

interpretation explains a particular instance of a fundamental and

persistent Hegelian complaint against Kant—the complaint, namely, that his arguments presuppose

content and are therefore insufficiently critical. In the case I consider, Hegel directs this charge at Kant’s

treatment of the arguments of the antinomies. Kant assumes that, in bringing his critical method to bear

on the arguments, he can derive insight into absolutely fixed and universally valid conditions of human

cognition. In assuming that he can discover universal and necessary conditions, he once again takes for

granted that his critical reflections allow him to overleap his time and access a standpoint that is

absolutely external. Kant thus fails to appreciate the way in which his own reflections on the arguments

are conditioned by the questions he begs, by the presuppositions that reflect his own debt to the realm of

the actual. In this respect, his treatment of the antinomies is insufficiently critical.

As should by now be obvious, I will be arguing in this work that Hegel draws the following implication

from his assumption that an external vantage point is unavailable to us: We cannot expect to gain insight

into eternal truths about the necessary conditions of our various domains of inquiry. Precisely because

“philosophy…is its own time comprehended in thoughts,”14 as he says, we should be wary of philosophers

who announce that they have discovered the absolutely unchanging and universally valid concepts and

laws of our sciences once and for all. A careful study of the history of ideas reveals instead that there has

been movement and thus contingency even in the case of those concepts or categories that appear to us

the most stable and fundamental—concepts such as “being,” “freedom,” and “right.”15 This history is

instructive not just because it informs us of limitations and contingencies in our past claims to know. As I

understand Hegel, it in addition suggests that we can expect more movement or “dialectic” from reason in

the future.16

Among those who are convinced, as I am, that there is for Hegel movement or dialectic even at the ground

level of our sciences, there is disagreement over precisely what drives that movement. According to some,

Hegel holds that the process whereby an initially abstract and indeterminate concept gradually actualizes

its at first only implicit content is attributable to thought (or “the concept”) itself—running on nothing

other than its own steam.17 In contrast, I argue that Hegel attributes the dialectical process at least in part

to the fact that human thinking occurs in history rather than outside of it. This has the implication for him

that the progressive advance is to some extent a response to forces of history; it is not propelled by “pure”

reason exercising a freedom or spontaneity that is in no way indebted to the realm of the actual. I defend

the view, in addition, that this conception of human thinking as not a pure spontaneity but as also in part

receptive is key to Hegel’s strategy for persuading us of the “identity” of concepts and intuitions, of subject

and object.

Hegel’s discussions of Kant are particularly rich and informative in two works of his Jena period of 1801–

3, Faith and Knowledge and the Difference essay. I therefore focus much of my discussion on these early

writings, especially in my first two chapters. As my discussion progresses, I draw increasingly on a variety

of Hegelian texts and lectures, including his 1807 Phenomenology, 1812–13Science of Logic (and the

revised first volume of 1832), the 1820 Philosophy of Right and the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia of

the Philosophical Sciences. There is of course development in Hegel’s own thinking during these years.

The early writings contain only hints of what will become his mature response and alternative to Kant. But

while there is development in Hegel’s understanding of how the dualisms of Kant’s system are to give way

to a theory of identity, there are no significant changes over the years in his interpretation and critique of

Kant. Hegel’s objections are well laid out in the early texts; and although he formulates his objections

differently in subsequent works, they remain in essential respects the same. The fact that Hegel repeats

his arguments against Kant in a variety of ways in a variety of contexts turns out to be a boon for his

reader, for it aids the process of piecing together the individual fragments of his often highly abstract and

mysterious commentary into a coherent general story.

Notes:

(1) Hegel makes this charge, for instance, in § 135 of his 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right. See also

his discussion in his Natural Law essay of 1802–3 (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungen des

Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven

Rechtswissenschaften), NL 77f./461f.). Of course, Kant provides further formulations of the supreme

practical law, and some of the further formulations seem less formal than the one Hegel singles out for

attack. But Kant also tells us in the Groundwork that the various formulations are formulations of the

“same law” (G 436). Our applications of the formula requiring universalizability, then, should yield exactly

the same results as our applications of any of the other formulae.

(2) This complaint is implied in Hegel’s remark, in his addition to § 134 of the Philosophy of Right, that

the “universal aspect of good, or good in the abstract, cannot be fulfilled as an abstraction; it must first

acquire the further determination of particularity.”

(3) “Holiness,” Kant writes in the Critique of Practical Reason, is “a perfection of which no rational being

of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his existence” (CPrR 238).

(4) According to the Kantian system, Hegel writes in the Philosophy of Right, the “subjective will” stands

“in a relationship to the good, a relationship whereby…it ought to make the good its end and fulfill it” (§

131). Hegel’s point here is that because the “subjective” human will is structurally incapable of perfect

conformity with the good, the good must for it always be determined as an “ought,” as duty (§ 133).

(5) See, e.g. Groundwork (401n) and Critique of Practical Reason (75f.).

(6) In the words of one prominent Kantian, a “Hegelian conception of rationalized nature” “implausibly

overlooks the finitude of human reason.” See Onora O’Neill, “Kant After Virtue,” published in her

collection, Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge, UK, New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 40n.

(7) Respect is awakened by the “activity” of the pure will (G 400f.). It is “produced solely by reason

[lediglich durch Vernunft bewirkt],” as Kant says (CPrR 76).

(8) When I think of myself as free, I presuppose that I have, in addition to an “empirical” character as an

“appearance” governed by laws of nature, an “intelligible” character. As Kant writes, “this acting subject,

in its intelligible character, would not stand under any conditions of time, for time is only the condition of

appearances but not of things in themselves” (CPR A 539/B 567).

(9) See Hegel’s Introduction to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (PH 24/35).

(10) Hegel is quite explicit in charging Kant with pessimism, for example in Faith and Knowledge. He

writes there of the “litanies” of Kant and Fichte on the “evils of the world.” Both philosophers gave

“pessimism a philosophical form, and proved it systematically” (FK 178/GW 420).

(11) In the first Critique, Kant describes the Leibnizian view as follows: Leibniz “compared all things

merely with reference to their concepts and found…no other differences than those by means of which the

understanding distinguishes its pure concepts from one another. He did not recognize the conditions of

sensible intuition, which contribute their own differences, as original; for in his view sensibility was only a

confused form of representation and not a unique source of representations” (CPR A 270/B 326).

The charge that Hegel’s idealism denies independent reality to sensations or intuitions has a long history.

In the now classic formulation of Ludwig Feuerbach, Hegel is an “abstract realist” who holds that thought

alone is real. For Hegel, “the concrete” is “made into a predicate of thought.” SeeFeuerbach’s

1843 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, transl. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Hackett

Publishing Company, 1986), §§ 29, 30. Marx adopts this line of interpretation in hisEconomic and

Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, “Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General.”

(12) I am again borrowing my mode of expression from Kant. While Leibniz “intellectualized

[intellektuierte]” sensible intuitions or “appearances,” Locke “sensualized [sensifiziert]” our concepts

(CPR A 271/B 327).

(13) In the context of political theory, this is the reading responsible for the charge that Hegel argues in

the Philosophy of Right for the reduction of the “rational” to the “actual.” He does so, it is claimed,

because the work is nothing other than an apology for the conservative (Prussian) state. See, for

example, Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), vol. 2,

chapter 12. For Hegel’s own alternative description of his project, see § 3 of the Philosophy of Right where

he explicitly tells us that the Philosophy of Right is not a work in “positive right.”

(14) Preface to the Philosophy of Right, 21/26.

(15) Others who have emphasized this Hegelian thesis about the contingency of even our most basic

concepts include Michael Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1998), 364; Songsuk Susan Hahn, Contradiction in Motion: Hegel’s Organic Conception

of Life and Value (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007), 52;Stephen Houlgate, The

Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2006),

13; Joseph McCarney, Hegel on History (London: Routledge, 2000), chapter 11; Terry Pinkard, Being

with Oneself: Hegel on the Final Ends of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming),

chapter 1; Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), 36, 259, and The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian

Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 12; Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and

the Return of Hegelian Thought(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 229.

(16) Of course, Hegel does not shy away from informing us that he is privy to the necessity of the

movement or “dialectic” of concepts in their developmental progress. But whatever else he may intend by

that claim, he presumably believes it can be reconciled with his thesis that an external vantage point is

unavailable to us, and that no philosophy can “transcend its contemporary world” (PR 21f./26).

On my reading, Hegel’s commitment to the thesis of conceptual necessity should not be understood as an

endorsement of the view that the dialectical movement of our concepts (or of real historical events, or of

self-consciousness) is set in advance (and could be known by us were we capable of accessing a trans-

historical perspective). The development of our concepts (and of history, etc.) depends for Hegel on

“unbiddable contingencies,” in Joseph McCarney’s nice phrase. See McCarney’s Hegel on History, 90. We

look back over that development from where we are. When we do so, we discover certain patterns (and so,

a certain logic or necessity). On McCarney’s description of what Hegel believes we learn from our study of

the history of consciousness, for example, we discover that the “movement of consciousness” is “directed

towards ever more extensive assimilation of objects, greater richness and concreteness in the manner of

their apprehension, and increasing reflexivity of awareness of its own character and activities” (88).

Looking back, we can make rationally intelligible the progressions among the various stages or moments

of consciousness. In this sense, we can tell a story about the necessity of that development. Terry Pinkard

explains Hegel’s commitment to conceptual necessity along these same lines in, Hegel’s Phenomenology:

The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 267.

(17) To borrow John McDowell’s now well-known phrase, the operations of thought on this conception are

a “frictionless spinning in a void.” In Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),

11.

Introduction to Hegel’s Critique

In the works of his Critical period, beginning with the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781, Kant defends the

thesis that human cognition is discursive rather than intuitive in nature. As discursive, our understanding

is a dependent mode of cognition in the following respect: in our efforts to know nature, we must rely on a

matter or content that is given in sensible intuition. We lack the capacity of an intellect that is “intuitive”

and as such capable of generating the matter of cognition merely by exercising its cognitive powers.

Hegel was clearly intrigued by Kant’s idea of an intuitive mode of understanding. His interest in the idea

is most evident in the texts with which we will be preoccupied in this chapter, his Jena writings of 1801–2.

But Hegel expresses his interest in the idea in later works as well. In his 1816 Science of Logic, for

example, he writes:

It will always stand out as remarkable how the Kantian philosophy recognized the relation of thought to

sensuous reality…as only a relative relation to mere appearance, and perfectly well recognized and

articulated a higher unity of both [thought and sensuous reality] in…, for example, the idea of an intuitive

understanding.1

In his 1830 edition of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel tells us that

The Critique of Judgment is impressive because in it Kant expressed the representation, even the thought

of the idea. The representation of an intuitive intellect, of inner purposiveness and so forth is the universal

conceived as at the same time in itself concrete. In these representations…the Kantian philosophy shows

itself to be speculative. (EL § 55)

In designating Kant’s idea of the intuitive intellect “speculative” in this latter passage, Hegel means to

suggest that, contrary to Kant’s intentions, the model of an intuitive understanding accurately captures (at

least some features of) human cognition. Kant failed to appreciate this insight, however, and persisted in

attributing to us the powers of a discursive mode of understanding.

Hegel’s explicit references to the idea of an intuitive intellect diminish in frequency after 1804, but the

inspiration he derives from the idea is still detectable in the model of cognition he defends even in his

most mature writings. The early works of 1801–2 are revealing for the clues they contain both to his

dissatisfaction with Kant and to the alternative model of human cognition he eventually develops.2

I have organized this chapter as follows: In section 1.1, I note passages in which Hegel comments on four

basic features of Kant’s conception of human discursivity, and I introduce Kant’s account of those features.

In sections 1.2 and 1.3, I explain the relation between the discursivity thesis and some of Kant’s further

doctrines. Kant argues that it follows from the fact that our understanding is discursive rather than

intuitive that we must, in our cognitions of nature, think of nature as a systematic unity and as

purposively arranged by a supreme intelligence. I review Kant’s arguments for these claims first in

the Critique of Pure Reason (section 1.2) and then in the Critique of Judgment (section 1.3). In section1.4,

I highlight the significance of Kant’s commitment to the discursivity thesis for what he tells us is his

primary objective in the first Critique: to provide a solution to the conflicts or antinomies that threaten

the employment of reason and thus the very possibility of metaphysics. I try to convey the centrality of the

discursivity thesis for his overall Critical program: for his project of “saving” metaphysics; for his effort to

demonstrate, against the skeptic, that we indeed possess some necessary material or non-analytic

knowledge; and for his restriction of our knowledge to “appearances.”

In my concluding section (section 1.5), I direct our attention back to Hegel and review passages in which

he indicates his awareness, not just of the features by means of which Kant distinguishes discursive and

intuitive modes of cognition, but also of the implications of the discursivity thesis for other key doctrines

of Kant’s Critical philosophy. I consider remarks in which Hegel suggests that Kant was mistaken in not

having awarded us at least some of the powers of the intuitive intellect. I propose that Hegel was

interested in the intuitive intellect because of its ability to achieve a “higher unity” of “thought” and

“sensuous reality,” a unity in which the dualism or “

heterogeneity” of concepts and sensible intuitions is overcome. I conclude with the suggestion that

Hegel’s interest in the model of an intuitive mode of understanding does not, however, imply that he

denied that, in our cognitions of nature, we must depend on concepts and sensible intuitions. Rather,

Hegel sought to challenge Kant’s particular account of the nature of these two fundamental components of

our form of cognition.3

1.1 Intuitive versus discursive forms of understanding:

Introduction

In his Difference and Faith and Knowledge essays, Hegel singles out the following four features of Kant’s

conception of an intellect that is intuitive rather than discursive in nature: First, the intuitive intellect

relies neither on concepts nor on sensible intuitions. Second, the intuitive intellect brings objects into

existence in its very intuition of them. Third, the intuitive intellect knows no distinction between merely

possible and actual objects because all of its objects are necessarily actual. Fourth, there is for the intuitive

mode of cognition no contingency either in how objects are given to it or in the relation between objects

and its representations of them. In this section, I note passages in which Hegel comments on each of these

four features, and I provide a brief introduction to Kant’s account of them. As I have noted, one of my

objectives here is to establish that Hegel accurately represents Kant’s distinction between intuitive and

discursive modes of understanding. Another is to provide a preliminary account of key features Kant

associates with human discursivity. The present section should be read as introductory—as preparing the

way for our elaboration of Kant’s conception of discursivity beginning in section 1.2.

1.1.1 For the intuitive intellect, concepts and intuitions “fall away”

In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel paraphrases the following passage from the Critique of Judgment § 76

[402]:

Were our understanding intuitive …[c]oncepts (which concern merely the possibility of an object) and

sensible intuitions (which give us something without yet allowing it to be known as object) would both fall

away [wegfallen].4

First, some preliminary remarks regarding Kant’s definitions of the terms “concept” and “intuition.”

Concepts, for Kant, are rules originating in the faculty of understanding [Verstand]. They are general

representations that, by virtue of their generality, function to unify multiple representations

[Vorstellungen] under a common one (CPR A 68/B 93, A 320/B 376f.). Those representations can be

other concepts (as when I classify under the concept “virtue” the concepts “charity” and “honesty,” and so

forth). As “predicates of possible judgments,” however, concepts ultimately relate to something judged, to

some object (CPR A 69/B 94). They do not relate to objects “immediately,” but only by means of some

“mark” or attribute which “can be common to several things” (CPR A 320/B 376f.).

Kant describes intuition as the only other, and as an entirely distinct, source of cognition (CPR A 50/B 74).

As we just saw, concepts originate in the faculty of the understanding, and the faculty of understanding “is

not a faculty of intuition” (A 68/B 92). Unlike concepts, intuitions are “singular [einzeln]”

“representations [Vorstellungen],” that is, representations of individuals (my perception of a tree, for

example, or the geometer’s representation of a triangle) (A 320/B 376f.). The singularity of an intuitive

representation is compatible with the representation’s including parts (the branches and trunk of the tree,

the sides of the triangle). Intuitions are also unlike concepts in that they relate to their objects, not by

means of “marks” that are common to several things, but directly or “immediately” (A 19/B 33, A 68/B

93). According to some commentators, Kant means us to understand this immediacy criterion

phenomenologically, as referring to an intuition’s direct “presence to the mind.”5 Kant further describes

intuitions as that at which “all thought is directed as an end” (A 19/B 33). Our concepts must “ultimately

be related to intuitions” because in the absence of intuitions, our concepts would have no objects to think

(A 19/B 33, A 51/B 75). Finally, Kant claims that our form of intuition is “sensible”: objects are given to us

in intuition by means of the faculty of sensibility (A 19/B 33). He recognizes, however, that there could be

non-sensible or “intellectual” forms of intuition as well.6

In the passage quoted above from the Critique of Judgment, Kant asserts that for a form of understanding

that, unlike ours, is non-discursive or “intuitive” in nature, intuitions “fall away.” Note that he does not

claim that the intuitive intellect has no intuitions.

He does not assert, that is, that its cognitions are wholly contentless or without objects. What “falls away,”

he says, is the intuitive intellect’s reliance on sensible intuitions [sinnliche Anschauungen]. Kant notes at

CPR B 72 of the firstCritique that if a form of intuition is sensible, then it is “dependent” in its cognitions

of nature “on the existence of the object.” (By “object” in this context he means sensible object or object of

sense experience.7) A sensible form of intuition is “only possible if the subject’s faculty of representation is

affected by the object.” The intuitions of an intuitive intellect, however, do not derive from sensible

affection. “Through itself” (that is, through the intuitive intellect’s intuiting activity), “the existence of the

object of intuition is given.” The intuitions of an intuitive intellect, on Kant’s account, are thus “original

[ursprünglich]” versus “derived [abgeleitet].” Not deriving its intuitions from sensible affection, sensible

intuitions for it “fall away.”

In the passage with which we began, Kant furthermore claims that concepts “fall away” for the intuitive

intellect. At first glance, his point seems to be that the intuitive intellect does not employ concepts at all.

This is suggested by his remark at CPR B 145 where he tells us that concepts are rules for an

understanding that thinks rather than intuits. Concepts are

rules for an understanding whose whole power consists in thought, consists, that is, in the act whereby it

brings the synthesis of a manifold, given to it from elsewhere in intuition, to the unity of apperception—a

faculty, therefore, which…merely combines and arranges the material of knowledge, that is, the intuition,

which must be given to it by the object.

So when the “material of knowledge” is sensible or “given…by the object,” as it must be for a non-intuitive

or discursive form of understanding, that material must be “combined and arranged.” Such combination

in turn requires thought and therefore also the functions of thought (that is, concepts).

In fact, however, Kant’s view on the role of concepts for the intuitive intellect is more nuanced than this.

For in some passages he suggests, not that the intuitive intellect employs no concepts whatsoever, but that

the concepts it employs are of a significantly different kind than ours. They are, as he sometimes puts it,

“synthetic” rather than “analytic” universals (CJ § 77 [407]). As a “faculty of concepts,”8 a discursive

understanding supplies nothing but concepts (“analytic universals”); its sensible intuitions must be

independently given. Kant writes of the intuitive intellect, however, that it “would be an understanding

[Verstand] in the most general sense of the term” (CJ § 77 [406]).

The intuitive intellect is more “general,” presumably, in that from its “complete spontaneity…of intuition,”

it in addition supplies particulars. Out of its special concepts (“synthetic universals”), particulars are

somehow generated. And since the intuitions of the intuitive understanding are generated out of its

special concepts, its intuitions are given as already formed or synthesized. Unlike the intuitions of a

discursive mode of understanding, the intuitions of the intuitive intellect therefore need no “special act of

synthesis” supplied by (discursive) concepts.9

So what “falls away” for the intuitive intellect, it seems, are discursive concepts. Thanks to the intuitive

intellect’s power of producing its intuitive manifold, (discursive) concepts (including the a priori concepts

Kant calls the “categories”) have for it “no meaning” [keine Bedeutung]:

Did I wish to think of an understanding that itself intuited (such as a divine understanding that did not

represent to itself given objects, but through whose representation the objects were themselves at the

same time given or produced), the categories for such a mode of knowledge would have no meaning

whatsoever. (CPRB 145; emphasis added)10

The intuitive understanding knows its manifold, Kant seems to imply here, without having to perform a

“special act of synthesis,” and thus without having to employ (discursive) concepts. The given sensible

intuitions of our form of understanding, however, are cognizable by us only once subject to a “special act”

of conceptual determination.11

1.1.2 The intuitive intellect proceeds from the intuition of the whole (from the “synthetic universal”) to

parts or particulars

In these same pages of Faith and Knowledge, Hegel quotes passages from §§ 76 and 77 of the

thirdCritique where Kant draws our attention to a further consequence of the fact that the intuitions of an

intuitive form of intellect are “original” versus “derived.” We just saw how the sensible manifold or

material of knowledge for any discursive understanding must first be “combined and arranged,” on Kant’s

account, in order to become thought or known; the manifold, that is, must first be subsumed under

discursive concepts or the “analytically universal” (CJ §77 [407]). For the intuitive form of understanding,

however, no such subsumption is required. Instead, the intuitive intellect “proceeds from the synthetically

universal,” Kant says, and parts or particulars come to be as products of its intuiting activity (CJ § 77

[407]). As Hegel writes in his paraphrase of Kant, the intuitive or “archetypal” intellect does not, “proceed

from the universal to the particular and so to the individual (through concepts)”; it does not, that is, apply

concepts to independently given sensible parts or particulars. For the intuitive intellect, “the possibility of

the parts,” rather than given in sensible intuition, are “dependent on the whole” (FK 88f./GW 324f.).12

1.1.3 For the intuitive intellect, possibility and actuality are one

Kant “expresses the Idea of Reason…in the idea of an intuitive intellect,” in Hegel’s words, “for which

possibility and actuality are one” (FK 88/GW 324). Here Hegel refers once again to the passage we

considered a moment ago from § 76 of the Critique of Judgment. In that passage Kant writes that the

distinction between possibility and actuality holds only for a form of cognition that requires the “entirely

heterogeneous”

faculties of concepts, on the one hand, and sensible intuitions, on the other.13 To quote the passage again,

this time without the ellipsis:

Were our understanding intuitive, it would have no objects other than actual objects. Concepts (which

concern merely the possibility of an object) and sensible intuitions (which give us something without yet

allowing it to be known as object) would both fall way [wegfallen]. (CJ § 76 [402])

As we noted earlier, Kant arrives at the conclusion that the intuitive intellect has no need for concepts

from the assumption that it produces its objects out of its intuiting activity. Concepts (that is, discursive

concepts) are necessary only for a form of understanding that is sensible and as such dependent on

independently given sensible intuitions. Independently given sensible intuitions need to be “combined

and arranged” (via concepts) in order to be thought and cognized as objects. But although concepts are

necessary for providing the acts of synthesis without which no sensible manifold can be thought or

cognized, concepts are not in Kant’s view sufficient to determine the existence of objects. Objects (of

experience) do not derive from or get produced out of concepts. As he says in the passage quoted above,

concepts “concern merely the possibility of an object.” For our form of understanding, concepts allow for

the cognition of actually versus merely logically possible objects only when applied to sensible intuitions.14

Obviously, Kant’s distinction between possible and actual objects is parasitic upon his distinction between

concepts and sensible intuitions. For the intuitive intellect, possibility and actuality “are one,” as Hegel

says, thanks to the fact that, for the intuitive intellect, both concepts and sensible intuitions “fall away.”

Because the intuitive intellect’s activity gives itself the existence of the object, its objects are not merely

possible but necessarily actual. Such an understanding is therefore entitled to claim, in Kant’s words: “all

objects that I know, exist” (CJ § 76 [403]).

1.1.4 The connection between the intuitive intellect’s representations and its objects is not contingent

We already saw that Hegel quotes the passage from § 77 [406] of the third Critique where Kant writes that

the intuitive intellect does not “proceed from the universal to the particular…through concepts.” But this

is not where Hegel’s quotation of this passage leaves off. He continues:

“the agreement [Zusammenstimmung] of the particular laws in nature’s products with the [intuitive]

intellect is not contingent for it.” (FK 88/GW 325)

Once again, Hegel alerts us to an important respect in which the intuitive and discursive modes of

understanding differ, on Kant’s account. Clearly, Kant holds that there is contingency in the relation of

a discursive understanding to “the particular laws in nature’s products.” Kant in fact identifies two kinds

of contingency in connection with the discursive intellect’s efforts to know. First, for our discursive form

of understanding, “the variety of ways in which [the given particulars] may come before our perception is

contingent” (CJ § 77 [406]). This point follows from the fact that a non-intuitive or discursive

understanding must, in its efforts to cognize nature, rely on sensible affection. Its objects or content,

rather than derivable from or produced out of its cognitive activity, are independently given. As Kant puts

it, the concepts of the discursive understanding do not “determine” anything regarding “the diversity of

the particular.”

From this contingency in the way in which sensible intuitions “may come before our perception” follows

another, namely, the contingency Kant refers to in the passage from CJ § 77 that Hegel quotes. This is the

contingency in the relation between “nature’s products” and the “intellect.” As Hegel expresses the point

in Difference, for our discursive form of cognition, “concepts remain contingent with respect to nature

just as nature does with respect to the concepts” (D 164/104). Because our discursive understanding lacks

the intuitive intellect’s power to “through itself” “give the existence of the object,” as Kant says, not only

are we incapable of determining the way in which the manifold presents itself to us in sensation, we

furthermore can only cognize that independently given manifold by means of concepts or analytic

universals. As discursive, our form of understanding must subsume sensible particulars under concepts,

and it does this by dividing the given material of knowledge into species and genera. Since our

understanding cannot, however, determine how particulars may be given, we have no way of knowing that

our classifications are in keeping with “nature’s products.” The fact that “our understanding has to

proceed from the universal to the particular” thus has the “following consequence,” Kant writes: “In terms

of the universal [supplied by the understanding] the particular, as such, contains something contingent”

(CJ § 76 [404]). For the intellect that is intuitive, however, and “does not (by means of concepts) proceed

from the universal to the particular and thus to the individual…there would not be that contingency in the

way nature’s products in terms of particular laws harmonize with the understanding” (CJ § 77 [406]).15

Two general observations are in order at this point. First, we should not fail to notice how closely Hegel’s

presentation of Kant’s account of the intuitive intellect is tied to Kant’s own discussions. Since the

portrayal Hegel gives us in these Jena writings depends largely on quotation and paraphrase, we hardly

have grounds for concluding (at least on the basis of the material we have reviewed) that he has

misinterpreted Kant. Second, and as shall become increasingly clear as our study proceeds, the Kantian

claim that there is for the intuitive intellect no contingency in the connection between its representations

and objects is of crucial importance for Hegel. Needless to say, Hegel was interested in more than merely

cataloguing the various features by means of which Kant distinguished intuitive from discursive modes of

cognition. He was dissatisfied, as I suggested earlier, with Kant’s view of theimplications of these

differences. In particular, he rejected Kant’s account of the limits that are supposed to follow from the fact

that our form of understanding is discursive rather than intuitive. In due course it will become clear that

Hegel found the intuitive model of cognition intriguing precisely because he rejected Kant’s specific

account of the limits implied by our discursivity.

So far, I have simply noted the features Hegel singles out as basic to Kant’s distinction between the

intuitive and discursive modes of understanding. I have not yet tried to explain Hegel’s preoccupation

with the distinction, nor have I ventured any guesses about why he found Kant’s insistence upon the

discursive character of human understanding unacceptable. To get at the ultimate motivation underlying

Hegel’s critique, we will need to consider a fuller account of the implications Kant takes to follow from the

fact of our discursivity. There is no way to overstate how far-reaching those implications are for his

Critical philosophy. As I noted earlier, this fundamental assumption about the nature and limits of our

form of cognition shapes his entire system. It is responsible for how he identifies the proper objects of our

knowledge. It determines his options for responding to those who deny that our knowledge of nature can

be necessary. It allows him, he thinks, to solve the conflicts or “antinomies” that threaten the vocation of

reason. Finally, Kant’s thesis of discursivity lays the ground for his arguments for the practical necessity of

ideas such as that of a divine intelligence or God and freedom of the will.

In sections 1.2–1.4 below, I rely on both the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment to

draw out further implications of Kant’s discursivity thesis. In the final section of this chapter (section1.5),

I provide evidence that Hegel represented these further implications accurately.

1.2 Systematic unity, purposiveness, and the supreme being

in the Critique of Pure Reason

We know from the above discussion that Kant associates the following features with our discursivity: As

discursive or non-intuitive, our form of understanding is “dependent” versus “original” and must

therefore rely in its cognitions of nature on an independently given sense content. Precisely because a

discursive intellect cannot determine how sense content is given to it, the ways in which that content is

given to it are “contingent” for it. Moreover, a discursive understanding must combine and arrange the

sensible manifold, and this it does by the application of concepts. Since it cannot determine how the

sensible manifold is given, it furthermore must contend with contingency in the relation between its

concepts and the given manifold. A discursive understanding such as ours, then, cannot rest assured that

the given manifold is susceptible to its conceptual arrangements.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant has more to say about the implications of our discursivity, and in

this section we will focus our attention on three of them. First, although a discursive intellect cannot rest

assured that the given manifold is susceptible to its conceptual arrangements, it must presupposethat this

is so as a condition of its very employment. As Kant expresses the point, a discursive understanding must

presuppose that nature admits of systematic unity. Second, to presuppose systematic unity, for Kant, is in

effect to presuppose that nature is purposive. Third, to presuppose that nature is purposive is to conceive

of nature as if it were the creation of a “wise and all-powerful creator of the world” (CPR A 697/B 725).

In the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, Kant argues these points by means

of reductio. He begins by asking us to consider the consequences for our mode of understanding were we

to assume that the given particulars of sensible intuition are not susceptible to our conceptual

determinations. Suppose, he asks, that in the great variety of appearances we assumed “just as many

different powers as there are different effects” (CPR A 648/B 676)? Suppose we assumed, in other words,

that everything that happens in experience is caused by a unique force or power? How could we then form

empirical generalizations about the behavior of natural phenomena? And, in the absence of the conditions

necessary for forming generalizations, how could we form hypotheses about or inquire into the workings

of nature at all?

We can only form empirical generalizations or laws, Kant points out, if we discover in the variety of

appearances some similarity, if we divide appearances into genera and species. Our inquiries into the

behavior of natural phenomena are therefore necessarily guided by a “logical maxim”: the maxim that “we

should reduce, so far as possible, this seeming diversity, by comparing [the phenomena] with one another

and detecting their hidden identity” (CPR A 649/B 677). This “logical principle of reason,” Kant continues,

requires us to “bring about such unity as completely as possible.” In order to bring about this unity, we

seek to explain natural phenomena in terms of a set of “comparatively” fundamental forces. Ultimately,

we subsume these forces under the

idea of a “single absolute fundamental power.”16 Guided by our logical maxim, we seek to discover that

our knowledge is not merely a “contingent aggregate, but a system connected according to necessary laws”

(emphasis added). In relying on the idea of a system of nature governed by fundamental forces, we in

effect also rely on what Kant describes as the idea “of the form of a whole of knowledge—a whole which is

prior to the determinate knowledge of the parts and contains the conditions that determine a priori for

every part its position and relation to the other parts” (CPR A 645/B 673).17

Kant goes on to argue that although we cannot know that such comparatively fundamental powers and the

absolute fundamental power actually exist, we do and must presuppose that they exist (CPR A 649/B 678).

In seeking general principles under which to subsume particular regularities, we “presuppose,” in his

words, that “things by their nature supply material for the unity of reason, and that the seemingly infinite

variety need not hinder us from assuming that behind this variety there is a unity of fundamental

properties” (CPR A 652/B 680).18 We must assume that unity is discoverable in nature, Kant asserts, if

reason is not to “run counter to its own vocation”:

For with what right can reason, in its logical employment, call upon us to treat the multiplicity of powers

exhibited in nature as simply a disguised unity, and to derive this unity, so far as may be possible, from a

fundamental power—how can reason do this, if it be free to admit as likewise possible that all powers may

be heterogeneous [ungleichartig], and that the systematic unity of its derivation may not be in conformity

with nature? (CPR A 651/B 679)

The logical maxim requiring us to seek systematic unity therefore presupposes, in Kant’s words, a

“transcendental principle…whereby such a systematic unity is a priori assumed to be necessarilyinherent

in the objects themselves [als den Objekten selbst anhängend]” (CPR A 650f./B 678f.; emphases added).

To avoid countering the vocation of reason, we are required not just to seeksystematic unity; we must in

addition assume that nature admits of systematization. We must assume that “parsimony in principles is

not only an economical requirement of reason, but an inner law of nature” (CPR A 650/B 678).19

Below we will take a closer look at Kant’s defense of the status (the “objectivity validity”) of this

transcendental principle. Before doing so, however, we should note that the idea of systematic unity is

necessary, in his view, not simply in order to secure the possibility of empirical generalizations or laws.

The Appendix to the Dialectic contains passages in which Kant also suggests that we must presuppose

systematic unity even as a condition of the possibility of forming empirical concepts. “[I]n the absence of

homogeneity,” he writes, “no empirical concepts, and therefore no experience, would be possible” (CPR A

654/B 682). And again:

Were there among the appearances, which present themselves to us, so great a variety…that even the

acutest human understanding could never by comparison of them detect the slightest similarity…we

should not even have the concept of a genus, or indeed any other universal concept; and the

understanding itself, which has to do solely with such concepts, would be non-existent. (CPR A 653f./B

681f.; emphasis added)

If we consider how Kant defines “concept” in the Transcendental Aesthetic, we can reconstruct his

reasoning in this passage. “[E]very concept,” he writes at CPR A 25/B 40, “must be thought as a

representation which is contained in an infinite quantity of different possible representations (as their

common mark [Merkmal]), and thus [as a representation] which contains these under itself.” A concept,

on this account, is thus a “common mark” shared by an “infinite quantity” of representations, under which

these representations are subsumed. As we have seen, Kant points out that there can be no such

subsumption unless we first divide appearances into species and genera, unless we discover similarity in

the given variety. We must seek in the appearances unity under which to subsume diversity; we must,

then, apply the “logical maxim” “which requires that we…reduce, so far as possible, [the] seeming

diversity [in appearances], by comparing these with one another and detecting their hidden identity”

(CPR A 649/B 677). Furthermore, we must presuppose that such identity or unity is discoverable in

nature itself. Again, Kant’s argument for the indispensable roles of both the logical and the transcendental

maxims is not merely that each is a necessary condition of empirical generalizations or laws. As he says in

the above passage, we would have no concept of a genus at alldid we not discover similarity in the

diversity of appearances.

Turning, now, to a closer examination of the epistemic status Kant awards the two maxims: Both the

“logical” maxim that we seek order in nature and the “transcendental”

maxim requiring us to regard such order as grounded in nature are “subjective principles” in that they

derive from the “interest of reason” rather than from the constitution of nature itself. Both maxims, in his

words, go “far beyond what experience or observation could verify [gleichkommen]” (CPR A 668/B 696).

But although “subjective” with respect to their origin (as principles of reason), the maxims nonetheless

have, he says, “some sort of [einige] objective validity” (CPR A 664/B 692). As it turns out, the objective

validity Kant assigns to the maxims is tied to the necessity of what he terms their “regulative” function. As

is the case with all principles of pure reason, the principle of synthetic unity regulates the faculty of the

understanding in prescribing a priori “thoroughgoing unity in its employment” (CPR A 665/B 693). The

principle is “objective,” Kant claims, because it indicates “the procedure whereby the empirical and

determinate employment of the understanding can be brought into complete harmony with itself” (CPR A

665f./B 693f.). Kant most explicitly links the objective validity of the principle of synthetic unity to its

necessary regulative role in the following passage:

The law of reason which requires us to seek for this unity, is a necessary law, since without it we would

have no reason at all, and without reason no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the

absence of this no sufficient criterion [Merkmal] of empirical truth. In order to secure the latter, we thus

must presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary. (CPR A 651/B 680)

As Kant writes here, the law or principle of systematic unity is a necessary condition of reason’s

“employment.” Without it, “we would have no reason at all.” We would have “no reason at all,”

presumably, because it is the task of reason, on his conception, to unify the acts of the understanding. As

we saw a moment ago, reason unifies the concepts of the understanding to insure that the knowledge of

the understanding, rather than a “mere contingent aggregate,” is a “system connected according to

necessary laws” (CPR A 645/B 674). Without presupposing unity in nature, without dividing appearances

into genera and species, we could form neither empirical laws, nor even empirical concepts. We could

therefore have, in Kant’s words, “no coherent employment of the understanding” and thus “no sufficient

criterion of empirical truth.”

Although objectively valid as indispensable conditions of our cognition of nature, principles of pure

reason, unlike principles of pure understanding, “never allow of any constitutive employment,” on Kant’s

account (CPR A 644/B 672). Their function is confined to the regulative one, he claims, of “directing the

understanding towards a certain goal” and “securing its greatest possible extension” (CPR A 644/B 672).

Given that Kant insists that both principles of pure understanding and principles of pure reason are

objectively valid conditions of experience, in what sense are the former “constitutive” and the latter not?

To answer this question, we first need to review the status Kant awards principles of pure understanding.

He classifies these principles as “transcendental” and “a priori”

laws of possible experience (e.g. at CPR A 148/B 188). He tells us these principles are applications of pure

concepts or categories to “appearances” (that is, to objects given in space and time). The principle of pure

understanding that Kant refers to as the “Second Analogy,” for example, expresses the application to

appearances of the category of causality. The Second Analogy specifies an a priori rule governing the

temporal order of appearances. We apply the category of causality to appearances, according to Kant,

whenever we judge that the order of succession of our perceptions is necessary or irreversible (whenever

we judge, that is, that the object of our perceptions is an event). The Second Analogy, then, is the rule that

expresses the empirical employment of the category of causality. Without it, we could not judge regarding

the causal connectedness of nature. We could make no empirical generalizations about the properties or

behaviors of empirical objects. We could form no empirical concepts such as that of a moving force.

No less than principles of pure reason, then, principles of understanding are indispensable conditions of

our form of experience. But principles of understanding are constitutive, in a way that principles of pure

reason are not, because the objects for which they are the a priori rules are appearances (objects given in

space and time). We are thus entitled to say of principles of understanding that they may be instantiated

or exhibited in empirical intuition. Returning to the example we just reviewed, the Second Analogy is

instantiated in experience in the following way: Whenever we judge a series of appearances to be an event,

we come upon instances in empirical intuition of the application of the category of causality.

Principles of pure reason, on the other hand, are never “constitutive in respect of empirical concepts,” in

Kant’s view (CPR A 664/B 692). They have no immediate relation to appearances; rather, they govern the

faculty of understanding itself (CPR A 644/B 672). Like the principles of understanding, they are

indispensable conditions of experience; without them we would have no “sufficient criterion of empirical

truth.”20 Nonetheless, principles of pure reason can have no legitimate empiricalemployment. Because

they express the idea of the systematic unity and completeness of all the acts of the understanding, they

refer to objects that can never be met with in perception (objects such as the totality of experience, or the

unconditioned and final cause or purpose of experience). Principles of pure reason are never “constitutive

in respect of empirical concepts,” then, because their objects cannot be exhibited in intuition.21 As Kant

puts it, no “schema of sensibility corresponding to them can be given” (CPR A 664/B 693).22

We have yet to consider the connection Kant discovers between the principle of systematic unity and the

idea of the purposiveness of nature. Nor have we reviewed his grounds for asserting that the idea of

nature as a systematic unity requires us to postulate the idea of a supreme being. Kant’s discussion of

these topics is more fully developed in the Critique of Judgment, but the first Critiqueprovides some

preliminary indication of his reasoning.

A good place to start is the following passage from the section of the Transcendental Dialectic entitled

“The Final Purpose of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason.” There, Kant writes:

The speculative interest of reason makes it necessary to regard all order in the world as if it had originated

in the purpose of a supreme reason. (CPR A 686/B 714)

In an earlier remark, Kant reminds us that the principle of systematic unity is regulative rather than

constitutive. He then goes on to insist that “reason cannot think this systematic unity except by at the

same time giving to the idea of this unity an object”—an object, he continues, that “cannot be given in

[durch] experience” (CPR A 681/B 709). The object we are “constrained [genötigt]” to posit in connection

with the unity of the series of appearances, he tells us several pages later, is “God” (CPR A 677/B 705, A

686/B 714). Reason commands, he writes,

that all connection in the world be viewed in accordance with the principles of systematic unity—as if all

such connection had its source in one single all-embracing being, as the supreme and all-sufficient cause.

As he expresses the point earlier in this section, the “things of the world must be viewed as if they received

their existence from a highest intelligence” (CPR A 671/B 699).

In conceiving of nature as a systematic unity, then, we in effect think of it as purposively arranged or as

the “outcome of wise purposes” (CPR A 687/B 715). To think of nature as purposively arranged is to

assume that “things of the world” “received their existence from a highest intelligence.” In this way, the

idea of nature as a systematic unity implies that of an “Author of the world” who is ultimately responsible

for that unity (CPR A 687/B 715).

1.3 Systematic unity, purposiveness, and the supreme being

in the Critique of Judgment

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant’s discussion of these topics proceeds by essentially the same steps. He

begins by deriving from features of a discursive understanding the necessary role of the regulative idea of

systematic unity. He then argues that to conceive of nature as a systematic unity is in effect to conceive of

it as purposive and

as created according to the wise intentions of an “original understanding” or “cause of the world” (CJ § 77

[410]). This would be a mode of understanding whose cognitive powers far exceed our own.

Taking these points in turn: In the Critique of Judgment, Kant once again draws attention to the

implications that follow from the fact that our understanding is discursive or a “power of concepts.” As we

saw when we first considered these passages in section 1, he highlights the contingency with which a

discursive understanding must contend. There is contingency, first, in the “variety of ways in which [the

given sensible particulars] may come before our perception” (CJ § 77 [406]). There is contingency, second,

in the relation of our concepts (or universals) to the sensible given (CJ § 77 [406]). This latter contingency

follows from the fact that for our discursive understanding, as he puts it, “the particular [das Besondere]

is not determined by the universal and therefore cannot be derived from it alone” (CJ § 77 [406]).23 Were

our understanding intuitive, it would have to contend with neither kinds of contingency. For an

understanding that is intuitive, there simply is no contingency in “the way nature’s products in terms of

particular laws harmonize with [it]” (CJ § 77 [406]).

It is in light of the two kinds of contingency associated with a discursive mode of cognition that Kant

proceeds to argue for the role of maxims in regulating our empirical inquiry. The “logical maxim” of the

first Critique that requires us to seek unity in nature’s diversity, appears in the Critique of Judgment as

the rule governing the faculty he now identifies as “reflective judgment.”24 Reflective judgment, Kant

notes in his Second Introduction to that latter text, seeks unity in diversity. In seeking unity, it is “obliged

to ascend from the particular in nature to the universal” (CJ, Second Intro. IV [180]). Reflective judgment

in turn “requires a principle”—a “transcendental principle” that it gives “to itself.” This is the principle,

Kant writes, that “what to human insight is contingent in the particular (empirical) natural laws does

nevertheless

contain…a law-governed unity” (CJ, Second Intro. V [183f.]). Reflective judgment must assume that the

“particular in nature’s diversity must (through concepts and laws) harmonize with the universal,” he tells

us, “in order that the particular can be subsumed under the universal” (CJ § 77 [406f.]). Without this

assumption of harmony, “our empirical cognition could not thoroughly cohere to form a whole of

experience” (CJ, Second Intro. V [183]).

In essential respects, Kant’s reasoning in these passages reproduces his reasoning in the corresponding

discussions of the first Critique. We could form neither empirical concepts nor empirical laws or

generalizations did we not divide the phenomena of nature into genera and species.25 We need to

presuppose, then, that nature admits of such division, that it has “a certain order in its particular rules”

and is thus a systematic unity (CJ, Second Intro. V [184]). By means of a “transcendental principle” we

assume the “harmony of nature with our cognitive power,” because “without presupposing this harmony,

we would have no order of nature in terms of empirical laws, and hence no guide to using those laws in

the experience and investigation of nature in its diversity” (CJ, Second Intro. V [185]). Kant furthermore

argues that to assume that the “particular in nature’s diversity must…harmonize with the universal” is to

“think of nature…according to a principle of purposiveness for our cognitive power” (CJ, Second Intro. V

[184]). It is by means of this transcendental principle of purposivenessand the more specific maxims

“based on” it that “a cognizable order of nature in terms of [empirical] laws is possible,” in his view (CJ,

Second Intro. V [185]):

A principle like this is expressed in the following propositions: that there is (in nature) a subordination of

genera and species that we can grasp; that every [genus]…approaches every other by a common principle,

so that a transition from one to the other and thus to a higher genus is possible; that although it initially

seems to our understanding unavoidable to assume for every specific difference in natural effects as many

kinds of causality, those effects may however fall under a small number of principles. (CJ, Second Intro.

V [185])

Just as in the first Critique, Kant insists in the Critique of Judgment that the principle of purposiveness is

a “subjective principle (maxim) of judgment” (CJ, Second Intro. V [184]). The principle is necessary for

any discursive form of understanding, but we have no way of knowing that it is also valid for other forms

of cognition. We thus have no justification for assuming that the principle “attaches to the object rather

than merely to ourselves, as subjects” (CJ § 75 [399]). Purposes in nature, according to Kant, “are not

given to us by the object: we do not actually observe purposes in nature…but we merely add this

concept…in our thought” (CJ § 75 [399]). The principle of purposiveness is therefore a principle reflective

judgment prescribes “not to nature,”

Kant says, but “to itself” (CJ, Second Intro. V [185]). It is a heuristic principle specifying that “however

nature may be arranged in terms of its universal laws, any search for its empirical laws should follow both

this principle of purposiveness and the maxims based on it, because only to the extent that this principle

has application can we make progress in using our understanding in experience and arrive at cognition”

(CJ, Second Intro. V [186]).

Although “subjective” as a principle of reason, the principle of purposiveness is at the same time

“objective,” on Kant’s account. What he says in these passages of the Second Introduction is that it is

“both objective and contingent [zugleich objektiv und zufällig]” (CJ, Second Intro. V [185]). The principle

of purposiveness is contingent for reasons we just reviewed: we can at most demonstrate its conditional

necessity, that is, its necessity for a discursive understanding such as ours. We have no warrant for

assuming its validity for other forms of cognition. Nonetheless, Kant insists that the principle is

objective—and for the same reasons he provided in the first Critique: In common with all the principles of

pure reason, the principle of purposiveness is for our discursive form of understanding an indispensable

condition of empirical inquiry. Did we not presuppose that nature is purposive, did we not in other words

assume that the given sensible particulars harmonize with our cognitive power, “we would have no order

of nature in terms of empirical laws, and hence no guide to using those laws in the experience and

investigation of nature in its diversity” (CJ, Second Intro. V [185]).

Finally, Kant asserts that we can only make the idea of purposiveness “comprehensible” to ourselves if we

“think of it, and of the world as such, as a product of an intelligent cause (a God)” (CJ § 75 [400]). He then

goes on to argue that to conceive of nature as a product of an intelligent cause is to conceive of it as it were

created by a form of understanding not subject to the limitations of our own.26 This would be an

understanding, in his words, for which there is therefore no contingency “in the way nature’s products

harmonize with [it] in terms of particular laws” (CJ § 77 [406]).

In these passages in the Critique of Judgment, Kant explicitly identifies the form of understanding he has

in mind as that of the intuitive intellect. There is for the intuitive intellect no contingency in the relation

between its particular laws and nature’s products, because the intuitive intellect, as we know, is a form of

cognition “wholly independent of sensibility” (CJ § 77 [406]). Because sensible intuitions for it “fall away,”

it has no need of the functions (concepts) of thought (CJ § 76 [402]). It cognizes not by means of concepts

(“analytic universals”), but rather from the “synthetically universal (the intuition of the whole as whole)

to the particular.” For this form of understanding (which Kant sometimes also refers to as the intellectus

archetypus or “

original understanding” as “cause of the world” (CJ § 77 [410])), “the possibility of the parts, in their

character and combination, depends on the whole” (CJ § 77 [407]).27

1.4 Discursivity as the key to saving metaphysics

The ideas of nature as a systematic unity, as purposive, and as the product of an “intelligent cause”—these

are all, on Kant’s taxonomy, “ideas of reason.” As such, their objects cannot be discovered in the realm of

experience, and thus can never be known by us. Although we are warranted in expecting to discover in

experience, for everything that happens in nature, some antecedent causal condition or set of conditions,

experience can never justify the judgment that objects of nature are “produced intentionally and as

purposes” (CJ § 77 [405]). Nor can experience confirm our belief in the existence of an “intelligent cause”

or “all-powerful author of nature.”

As we have seen, Kant nonetheless maintains in both his first and third Critiques that even though ideas

of reason go “far beyond what experience or observation could verify,” they are objectively valid (CPR A

668/B 696). Their objectivity derives from their role, for our form of understanding, as necessary

conditions of empirical inquiry. We have no option but to assume that nature is a systematic unity and

that its parts are governed, not just by blind mechanical forces, but also by a causality of purposes. Since it

is a “command of reason” that “all connection in the world be viewed in accordance with the principles of

a systematic unity,” we furthermore have no option but to assume that all connection in the world be

viewed, “as if [it]…had its source in one single all-embracing being, as the supreme and all-sufficient

cause” (CPR A 686/B 714).

Kant derives the objective validity of ideas of reason, then, from their indispensability as conditions of

empirical inquiry. In sections 1.2 and 1.3, we saw that we must rely on these ideas, in his view, because our

understanding is discursive and as such dependent on being affected in cognition by an independently

given sensible matter or content. Were our understanding intuitive such that it could produce its objects

from its cognitive powers (out of the synthetic universal or whole), we would have no need for ideas of

reason at all. We would have no need for them, because there would be for us no contingency in the

relation between our representations and their objects. As Kant argues in theCritique of Judgment, were

our understanding intuitive, we would indeed experience nature as necessarily in harmony with our

cognitive powers. We would not even have the concept of purpose (CJ § 77 [407]).28

Our discussion up to this point should suffice to explain the link Kant establishes between the fact of our

discursivity and the specific role he assigns ideas of reason. The central point, again, is this: It is as a

consequence of our discursivity that we have to think of nature as purposively arranged and as the

product of a divine or intuitive form of understanding. It is important to note, however, that this link

between the specific character of human cognition and the role of ideas of reason only begins to reveal the

significance of the discursivity thesis for Kant’s Critical philosophy. For he also argues that if we fail to

acknowledge the fact of our discursivity, irresolvable conflicts or “antinomies” result—conflicts that

threaten the vocation of reason and thus the very possibility of metaphysics. The fact of our discursivity,

then, plays an essential role in what Kant tells us in his Prefaces to the first Critique is his primary aim: to

solve the antinomies of reason and in so doing “save” metaphysics.

In this section we will take a brief look at particular cases of antinomy in both the first and thirdCritiques,

and consider Kant’s strategy for solving them. This will take us a step further in highlighting the

significance of the discursivity thesis for his overall Critical program. Before we review the particular cases,

however, it will be helpful to outline the general shape of his treatment.

Kant claims that the antinomies of reason arise from the over-estimation of our cognitive powers. They

arise, that is, when we make the mistake of assuming that concepts of objects not given in space and time

refer to objects we can know. In making this mistake, we in effect attribute to ourselves the cognitive

powers of an intuitive form of understanding; we take ourselves to be entitled to infer the real possibility

of objects from our mere representations of them. Correcting this mistake, Kant argues, is a matter of

acknowledging the constraints on our theoretical knowledge that follow from the fact that our

understanding is discursive rather than intuitive.

We have already reviewed Kant’s characterization of some of those constraints. We know that, because

our understanding is discursive, we lack the power to produce objects merely by exercising our cognitive

powers. Unlike an intuitive form of understanding, we have to rely on an independently given sense

content and subsume that content under concepts. We know, furthermore, that we must as a condition of

the possibility of empirical inquiry presuppose that the given sensible particulars harmonize with or are

susceptible to our conceptual arrangements. We must in other words presuppose that nature is purposive.

But Kant associates a further feature with our form of cognition, a feature we have not yet directly

considered. He argues for this feature in the Transcendental Aesthetic of the first Critique. In addition to

the fact that our understanding, as discursive, must rely in its cognitions of nature on independently given

sensible content, it is furthermore the case that what is given to us in sensation must be given in a certain

way. It must appear to us through our a priori “forms of intuition,” space and time. Kant in other

words argues for a necessary constraint on how we are sensibly affected. If what is given in sensation is to

be for us a possible object of theoretical knowledge, he claims, it must be subject to our spatial and

temporal forms of intuition. The implication that the objects of theoretical knowledge are, for us, limited

to what is given in space and time (to what Kant terms “appearances”), follows, then, from these two

features of our form of cognition: First, from the fact that we must rely on independently given sense

content. Second, from the fact that that sense content must be given to us through our a priori forms of

intuition. Together, these two features yield the central thesis of Kant’s “transcendental” idealism

(sometimes referred to as his “restriction thesis”): For our form of understanding, theoretical knowledge

is limited to “appearances.”29 We can know only what appears to us in space and time; we cannot know

what remains when we abstract away our a priori forms of intuition. We cannot, that is, know what Kant

calls “things in themselves.”

Implicit in this account of the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, between objects

discoverable within the realm of human experience and objects transcending that realm, is Kant’s

recognition of the logical possibility of a mode of understanding different from our own. On the one hand,

he insists upon the limits to our form of knowledge. On the other hand, this limitation invites speculation

about the possibility of an understanding that, unlike our own, need not rely on sensible affection at

all.30 A non-discursive or intuitive mode of understanding would be capable of knowingobjects that, for us,

are merely thinkable or logically possible. To put this point differently, in drawing the limits of human

knowledge, Kant invites the consideration of objects from two different points of view: from the

standpoint of human understanding and knowledge, and from the standpoint of what is merely thinkable

for us but capable of being known by a non-discursive or intuitive understanding. In both the first and

third Critiques, this point about two different ways of viewing objects provides the basis for his insistence

that we bear in mind the difference between objects we can expect to encounter in experience and objects

that transcend the limits of our possible experience. It likewise underlies his distinction between concepts

or principles that have a constitutive employment, and ideas or principles that are merely regulative.

Turning, now, to Kant’s treatment of antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason, he tells us in his B-Preface

that a critique of pure reason is necessary if metaphysics is ever to follow the “secure path of a science”

and amount to more than a “mere random groping” (CPR B vii, xv, xxx). Metaphysics is (and has been) in

a state of crisis, he claims, precisely because of the problem mentioned above: the failure of philosophers,

in empiricist and rationalist traditions alike, to draw the proper limits to knowledge, to distinguish objects

that can be known by our form of understanding from objects that cannot. It is precisely this failure, in his

view, that is responsible for the antinomies that threaten the very employment of reason and reduce

metaphysics to a “random groping.” Kant proclaims that he has discovered, not just the error responsible

for the conflicts, but also the means of correcting it. Indeed, he tells us that his particular form of idealism,

transcendental idealism, is uniquely suited to save philosophy from what he refers to as the “skeptical

despair” or “euthanasia” of pure reason (CPR A 407/B 434).

Kant argues that when we consider ideas of reason to be constitutive rather than merely regulative—when

we take them to be “concepts of real things”—they become “transcendent in their application and for that

very reason can be delusive” or “dialectical” (CPR A 643f./B 671f.). When taken for concepts of real things,

we suppose that ideas of reason to refer to objects “absolutely [schlechthin]” versus “in the idea [in der

Idee],” as he says (CPR A 670/B 698). Kant contends that this mistake is directly responsible for the

conflicts or antinomies that confound pure reason and threaten to paralyze its employment.

We can better appreciate the threat with which Kant was concerned if we recall what is perhaps his most

familiar example of antinomy in the first Critique: the conflict between the theses of freedom and natural

necessity. The thesis of this antinomy expresses a commitment to a special form of causality, a causality of

freedom. The thesis claims that nature itself (the series of appearances) must have a first beginning or

“absolute spontaneity” “not itself determined, in accordance with necessary laws, by another cause

antecedent to it” (CPR A 446/B 474). The antithesis asserts, in contrast, that “everything in the world

takes place solely in accordance with laws of nature” and that there is “no freedom” (CPR A 445/B 473).

Because the two theses are contradictories, both cannot be true. Nor can either, considered on its own

terms, be demonstrated to be false. Kant reasons that the antinomy may nonetheless be resolved (that is,

made to disappear) once we recognize that each side of the conflict rests on an “illusion.” Each commits

“dialectical illusion,” on his account, in that each presumes to possess knowledge of an object that can

never be given in possible experience. Once we acknowledge this illusion, he says, we may conclude with

confidence that each side of the antinomy is “pseudo rational” or fallacious.

The dialectical illusion is most apparent on the side of the claim for freedom. There, reason’s object (a

form of causality that is “spontaneous” or not itself given in time) is clearly nothing experience or

observation could ever discover. Kant insists, however, that the side of natural necessity is equally illusory.

For what it purports to know is not

just that everything that happens in nature must have an antecedent causal condition, but that nature

itself—the series of appearances as a totality—is also caused. In supposing that nature as a totality could

ever be an object of human knowledge, the standpoint of natural necessity, no less than that of freedom,

posits the existence of an object that transcends the limits of human experience. Both sides of the

antinomy thus conflate what is merely an object “in the idea,” as Kant calls it, with an object taken

“absolutely.” Otherwise put, both treat as constitutive ideas that have at best a merely regulative use.

What should not escape our notice here is the way in which the solution Kant proposes depends on our

viewing objects in two different ways: as capable of being discovered or instantiated in experience, on the

one hand, and as extending beyond or transcending the realm of experience, on the other. He extols the

virtues of this solution in the following footnote to his B-Preface:

Now the propositions of pure reason, especially if they dare to venture out beyond all limits of possible

experience, cannot be brought to the test through any experiment with their objects (as in natural science).

In dealing with those concepts and principles that we adopt a priori, all that we can do is contrive that

they be used for considering the same objects [dieselben Gegenstände] from two different sides [von zwei

verschiedenen Seiten]—on the one hand, in connection with experience, as objects of the senses and of the

understanding, and on the other hand, for the isolated reason that strives to transcend all limits of

experience, as objects which are thought merely. If, when things are viewed from this twofold standpoint

[doppelten Gesichtspunkte], we find that there is agreement with the principle of pure reason, but that

when we regard them only from a single point of view reason is involved in unavoidable self-conflict, the

experiment decides in favor of the correctness of this distinction. (CPR B xviiif. [note])

As Kant tells us here, a virtue of viewing the same objects from two different standpoints is that it solves

the conflicts of reason. Once we recognize that both sides of the antinomies refer not to objects of the

senses but to objects that transcend the limits of our knowledge, the conflicts are revealed to rest on an

illusion and thus disappear.

Of course, this two-standpoint strategy would not be possible without the central tenet of transcendental

idealism: that human knowledge is limited to appearances. Drawing the limits to human knowledge has

the “negative” advantage, Kant says, of exposing the antinomies as merely pseudo-rational arguments:

each side claims knowledge of an object that transcends our possible experience. But drawing the limits to

human knowledge also has the “positive advantage,” on his account, of legitimating ideas that are

properly identified as having a necessary regulative use (CPR B xxivff.). With regard to the ideas of reason

we reviewed earlier, Kant thus believes he is entitled to argue, then, not just that we are “constrained” to

posit an (unknowable) “self-subsistent reason” which “through ideas of the greatest harmony and unity is

the cause of the universe,” but also that it is legitimate for us to do so (CPR A 677f./B 705f.). It is

legitimate, provided we bear in mind the fact that this rational being [Vernunftwesen]

is a mere idea; it is not assumed as a something that is real absolutely and in itself, but is postulated only

problematically… in order that we may view all connection of the things of the world of sense as if they

had their ground in such a being. In thus proceeding, our sole purpose is to secure that systematic unity

which is indispensable to reason. (CPR A 681/B 709)

Likewise, Kant tells us we are warranted in asserting that nature is purposively arranged. Provided we

understand this idea to refer to what is real “in the idea” versus “absolutely,” we need not worry about

contradicting ourselves in claiming, on the one hand, that the only causes discoverable in nature are blind

mechanical forces and, on the other, that we have no option but to think of nature as purposively arranged.

As in the first Critique, Kant seeks in the Critique of Judgment some way to defend the necessity of our

thinking of nature as purposive even though, as he reminds us again and again, experience can never

justify our doing so. In CJ §§ 70–8 he discusses at much greater length one of the questions he had raised

in the section of the first Critique on the “The Final Purpose of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason.”

The question is this: How do we reconcile the fact that we must as a condition of the possibility of

empirical inquiry consider natural products as produced intentionally, with the fact that “purposes in

nature are not given to us by the object”? “[W]e do not actually observe purposes in nature as intentional,”

Kant asserts, “but merely add this concept [to nature’s products] in our thought” (CJ § 75 [399]). As in the

first Critique, Kant’s defense of the necessity of a teleological consideration of nature comes with the

following warning: we are not to misidentify the status of our idea of nature as a purposive unity. If we

take the idea to refer to an object that may be known by us, an object of our possible experience, we land

in self-contradiction or antinomy.

Kant presents the antinomy of teleological judgment in CJ § 70 [387] as a conflict not between twoideas of

reason (as in the first Critique), but between two maxims of judgment. On the side of the thesisis the

maxim: “All production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible in terms of

merely mechanical laws.” On the side of the antithesis is the maxim: “Some products of material nature

cannot be judged to be possible in terms of merely mechanical laws. (Judging them requires a quite

different causal law—namely, that of final causes.)” The antinomy arises, on Kant’s analysis, only if we fail

to recognize that each of these maxims is regulative, rather than constitutive. In the Critique of Judgment,

then, Kant’s general strategy for resolving antinomy is, in essential respects, the same as in the Critique of

Pure Reason. Once again, the distinction between constitutive and regulative is crucial—only now it refers

to the employment of the faculty of judgment rather than of reason. And, as in the first Critique, Kant

grounds his constitutive/regulative distinction on his commitment to the assumption that human

experience may not be the only form of experience there is.

But what does it mean to characterize each of the above two maxims of judgment as regulative? This

question is particularly pressing with regard to the maxim of the thesis, for why should we not award

constitutive status to the rule requiring us to judge nature

mechanically? Isn’t this maxim just a different expression of the principle of the Second Analogy of the

first Critique that states that we must judge everything that happens in nature to be causally determined?

And doesn’t Kant in fact identify the Second Analogy as a principle that is “constitutive in respect of

experience” (CPR A 664/B692)? Why, then, does he claim in § 70 of the third Critique that we should

regard the thesis of the antinomy of teleological judgment as merely regulative?

In answering these questions, the key point to bear in mind is that, contrary to what we might at first

suppose, the principle of the Second Analogy and the thesis of the antinomy of teleological judgment are

not identical.31 The thesis of the antinomy of teleological judgment states that we must judge nature

mechanically. The Second Analogy specifies a rule that we necessarily employ when we judge nature

mechanically: we regard everything that happens in nature as causally determined. In asserting that we

must judge nature mechanically, the antinomy of teleological judgment highlights consequences of the

fact that our understanding is discursive, rather than intuitive. It is because our understanding is

discursive that we have to rely on given sensible particulars and subsume them under concepts. It is

because our understanding is discursive that we furthermore must proceed in our cognitions of nature,

not from the synthetic universal or whole to parts or particulars, but from parts to whole. As discursive,

our understanding can thus only cognize “a real whole in nature,” Kant says, as “the effect of the

concurrent dynamical forces of its parts” (CJ § 77 [407]). So when in the context of the antinomy of

teleological judgment he tells us that we must judge nature in terms of mechanical laws, his aim is to draw

attention to this respect in which our discursive understanding contrasts with that of an intuitive intellect.

We treat the maxim of the thesis as constitutive rather than regulative, in the context of the antinomy of

teleological judgment, when we fail to acknowledge that the requirement that we judge nature

mechanically is a necessary rule governing merely our form of cognition. In failing to acknowledge this,

we in effect assume the stance of the “dogmatic” mechanist who supposes that a discursive or human form

of understanding is the only form of understanding there is. Only then does our maxim genuinely conflict

with the maxim of the antithesis, for the claim of the antithesis is that mechanical explanation

is not sufficient to explain all in nature that needs to be explained. The antithesis asserts that we need to

think of nature in terms of a causality of purposes as well.

As we observed a moment ago, Kant’s solution to the antinomy of teleological judgment requires that we

regard both the maxims of the thesis and the antithesis as regulative rather than constitutive. To treat the

antithesis as merely regulative is to acknowledge, in effect, that we cannot expect to discover or observe

final causes or purposes in nature. It is to concede that we have no more justification for expecting to

discover purposes in nature than we have for the claim that mechanical explanation is

sufficient to explain everything in nature that needs to be explained. We legitimately can and must think

of nature teleologically, Kant argues, because our form of understanding is discursive. Since it is

discursive, we are incapable of producing particulars out of our own cognitive activity and must rely on an

independently given sensible content. This is why, for our form of understanding, there is contingency in

the relation between the given sensible particulars and our concepts. Precisely because we lack the ability

of an intuitive form of cognition to proceed from the synthetic universal or whole to parts or particulars,

we must as a condition of the possibility of empirical inquiry rely on the idea of nature as a purposive

unity—as the cause or ground of its parts.

It has been my objective in this section to link Kant’s insistence upon the discursive character of our mode

of cognition to the principal project of his Critical philosophy: the project of saving metaphysics. The

“crisis” of metaphysics to which he refers most explicitly in his B-Preface to the first Critiquestems, he

says, from the failure of philosophers to acknowledge the limits of human knowledge. As we have just

seen, Kant is convinced that it is precisely this failure that is responsible for the antinomial conflicts that

are the potential “euthanasia” of pure reason. We cannot steer clear of these conflicts, he tells us, without

acknowledging that our knowledge is limited to appearances. We arrive at this conclusion about the limits

of our knowledge by granting two premises: First, a premise about the reliance of our discursive intellect

on an independently given sensible content. Second, a premise about how our discursive understanding is

in addition subject to a priori constraints on how that sensible content must be given. To be experienced

or known by us, the sensible manifold must appear via our a priori forms of intuition, space and time.

1.5 Conclusion: Hegel’s portrayal of the Kantian intuitive

intellect

In section 1.1, we reviewed passages that suggest that Hegel correctly identified features by means of

which Kant distinguishes discursive from intuitive forms of understanding. For the Kantian discursive

understanding, in Hegel’s words, “concepts remain contingent with respect to nature just as nature does

with respect to concepts” (D 164/104). As we saw, Hegel’s reference in this passage is to the implications

of Kant’s point, made most explicitly in § 77 of the third Critique, that our discursive mode of cognition is

unable to bring sensible particulars into being. For us, sensible particulars must be independently given,

and they must be subsumed under concepts as a condition of our cognizing them. It is not possible for us,

then, to simply produce or derive sensible particulars from our concepts. Hegel reminds us of this point

when he quotes from § 76 [401] of the Critique of Judgment: “ ‘The intellect is for concepts, sensible

intuition for objects—they are two entirely heterogeneous parts’ ” (FK 89/GW 325).

Because the intuitive intellect can produce objects out of its own intuiting activity, however, it relies in

cognition neither on sensible intuitions nor on (discursive) concepts. It does not rely on sensible

intuitions because its intuitions do not derive from sensible affection but are instead “original.” As

“original,” its intuitions need not be subsumed under concepts as a condition of their cognition. The

intuitive intellect proceeds from the intuition of the whole (from the “synthetically universal”) to parts or

particulars. For it, Hegel reminds us, “the possibility of the parts (their properties and connection, etc.) is

dependent on the whole” (FK 88f./GW 324f.).32 As we saw, Kant takes this feature of the cognitive powers

of the intuitive intellect to imply that there is for it “no contingency” in the way “nature’s

products…harmonize with the understanding” (CJ § 77 [406]).

This summarizes the material we considered above in section 1.1. It should not escape our notice, however,

that Hegel was also aware of the implications of discursivity we reviewed in sections 1.2 and1.3. He was

aware of Kant’s claims that it is a feature of our discursive understanding that we have no option but to

posit the ideas of systematic unity, of nature as purposive and as created by a form of understanding not

subject to the limitations of our own. In the Difference essay, for example, Hegel writes that because, for

Kant, the “variety of particular appearances are left undetermined by our…discursive understanding,”

they “must be thought of as determined by another understanding” (D 143/80f.). In Faith and Knowledge,

he registers his awareness of Kant’s claim that the ideas of a unity of concept and intuition, possibility and

actuality, mechanism and teleology, are ideas of “the faculty of judgment that…reflects.” The principle of

reflective judgment requires us to think, in Hegel’s words, “as if an intellect having consciousness

determined nature” (FK 91/GW 327). Again in Difference, Hegel tells us that

Kant…posits the object as undetermined (by the understanding). He represents nature as subject-object,

in that he considers the product of nature as an end of nature, as purposive without the concept of

purpose, necessary without mechanism, as identity of concept and being.

Kant insists that this idea of nature is valid, Hegel goes on to point out, “only as a maxim of our limited

discursive thinking human understanding”:

For a sensible understanding, the synthesis of undetermined nature and the determinations of the

understanding is supposed to remain a mere idea; for us humans it is supposed to be impossible that

mechanical explanation should harmonize with purposiveness. (D 163/103)

In these remarks, Hegel correctly identifies the ideas of systematic unity, of nature as purposive (and so

forth) as ideas of reflective judgment. He furthermore accurately observes that these ideas, for Kant, are

both “absolutely necessary” and “problematic”

(FK 89/GW 325). They rely on conceiving of the possibility of another form of understanding; but, as

Hegel observes, “nothing is asserted about the actual existence of this understanding” (D 143/81).

Reflective judgment requires us to think, “as ifan intellect having consciousness determined nature.” This

is an intellect, in his words, “for which possibility and actuality are absolutely identical” (FK 89/GW 326).

It is an intellect for which there is in addition agreement or harmony between mechanism and the

purposiveness of nature. Again paraphrasing Kant in the Critique of Judgment, this time from § 80, Hegel

writes that

Kant recognizes that…in itself it is not impossible that the mechanism and the purposiveness of nature

coincide [zusammentrifft]; but for us humans it is impossible. The cognizance of this coincidence would

require an intuition other than the sensible. It would require a determinate cognition of the intelligible

substratum of nature through which it would be possible even to give a ground for the mechanism of

appearances according to particular laws. All this transcends our capacity completely. (FK 91/GW 328)

The review I have provided in this chapter of Hegel’s remarks in the Difference and Faith and

Knowledge essays should convey the impression that he accurately represents central features of Kant’s

account of the nature and implications of human discursivity.33 It has been my aim to convey that

impression, and I have selected passages from Hegel’s texts with that aim in mind. I have sought to

discourage any premature rejection of his treatment of Kant motivated by the assumption that it suffers

from an unacceptable degree of carelessness and misinterpretation. Obviously, none of the material we

have reviewed so far conclusively clears Hegel of these charges. (It may be that his misrepresentation of

Kant occurs elsewhere.) But the above discussion should shift the presumption somewhat in Hegel’s favor.

In any case, my objective in this work is not just to establish the accuracy of Hegel’s portrayal of Kant. I

also seek to cast his critical reflections in a sympathetic light and gradually piece together an

interpretation of his own alternative conception of human cognition. Among the questions we will

eventually need to consider are these: How does Hegel take Kant’s ideas of an “intuition other than

sensuous” and of a nature in which mechanism and teleology coincide, and use them to persuade us of

the deficiencies of Kant’s Critical program? How does he derive from Kant’s idea of the intuitive

intellect inspiration for his own estimation of the proper limits of our knowledge and for his own version

of idealism?

The two texts we have been focusing on, the Difference and Faith and Knowledge essays, contain not just

Hegel’s efforts to represent or reconstruct features of Kant philosophy but his critical reflections as well.

In my concluding paragraphs, I review some of those critical remarks and extract clues from them to the

direction our discussion will need to take in the chapters to come.

Quoting from § 76 of the Critique of Judgment, Hegel writes in Faith and Knowledge that although the

idea of an intuitive or archetypal intellect occurs to Kant and is judged by him to be “necessary,”

reality must not be predicated of it. On the contrary, we must once for all accept the fact that universal

and particular are inevitably and necessarily distinct. “The intellect is for concepts, sensuous intuition for

objects—they are two heterogeneous parts.” (FK 89/GW 325)

Hegel goes on to state that Kant was mistaken in not awarding human cognition the capacities of the

intuitive intellect. Instead, he writes, Kant “regards discursive understanding as…absolute”—the “absolute

fixed unsurpassable finitude of human reason.” For finite human understanding, according to Kant,

“rational knowledge [Vernunfterkenntniß] for which…the universal and the particular are identical,” must

remain “transcendent” (FK 90/GW 326).34

These are precisely the kind of claims that Hegel’s critics regard with suspicion. Can Hegel actually mean

to imply that Kant should have awarded human cognition literally all of the powers of the intuitive

intellect? Does his objection to Kant’s insistence upon our discursivity amount to a rejection of Kant’s

assumption that, in our cognitions of nature, we have to be sensibly affected? Is it really Hegel’s intention

to suggest that, like an intuitive or divine form of understanding, we have the capacity to produce, not just

the form, but also the matter of objects simply by exercising our cognitive powers? Is he committed to the

view that, for us, all possible or conceivable objects are at the same time actual? If the answer to any one

of these questions is “yes,” then it is unclear how we avoid the conclusion that Hegel vastly overestimates

the capacities of human cognition and thus earns the standard charges of extravagance and implausibility.

There can be no doubt that Hegel was convinced that certain features of Kant’s conception of the intuitive

intellect capture, in a way that Kant himself did not acknowledge, the nature of our form of understanding.

For this very reason, Hegel thought that those features deserved to be praised as genuinely “speculative.”

But what

I hope will emerge from our study is that Hegel’s appreciation of the speculative features of the intuitive

intellect did not commit him to denying that, in our efforts to know nature, we have to rely on sensible

intuitions and employ concepts. Indeed, Hegel never sets out to defend the thesis that for our form of

cognition, sensible intuitions as well as concepts “fall away.” Instead, what he tries to persuade us is that

Kant offered a defective account of their nature. In particular, Hegel challenges Kant’s commitment to the

thesis that sensible intuitions and concepts are, “ ‘two entirely heterogeneous parts,’ ” and that the

particular and the universal are therefore “inevitably and necessarily distinct” (FK 89/GW 325). Hegel is

intrigued by the idea of the intuitive intellect, and by Kant’s conception of nature as a systematic unity

that must be conceived as if created according to the wise purposes of a supreme being, because he

believes that these ideas suggest how the heterogeneity of concepts and intuitions is somehow overcome.

These are highly complicated matters, and they will require a great deal of clarification in the chapters

that follow. At this point we have established only Hegel’s frustration with Kant for not awarding us the

powers of an intuitive form of intellect. I have just proposed that, without denying that we must rely on

both sensible intuitions and concepts, he seeks some way to defend the thesis that the “synthesis of

undetermined nature and the determinations of [our] understanding” can be for us (as for the intuitive

intellect) more than a “mere idea,” and that it is therefore also possible that, for us, “mechanical

explanation should harmonize with purposiveness” (D 163/103).

Of course, the claim that Hegel does not deny that we must rely both on concepts and sensible intuitions

requires defense. In Chapter Two, I lay the ground for my interpretation of what he has in mind in

challenging Kant’s commitment to the heterogeneity of concepts and intuitions. I try to specify the precise

nature of the harmony or unity Hegel admires in the intuitive model of cognition.

To anticipate: In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel characterizes the “true unity” of the intuitive intellect as an

“organic unity” (FK 91/GW 327). He correctly notes that Kant denies our discursive understanding this

kind of unity. Kant in other words denies us, in Hegel’s words, “rational knowledge, for which the

organism…is the higher principle of nature and the identity of the universal and the particular” (FK

90/GW 326). Our objective in Chapter Two will be to clarify the nature of the unity that nature as an

organism represents for Hegel. For as I have suggested, Hegel believes this is a unity human cognition is

capable of achieving.

Notes:

(1) This passage appears in the section, “The Notion [Begriff] in General,” SL 592/WL II 264.

(2) There is an interesting story to be told of the reception of Kant’s idea of the intuitive intellect, not just

by Hegel but also by some of his prominent contemporaries (such as Fichte and Schelling). I am not

concerned to tell that story here, but see the following essays in the Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed.

Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993): H. S. Harris, “Hegel’s

Intellectual Development to 1807,” 25–51; Beiser, “Introduction: Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics,”

1–24. See also Kenneth Westphal, “Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of ‘the’ Intuitive Intellect,” in The Reception

of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, ed. Sally Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2000), 283–305; and Klaus Düsing, “Die Entstehung des spekulativen Idealismus:

Schellings und Hegels Wandlungen zwischen 1800 und 1801,” in Transzendentalphilosophie und

Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer Ersten Philosophie (1799–1807), vol. 2, ed. W. Jaeschke

(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1993), 144–63. For an exploration of Goethe’s interest in Kant’s idea of

the intuitive intellect, see Eckart Förster, “The Significance of §§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment for

the Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1),” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 30 (2009),

1–21. This essay originally appeared in German as, “Die Bedeutung von §§ 76, 77 der Kritik der

Urteilskraft für die Entwicklung der nachkantischen Philosophie (Teil 1),” Zeitschrift für philosophische

Forschung 56, no. 2 (2002), 169–90.

(3) The point that Hegel does not set out to deny a role for both concepts and intuitions in cognition but is

rather critical of Kant’s particular account of the concept-intuition distinction, has been emphasized

by Robert Pippin, for example in “Concept and Intuition: On Distinguishability and Separability,” Hegel-

Studien 39/40, ed. Walter Jaeschke and Ludwig Siep (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2004/5), 26.

(4) In this paraphrase, Hegel writes of Kant’s “Idee eines anschauenden Verstandes,” “für welchen Begriffe

(die bloß auf die Möglichkeit eines Gegenstandes gehen) und sinnliche Anschauungen (welche uns etwas

geben, ohne es dadurch doch als Gegenstand erkennen zu lassen) beyde wegfallen” (FK 88/GW 324).

Hegel borrows from Kant’s text almost verbatim, omitting only “würden” in “würden beyde wegfallen.”

(5) The commentator I have quoted here is Charles Parsons. See his essay “The Transcendental Aesthetic,”

in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,

1992), 66. As Parsons notes in this essay, Kant gives us little explanation of the “immediacy”condition. It

is not obvious, for example, that Kant intends the immediacy condition as a mere corollary of the

singularity condition, as Jaakko Hintikka has argued (64).

(6) Kant writes in § 24 of the B-Deduction of the first Critique that pure concepts (“categories”) relate to

“objects of intuition” in general, whether sensible or not. For our form of understanding, pure concepts

must apply to objects of sensible intuition if they are to function as predicates of possible knowledge or

cognition [Erkennen] (versus of mere thought [Denken]), § 22. He defines sensibility as “the receptivity of

our mind to receive representations insofar as it is affected in some way” (CPR A 51/B 75).

Kant identifies “non-sensible” and “intellectual” intuitions at CPR B 307. He implies this identification

also at B 72, where he writes that, because “derived” and not “original,” our mode of intuiting is “sensible”

and “therefore not an intellectual intuition.”

(7) That is, Kant is writing here of the conditions governing our cognition of objects of nature, not of

mathematics. Our cognition of mathematical objects also relies on sensible intuition, but Kant does not

hold that mathematical cognition depends on “the existence of the object.” In mathematical cognition,

sensible intuition is “pure” versus “empirical.” The intuitions of mathematical cognition do not depend on

the “existence of the object” because, as pure, the content or matter of these intuitions is not given in

sensation (CPR A 20/B 34). In contrast, our cognitions of objects of nature are “dependent on the

existence of the object,” in that the matter of intuition is given in sensation. See Kant’s discussion of these

points in CPR B 34/A 20, and § 22.

(8) CJ § 77 [406].

(9) Kant claims that a “special act of synthesis” is necessary only for the “human understanding” that

“thinks only and does not intuit” (CPR B 139).

(10) In this passage, Kant seems to identify the intuitive understanding with a divine-like understanding

that, in producing its objects, is “cause of the world” (as he says in CJ § 77 [410]). As Eckart Förster notes,

however, some of Kant’s other descriptions of the intuitive intellect do not imply this identification. See

Förster’s paper, “The Significance of §§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgmentfor the Development of

Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1),” esp. 6–9. I discuss this point further in note 12.

(11) For illuminating discussions of Kant’s view of the kind of concepts employed by the intuitive

understanding, see Werner S. Pluhar in his introductory essay to his translation of the Critique of

Judgment, xci–xcii. See also the papers by Kenneth R. Westphal and Béatrice Longuenesse in

myReception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. (In Westphal’s essay, see esp. 284–5; in Longuenesse, esp.

261–2.) In “Thought and Being: Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” Cambridge

Companion to Hegel, 200, Paul Guyer writes that the intuitive understanding has “concepts” which are

“themselves the source of particulars and of all their determinations.” (In his note 21, he characterizes the

intuitive intellect described in CJ §§ 76–7 as, “an understanding whose particular objects would

somehow…be derived from its concepts.”)

Some have suggested that Kant’s model of an intuitive understanding derives inspiration from the

Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions, which characterize the representations of a supreme or divine

understanding as “ideas.” This point is argued by Klaus Düsing in his essays, “Äesthetische

Einbildungskraft und intuitiver Verstand. Kants Lehre und Hegels Spekulative-Idealistiche

Umdeutung,” Hegel-Studien 21 (1986), 105f., and “Naturtheologie und Metaphysik bei Kant und Hegel,”

in Hegel und die “Kritik der Urteilskraft”, eds.Hans-Friedrich Fulda and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart:

Klett-Cotta, 1990), 145. See also Manfred Baum, “Metaphysik und Kritik in Kants theoretischer

Philosophie,” in Klaus Held and Jochem Hennigfeld, eds., Kategorien der Existenz. Festschrift für

Wolfgang Janke, (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen und Neumann, 1993), 13–30. Baum reminds us of

passages from the section “Ideas in General” in the first Critique in which Kant expresses his admiration

for Plato’s doctrine according to which nature originates from the “ideas” of a “supreme understanding”

(CPR A 317/B 374).

(12) As Henry Allison explains, a discursive understanding cannot think of the whole as prior to and

conditioning the parts; it can only think of the whole as composed of and conditioned by its parts. It can

only think of the whole, that is, as an aggregate. This follows from the fact that the discursive intellect, for

Kant, cannot produce parts or particulars out of a synthetic universal: parts or particulars must be

independently given to it in sensible intuition. See Allison’s essay, “Kant’s Antinomy of Teleological

Judgment,” Southern Journal of Philosophy XXX (The Spindel Conference 1991 Supplement), (1992), 35.

For a further helpful examination of these features of our discursivity, see in the same volume, Rudolf A.

Makkreel, “Regulative and Reflective Uses of Purposivenesss in Kant,” 56ff.

As I pointed out in note 10 above, Kant’s characterization of the intuitive intellect as a “complete

spontaneity of intuition” and as therefore having the productive power of a “divine understanding” is

distinct from his characterization of the intuitive intellect as proceeding in cognition from the intuition of

the whole (from the “synthetic universal”) to parts or particulars. The idea of an intellect that proceeds

from the synthetic universal to parts or particulars does not in other words necessarily imply that such an

intellect possesses the causal powers of a divine mind. Eckart Förster wishes us to appreciate that Kant

“oscillates” between these two distinct descriptions. If I have understood him correctly, Förster

emphasizes this point because he wants us to bear in mind that although post-Kantians such as Goethe

and Hegel were intrigued by Kant’s idea of the intuitive intellect, they did notdefend the view that the

human mind has the God-like power to be “cause of the world.” See Förster’s paper, “The Significance of

§§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment for the Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1),” esp.

6–9.

(13) For our form of cognition, Kant writes in CJ § 76 [402], a distinction exists between an object’s being

merely thinkable (as a possible concept) and its being actual. But what we cannot assume, he claims, is

that “thought and intuition are two distinct conditions of the exercise of cognitive powers

forevery cognitive [erkennende] being” (emphasis added).

(14) See Kant’s note on the distinction between logical and real possibility at CPR B xxvi.

(15) A question that naturally arises here is this: Is the contingency that obtains between the universal and

the particular, according to Kant, a contingency between empirical concepts and particulars or between

our pure concepts or categories and particulars (or both)? Since sensible intuition plays no role

whatsoever in the formation of the pure concepts or “categories,” it seems clear that Kant must be

committed to the view that there is contingency in the relation between the categories and given sensible

particulars. As for empirical concepts, they are not simply deduced out of pure concepts or principles of

understanding, in his view. But neither are they simply given in empirical intuition. (Sensible intuitions

on Kant’s account do not present themselves to us pre-sorted into empirical classifications.) Because

empirical concepts are not simply given to us in sensible intuition, for Kant, he presumably holds that

there is contingency in their relation to sensible particulars as well.

As Ralf Meerbote observes, this “contingency of fit” problem is evidence of a “realist and a posteriori”

component in Kant’s account of reference and truth. Our cognitive achievements depend only in part, for

Kant, on the concepts we bring to perception. If cognition depended on our conceptual classifications

alone, there would be no “gap” between our concepts and the given data of sense. SeeMeerbote’s essay,

“Systematicity and Realism in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy XXX

(The Spindel Conference 1991 Supplement), (1992), 132ff.

(16) In this paragraph, Kant provides the following example to illustrate how the logical maxim requiring

us to reduce diversity to identity guides us in cognition: He asks us to consider the way in which we

classify our various mental dispositions. At first glance, he explains, we might be tempted to trace

“sensation, consciousness, imagination, memory, wit, power of discrimination, desire, appetite, etc.” each

back to a distinct cause. Guided by our logical maxim, however, we judge that these various appearances

are in fact different expressions of the same fundamental forces (of the faculties, perhaps, of

“understanding and reason,” Kant suggests). Our logical maxim urges us on to discover identity in the

wide array of “comparative fundamental forces.” We are to reduce the diversity of natural causes, in other

words, to some “single radical…absolute fundamental power” (CPR A 649/B 677).

(17) Kant further specifies into three separate principles the general “logical maxim” guiding all empirical

inquiry. He summarizes his discussion of the three principles at CPR A 657/B 685: “Reason thus prepares

the field for the understanding: (1) through a principle of homogeneity [Gleichartigkeit] of the manifold

under higher genera; (2) through a principle of the variety of the homogeneous under lower species; and

(3) in order to complete the systematic unity, a further law, that of the affinity of all concepts—a law

which prescribes a continuous transition from each species to every other by gradual increase of diversity.”

(18) “[E]veryone presupposes,” he writes, “that the unity of reason accords with nature itself” (CPR A

653/B 681).

(19) In Kant’s German, we presuppose that the parsimony of principles is “nicht bloß ein ökonomischer

Grundsatz der Vernunft, sondern inneres Gesetz der Natur.” Here I have departed from the translation of

the Guyer and Wood 1998 edition, which renders “inneres Gesetz der Natur” as “an inner law of its [i.e.

reason’s] nature.” Although the parsimony in principles Kant writes of here is indeed a requirement or law

of reason, he means in this context to emphasize the fact that this principle istranscendental. As such,

what we assume is that the unity is not merely a principle of reason but is in nature. (See, again, CPR A

650f./B 678f.)

(20) This point that the principle of systematic unity, although regulative, is nonetheless an indispensable

condition of empirical inquiry, is stressed by Henry Allison in, “Is Kant’s Critique of Judgment ‘Post-

Critical’?” The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy, 82.

(21) Ideas of pure reason, including the idea of systematic unity, are “heuristic” versus “ostensive” concepts,

Kant tells us at CPR A 671/B 699. These ideas do not govern the constitution of their objects in empirical

intuition; indeed, their objects do not appear in empirical intuition at all. Ideas of pure reason are

heuristic in that they guide the faculty of understanding in achieving the thoroughgoing unity of its

concepts.

(22) For an illuminating study of Kant’s distinction between the constitutive principles (and categories) of

pure understanding, and the regulative ideas and principles of reason, see Michael Friedman’s essay

“Regulative and Constitutive,” Southern Journal of Philosophy XXX (The Spindel Conference 1991

Supplement), (1991), 73–102.

(23) Henry Allison articulates this point as follows: For our discursive understanding, “universal principles

underdetermine the particulars following under them.” In “Kant’s Antinomy of Teleological Judgment,”

34. Ralf Meerbote elaborates Kant’s idea in a similar way. On Kant’s account, Meerbote writes, perceptual

content “comes to us with no identity conditions on its own.” Concepts, on the other hand, “discursively

constitute some similarities as identity conditions, smoothing over many other features. All of the

similarities and features in question are ill-defined in terms of perceptual resources alone, and our

understanding radically simplifies what is perceptually presented.” In “Systematicity and Realism in

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,” 132.

(24) Kant assigns reflective judgment the role of reducing the variety of the given sensible particulars to

identity, of seeking some general concept or universal under which to subsume the diversity of species.

“[I]f…the particular is given and judgment has to find the universal for it, then this power is merely

reflective [reflektierend]” (CJ, Second Intro. IV [179]). In seeking some universal under which to subsume

the given diversity, reflective judgment seeks the unity of particular empirical principles or laws under

more general principles. Its role contrasts with that of “determinative [bestimmende] judgment” which,

on Kant’s account, is “subsumptive [subsumierend].” Determinative judgment begins with some universal

(some a priori rule, law, or principle) and subsumes the particular under it (CJ, Second Intro. IV [179]).

For example, determinative judgment subsumes all objects of nature under the principles of pure

understanding. All objects of nature must conform to (be subsumed under) the law, for instance, that “all

events are caused” (CJ, Second Intro. V [183f.]).

(25) For lucid discussions of Kant’s account of the role of reflective judgment in empirical concept

formation, see Hannah Ginsborg, “Reflective Judgment and Taste,” Noûs XXIV, no. 1 (1990), 65–7; Henry

Allison, “Is Kant’s Critique of Judgment ‘Post-Critical’?,” 83–6; Rachel Zuckert, Kant on Beauty and

Biology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter two; and Paul Guyer, “Reason and

Reflective Judgment: Kant on the Significance of Systematicity,” Noûs XXIV, no. 1 (1990), 17–43.

(26) “[T]his distinguishing feature of the idea of a natural purpose concerns a peculiarity of our(human)

understanding in relation to the power of judgment and its reflection on things of nature. But if this is so,

then we must here be presupposing the idea of some possible understanding different from the human

one” (CJ § 77 [405]).

(27) Taken together, these passages once again seem to imply that Kant identifies the intuitive intellect and

the divine understanding or “cause of the world.” On his own account, however, an intellect that is

intuitive or non-discursive is an intellect that is productive of its own objects or intuitions. This definition

does not commit him to the view that the intuitions of the intuitive intellect must be identical to those of a

divine mind. Other models of what an intuitive understanding might be like are therefore compatible with

Kant’s own definition of this mode of understanding as “original” versus “dependent.”

(28) This point is emphasized by Manfred Baum in his essays, “Kants Prinzip der Zweckmäßigkeit und

Hegels Realisierung des Begriffs,” in Hegel Und Die “Kritik Der Urteilskraft,” ed. Hans-Friedrich Fulda

and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 168, and “Metaphysik und Kritik in Kants

theoretischer Philosophie,” 30.

(29) In the Transcendental Aesthetic § 1, Kant defines appearance [Erscheinung] as the “undetermined

object of empirical intuition.” Kant’s aim in the Aesthetic is to lay out the a priori conditions under which

objects are given to us in sensible intuition. Appearances must be given to us via our a priori forms of

intuition, space and time. Their lack of determination in this context must refer to the fact that Kant has

not yet introduced the role of the categories in providing the conditions without which appearances could

not be objects of thought.

(30) Kant, in addition, entertains the possibility that there may be beings whose mode of cognition is

discursive and who thus share with us a reliance on sensible intuition, but whose forms of sensible

intuition are different than our own. While it may be, he writes, that all finite thinking beings intuit by

means of the same forms of intuition that we do, “we are not in a position to judge whether this is actually

so” (CPR B 72).

(31) Henry Allison stresses this point in his essay, “Kant’s Antinomy of Teleological Judgment.” Allison’s

analysis very much informs my discussion here.

(32) Hegel notes this point also in EL § 55: “The principle of an intuitive intellect is ascribed to reflective

faculty judgment, that is, to an understanding for which the particular…would itself be determined

through this universal itself—as is experienced in products of art and of organic nature.”

(33) Eckart Förster argues that Hegel makes the mistake in Faith and Knowledge of interpreting Kant’s

idea of an intuitive intellect narrowly to refer to the divine mind. But as I mentioned back in note 12,

Förster concedes that Kant himself does not always clearly distinguish the two and sometimes seems to

imply that an intellect that proceeds from the synthetically universal to the parts must be a divine

understanding that causes nature. See Förster’s, “The Significance of §§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of

Judgment for the Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1),” 8. In the sequel to that paper,

Förster draws our attention to development in the early Hegel’s thinking about Kant’s idea of an intuitive

understanding, and he has much to say about the important role Goethe plays in that development. See

his essay, “Die Bedeutung von §§ 76, 77 der Kritik der Urteilskraft für die Entwicklung der

nachkantischen Philosophie: Teil II,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 56, no. 3 (2002).

(34) Remarks of this kind appear throughout Hegel’s writings. See, for example, the passage from the

1816 Science of Logic with which we began this chapter. There Hegel notes that Kant recognized in the

idea of an intuitive intellect a “higher unity” of thought and sensible existence, but remained committed to

the view that, for our mode of cognition, concepts and reality must forever remain separate (SL 592/WL II

264). Hegel expresses his worries, in these pages, about the fact that, for Kant, ideas of reason have at

most a merely regulative employment (SL 590/WL II 262).

Organic Unity as the “True Unity” of the

Intuitive Intellect

That which has died the death of dichotomy, philosophy raises to life through absolute identity.

(D 195/137)

In Chapter One, we considered the principal features of Kant’s distinction between discursive and

intuitive forms of cognition. We discovered the sense in which, on his portrayal, the intuitive intellect is a

“complete spontaneity…of intuition”: it generates or produces its intuitions from its own acts of cognition

(CJ § 77 [406]). We discovered in addition that since the intuitive intellect generates its intuitions (out of

the “synthetically universal,” as Kant says, or out of the “intuition of a whole as a whole”), its intuitions do

not need to be subsumed under discursive concepts (under the “analytically universal”) (CJ § 77 [407]).

The intuitions of the intuitive understanding come into being, in effect, as already formed or

conceptualized contents. We also saw that Kant takes it to follow from the fact that our mode of cognition

is discursive rather than intuitive, that we must rely on independently given sensible intuitions, and that

we must subsume those intuitions under (discursive) universals or concepts in order to cognize them.

Kant claims that we have no grounds for assuming a necessary harmony between the given sensible

particulars and our concepts, but he argues that we must as a condition of empirical inquiry assume that

such a harmony obtains. Because our mode of cognition is discursive, we must in other words presuppose

that nature is a systematic unity or purposively arranged whole.

We also reviewed further implications of the thesis of discursivity for Kant’s Critical philosophy. From the

fact of our discursivity, and from a thesis about the way in which independently given sensible intuitions

must affect us (namely, via our “forms of intuition,” space and time), Kant concludes that our knowledge

is restricted to “appearances.” He notes, however, that this restriction need not hold for a form of

cognition that, unlike ours, does not depend on an independently given content. He acknowledges that

objects that do not appear to us in space and time and that are therefore not possible objects of our

knowledge, may indeed be known by a non-discursive or intuitive mode of cognition. Kant moreover

argues that although

our knowledge is restricted to appearances, this limitation has a significant positive advantage. For this

restriction, and the distinction between “appearances” and “things in themselves” upon which it rests, is

precisely what provides a solution to the “crisis” into which he believes metaphysics has fallen, the crisis

that threatens to destroy human reason itself. Kant argues that it is only if we acknowledge the proper

limits of our knowledge and grant the unknowability, for us, of things in themselves, that we can save

reason from self-contradiction or antinomy. The thesis about human discursivity, then, is an essential

premise in Kant’s argument for saving metaphysics.

In our conclusion to Chapter One, we highlighted passages in which Hegel reveals his familiarity with

these key Kantian doctrines. We also reviewed remarks in which he criticizes Kant for regarding the

discursive mode of cognition “as absolute” and for denying us at least some of the powers of an intuitive

intellect (FK 77/GW 313). I suggested that Hegel’s own account of human cognition draws inspiration

from the intuitive model, and that we can therefore derive clues from that model to his own view of the

nature and limits of our knowledge.

Our task in the present chapter is to identify further features of the intuitive intellect that inspire Hegel’s

own understanding of the nature of human cognition. So far, I have proposed that he is not out to

establish that, in our cognitions of nature, it is possible for us to dispense either with concepts or with

sensible intuitions. Instead, he challenges Kant’s commitment to the thesis that, for us, concepts and

sensible intuitions are “ ‘two entirely heterogeneous parts’ ” (FK 89/GW 325). I suggested that the idea of

the intuitive intellect is of interest to Hegel precisely because it suggests a model of cognition in which the

heterogeneity of concepts and intuitions is overcome. As we saw, Kant grants that as a condition of

empirical inquiry we must presuppose a unity or harmony between the given sensible particulars and our

conceptual determinations. In his view, only an intellect that is intuitive is capable of actually knowing

and experiencing nature as a unity of concepts and intuitions. In our conclusion to Chapter One, I noted

Hegel’s intriguing description of the “true unity” of the intuitive intellect as “organic unity” (FK 91/GW

327). In Kant’s idea of organic unity, he says, we are offered a model of the “identity of the universal and

the particular” (FK 90/GW 326).1

Our central aim in this chapter is to determine what Kant’s model of organic unity suggests to Hegel about

the “true unity” achieved by the intuitive intellect. I begin in section 2.1 with a brief characterization of

Kant’s definition of organisms in especially §§ 64 and 65 of the Critique of Judgment. As we shall see, the

parts and whole of an organism, for Kant, stand in a relation of purposive reciprocal determination. Parts

are related to the whole as if purposively arranged or designed, and the whole relates to the parts as if

purposively sustained by them.

In section 2.2, I recall the Kantian point that purposes are not possible objects of human knowledge or

experience. Although we must, as a condition of empirical inquiry, think of nature as a purposively

arranged whole (as an organic unity), we have no grounds in his view for expecting to discover purposes

in nature. If purposes are known or experienced at all, they are known or experienced only by a mode of

cognition for which there is a necessary harmony between its ideas of nature and parts of nature. This

would be a non-discursive or intuitive mode of cognition which produces its objects in the very act of

cognizing them.

I return in section 2.3 to Hegel’s fascination with the idea of organic unity as containing the key to how he

thinks human cognition is able to achieve the identity of universal and particular, of concept and intuition.

I suggest that achieving identity, for Hegel, is neither a matter of depriving concepts and intuitions of a

role in human cognition altogether, nor a matter of reducing one component of cognition to the other.

Instead, we achieve identity, in his view, by recognizing the way in which the two components stand to

each other in a relation of reciprocal determination.

In section 2.4, I examine passages from Hegel’s Difference essay that further fill out his account of

concepts and intuitions as reciprocally conditioning elements of human cognition. With Schelling, Hegel

argues that we should recognize that concepts and intuitions (or intelligence and nature) are not

absolutely heterogeneous or opposed, but are rather each “subject-object.” Just as nature is an “immanent

ideality,” he writes, so is intelligence or subjectivity an “immanent reality” (D 166/107).

Finally, I rely on the Difference essay in section 2.5 to explain how Hegel thinks we should regard the

sciences of subject and object (of intelligence and nature). Hegel warns against efforts either to reduce one

science to the other or to privilege one science over the other. He argues that both Kant and Fichte fail to

recognize the unity of the two sciences because each philosopher in effect privileges the science of

intelligence over that of nature. This privileging of the science of intelligence is responsible, Hegel claims,

for the ultimate “subjectivity” of their idealisms. What we learn from our review of this discussion

in Difference, then, is that the key to replacing heterogeneity with identity, for Hegel, requires (among

other things) that we give up the “subjectivity” of our idealism.

2.1 Natural products as organisms in the Critique of

Judgment

We first need to familiarize ourselves with the context in which Kant’s discussions of organic unity come

into play. Beginning in § 64 of the Critique of Teleological Judgment, he sets out to explicate in far greater

detail than he did in the Critique of Pure Reason what it means to consider objects of nature (or “natural

products,” as he calls them here) as purposive (as “natural purposes”). As we shall see, he argues that

when we consider natural products as natural purposes, we take them to possess special causal properties.

Qua natural purpose, a natural product, Kant tells us, is “both cause and effect of itself.” When we think of

natural products in this way, he goes on to point out, we treat them as “self-organizing” beings or

organisms.

Taking these points in turn, Kant begins CJ § 64 by explaining what it means to say a thing is possible as a

purpose:

To say that a thing is possible only as a purpose is to say that the causality that gave rise to it must be

sought, not in the mechanism of nature, but in a cause whose ability to act is determined by concepts.

(CJ § 64 [369])

In what sense can a cause be “determined by concepts”? Kant illustrates what he has in mind by asking us

to imagine a geometric figure traced in the sand. We would not judge such a figure to be produced by any

non-rational cause or merely natural law, he says. Instead, we would assume its cause to be, in his words,

“the concept of such an object, a concept that only reason can provide” (CJ § 64 [370]). By this, he seems

to mean that we would assume that the figure owes its form and existence, not to blind mechanical forces,

but to the intentions of a rational agent.

Of course, a geometric figure drawn in the sand is a product of art rather than a natural purpose, and it is

the notion of natural purpose [Naturzweck] that Kant is ultimately concerned to elucidate in these

passages. We think of the figure in the sand, he says, not merely as produced by a rational versus purely

mechanical cause, but also as produced by a rational cause distinct from the figure itself. We do not

suppose in the case of artifacts, in other words, that their parts are themselves in any way responsible for

the purpose or form of the whole. The rational plan or cause that determines the production of the figure

in the sand is nowhere to be discovered in the parts of the figure itself. Rather, we assume that the figure’s

cause is not nature at all (not even natural purposes), but, as Kant says, “art” (CJ § 64 [370]). In the case

of an artifact, then, the thing’s purpose, as he puts it, is a cause “distinct from the matter of the thing” or

“distinct from a thing’s parts” (CJ § 65 [373]).

The distinguishing feature of a thing considered as a natural purpose, however, is that it has “in itself and

its inner possibility [in sich selbst und seiner inneren Möglichkeit]” relation to purposes (CJ § 65 [373]).

Rather than determined by a “causality of the concepts of rational beings,” a natural purpose, in Kant’s

words, is “an organized and self-organizing being” (CJ § 65 [374]). Kant admits that this notion of

natural purposes as “

self-organizing” is mysterious or “inscrutable.” A natural purpose is “both cause and effect of itself”; as

such, it is governed by a form of causality that, in his words, “has nothing analogous to any causality

known to us” (CJ § 65 [374]).

Using the example of a tree, Kant outlines three ways in which a natural purpose may be thought to have

this special kind of causal power such that it may be described as both cause and effect of itself. First, a

tree both generates and is generated by itself qua species in the following way: By natural law, a tree

generates or brings into being (from its seedlings) another tree. There is a sense in which, in causing or

generating the second tree, the first tree also causes itself. In generating the second tree, the first tree

reproduces itself as a species. In this way, Kant explains, the first tree (qua species) is both cause and

effect of itself. Second, the tree produces itself as an individual. It does this simply by growing. Growth,

Kant points out, is more than merely the increase in a thing’s size or matter caused by mechanical laws.

Growth is also a process by means of which parts of a thing “separate and combine” that added matter in

a particular way, in a way that produces or causes the thing as an individual member of a species (CJ §

64 [371]). Finally, a natural purpose is both cause and effect of itself in that its parts depend on each other

for their existence. The leaves of a tree are products of the tree and its trunk. But the growth of a tree

depends on the effects of its leaves on its trunk. As Kant points out, repeated defoliation would ultimately

kill the tree. Though “produced by the tree,” the leaves of the tree also “sustain it in turn” (CJ § 64 [371f.]).

We can summarize the main points of Kant’s treatment of natural purposes as follows: For a thing to

count as a natural purpose, two conditions must obtain. First, its cause must be sought “not in the

mechanism of nature, but in a cause…determined by concepts” (CJ § 64 [369]). Sometimes Kant

expresses this first condition by telling us that considered as a natural purpose, the possibility of a thing’s

parts “(as concerns both their existence and their form) must depend on their relation to a whole.” Parts

depend on a whole in the sense that the thing qua natural purpose, “is covered by a concept or idea that

must determine a priori everything that the thing is to contain” (CJ § 65 [373]). Here Kant draws

attention to a feature natural purposes share in common with artifacts: their parts are not merely

contingently or accidently related, but related according to some design or plan. The form and existence of

natural purposes, that is, cannot be adequately explained with references to blind forces of nature. Were

we to rely on mechanical explanation alone, Kant writes, we would have to say regarding the structure of

the wings of birds, for example, that it is “utterly contingent” that the wings were so structured as to allow

birds to fly (CJ § 61 [360]).

Second, we assume that natural purposes are self-caused or self-organizing. In this respect, natural

purposes differ from artifacts. In the case of artifacts (such as a geometrical figure drawn in the sand),

parts are said to depend on the whole as products of some rational plan or cause—a plan or cause that is

“distinct from the matter of the thing,” as Kant says. Although the causality of artifacts, as we saw, must

be sought not in the “mechanism of nature” but in “concepts,” our explanation of the production of

artifacts shares with mechanical explanation a reliance on a causality of efficient causes.

In mechanical explanation, we say that an effect depends on a cause but not vice versa. As Kant puts it, in

our purely mechanical explanations, we think of causal connection in terms of a descending series: “the

things that are the effects, and that hence presuppose others as their causes, cannot themselves in turn be

causes of those others” (CJ § 65 [372]). In the case of natural purposes, however, the effect of something is

also the cause of that thing. Unlike artifacts, natural purposes are self-organizing; they possess within

themselves a “formative” force by means of which they are capable of maintaining and generating

themselves (and ultimately nature as a whole) (CJ § 65 [374]). Their plan or purpose, rather than “distinct

from the matter of the thing,” is somehow immanent in natural processes themselves.2

In explaining natural purposes, then, we have to rely on something other than the model of efficient

causation. When we invoke a causality of natural purposes, in Kant’s words, “here we could call a thing

the effect of something and still be entitled to call it, as the series ascends, the cause of something as well”

(CJ § 65 [372]).3 Qua natural purpose, a natural product is thus “both cause and effect of itself” (CJ § 64

[370]). Each of its parts exists as an effect of the whole, in that each part depends both for its “existence”

and its “form” on the whole. But there is causality in the other direction as well. Each part must in

addition be thought of as playing a role in the production of the whole. We treat each part, Kant writes,

“as an organ that produces the other parts (so that each reciprocally produces the other)” (CJ § 65 [375]).

Parts of a natural purpose must “produce one another as regards both their form and their combination”;

in this way, “they produce a whole” (CJ § 65 [373]).4

As if to try one last time to illustrate his notion of natural purposes, Kant asks us to consider the way in

which members of a “certain association” are related to the association as a whole. In an intriguing

footnote in § 65, he refers to recent “complete transformation of a large people into a state,” and describes

the organization as follows: “[E]ach member in such a whole should indeed be not merely a means, but

also a purpose; and while each member contributes to making the whole possible, the idea of that whole

should in turn determine the member’s position and function.” Kant does not elaborate here on the

precise sense in which this state and its members “make each other possible.” He indicates only that this

example illustrates the reciprocal form of causality that, in his view, characterizes the relations of parts to

whole in organized natural products.

We might wonder at this point just how far Kant takes the formative power of natural purposes and their

parts to extend. Does the self-organizing power of nature, on his account, include the power to produce or

generate the organizing principle itself? Qua purposive, a thing, as he says, is “covered by a concept or

idea that must determine a priori everything that the thing is to contain” (CJ § 65 [373]). But from what

does this concept or idea derive? Kant notes that, qua natural purpose, the plan of a thing is not supposed

to originate from some cause distinct from its matter. This is why he writes that the form of causality

enjoyed by natural purposes is not “conceivable or explicable on any analogy to any known physical

ability…[and] not even…on a precisely fitting analogy to human art” (CJ § 65 [375]). Should we think of

natural purposes in the way we think of products of art, he tells us, we say “far too little.” We say too little

to capture the notion of self-organization because, as we have seen, products of art are not self-organizing.

Should we think of natural purposes in the way in which we think of life, however, we fare no better. For if

we defend the claim (of “hylozoism”) that matter is somehow governed by an “inner animating principle”

(for example, a “world soul”), and that we should conceive of matter as having mental powers and

intentionality, we contradict what Kant insists is the “essential character of matter,” namely

“lifelessness…inertia” (CJ § 73 [394]). For this reason, hylozoism, too, does not offer us a viable

description of what it means to be a natural purpose.5 Kant furthermore rejects the model whereby life or

soul is somehow “conjoined” to matter as an alien principle.

This model is no more successful in capturing the self-organizing character of natural products. If we

think of natural purposes as analogous to life in this way, he says, we again lose what distinguishes them

from artifacts.

Later on, at CJ § 81, Kant returns to the question of the origin of nature’s organizing principle. He rejects

the approach of occasionalism according to which some supreme cause directly gives matter its

organization. Presumably, his rejection of this approach is tied to the fact that it compromises the self-

organizing character of natural purposes as well. He seems more sympathetic to the theory of pre-

established harmony, which proposes that the supreme being imparts only the predisposition to organic

unity. Among variations of the pre-established harmony hypothesis, he favors that of “epigenesis.”

According to this view, individual bodies themselves have formative force and the capacity to actually

produce (rather than merely develop a pre-given) organic unity. This view is to be preferred, Kant says,

because it “minimizes appeal to the supernatural.” “[A]fter the first beginning,” he continues, it “leaves

everything to nature” (CJ § 81 [424]).6

2.2 Nature as experienced by the intuitive intellect

In due course we will discover the significance, for Hegel, of Kant’s idea that there exists between the

parts and whole of an organism a relation of purposive reciprocal causality. So far, we know only that this

special kind of causality is supposed to characterize the relations of parts to each other and to a whole in

organized natural products, and that it is responsible for what Hegel claims is the “true unity” that is the

“organic unity of an intuitive intellect” (FK 91/GW 327). Kant repeatedly reminds us that this unity is for

our discursive understanding merely a regulative idea or maxim. If organic unity is experienced or known

at all, in his view, it is experienced or known only by a form of understanding different from our own, a

form of understanding that is intuitive.

In light of the fact that Hegel sets out to establish, against Kant, that we are capable of at least some of the

cognitive achievements of the intuitive intellect, we need as complete a picture as possible of Kant’s

understanding of the nature of those achievements. As just noted, an intellect that is intuitive experiences

nature as an organic unity. How, exactly, does the intuitive intellect’s experience differ from our own?

We can draw much of our answer from the material we reviewed in Chapter One. We know that for a non-

discursive or intuitive understanding, parts or particulars, rather than independently given, are produced

out of the “synthetically universal,” out

of the “intuition of the whole as whole” (CJ § 77 [407]). For the intuitive understanding, both (discursive

or general) concepts as well as sensible intuitions “fall away.” Concepts fall away, presumably, because the

intuitions produced by the intuitive intellect are given as already formed or synthesized. Moreover, since

the intuitive intellect produces parts or particulars out of the intuited whole, there is for it no contingency

either in how parts or particulars are given or in their relation to the whole. Nor, as we have seen, is there

for such an understanding any distinction between what is merely logically or conceptually possible and

what is real. Because the intuiting activity of the intuitive intellect generates the existence of its objects, all

of its objects are necessarily actual (CJ § 76 [403]).

We also saw in Chapter One that there is for the intuitive form of understanding, on Kant’s account, no

distinction between mechanism and teleology (no distinction, as he puts it, between “natural mechanism

and the technic of nature, i.e. connection in it in terms of purposes”) (CJ § 76 [404]). For usthere must be

such a distinction, because although we necessarily rely on the idea of systematic or purposively arranged

unity in our cognitions of nature, this is an idea for which mechanism can provide no evidentiary basis.

Mechanism, in other words, can provide no warrant for our idea of a necessary conformity of the

particulars given to us in sensible intuition to our universals or concepts. For our mode of understanding,

as we noted in section 2.1, mechanical explanation seeks, for everything that happens, antecedent causal

conditions. It offers an account of the natural forces and elements necessary for a tree’s growth, but it

cannot explain the processes by means of which the treeuses the elements and forces required for its

growth and so reproduces or causes itself. Mechanism cannot in other words explain how the tree’s

growth and its capacity for self-preservation is as ifdesigned versus merely contingent.7 If we rely on

mechanical explanation alone, we thus have no way to conceive of the properties of a natural product as

proceeding, not just from efficient causes, but also from its own capacities of self-generation. On the

model of mechanical explanation, a natural product is thus a mere effect (of blind mechanical forces); it

cannot be thought of as “both cause and effect of itself.”8

This is why Kant argues that, for our discursive understanding, the idea of nature as a systematic unity or

purposively arranged whole, “leads reason into an order of things wholly different from that of a mere

natural mechanism” (CJ § 66 [377]). The concept of purpose leads beyond mechanism because, “the

purpose of the existence of nature itself must be sought beyond nature” (CJ § 67 [378]). Here Kant

reminds us that we are not warranted in inferring from the fact that we must, as a condition of empirical

inquiry, think of nature as a systematic unity governed by a causality of purposes, that it is possible for us

to know nature as such a unity. Unlike efficient natural causes, final causes or purposes are not possible

objects of human experience (CJ § 75 [399]). The subjective maxim that “Everything in the world is good

for something or other; nothing in it is gratuitous,” Kant writes, “only serves as a guide that allows us to

consider natural things in terms of a new law-governed order by referring them to an already given basis

[a purpose] as that which determines them” (CJ § 67 [379]). The maxim is regulative of our inquiry, but

we have no grounds for asserting that it is constitutive of nature itself.

Kant furthermore cautions us to bear in mind that the fact of our discursivity implies merely

that wecannot think of natural products as natural purposes or organisms without invoking a causality of

purposes—without, that is, presupposing a basis that is “beyond nature” or supersensible, and without

presupposing that appearances are produced intentionally (CJ § 75 [398]).9 It is merely for us that

purposes can never be possible objects of experience. But from the fact that “we need the idea of purposes,”

it does not follow that “every thinking and cognizing being is subject to the same need as a necessary

condition” (CJ § 75 [399]; emphasis added). An intuitive understanding requires no such appeal to a

special kind of causality. Since it produces its parts or particulars out of a “synthetic universal,” an

intuitive understanding experiences a relation of necessary harmony between its ideas or universals and

its parts.

In summary, we can characterize the experience of the intuitive intellect as follows: The intuitive intellect

experiences as constitutive of nature itself a necessary harmony between parts of nature and nature as a

whole. This harmony is not for it a regulative idea necessary for its cognition of nature; instead, the

intuitive intellect on Kant’s conception is warranted in assuming that nature itself is in perfect agreement

with its cognitive powers. The intuitive intellect experiences this agreement or unity, we

might also say, not as intentionally produced or caused by an external power, but as a product of nature’s

own laws. Its knowledge or experience of nature in no way rests, as ours does, on a supersensible basis.10

This completes our discussion of how the intuitive intellect’s experience of nature differs from our own,

according to Kant. The intuitive intellect experiences nature as an organic unity, as a necessary and

mutually sustaining harmony of parts and whole. The idea of nature as an organic unity thus serves to

specify for Kant the object of the intuitive intellect’s knowledge or experience. More than that, however,

the idea of nature as an organic unity also provides a model of the intuitive intellect’s mode of

knowing.11 This is apparent in at least three ways: First, in an organism the possibility of a thing’s parts, in

Kant’s words, “(as concerns both their existence and their form) must depend on their relation to a whole”

(CJ § 65 [373]). Similarly, the intuitions of the intuitive intellect, rather than independently given, are

produced out of the “synthetically universal”—out of the “intuition of the whole as whole” (CJ § 77 [407]).

Second, because parts of an organism are determined by the whole “as if” designed to sustain and

reproduce it, parts stand in a relation of necessary harmony to the whole. Likewise, for the intuitive

intellect, there is between parts and the synthetically universal no contingency or lack of fit. There is a

necessary harmony between parts and whole in the cognitions of the intuitive intellect, because parts or

particulars are produced from its “intuition of the whole as whole.” Finally, an organism on Kant’s

conception differs from an artifact in being self-organized and self-sustaining. Its organization is not

accounted for by appeal to an outside designer; its cause is not distinct from its matter, as Kant says (CJ §

65 [373]). In the same way, the intuitive intellect’s mode of cognition is non-dependent or “original” (CPR

B 72). It relies on nothing other than its own cognitive activity for both the production and determination

of its intuitions.12

2.3 From heterogeneity to identity

Now that we have filled in more details of the cognitive capacities of the intuitive intellect and the nature

of its experience, we can return to the question we raised in the opening paragraphs of this chapter: Why

does Hegel criticize Kant for denying us the powers of an intuitive form of understanding? To formulate

this question in a different way, why does he claim that Kant was mistaken in taking our discursive form

of understanding to be “absolute” (FK 77/GW 313)? Earlier, I noted a number of reasons we might have

for not taking Hegel’s challenges seriously. I noted that, at least at first glance, they seem to presuppose a

far too generous estimation of the capacities of human cognition. They seem to suggest that, in his view,

our understanding does not rely on independently given sensible intuitions at all because it is able to

produce objects in the very act of cognizing (or intuiting) them. Hegel’s challenges may furthermore be

interpreted to suggest that he believes we share with an intuitive form of understanding every justification

for claiming that our concepts (even of objects Kant would classify as supersensible) invariably capture

the nature of what is “really” versus merely “logically” possible, and that we are warranted in assuming a

perfect harmony between our concepts and their objects.

But I have proposed an alternative interpretation of Hegel’s appreciation for the intuitive model. In

particular, I have suggested that we not assume that he set out to establish that our understanding is like

that of an intuitive intellect in the following respect: that for us, as for the intuitive intellect, both concepts

and sensible intuitions “fall away.” Our reading of Hegel’s critique is more on track, I believe, if we instead

take him to challenge Kant’s particular conception of the nature and function of our concepts and sensible

intuitions (and of the faculties responsible for them). This suggestion is so far quite vague and I have

offered little in support of it. Up to this point, I have merely drawn attention to a few passages that

contain clues to how our reconstruction of Hegel’s critique should proceed.

In one such passage (a passage we reviewed from Faith and Knowledge), Hegel objects to Kant’s

insistence that, for our understanding, “the universal and particular are inevitably and necessarily

distinct.” He paraphrases Kant’s remark in CJ § 76 [401] that, “[t]he intellect is for concepts, sensible

intuition for objects—they are two entirely heterogeneous parts” (FK 89/GW 325; emphasis added).

Notice that these remarks need not be interpreted as calling into question Kant’s assumption that human

cognition must rely on the two faculties of understanding and of intuition (the faculties of the universal

and of the particular). It is not obvious, in other words, that the message Hegel means to convey is that we

achieve identity by collapsing the distinction between the two faculties and their functions, and reducing

one to the other. What is obvious is that Hegel’s challenge, in this and numerous other passages, is

directed at what he refers to as the assumption of “heterogeneity.” We don’t yet know just what he has in

mind by this; we know only that he opposes the “heterogeneity” of the universal and the particular to the

“true” or “organic” unity that he says is the unity of the intuitive

intellect (FK 91/GW 327). We know that the model of organic unity, in his view, substitutes for

heterogeneity the “identity of the universal and the particular” (FK 90/GW 326; emphasis added).13

This clue—that Hegel calls into question not Kant’s insistence that our discursive form of understanding

must rely on sensible intuitions as well as concepts, but rather his commitment to their heterogeneity—

will determine the course of our discussion in what follows. Since I am proposing that the charge of

heterogeneity is key, the overall persuasiveness of my account of Hegel’s critique will of course rest on the

interpretation I provide of it.

In my introductory chapter, I noted that Hegel has been interpreted as recommending, as the remedy for

heterogeneity, precisely the reductive approach I sketched a moment ago. On this interpretation, he aims

to replace Kant’s assumption of heterogeneity with the thesis that, for our understanding,sensible

intuitions reduce to concepts. According to this view, we do not in our cognitions of nature rely on

independently given sensible intuitions at all. We do not rely on sensible affection, because we have the

power to bring objects of experience into being merely by thinking them. Our cognitions of nature, then,

do not require the cooperation of two independent faculties, a faculty of concepts and a faculty of

intuitions. We have one faculty, the faculty of the intellect or understanding, and its concepts or ideas

supply sensible intuitions. This interpretation claims to derive confirmation from Hegel’s fascination with

the creative powers of the intuitive intellect. It portrays him as committed to an extreme form of

rationalism, according to which the material world is simply a product or objectification of the human

mind.

Others suppose, however, that the reduction for Hegel proceeds in the opposite direction. On this

interpretation, Hegel’s insistence upon identity is taken to imply that our concepts reduce to intuitions.

This reading attributes to Hegel the view that our ideas or concepts owe their origin entirely to sensation.

Against those who insist that we have some concepts that are genuinely innate or a priori, Hegel is

understood to argue that all that the mind is, all of its supposedly creative content and legislative power, is

determined by nature. All of what we consider “rational,” then, is “actual” in the sense that it reflects the

way in which nature and actual historical conditions have made our cognitive faculty (its powers and its

concepts) what it is.

Of course, these two representations of Hegel’s defense of the “identity” of concepts and intuitions do not

exhaust the interpretative possibilities.14 I mention them now because they most obviously contrast with

the reading I will offer in their place. Again, I take as my leading clue the fact that Hegel derives his

understanding of the “true

unity” of the intuitive intellect (a unity in which universal and particular are not “inevitably and

necessarily distinct”, but rather “identical”) from Kant’s model of nature as an organism. An intellect that

is intuitive experiences nature as an organic unity. In organisms, as we have seen, the relation between

parts and whole is that of purposive reciprocal determination. Parts are produced out of and determined

by the whole, and the behavior and interconnection of the parts (in acting “as if designed”) sustain each

other as well as the whole. In the pages to come, I defend the view that in criticizing Kant’s insistence

upon the heterogeneity of universal and particular, Hegel in effect takes him to task for failing to

appreciate the sense in which the two stand to each other in a relation of reciprocal determination. This is

why he claims that Kant’s philosophy is not a true or thoroughly consistent form of idealism. A genuinely

idealist system, in Hegel’s words, “does not acknowledge either one of the opposites as existing for itself in

its abstraction from the other” (FK 68/GW 303).

In order to make Hegel’s charge of heterogeneity more precise, we will need to supply answers to the

following two questions: First, what does he take to be the consequence of the commitment to

heterogeneity for Kant’s understanding of the nature of our concepts? To phrase this question in a

different way, what conception of the universal does Hegel think is implied if we follow Kant in assuming

that the universal and the particular are “inevitably and necessarily distinct”? Second, what does he take

to be the consequence of the commitment to heterogeneity for Kant’s understanding of the nature of the

sensible particular? If we in other words presuppose with Kant that the universal and the particular are

“inevitably and necessarily distinct,” what must this entail for our treatment of the independently given

content of sensation, of the contribution made to our cognition on the part ofnature? (These questions

may be reformulated as questions about the consequences of Kant’s commitment to heterogeneity for his

understanding of our two faculties of knowledge. What conceptions of the faculty of understanding or

intellect and of sensibility or receptivity are implied by the thesis of heterogeneity?)

My hope is that once we complete our discussions in Chapters Three and Four, we will have answers to

these questions. My aim in the remaining sections of the present chapter is to suggest the direction our

discussion in subsequent chapters will take. In sections 2.4 and 2.5, we will look at passages from

theDifference essay that provide support for my proposal that, in arguing for the “identity” of concepts

and intuitions, Hegel is not committing himself to either of the above two reductive models.

TheDifference essay suggests instead that the idea he aims to exploit is that of the reciprocal

determination of the parts and whole of an organic unity.

The general target of Hegel’s complaint in the passages we will consider is the assumption about

heterogeneity that underlies Kant’s conception of human discursivity. Kant tells us that, because our

understanding is discursive, we must presuppose that nature is a systematic unity. Of course, the most we

are entitled to claim, on his account, is that this unity is a necessary maxim or principle of reason. The

fact that we are not entitled to claim that nature contains within itself unity or is in itself in harmony with

our concepts, follows for Kant from the assumption of the heterogeneity of the sensible particulars that

nature supplies and our concepts or universals. In Difference, as we will see, Hegel suggests that the key

to achieving a fully adequate or genuine form of idealism lies in rejecting the presupposition of

heterogeneity. He is convinced, furthermore, that he and Schelling have discovered the means of doing so.

2.4 Kant’s “merely teleological” conception of nature

Let’s return our attention to a passage we considered earlier from the Difference essay. Hegel writes that

Kant

represents nature as subject-object, in that he considers the product of nature as an end of nature, as

purposive without the concept of purpose, necessary without mechanism, as identity of concept and being.

At the same time, however, this portrayal of nature remains merely teleological [nur teleologisch],

meaning valid only as a maxim of our limited discursive thinking human understanding, in whose general

concepts the particular appearances of nature are not contained. From this human point of view nothing

about the reality of nature is supposed to be said; this standpoint remains through and through something

subjective and nature a pure objective, something merely thought. For a sensible understanding, the

synthesis of undetermined nature and the determinations of the understanding is supposed to remain a

mere idea; for us humans it is supposed to be impossible that mechanical explanation should harmonize

with purposiveness. (D 163/103)

As Hegel notes here, Kant has the idea of nature as “subject-object,” as a purposive unity.15 But Kant

warns that if we claim to know nature in this way (as “through mechanism” an organic unity), we ignore

the limits of our understanding. We overlook the fact that for our discursive understanding, as Hegel puts

it, the “synthesis of undermined nature and the determinations of the understanding is supposed to

remain a mere idea.” Further on in the same paragraph, Hegel reminds us of the Kantian point that, for

our discursive understanding, there is contingency in the relation between our concepts and the given

sensible particulars (CJ § 75 [400]). “[C]oncepts remain contingent with respect to nature just as nature

does with respect to concepts,” he says (D 164/104).

So for Kant, nature itself must not be considered as “subject-object” or as “identity of concept and being.”

Instead, nature must be thought to derive its unity from a “mere idea.” It must, as Hegel writes elsewhere,

be thought of as “determined according to external purposes”—purposes awarded by human cognition (D

165/105). This is the conception of nature Hegel labels “merely teleological.”

What are we to make of Hegel’s counter-suggestion, in the above-quoted passage, that we

indeed canknow nature as “subject-object” or as “identity of concept and

being”? Presumably, the point is that we can know nature as something other than an in itself unformed

or bare sensible content that must derive its unity from some external source (from ideas or maxims of

human reason, for instance). On the conception Hegel seems to propose, we are warranted in assuming

that nature itself contains unity. Nature itself is like an organism, thanks to its capacity for self-

determination. Our knowledge or experience of nature, on this model, is like that of an intuitive form of

cognition because we are presumably able to cognize nature as already formed. Our intuitions, in other

words, are given not as bare “being” in need of subsumption under concepts; they are given, rather, as

“identity of concept and being.”

Hegel proposes this alternative representation of how nature may be known or experienced by us as

“compensation [Versöhnung]” for what he tells us in the Preface to Difference is the “mishandling

[Mishandlungen]” nature has suffered due to the idealisms of Kant and Fichte (D 83/13).16 A principal

aim of the Difference essay as a whole, he suggests in these paragraphs, is to convince us that such

compensation is possible and that he and Schelling have discovered how to provide it. But in what sense

does Hegel think nature is “mishandled” by Kant and Fichte? On the basis of the ground we have covered

so far, we can venture a good guess about at least part of his answer to this question. The transcendental

idealisms of Kant and Fichte imply that although we can (indeed, must) think of nature as a systematic

unity, as a perfect harmony of parts and whole, we can never claim to know nature as anything more than

as, in Hegel’s words, “something essentially determined and lifeless” (D 139/76). According to Kant and

Fichte, nature for our form of knowledge is in itself “only matter” (D 164/105). Rather than self-

determined, nature is “absolutely determined by the concept, i.e., by something alien to it” (D 165/105).

Hegel sometimes identifies as “empiricist” this conception of nature as “only matter.” In one passage, for

example, he writes of empiricism that it “gives up hope of creating spirit and an inwardness itself, and

bringing its dead [stuff] to life as nature” (D 193f./137).

So “compensating” nature means freeing ourselves, somehow, of the “empiricist” or “merely teleological”

conception of it as in itself “essentially determined and lifeless.” Compensation is achieved, Hegel seems

to be saying, if we can establish that nature may be, not merely be thought, but actually known or

experienced by our mode of understanding as a systematic unity or purposive whole. Compensating

nature, then, requires demonstrating that we can indeed cognize it as a unity, as self-determined. Hegel

sometimes makes this point in colorful ways. In one passage, he says we need to establish that we know

nature not merely as object but also as subject, as containing features of free self-consciousness (D

167f./107f.). Instead of supposing that our idea of

its systematic or purposive unity must rest on an appeal to the supersensible, we should acknowledge that

subjectivity (that is, features of free self-consciousness) dwells in nature. In language reflecting the

influence of Schelling, he writes that, contrary to what is permitted by the idealisms of Kant and Fichte, it

is indeed possible for us to know nature as an “immanent ideality” (D 166/107).17

Perhaps the temptation to dismiss these remarks as sheer fantasy is irresistible, but we are still a long way

from understanding what Hegel means by them. We do not yet know, for example, exactly how he expects

to establish that, in the above-specified ways, our experience of nature shares features in common with

that of the intuitive intellect. And we cannot really hope to get clear about that until we have a better grasp

of the grounds of his critique of Kant and of the kind of idealism he attributes inDifference to both Kant

and Fichte.

One question we need to answer is this: Just what in the idealisms of Kant and Fichte does Hegel suppose

is responsible for the conclusion that we can know nature as in itself “only matter”? TheDifference essay, I

believe, offers us two important clues. Both occur in contexts in which Hegel expresses his admiration for

Schelling, and both will be essential in guiding our interpretation of Hegel in what is to come. The first

clue should strike us as familiar. It is given in Hegel’s praise of Schelling for adopting as the “absolute

principle of [his] system as a whole” the “principle of identity” (D 155/94). In this and other passages,

Hegel asserts that the key to compensating nature lies in adopting the principle of identity as the principle

of idealism. The “mishandling” that nature has suffered in the idealisms both of Kant and Fichte is a

consequence of the fact, then, that both philosophers embrace heterogeneity rather than identity as a

basic principle of their systems. Both in other words presuppose that, as Hegel writes in one passage,

“concept and object are mutually external to each other” (D 165/106).

The second clue alerts us to an aspect of Hegel’s critique we have not yet considered. It is contained in

passages in which he praises Schelling for recognizing the necessity of giving up what is “subjective” in the

idealisms of Kant and Fichte. “The foundational formula [formelle Grundcharakter] of [Schelling’s]

philosophy,” he writes, “is the abstraction from the subjective of the transcendental intuition” (D 176/118).

In this and other remarks, Hegel attributes to Schelling the insight that we cannot expect to replace

heterogeneity with identity (at least when it comes to compensating nature for the harm done by the

transcendental idealisms of Fichte and Kant) unless we give up what is subjective in their idealisms. As

Hegel says explicitly in the quotation with which we began this section, Kant’s system “remains through

and through something subjective and nature a pure objective, something merely thought.” Hegel

criticizes Fichte in much the same vein. In Fichte’s system of “transcendental idealism,” he

writes, “identity constitutes itself only as subjective subject/object” (D 155/94; emphasis added).

In just what respect are the idealisms of Fichte and Kant subjective, according to Hegel? This is a large

topic and we will consider it at length beginning in Chapter Three. For now, however, we can at least say

this: We know from these pages of the Difference essay that Hegel directs this particular complaint not at

the way in which these systems conceive of the objects of our knowledge, but at the way in which they

conceive of the knowing subject and its functions. The idealisms of Fichte and Kant are subjective, he says,

because they fail to acknowledge that subjectivity itself is “subject-object.” He praises Schelling for

recognizing that both nature and subjectivity are “subject-object” (D 155/94, 160/100). Thanks to

Schelling, it is clear that overcoming what is subjective in the idealisms of Kant and Fichte is a matter of

granting that, just as nature is an “immanent ideality,” so is subjectivity an “immanent reality” (D

166/107).18

From these remarks we can anticipate the general strategy Hegel will adopt, inspired by Schelling, for

improving upon the idealisms of Kant and Fichte. If we grant that a main objective of the Differenceessay

is to “compensate” nature, then the strategy Hegel proposes, simply put, is that we replace heterogeneity

with identity as the principle of our idealism. As far as the idealisms of Kant and Fichte are concerned,

replacing heterogeneity with identity requires us to dispense with the “empiricist” or “merely teleological”

conception of the objects of our knowledge, and this in turn requires us to abstract from what is

“subjective” in their idealisms. We abstract from what is subjective in their idealisms by recognizing that,

in some sense (a sense that at this point is quite mysterious), subjectivity itself is “subject-object,” as

Hegel says. In order to compensate nature for the “mishandling” it suffers in the idealist systems of Kant

and Fichte, we need to acknowledge, not just that “every speck of dust is an organization,” but also that

“every cognition” is more than merely the contribution of a thinking subject, but “a truth” (D 157/97).

2.5 Identity of the sciences of subject and object

We began this chapter with a reminder of our central question: Why did Hegel think Kant was mistaken

in denying us the cognitive powers of an intuitive intellect and in regarding discursivity as “absolute”? In

our effort to provide an answer, we first

expanded the description we provided in ChapterOne of Kant’s contrast between the two forms of

cognition. We recalled that for a discursive understanding, in his view, the relation between given sensible

particulars and concepts must remain contingent. This is why Hegel characterizes Kant’s notion of

discursivity as implying that the “synthesis of undetermined nature and the determinations of [our]

understanding” can be for us no more than a “mere idea” (D 163/103). We also saw that, on Kant’s

conception of discursivity, mechanical and teleological explanations necessarily remain distinct. Again

quoting Hegel, it is not possible for us that “mechanical explanation should harmonize with purposiveness”

(D 163/103). For a discursive understanding, the idea of nature as a systematic unity or as purposively

arranged rests on a supersensible basis and therefore cannot be known to be valid of nature itself.

I then went on to suggest that although Hegel rejected Kant’s characterization of the nature and limits of

human understanding, and although he was convinced that we share at least some of the capacities of an

intuitive mode of cognition, he did not set out to argue that, for our form of understanding, concepts and

sensible intuitions “fall away.” Nor did he defend the view that the two sources of knowledge reduce to

one, or that one source is a mere species or mode of the other. Instead, I proposed that we take him at his

word when he tells us that we should understand the “true unity” achieved by the intuitive intellect on the

model of “organic unity” (FK 91/GW 327). The idea of an organism suggests a model of that form of

“rational knowledge,” he writes, “for which the universal and the particular are identical” (FK 90/GW

326). And, as we saw, the “identity” Hegel associates with organic unity is linked to the fact that the parts

and whole of an organism stand to each other in a relation of mutual dependence or determination. Recall

his remark from Faith and Knowledge: “Philosophy is idealism because it does not acknowledge either

one of the opposites as existing for itself in its abstraction from the other” (FK 68/GW 303).

Our discussion in section 2.4 provided preliminary support for this line of interpretation. There we

considered passages that suggest that “compensating nature” for its mishandling in the idealist systems of

Kant and Fichte, according to Hegel, is a matter, not of reducing sensible intuitions to concepts (or vice

versa), but of revising our understanding of the nature of these two components of our knowledge. The

revision is supposed to require that we replace our commitment to heterogeneity with a recognition of

identity. We do so, in Hegel’s view, by acknowledging that nature is (somehow) not just objective but also

subjective (an immanent ideality), and that subjectivity is (somehow) not merely subjective but also

objective (an immanent reality).

Although we are a long way from understanding precisely what Hegel had in mind by the “identity” of

universal and particular, concepts and intuitions, subject and object, we can discover in

the Differenceessay further evidence that his aim was not to argue that we achieve identity either by

collapsing these distinctions or by privileging one side of them over the other. Indeed, the section

of Difference entitled “Comparison of Schelling’s Principle of Philosophy with Fichte’s,” contains explicit

warnings against understanding identity in either of these ways. In this section of the essay, Hegel

considers how we ought to think of the “sciences” of subject and object (of intelligence and nature). He

insists that we bear in mind, not just that the two sciences or systems are “are one and the same,” but also

that they are importantly distinct (D 166/106). He cautions us against taking their identity to imply either

that one science may be reduced to or derived from the other, or that only one of the two sciences is truly

legitimate.19

In a moment I will review Hegel’s explanation, in these pages, for how we ought not to interpret the

relation of the two sciences, but I first want to highlight a few remarks in which he offers positive clues to

the nature of their identity. He tells us that the sciences are identical in that they form a “continuous

whole” (D 169/111). Both, he says, “present the Absolute as it emerges from the lower levels of one form of

its appearance and gives birth to itself as the totality in this form” (D 166/106). Hegel refers here to an

“older philosopher” (presumably Spinoza), according to whom “the order and coherence of ideas (the

subjective) is the same as the coherence and order of things (the objective).” He seems to suggest in these

passages that the “identity” of the two sciences is manifested in the fact that each is an “appearance” of

some greater totality (of what he refers to here as “the Absolute”).

The point I believe we should extract from these remarks is simply that each science, on Hegel’s account,

manifests or expresses in its own way the nature of the whole (of the Absolute). His suggestion is not that,

in the name of achieving identity, either science can or should be eliminated. Indeed, in these pages

of Difference, Hegel repeatedly asserts the importance of acknowledging their difference; separation, he

says, must get its due (D156/96).20 Hegel does, however, add the following warning: We are not to forget

that any distinction we draw between the two sciences demands of us an act ofabstraction. If we forget

the role of abstraction (as he apparently believes many philosophers do), we misunderstand the proper

relation of the sciences. In

particular, we overlook the respect in which the sciences of nature and intelligence are not just distinct but

also identical.

Since Hegel is convinced that Kant belongs among those who “forget” the role of abstraction in their own

thinking and thus fail to grasp the identity of the sciences, it is worth our while to give some attention to

Hegel’s analysis of how abstraction is brought into play in our various ways of distinguishing the two

sciences. While many of his remarks in this discussion are too mysterious to decode, the general moral of

his story is relatively straightforward. Regarding, first, his account of thescience of intelligence: Hegel tells

us that it abstracts from what is peculiar to the science of nature. This abstraction, he says, results in a

particular conception both of nature and of intelligence. If we assume the standpoint of the science of

intelligence, we conceive of nature as having a standing, not “in itself,” but only as an object of

consciousness (D 160/100). We take nature, moreover, to get its unity or determination from us.

The science of intelligence relies on abstraction for its conception of intelligence or subjectivity as well. It

abstracts from how intelligence is considered from the standpoint of the system of nature. The science of

intelligence thus abstracts, Hegel writes, from the fact that intelligence, as consciousness, is itself

“conditioned” by nature (D 160/100). From the standpoint of the science of intelligence, in other words,

intelligence is assumed to be a faculty that is entirely independent of the determinations of nature.

As for the science of nature, it abstracts from what is peculiar to the science of intelligence. From its point

of view, intelligence or consciousness is understood to be wholly “conditioned by nature”; and nature, on

this conception, is considered in abstraction from how it may be known by a discursive understanding. So

from the standpoint of the science of nature, as Hegel describes it, we assume that nature is like an

organism in that its form or unity is internally generated. Nature is an “immanent ideality”; it is capable of

self-determination.21

Again, Hegel’s point in this discussion is not that we are unwarranted in distinguishing these two sciences

or systems. He insists only that we bear in mind that in distinguishing them in the way he describes, we

rely on acts of abstraction. His claim seems to be, then, that “in themselves” the two sciences are

(somehow) not distinct. “In themselves” or originally, they form some kind of identity, in his view. We

need to be reminded of the role abstraction plays in distinguishing them, he contends, because we tend to

forget the fact of their original identity.

Hegel goes on to explain that this “forgetting” can assume different forms. We forget the identity of the

sciences when we suppose either that one science may be derived from the other or that the two sciences

are not of equal standing. As for the mistake of expecting that we can derive one from the other, what

Hegel says is this: We misconstrue their proper relation when we try to “mix” one science with the other.

We mix the sciences, he claims, when we suppose that one is the cause or ground of the other. We mix the

system of nature with that of intelligence, for instance, when we set out to explain mental phenomena in

physical terms. What results, Hegel writes, are “transcendent hypotheses” such as the “fiber theory of

consciousness.” We mix the system of intelligence with the system of nature, on the other hand, when we

try to explain the workings of nature in terms of conscious purposes or intentions. This yields what Hegel

refers to as “hyperphysical, and especially teleological explanations” (D 162/102). Mixing, he seems to

imply, is an attempt to derive one science from the other in that we take the phenomena treated by one to

sufficiently cause (and thus be thoroughly capable of explaining) the phenomena treated by the other. But

by this kind of reduction, he implies, “identity” is not preserved.

Nor is identity preserved if we treat the two sciences as of unequal standing. This need not involve our

adopting the extreme measure of reducing one science to the other. We deny the two sciences equal

standing when we assume that the standpoint of one has greater validity than the standpoint of the other.

If we privilege in this way the science of nature, for example, we by implication also privilege its implied

conception of intelligence. We then make the mistake of supposing that intelligence or consciousness is in

itself wholly conditioned by nature and thus in no respect self-determining. We forget that this conception

of intelligence depends on abstracting from the perspective of the science of intelligence. In so doing,

Hegel says, we in effect “nullify [vernichten]” the science of intelligence (D 161/101).

If we privilege the standpoint of intelligence, on the other hand, we “nullify” the science of nature. We

commit ourselves to the view that nature is in itself something other than what the science of nature takes

it to be. We abstract, then, from the perspective of the science of nature. If we privilege the standpoint of

intelligence, we make the mistake of supposing that nature is in itself “only matter”—a bare sensible

content that must get its form or unity from us (D 164/105). From this standpoint, the determination of

nature must be a “form lent to it by knowledge,” as Hegel says (D 160/100). In privileging the standpoint

of intelligence, we in addition commit ourselves to the view that intelligence is in itself something other

than what the science of nature takes it to be. We assume that intelligence or subjectivity, then, is wholly

independent of or wholly undetermined by nature.

If we recall from section 2.4 Hegel’s complaint about the “merely teleological” or “empiricist” conception

of nature implied by the idealisms of Kant and Fichte, we can see that the mistake of privileging the

standpoint of intelligence is precisely the mistake he attributes to these idealist systems. Hegel’s charge is

not that Kant and Fichte set out to “mix” the science of intelligence with that of nature and

thereby reduce mechanical

to teleological explanations. These idealist systems insteadprivilege the standpoint of intelligence (and

are hence “subjective”); as such, they deny the sciences of intelligence and nature equal standing.22 As we

just saw, if we privilege the science of intelligence, we abstract from how intelligence is considered from

the standpoint of nature, namely, as conditioned by nature. We assume, moreover, that nature is “only

matter”; it has no capacity of self-determination. We take the form and unity of nature to derive

externally—from a knowing subject.

Perhaps we can now better grasp what Hegel has in mind when he warns us against “asserting that just

one of the two is the unique science and nullifying the other from the standpoint of that one” (D 161/101).

The proper way to understand the two sciences, he tells us, neither “mixes” the two sciences nor

“suspends one of the other…and asserts that the subject alone, or the object alone is the Absolute” (D

161/68). Instead, the proper understanding of the two sciences acknowledges, in his words, that the

“principle of the identity of subject and object had to become the road to the insight that the Absolute as

identity is neither subjectivity, nor mere objectivity” (D 175/116).23 A “true identity of subject and object”

is achieved, he says (again echoing Schelling), only when “both subject and object are subject-object” (D

159/99; emphasis added).

2.6 Subjectivity as self-determining and determined

My aim in reviewing these passages from the “Comparison” section of the Difference essay has been to

strengthen the case for the thesis that, in arguing for the replacement of heterogeneity with the identity of

subject and object, Hegel proposes neither the complete nor partial reduction of one term to the other. If

this interpretation is accurate, we have reason to conclude that dualism (of some kind) is alive and well in

his theory of identity. As our story unfolds, it will become clear that Hegel indeed retains a role for

concepts as well as sensible intuitions in his own account of human cognition. He departs from Kant, not

because he eliminates either or both of these components of our knowledge, but because he has a different

understanding of their nature and function. That difference is fundamental rather than trivial. As I hope

will become evident in the pages to come, it is responsible for what is deep and compelling about his

alternative to Kant.

In this chapter, I have suggested that it is possible to derive some indication of the alternative Hegel has

in mind by attending to his fascination with the model of organic unity. We replace heterogeneity with

identity, in his view, by recognizing that concept and intuition, subject and object, stand to each other in a

relation analogous to that of the parts and whole of an organism: a relation of reciprocal determination.

This idea of reciprocal determination is of interest precisely because of its non-reductive implications. Of

course, the idea itself—or, rather, the use to which Hegel puts it—is far from self-explanatory. We have a

great deal more work to do to determine the precise respect in which subject and object are mutually

conditioning, on his conception. It is by no means obvious just how he thinks concepts and sensible

intuitions are supposed to function as reciprocally determining elements of our knowledge.

Hegel’s fully developed or mature conception of the identity of subject and object is not yet formulated in

the pages of these early Jena writings. We can nonetheless claim with confidence, on the basis of the texts

we have been considering, that the account of identity he is after is intended to supply an alternative to

the “merely teleological” or “empiricist” of nature. We know that Hegel believes we are mistaken if we

consider nature as in itself “essentially determined and lifeless,” as merely object and not also subject, and

as therefore having to derive its form or unity from an external source. In ChapterThree, we will

discover why Hegel believes this mistake is of consequence. There, it will become clear that he holds this

“merely teleological” or “empiricist” conception of nature responsible for what he takes to be the

ultimately skeptical implications of Kant’s theory of knowledge. In a revealing passage in

the Difference essay, he writes,

If nature is only matter, if it is not subject-object, then no scientific construction of nature is possible for

which knower and known are necessarily one. (D 164/105)

It will become clear that Hegel’s reasoning is very roughly this: If we assume (as he thinks Kant does) that

nature is “only matter” in that its form is not “immanent” but derives from us, we will have to contend

with a skeptical gap, as he says, between “knower and known.” We will face the difficulty of establishing

any “necessary” relation between that subjective form and the independently given content of nature itself.

We will have to conclude that we know objects only through those forms—only, that is, as mediated.

The material we have covered so far allows us to anticipate Hegel’s strategy for arguing that nature is

more for us than “only matter.” As we saw in section 2.4, he holds that this conception of nature stems

from the commitment to the “heterogeneity” of concepts and sensible intuitions. We avoid thinking of

nature as “only matter,” then, only if we replace heterogeneity with identity. We establish the “identity” of

concepts and sensible intuitions by granting, with Schelling, that not just nature, but also subjectivity, is

“subject-object.” Achieving identity thus requires that we give up the “subjectivity” of our idealism. Our

idealism is subjective, we now know, if we privilege the standpoint of intelligence. In privileging the

standpoint of intelligence,

we forget the equal validity of the standpoint of nature. We forget that nature, from the standpoint of

nature, is in some sense self-determining. If we privilege the standpoint of intelligence, we forget as well

that the freedom or self-determination of intelligence is itself conditioned by nature. So giving up what is

“subjective” in our idealism is a matter of granting, as Hegel believes we should, that subjectivity

is both self-determining and determined (both subject and object, as he says). It is a matter of recognizing

the sense in which subjectivity or intelligence is an “immanent reality.” Or, as Hegel writes in one passage,

it is a matter of recognizing that “necessity belongs to intelligence just as it does to nature” (D 167/108). In

the chapters to come, we will explore how Hegel develops this conception of subjectivity.

Notes:

(1) It is not only in Kant’s idea of organic unity that Hegel discovers a clue to overcoming of heterogeneity.

He has much to say about Kant’s treatment of the idea of beauty as well. In Faith and Knowledge, for

example, he writes that in Kant’s treatment of aesthetic experience, “the form of opposition between

intuition and concept falls away” (FK 87/GW 323). Although Kant holds that a discursive understanding

can no more cognize or experience nature as beautiful than as purposively arranged, his account of

aesthetic judgment (like his account of our judgments about purposes in nature) suggests an alternative to

the heterogeneity of concepts and sensible intuitions. For our form of cognition, Kant claims, beauty is not

given in nature. But when we judge a sunset to be beautiful, we think of it as an intuitive representation of

an idea of reason (the idea of beauty). We conceive of the particular experience, that is, as already formed,

as already exhibiting or representing the universal.

Because the inspiration Hegel derives from Kant’s ideas of organic unity and of beauty is in essential

respects the same, I avoid redundancy by restricting my attention in this chapter to his discussion of

organic unity. For a discussion of Hegel’s treatment of Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment, see §§ IV and

V of Robert Pippin’s, “Avoiding German Idealism: Kant, Hegel, and the Reflective Judgment Problem,”

in Idealism as Modernism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

(2) I owe this formulation to Klaus Düsing. See his discussion of these points in “Naturteleologie und

Metaphysik bei Kant und Hegel,” 142. Kant sometimes expresses this point by saying that the purposes of

organisms are “intrinsic” (see, e.g., CJ § 65). In light of the fact that the purposiveness of organisms is not

supplied externally by an intelligent agent (as in the case of artifacts), we can in addition speak of the

purposiveness of organisms as “without a purpose” (meaning: without an externally supplied concept of

purpose). See CJ § 10 [220], and Zuckert’s discussion of these points in Kant on Beauty and Biology, 76–

86, 119.

(3) As Rudolf Makkreel describes it, a causality of natural purposes involves both “progressive and

regressive conceptions of causality.” It involves regressive causality in our explanative search for efficient

causes of nature (as in mechanical explanation). It involves purposive or final causality in that parts of a

thing qua natural purpose are taken to also reciprocally cause objects (and ultimately nature as a whole).

See his paper, “Regulative and Reflective Uses of Purposiveness in Kant,” 52. For an illuminating

discussion of the various senses of “mechanical” in Kant, see section 2 of Hannah Ginsborg’s essay, “Kant

on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purposes,” in Kant and the Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2001), 231–58.

(4) In his remarks at CJ § 65 [373], Kant appears to make conflicting claims. We must think of a natural

purpose, on the one hand, as “covered by a concept or idea that must determine a priori everything that

the thing is to contain.” But we must also think of the “idea of the whole,” he says, as not causing in a

natural purpose the “form and combination of all the parts.” The apparent inconsistency disappears,

however, once we bear in mind that his concern in these remarks is to distinguish natural purposes from

artifacts. As is the case with artifacts, the possibility of the parts of a natural purpose (or organism) “must

depend on the relation to the whole,” in that a natural purpose has to be “covered by a concept or idea that

determines a priori everything that the thing is to contain.” But the “idea of the whole” does not cause the

“form and combination” of the parts of a natural purpose in the following sense: A natural purpose

is not caused by the “idea of the whole,” only in that the concept or idea that must determine its parts is

not to be discovered in some “causality of concepts which rational beingsoutside it have” (emphasis

added). Rather than products of a concept or idea that is “distinct from the matter of the thing,” natural

purposes or organisms are, as Richard Aquila aptly puts it, “structured wholes in their own right.” See his

“Unity of Organism, Unity of Thought, and the Unity of the Critique of Judgment,” Southern Journal of

Philosophy XXX, Supplement (1991), 144.

(5) In “Organisms and the Unity of Science,” Paul Guyer suggests that Kant seems to change his mind in

the Opus postumum about the viability of the hylozoism hypothesis. Guyer quotes the following passage

from Kant: “ ‘An organic body presupposes an organizing principle, whether inner or outer. The latter [the

organizing principle, S.S.] must be simple, for otherwise it would itself require an organization. As simple,

it cannot be a part of matter (for each part of matter is always itself composite). So the organizing

principle of the organic body must be outside space in general. It can, however, be internally active in one

respect, while being external in another; that is, in another substance, the world-spirit.’ ” In Kant and the

Sciences, ed. Eric Watkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 277. For an in depth examination

of Kant’s views on eighteenth-century hylozoism, see chapter 9 of John H. Zammito’s, The Genesis of

Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

(6) Obviously, a great deal more could be said about Kant’s views on the self-organization of nature. For

further commentary, see e.g. Klaus Düsing, “Naturteleologie und Metaphysik bei Kant und Hegel,” esp.

141.

(7) For a helpful discussion of Kant’s insistence that we consider natural purposes as if designed, see

section I of Hannah Ginsborg’s paper, “Kant on Aesthetic and Biological Purposiveness,” in Reclaiming

the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, ed. Andrews Reath, Barbara Herman, and Christine M.

Korsgaard (Cambridge/New York/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 329–60.

(8) In her essay “Kant on Understanding Organisms as Natural Purposes,” 235, Hannah Ginsborg

observes that our use of the notion of purposiveness with respect to natural products is for Kant not

strictly speaking explanatory. As Kant says at CJ § 65 [375], when we consider natural products as

purposes, we do so not for the “sake of knowledge.” The principle of purposiveness, he says at CJ § 78

[411], is a “heuristic principle” without which we could not think of nature as systematically arranged.

Ginsborg, in addition, offers a persuasive answer to the following question: Why does Kant hold that the

capacity of a natural purpose for self-preservation or generation cannot be explained mechanically? She

suggests that to understand a natural product as a purpose, for Kant, is to invoke more than a merely

mechanical form of explanation in the following sense: it is to understand a natural product as subject

to normative constraints (governing the organization and function the thing ought to have). Moreover, as

she points out, we can consider a thing as subject to normative constraints without also committing

ourselves to any position on how the thing qua organism came into being (or on what caused its design).

(See especially her 249–51.) Ginsborg returns to these issues in her later paper, “Kant’s Biological

Teleology and its Philosophical Significance,” in A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird (Oxford, UK:

Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2006), esp. 464–5.

(9) This point, that a causality of purposes has for Kant “a basis beyond nature,” is not incompatible with

his characterization of organisms as self-organized. As we saw, organisms on Kant’s account organize

themselves by means of a causality of purposes, and those purposes are causes not “distinct from the

matter of the thing” (CJ § 65 [373]). At the same time, final causes or purposes are not possible objects of

experience, according to Kant. Although not “distinct from the matter of the thing,” they nonetheless have

a supersensible basis or a basis “beyond nature.”

(10) At CJ § 77 [405f.], Kant remarks that we should not rule out the possibility of an understanding

different from (“higher than”) our own for which the mechanism of nature determines natural products

purposively. He makes this point again at CJ § 80 [418].

(11) Richard Aquila makes this point in his paper, cited above, “Unity of Organism, Unity of Thought, and

the Unity of the Critique of Judgment,” 144.

(12) In “Metaphysik und Kritik in Kants theoretischer Philosophie,” 28–30, Manfred Baum suggests that

we should understand the relation between the intuitive intellect’s synthetic universal and its parts or

particulars on analogy with the form of intuition of space and our perception of parts of space. As Baum

points out, Kant holds that space as a form of intuition is a whole that is not an aggregate made up of

parts of space. Instead, our perception or determination of parts of space would not be possible without

the a priori form of space. Likewise, the parts or particulars produced by the intuitive understanding

depend on the prior intuition of the whole; and the whole (or synthetically universal) is not an aggregate

of independently given parts. If we wish to understand Kant’s model of the productive powers of the

intuitive intellect, Baum asserts, we are well advised to study his account of geometric construction. As

Baum notes on page 28, Kant explicitly compares the productive activity of the intuitive intellect with

geometric construction in CJ § 77 [409].

(13) In a passage we considered already in Chapter One, Hegel writes that for a finite human

understanding, on Kant’s account, the universal and the particular are necessarily distinct, and “rational

knowledge [Vernunfterkenntniß] for which…the universal and the particular are identical,” must remain

“transcendent” (FK 90/GW 326).

(14) I discuss a further interpretation in section 3.7 of Chapter Three.

(15) Indeed, in a passage in CJ, Kant concedes that it would be “presumptuous” for us to assume that there

“could not be in nature a hidden basis adequate to make organized beings possible without an underlying

intention (but through the mere mechanism of nature)” (CJ § 73 [393]).

(16) I follow Harris and Cerf in translating “Versöhnung” as “compensation.” “Versöhnung” is more

commonly translated as “reconciliation”; its verb form is often rendered as “to reconcile” or “to restore

harmony” (e.g. among enemies). But “Versöhnung” is also sometimes used to mean repayment or

compensation, as in the following passage from Friedrich Schiller’s “Die Braut von Mesina oder die

feindlichen Brüder” (1803): “ist sie wahrhaftig seine, meine schwester, so bin ich schuldig einer greuelthat,

die keine reu und büszung kann versöhnen.”

(17) For a defense of the thesis that Goethe’s reading of §§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment was just

at least, if not more influential, on Hegel than Schelling’s, see Eckart Förster’s essay, “The Significance of

§§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment for the Development of Post-Kantian Philosophy (Part 1).” The

topic of Goethe’s influence on Hegel is also the focus of Part I ofSongsuk Susan Hahn’s Contradiction in

Motion.

(18) See Schelling’s references to nature as “visible spirit” and subjectivity as “invisible nature” in his 1797

essay, “Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft,”

in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling: Schriften, vol. I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985),

294. Priscilla Hayden-Roy provides an English translation of this essay in Philosophy of German Idealism,

ed. Ernst Behler (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1987), 167–202. For discussions of

Schelling’s treatment of the Critique of Judgment, see Robert Pippin, “Avoiding German Idealism: Kant,

Hegel, and the Reflective Judgment Problem,” §§ I and II; and Rolf-Peter Horstmann,Die Grenzen der

Vernunft (Frankfurt: Verlag Anton Hain GmbH, 1991), 210–19.

(19) Hegel includes a similar cautionary note in his preface to the Phenomenology ¶ 26. Regarding the

science of nature, Hegel says here that it is essential that it posits “self-consciousness as at one with itself.”

(20) This point—that separation or difference must get its due—is very likely intended as a critique of

Schelling. Although Hegel credits Schelling with appreciating the necessity of both standpoints of nature

and intelligence (of object and subject), these pages of Difference contain clues that he was already

dissatisfied with Schelling’s view of how identity is to be achieved. For Schelling, identity is achieved by

means of “transcendental intuition.” Hegel’s worry, as he expresses it in these pages, is that

transcendental intuition is an “intuition of colorless light” (D 156/95). Here he anticipates his well-known

charge in the Preface to the Phenomenology that Schelling’s Absolute is like a night in which “all cows are

black” (¶ 16). For a quick overview of the influence of Schelling on the young Hegel, see Frederick C.

Beiser’s introductory essay to The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 6–20. (Beiser provides a much more

extensive account in section IV of his German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–

1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).) See also H. S. Harris’s discussion of these issues

in his introduction to his edition of this text, pp. 15 f., 40f. For further discussions of Hegel’s

representation of Schelling in the Difference essay, see Terry Pinkard’s Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 153–60; and Ludwig Siep’s essay “Zur praktischen Philosophie

Schellings und Hegel in Jena (bis 1803),” chapter 6 of hisPraktische Philosophie im deutschen

Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), 130–41.

(21) In light of Hegel’s appreciation for the idea of nature as an organism, it is puzzling that he finds the

science of nature’s conception of nature objectionable. What we need to bear in mind, however, is that his

objection is to the fact that this account of nature abstracts from the standpoint of subjectivity. From the

standpoint of the science of nature, nature is taken to be wholly responsible for its own form or self-

determination; its self-determination, then, owes no debt whatsoever to forms of subjectivity. In

criticizing this standpoint as abstract, Hegel seems to commit himself to the view that our science of

nature indeed should take subjectivity and its forms into account, but without falling prey to that other

abstraction which assumes that nature is therefore “only matter” and its forms wholly “external.”

(22) Hegel writes of this form of idealism (“transcendental idealism”) that it suspends “the positing of the

principle of one science in the Absolute,” and thus is one-sided (D162/103). In a comment specifically

directed at Fichte, he says of this idealism that it is “subjective” because it “nullifies” one side of the

dualism (that is, nature) and “exalts [steigert]” the other “into something infinite” (D155/94). Hegel

contrasts this “subjective” idealism with the “higher standpoint” which “recognizes the same Absolute in

both” of the two sciences (D161/101f.).

(23) Hegel employs Schellingian language in this discussion to describe the Absolute as the “indifference

point” or “absolute middle.”

Hegel on the “Subjectivity” of Kant’s

Idealism

We saw in our last chapter that Hegel takes Kant’s model of organic unity to capture what he describes as

the “true unity” of the intuitive intellect, a unity in which the heterogeneity between intuitions and

concepts, between particulars and universals, is overcome. I drew attention to the way in which, on Kant’s

model, the parts and whole of an organic unity enjoy a relation of perfect harmony or fit. As if designed,

parts of an organism are produced out of the whole, and parts in addition sustain each other as well as the

whole. Parts and whole of an organic unity stand to each other in a relation of purposive reciprocal

determination.

I then pointed out that, without denying that we rely in cognition on sensible intuitions as well as

concepts, Hegel seems convinced that, for our mode of cognition, sensible intuitions and concepts stand

to each other in a relation similar to that of the parts and whole of an organism. Sensible intuitions and

concepts somehow depend on each other, and neither exists in abstraction from the other. In this way, in

his view, the two components of cognition form a unity or “identity.”

Of course, Kant denies that his model of organic unity captures the nature of human cognition. From the

fact that, for our discursive mode of understanding, sensible intuitions are independently given rather

than produced out of our cognitive powers, he concludes that we have no grounds for assuming that

independently given sensible intuitions harmonize with our cognitive powers. If they are to be cognized by

us, given sensible particulars must be subsumed under subjective forms. But their relation to our concepts,

according to Kant, is one of “contingency” rather than harmony.

As we saw, Hegel challenges this Kantian portrayal of the implications of our discursivity. In his view, the

model of organic unity suggests a more adequate way of understanding the relation, for our mode of

cognition, between given sensible intuitions and subjective form. The problem with Kant’s account of the

implications of our discursivity, he thinks, is that it suffers from “subjectivity.” We appreciate the true

nature of human cognition if we follow Schelling and give up the subjectivity of our idealism. As Hegel

suggests, this is a matter of recognizing that just as nature is “subject-object” and thus an “immanent

ideality,” so is subjectivity “subject-object” and thus an “immanent reality.”

In this chapter, we take a closer look at what Hegel has in mind in recommending that we give up the

subjectivity of our idealism. Hegel repeatedly charges Kant’s idealism with subjectivity, and it is typical for

commentators to dismiss this charge as the product of misinterpretation. Hegel’s critics argue that he

discovers subjectivity in Kant’s idealism only because he makes the mistake of attaching skeptical

implications to Kant’s restriction thesis, to Kant’s claim that we can know “appearances” but not “things

in themselves.” Hegel makes this mistake, it is claimed, because he fails to appreciate the way in which

Kant’s transcendental idealism differs from empirical idealism. I explore this unsympathetic

representation of Hegel in section 3.1.

In section 3.2, I cite textual evidence that suggests that Hegel does not commit the interpretative errors

typically attributed to him and was well aware of the unique nature of Kant’s distinction between

appearances and things in themselves. Despite the comparisons he undeniably makes between Kant’s

system and empiricism, Hegel appreciates the special character of Kant’s project of demonstrating that

human experience rests on a priori conditions.

In sections 3.3 and 3.4, I provide an alternative reading of what Hegel intends by the subjectivity of Kant’s

idealism. Hegel indeed attaches skeptical implications to the subjectivity of Kant’s idealism. But he

discovers skepticism in Kant’s idealism, not because he conflates transcendental idealism with empirical

idealism, but because he believes that systems as different as those of Kant and Locke (or more obviously,

Hume) adhere to the thesis of absolute opposition. Hegel is, in other words, convinced that skepticism

results from assumptions these systems share about the respective contributions of the two basic

components of empirical knowledge: sensible content and subjective form.

In section 3.5, I offer a sympathetic interpretation of Hegel’s charge with respect to Kant. It’s not that he

charges Kant with skepticism because he misunderstands Kant’s thesis that appearances are the only

objects that can be empirically real for us. Instead, the skepticism Hegel discovers in Kant’s idealism

follows from Kant’s assumption that, since some of our concepts are subjective in the sense of a priori,

they cannot be assumed to reflect the given content of nature itself. In section 3.6, I indicate Hegel’s

reasons for attributing skepticism, not just to Kant’s idealism, but to empiricism as well.

I conclude in section 3.7 by proposing that the subjectivity Hegel takes to be ultimately responsible for the

skeptical implications of Kant’s idealism is tied to a particular conception of subjective form (and of the

faculty or faculties that bring that form into being). On this conception, form is “absolutely opposed” to

content in this respect: it is taken to owe nothing of its nature and origin to the realm of the empirical.

3.1 The standard interpretation

Since our aim in this chapter is to understand what Hegel has in mind by the “subjectivity” of Kant’s

idealism, a good place to begin is with passages from the Jena writings in which he represents the Kantian

philosophy as a “metaphysic of

subjectivity” (FK 189/GW 430). The texts I have selected for review seem on the face of it to justify a

widely accepted portrayal of Hegel as rather seriously in the dark about fundamental features of Kant’s

idealism.1 I present that portrayal here in section 3.1, and then go on to challenge it, beginning in

section 3.2.

In the Difference essay, Hegel writes that the Kantian views nature from the limited standpoint of a

“discursive human understanding” for which “universal concepts” contain “nothing of the particular

appearances of nature.” “This human perspective,” he continues, “is supposed to express nothing about

the reality [Realität] of nature” (D 163/103). Hegel’s point here seems straightforward enough. He seems

to be saying that, for Kant, “universal concepts” fail to disclose to us the reality of nature itself. This is

perhaps the message of the following remark from Faith and Knowledge as well: From the perspective of

the “metaphysic of subjectivity,” in his words, “[t]he world as thing is transformed into the system of

appearances, or of affections of the subject and believed realities [geglaubten Wirklichkeiten]” (FK

189/GW 430). As Hegel describes the “metaphysic of subjectivity” in these passages, our knowledge is

limited to appearances or merely “believed realities,” and we are denied cognitive access to reality itself.

In later works such as the Encyclopaedia Logic he makes this point again: “The Kantian objectivity of

thinking is…itself only subjective insofar as, according to Kant, thoughts, although universal and

necessary determinations, are only our thoughts and separated by an unbridgable gulf from what the

thing is in itself” (EL § 41A2).2

Hegel furthermore portrays the “metaphysic of subjectivity” as preoccupied with the investigation, not of

objects, but of the nature and limits of our cognitive faculties. He writes of the Kantian philosophy, for

example, that it “falls back into absolute finitude and subjectivity;…its entire task and content is not

knowledge of the Absolute, but knowledge of this subjectivity or a critique of the faculties of cognition”

(FK 68/GW 330).3

Finally, Hegel tells us in Faith and Knowledge that although Kant argues that the categories or pure

concepts of the understanding are objective or universally valid forms of human experience, they are in

fact, for Kant, “something contingent and subjective” (FK 77/GW 313). Once again, this reading is

suggested, not just in the Jena writings but also in later works. In a passage from the Encyclopaedia Logic,

for instance, Hegel notes that Kant arrived at the determinations of the categories “empirically” (EL §

42).4

We can summarize this representation of Hegel’s criticisms as follows: Kant’s philosophy is “subjective” or

an instance of the “metaphysic of subjectivity” in at least three respects: 1. His philosophy denies to

human understanding any possibility of knowing the “reality of nature.” 2. It is preoccupied with the

standpoint of the subject and with the nature of our cognitive faculties. 3. Its categories or pure concepts

are empirically derived and thus merely contingent.

Especially in light of the first and third points, it is not difficult to see why commentators conclude that

Hegel is an unreliable interpreter of Kant. Kant certainly does insist that human (theoretical) knowledge

is restricted to appearances, but as Kantians are quick to point out, he in no way intends this to imply that

we can have no epistemic access to reality. He indeed undertakes an examination or “critique” of our

cognitive faculties; and it is moreover true that he argues that our pure concepts or categories are, in a

certain sense, subjective. But on his account, the categories are subjective because they derive from pure

understanding rather than sensation. Their subjective origin, in his view, is entirely compatible with their

necessity.

To examine the standard interpretation of Hegel’s critique more closely, let’s begin with the first point

sketched above: Why, in the eyes of his critics, does Hegel claim that Kant denies us epistemic access to

reality? An answer commonly given is that Hegel simply misunderstands the most important implication

of Kantian idealism: that we can know appearances but not things in themselves. Hegel can only suggest

that Kant’s philosophy denies us access to the real, his critics tell us, because he commits the error of

identifying “things in themselves” with the “real”—an identification Kant repeatedly warns us not to make.

Alternatively put, Hegel takes Kant’s claim that we can know only appearances to imply that the objects of

our theoretical knowledge are at best mere representations of the real. Hegel, in other words, embraces

what some have called the “deflationary” interpretation of Kant’s conception of appearances.5

On what grounds do commentators contend that Hegel commits these elementary errors? Frequently,

what is argued is that he misunderstands Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and

appearances, because he overlooks or ignores important differences between Kant’s transcendental

idealism and the idealism of some of Kant’s empiricist predecessors. In the Transcendental Aesthetic of

the first Critique, Kant is explicit in warning us not to conflate these two kinds of idealism. Such a

conflation, he says, misleads us about what he intends by the term “appearance.” For the empiricist such

as Locke, Kant explains, “appearance” refers to those properties of perceivable objects that depend for

their very existence on the contingent perspective of the perceiver. The smell and color of a rose, for

example, reveal at most its appearance (in the sense intended by the empiricist), because they are

properties perceived, in Kant’s words, “only as contingently added effects” of sensation on our sense

organs (CPR A 29). For the Lockean empiricist, such properties (properties commonly identified as

“sensible” or “secondary”) are not taken to inform us about the reality of objects themselves. Rather, they

are subjective or ideal in the following sense: they reveal not the “objective” or “real” properties of things,

but only how objects contingently appear to the perceiver.

Kant asserts that this way of understanding the distinction between subjective and objective properties,

between the appearance of a thing and the thing itself, is merely “empirical” (CPR B 62/A 45). It assumes

that, for any perceivable object, a distinction may be drawn between properties dependent for their

existence on a perceiver and properties really inhering in or constituting the object itself. It is not Kant’s

aim to dispense with or call into question this distinction between the real and merely subjective

properties of things. He does, however, wish us to bear in mind that this is not the distinction he intends

to capture when he contrasts appearances and things in themselves. Heintends the distinction in a

different sense, a sense that he terms “transcendental.” Whereas for the empiricist, “appearances” refer to

a certain class of properties of empirical objects (properties dependent for their existence on the

contingent perspective of the perceiver), Kant means by “appearances” the empirical objects

themselves (CPR B 62/A 45). According to his transcendental idealism, “appearance” stands for any

object that can be given to us in perception (any object that can be “empirically real,” as he says). For the

transcendental idealist, then, the empirical distinction between real and sensible properties is a

distinction that applies to appearances in the transcendental sense. For any appearance in the

transcendental sense (for any empirical object, that is), we can empirically distinguish those properties

that depend on the contingent perceptual standpoint of the perceiver from those that do not.

It is not difficult to understand why Kant finds it necessary to warn us against conflating the empiricist

and the transcendental conceptions of “appearances.” On

both conceptions, appearances depend on subjective conditions in some way. For the Lockean empiricist,

colors, tastes, and smells depend for their existence on (among other things) the particular constitution of

the sense organs of the perceiver. For Kant, however, there is a sense in which what is perceiver

dependent are not just these sensible properties, but also the objects themselves. His view is that there are

subjective conditions that determine the form of anything that can be given to us as an object of

perception at all. This subjective form (namely, the a priori forms of intuition, space and time) is unlike

sensible or secondary qualities in the following significant respects: First, it is not contingent upon the

particular perspective of a perceiver or on the fitness of that perceiver’s sense organs. Second, it sets

necessary and universal constraints on what can be, for any human experience, a possible object of

perception.

So when Kant employs the term “appearances,” he does not mean to refer to those properties of objects

that are subjective in the sense of sensible or secondary qualities; “appearances” on his account do not

designate mere representations. Rather, by “appearance,” Kant has in mind any possible object of human

perception. By “appearance,” he means objects that may be, for us, empirically real—objects of our

possible experience. Objects that are independent of the subjective forms of space and time, objects

considered “in themselves,” are not possible objects of human perception, on his account. Kant restricts

our knowledge to appearances, but in doing so, he certainly does not take himself to thereby deny our

capacity to know the empirically real.

As already noted, Hegel’s critics tell us that he can only suggest that the Kantian philosophy denies us

epistemic access to reality because he adopts the deflationary (or merely empirical) interpretation of

Kant’s notion of “appearance” and thus assumes that Kant identifies “reality” with the realm of things in

themselves. On this reading, Hegel is understood to simply ignore an important respect in which Kant

parts ways from his empiricist predecessors, namely, in arguing that objects of human perception depend

on a priori forms of intuition. This failure to distinguish Kant’s transcendental philosophy from

empiricism, Hegel’s critics suggest, is further evident in his misunderstanding of the modality of the

Kantian categories. The fact that Hegel attributes to Kant the view that our pure concepts or categories are

“contingent” can only imply that he ignores or overlooks Kant’s argument for their role as a priori or

transcendental conditions. It is as if he is unaware of Kant’s effort to demonstrate how the categories are a

priori concepts without which no object for our discursive understanding could be thought or experienced

by us at all. Or, it is as if he is unaware of Kant’s project of providing an alternative to the concept-

empiricisms of Locke and Hume.

This suggestion that Hegel was insufficiently aware of the distinction between Kant’s transcendental

philosophy and Lockean empiricism seems further supported, not just by passages such as those we

considered in Chapter Two in which he identifies Kant’s conception of nature as “empiricist,” but also by

his remark in Faith and Knowledge that Kant’s philosophy (along with the philosophies of Jacobi and

Fichte) is “the completion and idealization of…empirical psychology” (FK 63/GW 297). In the opening

pages of the section on Kant in that same text, Hegel reminds us of Kant’s

project of critiquing the cognitive faculties. He then quotes a long paragraph from Locke’s Essay

Concerning Human Understanding—as if to thereby illustrate what Kant must have had in mind by the

project of a critique. Locke’s assertion in that passage that we need to understand the nature and limits of

our “capacities of…understanding,” Hegel writes, are words we “could just as well read in the Introduction

to Kant’s philosophy.” Both philosophers, he tells us, are involved in a “consideration of the finite intellect”

(FK 69/GW 304).

3.2 Evidence against the standard interpretation

The passages we just reviewed could be read to imply that Hegel mistakes Kant for an empiricist in the

following respects: He fails to appreciate the fact that, for Kant, the project of undertaking a critique of

cognition results in an account of the a priori or non-empirical conditions of the possibility of

experience—an account of the a priori or non-empirical origin of our categories and forms of intuition.

Moreover, Hegel misunderstands the implications of Kant’s restriction of our knowledge to appearances.

He supposes that what this means, for Kant, is that we can have no epistemic access to reality.

There is abundant textual evidence, however, to suggest that this reading of Hegel is off the mark.

Although it cannot be denied that he thinks that Kantian idealism deserves to be considered empiricistin

some sense, he does not commit the elementary errors his critics attribute to him. As we shall see, his

representation of Kant’s empiricism is considerably more complex than the above account might lead us

to suppose. It certainly is not indicative of any failure to appreciate that, for Kant, we have some concepts

that are not of empirical origin. Nor does it demonstrate that he is ignorant of Kant’s insistence that

“appearances” refer to the possible objects of human experience and not merely the secondary or sensible

qualities of those objects.

We need only consider a few texts to cast the critics’ line of interpretation into doubt. Beginning with the

passage from Faith and Knowledge we reviewed at the end of section 3.1, Hegel follows his remark that

the programs of Kant and Locke share in common the “consideration of the finite intellect,” by adding the

point that Kant’s results are “entirely different” (FK 69/GW 304). He then draws attention to a feature he

believes is unique to Kant’s transcendental philosophy: its preoccupation with the question, “How are

synthetic judgments a priori possible?” He goes on to review in considerable detail Kant’s account of the

role of the original synthetic unity of apperception, and of the faculty of productive imagination in

applying the categories to the manifold given in space and time. There is no evidence in these remarks

that Hegel fails to acknowledge the difference between Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories

and an empiricist account of the origin of our concepts.

Other works support this conclusion as well. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel prefaces

his discussion of the Critical philosophy with the reminder that Kant sets out to provide an alternative,

not just to the metaphysical philosophy of

Wolff, but also to the empiricism of Locke.6 He then reviews key features of Kant’s Transcendental Logic

and of his argument that there are a priori concepts and forms of intuition that condition the possibility of

experience. In theEncyclopaedia Logic, Hegel notes that for empiricism, principles and laws “are not

supposed to have any more significance and validity on their own account than that which is taken from

perception” (EL § 38). He goes on to point out that Hume “attacks all universal determinations and laws,

precisely because they have no justification by way of sense perception” (EL § 39). For the “Critical

philosophy” of Kant, however, universality and necessity do not “stem from the empirical as such,” but

belong to “the spontaneity of thinking” and are “a priori” (EL §§ 40, 41A2).

At the very least, these passages call into question the interpretation of Hegel we sketched in

section3.1. When we turn in Chapter Four to consider his treatment of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,

we will encounter further evidence that he was well acquainted with Kant’s project of providing an

alternative to empiricism. It will then become clear that Hegel appreciated Kant’s effort to challenge both

the empiricist’s account of the origin of our concepts and the skeptical conclusions of Hume. Instead of

considering more evidence of this kind here, however, I want to suggest in the remaining sections of this

chapter an alternative to the mistaken reading. For even if we grant that Hegel does not commit the

elementary errors commentators attribute to him, we still need to explain the comparisons he undeniably

makes between Kantian idealism and empiricism. We need some account of his curious remark in the

Introduction to Faith and Knowledge that the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, represent the

“completion and idealization of…empirical psychology.”

3.3 The finitude of human cognition: Kant, Fichte,Jacobi,

and Locke

To get our alternative interpretation underway, it will be helpful to explore more fully Hegel’s portrayal,

in Faith and Knowledge, of the “metaphysic of subjectivity.” Beginning with the second of the three points

we outlined in section 3.1, why does he write that, in common with empiricism, Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi

“raise to the first and highest standpoint the standpoint of a subject” (FK 63/GW 297)? Hegel tells us that

these philosophers “asked and answered the question of what the universe is for a subjectivity that feels

and is conscious.” Each set out from the “certainty” that there “exists a thinking subject,” he writes a few

paragraphs later; and for each, “the whole of philosophy consists in determining the universe with respect

to this finite reason [endliche Vernunft]” (FK 64/GW 298).

These references to the “certainty” of the thinking subject, and to the elevation of subjectivity to the “first

and highest standpoint,” bring Descartes to mind; and there is reason to suppose that at least one of

Hegel’s aims in these passages is to draw attention to the way in which Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi are

indebted to Descartes.7 Here, as in other texts, Hegel characterizes the Cartesian as insisting that prior to

inquiring into the nature of any object, we need to examine the faculty of knowledge itself. Hegel discovers

this insistence upon the priority of a critique of cognition as much at the basis of the philosophical

strategies of Locke and Hume as of Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi. He also seems to suggest that implicit in the

“modern” demand for such a critique is the assumption that the standard of what is to count as knowledge

is to be set by subjectivity itself rather than by anything “external.” He explains in the Encyclopaedia

Logic that modern or Cartesian philosophy differs in this respect from Scholasticism, for example, which

merely presupposes or takes for granted some “content” (namely, the dogmas of the Christian church)

and limits its task to that of clarifying that content and rendering it more precise (EL § 38A).8

Of greater interest for our present purposes, however, is Hegel’s comment that each of these philosophers

shares with Locke the conviction that philosophy determines the universe with respect to “finite

reason.”9 In what sense does Hegel believe that reason is “finite” for Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, as well as

Locke? One important clue is this: Finite reason, he writes, “renounces intuition and cognition of the

eternal” (FK 63/GW 297). For each of these “Enlightenment” philosophers, he says, “the Absolute

is…beyond reason” (FK 56/GW 288).

Hegel’s point, then, is that each of these philosophers considers reason to be finite, because each supposes

that our ideas or concepts are unable to yield knowledge of objects outside or beyond the realm of sense

experience (objects that are “eternal” or “Absolute,” as he puts it). Implied by the thesis of the finitude of

reason, Hegel seems to suggest, is the assumption endorsed by Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Locke alike that

if a concept is to provide material knowledge (knowledge of “the universe”), it must in some way be tied to

sense experience.

Let’s focus in on Hegel’s treatment of the Kantian and empiricist systems and grant for a moment that he

is right to compare them in this way. We nonetheless have to concede that there are significant differences

in how Kantians and empiricists specify the connection between our concepts and sense experience. For

the empiricist such as Locke, an idea or concept gives us knowledge of nature—is genuinely

representative—only if it (or its constituent parts) ultimately originates in experience. If an idea is

genuinely representative, then we should be able to discover its origin in the sense impressions that

originally caused it. For Kant, however, we demonstrate a necessary connection of our concepts to objects,

not by tracing their origin back to sense impressions, but by establishing that in the absence of such

concepts, we would have no experience at all. Our concepts have a necessary connection to objects, that is,

only as a priori conditions of our cognition or experience of those objects.10

Despite these differences in the views of Kantians and empiricists regarding the kind of connection that

must obtain between our concepts and sense experience, Hegel is surely right to claim that both Kantians

and empiricists defend the thesis that knowledge of the supersensible is not possible for human

understanding. This is at least part of the point he wishes to emphasize when he asserts that both

approaches are committed to the thesis of the “finitude” of reason. The finitude thesis for both approaches

thus implies a restriction on the scope of our knowledge. Although their grounds for imposing this

restriction are not the same, Kantians and empiricists alike insist that we can have no warrant for

claiming knowledge of objects that transcend the realm of sense experience.11

But Hegel’s comparison of these two philosophical systems goes deeper than this. In answer to the

question, why do the Kantians and the empiricists consider reason to be finite or limited in this way, what

he tells us is that, for both, reason (or, in Kant’s case, the faculty of understanding) is a faculty that is

“affected by sensibility” (FK 65/GW 299). Hegel highlights the fact that both systems are committed to

the assumption that, in our efforts to know nature, we must rely on an independently given sense content.

For Kantians and empiricists alike, we know nature neither by merely analyzing the meaning of our

concepts nor by means of intuitions that are non-sensible or intellectual. Both Kantians and empiricists

thus renounce the “intuition and cognition of the eternal,” as Hegel says. For both approaches, the only

intuitions of nature available to us are sensible—intuitions linked in the above-mentioned ways to our

concepts. And it is precisely because the only intuitions of nature available to us are sensible, that for

Kantians as well as empiricists, “philosophy cannot aim at the cognition of God, but only at what is called

the cognition of man” (FK 65/GW 299).

The fact that Hegel makes these points of comparison at a high level of generality perhaps explains why

there is nothing obviously objectionable in them. Without having to misrepresent either philosophical

approach, we can grant his general claim that Kantians as well as empiricists deny us knowledge of the

supersensible and require that, in our efforts to know nature, we must be “affected by sensibility.” But the

next step in Hegel’s comparison is less straightforward. The point about the finitude of reason leads him

to claim in addition that, for Kantians and empiricists alike, the knowledge we do and can (legitimately)

have is not only limited in scope but also second rate—a mere representation of the real thing. This

message is conveyed, for example, in the passage from Faith and Knowledge we considered earlier, where

he writes that the “metaphysic of subjectivity” to which Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi, as well as Locke adhere,

transforms the world into a “system of appearances, or of the affections of the subject, and believed

realities” (FK 189/GW 430). This seems to be the message of the following remark as well:

The fundamental principle common to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte is…the absoluteness of

finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the

sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute. (FK 62/GW

295f.; emphasis added)

This latter passage is contained in Hegel’s Introduction to Faith and Knowledge, and it is in these pages

that he most explicitly alerts us to the following implication of the metaphysic of subjectivity: that in

denying us knowledge of the supersensible, it denies us knowledge of what is “truly real and absolute.”

The “Enlightenment” philosophies of Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi set out to establish the primacy of reason or

knowledge over faith, he tells us, but they end up achieving just the opposite. Because of their insistence

upon the finitude of reason, because of their denial of the possibility of the “intuition and cognition of the

eternal,” these philosophers convert the consciousness of their own “nothingness,” Hegel writes, “into a

system” (FK 56/GW 289). In restricting human knowledge to the merely sensible, in taking the empirical

or the finite to be “absolute,” as he puts it, Enlightenment philosophy in the end is forced to “take refuge

in faith.” The Enlightenment metaphysic of subjectivity, he argues in these pages, is thus a metaphysic of

grief and longing.

The central message of these remarks is not difficult to make out: Hegel means to suggest that the

metaphysic of subjectivity (whether of the Kantian or the empiricist variety) has

ultimately skepticalimplications for our knowledge. On his portrayal, as we have seen, the metaphysic of

subjectivity assumes not just that reason is limited in its knowing to what is given in sense experience; it

also supposes that our form of knowledge is somehow deficient or second rate. In addition to the

limitation on the scope of human knowledge that follows from the finitude of reason, the metaphysic of

subjectivity asks us to concede that our knowledge of nature is ultimately something other than

(something inferior to) what Hegel calls the “truly real and absolute.”

It is precisely this latter point that motivates the criticisms of Hegel we reviewed in section 3.1. It is one

thing to suggest, as Hegel does, that empiricism ultimately results in skepticism. (This we might be ready

to grant, especially in light of the transformation Lockean empiricism undergoes once subject to the

criticisms of Berkeley and Hume.) It is quite another, however, to claim that Kantian idealism results in

skepticism as well. Hegel seems to be convinced, not merely of the skeptical implications of both systems,

but also (and perhaps more remarkably) of the fact that they are skeptical for the same reason. Their

skepticisms, he proposes, rest on the same basis: on the “metaphysic of subjectivity,” and thus on a

common commitment to the thesis of the finitude of reason.

In order to account for the comparisons Hegel makes of these two systems, critics resort to the

supposition we considered earlier that he cannot have fully appreciated Kant’s effort to provide an

alternative to the empiricisms of Locke and Hume. Hegel’s assumption that Kantian idealism and

empiricism are skeptical in the same way is surely evidence, his critics tell us, that he fails to acknowledge

key differences in the two forms of idealism. This is why he takes it to follow from Kant’s insistence that

our knowledge is limited to appearances, that we can have no knowledge of the really real. The charge, in

effect, is that Hegel makes the mistake of interpreting appearances in the deflationary sense: he confuses

Kant’s claim that we can know only appearances with the view that we can know only our contingent or

merely subjective representations of the real.

Earlier, I suggested that this thesis that Hegel failed to appreciate key differences in Kantian idealism and

empiricism is without merit. As I hope will be clear by the end of this chapter, there is simply too much

evidence against it. Of course, if this is true, we then need an alternative explanation for Hegel’s charge,

not just that both approaches result in skepticism, but that their skepticisms share a common ground. In

the name of providing that alternative reading, I believe we benefit from exploring a clue contained in a

passage we already considered: “The fundamental principle common to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi

and Fichte,” Hegel writes, “is…the absoluteness of finitude and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis

of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous.”

We now know what Hegel has in mind by the “absoluteness of finitude.” He believes that philosophers

committed to the metaphysic of subjectivity hold that the only intuitions of nature accessible to us are

sensible intuitions. If our ideas or concepts are to yield knowledge of nature, they must be tied to or

anchored in sense experience. But what about Hegel’s reference in the above passage to “absolute

antithesis” (FK 62/GW 295)? His assumption seems to be that if we are committed to the thesis about the

finitude of our cognitive powers, then we are also committed to the “absolute antithesis of finitude and

infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous.” He furthermore suggests that it is

because of their commitment to this thesis about “absolute antithesis” that the philosophies of Kant,

Fichte, and Jacobi

represent the “completion and idealization of…empirical psychology.” The philosophies of Kant, Fichte,

and Jacobi are similar to Lockean empiricism, he says, in that they come “to understand that the infinite

concept is strictly opposed to the empirical” (FK 63/GW 297; emphasis added). So common to

empiricism and Kantianism (or common to those who embrace the “metaphysic of subjectivity”) is this

commitment to the thesis of absolute opposition. As we shall see, it is this adherence to the thesis of

absolute opposition that Hegel believes is responsible for the fact that both empiricism and Kantian

idealism reach ultimately skeptical conclusions regarding the possibility of human knowledge.

3.4 Kant’s commitment to absolute opposition revisited

We just reviewed Hegel’s reasons for claiming that a commitment to the finitude of reason implies a

commitment to the view that our knowledge is limited in scope: Those adhering to the thesis of finitude

hold that our knowledge is restricted to objects of sense experience. Moreover, we saw that Hegel is

convinced that a commitment to the thesis of finitude has skeptical implications for our knowledge: For

the philosophers of finitude, our knowledge claims fall short of the real and the true, even if we restrict

their objects to what can be given in sense experience. Hegel attributes these implications to the

metaphysic of subjectivity and thus to empiricism and Kantianism alike. As we noted in section 3.3, he in

addition seems convinced that the metaphysic of subjectivity results in skepticism because it presupposes

(as he believes empiricism and Kantianism do) the thesis of absolute opposition.

It should be no mystery what our next set of questions needs to be: What, exactly, is this thesis of absolute

opposition? Upon what account of ideas or concepts and of the given content of sense experience does it

rest? Why is Hegel convinced that systems as dissimilar as Kantian idealism and empiricism hold it in

common? Why, furthermore, does he assert that the thesis of absolute opposition implies skepticism?

None of these questions admits of an easy answer, but we need to address them if we are to explain

Hegel’s curious suggestion that since empiricism and Kantian idealism share a commitment to the thesis

of absolute opposition, both systems yield ultimately skeptical conclusions about what we can know.

In Chapter Two, we reviewed some of the features Hegel associates with the thesis of absolute opposition

(or of “heterogeneity,” as he alternatively calls it). There, we explored his criticism of Kant for taking

discursivity to be “absolute,” for denying our form of cognition the powers of an intuitive understanding.

We saw that, on Kant’s conception, there is for the intuitive intellect no heterogeneity or opposition of

concepts and sensible intuitions, of universal and particular. There is no heterogeneity, because the

intuitions of the intuitive intellect are “original” versus independently given by means of sensible affection.

Since the intuitive intellect brings its intuitions into being, there is furthermore for it no “contingency” in

the relation between its

representations and the objects it intuits. In these important respects, Kant points out, the cognitive

powers of an intuitive understanding differ from our own.

In section 2.4 of that chapter, we considered Hegel’s portrayal of the way in which a discursive

understanding must conceive of nature. We saw that, because concepts and sensible intuitions are

heterogeneous for the discursive intellect, what is given to it in sense experience is for it, in Hegel’s words,

“only matter,” something “essentially determined and lifeless” (D 164/105, 139/76). To conceive of nature

as “only matter” is to assume that nature gets its form externally. This, Hegel tells us, is precisely Kant’s

conception of form. For according to Kant, form for any discursive understanding is not given in or with

the matter of experience itself. Nature gets its form as appearance from our a priori forms of intuition,

space and time; it gets its form as a thinkable contentfrom our a priori concepts or categories.12

This point that form is external to matter (and so, not already present in what is given in sensation) is

surely part of what Hegel takes to be implied by the “heterogeneity” or “absolute opposition” of form and

content, of concept and intuition. But is he right to attribute these assumptions to Kantian idealism and

empiricism alike? Is it in other words true, for Kant as well as for the empiricist, that nature must be

conceived as in itself “only matter,” and that its form must be thought of as “external”? Eventually, we will

have to supply answers to these questions. Before we set out to do so, however, there is another question

we need to consider first: Even if we grant that Kantian idealism and empiricism are committed to the

thesis of heterogeneity in just the way Hegel claims they are, why should we agree with him that the thesis

of heterogeneity or opposition has ultimately skeptical implications for our knowledge?

This question is particularly vexing if only because Kant never suggests that skepticism follows from the

dualism of form and content in his system, or from his assumption that form is not given in the matter of

sensation itself. Kant, that is, never derives skeptical implications from his thesis that in knowing the

independently given sensible manifold we must rely on both a priori forms of intuition and a priori forms

of thought. Of course, he does grant that since our mode of cognition is discursive and must therefore rely

on an independently given sense content, the relation between our concepts and that sense content is

“contingent.”13 As we know from our earlier discussions, he argues in §§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of

Judgment that since we cannot from our cognitive activity produce the content of sense perception, we

are not entitled to assume that the given manifold of sensation is susceptible to our conceptual

determinations. Although we must as a condition of empirical inquiry presuppose a

harmony or fit between our concepts and that sense content, this presupposition does not admit of

confirmation by experience, in his view. But Kant never identifies as skeptical this thesis about

contingency in the relation of our concepts to the given sense content. We need to dwell for a moment on

his reasons for this, for later in this chapter I will suggest that the reasons he provides are insufficient to

answer Hegel’s charge that the commitment to the thesis of the heterogeneity of form and content is

indeed skeptical in its implications.

We can best capture Kant’s reasoning by recalling his representation of the general strategy of his Critical

project. Far from portraying his project as in any way playing into the hands of the skeptic, he tells us in

the Prefaces of the first Critique that his Critical philosophy offers us the only means of saving

metaphysics. In order to save metaphysics, he says, he must provide an alternative, not just to dogmatic

rationalism but also to Humean skepticism. Against Hume, Kant argues that it is indeed possible to

demonstrate that we have knowledge of nature that is necessary and universal. Against dogmatic

rationalism, he believes he can establish that such knowledge, although necessary and universal, is

synthetic rather than merely conceptual or analytic. As he famously points out, we can only establish that

we have this kind of knowledge (knowledge that is both synthetic and a priori) by giving up an assumption

that both the Humean empiricist and the dogmatic rationalist hold in common: the assumption, namely,

that it is possible to demonstrate a necessary connection between our concepts and objects wholly

independent of the a priori conditions of our knowing them. The possibility of saving metaphysics in other

words requires what Kant refers to as a “Copernican revolution” in philosophy. The strategy demands that

we grant that our material knowledge is limited to objects thought through our a priori concepts or

categories, and given via our forms of intuition, space and time. Our necessary synthetic knowledge, then,

is not of objects “in themselves” but only of objects qua “appearances”—that is, of objects subject to the a

priori conditions of our knowing them. This is the point of Kant’s remark in his B-Preface that, “we can

cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves put into them” (CPR B xviii).

The fact that Kant discovers no trace of skepticism in this result is clearly tied to his conviction that it

allows him to save metaphysics. I suggested a moment ago, however, that this line of reasoning does not

address the real target of Hegel’s critique. When Hegel dismisses Kant’s idealism as “subjective” and as

having ultimately skeptical implications for our knowledge, it is not because he fails to appreciate Kant’s

Copernican strategy and effort to offer an alternative to the skeptical empiricism of Hume. Nor is it even

because he thinks Kant’s Copernican strategy does not earn the claims Kant makes for it. Rather, Hegel’s

objection is aimed at an assumption upon which the Copernican strategy rests: the thesis of absolute

opposition. Although we do not yet know why, it is the thesis of absolute opposition or heterogeneity—

with its particular conception of the nature of subjective form and of the given content to which form must

apply—that moves Hegel to complain that the Kantian philosophy denies us

knowledge of the “truly real and absolute” and is thus a metaphysic of grief and longing.

3.5 Kant’s contingency thesis revisited

We cannot assess the merits of Hegel’s complaints, of course, until we understand why he makes them.

After all, it is by no means obvious that skepticism is the price we must pay if we endorse Kant’s

Copernican strategy for saving metaphysics, and if we grant his account of the implications of our

discursivity. It is true that Kant argues that it is a consequence of our discursivity that there is contingency

in the relation of our concepts to the given sense content; but as we just saw, he does not take this

contingency to cast skeptical doubts on what we can know. In his view, contingency follows from the fact

that, in our cognitions of nature, we have to rely on a sense content we do not make, a content that is

independently given. And the theses that we must rely on an independently given sense content, and that

we can only know that content as conditioned by our subjective forms, are essential premises in his

argument for saving metaphysics. Metaphysics needs to be saved, Kant tells us, precisely because

philosophers have presupposed that it is possible to demonstrate a necessary connection between our

ideas or concepts, and objects wholly independent of our subjective conditions. On his account, however,

we can save metaphysics only if we take the Copernican turn andgive up this assumption. We save

metaphysics, that is, by acknowledging that our ideas or conceptscannot inform us about objects wholly

independent of our subjective forms.

What grounds could Hegel possibly have, then, for claiming that this Copernican strategy for saving

metaphysics has skeptical implications? If he is warranted in reaching this conclusion, it is for reasons we

have yet to bring to light. To prepare the way for what is to come: I suggested back in Chapter Onethat,

whatever else Hegel’s critique amounts to, its aim is not to challenge Kant’s assumption that because our

intellect is discursive, we must in our cognitions of nature rely on an independently given sense content.

Hegel is not out to award us literally all the powers of an intuitive intellect. As I have been urging, he

rejects merely some of the features Kant associates with the discursive model. He rejects the model’s

reliance on the thesis of absolute opposition, that is, on a particular conception of the nature of subjective

form and of the given content to which that form must apply. But we still do not know why Hegel finds the

thesis of absolute opposition objectionable; nor is it clear why he thinks the thesis commits the Critical

philosophy to skepticism.

If I am right in proposing that Hegel does not reject Kant’s claim that we must rely on an independently

given sense content, what assumption of Kant’s portrayal of our discursivity does he reject? We can

answer this question, I believe, by drawing out further assumptions of Kant’s argument for the

contingency of our concepts—assumptions we have not yet made explicit. Up to now, I have presented

Kant’s contingency argument as depending on the following premise: the premise, namely, that since our

mode of understanding is discursive, it is not possible for us to produce

sensible intuitions by exercising our cognitive powers; we must in our cognitions of nature rely on an

independently given sense content. This is how Kant presents the argument in §§ 76 and 77 of the Critique

of Judgment; he conveys the impression there that the point about contingency follows from that premise

alone.14 Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this is not the case. To see why not, we

need only consider the fact that other philosophers derive from essentially the same premise very

different conclusions. For a realist such as Locke, for example, the assumption that our cognitions of

nature depend on an independently given sense content (rather than, say, on reason or intellectual

intuition alone) is taken to be perfectly compatible with the conclusion that our concepts are capable of

reflecting or harmonizing with that content. The Lockean realist, that is, understands the following two

assumptions to be entirely compatible: that we have to rely in our cognitions of nature on an

independently given sense content, and that some of our concepts are capable of reflecting that content.

The Lockean understands these assumptions to be compatible, because he has a story to tell about how

our ideas or concepts ultimately derive from experience.

Of course, Kant does not follow Locke down this path. The fact that he does not is illuminating—for it

reveals that his conclusion about the contingency of our concepts rests on some further assumption or set

of assumptions we have yet to identify. In agreement with Locke, Kant denies that the given content or

matter of sense perception comes to us already formed. With Locke, that is, he supposes that the complex

concepts that determine the basic form of our experience—concepts such as substance, causality, and

necessity—are not themselves perceivable, are not themselves immediately present in sensation, but have

to be accounted for in some other way. But Kant does not follow Locke in arguing that the way in which

we account for these concepts involves tracing their origin (or that of their constituent parts) back to sense

impressions.15 Nor is

Kant prepared to grant Locke’s realist assumption that it is due to the fact that we can trace the origin of

our ideas or concepts back to sense impressions, that we can rest assured that they are capable of

reflecting the reality of nature itself.

In order to derive the conclusion that the relation between our concepts and the independently given

content of sensation is contingent, Kant thus has to rely on more than the premise that our mode of

understanding (because discursive) is dependent on sensible affection. Two further premises are at work

in his argument: One premise is that the most basic concepts that govern all cognition (the pure concepts

or categories without which we could not even have empirical concepts) do not derive from sense

experience at all, but are a priori. The other, more interesting premise is that since these concepts are a

priori, neither they nor the empirical concepts that depend on them can be assumed to reflect the given

content of sense experience itself.16

It is worth emphasizing once again that without these additional assumptions, the contingency conclusion

does not follow. This has the important implication that the premise that we must rely on sensible

affection is not by itself responsible for Kant’s conclusion that there is contingency in the relation between

our concepts and the given sensible content. As I suggested back in Chapter One, this premise about our

reliance on sensible affection is also not what troubles Hegel.17 We saw a moment ago that Hegel’s

objections to the metaphysic of subjectivity are aimed at its ultimately skeptical implications. The

metaphysic of subjectivity has skeptical implications, in his view, because of its commitment to the thesis

of absolute opposition or heterogeneity. The thesis of absolute opposition, however, is not wholly

captured by the claim that, in our cognitions of nature, we have to rely on an independently given sense

content. The thesis of absolute opposition takes for granted the further assumptions that what is given to

us in sense experience is in itself “lifeless” or without form, and that the form the given content comes to

take on cannot be assumed to reveal the reality of that

content itself. No skeptical implications follow simply from the premise that our understanding, qua

discursive, must rely in its cognitions of nature on an independently given sense content.

3.6 Form and matter: Locke, Hume, and Kant

The above remarks reveal enough about the thesis of absolute opposition to answer one of the questions

we raised in section 3.4: On what basis does Hegel discover similarities in the systems of Kantian idealism

and empiricism? We know why he claims that Kant’s view about the given content of experience is

empiricist. This is because, he tells us, Kant follows empiricism in holding that the independently given

content of sensation is “only matter”—matter without form—which must derive its form

“externally.”18 Hegel is not guilty of inaccuracy on this point; for as we saw in section 3.5, it is neither for

Locke nor for Kant the case that sense impressions are given to us already individuated into objects,

already unified or determined by concepts such as substance, necessity, and causality. This is why, for

both philosophers, the basic form of our experience cannot be accounted for with reference to what is

given to us in sensation alone.

It might seem, however, that the similarities between Kantian idealism and empiricism end here. For

although there is agreement regarding the nature of the given content of sensation, there appears to be

nothing but disagreement about the nature of form. The two systems most obviously part ways when it

comes to the respective stories they tell about the origin of form. The Lockean empiricist, as we saw,

believes it is possible to trace at least the simple components of form (components of our ideas or

concepts) back to sense impressions. In sharp contrast, the Kantian idealist argues that the basic form of

experience (the “categories” of substance, necessity, causality, etc., as well as the forms of intuition, space

and time) is not empirically derived at all, but a priori. The two systems furthermore part ways when it

comes to specifying what we can expect the form of our experience to reveal about its given content, about

nature as it is independent of the subjective conditions of our cognizing it. For the Lockean empiricist, we

have reason for confidence that our ideas or concepts are capable of mirroring the reality of nature.19 For

the Kantian idealist, in contrast, we strictly speaking have no cognitive access to nature as it is in itself (no

access to a wholly

mind-independent content). We know independently given content only as thought by means of a priori

concepts and as given through our a priori forms of intuition, space and time.

As will become clear below, Hegel recognizes these differences in the Kantian and empiricist views about

form. Nonetheless, he is convinced that there is something of interest in how their views about form

intersect. We have reason to believe that Hegel is convinced that their views intersect because, as we

noted in the first section of this chapter, he classifies both systems under the heading of the “metaphysic

of subjectivity.” As instances of the metaphysic of subjectivity, they share the following features, on his

account: Both systems deny us knowledge of the supersensible. Both, he claims, are in addition

committed to the view that our knowledge of objects of the sensible realm is ultimately “subjective.” (We

know nature as a mere representation, not as it is in itself.) In this way, both systems result in skepticism.

Furthermore, the skepticism of both systems does not follow in Hegel’s view from the thesis they share

about the givenness of sense content—about the fact that in our cognitions of nature we have to rely on

sensible affection. Rather—and this is the important point—skepticism follows, on Hegel’s interpretation,

from their shared views, both about the nature of the sense content that is given (namely, it is given as

“lifeless”), and about the form that sense content comes to take on.

Let’s direct our attention more narrowly, now, to the account of form Hegel believes is shared by

empiricism and Kantian idealism. The assumption he thinks is responsible for the skepticism of Kant’s

philosophy is this: The form we contribute, on Kant’s analysis, cannot be taken to reveal the nature of the

independently given sense content itself. Form, for Kant, is in this sense “external” or “absolutely opposed”

to matter. As just noted, Hegel seems to attribute this conception of form to empiricism as well. He seems

to suggest, then, that it is also the case for empiricism that the form the independently given content of

sensation comes to take on cannot reveal to us the nature of that given content. This is an odd view to

impute to empiricism—at least if the version of empiricism we have in mind is that of Locke. For as we

know, Locke is confident that at least some of our concepts can reflect the reality of nature itself. He

assures us that his concept-empiricism justifies a commitment to representative realism.

Hegel does in fact argue that empiricism, like Kantian idealism, ultimately results in skepticism. He does

so, as we shall see, not because he is ignorant of the realist ambitions of Locke, but because he is

convinced that the realist ambitions of Locke collapse under the skeptical scrutiny of Hume. Empiricism

(in general) is an instance of the metaphysic of subjectivity, on Hegel’s interpretation, because it achieves

its completion in Hume’s skepticism. And Hume is a skeptic, in Hegel’s view, because (like Kant) he is

convinced that the form we contribute in our cognitions of nature cannot reveal to us the reality of nature

itself.

Since it is important for our purposes to be clear about Hegel’s reasons for characterizing empiricism as a

“metaphysic of subjectivity,” I devote the remaining paragraphs of this section to a brief review of the

story he tells about the transformation

empiricism undergoes in the transition from Locke to Hume. There are intimations of this account in the

Jena writings, but Hegel’s most explicit discussions of it occur in the Phenomenology, the Lectures on the

History of Philosophy, and theEncyclopaedia Logic.20 For the sake of economy, I restrict my attention in

what follows almost exclusively to passages from the latter text.

Hegel writes in the Encyclopaedia Logic that “instead of seeking what is true in thought itself,”

“empiricism proceeds to draw it from experience” (EL § 37). Its “great principle” is that “what is true must

be in actuality and must be there for our perception” (EL § 38). Empiricism starts with “the content that

belongs to perception,” Hegel says, and takes that content to be “multifariously concrete” (EL § 38, 38A).

It supposes, in other words, that the given content of sense perception is an “infinitelymanifold

material that isolates itself into single [bits] that stand on their own” (EL § 39). The single bits or atoms

“stand on their own,” presumably, because they are taken to bear to each other no intrinsic relation.21

Here Hegel highlights an assumption of empiricism we considered earlier: Empiricism does not suppose

that the basic form of our experience is itself immediately discoverable or observable in the impressions

given in sensation. What it does suppose is that sense impressions supply an “infinite manifold” of

“isolated bits” that bear no intrinsic connection to one another. Empiricism attempts to demonstrate,

however, that the form our experience takes on ultimately derives from sense impressions in some way.

Empiricism attempts to justify this conclusion by arguing, against innatism, that if not the complex ideas

that determine the form of our experience, then at least their simple constituents are given in

sensation.22 As Hegel puts it, empiricism endeavors to discover in the “perceived singular” the origin of

our concepts or universals (EL § 38A). It employs acts of analysis (acts of comparison, combination,

abstraction, and so forth) to “elevate [the content of perception] into the form of the universal

representations, principles, and laws” (EL § 38). The universal determinations that empiricism sets out to

discover, he continues, “are not supposed to have any more significance and validity than that which is

taken from perception, and no justification save the connection that can be demonstrated in experience”

(EL § 38).

But in this endeavor, Hegel continues, empiricism cannot succeed. “Empiricism falls into error in

analyzing objects,” he writes, “if it supposes that it leaves them as they are, for, in fact, it transforms what

is concrete into something abstract.” The process of

analysis, the process of combining and abstracting, requires us to “advance from the immediacy of

perception to thought.” In this advance, we transform what is concrete into something abstract. Even

what we refer to as the given “matter” of experience is already abstract; for “matter,” Hegel writes, is

“something that cannot be perceived as such” (EL § 38A). Our efforts to appeal to the given content of

sensation to justify our “universal determinations” must therefore fail. The determinations, for example,

of universality and necessity on the side of form, cannot be discovered in the content of perception at all.

Instead, they reflect what is added by thought. As Hegel puts the point, very much in the spirit of Hume:

It is true that empirical observation…provides perceptions and alterations that follow one after the other,

and of objects that lie side by side; but it does not provide any necessary connection. Since, however,

perception is to remain the foundation of what counts as truth, universality and necessity appear to be

something unjustified, a subjective contingency, a mere habit. (EL § 39)

A few sentences later, he mentions Hume by name:

In Humean skepticism, the truth of the empirical, the truth of feeling and intuition is taken as basic; and,

on that basis, he attacks all universal determinations and laws, precisely because they have no justification

by way of sense perception. (EL § 39)

In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel tells us that Hume in effect “destroyed” “the

objectivity…of thought-determinations.” He did so by demonstrating that the Lockean effort to justify our

concepts or universals by appealing to sense experience cannot succeed (LHP III 371ff./VGP III 277ff.). By

rendering our concepts “subjective,” Hegel then observes, Hume “completed” the philosophy of Locke.23

So the empiricism that is the “completion” of Locke’s system is unable to avoid skepticism, on Hegel’s

interpretation, because it is committed to the following two assumptions: First, that it is not in fact

possible to trace the form of our experience back to sense impressions, since the form of our experience is

indebted to what in the process of analysis gets added by thought. Second, that since form gets added in

this way, it cannot be grounded in that independent content itself.

Expressed in terms as general as these, we can see that the two assumptions responsible for the

skepticism of empiricism are identical to the assumptions responsible for the skepticism Hegel discovers

in Kant’s idealism as well. For Kant likewise denies that we can trace the form of our experience back to

sensation. Moreover, Kant agrees with Hume that the effort to justify the form of our experience by

appealing to the given content of sensation cannot succeed. The key point of comparison, for Hegel, is

this: Both Hume and Kant are committed to the view that, since form is contributed by the subject, we can

have no warrant for assuming that it reflects the independently given reality of things.24 For both

philosophers, then, we know nature only as conditioned or mediated by our subjective forms.

Hegel is aware that, in significant respects, Kant and Hume provide very different characterizations of the

nature and origin of form. As is clear from the Encyclopaedia passage we just considered, he knows that,

for Hume, our ideas of universality and necessity come to be as the result of “mere habit.” He nowhere

suggests that for Hume, as for Kant, the form of our experience is given a priori. Nonetheless, Hegel

believes that in one important respect the two philosophers agree on the status of form: Whether given a

priori or a product of custom and habit working on the faculty of the imagination, the form contributed by

the subject cannot be assumed to reflect the nature of the given content of sensation itself. The two

philosophers thus agree that, in this sense, form is “opposed” to matter. This is the assumption Hegel

holds responsible for the skepticism of both systems.

3.7 On treating reason as “independent” from “common

reality”

We now have our explanation for Hegel’s charge that Kant’s idealism shares with empiricism skeptical

implications for our knowledge. Each of these systems results in skepticism, because each adheres to the

thesis that the form of our knowledge is subjective. For Kant and for empiricism “culminating” in Hume,

form is subjective, not just because it derives from the subject, but because it is taken to reveal merely the

conditions we bring to objects in thinking and knowing them. Form is not assumed to disclose to us the

nature of objects wholly independent of those conditions.25

Whatever we in the end decide regarding the merits of Hegel’s comparison of the Kantian and empiricist

systems, it should be clear at this point that his comparison is not based on a misunderstanding of

essential respects in which they differ. As I argued earlier in this chapter, when Hegel tells us that it is a

consequence of the subjectivity of Kant’s idealism that we can know nature only as a representation or

“believed reality,” he is not conflating transcendental and empirical idealism. He is not interpreting

“appearances” in the deflationary sense; he knows that, for Kant, the term “appearances” refers to

possible objects of human perception and not to those (sensible or secondary) properties of objects that

depend for their existence on the contingent

perspective of the perceiver. Nor does Hegel ignore key differences in the Kantian and Lockean projects of

investigating or “critiquing” the nature of our cognitive faculties. He grasps the difference, for instance,

between empirical and transcendental deductions of concepts.26

Starting out from the assumption that Hegel is a better historian of philosophy than his critics typically

make him out to be, I have offered a reading of his subjective idealism critique that does not attribute to

him these elementary interpretative errors. An interesting discovery emerges from this alternative reading.

As we have seen, Hegel’s charge that Kant’s idealism suffers from subjectivity is aimed at Kant’s system as

an instance of what Hegel labels the “metaphysic of subjectivity.” This suggests that Hegel’s target is not

what is unique or innovative about the Critical philosophy; instead, it aims at assumptions he believes the

Critical philosophy shares with other systems, including empiricism. BothKantian and empiricist systems

are instances of the metaphysic of subjectivity, in his view.

We know that, for Hegel, systems committed to the metaphysic of subjectivity embrace the thesis of

absolute opposition. Hegel is therefore convinced that, for all their differences, Kantians and empiricists

share assumptions about the respective contributions, in cognition, of sensible content and subjective

form. If we grant that these shared views are the true target of Hegel’s critique, then it follows (as I just

noted) that his objections to the subjectivity of Kant’s system are objections to assumptions Kant inherits

from his predecessors. Hegel is convinced that as long as we cling to these assumptions (in particular, the

assumption of absolute opposition), skepticism (of a certain variety) results. Skepticism results, then,

whether we take the Copernican turn with Kant or not.27

If we direct our attention to features of Hegel’s own alternative conception of cognition, this point about

the real target of his critique becomes even more evident. Back in Chapter One, we determined that he is

interested in the model of an intuitive intellect because such an intellect is capable of knowing nature as in

perfect harmony with its cognitive powers. The intuitive intellect need not content itself with knowledge

that is subjective; it knows objects as they are in themselves, not merely as conditioned by its subjective

forms. Its knowledge is not limited in this way because its concepts and sensible intuitions, unlike those of

a discursive understanding, are not “entirely heterogeneous” (FK 89/GW 325). The intuitive intellect is

not a dependent mode of cognition that must rely on an independently given content; it produces its

objects out of its own cognitive activity.

In Chapter Two, we saw that the key to replacing heterogeneity with identity, for Hegel, requires that we

give up the subjectivity of our idealism. In section 3.3 of the present chapter, we explored in a preliminary

way what this involves. An idealism that is merely subjective grants the validity of the following inference:

Given that form comes from us (either because it is a priori, or because it results from the work of custom

and habit on our faculty of imagination), we can have no warrant for supposing that it captures the reality

of things. As we saw, Hegel attributes this reasoning not just to Kant but also to empiricism culminating

in Hume. In calling the inference into question, he invites us to examine the assumption or assumptions

upon which it rests. What does the inference presuppose about the nature of subjective form? What does

it presuppose about human subjectivity more generally?

Our discussions up to this point have provided a few clues to Hegel’s answers to these questions. At the

end of Chapter Two, we reviewed passages from the Difference essay in which he warns us against

conceiving of subjectivity (or more precisely, the science of subjectivity or intelligence) in an “abstract”

way. We do so, he says, when we “privilege” the science of subjectivity over the science of nature; we

forget the sense in which the two sciences form a “continuous whole” (D 169/111). If we privilege the

science of subjectivity or intelligence, we treat nature as in itself “only matter”—as a bare sensible content

that must get its form from us (D 164/105). We treat intelligence as wholly independent of and

undetermined by nature. In privileging the standpoint of subjectivity or intelligence, then, we forget that

intelligence and nature stand to each other in a relation of reciprocal determination or organic unity. We

forget that just as nature is conditioned by subjectivity, so is subjectivity conditioned by nature.

Hegel’s warnings against an “abstract” treatment of subjectivity show up in Faith and Knowledge as well.

Although Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi deny us knowledge of “the eternal” (and determine the universe with

“finite” reason), he writes, they at the same time locate the eternal (the “Absolute”) “above” the realm of

the empirical. They claim that this realm “above” or beyond the empirical is unavailable to “finite” reason

but nonetheless thinkable or intuitable—accessible to reason in its speculative employment. So while

insisting upon the finitude of our knowledge, each of these philosophers nonetheless awards reason in its

non-empirical or speculative use an “absoluteness [Absolutsein]” that consists in its “independence from

common reality [Unabhängigkeit von der gemeinen Wirklichkeit]” (FK 63/GW 296). For each of these

philosophers, reason can think (or intuit) “the eternal”; and reason’s very idea or intuition of the eternal

derives from its power to transcend the realm of the empirical. What Hegel argues here, however, is that

this “tendency” on the part of these Enlightenment philosophers to try to “vindicate” reason’s

“independence from common reality,” is a tendency we should resist. Likewise in his Encyclopaedia Logic,

he recommends that we be wary of the dualistic point of view that discovers, on the one side, a world of

“perception upon which the faculty of understanding reflects,” and on

the other, the “independence of self-comprehending thought [Selbständigkeit des sich erfassenden

Denkens]” (EL § 60).

These passages suggest that if we are to give up the “subjectivity” of our idealism, we need to abandon the

assumption that reason (or as he sometimes says, “thinking [Denken]”) is a transcendent power, a faculty

that enjoys “independence” from “common reality” or the realm of “perception.” This seems to be the

conception of reason Hegel discovers at the basis of systems adhering to the metaphysic of subjectivity. It

is the conception of reason he believes is ultimately responsible for the skepticism of the systems of both

Kant and Hume.28

If this interpretation is accurate, it challenges a number of alternative representations of Hegel’s

reasoning. Most obviously, it challenges the following caricature, according to which Hegel’s prescription

for overcoming heterogeneity (for achieving the “identity” of subjective form and the given sensible

content) is to award human cognition literally all the powers of an intuitive mode of understanding—

including the power to actually generate material objects out of its cognitive activity. This caricature

(which might appeal to those looking for an easy reductio of Hegel’s system) could be taken to explain his

remedy for the metaphysic of subjectivity; it might appear to clarify how he thinks we can avoid having to

content ourselves with knowledge of mere representations or “believed realities” (FK 189/GW 430).

In sharp contrast, I have suggested that giving up what is subjective in our idealism, on Hegel’s account,

requires us to steer clear of thinking of subjectivity (and its science) in an “abstract” way. We are to bear

in mind that human reason (even in its speculative

use) is not entirely independent from common reality; its form is not absolutely “external.” As Hegel says,

subjectivity is not purely subjective, but in some sense “subject-object.” It not only conditions but is

also conditioned by nature.

My reading contrasts not just with the above-mentioned caricature of Hegel, but also with the following

more plausible interpretation: On this view, Hegel believes we avoid heterogeneity, not by recognizing

that we possess the God-like power to bring objects of cognition into being, but by modifying our

expectations regarding what our concepts can reveal to us about a reality wholly independent of thought.

What Hegel proposes, on this reading, is that we abandon the effort to demonstrate that our concepts are

capable of corresponding to independently given sensible content. He in other words urges us to

appreciate that nothing wholly outside thought can be cognitively available to us. According to this

interpretation, Hegel considers the “thing in itself” (considered as a non-conceptual content) to have no

epistemic import for our mode of cognition. We close the gap between concept and object, in his view, by

granting that the proper objects of our knowledge are not objects wholly independent of thought, but

thought itself. In effect, overcoming the heterogeneity of our concepts and sensible intuitions is for Hegel

a matter of trading in representationalism for internalist coherentism.29

On my alternative reading, it is a mistake to claim that Hegel deprives objects wholly independent of our

concepts of any role to play in our knowledge. He undeniably sets out to close the gap between our

concepts and objects; but closing the gap, in his view, does not require a retreat into the realm of pure

thought. It requires no such retreat because, as I have been suggesting, the very idea of a realm of pure

thought is for Hegel an abstraction. As we have seen, the skepticism Hegel takes to plague the

“metaphysic of subjectivity” relies on a misguided commitment to the thesis of heterogeneity or “absolute

opposition.” In relying on this thesis, the metaphysic of subjectivity takes for granted the assumption that

human cognition is indeed God-like—not because it is possible for us to literally bring the material world

into being—but because, in thinking, we can abstract to a realm of pure thought, to a standpoint wholly

outside or “absolutely opposed” to “common reality.” The skepticism implied by the metaphysic of

subjectivity follows, that is, from the assumption that some of our ideas or concepts are formed in

complete abstraction from any input from the realm of the empirical.

In this chapter, I have outlined an interpretation of Hegel’s remedy for an idealism that is merely

“subjective.” My interpretation requires further defense—and this sets my task in the chapters to come.

Before moving on, however, I want to note that the reading I have so far proposed demystifies some of

Hegel’s persistent complaints about the Enlightenment philosophers of finitude. One complaint is that

these philosophers are inconsistent. As we saw, the philosophers of finitude renounce knowledge of the

eternal or infinite; they insist that “philosophy cannot aim at the cognition of God, but only at…the

cognition of man.” But for all their emphasis on limits, these philosophers at the same time grant human

reason extraordinary abstractive powers; they are confident that reason in its speculative capacity can

wholly transcend the realm of the empirical.30 Hegel seems to think that this inconsistency justifies a

further complaint as well. The philosophers of finitude are guilty of a certain “vanity.” For underlying

their project of “vindicating” the “absoluteness of reason” is the conviction that they have full access (if

only in thought) to reason’s not-so-finite nature.31

Notes:

(1) Doubts about the reliability of Hegel’s Kant interpretation are expressed, for example, by Karl Ameriks

in “Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46

(1985): 1–35, and Paul Guyer in “Thought and Being: Hegel’s Critique of Kant,” in Frederick C. Beiser

(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 171–210.

(2) Hegel’s discussion of the “Critical” philosophy in the Encyclopaedia Logic contains a number of

similar passages. He writes at EL § 60A1, for example, that the “one-sidedness of the Critical philosophy

consists alone in the fact that the finitude of the thought-determinations is attributed to the fact that they

belong only to our subjective thinking, for which the thing-in-itself is supposed to remain an absolute

beyond.”

Hegel finished and published the first edition of his three-part Encyclopaedia in 1817. The edition I rely

on of the first part of the Encyclopaedia (the Logic) is the expanded third edition of 1830. As Terry

Pinkard notes, the Encyclopaedia is drawn from lectures Hegel first began giving in the Gymnasium in

Nuremberg in 1812–13. See Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, 337, 375.

(3) Hegel provides his most fully articulated attack of the assumptions underlying the project of a critique

in the Introduction to his Phenomenology. But he voices his objections to the project of a critique in other

texts as well. In EL § 41A1, he writes that the “Critical Philosophy sets itself the task of investigating just

how far the forms of thinking are in general capable of helping us reach the cognition of truth. More

precisely, the faculty of cognition was to be investigated before cognition began.” See also his second

preface (1831) to the Science of Logic. I consider Hegel’s objections to critique at length in Chapter Five.

(4) As Rolf-Peter Horstmann notes, Hegel’s complaint is not directed at Kant’s list of categories. Indeed,

Hegel claims that Kant’s “inventory” of categories is “mainly correct” (EL § 60A1). What Hegel objects to

is the method by means of which Kant derives the categories. See Horstmann’s “Hegels Kritik der

Kantischen Kategorien,” in his collection, Bausteine kritischer Philosophie: Arbeiten zu Kant(Bodenheim

bei Mainz: Philo Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1997), 189.

(5) For recent expressions of the view that Hegel is among those who make this mistake of interpreting

Kantian appearances in the deflationary sense, see Henry Allison, “We Can Only Act Under the Idea of

Freedom,” Pacific Division APA Presidential Address, published in the Proceedings and Addresses of the

APA 71, no. 2 (1998), 45, and Graham Bird in “McDowell’s Kant: Mind and World,”Philosophy 71, no. 276

(1996), 234. For an overview of the history of “subjectivist” interpretations of Kant’s idealism,

see Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism 1781–1801, 17–25.

(6) Lectures on the History of Philosophy III, 429. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III:

Theorie Werkausgabe, Bd. 20 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971), 334–5. Hereafter “LHP III 429/VGP

III 334–5.”

(7) Hegel writes in the Encyclopaedia Logic, for example, that it is Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum” that is at

the center of the “entire concern of modern philosophy” (§ 64).

(8) In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel tells us it is characteristic of “modern philosophy”

to set aside the “dead authority of externality,” for example by challenging the authority of the Church. In

place of external authority, modern philosophy beginning with Descartes asserts the authority of reason.

“The principle of this new period is the principle of thinking—the thinking that proceeds from itself [das

von sich ausgehende Denken]…According to this principle of inwardness [Innerlichkeit]…thought that is

for itself free, is what is supposed to be valid.” This principle, he says, “begins with Descartes” (LHP III

217f./VGP III 120). Hegel describes Kant’s version of the standpoint of subjectivity in this way: For this

standpoint, “thought understands itself as absolute.” “Nothing external is for it authoritative; everything

authoritative is granted validity only through thought” (LHP III 424/VGP III 331).

(9) Hegel mentions Hume as a representative of the standpoint of subjectivity as well. (See FK 137,

154/GW 377, 395.) I consider Hegel’s portrayal of the importance of Hume for the development of

empiricism in the final sections of this chapter.

(10) In Kant’s view, the valid application of our a priori concepts or categories is limited to objects of

possible experience (objects given in space and time or “appearances”). From the standpoint of knowledge,

our concepts have no legitimate application to objects outside the realm of experience. They have no

legitimate application, that is, to “things in themselves.”

(11) Hegel makes these points not just in Faith and Knowledge, but in the Encyclopaedia Logic as well.

According to (a consistent) empiricism, he writes in the latter text, “no cognition of [the supersensible] is

supposed to be possible. We have to confine ourselves to what belongs to perception” (EL § 38).

According to Kant, the categories are “empty on their own account and have their application and use only

in experience” (EL § 43).

(12) Although Kant frequently uses the term “appearance [Erscheinung]” to refer to an object that is not

just given in space and time but also subject to categorial determination, he sometimes uses the term to

refer merely to the matter of experience, given a posteriori through the forms of intuition (space and time)

but not subsumed under categories. (Note that without categorial determination, appearances in this

latter sense are neither thinkable nor perceivable as objects.) Kant has this latter definition in mind when

he describes “appearance” as the “undetermined object of an empirical intuition” (CPR A 20/B 34).

(13) See my discussion of these points in Chapter One, sections 1.1–1.3.

(14) We reviewed this argument in some detail in Chapter One, but recall the central points: Kant writes in

the third Critique that our understanding, unlike that of an intuitive intellect, is dependent in its cognition

of nature on an independently given sense content. Because our understanding is dependent in this way

and does not produce objects out of its own cognitive activity, we must determine (and thus render

cognizable) the independently given sense content. We determine the independently given content by

subsuming sensible particulars under discursive concepts. This is the point he means to express when he

writes that our form of understanding, “has to proceed from the universal to the particular through

concepts.” The fact that we have to proceed in this way, Kant continues, has the “following consequence”:

“In terms of the universal [supplied by the understanding] the particular, as such, contains something

contingent” (CJ § 76 [404]). For the intuitive intellect, however, which “does not (by means of concepts)

proceed from the universal to the particular,” there is no “contingency in the way nature’s products in

terms of particular laws harmonize with the understanding” (CJ § 77 [406]). Kant does seem to suggest in

these remarks that contingency in the relation between our concepts and the given sense content follows

simply from the fact that we must, in our cognitions of nature, rely on an independently given sense

content. But this is the interpretation of his reasoning I intend to challenge.

(15) I say that Locke’s effort to account for these concepts “involves” tracing their origin to sense

impressions because the origin of all but “simple” ideas of sensation requires more, in his view, than an

appeal to the role of sensible affection. For Locke, operations of the mind (such as abstraction and

combination) are also necessary for the formation of some of our ideas.

(16) A point of clarification: In section 3.3, I pointed out that Kant holds that some of our concepts (namely,

the categories) do have a necessary connection to experience. One might wonder how this point about

necessary connection is compatible with the point we are presently reviewing, namely, that there is in his

view contingency in the relation of our concepts to the independently given sensible content. For Kant,

however, these two points are compatible. Kant defends the thesis that there is a necessary connection

between our a priori concepts or categories and experience by arguing that without such concepts, we

could not unify or synthesize the given sensory manifold into a thinkable content. Without the categories,

that is, what is given to us in sensation could not be thought as an object at all. But from the necessity of

the categories in unifying the given manifold into a thinkable content, it does not follow that the

categories (or any of our concepts) conform to the independently given sense content (the matter of

experience) itself. It is one thing to claim (for instance, with Kant) that we need a priori concepts in order

to think or judge some sense content; it is quite another to claim (for instance, with Locke) that our

concepts can be demonstrated to reflect the nature of that independently given sense content. To claim

the latter, according to Kant, would be to overreach the limits of what we can know.

(17) There, I proposed that even though Hegel clearly believes that our form of understanding

sharessome features in common with the intuitive intellect, he is not concerned to argue that, for us (as

for the intuitive intellect) sensible intuitions “fall away.” He does not, that is, reject Kant’s claim that, in

our cognitions of nature, we have to be sensibly affected. We will consider evidence in support of this

hypothesis in Chapter Four when we review Hegel’s discussion of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction.

(18) Hegel often puts this point about the externality of form in colorful ways. Consider, for example, the

following passages from Faith and Knowledge: According to Kant’s philosophy, in his words, “the

world…is in itself falling to pieces, and only gets objective coherence and support…through the good deed

of the self-consciousness of the understanding [verständigen] human” (FK 74/GW 309). The “objective or

universal aspect of the real” consists for Kant in what is contributed from the ideal side, “i.e., from the I.”

The other side, the side which is “nothing but sensation,” is no more than a “formless lump [ein formloser

Klumpen]” (FK 76/GW 312).

(19) Our ideas are capable of reflecting nature, according to Locke, even though our knowledge of nature is

limited to the existence of things and not their “real essences” (An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, Bk IV, iii). Furthermore, our knowledge of the existence of things is probable at best (Bk

VI, ii, 14).

(20) In the Phenomenology, see in particular the first two sections of the Consciousness chapter. In

theLectures on the History of Philosophy, see vol. III, the chapter devoted to Hume.

(21) Hegel tells us that the principle of empiricism is the individual or particular. For empiricism, he says,

the individual or particular [das Einzelne, das Besondere] is the source of our conceptions (LHP III

296/VGP III 203). See also EL § 40, where he writes that Kant shares with empiricism the principle that

what is contained in perception is “only the individual [nur Einzelnes].”

(22) For Hegel’s account of Locke’s view that general, complex ideas (such as the idea of substance)

ultimately derive from sensation, see LHP III 304–5/VGP III 210–13.

(23) “Hume completed [vollendete] the system of Locke, in that he consistently drew attention to the fact

that if this point of view be adhered to, experience is indeed the principle of whatever one knows, or

perception itself contains everything that happens, but nevertheless the determination of universality and

necessity are not contained in, nor are they given us by experience” (LHP III 371/VGP III 277–81). For an

extensive discussion of Hegel’s relation to Hume, see Kenneth R. Westphal, “Hegel and Hume on

Perception and Concept-Empiricism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (January 1998): 99–123.

(24) Or as Horstmann puts it in characterizing Hegel’s critique of Kant: subjective form for Kant has a

merely “epistemic” function. Subjective form on Kant’s account has no “ontological” implications; it does

not inform us about what “an object really [in Wirklichkeit] is.” Kantian subjective form informs us only

of the conditions by means of which we know objects. In Bausteine, 191.

(25) The general line of interpretation I have been defending here is also argued in chapter 1 of William F.

Bristow’s, Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,

2007).

(26) I provide further support for these claims in Chapter Four.

(27) Hegel is convinced that the thesis of absolute opposition lies at the foundation not just of

Kant’sstrategy for solving the crisis of reason (for saving metaphysics), but of his understanding of the

crisis as well. It accounts for how he interprets the shortcomings of his predecessors; it explains why he

believes their systems pose a threat to metaphysics. This is a large story to which I return in ChapterFive.

(28) We might wonder how the philosopher who argued that reason is a “slave” of the passions can be

thought to “vindicate” the “absoluteness” of reason. Indeed, how might Hume’s conception of human

reason be thought to share anything in common with Kant’s (or Fichte’s)? One thing Hegel clearly wants

to argue is that, were Hume not in some way committed to the thesis of the absoluteness or independence

of reason, he would not be forced to infer from his account of the role of imagination a skeptical

conclusion about human knowledge. Hume’s argument that there can be for us no knowledge of “matters

of fact,” in other words depends not just on the assumption that our cognition of nature is conditioned by

contributions of the imagination (by “custom and habit”), but also on the assumption that we have no

warrant for assuming that our subjective contributions (our ideas of causality and identity, for example)

inform us about the reality of nature itself. Hegel has no quarrel with Hume’s point about the active role

of imagination in cognition; he challenges only the skeptical implication Hume draws from it. (This point

is also noted by Westphal in “Hegel and Hume on Perception and Concept-Empiricism,” 111.) That is to

say, Hegel challenges Hume’s inference from the fact of the contribution of the imagination to the

unknowability, for us, of nature itself. The fact that Hume makes this inference is precisely what reveals

his commitment to the thesis of the “absoluteness” or “independence” of reason, in Hegel’s view. We

presuppose the thesis of the absoluteness of reason, according to Hegel, if we assume that the

contribution of reason (or in this case imagination) cannot disclose to us the reality of nature itself.

As already mentioned, Hegel’s diagnosis of the skeptical results of Kant’s philosophy is essentially the

same. More obviously than Hume, Kant also adheres to the thesis of the absoluteness or independence of

reason. The thesis of independence is more obvious in Kant because, in contrast to Hume, Kant identifies

some of what the mind contributes in its effort to know as a priori. In common with Hume, Kant

concludes that we have no warrant for assuming that the forms contributed by the mind inform us about

the reality of nature itself, about nature as it is in abstraction from those a priori forms. Like Hume, Kant

is thus also committed to the thesis of the mind’s absoluteness or independence. This commitment is

ultimately responsible for his remark, then, that we can “cognize of things a priori only what we put into

them” (CPR B xviii).

(29) This interpretation has a long history. In recent years, it has been eloquently defended, for example,

by Béatrice Longuenesse in Hegel et la Critique de la Métaphysique (Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin,

1981). This book has appeared in English as Hegel’s Crtique of Metaphysics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge

University Press, 2007). In Longuenesse’s words, the point of Hegel’s two “deductions” in the Science of

Logic is to “put an end…to all representational illusions, according to which thought could be gauged by

any means other than itself. Thought…is not the mirror of nature” (5f.).

Sometimes Robert Pippin appears to endorse this view. In his discussion of Hegel’s “idealist logic”

inHegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, for example, he writes this: “As was the case

in the PhG, Hegel’s account of the internal coherence of thought’s fundamental self-transformations, its

determinacy, and the objectivity, at a certain level, of that determinacy, looks not to the origin or grounds

of thought, to anything external to thought, but to its end,” 235; first emphasis added). On the same page,

he writes of the “radical internality of the Notion’s development.” In his final chapter, however, Pippin

expresses reservations about this “radically internalist” reading (235). He indicates that he is tempted by

the view that the developmental progress of the Hegelian “Notion [Begriff]” is responsive to empirical

discoveries. In his words, “no serious student of Hegel should…want to deny that the results of Darwin or

the experience of the holocaust can be ‘Notionally’ relevant” (259). Pippin challenges the internalist

reading in other works as well. In “Hegel, Modernity, and Habermas,” for example, he describes Hegel’s

deduction of the notions of the Logic as a “radicalization” of Kant’s conception of categoriality

(chapter 6 of Idealism as Modernism, 168). The radicalization is tied to Hegel’s denial of reason’s

“independence” or “supreme authority” (162). Instead, the “Hegelian experiment…involves entertaining

and thinking through the view that, in accounting for the fundamental elements of a conceptual or

evaluative scheme, there is and can be no decisive or certifying appeal to any basic “facts of the matter,”

foundational experience, logical forms, constitutive “interests,” “prejudices,” or guiding “intuitions” to

begin or end any such account. We can appeal only to what we have come to regard as a basic fact or

secure method or initial orienting intuition” (163). And what we come to regard as a basic fact itself

depends on “ways of looking” that evolve (168). When Pippin characterizes the categories of

Hegel’s Logic as non-empirical, as he does in this essay and elsewhere, he does not mean to claim that

they are absolutely fixed or absolutely a priori. For Pippin, the claim that the categories are non-empirical

instead amounts to “a denial that the manifold of impressions alone” could be responsible for them (168;

emphasis added). For further evidence that Pippin does not endorse the internalist reading, see his “Hegel

and Category Theory,” where he explicitly opposes the view that the development of the categories of

Hegel’s Logic is a mere and wholly “self-enclosed” “thought-game” (Review of Metaphysics XLIII, no. 4,

June 1990, 844). Pippin also comments on the “deeply historical” nature of Hegelian reasons in his essay,

“The Kantian Aftermath: Reaction and Revolution in Modern German Philosophy,” in The Persistence of

Subjectivity, 49.

(30) Hegel frequently complains that the philosophers of finitude are disingenuous. With Kant in

particular in mind, he writes in EL, for example, of the “supreme inconsistency” of those who admit, on

the one hand, “that the understanding [Verstand] knows only appearances, and…assert, on the other, that

this cognition is something absolute—by saying: cognition cannot go any further, this is thenatural,

absolute limit of human knowing” (EL § 60).

(31) In Chapter Five, I shall return to this theme about the vanity Hegel discovers in Kant’s philosophy in

particular. Perhaps the clearest expression of Hegel’s charge that the philosophers of finitude suffer from

vanity (as well as duplicity) is in the Encyclopaedia Logic. The philosopher of finitude asks, “ ‘How should

a poor worm like me be able to discover what is true?’ ” Hegel then comments: “Here it is not modesty

that holds us back from the study and cognition of the truth, but rather the conviction that we possess the

truth in and for itself already” (EL § 19A1).

Hegel on the Transcendental Deduction of the

first Critique

The Kantian philosophy has the merit of being idealism insofar as it demonstrates that neither the

concept alone nor intuition alone is anything at all; the intuition by itself is blind and the concept by itself

is empty.

(FK 68/GW 303)

Hegel discovers traces of an idealism that is “genuine” versus merely “subjective,” not just in Kant’s ideas

of the intuitive intellect and of nature considered as purposive or as an organic unity, but in the

Transcendental Deduction of the first Critique as well. “In the principle of the deduction of the categories,”

he writes in the Difference essay, “[Kant’s] philosophy is genuine [ächter] idealism” (D 79/9). Hegel

discovers traces of genuine idealism in the Transcendental Deduction, apparently, because he believes

that in its pages we are provided evidence of the identity of subject and object: “In the deduction of the

forms of understanding,” he tells us, “the principle of speculation, of the identity of subject and object, is

most precisely expressed” (D 80/10).

Not surprisingly, however, Hegel also insists that Kant is no more successful in carrying through the

“speculative” insight of the Transcendental Deduction than he is in recognizing the speculative

implications of his accounts of the intuitive intellect and of nature as an organism. In the Transcendental

Deduction, Kant articulates the principle of speculation, that is, the identity of subject and object;

ultimately, however, this identity “vanishes.” It vanishes, Hegel tells us, for reasons we have encountered

before: Kant is unable to exploit the speculative insight of the Transcendental Deduction because of his

commitment to the thesis of absolute opposition or heterogeneity. As Hegel writes, “non-identity,” for

Kant, is “raised to an absolute principle” (D 81/10).1 Kant posits the “idea [Idee]” as “absolutely opposed

[absolut entgegengesetzt]” to “being [Sein]” (D 81/11).

In this chapter, we will encounter further evidence that Hegel was a careful reader of Kant’s texts. In

addition, we will once again discover that the “identity” he claims to discover in Kant’s Critical system is

achieved neither by a reduction of concepts to intuitions nor by a reduction of intuitions to concepts. We

will review passages that indicate that Hegel embraces Kant’s claim that human cognition requires the

contributions of these two basic and distinct components of knowledge, and that in this respect he sides

with Kant against Locke (and Hume) and Leibniz. Consistent with the interpretation I have defended in

earlier chapters, we will also discover in Hegel’s remarks on the Transcendental Deduction more

justification for concluding that what he objects to is not the Kantian assumption that concepts and

intuitions each have distinct and necessary contributions to make to human knowledge, but rather Kant’s

particular treatment of these two components of cognition and their respective faculties. Precisely because

Hegel finds Kant’s treatment unsatisfactory, he takes for example Kant’s claim that concepts without

intuitions are “empty” in a whole new direction. The lesson he believes we should ultimately derive from

Kant’s insight about the emptiness of concepts, I will argue, is that we need a new and non-Kantian

account of the nature and origin of conceptual form.

Precisely where in the Transcendental Deduction does Hegel discover traces of the “identity of subject and

object”? In Faith and Knowledge, he provides three answers to this question: First, evidence of the

identity of subject and object is contained in Kant’s consideration of the problem, “How are synthetic

judgments a priori possible?” As Hegel puts it, “This problem expresses nothing other than the idea that

subject and predicate of the synthetic judgment…are identical a priori or absolutely” (FK 69/GW 304).

Second, Hegel is convinced that the idea of identity is implicit in Kant’s conception of the faculty of the

original synthetic unity of apperception. Hegel describes this faculty as “a truly necessary, absolute,

original identity of opposites” (FK 70/GW 305). Third, he tells us that Kant’s account of the faculty of

productive imagination is “a truly speculative idea” as well (FK 71/GW 306). We will explore each of these

Hegelian claims in the first three sections of this chapter.

4.1 Kant’s “speculative” treatment of the question: “How

are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”

Why is Hegel persuaded that in Kant’s account of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, the idea

of the “identity” of subject and predicate is expressed? We cannot set out to answer this question without

recalling some of the issues that motivate Kant’s concern with this particular class of judgments. He tells

us in the Prefaces and Introduction of the first Critique that in order to save metaphysics, he must

determine the proper limits of human knowledge. As we know from our discussion in

Chapter Three (section 3.4), part of this project requires providing an alternative to the skepticism of

Hume. Kant believes he needs to provide an alternative to Hume, because he thinks Hume was

mistaken in concluding that our material or synthetic knowledge can never have the status of necessity.

Kant therefore identifies as a central objective of the Critique that of establishing that we are indeed in

possession of some necessary non-analytic knowledge—not just in mathematics, but in our science of

nature as well. With respect to our science of nature, a priori synthetic knowledge is possible.

In deciding upon an argumentative strategy, Kant dismisses two possibilities outright. His task is to

demonstrate that we have some concepts that are necessarily connected to nature, and this task can be

accomplished, in his view, neither by means of a mere analysis of concepts nor by a demonstration of their

empirical origin. The most that conceptual analysis can determine is the “logical possibility” of a

concept—whether, that is, the concept may be thought without contradiction. Conceptual analysis cannot

by itself insure that our concepts bear any relation to objects.2 An empirical deduction or derivation of the

origin of our concepts, however, serves us no better. For as Hume correctly pointed out, if we operate

under the assumption that our concepts are without exception empirical in origin, our efforts to establish

their necessary connection to objects invariably fail.

Kant famously argues that the project of demonstrating that we indeed have some concepts that are

necessarily connected to objects requires a “transcendental” proof or “deduction.” He is convinced that it

can be established that we have some concepts that, rather than derived from experience, serve as

necessary conditions of experience. Since these concepts cannot originate in experience, they must lie in

us a priori (CPR B 19). The aim of the transcendental deduction, then, is to demonstrate that without

these a priori concepts (or as Kant calls them, “categories”), we could not explain how given

representations become possible objects of thought and empirical knowledge for us at all.

The argument of the Transcendental Deduction section of the first Critique is thus an essential piece of

Kant’s effort to determine the proper limits of our knowledge and provide an alternative to Hume’s

skepticism. The argument is intended to persuade us that our material or synthetic knowledge depends

not just on the given content of sensation, but also on a priori concepts or categories. The categories, Kant

argues, are necessary conditions of all thought or judgment, including thought or judgment that has as its

object, nature or the realm of appearances. They are functions or rules of a faculty he names the “original

synthetic unity of apperception.”

To return to the question with which we began this section: Why does Hegel tell us that Kant’s

consideration of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments “expresses” the idea of absolute identity?

He gives us a clue when, in the context of his discussion of the Transcendental Deduction, he notes that

synthetic a priori judgments are possible, according to Kant, “through the original, absolute identity of the

heterogeneous” (FK 72/GW 307). Hegel thus seems convinced that the account Kant provides in the

Transcendental Deduction of the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments itself depends on enlisting

absolute identity as an essential premise or presupposition. Since this is Hegel’s suggestion, we need to

consider it further.

Our first task is to determine what Hegel could be referring to when, in his remarks on the Transcendental

Deduction, he asserts that synthetic a priori judgments are possible, for Kant, “through the original,

absolute identity of the heterogeneous.” Precisely where does Hegel believe we are to find evidence of this

“absolute identity” in Kant’s work? In an important passage in Faith and Knowledge, Hegel writes:

The true synthetic unity or rational identity is just that identity that is the connection [Beziehung] of the

manifold to [auf] the empty identity, the I. (FK 71/GW 306f.)

We can plausibly read this passage to reveal something about the role Hegel takes the “absolute identity”

to play: “Absolute” or “rational identity,” he suggests here, is responsible for “connecting” the manifold

and the “empty identity” or “I.” This passage implies in addition that the “true synthetic unity” or “rational

identity” that does the connecting is distinct, on Hegel’s account, from the “I” that gets connected to the

manifold. “Kant himself distinguishes the abstraction of the I or the abstract identity of the understanding

[verständigen Identität],” Hegel writes, “from the true I, the absolute, original synthetic identity which is

the principle” (FK 71f./GW 307). Emphasizing this point once more, Hegel claims that

The whole transcendental deduction…cannot be understood without distinguishing what Kant calls the

faculty [Vermögen] of the original synthetic unity of apperception from the I that does the representing

and is the subject—the I that, as Kant says, merely accompanies all representations. (FK 72f./GW 307f.)

Two points are particularly worth noting here: First, Hegel discovers evidence of absolute identity in the

role played by the faculty he identifies as the “original synthetic unity of apperception.” The original

synthetic unity of apperception, then, is a genuinely “speculative” feature of the Transcendental

Deduction, in his view. Second, Hegel insists that we must take care to distinguish this faculty from the

“empty identity” or “I” that “does the representing” and “accompanies all representations.”

I am going to postpone until section 4.3 a consideration of Hegel’s reasons for supposing that it is the

original synthetic unity of apperception that is the “absolute identity.” I want to focus now on the

following question: Has he any basis for claiming that this distinction between the “I” that “does the

representing” and the “original synthetic unity of apperception” is actually put forward by Kant? The

answer to this question, it turns out, is relatively straightforward. The distinction between what Hegel

refers to as the “I” “that does the representing” or “that accompanies all representations” and the “original

synthetic unity of apperception” is indeed introduced by Kant. In the B-Deduction (the edition from which

Hegel quotes in Faith and Knowledge), Kant suggests the need for such a distinction already in § 15, the

section entitled “

The Possibility of Combination in General.”3It is clear in this and subsequent sections that Kant is

convinced that this distinction must be introduced in order to solve the general problem of the

Transcendental Deduction: the problem of demonstrating the necessity of our a priori concepts or

categories for experience. Expressed a bit more fully, it is the problem of demonstrating that objects given

in sensible intuition (both our forms of sensible intuition and sensible intuition in general) may

necessarily conform to the categories.4

Kant begins the argument of the B-Deduction by stressing in § 15 that we can only explain how we are able

to unify given representations into concepts of objects by carefully distinguishing among

thevarious operations of the mind that fall under the general heading of “combination” or “synthesis.”

Combination is not itself given a posteriori, he says; it can “never come to us through the senses.” Nor is

combination given in or with our pure forms of intuition, space and time, on his account (CPR B 129).

Instead, combination or synthesis is always an “act of spontaneity [Aktus der Spontaneität]” and as such

is performed by the faculty of understanding [Verstand] (CPR B 130).5 It is by means of acts of

combination or synthesis, Kant furthermore notes, that the understanding unites representations to form

concepts and brings concepts together to form judgments. Already in § 15, Kant suggests thatthese acts of

combination performed by the faculty of the understanding, both in forming concepts and in combining

concepts into judgments, themselves presuppose a more fundamental act of unity or combination—an

act he eventually comes to refer to as the “original synthetic unity of apperception.” In these paragraphs of

§ 15, Kant hints at a distinction between these more and less fundamental acts of combination in his

mysterious remark that the “concept of combination includes besides the concept of the manifold and of

its synthesis, also the concept of the unity of the manifold” (CPR B 130; emphasis added). It is this more

fundamental act of combination or synthesis responsible for the “unity of the manifold,” he goes on to

argue (starting in § 16), that supplies “the ground of the unity of diverse concepts in judgment, and

therefore of the possibility of the understanding” (CPR B 131; emphasis added).

So already in § 15 of the B-Deduction, Kant insists upon the importance of distinguishing various acts of

combination. Beginning in § 16, he suggests that the very possibility of the functions of the “I think” (the

faculty that “does the represent

ing” and that “accompanies all representations,” as Hegel characterizes it) depends on the more

fundamental acts of synthesis performed by the “original synthetic unity of apperception.” We can thus

conclude, on the basis of this preliminary review of Kant’s remarks in these passages, that Hegel is not

mistaken in discovering evidence in the B-Deduction of a distinction between these two faculties or forms

of self-consciousness.6

4.2 Original synthetic unity of apperception as “absolute

identity”

We are now in a position to turn our attention to the more difficult question: Why does Hegel claim that

of the two forms of subjectivity (the “I think” and the “original synthetic unity of apperception”), it is the

latter faculty that is the “absolute identity”? We cannot expect to answer this question without bringing

into sharper focus Kant’s own characterization of the nature and role of this faculty. So far, we know only

that he aims to persuade us that the original synthetic unity of apperception is what supplies the prior act

of unity necessary for all other acts of combination. Original synthetic unity is what allows me to find

myself as an identical self-consciousness in all my representations. It is also necessary, on his account, for

the very formation of concepts and judgments. We know, furthermore, that this faculty of apperception is

in his view “pure” or “transcendental” rather than empirical (CPR § 16).7 All of this suggests that Kant’s

argument for the necessity of the original synthetic unity of apperception is intended to convince us of the

inadequacy of a merely empirical explanation of how it is possible for us to unify given representations

into a thinkable and cognizable content.

To expand very briefly upon this latter point: Kant seems to hold that we are mistaken if we assume we

can account for a necessary connection between given representations and our concepts with the help of

nothing more than an empirical treatment of the operations by means of which we first associate various

representations, analyze and compare them, and then select out or abstract common elements or marks

(concepts). What is in addition needed to guide these processes along, he suggests, is the unifying

function of special rules or concepts—rules or concepts that are a priori and that can be supplied only by a

“transcendental” or “original” form of apperception. The objective validity of these a priori concepts or

categories is secured

thanks to the fact that without them, the various operations responsible for our apprehension and

cognition of experience would not be possible for us at all.

Taking as our guide this very general representation of Kant’s objectives in the Transcendental Deduction,

we can highlight for the sake of our present discussion three claims he is particularly concerned to defend:

1. 1. The necessity of the identity of self-consciousness. Kant acknowledges the role of comparison

and abstraction in the process of concept formation, and he points out that these operations

require us to first associate representations we apprehend as distinct. He also points out, however,

that association is a process of combining representations into one consciousness. I cannot

associate distinct representations, or even be aware of them asdistinct, without uniting them in

one self-consciousness as “my representations” (CPR B 131n, B 132).8 The manifold of given

representations, Kant writes, “would not be one and all my representations did they not all

belong to one self-consciousness” (CPR B 132). Were not the identity of self-consciousness, the “I

think,” able to “accompany all my representations,” in his words, “something would be

represented in me that could not at all be thought” (CPR B 132).9Identity of self-consciousness is

therefore, in his view, a condition of the possibility of the operations of association, comparison,

and abstraction—operations without which I could form no concepts (and hence also no

judgments) at all.

2. 2. The inadequacy of the empiricist account of identity of self-consciousness. Since identity of

self-consciousness must be presupposed as a condition of the possibility of the acts of association,

comparison, and abstraction necessary for concept formation, it cannot itself depend on or derive

from those operations. The only idea of my own subjectivity that can be derived from those

operations is empirical. But qua empirical, that sense of self is, as Kant writes, “in itself dispersed

[an sich zerstreut]” and “without relation to the identity of the subject” (CPR B 133).

3. 3. The necessity of the faculty of original synthetic unity of apperception. If identity of self-

consciousness (the “I think”) cannot itself derive from acts of association, comparison, and

abstraction—if it is a condition of the possibility of these acts—then it must be grounded in a

“higher unity,” a prior act of synthesis (CPR B 131). In § 16 of the B-Deduction, Kant identifies

this prior act of synthesis as that of “pure” or “original” apperception. He tells us that it is this

original act of combination that allows me to intuit the representations of a given manifold as a

unity and as thus belonging to me (CPR B 133). I am able to intuit the manifold as a unity, he

seems to suggest, only because the original synthetic apperception somehow “generates” or

“produces [hervorbringt]” the representation “I think” in the manifold (CPR B 132).

The argument of the Transcendental Deduction thus sets out to establish that there must be a prior

synthesis or unity without which identity of self-consciousness (identity of the “I think”) would not be

possible. This is the point of Kant’s remark in § 15 that the “concept of combination” includes “besides the

concept of the manifold and of its synthesis, also the concept of the unity of the manifold” (CPR B 130). In

arguing for the necessity of this prior act of unity and of the faculty of original apperception responsible

for it, he believes he is able to provide a successful alternative to the skepticism of Hume. For the prior

unity of the manifold is “possible,” Kant says, through the original synthetic unity of apperception “alone”

(CPR B 143).10 Original or transcendental apperception supplies this unity, and its rules or concepts are a

priori rather than empirical (CPR § 20). A priori concepts or categories thus furnish the rules without

which an individual self-consciousness could not find itself in all its representations. They determine how

we can be aware of representations as distinct and then compare and abstract common marks from them.

A priori concepts or categories thus condition the possibility of all apprehension or conscious awareness

of the unity of a sensible manifold. Kant therefore believes he can demonstrate, in opposition to Hume,

that we have some concepts that indeed bear a necessary connection to experience.11

This highly abbreviated sketch of Kant’s objectives portrays only in the most preliminary way the role he

assigns the faculty of original or transcendental apperception. It reveals his commitment to the thesis that

without strict identity of self-consciousness we have no means of explaining how, from given

representations, we are able to apprehend objects, extract common marks or concepts from them, and

combine concepts into judgments. In noting his introduction of the faculty of transcendental apperception

with its a priori rules or concepts, it draws attention to his effort to make up for the deficiencies of

empiricism. The above sketch does not explain, however, just how Kant thinks the faculty of

transcendental apperception is able to provide for strict identity of self-consciousness. (In particular, it

does not explain how transcendental apperception is capable of generating identity of self-consciousness

in the manifold.) Of more consequence for our present purposes, the account of transcendental

apperception we have just sketched is also of little help in providing an answer to the question with which

this section began, namely, why does Hegel claim that transcendental apperception is an “absolute

identity”?

In section 4.1, we noted Hegel’s remark in Faith and Knowledge that transcendental apperception is

“absolutely identical” because it is a “truly necessary, absolute, original identity of opposites” (FK 70/GW

305). This comment is far from transparent, but

Hegel gives us some guidance regarding how we should interpret it when he tells us a few paragraphs later

that the prior or original synthesis necessary for concept formation and judgment is a synthesis out of

which the distinction between the “empty I” (the “I” that thinks) and the given manifold first emerges. It

is from this original identity, he writes, that the “I as thinking subject, and manifold as body and world

first detach themselves” (FK 71/GW 306f.). Concepts come to be, Hegel goes on to suggest, only by

“stepping outside” the “difference” in which they are originally immersed. This emergence of concept, or

of the very distinction between concept and the manifold, first occurs, he says, “in consciousness as

judgment” (FK 71/GW 306).

As obscure as these claims may be, they give us some indication of the conception of absolute identity

Hegel is after. If transcendental apperception is the faculty out of which the very distinction between the

“I think” and the manifold first comes to be, as he claims, then we must be mistaken if we classify this

form of self-consciousness as a species either of the faculty that thinks or of the faculty through which the

manifold is given. Transcendental or original apperception, Hegel seems to imply, is neither a faculty of

spontaneity nor a faculty of receptivity, but somehow prior to and a condition of the possibility of both. As

such, its very existence challenges a fundamental tenet of Kant’s Critical system: that at the basis of our

knowledge are the contributions of the two independent and heterogeneous faculties of understanding

and intuition.12

If this is indeed what Hegel is driving at (and in section 4.4 we will encounter further evidence that it is),

then we have good reason to suppose that his conception of the nature and role of the original synthetic

unity of apperception (as neither spontaneity nor receptivity) is not one Kant would accept. To see why

Kant would not accept it, we need only consider more carefully the way in which he specifies the role of

that faculty. Consider, for example, his remark that,

The transcendental unity of apperception is that through which all of the manifold given in an intuition is

united in a concept of object. (CPR B 139)

This could be the sentence Hegel means to gloss when he tells us, in a passage we reviewed earlier, that

“the true synthetic unity” is responsible for “connecting” the manifold and the “empty identity” or “I” that

thinks or applies concepts (FK 71/GW 307f.). But why should we follow Hegel in taking this passage to

suggest that Kant means to infer from the role that the “true synthetic unity” plays in connecting the

manifold and the “I think,” that transcendental apperception is itself an “original identity of opposites”?

According to Kant, transcendental or original apperception “connects” the manifold and the “I think” in

its function as the faculty that introduces into the manifold the prior unity without which identity of self-

consciousness would not be possible. It introduces that prior unity, he tells us, by subsuming the manifold

of a given intuition under its a priori rules or categories. In subsuming the manifold under the categories,

transcendental apperception performs an act of combination or synthesis. In § 15 of the Transcendental

Deduction, Kant writes that allcombination “is an act of the spontaneity” and as such is performed by the

faculty of understanding. Where is the evidence, then, that Kant holds that the original synthetic unity of

apperception is itself an “original identity of opposites,” and as such neither a faculty of spontaneity nor a

faculty of receptivity but somehow prior to both? To put this question in another way: why should we

conclude from the role Kant assigns transcendental apperception, that thoughts or concepts, in his view,

are “originally identical” to intuitions?

It is important that we bear in mind that Hegel nowhere suggests that the identity he discovers in Kant’s

account of the original synthetic unity of apperception is in keeping with Kant’s own intentions.13 On the

contrary, Hegel explicitly notes in the Difference essay that although Kant discovers the “principle of

speculation, the identity of subject and object” in the Transcendental Deduction, the idea of an “absolute

original identity,” for him, “disappears” (D 80/10). Hegel even provides an accurate explanation for why

identity must “disappear,” for Kant. In his discussion of the Transcendental Deduction in Faith and

Knowledge, his explanation takes the form of emphasizing the implications, as Kant understands them, of

the fact that our mode of understanding is discursive rather than intuitive. According to Kant, Hegel

writes, “the understanding [Verstand] is the absolutely fixed insuperable finitude of human reason.” Kant

considers our “discursive” understanding, he says, to be “in itself and absolute” (FK 77/GW 313). This

emphasis upon Kant’s commitment to discursivity is important because it demonstrates that Hegel

understood why Kant could not affirm the “identity of subject and object.”

Kant is explicit in the Transcendental Deduction about why the fact of our discursivity implies the non-

identity of subject and object. In § 17 of the B-Deduction, he notes that it is only for a discursive or non-

intuitive form of cognition that an argument is required to establish a necessary connection between its

concepts and objects. The need for a transcendental deduction, and the need to posit a special or

“transcendental” act of synthesis, is in his view tied to the fact that our discursive mode of cognition

cannot, merely by exercising its cognitive powers, bring its objects into being.14Unlike an intuitive

understanding “through whose representation the objects of this representation would at the same time

exist,” we have to rely in our cognitions of nature on an independently given sensible content (CPR B 139).

For this reason, it is by no means obvious that any of our concepts have a necessary connection to that

given content. For a mode of understanding such as ours, the challenge therefore arises of establishing

such a connection.

So the very necessity of a transcendental deduction, and the very necessity of positing a faculty of original

synthetic unity of apperception, is for Kant a consequence of the fact that our mode of understanding is

discursive and that, for us, thinking is one thing and intuiting quite another. The nature of our

understanding is such that an argument needs to be supplied to demonstrate that our representations are

objectively valid for the independently given sensible content. Far from predicated upon the identity of

subject and object, concept and intuition, spontaneity and receptivity, Kant’s transcendental deduction

rests instead upon his assumptions about the nature and implications of our discursivity. It rests upon

what Hegel refers to as the thesis of “heterogeneity” or “absolute opposition.” Alternatively put, it rests

upon the fact that, in his understanding of the implications of our discursivity, Kant raises “non-identity”

to an “absolute principle” (D 81/10).

4.3 Productive imagination as a “truly speculative idea”

To review the main points covered in this chapter so far: We know, first, that Hegel was aware of the

importance for the Transcendental Deduction of Kant’s distinction between the faculty of original or

transcendental apperception and the “I” that, as he says, “accompanies all representations.” We also know

that Hegel was aware that it is the original synthetic unity of apperception, on Kant’s account, that

performs the function of connecting the manifold and the “I think.” In connecting the manifold and the “I

think,” the original synthetic unity of apperception makes possible our apprehension of the manifold as a

unity. It is what allows me to “find myself” (as an identical

self-consciousness) in “all my representations,” as Kant says.15 It is furthermore clear that of the two

forms of self-consciousness, Hegel singles out the faculty of original apperception as the “absolute

identity.” What Hegel means by this identity is still a mystery, but from the passages we have reviewed up

to this point, we at least have reason to suspect that his conception of transcendental apperception

departs significantly from Kant’s. Hegel no doubt seeks to exploit the idea that transcendental

apperception is, as Kant himself characterizes it, an originally synthetic unity. Hegel wants to convince us

that, as such, it is neither a faculty of spontaneity nor of receptivity, and therefore productive neither

merely of concepts nor merely of intuitions. Somehow, in his view, transcendental apperception is a

faculty on which both concepts and intuitions depend and out of which they first emerge.

Earlier, we noted that Hegel also identifies Kant’s account of productive imagination as “a truly

speculative idea” (FK 71/GW 306). Apparently, he is convinced that Kant comes very close to articulating

that speculative idea in his discussions of productive imagination in the Transcendental Deduction. If we

ask why Hegel tells us in one passage that transcendental apperception is an “absolute identity,” and in

another passage characterizes productive imagination in just the same way, the explanation is that he

discovers “speculative” elements in a number of doctrines of the Critical philosophy. He is convinced that

Kant more than once comes close to recognizing—perhaps even endorsing—the speculative implications

of his own system. This occurs in the Transcendental Deduction, in Hegel’s view; but as we know from our

discussions in Chapters One and Two, he believes it occurs in Kant’s treatment of the ideas of the intuitive

intellect and of nature as an organism as well.

Why does Kant introduce the faculty of productive (or as he sometimes also calls it “transcendental”)

imagination into the argument of the Transcendental Deduction at all? In the sections of the B-Deduction

with which we have so far been concerned (§§ 15–20), his aim is to convince us that without the original

acts of unity or synthesis performed by the faculty of transcendental apperception, there could be no

apprehension or empirical consciousness of a given manifold. A manifold can be perceived or

apprehended, in his view, only if it is given as a unity; and as we saw, Kant holds that the representation of

a manifold as a unity requires an original act of synthesis. So original synthetic unity of apperception is

necessary, he argues, for the apprehension of any given manifold, whether the manifold is given via our

forms of sensible intuition or any other. Kant believes he has shown in §§ 15–20 that this prior synthesis

is governed by a priori rules or categories, and that the categories are therefore necessary for the

apprehension of objects of sensible intuition in general. He refers to the synthesis they perform as

“intellectual” (synthesis intellectualis) in order

to indicate that it is a synthesis requiring the operation of the faculty of understanding alone (CPR § 24, B

150).

In § 23, however, Kant argues that unless the categories are applied to the manifold given via our forms of

sensible intuition in particular, they remain for our form of understanding “empty” (CPR B 148). The

categories remain, then, “mere forms of thought [bloße Gedankenformen]” “without objective reality

[ohne objektive Realität].” Kant means by this that the categories can only serve for our form of

understanding as necessary conditions of knowledge if they are applied to the manifold as it must appear

to us through our forms of sensible intuition (space and time). He therefore announces in § 21 that in the

remaining sections of the B-Deduction he will narrow his focus and consider the application of

transcendental apperception and its rules to objects given via our forms of intuition, namely, to

“appearances.” Although the categories are functions of the understanding (and although their synthesis,

considered in this light, is “intellectual”), they require in their application to appearances another faculty,

a faculty Kant identifies in § 24 as that of productive or transcendental imagination. Productive or

transcendental imagination applies the categories to objects given via our particular forms of sensible

intuition (to appearances); it does so by means of a special act of “figurative” synthesis.16

As I mentioned a moment ago, Hegel’s praise for the speculative insight of Kant’s idea of productive

imagination seems simply to replay his treatment of the speculative implications of the faculty of

transcendental apperception. As we saw, Hegel describes transcendental apperception as that original

unity out of which the distinction between the “I think” and the manifold first comes to be. When he turns

his attention to productive imagination, he characterizes it in much the same way. Productive imagination,

Hegel writes, is “that out of which subjective I and objective world first sunder themselves” (FK 73/GW

308). Its synthesis is “absolute,” he tells us, because “it is not an aggregate of manifolds which are first

picked up” and only afterwards combined together or synthesized (FK 71/GW 306). Productive

imagination achieves the status of absolute identity, Hegel seems to suggest, because like transcendental

apperception, it is an original identity of opposites.

Our aim in this section is to derive from an examination of Hegel’s remarks on productive imagination a

better grasp of his conception of absolute identity. Our discussion will focus on one especially provocative

passage from Faith and Knowledge in which he hints at what he believes are the speculative implications

of Kant’s account of productive imagination and its figurative synthesis. Taken in isolation from Hegel’s

many remarks about productive imagination in these pages, the passage is more misleading than

illuminating. It appears to support a mistaken interpretation of what he intends by the “absolute” or

“original” identity of productive imagination. In

particular, it seems to suggest that productive imagination is an “original identity,” in his view, because it

demonstrates in its synthesis of the sensible manifold that given intuitions are in fact merely products of

(and in this sense “identical” to) concepts, and that receptivity is simply a species or mode of the faculty of

spontaneity.

The point of dedicating our interpretative efforts to this passage is to correct this reading of what Hegel

has in mind by original identity. As will become clear, the original identity Hegel discovers in Kant’s

discussions of productive imagination is not equivalent to the thesis that intuitions reduce to or are mere

species of concepts. Hegel does not set out to defend any such reduction. Rather (and as I have been

suggesting all along), he appreciates Kant’s insistence upon the necessary role of both intuitions and

concepts (of both receptivity and spontaneity) as conditions of human experience. He seems convinced

that if we have properly grasped this fact about the respective contributions of the two faculties—in

particular, about their interdependence as conditions of knowledge—we will be led to dispense with the

Kantian thesis of their original heterogeneity. We will come to appreciate that, in abstraction from each

other, concepts and intuitions, spontaneity and receptivity, are (somehow) nothing at all.17

In the account I provide in this section of Hegel’s treatment of productive imagination and figurative

synthesis in the B-Deduction, I defend three claims: First, Hegel’s interpretation reflects a careful reading

of Kant’s own discussions especially in §§ 24–26. Second, he does not aim to persuade us that Kant either

tried or should have tried to reduce intuitions to concepts. Finally, the “speculative” lesson of the

Transcendental Deduction, in his view, draws inspiration from Kant’s insistence upon the cooperating

roles of the two faculties in making experience possible.

In language that recalls §§ 24–26 of the B-Deduction and Kant’s perplexing footnote at B 160, Hegel

writes that in the Transcendental Deduction,

the original synthetic unity of apperception is recognized…as the principle of the figurative synthesis or

[oder] of the forms of intuition; space and time themselves are understood as synthetic unities; and

productive imagination, spontaneity and absolute synthetic activity, is conceived as the principle of

sensibility that previously was only characterized as receptivity. (FK 69f./GW 304f.)

Because of the considerable obscurity of this passage, we will need to examine it step by step. Hegel begins

by telling us that, “the original synthetic unity is recognized [in the Transcendental Deduction]…as the

principle of the figurative synthesis or [oder] of the forms of intuition.” The fact that he links together the

terms “figurative synthesis” and “forms of intuition” here is a clue that he has § 24 of the B-Deduction in

mind; for as we have just seen, it is in § 24 that Kant introduces the idea of figurative synthesis

(synthesis speciosa) and distinguishes it from the synthesis he calls intellectual (synthesis intellectualis).

Prior to this section of the Deduction, Kant had argued that the categories synthesize or combine the

manifold of objects of sensible intuition in general, whether that sensible intuition be ours or any other.

This synthesis performed by the categories, he asserts, is so far “intellectual” and the categories mere

“forms of thought” without “objective reality” or “sense and meaning” (CPR §§ 23, 24). The categories

obtain objective reality, Kant states at § 24, only when the manifold they synthesize or unify is given

through our forms of intuition—only, that is, when they serve for us as conditions of objects of our form of

experience. When they serve to synthesize thismanifold—namely, the manifold of “appearances” or of

objects given in space and time—their synthesis is “figurative.” This explains why Hegel associates

“figurative synthesis” and “forms of intuition” in the quoted passage. Although his reference in this part of

the passage is simply to “forms of intuition” (that is, in general), the fact that he mentions space and time

in the phrase immediately following suggests that he is aware that, for Kant, “figurative synthesis” refers

to the synthesis of the manifold given via our particular forms of sensible intuition, space and time.

Moving on, why does Hegel then claim that, according to the argument of the Transcendental Deduction,

the “original synthesis of apperception” is “the principle of the figurative synthesis, or of the forms of

intuition”? To phrase this question differently, what is the role he attributes here to the original synthesis

of apperception in relation to “figurative synthesis, or…the forms of intuition”? As we know, Kant holds

that in figurative synthesis the categories are applied to objects given via our forms of sensible intuition—

applied, that is, to appearances. Although applied to appearances in figurative synthesis by the faculty of

productive imagination, the categories are a priori rules of the transcendental unity of apperception. So

perhaps when Hegel writes in this passage that the “original synthetic unity of apperception” is the

“principle of the figurative synthesis,” he simply means to draw attention to the fact that figurative

synthesis, for Kant, is a synthesis of appearances determined by the rules or categories of the faculty of

transcendental apperception.

But even if this interpretation is true to Kant’s intentions in this section of the Deduction, it sheds no light

on Hegel’s claim to discover there traces of “speculative” philosophy. There is nothing speculative in the

interpretation we have just considered because there is so far nothing in it to suggest any “original identity

of opposites.” That is, there is nothing in it to suggest that the faculty with which we are concerned in this

section, the faculty of productive or transcendental imagination, achieves a synthesis that is prior to

Kant’s distinction between the categories and forms of intuition, or between the faculties of spontaneity

and receptivity. As we shall see in a moment, Hegel identifies the interpretation of figurative synthesis we

have just provided both as Kantian and as unspeculative. This portrayal of the role of figurative synthesis

conveys the message, he thinks, that far from an “original identity of opposites,” imagination is for Kant

merely the faculty that in figurative synthesis makes contact between “opposites.” As Hegel puts it,

productive imagination, on Kant’s account, is the “

middle term that gets inserted between an absolute existing subject and an absolute existing world” (FK

73/GW 308).

If we examine Hegel’s comments on these sections of the Transcendental Deduction more closely,

however, we can gain a better grasp of his claim to discover something “speculative” in them. Returning to

our quoted passage, recall that he writes of the Transcendental Deduction that

space and time themselves are understood as synthetic unities; and productive imagination, spontaneity

and absolute synthetic activity, is conceived as the principle of sensibility that previously was only

characterized as receptivity. (FK 69f./GW 305)

What has Hegel in mind in referring to space and time as “synthetic unities”? The reference is surely to

Kant’s note at B 160f., which informs us that space and time are “first given as intuitions” “by means of

[durch]” synthetic unity. At B 162, Kant reminds us that the function of unity or combination “has its seat

in the understanding” (and is governed by the categories). So in writing that space and time are “first

given as intuitions” “by means of” synthetic unity, Kant could be making the alarming suggestion that our

forms of sensible intuition (of receptivity) themselves have their “seat” in (and so are derived from) the

faculty of understanding or spontaneity. Kant could in other words be taking back his commitment to the

central thesis of the Introduction to his Transcendental Logic: that our knowledge springs from “two

fundamental sources,” receptivity and spontaneity, neither of which can perform the function of the other

or bring the other into being (CPR A 50f./B 74f.).

But there is good reason to suppose that Kant is not suggesting in his note at CPR B 160f. that our forms

of receptivity are themselves given by means of or produced out of spontaneity. He emphasizes more than

once in these passages that he is concerned to explain the relation, not of space and time as forms of

intuition to synthetic unity, but of space and time as “themselves intuitions” to synthetic unity (CPR B

160).18 Kant emphasizes, in other words, that he is concerned in these paragraphs to draw attention to the

role of synthesis or combination in making possible, not the forms of intuition themselves, but

our objective representation of space and time. That is, he wishes to draw attention to the way in which

we represent spatial and temporal relations in our perception of appearances. Briefly stated, what Kant is

noting in these paragraphs is that perception requires more than that a manifold be given to us through

our a priori forms of intuition. We perceive or apprehend the sensible manifold in space and time,

but perception or apprehension requires in addition acts of combination. These acts of combination

provide the synthetic unity by means of which space and time are “first given,” not as forms of intuition,

but as “themselves intuitions” (that is, as themselves objects either of empirical or pure intuition).19

Kant illustrates the role of unity in making possible our perception of space and time as “themselves

intuitions” by noting that perception or empirical consciousness requires more than a manifold given in

space and time. It requires in addition that the empirical manifold (the so far “undetermined”

appearances) be determined or synthesized.20 We perceive a house, he notes, not merely in space and time

but under further conditions of apprehension. In apprehending the sensible manifold, we associate

various impressions (of, say, the parts of the house). Because this act of association takes place in time, it

requires memory or “reproductive imagination,” the faculty that retains for consciousness impressions

that are no longer present. Retention, in turn, is rule-governed: its very possibility depends, Kant writes,

upon the condition that “what we think [now] is the same as what we thought a moment before” (CPR A

103). Retention in other words requires that even though our apprehension of impressions is necessarily

successive, the objects of our apprehension abide through time. Our apprehension of the house is

governed, then, by the condition that our impressions of its various parts are reproducible, and

reproducibility is possible only if we presuppose that the appearance conforms to the rule of permanence

through time. Kant identifies this rule as the category of substance applied to appearances. Like all

categories, substance is an a priori concept of the understanding. It is applied to appearances (in the act of

figurative synthesis) by the faculty of productive imagination.21

It is therefore far from obvious that these passages of the Deduction warrant the conclusion that when

Kant writes that space and time are “given as intuitions” “by means of” synthetic unity, he is either taking

back or contradicting his commitment to the thesis that our knowledge of appearances requires the

cooperation of two independent faculties. Kant does not in other words seem to be claiming at CPR B 160

that

space and time as forms of intuition themselves derive from or are given by the faculty of understanding

or spontaneity. Rather, he means to draw attention to the fact that perception is for us more than a matter

of mere receptivity to the matter of sensation given in space and time. Perception requires, in addition,

the unifying or synthesizing activity of spontaneity. The pure forms of space and time are a priori

conditions of the possibility of empirical intuition, but empirical intuition only becomes determinate (and

so, a possible object of perception or empirical consciousness) when unified by the categories.

Although this may explain what Kant has in mind when, in his note at CPR B 160f., he describes space

and time as “given” “by means of” unity, we still need to clarify Hegel’s interpretation of this passage.

What is Hegel trying to tell us when he comments that, in the Transcendental Deduction, “space and time

themselves are understood as synthetic unities”? We might take this remark as an endorsement of the

view I just said Kant does not defend: the view, namely, that the forms of receptivity are themselves given

or produced by spontaneity—the view that conflicts with Kant’s adherence to the strict heterogeneity or

irreducibility of the two faculties. We might, in other words, be tempted to suppose that the “rational” or

“original” identity of receptivity and spontaneity Hegel claims to discover in these pages of the

first Critique is achieved by means of a reduction of one faculty to the other. As we shall see, however,

Hegel does not identify as the speculative lesson of CPR B 160 the point that space and

time themselves ultimately derive from or are given by (and so are in that sense “identical” to) spontaneity.

Instead, the lesson he derives seems to be in every respect Kantian: that from the standpoint of empirical

consciousness (the standpoint of our perception or experience of appearances), what appears to us in

space and time is already unified by acts of spontaneity.

The evidence in support of this claim—the claim, namely, that Hegel’s understanding of space and time as

“synthetic unities” is in keeping with Kant’s intentions—occurs, first, in the section of Faith and

Knowledge devoted to his critique of Jacobi. There Hegel makes explicit reference to CPR B 160 (and its

note), and draws attention to a distinction in Kant he believes Jacobi wrongly takes to imply a

contradiction. The distinction in question is between (i) the “form of intuition, as a purely abstract form

opposed to the concept of the understanding, [that] is not an object,” and (ii) the form of intuition that

“can be made into an object (as in geometry) on account of its inner a priori unity.” Hegel goes on to write

that when space is treated as an object (as, in his words, a “formal intuition”), its “unity” is first made

possible by the “understanding as transcendental synthesis of imagination.” The unity of the formal

intuition of space, he is apparently telling us, derives from the understanding, and is given by means of

the (figurative) synthesis performed by the imagination. (Here Hegel explicitly refers his reader to § 24 of

the Transcendental Deduction.) Following this remark about the unity of the formal intuition of space (“as

in geometry”), he writes that what Kant says about “sensibility and a priority” is one of his “most

important points” (FK 122/GW

361). The important point Hegel means to highlight here, then, is about space as a formal

intuition, not about space as a form of intuition.22

These passages from Faith and Knowledge are consistent with the suggestion that what Hegel finds of

interest in these sections of the Transcendental Deduction are Kant’s conclusions, not about the nature of

space and time as forms of intuition, but about the nature of our objective representations of space and

time. According to Kant, as we have seen, if the manifold appearing to us in space and time is an object of

empirical consciousness or apprehension, it is already subject to the unifying work of spontaneity; more

precisely, it is already subject to the work of transcendental or productive imagination applied to

appearances, the work of figurative synthesis. There is reason to suppose, then, that it is this point (the

point that we perceive or apprehend the manifold only as already synthesized) that Hegel wishes to

emphasize when he writes in the passage we have been considering that, in the Transcendental Deduction,

“productive imagination, spontaneity and absolute synthetic activity, is conceived [in the Transcendental

Deduction] as the principle of sensibility.”

Hegel’s appreciation of the fact that Kant treats space and time in this section of the Deduction as

“themselves intuitions” and not as forms of intuition is further suggested by the way in which he

completes the sentence just quoted: “productive imagination,” he writes, “is conceived [in the

Transcendental Deduction] as the principle of sensibility that previously was only characterized as

receptivity” (emphasis added). This is very likely a reference to Kant’s own comparison, in the note at

CPR B 160, of his treatments of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic and in the Transcendental

Analytic. In the Aesthetic (§ 1), Kant defines sensibility as “the capacity (receptivity) for receiving

representations through the mode in which we are affected by objects.” “Objects are given to us by means

of sensibility,” he continues, “and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the

understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts.” In the Transcendental Aesthetic, then, Kant

is concerned to argue for the role of space and time as the a priori forms of intuition through which the

manifold of inner and outer sense must be given to us.23

In the Transcendental Analytic, however, Kant’s task becomes that of establishing the a priori conditions,

not of mere receptivity, but of our perception or experience of objects. As we have seen, his aim in the

second half of the B-Deduction is to argue for the role of the categories in our apprehension of what is

given to us in space and time, that is, of their role in figurative synthesis. The aim of this half of the

Deduction is

in other words to specify the a priori conditions, contributed by spontaneity or the faculty of

understanding, of the spatial and temporal representation of appearances (of the representation of space

and time as “themselves intuitions”) (CPR B 160). Kant’s argument, then, is that the objective

representation of space and time requires as a condition of its possibility the synthetic activity of

spontaneity. Space and time are thus “first given as intuitions” (that is, as objective representations) “by

means of” synthetic unity (whereby the “understanding determines sensibility”) (CPR B 161n).24 Hence

Hegel’s remark: the forms of sensibility characterized (in the Transcendental Aesthetic) “as receptivity,”

are conceived in the Transcendental Deduction as having as their “principle,” “productive imagination,

spontaneity and absolute synthetic activity.”

Not only does this point about the role of spontaneity in determining what we may perceive or apprehend

in empirical intuition seem so far entirely Kantian, Hegel presents it as entirely Kantian. In the paragraph

of Faith and Knowledge immediately following the one we have been examining in this section, he

reminds us of Kant’s insight that intuitions without form are blind (FK 68/GW 303). In an earlier passage,

he praises Kant for arguing that intuition by itself is insufficient to provide for the possibility of “seeing or

being conscious” (FK 70/GW 305). Thus, contrary to what we may at first have thought, our quoted

passage from Faith and Knowledge conveys Hegel’s endorsement of the Kantian thesis that we can have

no experience or perceptual awareness of objects unless what is given to us in empirical intuition is

subject to the categories. Independent of the contribution of spontaneity, intuitions for us are, as Kant

says, blind.25

Notice, in addition, that the passages we have been considering do not warrant us in concluding that the

“identity” Hegel discovers in the Kantian faculty of productive imagination is achieved because its

operations reveal that receptivity is really nothing more than a mode of spontaneity. They offer no

evidence that Hegel seeks to persuade us that what we take to be independently given intuitions are in fact

merely species of, or derived from, concepts. Hegel does not argue, in other words, that what we learn

from Kant’s discussion of the role of productive imagination is that, in knowing or perceiving nature, we

rely on acts of spontaneity alone.

4.4 Kant’s “highest idea”: The “emptiness of subjectivity”

If the “original identity” Hegel claims to discover in the operations of productive imagination is not

captured by the idea that receptivity is simply a mode of and therefore ultimately reducible to spontaneity,

just what does he have in mind by it? One possibility is this: Perhaps he is convinced that the speculative

insight that concepts and intuitions are identical is simply the conclusion we should draw from Kant’s

point that intuitions without concepts are blind. We know from our discussion above that Hegel found

that Kantian point persuasive. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that when he insists upon the

original identity of concepts and intuitions, he means no more than to affirm Kant’s claim that empirical

consciousness is only possible for us if what is given in sensible intuition is already subject to acts of

spontaneity. Perhaps Hegel tells us that concepts and intuitions are identical, then, because he believes

Kant was warranted in concluding that without concepts, intuitions for empirical consciousness are

nothing at all.

For reasons we reviewed in Chapter Three, however, this interpretation of what Hegel has in mind by

original identity cannot be entirely accurate. Even though we encountered evidence there of his

admiration for the Kantian point that perception or empirical consciousness is necessarily determined by

acts of spontaneity, we also saw that he rejects Kant’s particular account of conceptual form. Kant was

justified in arguing that intuitions without concepts are blind, in Hegel’s view, but wrong to treat concepts

as “external.” In our discussion in Chapter Three, we discovered that by the “externality” of conceptual

form, Hegel has in mind the conjunction of two assumptions: First, the assumption that concepts are not

already given with the a posteriori matter of empirical intuition but must be contributed by us; and

second, the assumption that the conceptual form we contribute cannot be known to reflect the nature of

the given content itself. We saw that it is Kant’s commitment to these two assumptions that condemns his

idealism, in Hegel’s estimation, to “subjectivity” and skepticism.

It explains why Kant felt compelled to remind us that, although we must for the sake of empirical

inquiry presuppose a harmony or fit between our concepts and the independently given matter of

sensation, we can never know that such a harmony exists. It is his reason for insisting that, with respect to

that given sense content, our concepts must remain “contingent.”

So it cannot be that “original identity,” on Hegel’s conception, is just another name for Kant’s thesis that

intuitions without form are blind. Hegel grants Kant’s point that we have no cognition or even perception

of the sensible manifold without acts of spontaneity, but he rejects Kant’s account of thestatus of the

concepts that govern those acts. In particular, he is unconvinced by the Kantian assumption that the

conceptual form we contribute cannot be known to reflect the nature of the independently given content

itself. He calls into question the presupposition that form is in this sensesubjective—a reflection merely of

what we a priori put into things, but not of things themselves. As I suggested in the final paragraphs of

Chapter Three, Hegel is convinced that as long as this is our understanding of subjective form, we can

have no means of progressing from subjective to “genuine” or “absolute” idealism.

But if original identity is achieved neither by a reduction of intuitions to concepts nor by granting the

truth of Kant’s insight that intuitions without concepts are blind, how does Hegel think we are to make the

transition to genuine idealism? If what I just noted is true—namely, that he is persuaded that genuine

idealism requires a new account of conceptual form—what is that new account and how does he set out to

defend it? I have been urging all along that, in our effort to understand Hegel’s idea of original identity,

we allow ourselves to be guided by his interest in Kantian claims regarding the necessary interdependence

of concepts and intuitions as conditions of experience. I want to pursue this suggestion a bit further, now,

because I believe it can steer our efforts to answer these questions in the right direction.

Hegel expresses his interest in the interdependence of concepts and intuitions in the following passage

in Faith and Knowledge:

The Kantian philosophy has the merit of being idealism insofar as it demonstrates that neither the

concept alone nor intuition alone is anything at all; the intuition by itself is blind and the concept by itself

is empty. (FK 68/GW 303)

Now, given that Hegel seeks to provide an alternative to Kant’s “subjective” version of idealism, it cannot

be that he thinks that Kant’s own account of the interdependence of concepts and intuitions is fully

adequate. It cannot be, then, that all Hegel is telling us in this passage is that Kant was right to stress that

experience requires, as a condition of its possibility, the cooperating roles of concepts and intuitions. In

writing that the Kantian philosophy “has the merit of being idealism,” Hegel is suggesting something

more than this. He is telling us that, if properly understood, the point about the interdependence of

concepts and intuitions should pave the way to a genuine form of idealism. It is his view that genuine or

absolute idealism acknowledges, in a way that

Kant’s subjective idealism does not, that neither concept nor intuition “alone” is “anything at all.”

What, then, is the deeper or “speculative” lesson we are supposed to learn from the interdependence of

concepts and intuitions? Regarding the dependence of intuitions on concepts, we already have our answer.

As we have seen, Hegel is not out to convince us that intuitions depend on concepts because they are

really nothing more than modes or species of concepts. He does not, in other words, defend the view that

merely by thinking, it is possible for us to bring sensible intuitions into being. Hegel is, however,

persuaded by the Kantian point that our perception or empirical consciousness of what is given in sensible

intuition requires the synthesizing acts of special concepts or categories. Intuitions depend on concepts,

for Hegel, in this sense. If what we intuit are objects of perceptual awareness versus merely a succession of

sensations, categorial determination is necessarily in play.

Up to this point at least, Hegel’s position is straightforwardly Kantian. But this surely is not the case

regarding his interpretation of the other half of Kant’s formula, the claim that “the concept by itself is

empty.” We have so far said very little about this particular claim, but Hegel’s understanding of it is key to

his strategy for overcoming the “externality” of conceptual form. His speculative transformation of it, as

we shall see, is absolutely decisive for the development of his own alternative to Kant.

We know from Kant’s Introduction to the “Idea of a Transcendental Logic” what he has in mind by the

claim that concepts without intuitions are empty (CPR A 51/B 75). He tells us that unless our categories

apply to a particular kind of content, to the manifold given by means of our forms of sensible intuition,

they are empty, in that they cannot serve for us as conditions of knowledge. Were our understanding

intuitive, this restriction on the application of the categories would not be necessary. Were our

understanding intuitive, we would not need to rely for our cognitions of nature on an independently given

sense content at all; we would have the capacity to bring the objects of our knowledge into being merely

by exercising our intuitive powers. So the fact that the valid application of the categories is limited for us

to what is given in space in time is a necessary consequence, for Kant, of our discursivity—of the fact that,

in knowing nature, we have to rely on a sensible content that is independently given.

As for Hegel’s transformation of these points, we saw not only in section 4.2 above but already in

Chapter One that he was aware of the features Kant associates with human discursivity. He knew that, for

Kant, our knowledge of nature depends on both the a priori functions of thought and the application of

those functions to appearances.26 He was aware of Kant’s claim that our form of understanding cannot

merely by thinking bring objects of experience into being. In Faith and Knowledge, he even reminds us of

this restriction on our cognitive powers by paraphrasing Kant’s remark at

CPR B 135 that “through the empty I as single representation nothing manifold is given” (FK 71/GW

306).27Nevertheless, from Kant’s thesis about the necessary reliance of thought on sensible intuition,

Hegel derived implications that go far beyond anything Kant intended.

One indication that this is so is contained in the final paragraph of the section of Faith and

Knowledgedevoted to Kant’s philosophy. There, Hegel summarizes his reflections on the significance of

Kant’s insight that thoughts without content are empty with the following curious remark: “The highest

idea [höchste Idee] of the Kantian philosophy,” he writes, “is the complete emptiness of subjectivity” (FK

96/GW 333). At first glance, this seems an odd comment for Hegel to make, especially in light of the

indispensable role Kant awards subjectivity in determining (through its a priori concepts and laws) the

very form of our experience. What could Hegel be trying to tell us?

We first need to establish just which form of subjectivity, in Kant’s system, Hegel means to refer to as

“empty.” We can extract our answer from our discussion back in section 4.3. We saw there that Hegel

refers to the “I think” that “does the representing” and that “accompanies all representations” as the

“empty identity” (FK 71/GW 307). The “I think” is “empty,” in Kant’s system, because its operations are

incapable of producing or generating intuitions. “[T]hrough the I as single representation,” Kant writes,

“nothing manifold is given” (CPR B 135). Because the “I think” is in this sense empty, no appeal to its

functions can thus be sufficient to establish a necessary connection between its concepts and their objects.

Hegel observes that Kant secures this connection, in the Transcendental Deduction, by introducing a form

of self-consciousness other than that of the empty “I think,” a form of self-consciousness that on Kant’s

own characterization is an “originally synthetic unity.” As Hegel writes, “The whole transcendental

deduction cannot be understood without distinguishing what Kant calls the faculty of the original

synthetic unity of apperception from the I that does the representing” (FK 72f./GW 308).

We thus have reason to conclude that when Hegel tells us that the “emptiness of subjectivity” is the

“highest idea” of Kant’s philosophy, what he is proposing is that even Kant recognized that by appealing

solely to the operations of the “I think,” the problem of the Transcendental Deduction could not be solved.

According to Kant, we can only secure the necessary relation of the categories to experience (we can only

secure their “objective validity”) by presupposing a form of self-consciousness in addition to the “I

think”—a form of self-consciousness capable of connecting the “I think” and the sensible manifold. The

emptiness of the “I think” is Kant’s “highest idea,” then, because it motivates what Hegel takes to be the

“speculative” insight that a necessary connection between our concepts and the sensible manifold is

secured only by means of a form of self-consciousness that, on Kant’s own description, is “originally

synthetic.”

Hegel never claims that Kant’s philosophy itself deserves to be characterized as genuinely speculative. On

the contrary, he tells us that although Kant had the idea of a faculty of self-consciousness that is originally

synthetic, he failed to exploit the full potential of that idea. In the end, Kant identifies that faculty as not

originally synthetic at all. On Hegel’s reading, original synthetic unity of apperception is ultimately, for

Kant, just another faculty of combination or synthesis. As such, it is not an identity or original unity of

receptivity and spontaneity; it is a faculty of thought or spontaneity alone.

Turning his attention to Kant’s treatment of the faculty of productive imagination, Hegel argues that this

faculty suffers essentially the same fate. Passages of the Transcendental Deduction give the impression

that Kant aims to classify productive imagination as neither a faculty of receptivity nor of spontaneity but

as “belonging to” both. Kant writes at CPR B 155f., for example, that imagination “belongs [gehört] to

sensibility [Sinnlichkeit]” and yet is also “spontaneity.”28 Not surprisingly, Hegel interprets these remarks

as further evidence of Kant’s own acknowledgement of the necessity of postulating a form of subjectivity

that is an original identity. He tells us that Kant recognized thespeculative idea of figurative synthesis, a

synthesis that is not a combination of originally heterogeneous items but from which, as he writes, the “I

as thinking subject, and the manifold as body and world first detach themselves” (FK 71/GW 307). But

once again, Kant did not remain true to this (speculative) conception of productive imagination. He

betrayed the idea of productive imagination as what Hegel calls a “genuine [wahrhafte]” middle (FK

94/GW 330). In the end, its synthesis, for Kant, is not that from which the “I as thinking subject, and the

manifold as body and world first detach themselves”; rather, it is a synthesis that, as Hegel says,

presupposes antithesis or “absolute opposition” (FK 128/GW 367). In that Kant describes figurative

synthesis (at B 152) as an “action of the understanding on the sensibility,” productive imagination on his

account ultimately “abandons its place in the middle,” as Hegel puts it (FK 93/GW 329). Rather than

“originally synthetic,” productive imagination gets “fixated as intellect” or turned back into what Hegel

calls a “pure unity” (FK 73f./GW 309).

So the “highest idea” of Kant’s philosophy is the “emptiness of subjectivity,” according to Hegel, because

Kant’s recognition of the emptiness of the faculty of the “I think” is precisely what motivated his

introduction of a form of self-consciousness that is neither pure thought nor pure intuition but a unity or

identity of both. Kant, however, turned this original synthetic unity back into a “pure unity”; and as far as

Hegel is concerned, this is why he was unable to make the transition from “subjective” to “genuine” or

“absolute” idealism.

4.5 Kantian rejoinders

The orthodox Kantian will very likely challenge this Hegelian assessment of the shortcomings of the

Transcendental Deduction. This Kantian will tell us that it is a mistake to suggest, as Hegel sometimes

appears to suggest, that Kant is inconsistent in identifying transcendental apperception as “originally

synthetic,” on the one hand, and as a faculty of spontaneity or understanding, on the other. Kant commits

no inconsistency for the simple reason that he does not argue, as Hegel does, that as originally synthetic,

transcendental apperception is neither a faculty of spontaneity nor of receptivity, but an “identity” or

“unity” of both. Transcendental apperception performs a synthesis that is prior to and a condition of the

possibility of all other acts of synthesis or combination; but the fact that its synthesis is “prior” or

“original,” in Kant’s view, is perfectly compatible with its originating in acts of the faculty of

understanding. The Kantian will furthermore point out that transcendental or original apperception, as

Kant defines it, is entirely adequate to the task he sets for it, the task of connecting the “I think” and the

sensible manifold. On Kant’s conception, connecting the “I think” and the sensible manifold is a matter of

demonstrating (against Hume) that we have at least some concepts that relate with necessity to

experience. As we saw, Kant provides this demonstration in the Transcendental Deduction by arguing that

unless the sensible manifold is subject to the synthesizing activity of these concepts or categories, there

can be for us no objects of perception or empirical consciousness at all.

It is not my objective here to assess the merits either of the Transcendental Deduction itself or of this

particular defense of it. For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that even if we grant the accuracy of this

representation of Kant’s aims and assumptions in this section of the Critique, we should not be tempted to

conclude that it serves as an adequate response to Hegel’s objections. For one thing, Hegel never tries to

convince us that Kant intended by original or transcendental apperception a faculty that is neither

spontaneity nor receptivity. As I mentioned earlier, he was fully aware that original apperception, as Kant

defines it, belongs to the faculty of spontaneity alone. For just that reason, he never claims that Kant is

inconsistent in identifying transcendental apperception both as “originally synthetic” and as a faculty of

the understanding. Hegel’s point is simply that, in conceiving original synthetic unity in this way, Kant

misses its potentially speculative implications. Moreover, Hegel was aware of the specific problems Kant

set out to solve in the Transcendental Deduction. He knew that Kant intended his demonstration of the

objective validity of categories primarily as a response to the empiricisms of Locke and Hume.29 It is

perhaps even fair to say that he believed that, relative to the specific goals Kant set for himself, the

argument of the Transcendental Deduction was a complete success.

We more accurately portray the basis of Hegel’s objections, I believe, by noting that as far as he was

concerned, the success of the Deduction comes at too high a price. As we saw in Chapter Three, the price

we pay, on his account, is subjective idealism. For even if we grant that it is possible to establish the

objective validity of the categories with reference to their role in unifying the given manifold, the most this

demonstrates, as Kant himself repeatedly reminds us, is their validity for nature as it must be thought and

known by us. Kant never pretends to establish any more than this; he never argues that it follows from his

Copernican revolution in philosophy that we have necessary synthetic knowledge of the independently

given matter of experience itself. Instead, he insists that we can know that independently given content

only as conditioned by our a priori forms. It is precisely this implication of his Critical project that is

responsible for Hegel’s frequently repeated complaint that in spite of their role as necessary conditions of

experience, the categories remain subjective. They remain subjective, not just because they originate in us

(as a priori concepts), but because Kant concludes from the fact that they originate in us that their validity

extends only to objects considered as conditioned by our subjective forms.30

Of course, from Kant’s perspective, there is nothing unacceptable about this restriction on the validity of

the categories. The restriction is a necessary implication of his Copernican revolution; and without this

revolution, he tells us, metaphysics cannot be saved. We reviewed his reasons for this in section3.4of

Chapter Three. We saw there that saving metaphysics, for Kant, requires two major innovations in our

understanding of the conditions of theoretical knowledge: First, it requires us to recognize that our

knowledge of nature depends on concepts as well as sensible intuitions, neither of which derives from or

reduces to the other. Second, it requires us to grant that both our thinking and our intuiting are

conditioned by a priori forms. The given content of our experience is necessarily conditioned by our a

priori forms of intuition, space and time; the synthesis of that given content into objects of perceptual

awareness and judgment is made possible by a priori concepts or categories.

We misrepresent Hegel’s critique, then, if we suppose that it is directed at inconsistencies he discovers

internal to Kant’s system. Hegel is able to imagine an alternative form of idealism only because he believes

that we need not take Kant’s basic assumptions for granted. As we saw beginning in ChapterOne, he is

particularly critical of the view that our concepts and intuitions are originally heterogeneous. In this

chapter, we have been considering his reasons for thinking that a better model of these two sources of

knowledge is available, a model inspired by Kant’s idea of a form of self-consciousness that is “originally

synthetic.”

4.6 The need for a new account of conceptual form

Philosophy is idealism, Hegel writes in Faith and Knowledge, only when it “does not acknowledge either

one of the opposites as existing for itself in its abstraction from the other” (FK 68/GW 303). I have argued

that Hegel’s understanding of the sense in which intuitions cannot “exist” except in relation to concepts is

to this extent Kantian: With Kant, Hegel holds that our empirical consciousness or perception of the given

sensible manifold requires as a condition of its possibility the synthesizing work of special concepts or

categories. I also suggested, however, that Hegel departs from Kant in his understanding of the

dependence of our concepts or categories on intuitions. It is worth emphasizing once again that this

departure is key to his strategy for achieving an “absolute” or “genuine” versus merely “subjective” form of

idealism. On the interpretation I am proposing, it is key to his entire critique of, and alternative to, Kant.

What can we at this point say about the specifically “speculative” meaning of the dependence of concepts

on intuitions, of the idea that concepts without intuitions, as Kant puts it, are “empty”? “The pure isolated

concept,” Hegel writes, “is empty identity.” “[O]nly as relatively identical to that over against which it

stands is it concept, and filled only via the manifold of intuition” (FK 70f./GW 306). As I noted, it won’t

do to interpret Hegel’s message here as simply Kantian—as if all he wishes to convey is that our concepts

remain empty, from the standpoint of knowledge, unless they are applied to appearances. This

interpretation fails to capture all that Hegel has in mind for the following crucial reason: Hegel’s interest

in the idea of a faculty for which concepts and intuitions are an original synthetic unity is motivated by the

very same concern that is responsible for his interest in the ideas of organic unity and of a mode of

cognition that is intuitive. He seeks above all to avoid an idealism that is “subjective.” An idealism that is

subjective, in his view, treats form as “external.” Form is external not just if it is assumed to originate in

the cognizing subject. It is external, on Hegel’s definition, if the fact that it originates in the cognizing

subject leads us to conclude that it cannot reveal the mind-independent reality of things. For Hegel, an

idealism that is subjective, and that therefore treats form as external in this way, cannot close the gap

between our concepts and objects. It leaves us with “contingency” in the relation between our thought-

forms or concepts and given sensible particulars.31

So when Hegel urges us to appreciate the dependence of our concepts on intuitions, his point is not

merely that our concepts are empty unless they are applied to a particular kind of content. We make the

transition from a “subjective” to a “genuine” form of idealism, he believes, only when we embrace anew

account of conceptual form,

namely an account of conceptual form (and its faculty) as something other than “external.” In our earlier

chapters, we encountered a few clues to the nature of this alternative Hegelian account of conceptual form.

Back in Chapter Two, we considered Hegel’s fascination with the Kantian idea of organic unity, according

to which the parts and whole of an organism stand to each other in a relation of reciprocal determination.

Parts or particulars are generated out of the synthetically universal whole; as such, they are given as

already formed and as requiring no further conceptual determination. We saw, however, that the

determination also proceeds in the other direction. In the model of organic unity, parts or particulars are

conceived not only as if purposively produced by the whole; they are also assumed to purposively sustain

the whole.

We furthermore reviewed the way in which the idea of the reciprocal determination of concept and

intuition, of subject and object, gets expressed in Hegel’s characterization of how we should understand

the relation between the two sciences: the sciences of nature and intelligence. He urges us to avoid the

mistake of philosophers such as Kant and Fichte who privilege the science of intelligence, and in doing so

abstract from how intelligence or subjectivity is considered from the standpoint of nature. These

philosophers abstract from the standpoint of nature, on Hegel’s characterization, in failing to grasp that

subjectivity or intelligence is not simply free and self-determining; it is also determined or conditioned by

nature.32 The idealisms of Kant and Fichte are moreover ultimately “subjective.” It is an implication of

these systems that subjective form is “absolutely opposed” or “external” to content in this respect:

subjective form is taken to owe nothing of its nature and origin to the realm of the empirical. For these

philosophers, human reason (or “thinking”) is “absolute” in that it is capable of achieving complete

“independence from common reality” (FK 63/GW 296).33

So, again, when Hegel urges us to appreciate that the “highest idea” of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is

the “emptiness of subjectivity,” his message is not just that we need to follow Kant in acknowledging that

our concepts remain empty unless applied to appearances. Without denying this Kantian claim, Hegel in

addition wishes us to recognize the mistake of considering our concepts to be empty in the sense of

“external.” Unless we bear this point in mind—unless we appreciate what motivates his critique of the

emptiness of subjectivity (namely, his concern to avoid the conception of subjective form that bears a

skeptical result)—we are bound to miss what he is after when he describes our concepts or categories as

originally part of a synthetic unity, as originally “identical” to intuitions, and as originally “immersed in

extension” (FK 89/GW 325). In describing the nature of conceptual form in this way, Hegel means for us

to acknowledge their debt to “common reality.” He signals his intention to launch

an attack on a thesis he describes in the 1831 Preface to his Science of Logic: the thesis, namely, of the

“supposed self-subsistence [Für-sich-seyn-sollens]” of our thought-determinations (SL 39/WL I 30).34

Notes:

(1) To quote this passage more completely: “Outside the objective determination of the categories remains

an enormous empirical realm of sensibility and perception, an absolute a posteriority, for which no a

priority as merely a subjective maxim of reflective judgment is discovered [aufgezeit]. Non-identity is, in

other words, raised to an absolute principle” (D 81/10).

(2) See Kant’s discussion of this point in his note at CPR B xxvi.

(3) Because Hegel’s discussion of the Transcendental Deduction in Faith and Knowledge is directed at the

B-edition Deduction, I focus on that edition here.

(4) As Henry Allison points out, this description of the central task of the B-Deduction is implied by the

worry Kant expresses at CPR A 90f./B 123 that he has not yet shown that the given content of sensible

intuition must be subject to a priori rules or categories. Prior to the Transcendental Deduction of

theCritique, he has in other words not yet provided the argument to rule out the possibility that

“appearances could…be so constituted that the understanding would not find them in accord with the

conditions of its unity.” See Allison’s discussion of this passage in Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An

Interpretation and Defense (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 159–63.

(5) Kant repeats this point at CPR B 135: “Combination” “is an operation [Verrichtung] of the

understanding [Vertandes] alone.”

(6) Kant refers to the original synthetic unity of apperception, sometimes as an act of spontaneity (Aktus

der Spontaneität), sometimes as a representation (Vorstellung), sometimes as a faculty or capacity

(Vermögen), and sometimes as a form of self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtsein). See, for example, CPR §

16.

(7) The expression “transcendental apperception” occurs at CPR A 107. At CPR B 132 (§ 16), Kant treats

“pure apperception” and “original apperception” as synonyms. Both refer to “that self-consciousness

which produces the representation I think.” The unity of that self-consciousness which must accompany

all my representations (the unity of the “I think”), he calls “transcendental unity of self-consciousness”

(CPR B 132). At CPR B 133 and B 134n, he refers to this unity as the “synthetic unity of apperception.”

(8) As Kant also writes at CPR B 134: “[O]nly because I can comprehend [begreifen] [a manifold of

representations] in one consciousness, do I call them all my representations.”

(9) Kant also tells us here that the “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations, because

representations would otherwise be “impossible” or “nothing for me” (CPR B 132).

(10) The passage in full: “The manifold of a given sensible intuition necessarily belongs under [gehört

unter] the original synthetic unity of apperception, because ‘alone’ through this [synthetic unity of

apperception] is the unity of the intuition possible” (CPR B 143).

(11) In Kant’s words: “The manifold in a given intuition necessarily stands under [steht unter] the

categories” (CPR B 143).

(12) In an intriguing aside, Kant does consider the possibility that the two “stems of human cognition”

(namely, “sensibility and understanding”) “perhaps arise from a common but to us unknown root” (CPR A

15/B 29). In his “Doctrine of Method,” he again mentions the “general root” of our “cognitive power,”

which “divides and branches out into two stems” (CPR A 835/B 863). Kant entertains this possibility, but

also claims that “for us” it is “incomprehensible [unbegreiflich]” how the two stems could have a common

root (he makes this remark in his 1800 Anthropology, Akademie vol. VII (177)). The task of arguing for

the ultimate “identity” of sensibility and understanding is picked up, not just by German idealists such as

Hegel, but by later philosophers such as Martin Heidegger as well. This topic is explored in Dieter

Henrich’s now classic paper, “On the Unity of Subjectivity,” in The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s

Philosophy, ed. Richard L. Velkey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 17–54. Henrich

argues that the only understanding that could know or “access” the “common root of sensibility and

understanding,” according to Kant, “would have to think nondiscursively” (30). This conclusion seems

justified in light of Kant’s remark in the Anthropologynoted above.

(13) Paul Guyer argues otherwise in “Thought and Being: Hegel’s Critique of Kant,” 182. I believe Guyer is

also mistaken when, in another paper, he attributes to Hegel the view that Kant believed that the

distinction between concepts and intuitions could be overcome and that we could achieve the powers of

an intuitive understanding. See his “Absolute Idealism and the Rejection of Kantian Dualism,” in The

Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University

Press, 2000), 51–3.

(14) In Kant’s words: “That understanding through whose self-consciousness the manifold of intuition

would at the same time be given, an understanding through whose representation the objection of the

representation existed, would not need a special act of synthesis of the manifold to the unity of

consciousness” (CPR § 17, B 138f.). Kant discusses the connection between our discursivity and the need

for a transcendental deduction also in CPR §§ 13 and 14.

(15) As Kant writes at CPR § 17, B 138, without synthetic unity of apperception, “the manifold would not be

unified in one consciousness.” In Hegel’s words, what Kant calls “ ‘pure apperception’ ” is to be considered

the “activity of making [the object] mine” (EL § 42A1).

(16) At CPR A 124, Kant asserts that it is “only by means of the imagination” that concepts can be “brought

into relation to sensible intuition.” In § 24 of the B-Deduction, he characterizes figurative synthesis as the

“transcendental synthesis of the imagination” (CPR B 152).

(17) Hegel expresses the point as follows: “The Kantian philosophy has the merit of being idealism insofar

as it demonstrates that neither the concept alone nor intuition alone is anything at all; the intuition by

itself is blind and the concept by itself is empty” (FK 68/GW 303). I discuss this passage below in

section 4.5.

(18) There is a long history of controversy over how to interpret Kant’s note at CPR B 160f. I interpret Kant

along the same lines as, for example, Manfred Baum in “Kant on Pure Intuition,” in Minds, Ideas, and

Objects: Essays on the Theory of Representation in Modern Philosophy, ed. Phillip D. Cummins and

Guenter Zoeller (Atscadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1992), 303–15, and Guenter Zoeller in

“Comments on Professor Kitcher’s ‘Connecting Intuitions and Concepts at B 160n,’ ”Southern Journal of

Philosophy XXV, Supplement (1987), 151–5. For a different reading, seePatricia Kitcher’s paper in the

same volume of the Southern Journal, 214–25. See also Béatrice Longuenesse, who makes the intriguing

suggestion that space and time are products of figurative synthesis, both as formal intuitions and as forms

of intuition. In Kant and the Capacity to Judge, transl. Charles Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1998), esp. 214–25.

(19) In these paragraphs of the Transcendental Deduction, Kant is principally concerned with conditions of

the possibility of our representation of appearances. For that reason, he is principally concerned with

space and time as “themselves intuitions” in the following sense: They are themselves intuitions as

objectively represented in perception. Appearances are objective representations of space and time,

according to Kant. As objects of empirical intuition, appearances are perceived by us as having spatial and

temporal magnitude (although “inner experiences” have only the latter). But although Kant’s focus in

these paragraphs is with the way in which space and time are “themselves intuitions” as objectively

represented in perception, space and time are “themselves intuitions” in another sense as well, on his

account. Space and time may also be objectively represented in non-empirical or “pure” intuition. For

example, the geometer’s triangle (which borrows nothing from sensation) is a representation of space in

pure intuition (CPR A 20/B 34). The triangle is “itself an intuition,” that is, itself a representation of space

in the form of a non-empirical or formal intuition. See Kant’s discussion of these points at CPR A 165f./B

207f. See also Manfred Baum’s illuminating essay, “Kant on Pure Intuition,” 303–15.

(20) By “undetermined,” I mean not yet subject to categorial synthesis. I discuss Kant’s various uses of the

term “appearance” in Chapter Three, note 12.

(21) In Kant’s words, it is “only by means of the imagination” that concepts can be “brought into relation to

sensible intuition” (CPR A 124).

(22) Again, space (as well as time) can be objectively represented either as an object of pure intuition (“as

in geometry”) or as an object of empirical intuition (as an appearance), according to Kant. Hegel contrasts

space as a “form of intuition” with space as a “formal intuition” here, presumably, because he has objects

of geometry in mind as examples of the objective representation of space.

(23) Although the aim of the Transcendental Aesthetic is to argue for the role of space and time as forms of

intuition, Manfred Baum points out that Kant’s “metaphysical expositions” in the Aesthetic treat space

and time as objective representations. Kant argues in the Transcendental Aesthetic from a thesis about

space and time as objective representations (as “themselves intuitions”) to the conclusion that space and

time are our pure forms of sensible intuition. See Baum, “Kant on Pure Intuition,” 304.

(24) When Kant concludes this note with the puzzling comment that the unity of our intuition of space and

time “belongs to space and time, and not to the concept of the understanding,” he is not contradicting his

claim in the immediately preceding sentences that the unity of the intuitions or objective representations

of space and time derives from the “understanding” which determines “sensibility.” That is, Kant is not

taking back his point that the unity of space and time as “themselves intuitions” derives from the faculty

of the understanding. He writes that the unity of our intuitions of space and time “belongs to space and

time” in order to emphasize that he is concerned to argue, in these passages of the Deduction, that space

and time, considered as “themselves intuitions,” contain unity. Kant in other words means to underscore

the point that here, in contrast to the Transcendental Aesthetic, he is treating space and time as

“themselves intuitions,” rather than as a priori forms of intuition. In writing that the unity of our intuition

of space and time does not belong “to the concept of the understanding,” Kant reminds us that he aims in

these passages to establish the role of figurative synthesis in particular. This is why he refers us back to

CPR § 24, the section in which he introduced the distinction between figurative and intellectual synthesis.

Recall that he tells us there that the categories relate “to objects of intuition in general, whether that

intuition be our own or any other.” Their synthesis is so far merely “intellectual” and “relates only to the

unity of apperception” (CPR B 150). Kant’s remarks at CPR B 160, however, occur in the context of his

effort to establish the role of the categories in figurative synthesis, in the synthesis of objects given in

space and time. In figurative synthesis, the unity of the categories relates not merely to the understanding,

but is a condition of the possibility of our perception of appearances (a condition of the possibility, that is,

of the representation of space and time as objects of empirical intuition). The “unity of the synthesis of the

[empirical] manifold,” he tells us, “is given a priori as a condition of the synthesis of all apprehension.”

And this unity is given, he continues, “not indeed in, but with” the intuitions or objective representations

of space and time (CPR B 160f.).

(25) Hegel writes that the categories are what give the “infinity of sensations” “objectivity and stability.” If

abandoned by the categories, the infinity of sensations becomes a “formless lump” (FK 76f./GW 312). It is

by means of the categories that “mere perception” gets raised to “objectivity, to experience” (EL § 43).

“The thought-determinations or concepts of the understanding[Verstandesbegriffe] are responsible for

the objectivity of our knowledge of experience” (EL § 40).

(26) Note Hegel’s remark in EL § 43: The categories are “for themselves empty” (für sich leer) and “have

their application and use only in experience.”

(27) This paraphrase would be an exact quote were it not for Hegel’s insertion of the word “empty.”

(28) Kant explains that productive imagination “belongs to sensibility,” because the intuition it “gives” to

the categories is sensible rather than intellectual. Productive imagination, in other words, is

“dependent…for the manifoldness of its apprehension on sensibility” (CPR B 164). Productive imagination

is at the same time “spontaneity,” however, because its synthesis, like all synthesis or combination, is an

“act of spontaneity” (CPR B 129). The “unity of its intellectual synthesis,” Kant writes, is “dependent…on

the understanding” (CPR B 164).

(29) I defended this claim back in Chapter Three, section 3.2. Hegel notes in EL § 40, for example, that the

“Critical philosophy” departs from empiricism in arguing that “universality and necessity” are contributed

to experience by the “spontaneity of thinking.” See also his comparison of Locke, Hume, and Kant in FK

69/GW 303f.

(30) As Hegel writes in EL § 41A2, even the “objectivity of thinking in Kant’s sense is itself again only

subjective.” Although thoughts according to Kant are “universal and necessary determinations, they

nonetheless are only our thoughts and separated from what the thing is in itself by an unbridgeable gulf.”

(31) If, for example, we take productive imagination to be “subjective,” that is, as “merely the property of

the subject,” then its cognition of the manifold, Hegel writes, is “formal.” “The possible connection

between the two [between the ‘formal identity’ and the ‘manifold’] …is the incomplete relation within the

bounds of an absolute opposition” (FK 93/GW 330; emphasis added).

(32) I discuss these points in Chapter Two, section 2.5.

(33) I say “human reason (or ‘thinking’),” here, because in addition to the passage I quote from Faith and

Knowledge, I also have in mind Hegel’s remark in the Encyclopaedia Logic in which he criticizes dualistic

systems for their commitment to the “independence of self-comprehending thought [Denkens]” (EL § 60).

I discuss these points in Chapter Three, section 3.7.

(34) Passages in Robert Pippin’s work, if read too quickly or taken in isolation, might seem to suggest that

on his interpretation, Hegel’s strategy for closing the concept-intuition gap and for thereby offering an

alternative to a merely subjective idealism involves nothing more than properly appreciating the Kantian

point that intuitions without concepts are blind. In “Concept and Intuition: On Distinguishability and

Separability,” for example, Pippin acknowledges Hegel’s appreciation for Kant’s note at B 160 which can

be read to suggest that “any manifold . . requires categorical unity if it is to provide any possible content

for thought” (Hegel-Studien 39/40, ed. Walter Jaeschke and Ludwig Siep, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,

2004/5, 33). In “Leaving Nature Behind, or Two Cheers for Subjectivism: On John McDowell,” Pippin

once again devotes a great deal of attention to the point, taken up by McDowell, that closing the mind–

world gap involves sufficiently grasping the implications of Kant’s insight that “[o]ur sensory contact with

the world is through and through ‘already conceptual’ ” (chapter 9 of his The Persistence of Subjectivity,

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 192). From Pippin’s emphasis in these discussions on

this point that there already is spontaneity on the side of receptivity, we might thus be tempted to

conclude that he finds nothing of interest (or believes that Hegel finds nothing of interest) in Kant’s

further remark about the emptiness of concepts without intuitions. But it is clear from “Leaving Nature

Behind,” however, that Pippin understands Hegel’s strategy for closing the concept–intuition gap to

involve, not just a new account of receptivity (as already containing spontaneity), but also a new account

of spontaneity. McDowell worries that once we embrace the Kantian view that intuitions are blind (and

thus without cognitive import) without concepts, and that concepts have their source in the faculty of

spontaneity, we then have to worry that our idealism suffers from “subjectivity,” and that we have no way

of demonstrating that our concepts make cognitive contact with the given sensory content. But this worry

about “subjectivism,” Pippin states here, depends upon a false picture of the nature of spontaneity.

McDowell’s worry that our concepts are merely (“frictionless”) subjective impositions, wholly

unanswerable to the given intuitive content, is in other words parasitic on a view of subjectivity as wholly

“unconstrained by the world” (204). As Pippin remarks in this paper, and as I have been suggesting in this

chapter, this is not the Hegelian conception of subjectivity. In Pippin’s words, Hegel understands the

“space of reasons” not as absolutely unconstrained by the world, but as “a historically constituted human

practice…subject to revision and critical correction” (204).

Subjectivity as Part of an Original Identity

Theories which assume that the knowing subject, that mind or consciousness, have an inherent capacity

to disclose reality, a capacity operating apart from any overt interactions of the organism with

surrounding conditions, are invitations to general philosophical doubt.

John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, Chapter VII

A number of the claims I have defended up to this point are relatively uncontroversial. Among them is the

claim that from Kant’s ideas of an intuitive mode of cognition and of nature as an organism, Hegel derives

clues to an alternative to the Kantian dualism between concepts and intuitions, and between their

respective faculties. Also relatively uncontroversial is the claim that Hegel is convinced that an alternative

must be provided if we are to avoid an idealism that, like Kant’s, is merely subjective and as such unable

to secure for us knowledge of the reality of things.

But there is great lack of agreement over precisely how we should understand Hegel’s proposal for closing

the concept–intuition gap. As I have noted, a common suggestion is that the solution he settles upon is in

some way reductive. There are those who argue, on the one side, that Hegel holds that our concepts

reduce to intuitions. On this reading, his strategy for overcoming dualism involves persuading us that the

mind and its forms are simply products of nature. Our ideas or concepts come to be as nothing more than

effects of the impingement of sense impressions on our sense organs. All that we judge to be “rational”

derives entirely from the realm of the actual.

We reviewed evidence that suggests, however, that Hegel is too much of a Kantian to endorse a reductive

empiricism. In Chapters Three and Four, we saw that he follows Kant in urging that there can be no

objects for consciousness, strictly speaking, independent of concepts. Our knowledge of objects, even our

perception or apprehension of them, is only possible thanks to synthesizing acts of the mind, acts

governed by rules or concepts we bring to, rather than merely abstract out of, experience. When Hegel

urges us to think of nature as an “immanent ideality,” he thus expresses his Kantian-inspiredopposition to

“naïve” or reductive empiricism.

On the other side are those who argue that the reduction, for Hegel, proceeds in the opposite direction.

According to this proposal, Hegel closes the gap between concept and object with the help of a reductive

rationalism. The most extreme version of this interpretation attributes to him the view that human

cognition possesses the productive capacity of the intuitive intellect to literally generate sensible intuitions

and thereby bring material objects into being. But this reading of Hegel as a super-rationalist ignores

his debt to empiricism, his commitment to the view that we rely in cognition on a sense content we do not

make.

A more plausible interpretation of Hegel’s alleged reductive rationalism acknowledges his debt to

empiricism; it recognizes that, with Kant, he grants that our mode of cognition is discursive and as such

dependent on an independently given sense content. According to this interpretation, Hegel in addition

follows Kant in arguing that there can be no objects of thought or cognition without concepts, concepts we

bring to, versus merely abstract out of, experience. On this reading, moreover, Hegel endorses this

Kantian premise about the necessary role of concepts and derives from it the internalist conclusion that a

truly extra-conceptual content can have no cognitive significance for us. On this reading, the only possible

object of human cognition, for Hegel, is thought itself.

We can surely find passages in Hegel’s works that seem to support this latter kind of internalist

interpretation. Hegel frequently tells us, for example, that the very idea of an object wholly beyond

thought is itself just a thought-object, and that a wholly non-conceptual content is inaccessible to thought.

In his introduction to the Science of Logic, he writes that the very things that are supposed (by some

philosophers) to exist outside thought, “are themselves figments of subjective thought, and as wholly

indeterminate they are only a thought-thing—the so-called thing-in-itself of empty abstraction” (SL

36/WL I 26). On the internalist reading, passages such as this are supposed to warrant the conclusion that

Hegel awards extra-conceptual content no cognitive import. And this conclusion seems further supported

by remarks in which he characterizes his own investigations as having as their subject matter not things

but their “concept [Begriff].” Hegel thereby conveys the impression that he has abandoned the project of

demonstrating that our thought-forms can inform us about a reality wholly outside the mind. As he writes

in the Logic, “for us, the object can be nothing else but our concepts [Begriffe] of it” (SL 36/WL I 25).1

But the internalist interpretation suffers from a great weakness. It offers us no way to explain Hegel’s

repeated complaints about an idealism that is merely subjective. Internalism implies that we are trapped

behind a veil of ideas and must resign ourselves to the fact that our knowledge claims may bear no

relation to reality itself. We have

seen, however, that Hegel wishes to avoid precisely this skeptical outcome. He indeed grants Kant’s

premise that the objects of thought and cognition are for us always conceptualized contents; but as I have

suggested, he does not follow Kant in drawing from this premise the conclusion that the validity of our

knowledge extends no further than to objects as they must be known by us—objects not as they are in

themselves, but only as conditioned by our subjective forms. He resists the thesis of Kantian internalism

that since the only content for our cognition is a conceptualized content, we have no grounds for

supposing that the relation between our concepts and their objects is anything better than contingent.

Hegel believes he is able to avoid subjective idealism, I have argued, by rejecting an assumption upon

which it rests: the Kantian assumption of the “externality” of conceptual form. Hegel thinks of himself as

exploiting to its full potential Kant’s insight that our concepts and intuitions stand to each other in a

relation of reciprocal determination. He seeks to convince us that objects or intuitions are in some sense

also intelligence or subjectivity, and that subjectivity and its forms are in some sense also object. He

insists that subjective form is not “empty” in the sense of “external”; it is not “absolutely opposed” to

content.

The best evidence I have provided so far in favor of the thesis that Hegel rejects Kant’s account of

conceptual form is that such a rejection offers him a strategy for avoiding subjective idealism. I provide

further support for this thesis in these final two chapters. In this chapter, I rely on discussions primarily

in Hegel’s Phenomenology and Science of Logic to expand upon what we know at this point about his own

account of the nature and conditions of cognition. In Chapter Six, I argue that my interpretation enables

us to explain a persistent Hegelian complaint against Kant’s philosophy, namely, that it is question-

begging and insufficiently self-critical.

Our present task is to deepen our understanding of Hegel’s account of the nature and origin of conceptual

form. We need a better grasp of what he has in mind by a mode of self-consciousness or subjectivity that is

not merely subject but also object, that is not an empty identity but rather an original identity or synthetic

unity. I rely for guidance on some Hegelian claims we considered at the end of Chapter Three. There, we

reviewed his criticism in Faith and Knowledge of the “programmatic principle” of those (such as Kant,

Jacobi, and Fichte) who adhere to the “metaphysic of subjectivity.” This principle directs philosophy to

rise above the “subjective and empirical” and “justify the absoluteness of reason, its independence from

common reality” (FK 63/GW 321). We find evidence of Hegel’s opposition to this principle in

his Encyclopedia Logic as well. He despairs that “one of the assumptions of our times” is the Kantian

commitment to the “independence of reason, of its absolute inner self-sufficiency [absoluten

Selbständigkeit in sich]” (EL § 60). So the subjectivity of idealism, for Hegel, is tied to the assumption that

human reason is “self-sufficient” and “independent from common reality.” And we can reasonably take

his opposition to the supposed self-sufficiency and independence of reason to be another expression of his

rejection of the thesis of externality.

I begin this chapter with an examination of Hegel’s objection to the benign-sounding claim that cognition

(Erkennen) is a “means [Mittel]” for knowing the truth about things. Curiously, Hegel suggests that this is

a mistaken conception of thinking and its forms (Denkformen) or categories (Kategorien). His discussion

of this topic in his 1807 Phenomenology and 1812 and 1832 Science of Logic is illuminating for a number

of reasons. For one thing, it alerts us to the fact that he considers the mistake to consist, not in the aim of

knowing things, but rather in the conception of cognition that undercuts that aim. For another, it suggests

that the mistaken conception of cognition as a means rests, in his view, on the assumption of the self-

sufficiency or independence of reason.

5.1 Treating cognition as a means

In the opening paragraphs of his Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel outlines features of a

particular conception of the nature of cognition, a conception held by what he calls “natural

consciousness.” Natural consciousness uses cognition as a “means [Mittel]” of knowing objects, as a

means of accessing a content that it takes to be, as Hegel puts it, on the “other side” of cognition (PhG ¶

74). (In these paragraphs, Hegel refers to such content, alternatively, as: the “thing itself,” “the true,” “the

absolute,” “the in itself,” and “the absolute essence.”) He mentions no philosopher by name in connection

with the standpoint of natural consciousness; and as we will see, the features he associates with this

standpoint are common to a wide range of philosophical positions. There are indications in his discussion

here and elsewhere that he includes Kant among those committed to at least some of the assumptions of

natural consciousness.2

On Hegel’s portrayal, cognition is a “means” for natural consciousness in either of two ways. Some

adherents to the commitments of natural consciousness suppose that cognition is

a tool or instrument(Werkzeug) “by which to seize hold of the absolute essence.” Others treat cognition as

a passive medium (passives Medium) “which the light of truth passes through in order to reach us” (PhG

¶ 73). Natural consciousness eventually discovers, however, that neither of these two versions of the thesis

that cognition is a means serves it in achieving its initial aim. Initially, natural consciousness sets out to

employ thought to get at the truth or “in itself” of things. But natural consciousness comes to recognize

that if cognition is an active instrument, it necessarily reshapes or alters the thing; it does not let the thing

be what it is for itself. If cognition is a passive medium, on the other hand, our cognitive access to objects

is indirect or mediated. We know objects, according to this model, only through the medium.3

In response to this failure of cognition to serve as a means for getting at the truth of things, natural

consciousness engages in acts of self-examination or self-criticism. Here the hope is that if we first

familiarize ourselves with the nature of cognition itself, with the concepts and rules (Wirkungsweise) it

contributes in the act of knowing, we will then be in a position to subtract (abziehen) that contribution

away—and thereby lay bare the thing itself (PhG ¶ 73). But natural consciousness soon discovers that this

strategy is unsatisfactory as well. Natural consciousness seeks to know things. It supposes that we know

things only by employing cognition as a means. Natural consciousness thus defeats its own purposes by

subtracting away precisely what it deems to be its mode of access to things. The most it is able to gain

from its exercise in self-criticism is knowledge of the means, not of things.

From this obscure discussion in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, we can at least conclude the

following: Hegel wishes to convince us that the efforts of natural consciousness are in a certain respect

self-defeating. The original aim of natural consciousness, to get at the truth of things, cannot be satisfied.

The fact that it cannot be satisfied, he seems to imply, is tied in some way to its adherence to the thesis

that cognition is a means.

Less obvious, however, is the remedy Hegel proposes for extricating natural consciousness from this

predicament. He appears in these paragraphs of the Introduction to make two very different

recommendations. Sometimes it seems that his recommendation to natural consciousness is that it

abandon its conception of cognition as a means. After all, that conception seems only to insure failure in

the achievement of its epistemic end. But there are passages that suggest that Hegel’s aim is to urge

natural consciousness to abandon, not its conception of how to achieve its epistemic end, but the end

itself. Natural consciousness should cease striving to know the truth or “in itself” of things; it should

instead content itself with the fact that it can know things only as mediated by its cognitive forms.

On the view I defend here, it is the first line of interpretation that accurately captures Hegel’s position.

Hegel wishes to alert us, then, to the mistake involved in conceiving cognition as a means. I will turn my

attention to that line of interpretation in a moment, but I first want to consider why the second reading

appears persuasive on its face. The claim of the second reading, again, is that the message we are to derive

from Hegel’s critique of cognition as a means is that it is a mistake to suppose that our concepts can access

the “objective relations” or “pure truth” of things. On this reading, the target of Hegel’s critique seems to

be representative realism. For it is the representative realist who maintains that it is possible for us, by

means of our ideas or concepts, to know a reality that is wholly mind-independent (wholly “on the other

side of” cognition). If this interpretation is on target, then we have grounds for concluding that

representative realism is the thesis Hegel urges us to reject. His aim in these paragraphs of the

Introduction is to argue that as long as we adhere to the thesis that cognition is a means (either as a

passive medium or as an active instrument), we can have no warrant

for supposing that cognition can succeed in its effort to award us access to the truth of things.

This interpretation has prima facie plausibility for at least two reasons. First, Hegel repeatedly draws our

attention in these passages to the fact that natural consciousness is unsuccessful in its effort to get at the

truth of things. He thereby encourages the impression that his aim is to convince us that the efforts of the

representative realist are in vain. A second reason for thinking that Hegel’s target is representative

realism is that he explicitly mentions a key proponent of that thesis, namely Locke. Locke’s name appears,

not in the Introduction to the Phenomenology (where Hegel mentions nophilosopher by name), but in

other texts in which Hegel considers assumptions he associates with natural consciousness. In Faith and

Knowledge, for example, Hegel includes Locke among those who undertake an investigation of our means

of knowing prior to determining the extent of our knowledge—the project Hegel identifies there as a

“critique of the cognitive faculties [Kritik der Erkenntnisvermögen]” (FK 68/GW 303). To support his

claim that Locke engaged in critique, Hegel cites a long passage from the introductory chapter of

the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In this passage, Locke announces his intention to prepare

the way for his inquiry into the extent of human knowledge with an investigation of the “powers” and

“capacities” of the faculty of understanding. Locke asserts that this “first step” in determining the precise

nature and limits of our cognitive powers is necessary in order to defend his theory of knowledge against

the threat of skepticism.4

As it turns out, however, representative realism is not the target of Hegel’s critique—at least, not

exclusively. We know this, because there is textual evidence that in his attack on the standpoint of natural

consciousness, he implicates, not just Locke, but also Kant. The reference to Locke in Faith and

Knowledge occurs in the opening paragraphs of a section of that text devoted to the “Kantian philosophy,”

and the main point of Hegel’s reference to Locke in that context is to highlight one feature that the

Lockean and Kantian projects share in common: both undertake what Hegel refers to there as a

“consideration of the finite intellect.”5 Both, on his portrayal, insist that the project of determining the

nature and limits of our knowledge requires as a pre-condition an investigation of our faculties of

cognition. In other texts, Hegel is explicit about the fact that he discovers in Kant’s theoretical philosophy

a commitment to at least some of the assumptions of natural consciousness. In theEncyclopedia Logic,

for instance, he says of the “Critical philosophy” that it presupposes that before we set out to know God or

the essence of things we should first investigate our forms of cognition. The “Critical philosophy,” Hegel

writes, urges us to know the instrument itself before putting it to use (EL § 10).6 In a particularly revealing

passage in the 1831 Preface to the Science of Logic, he takes the “Critical philosophy” to task for holding

that thoughts [Gedanken] are “means” that separate us from things. This assumption yields the result,

Hegel says, that instead of connecting us to objects, thought cuts us off (SL 36/WL I 26).7

Of course, Kant is not a Lockean realist. He does not follow Locke in arguing that our forms of cognition

are means by which we access a reality that is wholly mind-independent. Nor does Kant propose to test

the adequacy of those forms against that independently given reality. Although he provides arguments in

the first Critique to justify his description of the a priori concepts and forms of intuition we bring to

objects in perception, his aim is not to convince us that these forms award us access to a content

absolutely external to mind. As we have seen, Kant’s justificatory project is less ambitious than Locke’s:

the a priori forms of thought and intuition are necessary subjective conditions of ourcognition of objects.

They are conditions without which objects of experience or “appearances” are unknowable for us. So the

fact that Hegel includes Kant among those committed to assumptions of natural consciousness suggests

that we cannot accurately describe his attack on natural consciousness as simply a critique of

representative realism.8

Let’s return, then, to our first interpretative suggestion and consider whether it holds more promise. On

this suggestion, Hegel’s criticism of natural consciousness is intended to dissuade us not from the effort to

know things on the “other side” of cognition, but from treating cognition as a means. Hegel’s aim is in

other words not to convince us that our efforts to know are doomed to fail. He instead means to urge us to

abandon the account of subjective form that stands in our way.

One challenge we have to meet if we are to lend plausibility to this interpretation of Hegel’s critique of

natural consciousness, is to explain why he seems to single out for attack theories of knowledge as

dissimilar as those of Locke and Kant. In what sense does Hegel think that each of these philosophers

treats cognition as a means? In what sense do their respective theories of knowledge result in skepticism,

in his view? We know so far that Hegel holds that both philosophers undertake a “critique of the cognitive

faculties.” But in our above comparison of Locke and Kant, we also noted a significant difference. For

Locke, critique serves the original aim of natural consciousness. Locke, that is, takes his “inquiry into the

mind of man” to be an essential

component of his endeavor to know nature. He is confident that he can succeed in demonstrating that it is

possible for us to know a reality wholly independent of mind.9 For Kant, in contrast, critique is called for

precisely because the efforts of philosophers to demonstrate that our concepts reveal the mind-

independent reality of things are in vain.

To expand upon this latter point: Kant famously argues that it is precisely the realist assumption that we

can know objects wholly independent of our subjective forms that lands reason in irresolvable conflicts or

antinomies. He is convinced that we can avoid these conflicts, but only if we radically alter our conception

of the proper objects of our knowledge. He enlists the services of critique precisely at this point—precisely

in order to reassess what we should identify as the proper objects of our knowledge. What we learn from

critique, on his account, is that we can know only “appearances.” Appearances are given to us through the

a priori forms of intuition, space and time, and are thought through a priori concepts or categories. We

can have empirical knowledge of their sensible properties and relations, and necessary or a priori

knowledge of the subjective forms that condition their possibility.10 But critique instructs us that

knowledge of objects wholly independent of our a priori subjective forms is unavailable to beings with our

mode of cognition.

So Kant’s insistence upon the necessity of critique follows in the wake of his recognition that efforts to

demonstrate that our ideas or concepts reflect the wholly mind-independent nature of things invariably

result in antinomy. Kant does not call upon critique to challenge the assumption of natural consciousness

that thought is a means. Instead, critique is required, in his view, because the effort to know things wholly

independent of our subjective forms needs to be reassessed. For Kant, the outcome of critique is a

“revolution” in our understanding of the proper objects of our knowledge. Expressed in Hegelian terms,

critique on Kant’s account yields the result that we have to substitute for knowledge of objects, knowledge

of the subject.

Again, this comparison of the role of critique for Locke and Kant presents us with the following puzzle. On

the interpretation I have just sketched, the aim of Hegel’s discussion in these paragraphs of

thePhenomenology is to urge us to abandon the assumption of natural consciousness that cognition is a

means. We should abandon this assumption, because it leaves us no way to demonstrate that we can know

the reality or “in itself” of things. But if what motivates Hegel’s argument is the wish to avoid skepticism,

why does he implicate not just Kant but also Locke?

The answer to this question is suggested in our discussion back in Chapter Three. There we saw that Hegel

identifies both the Lockean and the Kantian systems as

instances of what he terms the “metaphysic of subjectivity.” Both systems deserve to be classified under

this heading, in his view, because both systems have ultimately skeptical implications for our knowledge.

Hegel is convinced that, in both cases, skepticism is a necessary consequence of a mistaken account of

cognition.

Although we already discussed these matters at length, it will be worth our while to recall a few central

points.11 As we saw, Hegel was convinced that skepticism follows from Kant’s particular understanding of

the implications of human discursivity. Hegel arrived at this conclusion in response to Kant’s assertion, in

§§ 76 and 77 of the Critique of Judgment, that we are not entitled to assume that the given sensible

manifold is susceptible to our conceptual determinations. We noted in our earlier review of this material

that Kant’s assertion in these passages does not follow simply from the premise that, in our cognitions of

nature, we have to be affected by an independently given sense content. The skeptical conclusion follows

only because Kant is committed to the following additional assumption: that the form of experience is

contributed by the knowing subject. Kant in other words assumes that since form comes from us, we have

no grounds for supposing that it reveals the reality of the given sense content itself.

As for the case of Locke, we saw in Chapter Three that it is not strictly speaking Locke’s realism that Hegel

classifies under the heading of the “metaphysic of subjectivity,” but rather the “culmination” of his realist

project in the philosophy of Hume. We can summarize the point in this way: For Hegel, Locke’s

philosophy is an instance of the metaphysics of subjectivity because of its vulnerability to Hume’s

skepticism. In the story Hegel tells of the development of modern empiricism, Hume’s skepticism takes as

its point of departure the Lockean premise that our knowledge of objects requires, not just the passive

reception of sense impressions, but also operations of the mind. Hume argued that if we sufficiently

attend to the role played by the operations of combination, abstraction, reproduction, and so forth, we will

be forced to acknowledge that the origin of ideas has as much to do with the active contribution of our

cognitive powers as with the passive reception of sensory input. In particular, if we sufficiently appreciate

the role imagination plays in extending the data of sense, we will ultimately have to grant that we can have

no warrant for assuming that our ideas reflect the reality of nature itself. As Hegel describes it, the lesson

we are to derive from this particular episode in the history of philosophy is that, in his critique of Locke,

Hume demonstrated the ultimate “subjectivity” of our concepts.12

So the assumption shared by Kant and by Lockean realism culminating in Hume, according to Hegel, is

that it is in light of the contribution of our cognitive faculties that we can have no justification for our

claim to know nature as a content wholly independent of mind. As I noted back in Chapter Three, this

common assumption explains why Hegel classifies both the Lockean and Kantian systems as instances of

the “metaphysic of subjectivity.”

On the basis of the above review, we have grounds for concluding that Hegel’s attack on the claims of

natural consciousness is an expression of his opposition to a particular form of skepticism. This

conclusion should come as no surprise; it is consistent with the general line of interpretation we have

been developing in this work. The problem with natural consciousness, in Hegel’s view, is not its aim to

know things. Nor is the problem its assumption that, in our efforts to know things, we rely on thought-

forms or concepts as well as sense impressions. The problem, rather, is its assumption thatsince we bring

thought-forms to our acts of knowing, our efforts to know cannot be satisfied. This is the mistake Hegel

associates with natural consciousness. It is what he singles out as the crucial defect of its treatment of

cognition as a means.13

5.2 Thought-forms as “empty” and “external”

In section 5.1, we identified the motivation underlying Hegel’s attack in the Introduction to

thePhenomenology as the assumption of natural consciousness that cognition is a means. Hegel seeks to

close the gap between the knowing subject and a reality that is wholly mind-independent. To that end, he

urges us to abandon, not the effort to use cognition to get at the reality of things, but the conception of

cognition that stands in our way. He is convinced that the conception that stands in our way is the

conception of cognition as a means.

We now need to specify more precisely the features Hegel associates with this account of cognition. If we

turn our attention once again to his discussion in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, we discover

further indication of the precise point at which he thinks natural consciousness goes astray. Hegel tells us

that there is a problem with what natural consciousness takes “for granted.” It takes for granted that the

“absolute [das Absolute]” is “on one side” and “cognition [das Erkennen]” “on the other” (PhG ¶ 74). This

is a recurring theme of these paragraphs, and it shows up in other works as well, for example, in his

Introduction to the Science of Logic. Matter and form, Hegel says in one passage, are understood by (what

he there calls) “ordinary” or “phenomenal” consciousness to occupy “different spheres [geschiedene

Sphäre]” (SL 44f./WL I 37). Ordinary consciousness assumes, on the one hand, that the content of

thought is “outside” thought. It judges that objects are complete on their own; they are supposed to

occupy a “sheer beyond of thought [schlechthin ein Jenseits des Denkens].”

Thought, on the other hand, is assumed to be on the “other side” of content. For ordinary consciousness,

Hegel writes, thinking in its relation to content does not become “the other of” or “go outside” itself (SL

44f./WL I 37). Ordinary consciousness assumes that the forms we contribute in our efforts to know are

“empty [leer]” as well as “external [äußerlich]” to every matter or content (SL 44f./WL I 36f.).

We reviewed some of Hegel’s remarks on the emptiness of thought-forms back in section 4.4 of Chapter

Four. We saw there that he identifies two senses in which thought-forms may be characterized as empty.

First, their emptiness may be taken to derive from the fact that they are not themselves considered

capable of generating sensible content. They fulfill their function as forms of knowing, or serve as

elements of “actual cognition [reales Erkennen],” only when applied to a sense content that is

independently given (SL 44/WL I 37). Their emptiness in this respect is a consequence of the discursive or

dependent nature of our mode of cognition. As I pointed out, Hegel agrees with Kant that our knowledge

of nature requires, not just the exercise of our cognitive powers, but also the application of thought-forms

to an independently given sense content. He does not call this aspect of the discursivity thesis into

question. He grants that our thought-forms or concepts are empty in this sense.

But we also saw in Chapter Four that there is a further point to extract from Hegel’s remarks on the

emptiness of thought-forms—a point that brings into sharper focus the ultimate target of his criticism,

both of Kant and of the conception of cognition as a means.14 The further point is that the thought-forms

are empty not simply because they are unable to generate sensible content. They are empty if assumed to

be, as Hegel says, “external” or on the “other side” of content. In complaining of the emptiness of our

thought-forms or concepts in this further sense, Hegel reformulates his objection to the assumption we

considered beginning in section 1.5 of Chapter One: the assumption of “absolute heterogeneity,” according

to which our concepts are not taken to be part of an “original identity.” As I suggested in Chapter Four, to

assume that concepts or thought-forms are external in this sense is for Hegel to presuppose their

“independence from common reality” (FK 63/GW 296).15 As independent from common reality, our

concepts are taken to owe nothing of their nature and origin to objects known, to the process of knowing,

to the relation of the knower to what is known. They are “external” in that they are presumed to have a

fixed and already given nature. Although there is progress in human knowledge, this progress is not taken

to affect the thought-forms themselves. Nor do those thought-forms, if truly external, bear any

responsibility for the progress of inquiry.

If this interpretation is on track, we can conclude that in criticizing the notion that cognition is a means,

Hegel’s target is this second account of the emptiness of our concepts. To treat cognition as a means, in

his view, is to assume that we have thought-forms that are empty in the sense of external. It is to attribute

to such thought-forms a nature Hegel does not believe they have. I am suggesting that it is this conception

of thought-forms that, on his understanding, results in the skepticism that plagues both natural

consciousness and the “metaphysic of subjectivity.”

In the case of Kant, this commitment to the externality of thought-forms shows up in a number of ways.

Most obviously, it shows up in his insistence that some of our concepts, rather than derived from

experience, are a priori. In his view, such concepts or categories are brought to experience by thinking and

knowing subjects. As a priori, their validity is not merely contingent, but rather universal and necessary.

Kant’s commitment to externality is furthermore evident in his account of the appropriatemethod for

discovering our a priori forms, in his idea of critique. Because Kant is persuaded of the fixed and already

given nature of some of our thought-forms (namely, the categories), he believes his investigation into

these forms calls for a special method—a method not modeled after modes of inquiry that take as their

object a merely changeable reality. Rather than rely on the methods of the empirical sciences, then, Kant

requires for his inquiry into the nature of these cognitive forms a fundamentally different kind of

investigation.

In what follows, we will discover that Hegel indeed finds traces of the commitment to the externality of

form in Kant’s idea of a critique of our cognitive powers. When we considered the demand for critique

back in section 5.1, we observed that Hegel includes both Locke and Kant among those who call for a

critique of our means of knowing. Hegel includes Locke, presumably, because even Locke holds that the

examination of our cognitive faculties must be carried out before we can adequately determine the nature

and extent of our knowledge. For Locke as for Kant, moreover, the investigation of our cognitive faculties

is not just another exercise in empirical science; it is a meta-level inquiry into the conditions of the

possibility of any science of nature.

Of the two philosophers, it is of course Kant who more explicitly argues that the prior examination of our

subjective forms of knowing must be something other than a mere extension or broader application of

empirical inquiry. Kant insists that the discovery and ultimate justification of the nature and role of our

most fundamental thought-forms has to be “transcendental” rather than empirical. It is only by means of

a transcendental justification or “deduction,” in his view, that we are able to establish the special status of

the concepts without which we can neither think nor know objects. As we will see, Hegel takes this project

of transcendentally deducing pure concepts or categories to be a paradigmatic instance of the

commitment to the externality of form. For Kant claims that the concepts his transcendental deduction is

able to justify are a priori and as such absolutely independent from “common reality.”

I have suggested that in attacking the thesis that cognition is a means, Hegel’s intention is to challenge

this second conception of the emptiness of form—their emptiness as external. If my suggestion is correct,

we have reason to expect him to also call into question the very idea of a special meta-level investigation

of cognition suitable for the discovery and deduction of “external” thought-forms and split off from the

empirical sciences. In what follows, it will become clear that Hegel indeed launches such a challenge; it

takes the form of his objection to the project of critique. As we observed in section 5.1, natural

consciousness calls for critique when it discovers that its initial effort to know things is unsuccessful. But

critique, in Hegel’s view, is a failed strategy of those who adhere to the conception of cognition as a means.

The failure of critique, he attempts to show, is attributable to its adherence to this conception.

5.3 Kantian critique

I just proposed that Hegel discovers in Kant’s conception of critique evidence of his adherence to the

thesis of the externality of form. I also suggested that Hegel draws a connection between the thesis of the

externality of form and the thesis that cognition is a means. For Hegel, when we treat cognition as a

means, we reveal our commitment to the externality of form.

My task in this section is to highlight basic features of Kantian critique. This should make more

perspicuous one of the ways in which Kant treats form as external. It should therefore also sharpen our

understanding of the target of Hegel’s objection to the project of critique. Critique, at least on a certain

description, rests on a mistaken view of conceptual form. For this reason, critique fails as a mode of

knowledge. Not only is critique unable to provide us knowledge of objects; on Hegel’s analysis, it is

equally ill-suited to the task of yielding knowledge of the cognizing subject.

Kant uses the term “critique” in both a narrow and a broad sense. Narrowly defined, “critique” refers to

his project of identifying the a priori concepts and principles of theoretical cognition, concepts, and

principles that are constitutive of our cognition of nature.16 A principle is constitutive, in the context of

theoretical inquiry, if its objects are appearances and if it is a condition of the possibility of our experience

of appearances.17 Because the constitutive a priori principles of theoretical cognition derive from the

faculty of understanding, according to Kant, critique in the narrow sense confines its examination to that

faculty.18

But Kant in addition uses the term “critique” to stand for the “inquiry into the possibility and bounds of a

priori cognition” more broadly. Broadly defined, then, critique investigates not just the conditions of

theoretical knowledge, but the conditions governing the practical and aesthetic realms of inquiry as well.

While our cognition of nature rests on a priori concepts of the understanding, practicalcognition has at

its basis an a priori concept of reason (the concept of freedom). Mediating theoretical and practical forms

of cognition, according to Kant, is an a priori principle of the faculty of judgment. So in the broad or

general sense, critique investigates the a priori concepts and principles necessary for these three domains

of inquiry. As he writes, critique (in the broad sense) is an examination of “the judging powers insofar as

these are capable of a priori principles, no matter what their use may be (theoretical or practical)” (CJ

194).

Critique on Kant’s definition is carried out at a high level of abstraction. It is not the business of critique,

in his view, to predict the behavior of particular physical bodies or identify the specific causal laws

governing their motion. Nor is it the task of critique, in the realm of the practical, to discover the concrete

effects of the idea of a supreme being on individual lives, or the empirical conditions that aid or hinder the

practice of morality. Instead, critique specifies the concepts and principles without which the domains of

physics, ethics, and aesthetics would not be possible. This is why Kant describes his Critique of Pure

Reason, for example, as a “treatise on method” and not a “system of…science.” His objective in that work

is to illuminate the “internal structure [inneren Gliederbau]” of the science of metaphysics (CPR B xxiif.).

In the context of theoretical philosophy, he tells us, critique is a “preparatory activity necessary for the

advancement of metaphysics as a well-grounded science” (CPR B xxxvi).19 More generally, critique is an

examination of all the “judging powers insofar as these are capable of a priori principles.” In this broad

sense, critique, in Kant’s words, is “propadeutic to all philosophy” (CJ 194).

As I just noted, Kant employs critique to identify concepts and principles that are a priori.20He

characterizes a priori concepts and principles as “absolutely” independent of experience (CPR Intro 〈B〉

2f.). As “absolutely” independent of experience, such concepts and principles are not merely independent

of our observations here and now. They are not, then, “general rules” resulting from well-confirmed

inductive inferences. Rather, a priori concepts and principles are “absolutely” independent of experience

in that they in no way rely for their derivation or for their justification on the evidence of the senses. It is

the a priority of these concepts and principles, moreover, that guarantees their “necessity and strict

universality,” in Kant’s view.21 As “absolutely necessary,” a priori cognitions provide what he says is the

standard and example of “all apodictic (philosophical) certainty” (CPR A xv).

We saw in Chapter Four that Kant argues that a priori concepts and principles are brought to experience

by a non-empirical or “transcendental” form of self-consciousness (CPR B 132). This thesis regarding the

origin of our a priori concepts and principles explains why he sometimes characterizes critique as an

exercise in “self-knowledge [Selbsterkenntnis]” (CPR A xi, A 735/B 763). As he writes in the A-Preface of

the Critique of Pure Reason, his project there has to do “merely with reason itself and its pure thinking.”

He does not need to “see far beyond” himself to gain “exhaustive acquaintance” with his cognitive faculties,

he says, because he encounters them in himself (CPR A xiv).22 It is precisely because he has to do “merely

with reason itself and its pure thinking,” Kant goes on to tell us, that he is justified in asserting that the

results of his critical enterprise enjoy “completeness” as well as “certainty” (CPR A xiv).23 “Nothing here

can escape us,” he writes, “because what reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden” (CPR

A xx).24

We know so far, then, that the concepts and principles Kantian critique seeks to identify are the

framework concepts and principles of a given realm of inquiry, necessary for the possibility of that realm

of inquiry. We also know that these framework concepts and principles are a priori and as such

universally and necessarily

valid. But by what procedure does Kant believe he is able to identify these a priori concepts and principles?

What, in other words, is the method of critique, on his account? We just noted that he describes critique

as an exercise in “self-knowledge,” but we now want some insight into how he thinks that self-knowledge

is attained.

The topic of Kant’s critical method is enormously complex and could easily take us far afield. Its

complexity is in part tied to the fact that Kant relies on no single argumentative strategy to establish his

various conclusions. Reference to “Kant’s method,” then, is something of an abstraction. Moreover, clear

boundaries between Kant’s various methodological strategies are difficult to draw. In the remaining

paragraphs of this section, I want to say enough about some of Kant’s argumentative moves to motivate

the Hegelian criticisms we will consider later. My treatment of the particulars of Kant’s methods and their

differences will be relatively crude, for as we will see, what especially troubles Hegel are the general aims

and ambitions Kant brings to his project of critique, aims and ambitions that accompany his various

methodological strategies. In preparation for what is to come, I should also mention that I restrict my

remarks on Kant’s method to the domains of theoretical and practical philosophy. Beginning in

section 5.4, I move on to make the case that Kant and Hegel defend strikingly different accounts, both of

the conditions of critique and of what critique can achieve.

Kant describes one of his argumentative methods as “analytic” or “regressive.” This method begins with

some concept or assumption that is “already known to be dependable.” It subjects that concept or

assumption to careful analysis and then argues regressively to the conditions of its possibility (Proleg § 4

(275)). This method is already evident in Kant’s Prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason. There, he

announces his intention to save or make room for metaphysics. It is clear that metaphysics needs saving,

he says, because human reason is unable to extricate itself from self-contradictions that threaten its

employment. These self-contradictions or “antinomies” arise when reason claims knowledge of the

ultimate nature of experience—when it pronounces on such topics as whether matter is simple or

infinitely divisible, or whether the causal chain linking natural events does or does not have a first

beginning or cause. When reason flatters itself that it can settle such questions, it lands in irresolvable

conflicts. Kant claims that this is the “battlefield” that in his time has destroyed the authority of

metaphysics (CPR A viii, B xiv).25

Kant indicates that he will save metaphysics by demonstrating that it can be put on the secure path of a

science. He notes that his demonstration derives inspiration from the fields of mathematics and physics.

Mathematics and physics already enjoy scientific status, he asserts, precisely because each rests on

principles that are a priori. Moreover, the a priori principles at the basis of each of these sciences are of a

special nature. As a priori, the principles are valid universally and necessarily. On Kant’s understanding,

however, neither mathematics nor physics dogmatically awards these principles unconditional validity.

Their universal and necessary validity is instead restricted to forms of cognition such as ours that depend

on objects being given through the pure forms of intuition, space and time. Expressed in a different way,

Kant discovers in the sciences of mathematics and physics principles that, while a priori, are not

conceptual or logical truths. He in other words discovers at the basis of mathematics and physics

principles that are a priori as well as synthetic.26

Since these sciences are “actually given,” Kant says, we are warranted in concluding that they “must be

possible” (CPR Intro 〈B〉 20). Mathematics and physics can therefore provide clues to how we might

also secure metaphysics as a science. The key is to establish that, in common with mathematics and

physics, metaphysics rests on principles that are both a priori and synthetic. Metaphysics can be saved as

a science, Kant reasons, provided that it follows mathematics and physics in restricting the validity of its

principles to objects of experience or “appearances” (CPR B xviii).27

Notice the way in which Kant’s argument begins in this instance. He begins by taking the first step of the

analytic method. That is, he first isolates some fact or set of facts “already known to be dependable,” facts

with which, he believes, any rational nature like ours would agree. There is no need to doubt that

metaphysics is in a state of crisis and is so far unable to steer clear of perennial conflicts or antinomies

when it tries to decide questions concerning ultimate reality. Nor is there any reason to doubt the

possibility of pure mathematics or pure physics since, as Kant says, each is already actual. We can

moreover rest assured that both fields of inquiry already enjoy scientific status and that their fundamental

principles are synthetic a priori.

We find further examples of this methodological strategy in Kant’s efforts, in the first Critique, to

demonstrate the validity of particular synthetic a priori principles of experience. For instance, in the case

of the principle of the permanence of substance (the “First Analogy”), his starting point is once again

some fact or set of facts he believes he is warranted in taking for granted. In this case, he begins with

assumptions not even his opponent David Hume can doubt, in particular, that we perceive alteration, and

that the perception of alteration is not possible without the accompanying perception of an underlying

permanent (CPR B 231/A 188a). Kant proceeds to argue that this uncontroversial fact can only be

adequately accounted for if we grant the conditions of its possibility. To grant the conditions of its

possibility, in his view, is to accept a fact that escaped Hume’s attention, namely, that we bring to our

perception of alteration a rule that is a priori, the a priori synthetic rule of the permanence of substance.

Similar argumentative moves are at work in Kant’s practical philosophy. He tells us in his Preface to

the Groundwork, for example, that his starting place is a universally accepted conception of moral

obligation.28 As he writes,

Everyone must grant that a law, if it is to hold morally, that is, as a ground of obligation, must carry with it

absolute necessity; that, for example, the command, ‘thou shalt not lie,’ does not hold only for human

beings, as if other rational beings did not have to heed it.

As this passage indicates, Kant judges it to be uncontroversial that all rational natures agree that a law

holds morally only if it carries with it “absolute necessity.” He then informs us that if we regress to the

conditions of the possibility of this fact, we discover that the “ground of obligation” cannot be nature or

experience, but must rather be sought “a priori…in concepts of pure reason” (G 389).

What features do these three examples of Kant’s analytic method share in common? In each case, Kant’s

objective is to establish that at the basis of a particular realm of inquiry or form of experience are

synthetic a priori principles. To that end, he engages the method of critique in that he undertakes an

investigation of our cognitive and practical faculties. As illustrated in the cases we considered, he begins

by isolating some fact or set of facts that may be assumed to be beyond doubt, facts with which any

rational nature (or “common understanding”) would agree.29 He begins with these facts, subjects them to

analysis, and thereby makes explicit the conditions upon which they rest. By analyzing the concept of

moral obligation that “everyone must grant,” he determines that a priori concepts of reason must lie at its

basis. By analyzing what even Hume admits is the fact of our perception of alteration, he is able to

discover the a priori principle that is a condition of its possibility. By analyzing the concepts of the four

antinomies, he reveals that each thesis and antithesis rests on a mistaken assumption about the extent

and proper objects of human knowledge.

With the clarificatory work of analysis behind him, Kant can then move on to the third and final step of

his analytic procedure. By regressing from a fact that can be taken for granted, he can justify the

conditions of its possibility. This justificatory component of his critical method aims to establish, for

example, that we are warranted in thinking of ourselves as beings bound by a priori practical laws. In the

realm of the theoretical, its objective is to demonstrate that the perception of alteration would not be

possible did our faculty of understanding not supply the a priori rule of permanence to objects

of experience. It aims to demonstrate, in addition, that metaphysics can indeed be saved as a science

because, like mathematics and physics, it rests on a priori synthetic laws.

I mentioned earlier, however, that the analytic method is only one among Kant’s argumentative strategies.

He sometimes employs a method he describes as “synthetic” or “progressive.”30 As we have just seen,

the Critique of Pure Reason contains instances of analytic argumentation. Kant nonetheless describes the

argumentative strategy of the first Critique as a whole as synthetic.31 To take a relatively obvious example

of his synthetic or progressive method: In the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant argues progressively for the

status of space as an a priori form of intuition. He outlines positive features of our representation of space,

features he believes cannot be accommodated by either Leibnizian “relational” or Newtonian “absolutist”

theories. Against Leibniz, he argues that the fact that spatial representation for us is always singular

implies that space must be a pure form of intuition rather than a concept. He further argues against

Leibniz that it is not possible to account for the idea or concept we have of space merely with reference to

our observations of the relations of objects in space. The fact that we observe objects as spatially related,

he contends, is itself evidence that we bring to our experience the a priori intuition of space. Against

Newton, Kant insists that there is insufficient evidence to support the thesis that space is a container of

“absolute” reality. The most we can establish, in his view, is that space is an a priori form of human

experience.32

In section 5.4, we will examine passages that reveal Hegel’s concerns with Kant’s reliance on the analytic

method. It will become clear, in particular, that he was impatient with Kant’s confidence in the supposedly

unassailable assumptions of “common understanding.” But Hegel does not single outjust the analytic

method for attack. In an intriguing remark in the Encyclopaedia Logic, he tells us thatboth analytic and

synthetic methods are defective. Both are at fault, he says, for “starting from something that is externally

presupposed” (EL § 231).33

What we will discover is that the real target of Hegel’s objection to the two methods is the kind of

conclusions Kant believes each is able to support. Whether Kant begins with the assumptions of “common

understanding” and argues regressively to expose their necessary conditions, or instead progressively

defends positive features of (for example) the nature of spatial-temporal representation, his expectation is

the same: he believes he can demonstrate that a particular domain of inquiry rests on a foundation of

synthetic a priori principles. Kant insists that if his critical method is to establish this kind of conclusion,

it must rely on more than observation. A merely empirical investigation, in his view, is capable of yielding

no better than inductively warranted rules or precepts. It can never, then, justify laws in the strict sense

(rules that are universally and necessarily valid). Kant also tells us that his critical method cannot proceed

by means of conceptual analysis alone. Although his critical reflections make use of conceptual analysis,

conceptual analysis awards us insight only into what is logically possible or thinkable without

contradiction. Kant’s aim, however, is to identify a priori conditions, not of the logically possible, but of

theoretical or practical or aesthetic experience for discursive modes of understanding such as ours. The

point we most need to bear in mind, here, is that he is confident that his special form of critical reflection

(whether undertaken progressively or regressively) is capable of establishing claims about the necessary

and universal conditions of our form of experience. He believes he can discover a form that is fixed and

thus in no way indebted to contingent, historical reality.

5.4 The impossibility of knowing before one knows

When we first considered Hegel’s reaction to critique in section 5.1, we emphasized his complaint that the

most critique is able to offer is knowledge that is “subjective”: knowledge, not of objects, but rather of the

subjective conditions we bring to them, knowledge of the forms of cognition. Critique leads “our cognition

from its concern with objects…back to itself, back to the formal aspect [das Formelle]” (EL § 10). So the

most we can hope to gain from critique, according to Hegel, is insight into the

subjective forms that condition our knowledge of things; critique cannot, however, inform us about the

nature of things considered independently of those forms.

As I indicated early on in section 5.3, however, Hegel’s objection to critique is more radical than this. For

he also claims that critique fails to result even in knowledge of the subject. He attributes this failure to the

fact that critique is not a viable form of knowledge at all. Traces of this more radical objection are evident,

for example, in the section of the Science of Logic entitled, “With What Must the Science Begin?” “[T]o

want the nature of cognition clarified prior to the science,” Hegel writes there, “is to demand that it be

considered outside the science.” But this demand, he says, cannot be met (SL 68/WL I 67). In his

Introduction to the Logic, he tells us that it is “inept” to suggest that logic teaches us rules of thought

without regard to what is thought. It is inept to claim that, “what logic is can be stated beforehand” (SL

43f./WL I 35). In remarks in the Encyclopedia Logic where Hegel explicitly takes Kant’s “Critical

philosophy” to task, he writes that the investigation of cognition, “cannot take place in any other way than

cognitively.” It is just as “absurd” to “want to have cognition before we know,” he notes, as was the

“resolve of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he ventured into the water” (EL § 10).34

These remarks express Hegel’s doubts about the very possibility of a prior investigation of the nature of

cognition, an investigation that is supposed to occur, as he says, “outside” science. It is “inept” or “absurd”

to assume that this “prior” investigation can be carried out, in his view. Our meta-level investigations into

the conditions of cognition, “cannot take place in any other way than cognitively.”

But what is the absurdity, exactly? Is it contained in the suggestion that we can separate out from the

actual practice of a science a meta-level examination of the conditions of the possibility of that science? Is

Hegel trying to tell us that there is no point in adopting a critical perspective, in trying to make explicit the

underlying assumptions of a particular science or domain of inquiry? Is he recommending a

wholesale rejection of the practice of critique?

It cannot be that Hegel is out to convince us of the utter futility or absurdity of critical inquiry. This

cannot be his message, because even he engages in critique of some kind. We are more on the mark, I

believe, if we infer that Hegel calls into question a certain conception of critique—a conception he finds

paradigmatically executed by Kant. He finds something incoherent in a certain understanding of the

nature of critical reflection, of what it can achieve, and of who we are as critical thinkers.

The precise grounds of Hegel’s objection are difficult to make out. For if we suppose that he means to call

into question the first step of Kant’s analytic procedure, then we need some way to explain the fact that, in

his own major works, he appears to begin in much the same way. That is, Hegel seems to begin his critical

investigations just as Kant frequently does—by singling out some commonly agreed upon or

uncontroversial

assumption, some fact he believes he is entitled to take for granted. In thePhenomenology, for instance,

he starts with the assumption that our “truest” cognition of nature relies on the passive reception of sense

impressions alone, unmediated by concepts. He represents this assumption as one with which every finite

rational nature could agree. In the Science of Logic, his starting point is meant to be equally

uncontroversial. The Logic begins with the concept of pure being, a concept that, precisely because of its

emptiness or abstract indeterminacy, can reasonably be thought to serve as the unconditioned or absolute

ground of the science.

But if it is not the starting point of Kant’s analytic method that Hegel rejects, then perhaps he means to

call into question Kant’s reliance on conceptual analysis. This suggestion turns out to be unconvincing as

well, because Hegel follows Kant in availing himself of this same tool. The various progressions in

thePhenomenology would not be possible without his analysis of key concepts. Each step forward—for

instance, from the standpoint of “Sense Certainty” to that of “Perception” to that of “Force and

Understanding”—results from his making explicit, by means of conceptual analysis, the condition or

conditions of the set of concepts with which he began. This is likewise the case regarding the dialectical

progressions of the Logic. The advance from “pure being” and “nothing” to “becoming,” and so forth,

requires Hegel’s own employment of an analysis of concepts.

In section 5.5, I suggest that what Hegel finds mistaken is a certain understanding of the activity we are

engaged in when we perform critique, and a certain understanding of the status we believe we are entitled

to award the results of our critical reflections. We saw that critique, for Kant, frequently begins with the

identification of some commonly agreed upon assumption, some assumption or set of assumptions with

which all rational (or all finite rational) beings could agree. Kant holds that we can be confident in our

starting point because we have the ability to abstract out universally and necessarily agreed upon claims—

claims that “everyone must grant”—from all that is contingent. We can furthermore be confident that once

our initial assumptions are in place, we can subject them to analysis and make explicit the conditions

upon which they rest. We can rest assured that the conclusions we draw from our analysis of key concepts

will likewise be acceptable to all thinking subjects. Finally, we can be confident in the results of our final

justificatory project. For we assume we have the ability to reveal and ultimately justify the conditions of

the possibility of a given realm of inquiry. We can establish that these conditions are “absolutely necessary”

because they are “absolutely independent” of experience and thus a priori. They enjoy strict versus merely

“empirical” or “comparative” universality (CPR Intro 〈B〉 3f.). We are entitled to this confidence

because, in Kant’s words, what “reason brings forth entirely out of itself cannot be hidden.”

It will become clear in section 5.5 that Hegel’s more radical objection to critique—his reason for doubting

that critique on Kant’s conception can even result in knowledge of the subject—directs its aim at the level

of trust Kant places in his own powers of abstraction. This is what is behind Hegel’s assertion that there

can be no “knowing

before we know.” It is not that he denies the possibility of all varieties of critical reflection. Instead, he

calls into question the assumption that we can absolutely separate out our meta-level reflections on the

conditions of the possibility of some science or realm of inquiry from the norms that govern the actual

practice of that science or realm of inquiry. He, in other words, doubts that we can undertake critique

from an Archimedean point, from a standpoint of absolute “independence from common reality” (FK

63/GW 296).

These suspicions regarding our powers of abstraction give us some insight into Hegel’s own position on

the nature of critical reflection. They have implications for his own view of the status we are entitled to

award our most basic concepts and principles. They perhaps also suggest an explanation for why, in his

second Preface to the Science of Logic, he announces that one of his objectives in that text is to

demonstrate the “untruth” of the “supposed self-subsistence [Für-sich-seyn-sollens]” of our thought-

determinations (SL 39/WL I 30).

5.5 Hegel on how thinking begins

This is a good place to retrace the course our discussion has taken in this chapter so far. We began in

section 5.1 by considering Hegel’s objections to the thesis that cognition is a means. Natural consciousness

sets out to know the “truth” or “in itself” of things. It is unable to know the “truth” or “in itself” of things,

however, because it treats cognition as a means. In response to this failure, natural consciousness turns its

attention to cognition itself; it undertakes an examination or critique of the cognitive faculties. But it soon

discovers that this undertaking is also unsatisfactory, because the most critique is able to provide is

knowledge, not of things, but of the subjective forms by means of which we think and know them.

In section 5.2, we sought to understand why Hegel was convinced that the thesis that cognition is a means

undercuts the effort of natural consciousness to know things. We saw that, on his account, if we treat

cognition as a means (either as a passive medium or as an instrument), we effectively take thought and its

forms to be “empty” in the sense of “external” or on the “other side” of content. In the language of Hegel’s

Jena writings, we assume that thought is “absolutely opposed” to content and thus not part of an “original

identity.” When we considered this point back in section 5.2, all we were able to offer by way of

clarification was the following suggestion: In characterizing thought-forms as “external” or “absolutely

opposed” to content, Hegel means to call into question the assumption that we are in possession of

concepts that have a pre-given and fixed nature. Such forms are taken to owe nothing of their origin either

to the objects to which they get applied or to acts of knowing. Furthermore, such forms are not supposed

to be knowable by means of either ordinary or scientific empirical inquiry. We become acquainted with

them only by undertaking a special meta-level investigation, an investigation into the subjective

conditions of the possibility of ordinary as well as scientific inquiry.

To specify more precisely the sense in which Hegel was convinced that Kant’s project of critique relies on

the assumption that cognition is a means, we identified in section 5.3 some key features of Kantian

critique. As we saw, critique for Kant is a meta-level investigation. In the context of his theoretical

philosophy, its objective is to determine the nature and limits of our cognition of nature. In the context of

his practical philosophy, it seeks to secure the ground of practical obligation. We also saw that Kant holds

that the fundamental forms of cognition revealed by means of critique are a priori. Indeed, he believes

critique discovers as well as secures the validity of the pre-given and fixed contributions of human

subjectivity at the basis of theoretical and practical as well as aesthetic domains of inquiry. Because Kant

discovers at the basis of these domains concepts and principles that are a priori, his version of critique is a

model of what for Hegel is the commitment to the “externality” and hence “emptiness” of subjective form.

In section 5.4, we considered evidence in support of the thesis that Hegel is convinced that the project of

critique rests somehow on a mistake, a mistake that he believes poses a threat especially to paradigmatic

versions of critique such as Kant’s. But we have yet to determine exactly what Hegel understands this

mistake to be. We know only that it is connected in some way to a thesis about the externality of thought.

We can make some headway if we shift our attention, now, away from Hegel’s critical remarks both on the

project of critique and on the conception of cognition as a means, and focus instead on the account of

cognition he urges us to put in its place. This is itself no simple story, and there exists the risk that in

telling it we will wander off course. It is not my aim, either in the remaining pages of this chapter or in the

chapter to come, to offer an extensive treatment of Hegel’s positive view of the nature and conditions of

our various forms of cognition. I merely want to suggest enough about Hegel’s position to shed further

light on his critique of Kant. To that end, I conclude this chapter by examining a few texts in which Hegel

gives us fairly focused discussions of his own alternative account. The discussions I have in mind appear

in the opening pages of both his Phenomenology and his 1812 Science of Logic. As we redirect our

attention to Hegel’s positive portrayal in these texts of the nature of thought and conditions of critique, it

is important that we not lose sight of the following point: Hegel is convinced that, in providing an

alternative to the thesis that cognition is a means, he can avoid the form of skepticism implied by that

thesis. That is, he believes he can offer us a description of thought and its relation to content that prevents

that skeptical gap from opening up.

In remarks that recall Kant’s Prefaces to the Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel announces in the opening

paragraphs of the 1812 Preface to his Logic that metaphysics is in a state of crisis; it has “vanished from

the ranks of the sciences.” What is required, he goes on to say, is a “completely fresh start,” an “altogether

new concept of scientific procedure” (SL 27/WL I 16). Although it is tempting to infer from the rhetoric of

these paragraphs of the Logic that Hegel’s intention is to pay tribute to Kant, we soon learn that he casts

Kant in the role of principal opponent. The crisis into which metaphysics has fallen, Hegel informs us, is a

consequence of the “renunciation of speculative thinking.” No one is much interested any more in topics

treated by rational psychology or cosmology, and Kant is largely to blame for this situation (SL 25/WL I

13). Kant is largely to blame, because a central tenet of his Critical philosophy is that objects of speculative

metaphysics are inaccessible to our knowledge.35

The complaint Hegel expresses in these passages is one we have encountered before. It is the familiar

charge that Kant’s philosophy is ultimately a form of skepticism because it denies us knowledge of things

themselves. Of greater significance for our present purposes, however, is the fact that these passages

contain clues to Hegel’s explanation for the crisis of metaphysics. For he goes on to tell us that the crisis is

a consequence of the fact that philosophers—including Kant—are insufficiently self-critical. In his Preface

of 1831, he writes that it is the “business of logical thinking” to inquire into our most basic assumptions

(SL 42/WL I 33). “[T]horoughness [Gründlichkeit] seems to require that the beginning, as the foundation

on which everything is built, should be examined before anything else” (SL 41/WL I 32). But philosophers

typically fall short when it comes to examining their own “presuppositions and prejudices.” They simply

presuppose, for example, that “infinity is different from finitude, that content is other than form, that the

inner is other than the outer, also that mediation is not immediacy” (SL 41f./WL I 32).36 Or, they borrow

their methods and fundamental concepts uncritically from “a subordinate science such as mathematics”

(SL 27/WL I 16). They presuppose that these sciences are already in perfect order.37

At first glance, it appears that Hegel’s message is merely that philosophers—including Kant—are at fault

for not bringing their dogmatic proclivities under tighter control. They need to insure that, at the start of

inquiry, they make their basic assumptions fully explicit and have good reason for supposing that these

are assumptions with which all rational natures could agree. But Hegel’s objection is more interesting

than this. He is not just asserting that philosophers need to exercise greater care in observing the high

standards of critique; he instead means to call into question the standards themselves. As will become

apparent shortly, the real target of his remarks is a certain understanding of what critical inquiry can be.

In the early pages of the Logic, Hegel reminds us of the long history of efforts on the part of philosophers

to begin with “definitions” “imagined” to express the “accepted and familiar” “object and aim” of a science

(SL 49/WL I 42). Some thinkers, he says, have taken as their first principle a “particular content,” such as

“water, the one, nous, idea, substance, the monad.” Others have set out from a claim about the nature of

cognition itself (SL 67/WL I 65). Either way, philosophers typically begin with some assumption or set of

assumptions they believe they are entitled to take for granted. They credit themselves with the ability to

identify the “commonest” categories and methods, the categories and methods that can be affirmed by

every rational or finite rational nature (SL 32/WL I 21). They, in other words, assume that they can

separate out the categories and methods valid for all rational natures from those that reflect mere opinion

and have at best a conditional worth. They can make this separation, because they possess the ability to

leave the realm of appearances or shadows behind.

A chief objective of each of Hegel’s major works, however, is to challenge this portrayal of the nature of

critical inquiry. In his Logic, for example, he contrasts his own understanding of the science of “thinking

in general” with what he tells us is the standard account. The standard account assumes, he says, that

“thinking constitutes the mere form of a cognition, that logic abstracts from all content” (SL 43/WL I 36).

It assumes, in other words, that

thinking on its own is empty and comes as an external form to the said material, fills itself with it and only

thus acquires a content and so becomes a real knowing. (SL 44/WL I 36f.)

In opposition to this description, Hegel insists that thought is not an “empty” or “external” form that

“abstracts from all content.” At no point in the articulation or development of the science of logic, in his

view, are its concepts or laws empty of content—not even at the foundation of the science. Hegel’s claim

here is not that, at every stage in the development and articulation of the science, the laws and concepts of

logic are empty until they are actually applied in our thinking about objects. His claim is rather that, at no

point in the science, are the laws and concepts of logic empty in the sense of external. At no point are its

laws and concepts products of a special act of reflection whereby all that is contingent and of merely

conditional validity is abstracted away. On the interpretation I am proposing, one of the mistakes Hegel

attributes to those engaged in critique is that of attributing to the critical thinker extraordinary abstractive

powers—powers to separate out, at the start of inquiry, the concepts and methods that can be affirmed by

all rational natures from those that are merely contingently valid. As suggested in the passage from

the Encyclopaedia Logic we considered earlier, he seems to find evidence of this mistake in Kant’s critical

method, regardless of whether Kant employs analytic or synthetic argumentative strategies.38

There are indications in these early pages of the Logic, moreover, that Hegel associates afurther mistake

with critique. He is suspicious of the assumption that we can, when engaging in critical inquiry, achieve

a perfect grasp of our presuppositions, that we can make them fully transparent to ourselves. We make

the mistake of thinking that, at the start of inquiry, we have perfect knowledge of where we are. We over-

estimate the extent of our self-knowledge.

I noted earlier that, in each of his principal works, Hegel’s starting point appears to share much in

common with Kant’s. He characterizes the concepts and methods with which he begins much as Kant

often does—as those which are the most familiar and commonly accepted, as those which he is therefore

most warranted in taking for granted. And like Kant, Hegel enlists the method of analysis in the service of

making the conditions of those concepts and methods explicit. He follows Kant, furthermore, in that he

ultimately aims to rationally justify his sciences of logic, of consciousness, and of right.

But it is crucial that we not overlook the fact that, in Hegel’s case, the advance from the initial commonly

accepted assumptions, through the procedure of analysis, to the point of rational justification proceeds

quite differently than it does for Kant. For both philosophers, analysis reflects upon the common concepts

and methods with which we begin, and makes explicit the conditions upon they rest. But while in Kant’s

case analysis serves the interest of justifying or securing the common assumptions with which we set out,

in Hegel’s case analysis reveals that the assumptions with which our inquiry set out are not what we

initially took them to be. Analysis in other words reveals that we were mistaken in our initial self-

understanding. And not only that: In making explicit what we failed to initially grasp about our original

assumptions, analysis awakens in us the need to revise them. Instead of aiding the ultimate justification of

the assumptions with which we started, analysis as Hegel employs it has the effect of undercutting or

“sublating” them.

This message is conveyed again and again in Hegel’s works. The Science of Logic, for example, begins with

a concept that is supposed to be suitable as the absolute ground of the science, the concept of pure being.

We take the concept of pure being to qualify as the absolute ground because we assume that it expresses

abstract indeterminacy and that, as such, it rests on no prior ground or condition. But once we subject the

concept of pure being to analysis, we discover that we were wrong to suppose that we meant by “pure

being” something wholly indeterminate. For upon reflection, we discover that we in fact take the concept

“pure being” to have at least this determination: we mean by “pure being” something other than “nothing.”

As Hegel puts it, analysis reveals that the concept “pure being” is “itself an expression of reflection” (SL

69/WL I 68). So looking back, we learn that we were mistaken in our original understanding of our

starting point; we did not have the self-understanding we thought we did. We assumed that “pure being”

could serve as the ground of our science because of its abstract indeterminacy. We learn, however, that

“pure being” is not absolutely indeterminate

after all. We thus have to give up the expectation that we can ground our science on an abstract

indeterminacy. We have to move on in search of a more adequate ground.

The Phenomenology conveys this kind of lesson as well. Consciousness begins its search for the

conditions of knowledge with an assumption it believes it may take for granted, namely, that our most

reliable cognitive access to nature is achieved by means of what Hegel refers to as “sense certainty,” by the

passive reception of sense impressions, unmediated by concepts. Consciousness assumes that this direct

or immediate access to things is the “truest,” the best means of getting at the things themselves. But upon

reflection, consciousness discovers that its starting point—a starting point that at first seemed self-evident

and secure—is not what consciousness initially took it to be. For upon reflection, consciousness comes to

acknowledge that we cannot say what it is we know—we cannot even pick out the object of our knowledge

by ostension—without the aid of concepts. Consciousness discovers by means of analysis, then, that sense

certainty is not a form of knowledge at all. In discovering its mistake, consciousness moves on in search of

more adequate ground.

So as it turns out, the methodological similarities I highlighted earlier in the critical methods of Kant and

Hegel are superficial at best. For as Hegel employs it, analysis does not serve the purpose of finally

grounding the supposedly universally and necessarily valid assumptions with which we begin; it instead

makes their contingency explicit. It thereby sets reason in motion in search of a new ground. In exposing

our ignorance, analysis in addition awakens in us a new self-understanding. We initially thought we knew

our starting point; we thought our presuppositions were fully transparent. We thought that since we were

relying on nothing more than what reason brings forth “entirely out of itself,” nothing could “escape” or

“remain hidden” from us (CPR A xx, B 26/A 13). But we discover that this self-conception was also

mistaken, and that we were not entitled to the self-confidence we had at the start.

5.6 Hegelian critique

I have specified two respects in which Hegel’s conception of critique differs from Kant’s. First, critique as

Hegel employs it does not result in the ultimate justification of the common, familiar assumptions with

which our inquiries begin. Critique instead undercuts them; it reveals them to be unstable and in need of

revision. Second, critique for Hegel deflates our claims to know ourselves at the start of inquiry. We

thought that in beginning our logic with the concept of pure being, we were beginning with an abstract

indeterminacy. Upon reflection, however, we discover that we in fact mean by “pure being” something

determinate, something other than “nothing.” We thought that in beginning with sense certainty, we were

describing the truest means of knowing things. But we eventually learn that we are in fact committed to

the view that knowledge requires the employment of concepts, and that sense certainty is not a form of

knowledge at all.

In illustrating Hegel’s critical method, I have drawn my examples from the literal beginnings of his

discussions in the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology. But each of these texts tells the story of

a series of beginnings. Each records a history of false starts in the efforts of philosophers to ground their

sciences. The message Hegel seems to want to convey, then—the lesson he believes we learn from a careful

study of the history of philosophy—is that the efforts of philosophers to begin with what is common and

familiar, with assumptions every rational nature must grant, have so far suffered the same fate. The

assumptions we thought we could take for granted at the start of inquiry, the assumptions we took to

accurately capture the universal and necessary conditions of our science, turn out to be contingent.

Critique, as Hegel exercises it, exposes the need to move beyond them. This is equally the case regarding

our claims to self-knowledge. The history of philosophy records a series of self-conceptions, each initially

presuming to capture the truth about who we are as thinking or knowing or willing subjects. But again

and again, history instructs us that the self-knowledge we took ourselves to possess at the start was in

some way deficient, and that we did not know ourselves as well as we thought we did.

Hegel’s discussions of the history of the science of logic and of consciousness in its search for the ground

of knowledge thus contain a message not just about the failure of reason at some particular moment in its

journey. These histories reveal what he believes is a chronic condition. One general message of Hegel’s

histories is that human reason is incapable of carrying out the Cartesian experiment of identifying, at the

start of inquiry, the universal and necessary concepts and methods of a science, the concepts and methods

that ground that science once and for all. Human reason cannot succeed in this endeavor, because the

task of identifying the truly universal and necessary ground of a science requires powers of abstraction we

do not possess. One general message of Hegel’s histories, then, is that human reason is incapable of total

detachment; it cannot free itself of the presuppositions that tie it to “common reality.”39

It is in this sense not an “empty” or “external” form that “abstracts from all content.”40

A second general lesson of Hegel’s histories concerns our claims to self-knowledge. Since it is not possible

for us to transport ourselves in thought to a wholly external vantage point, we also cannot, at the start of

inquiry, be fully aware of our presuppositions. In an illuminating passage in the Logic in which Hegel

characterizes his own starting point in that text, he writes that the beginning, “is not yet truly known at

the beginning” (SL 72/WL I 71).41 This remark is not just a confession of the limits of his own knowledge,

or of his own grasp of the fundamental laws and concepts of his science. Rather, he directs this remark

at any claim to make fully transparent the assumptions with which we begin our science. In these early

pages of the Logic, Hegel reminds us of a point he stressed in the Preface to hisPhenomenology, namely,

that the “commonly known or familiar, precisely because it is familiar, is not well-known” (PhG ¶

31).42 For Hegel, then, we learn from the history of philosophy that not just our scientific investigations

but also our meta-level efforts to perform critique are invariably accompanied by a certain blindness. The

blindness results not only from the fact that, at the start of inquiry, we have not yet subjected our common

and familiar assumptions to careful analysis. In drawing our attention to the partial blindness that

accompanies critique, Hegel has more than the need for analysis in mind. The blindness or ignorance with

which he is chiefly concerned is in his view a necessary consequence of our limited powers of abstraction.

Precisely because critique proceeds, as he says, always from “within” some “shape of consciousness,” we

cannot at the start of inquiry be fully aware of our presuppositions (PhG, Intro. ¶ 89).43

As I suggested a moment ago, Hegel never urges us to abandon our efforts to think critically or identify

the internal structure and necessary conditions of our sciences. This is not the message he intends to

convey when he insists that there can be no “knowing before we know,” no critique of cognition that is not

itself a cognition. Nor does he recommend that, in undertaking critique, we begin with

something other than the common and familiar assumptions we judge to be universally and necessarily

valid. As we just noted, he portrays the history of philosophy as a series of efforts to begin with “accepted”

and “familiar” assumptions, and he nowhere suggests that we could begin in any other way. Indeed, he

writes in the Logic that

the definition with which any science makes an absolute beginning cannot contain anything other than

the precise and correct expression of what is imagined to be the accepted andfamiliar object and aim of

the science. (SL 49; WL I 42; first emphasis added)

So the message we are meant to derive from the fact that we cannot “know before we know,” is neither

that we should abandon critical inquiry nor that we should begin with assumptions other than those we

believe we are warranted in taking for granted. The lesson is rather that we need to adjust our

understanding of what critique can achieve. Given that critical reflection occurs always “within” some

“shape of consciousness,” as Hegel says, and given that critique for that reason is invariably carried out in

partial darkness, we need to modify our expectation that critique can fulfill Kant’s promise of providing us

“completeness” as well as “certainty” (CPR A xiv).44 We need to reassess the assumption that in

performing critique, “nothing can escape us” (CPR A xx).

5.7 The double dependence of concepts on intuitions

Throughout this work, I have been arguing that it is a mistake to portray Hegel as rejecting all of the

features Kant attributes to human discursivity. Hegel grants that our mode of cognition, because

discursive, is (as Kant says) a “dependent” mode of cognition (CPR B 72). With Kant, he grants that in

cognizing nature, our concepts or thought-forms must be applied to a sense content that is independently

given. Our concepts must be applied to an independently given sense content because we cannot, from

our concepts, produce or generate sensible intuitions. In this respect, our concepts

are empty. In this respect, furthermore, Hegel’s account of human cognition retains Kant’s dualism of

concepts and intuitions.

But I have also suggested that Hegel nonetheless calls into question some of the features Kant associates

with our discursivity. He calls into question the features he believes have skeptical implications for Kant’s

idealism, and thus condemn it to “subjectivity.” In particular, Hegel rejects the Kantian assumption that

since we bring conceptual forms to cognition, we have to contend with “contingency” in their relation to

given sensible intuitions. We can have no warrant, that is, for claiming to know objects wholly on the

other side of cognition.

On the interpretation I have defended, Hegel is convinced that the key to avoiding this version of

skepticism lies in rejecting Kant’s view of the nature of conceptual form. Hegel wishes to persuade us that

conceptual form is not empty in the sense of “external”; it is neither settled in advance nor fixed. For

Hegel, a careful study of the history of philosophy reveals that even those concepts or categories that seem

to us the most stable and secure exhibit what he calls “immanent plasticity” (SL 49/WL I 30). He states

explicitly that a central objective of his Science of Logic is to persuade us of this fact. He tells us that he

intends his discussion in that work to demonstrate the “untruth” of the “supposed independent self-

subsistence” of our thought-determinations (SL 39f./WL I 30).

At the basis of the thesis that we have concepts or categories that are “external” in the sense of pre-given

and fixed is what Hegel judges to be an equally implausible conception of the nature of critical reflection.

For the claim that critique affords us access to the universal and necessary conditions of the possibility of

a given realm of inquiry, rests on the assumption that we are in possession of extraordinary powers of

abstraction. It presupposes that, in thinking, we can overleap or transcend our time: we can access a

vantage point that is absolutely independent from “common reality.” As we have seen, Hegel doubts that

human reason is capable of this degree of detachment. In his view, it is not possible for us to abstract to a

meta-level form of inquiry that in no way reflects our debt to the ordinary as well as scientific practices of

our day. This is why he frequently characterizes the starting point of inquiry as invariably resting on a

“presupposition.”45 It is why he claims that, rather than beginning from an Archimedean point, every

starting point is a “result.”46 For Hegel, then, it is not just that thought depends on an independently given

content as a condition of cognition; thought depends on that content for its nature as well.

As I have noted, my interpretation is out of step with some well-entrenched representations of Hegel’s

critique of and alternative to Kant. For I have denied that

Hegel’s prescription for avoiding an idealism that is subjective is to attribute to human cognition literally

all the productive powers of an intuitive intellect. Such an intellect has no reason for concern that its ideas

or concepts may be only contingently connected to its objects; it can rest assured that the relation between

its concepts and objects is one of perfect harmony. It can be absolutely confident of this because it

possesses the God-like ability to bring its objects into being in the very act of thinking and knowing them.

I have in addition denied the far more plausible view that Hegel believes he can avoid the contingency

problem by fully attending to the implications of Kant’s insight regarding the role of concepts in our

conscious awareness and experience of objects. The Kantian insight is that there can be no object for

thought that is not a conceptually mediated or determined object. A wholly extra-conceptual content (the

“thing itself” or “thing in itself,” as Hegel sometimes calls it) is neither a possible object of our cognition

nor even thinkable. Such a content therefore has no cognitive significance for us. On this reading, Hegel

argues that if we adequately appreciate this fact about the role of concepts, we will cease to measure the

worth of our knowledge by the standard of representationalism. We will no longer set out to determine

whether the objects of our knowledge conform to the “things themselves.” If we fully appreciate the

Kantian insight about the role of concepts, we will give up representationalism in favor of internalist

coherentism.

I have suggested that we can demonstrate the inadequacy of this second interpretation of Hegel by

bearing in mind that it leaves us no way to explain his repeated complaints about an idealism that is

merely subjective. Internalism does not close the gap between concepts and objects; it judges the effort to

close that gap to be in vain. Internalism abandons the aim of natural consciousness to know objects on the

“other side” of consciousness. It satisfies itself, instead, with the “metaphysic of subjectivity,” the

metaphysic that on Hegel’s description condemns us as knowing subjects to grief and longing. In the

material we have reviewed, we have encountered ample evidence that Hegel resists this kind of skeptical

outcome.

On the interpretation I have defended, closing the concept-intuition gap, for Hegel, requires us to reject

the assumption that conceptual form is “external.” It requires us to radicalize Kant’s commitment, then,

to the dependent nature of thought. Not only must our concepts depend on an independently given

sensible content if they are to serve as conditions of cognition; they depend on that content for their

nature as well. Even our most basic and general concepts emerge from a faculty that is an “original

identity,” a faculty that is not a pure spontaneity but also in part receptive. Our concepts emerge from an

intellect that, as Hegel says, is “at the same time a posteriori,” an intellect whose freedom from nature and

history is conditioned rather than wholly unfettered or absolute (FK 79f., 89/GW 316, 325f.).47

I conclude this chapter by highlighting a passage in the 1831 Preface to the Logic that adds support to the

interpretation I have been defending. In this passage, Hegel gives us further insight into the basis of his

rejection of the treatment of cognition as a means. He alerts us to what he believes is a mistake we

commonly make about the nature of thought. Our mistake is that of ignoring or overlooking a feature

thought shares with our faculties of feeling, interest, and passion (SL 35–37/WL I 24–26). We typically

assume, Hegel says, that our thought-forms or categories are wholly subject to our control, and that when

we apply them in thinking about things, we can “stand above” as well as dominate them; we can

manipulate them to serve our purposes. (We can treat them as tools or means.) As he suggests here, we

thereby fall into the error of supposing that our faculty of thought is in this respect wholly unlike our

faculties of feeling. In the case of feelings and passions, we correctly acknowledge that although we can

guide and control them to some extent, we also have to accommodate ourselves to them. We correctly

recognize, in other words, that our feelings and passions are not entirely at our disposal. We acknowledge

that feelings, interests, and passions do not merely serve us, but that we also have to serve them. We are

to some extent “caught up” in them; they “have us in their possession,” as Hegel says. As “independent

forces and powers,” our feelings and passions set constraints we can neither thoroughly control nor

completely grasp.

In these remarks, Hegel once again tries to persuade us of the artificiality of the thesis of absolute

heterogeneity. If thought shares with feelings and passions the features he outlines here, it cannot simply

be an expression of spontaneity. It is not just the giver and author of law; it must be governed and acted

upon as well. It must, that is, be partly receptive. If thought is like feeling, its rules and laws are neither

perfectly transparent to us nor wholly under our control. The choices we make in employing them are not

supported by perfect knowledge and are not expressions of an unfettered freedom. What Hegel seems to

be suggesting, then, is that there is no thinking or application of

our forms of thought that is not conditioned by and thus responsive to actual natural and historical forces.

One implication of this is that the activity of critique, as well as its outcome, is not entirely up to us.48

Notes:

(1) The “concept [Begriff],” he furthermore tells us, is not the “sensibly intuited or represented”; rather, it

is a “product and content” of thinking (SL 39/WL I 30). “What we are dealing with in logic,” Hegel writes

in his introduction to the Logic, “is not a thinking about something which exists independently as a base

for our thinking and apart from it…On the contrary, the necessary forms and self-determinations of

thought are the content and the ultimate truth itself” (SL 50/WL I 44).

(2) I provide evidence in support of this claim below, drawing from the 1831 preface and the introduction

to his Science of Logic, as well as the section on Kant in volume III of his Lectures on the History of

Philosophy.

(3) Hegel also makes this point in his second or 1831 preface to the Logic. He writes of the view according

to which “thoughts [Gedanken]” are considered a “medium [Mitte]” between ourselves and things. This

view has the implication, he says, that the medium cuts us off from things instead of connecting us to

them (SL 36/WL I 25f.).

(4) The passage is from Book I, chapter 1, § 7 of the Essay.

(5) After quoting the passage from Locke’s Essay, Hegel writes: “With such words, Locke in the

Introduction to his Essay expresses the aim of an undertaking that one could just as well read in the

Introduction to Kant’s philosophy. For [Kant’s philosophy] likewise limits itself to the Lockean goal,

namely, the consideration of the finite intellect [Verstandes]” (FK 69/GW 304). Hegel sketches this

project of a prior critique of cognition in the opening sentence of his Introduction to thePhenomenology:

“It is natural to think that before philosophy delves into what really matters, namely, into the effectively

real cognition of what, in truth, there is, it would be necessary to reach prior agreement about cognition.”

He considers this portrayal to accurately represent the projects both of Locke and of Kant.

(6) See also EL § 41 A1.

(7) In this Preface, Hegel writes not broadly of the thesis that “cognition [Erkennen]” is a means, but more

narrowly of the thesis that “thoughts [Gedanken]” or “thought determinations [Gedankenbestimmungen]”

are means. For further discussion of the thesis that cognition is a means, see the chapter on Kant in

his Lectures on the History of Philosophy (LHP III 428f./VGP III 334).

(8) For a helpful discussion of Hegel’s implicit comparison of Locke and Kant in the Introduction of

thePhenomenology, see the commentary by Andreas Graeser, G.W.F. Hegel, Einleitung zur

Phänomenologie des Geistes: Kommentar (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1988), esp. 29–31.

(9) As I observed back in Chapter Three (note 19), Locke’s realism about the capacity of our ideas to reflect

or resemble a wholly mind-independent content is compatible with his view that our knowledge of nature

is probable at best and falls short of knowledge of “real essences.”

(10) In Kant’s words, “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (CPR B

xviii).

(11) I am recalling points discussed in sections 3.3–3.6 of Chapter Three.

(12) LHP III, 372/VGP III 278; EL § 39.

(13) Michael Forster has argued that Hegel is chiefly preoccupied in the Phenomenology and elsewhere,

not with the “modern” “veil of ignorance” skepticism I have been describing in these paragraphs, but with

the far more threatening “equipollence” skepticism of the ancients (Sextus Empiricus, for example). This

may be correct, but my focus here is Hegel’s concern with the kind of skepticism he takes to be implied by

the systems of Locke and Kant. See Forster’s Hegel’s Idea of a “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Chicago and

London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 128. Forster has much of interest to say on this topic in his

earlier book as well. See especially the first chapter of his Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, MA, and

London: Harvard University Press, 1989).

(14) See my discussion in sections 4.5–4.7 of Chapter Four.

(15) What Hegel actually says in this passage from Faith and Knowledge is that Kant, Fichte, and other

philosophers of the Enlightenment take “reason [Vernunft]” to enjoy “independence from common

reality.” Nonetheless, in this same discussion, Hegel writes of the status these philosophers award the

“pure concept [reine Begriff],” namely, that of “absolute identity and emptiness.” They insist upon a

“strict opposition” between the “infinite concept [unendliche Begriff]” and the “empirical” (FK 62f./GW

296f.).

(16) See Kant’s 1790 preface to CJ [167].

(17) I discuss Kant’s distinction between constitutive and regulative theoretical principles in Chapter One,

section 1.2. Although our concepts (more precisely, our “ideas”) of things in themselves are at best merely

regulative in the context of theoretical inquiry, they may have a constitutive use in the realms of the

practical or aesthetic, according to Kant. See his discussion of this topic in his 1790 preface to CJ [168].

(18) It is curious that Kant names the work that is concerned to identify the a priori concepts and

principles constitutive of theoretical cognition the Critique of Pure Reason, given that it is the faculty

of understanding, in his view, that is responsible for those concepts and principles. Although Kant calls

the work the Critique of Pure Reason, he describes his task there as a critique of “pure understanding”

(CPR B 345/A 289). He tells us that he seeks to determine the objective validity of a priori concepts

(categories) for objects of pure understanding. He tells us, furthermore, that he aims to “investigate the

pure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive faculty upon which it rests.” In his preface to

the 1790 edition of CJ [168], Kant explains why he titles his first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason. He

notes that his concern in the first Critique is to make “secure” against all other competitors the domain

containing the constitutive principles of cognition, the domain of the understanding. His thought seems to

be that because reason tends to encroach upon the proper domain of the understanding, it must be

subject to critique. A central task of the Critique of Pure Reason, then, is to expose the natural and

persistent tendency of pure reason to compete with the role of pure understanding. Reason tries to

present as “constitutive” concepts that are at best “regulative” of theoretical inquiry (CPR A xii, A 735/B

763). Kant thus describes his task in the first Critique as that of an investigation of the nature and limits,

of both faculties of understanding and reason. Note that his argument in that text for the role of space and

time as a priori forms of intuition does not properly belong to the project of critique as he defines it.

(19) For further remarks in which Kant describes critique as a “preparatory” or “propadeutic” exercise, see

CPR B 26/A 12f., A 841/B 869.

(20) Kant also ties critique to a priori cognition that is synthetic, but this point need not concern us at the

moment. (See, e.g., CPR A 13/B 27).

(21) “Strict universality,” Kant writes, “points to [zeigt auf]” a “special source of cognition, namely a faculty

of a priori cognition. Necessity and strict universality are therefore secure indications of a priori cognition”

(CPR Intro 〈B〉 4).

(22) See also CPR B 26/A 13. Compare Descartes in Parts I and II of the Discourse on the Method for

Conducting One’s Reason Well and for Seeking the Truth in the Sciences (1637). He reports that after he

had spent some years “studying in the book of the world,” he “resolved…to study within [himself] too.”

Hence his decision to shut himself up in his study, and to “converse with [himself] about [his] thoughts.”

As he writes: “My plan has never gone beyond trying to reform my own thoughts and building upon a

foundation which is completely my own” (Part II). Transl. Donald Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

Company, 1998), 6–8.

(23) In the Prolegomena, Kant puts the point in this way: Metaphysics “can be brought to such completion

and fixity as to require no further change or be capable of any augmentation by new discoveries, because

here reason has the sources of its knowledge in itself” (366).

(24) Kant makes this point at CPR B 26/A 13 as well.

(25) See Kant’s remarks also at CPR Intro 〈B〉 (24).

(26) For evidence that Kant draws this lesson from the history of mathematics, see CPR B xff.

(27) There is ambiguity in Kant’s use of the term “metaphysics.” In his B-Preface to the CPR, he identifies

“two parts” of metaphysics. Only the first part is concerned with showing that we have a priori laws that

ground our knowledge of nature. The second part has as its object the unconditioned or supersensible

(CPR B xviiif.).

(28) Kant writes in the Groundwork that he is involved in the project of explicating the “generally received

concept of morality” (G 445). Moral concepts, he says, have their origin in common reason (G 411; see also

G 394, 397). He makes similar points in his Critique of Practical Reason (CpR 27, 36, 155) and in CPR A

807/B 835.

(29) “Common understanding” or “common human reason” yields insight into principles that are

universally and necessarily valid, and should therefore not be confused with what Kant refers to in

theGroundwork as “popular opinion.” All that popular opinion is able to produce, he writes there, is a

“disgusting hodge-podge of patchwork observations and half-rationalized principles” (G 409).

(30) To note just one additional method Kant explicitly employs in the first Critique: In his chapter on the

antinomies, he mentions his use of a “skeptical method,” whereby he “watches” or perhaps even

“occasions” a dispute between assertions in order to determine whether “the object of the dispute is not

perhaps a mere mirage” (CPR A 423/B 451).

(31) Kant makes this point in the Prolegomena. He tells us that his method in that work is “analytic” in

contrast to the “synthetic” method of the Critique of Pure Reason. He writes in the Prolegomena that he

will begin with “something already known to be dependable, from which we can go forward with

confidence and ascend to the sources which are not yet known, and whose discovery not only will explain

what is known already, but will also exhibit an area with many cognitions that all arise from these same

sources” § 4 (275). A few paragraphs later, he describes the analytic procedure in this way: “one proceeds

from that which is sought as if it were given, and ascends to the conditions under which alone it is possible”

§ 5 (276n). (See also his remarks on the analytic or regressive method in § 117 of his 1800 Jäsche Logic.)

The “synthetic” argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, in contrast, is “progressive” or forward moving

(Proleg § 5 (276n)).

Kant provides a clear example of the difference between these two methods in the Groundwork. In his

preface, he notes that the first two sections of the work are “analytic” and the third section “synthetic.”

The Groundwork begins with the concept of a “good will,” a concept Kant that says is available to the

common understanding. As a result of the work he does in the first two sections of the work in explicating

that concept, we eventually learn, in the final pages of section II, that the concept of a good will rests on

the concept of autonomy. The “synthetic” work of the section III, then, begins with the concept of

autonomy and then sets out to justify our idea of ourselves as autonomous.

(32) If this characterization of Kant’s argumentative strategy in the Transcendental Aesthetic is correct, it

has the following interesting implication. It suggests that his argument for the nature of space and time as

a priori forms of intuition need not be taken to depend on presuppositions about the nature and validity

of the sciences of geometry and arithmetic. It suggests, that is, that instead of setting out from some

presumably uncontroversial fact (in this case, a fact about the validity of the sciences of geometry and

arithmetic) and arguing regressively to space and time as necessary conditions of their possibility, Kant

instead begins his argument in the Aesthetic with a discussion of features of spatial and temporal

representation. For a defense of this interpretation of Kant’s method in the Aesthetic, see Emily Carson,

“Arithmetic in the Critique of Pure Reason,” unpublished paper.

(33) Hegel’s remarks on the distinction between “analytic” and “synthetic” methods begins in the EL at §

227.

(34) See also EL § 41A1 where Hegel refers to “mistaken project of wanting to have cognition before having

any cognition.”

(35) I write here that Hegel holds Kant “largely” to blame for the “downfall [Untergang]” of metaphysics in

the “last twenty-five years,” because Hegel tells us in these opening paragraphs that the practical

mindedness of the time also bears some responsibility. The “modern educationists” are at fault, for

example, for focusing too narrowly on practical training.

(36) Hegel mentions in this context the fact that Kant simply borrows his logic from Aristotle. Kant

assumes that, since the time of Aristotle, general logic has neither lost nor gained ground; it is “finished

and complete” (SL 51/WL I 46). Hegel repeats this charge against Kant in EL ¶ 42. He tells us there that

Kant simply borrowed his categories from the “common logic.”

(37) Hegel notes here that he already argued for this point in his Preface to the Phenomenology. He

repeats the claim again at SL 53/WL I 48.

(38) In the passage we considered back in section 5.3, Hegel tells us that both analytic and synthetic

methods are at fault for “starting from something that is externally presupposed” (EL § 231).

(39) I quote here from a passage from Faith and Knowledge we discussed back in Chapter Three. Hegel

writes of the “programmatic principle” of those (such as Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte) who adhere to the

“metaphysics of subjectivity.” The programmatic principle is to rise above the “subjective and empirical”

and “justify the absoluteness of reason, its independence from common reality” (FK 63/GW 296).

In suggesting here that Hegel holds that human reason cannot achieve total detachment and entirely free

itself from the presuppositions that tie it to common reality, it would appear that I am challenging

Stephen Houlgate’s thesis that Hegel’s demand that philosophy be “utterly self-critical” is equivalent to

the demand for “radical presuppositionlessness” (The Opening of Hegel’s “Logic,” 25, 27). But I find two

accounts of what “radical presuppositionlessness” amounts to, on Houlgate’s portrayal. In writing about

Hegel’s beginnings in the Science of Logic, Houlgate sometimes seems to attribute to Hegel the position I

am arguing against, namely, that it is possible for us to begin inquiry without presuppositions. Houlgate

writes, for example, that, “Hegel’s Logic begins…with the radical suspension of all our presuppositions

about thought and being” (57). Houlgate tells us in another passage that Hegel’s demand that philosophy

be presuppositionless requires of us “the readiness to suspend or let go of what we have assumed to be

true of thought and being and the readiness…to be moved by…the minimal thought of pure being that

results from letting go of all our assumptions” (67). In other remarks, however, Houlgate describes the

“presuppositionless” starting point of the Logic in a different (and in my view more accurate) way. In his

words, “presuppositionless thought…begins with sheer indeterminacy and immediacy, then draws itself

out, as it were, as the various categories are unfolded, and finally comes to be the whole circle—the unity

of all the categories—of which sheer indeterminacy is retrospectively understood to be the necessary, but

mere, beginning” (50). On this description, the beginning is not presuppositionless; rather, we begin in

ignorance of all that we are presupposing (or alternatively, we begin in ignorance of all that we mean by

pure being). Our presuppositions are revealed to us retrospectively.

(40) For more on this point that thought is not “external” and that its forms are not “ready made,” see, e.g.,

EL § 28 A.

(41) This passage appears in the section of the Logic entitled, “With What Must the Science Begin?” In

his Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel explains why he did not begin his Science of Logic with the “Concept

[Begriff]” (which he says is the “truth” of “being” and “essence”). What he writes is this: “we cannot begin

with the truth, because truth, when it forms the beginning, rests on bald assurance, whereas the truth that

is thought has to prove itself to be the truth at the bar of thinking.” Instead of beginning theLogic with the

“Begriff,” he considered “being and essence in their own dialectical development, and [he recognized] how

they sublate themselves into the unity of the Concept” (EL § 159A).

(42) Hegel expresses his reminder in the Logic as follows: “while logical objects and their expressions may

be thoroughly familiar to educated people, it does not follow…that they are intelligently apprehended” (SL

33/WL I 22).

(43) On the meaning of Hegel’s idea of “shapes [Gestalten] of consciousness,” see Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s

Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, 5f., and Michael N. Forster, Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology

of Spirit, 119–23; 299ff.

(44) Of course, Hegel makes his own claims to completeness as well. In the final section of

thePhenomenology, for example, he announces that Spirit has achieved “complete self-consciousness” (¶

802). But I take Hegel at his word when he writes in his Preface to the Philosophy of Right that since no

philosophy can “transcend its contemporary world,” our expectations about what will or will not come

next invariably reflect our ties to a particular age and set of philosophical commitments. Our views about

completeness, then, are always relative to some particular set of aims and expectations, aims and

expectations that reveal our debt to actual historical conditions. For a persuasive defense of this line of

interpretation of Hegel on the “end” of history and philosophy, see Joseph McCarney, Hegel on

History (London: Routledge, 2000).

(45) As he writes in EL § 1, “a beginning…does make a presupposition, or, rather, it is itself just that.”

(46) EL § 13. See also EL § 22A, where Hegel asserts that philosophy establishes nothing new. For similar

passages in the Phenomenology, see ¶¶ 12, 20.

(47) Given my emphasis here on what I take to be Hegel’s commitment to the dependent nature of human

thought, it might seem that I am attributing to him a purely causal account of the origin of our concepts

and norms, according to which they derive from nothing but our passive reception of sensory input. As

John McDowell and others have pointed out, such an account would give us no way to explain how our

perceptual beliefs are answerable to experience. That is, it would give us no way to explain how nature

exercises a rational constraint on those beliefs. (McDowell has much to say about this issue, for example,

in Mind and World.) But my suggestion here is not that Hegel holds that our concepts are products of

mere receptivity; I am instead attributing to him the weaker thesis that our concepts are not products of

pure spontaneity. Should we persist in worrying that even this weaker thesis leaves us no way to explain

how our concepts or norms can be answerable to experience, this is because we adhere to a false standard

of what is needed to secure the normativity of perceptual belief. In McDowell’s terms, we cling to the myth

that he (following Sellars) refers to as the myth of the “endogenous given” (Mind and World, 135).

Normativity may be secured because, according to this myth, we possess a form of spontaneity whose

freedom or independence from nature is absolute. Expressed in Hegelian terms, this is the myth of the

absolute “externality” of thought. I discuss Hegelian influences on McDowell’s thought in “McDowell’s

Hegelianism,” European Journal of Philosophy 5, no. 1 (April 1997), 21–38, and in “Hegel, McDowell,

and Recent Defenses of Kant,” Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology 31, no. 3 (October 2000),

229–47. Reprinted in Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham, UK: Acumen Press,

2006), 49–67.

(48) Robert Pippin has drawn attention in recent work to the intimate relation Hegel discovers between

thinking (apperceptive self-consciousness) and feeling (in particular, desire). (See his Hegel on Self-

Consciousness: Desire and Death in the “Phenomenology of Spirit” (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2011).) From Hegel’s identification of self-consciousness with “desire itself [Begierdeüberhaupt]”

in ¶ 167 of the “Self-Consciousness” section of the Phenomenology, Pippin draws the conclusion that

Hegel wishes to drive home the point that self-consciousness is a task of self-constitution (an act of

spontaneity), rather than a passive product of self-observation or introspection. I agree with this

description of Hegel’s account of self-consciousness, but the passage from the Logic I discuss here

suggests a further explanation for Hegel’s identification of self-consciousness with desire (an explanation

with which I suspect Pippin would agree). As desiring natures, we are also highly dependent natures; and

this fact about ourselves is something over which we do not have complete control. Our acts of

spontaneity or self-constitution are conditioned rather than absolute; our reason or rationality is impure

rather than pure. I thus agree with Yirmiyahu Yovel that Hegelian rationality “contains unreason,

contingency, and negativity as integral ingredients.” In Hegel’s Preface to the “Phenomenology of Spirit”:

Translation and Running Commentary (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), 60.

Along similar lines, Paul Redding stresses the “radicallyfallibilist” nature of Hegel’s philosophy. In his

words, “we should not even think of something like Kant’s normative transcendental unity of

apperception as perfect and free from the problems of the causal embeddedness of ‘incarnation’ and

individuation.” See his Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought, 228.

The Question-Begging Nature of Kantian

Critique

The Kantian philosophy…serves as a cushion for the indolence of thought [Trägheit des Denkens] that

comforts itself with the conviction that everything is already proved and settled [bewiesen und abgetan].

(SL 62n./WL I 59n.)

In Chapter Five, we noted that Hegel challenges the particular expectations Kant brings to the project of

critique. He challenges Kant’s assumption that, if we carefully examine the nature of our faculties of

thinking, knowing, and willing, we can discover the a priori conditions of the possibility of our various

realms of inquiry, conditions that for our discursive mode of understanding are universally and

necessarily valid. As we saw, Hegel believes that these expectations rest on a too generous estimation of

our powers of abstraction. Kant assumes that in performing critique we can successfully separate our

merely contingent beliefs from those that may be affirmed by every common rational understanding. We

can achieve full awareness of our presuppositions and subject each of them to impartial review. In these

respects, we can “know before we know.” We have this capacity, because as thinking or reflective beings,

we can access a vantage point that is “external” or wholly “independent” from “common reality.”

As I have suggested, Hegel defends a markedly different account of the nature of critical reflection and

what it can achieve. He denies that a fully external point of view is available to us; he doubts that any

thinker can wholly overleap her age and achieve complete freedom from common reality. He argues

instead that even our most critical reflections are indebted to the realm of the actual. For that very reason,

they are also accompanied by a certain blindness.

If this representation of Hegel’s general objection to Kantian critique is correct, it should bear explanatory

fruit. It should help us demystify Hegel’s more local criticisms of Kant, criticisms directed at specific

Kantian arguments. In this final chapter, we consider Hegel’s critique of Kant’s treatment of the

arguments of the antinomies. In

particular, we will focus on his charge that Kant’s treatment is question-begging and, as such,

insufficiently self-critical.

Before we proceed, it is worth recalling a point I stressed in my introductory chapter. Hegel’s complaint

about the question-begging nature of Kant’s treatment of the antinomies is a complaint he directs at

a number of Kantian arguments. The complaint is perhaps most familiar to us in the context of his

critique of Kant’s categorical imperative. Kant argues that our maxims and actions conform to the

categorical imperative or supreme practical law only if they possess a certain form, the form of

universalizability. In Hegel’s view, however, Kant in fact relies on more than the formal requirement of

universalizability in his derivations of particular duties; he in addition presupposes content. Kant’s

derivations of particular duties in other words depend on assumptions, most notably about rational

nature and its ends. On Hegel’s interpretation, Kant simply presupposes the validity of these additional

assumptions; he assumes they could be affirmed by every finite rational nature. In this way, he begs the

question or presupposes content.1

Also question-begging, Hegel tells us, is Kant’s derivation in the first Critique of the categories or pure

concepts of the understanding. With regard to the derivation of the twelve categories from the forms of

judgment, the Kantian philosophy, in Hegel’s words, makes “things easy for itself.” Kant arrives at the a

priori concepts by inspecting the different forms of judgment, but he simply borrows from his account of

the forms of judgment “already given” in the “common logic” (EL § 42). Instead of taking the trouble to

actually demonstrate the content and necessity of the categories, Kant’s derivation rests in the end “only

on psychological-historical grounds” (EL § 41).2

To cite one last example, Hegel charges that Kant’s arguments for the properties of corporeal substance

are question-begging as well. In arguing that the force of repulsion (but not of attraction) is immediately

contained in the concept of matter, Kant reveals that he begs the question in favor of a Newtonian

conception of matter as impenetrability.3

My purpose in mentioning these examples is simply to substantiate my earlier observation that Hegel’s

charge that Kant begs the question is not limited to his critique of Kant’s treatment of the antinomies.

Hegel seems to hold that begging the question or presupposing content is a general feature of Kant’s

reasoning. Hegel highlights this feature of Kant’s reasoning, I believe, because he takes it to reveal

something of interest about the nature of reflection itself. At the very least, it reveals that the expectations

Kant brings to critique cannot be met.

To expand on this latter point: Hegel calls our attention to the questions Kant begs in order to expose

Kant’s failure to access a vantage point that is wholly external or wholly on the “other side” of content.

Hegel in other words wishes to make explicit the way in which Kant’s critical reflections are indebted to

the realm of the actual. In doing so, he believes he can also raise doubts about Kant’s claim to discover

conditions of the possibility of our various realms of inquiry that are absolutely fixed and unchanging. He

can convince us that concepts and rules Kant defends as universal and necessary are more accurately

described as “plastic.”

Characterized in another way, Hegel seeks to draw our attention to the “emptiness” of Kant’s formalism.

The claim of Kant’s formalism is that at the basis of our various realms of inquiry are rules and concepts

that, precisely because of their formal or a priori status, are universally and necessarily valid for discursive

intellects such as ours. Far from merely conditionally valid or valid merely for some particular culture or

historical epoch, these are rules and concepts that, on Kant’s account, “everyone must grant.”4 Hegel’s

project of exposing the emptiness of Kant’s formalism is essentially that of demonstrating that the claim

of formalism cannot be met. Underlying the rules or concepts Kant claims to be purely formal are the

questions he begs—questions that reveal that (like any other thinker) he is a “child of his time.”5

We considered Kant’s treatment of the arguments of the antinomies back in section 1.4 of Chapter One.

There, our concern was to highlight the role of the arguments in alerting Kant to the fact of our

discursivity, and to the limitations implied by that fact for our knowledge. In the present chapter, our

interest in Kant’s treatment of the antinomies is quite different. Our aim is to explore Hegel’s charge that

Kant’s treatment of the arguments is question-begging. In doing so, we will apply our general

interpretation of Hegel’s objection to Kantian critique to this particular case. Our consideration of Hegel’s

remarks on the antinomies will thus serve as a case study. It will allow us to test the explanatory power of

our general interpretation of his critique of Kant.

6.1 The arguments of the antinomies in the Critique of Pure

Reason

In a passage in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant writes that, “the antinomy of pure reason is the

most beneficial error into which human reason could ever have fallen” (CPrR 107). Reason becomes

entangled in antinomy when it asserts contradictory claims and can find no basis for rejecting either claim

as false. Antinomy in Kant’s view alerts us to the fact that reason has committed some kind of mistake or

is in the grip of a certain illusion. Antinomy thereby provides the benefit of “stimulating” philosophy to

undertake a “criticism of reason itself” (Proleg 338). In a letter to Christian Garve dated September 21,

1798, Kant reveals that it was indeed his own reflection on the antinomies that led to his discovery of the

Critical philosophy.6

Kant labels the antinomies “cosmological” conflicts because their object is the sensible world or series of

appearances (CPR A 408/B 435; Proleg 338).7 The arguments concern such matters as whether the series

of appearances does or does not have a beginning in time, whether the series does or does not have a first

cause, and whether particular appearances or substances are infinitely divisible versus composed of

simples. On Kant’s representation, the antinomies derive from reason’s demand for “absolute

completeness” in the series of appearances (CPR B 443/A 416). More precisely, they derive from reason’s

effort to discover, on the side of the conditions of the series, absolute completeness in the form of an

“unconditioned condition.” In its search for completeness, Kant writes, reason is guided by the following

assumption: “If the conditioned is given, then the whole sum of conditions, and hence the absolute

unconditioned, is also given, through which alone the conditioned was possible” (CPR A 409/B 436).8 In

seeking “absolute totality in the series of appearances,” however, reason invariably becomes trapped in a

“natural antithetic” (CPR A 407/B 433). In the case of the First Antinomy, for example, reason’s search for

an unconditioned condition yields the claim, on the side of the thesis, that the series of appearances has

an unconditioned or first beginning in time. But reason considers itself equally justified in arguing, on the

side of the antithesis, that the series is unconditioned in that it is infinitely extended in time. As is the case

with each of the cosmological conflicts, the proofs of the thesis and antithesis of the First Antinomy are

“well grounded” (CPR B 535/A 507).9 But because the thesis and antithesis of each of the antinomies are

contradictories, both sides cannot be true.

Kant tells us that in common with all “dialectical” inferences of reason, the antinomies are “unavoidable

[unaufhörlich]” illusions (CPR A 339/B 397).10 They are “sophistries not of human beings but of pure

reason itself” (CPR A 339/B 397). The antinomies thus call our attention not just to the mistaken

inferences of particular persons, but to the very nature of human reason.11 The fact that the antinomies

have their basis in human reason explains why they have confounded philosophers since the ancients.

Kant discovers that the conflicts have reappeared in his own time in the form of the competing views of

the Leibnizians and the Newtonians.12 As he notes, the arguments of the Leibnizians and the Newtonians

merely express in new terms the rationalism of “Platonism,” on one side, and the empiricism of

“Epicureanism,” on the other (CPR A 471/B 499).

Kant contrasts his own response to antinomy with that of both the “dogmatist” and the “skeptic.” Each of

these responses, he says, is the “death of a healthy philosophy” (CPR A 407/B 434). The dogmatist asserts

one side of the conflicts and obstinately refuses to grant a hearing to the other. The skeptic responds to

antinomy with despair or “hopelessness”; she all too hastily surrenders to what Kant believes is effectively

the “euthanasia of pure reason” (CPR A 407/B 434). As we saw a moment ago, antinomy awakened in

Kant neither dogmatism nor skepticism but rather the need to search for a solution. Antinomy suggested

to him that both sides of the arguments rested on a false assumption.

Although Kant’s response to antinomy was not that of the skeptic, he tells us that he employed the

“skeptical method” in his search for a solution to the conflicts. Far from giving in to despair, the skeptical

method as he defines it “aims at certainty” (CPR B 451/A 424). It looks for evidence of fallacy at the basis

of philosophical conflict. In employing the skeptical method, Kant says, we assume the role of an

“impartial referee” and “watch” or even “occasion” a conflict between competing claims. Our objective is

to determine whether the object of dispute is perhaps a “mere mirage [bloßes Blendwerk]” (CPR A 423/B

451). Applied to the cosmological arguments, Kant takes the skeptical method to ultimately reveal both

sides of the conflicts to be “sophistical” or “dialectical” (CPR A 462/B 490). Each side makes a fallacious

assumption about the proper extent of human knowledge. Once this fallacious assumption is exposed, the

antinomies convert from genuine contradictions to pseudo-rational arguments. They no longer pose a

threat to the vocation of reason.

This completes our review of Kant’s general representation of the cosmological conflicts and his strategy

for solving them. Moving forward, our task is to make the above sketch more concrete by taking a brief

look at two examples of antinomy, beginning with the Third Antinomy. As we saw in our consideration of

this antinomy back in section 1.4 of Chapter One, the conflict in this case is between two conceptions of

causality. The claim on the side of the antithesis is that, “everything in the world takes place solely in

accordance with laws of nature” (CPR A 445/B 473). In sharp contrast, the side of the thesis asserts that,

in addition to a causality of nature, there must be a “causality through freedom” (CPR A 444/B 472). As

contradictories, the two sides cannot both be true. Kant applies his skeptical method and asks whether the

object over which this “natural antithetic” is locked in conflict is a perhaps “mere mirage.” Each side

makes a claim to knowledge. Perhaps it is the case that the object each side claims to know cannot be

known.

The mirage or illusion is most obvious on the side of the thesis. The thesis asserts knowledge of a form of

causality that is “spontaneous” in that it is a capacity to begin a state from itself and requires no prior

cause. As Kant observes, this mode of causality—a causality of freedom—”does not stand under another

cause determining it in time in accordance with the laws of nature” (CPR A 533/B 561). The thesis thus

asserts knowledge of what Kant identifies as a “transcendental idea.” That is, it asserts knowledge of a

cause that is outside the series of appearances, a cause that experience or observation could never aid us

in discovering.

Less obviously, the side of the antithesis likewise asserts knowledge of an object outside the series of

appearances. It purports to know that there is no first cause responsible for the series of appearances. It

asserts knowledge of nature as a series of appearances regressing infinitely on the side of causes or

conditions. The problem here, on Kant’s analysis, is that an infinitely regressive series of causes is not

itself a possible object of experience (CPR A 488/B 516). To put the point differently, when we seek

knowledge of nature as the totality of the series of appearances, we effectively set out to know an object

that transcends the limits of experience.

Common to both sides of the Third Antinomy, then, is an assumption that is exposed as sophistical. The

assumption is that we can know objects outside the limits of space and time, objects as “things in

themselves.” Applying the skeptical method, we learn that since each side of the antinomy is committed to

this assumption, each side is fallacious or “pseudo rational.” The antinomy thus reveals itself to express

something other than a genuine contradiction.

Turning, now, to our second example: The Second Antinomy concerns the nature or composition of

substance. The thesis asserts that, “every composite [zusammengesetzte] substance in the world is

composed of simple parts, and nothing exists except the simple or what is composed of simples” (CPR A

434/B 462). Denying this assertion, the antithesis claims that, “[n]o composite thing in the world is

composed of simple parts, and nowhere [in the world] does there exist anything simple” (CPR A 435/B

463).

Once again, the contradiction between these two claims turns out to be “dialectical” versus genuine, on

Kant’s analysis. As in the case of the Third Antinomy, each side presupposes that what is outside the series

of appearance is a possible object of human knowledge. The antithesis makes this assumption in holding,

in effect, that an infinitely divided whole is for us a possible object of perception. Kant notes that the

division of a whole consists in “progressive decomposition” (a regress from conditioned to conditions).

The antithesis is committed to the view that this regress is infinite. Kant points out, however, that

although the parts contained in the intuition of the series are possible objects of experience, the infinite

division of the whole is not a possible object of experience (CPR A 524/B 555). As he writes, “how far the

transcendental division of an appearance in general may reach is not a matter of experience at all” (CPR A

527/B 555). In claiming that substance is ultimately composed of simples, the thesis likewise claims

knowledge of objects that are not possible objects of our experience (CPR A 437/B 465). Kant explains

that an absolutely simple object would be an object without spatial and/or temporal extension. Such

objects lie outside the limits of our form of experience.13

As we saw back in Chapter One, Kant judges the illusion embraced by both sides of each of the antinomies

to consist in an over-estimation of our cognitive powers. Each side of the arguments assumes that it is

possible for us to know objects not given to us in space and time. Each side in other words embraces the

“transcendental realist” thesis that we can know “things in themselves.” We “solve” the antinomies and

thereby convert them into merely “dialectical” oppositions, according to Kant, by recognizing that our

knowledge is restricted to appearances, that is, to objects given through our a priori forms of sensible

intuition. We solve the antinomies, then, by granting the truth of transcendental idealism. For according

to transcendental idealism, we have no warrant for supposing that what are merely “ideas of reason” are

“concepts of real things” (CPR A 643/B 671).

6.2 Hegel on Kant’s treatment of the antinomies: A first look

Hegel’s remarks on Kant’s treatment of the antinomies are not wholly critical; he prefaces his objections

with a few notes of praise. In the Encyclopedia Logic, he identifies Kant’s insight that there is “essential

and necessary” contradiction in the determinations of the understanding as one of the “most important

and deepest advances in philosophy in the modern period” (EL § 48).14 He claims that this insight is a

significant advance beyond the perspective of the “older metaphysics,” according to which contradiction is

a sign of nothing more than a “contingent confusion” stemming from an “error of

inference and reasoning” (EL § 48A). But Hegel also tells us that Kant’s solution to the antinomies is as

“trivial” as his insight is “deep” (EL § 48). In some way, Kant fails to derive the correct conclusion from his

reflections on the arguments.

In the various texts in which Hegel lays out his criticisms of Kant on this matter, two charges emerge as

central. One is that Kant’s solution to the arguments is “subjective.” Kant makes the mistake of

discovering contradiction in “thinking reason,” Hegel says, rather than in the objects themselves (EL § 48).

In a particularly bewildering passage, he remarks that Kant locates the contradiction in reason because of

his “tenderness for things of the world” (EL § 48).15

It is far from obvious what Hegel has in mind by this first criticism. Kant certainly does discover the

source of the contradictions in reason. On his analysis, the contradictions have at their basis the fallacious

transcendental realist assumption that we can know things in themselves. But Hegel suggests that it is

precisely this “subjective” treatment of the antinomies that prevents Kant from grasping their “true and

positive meaning,” namely that “everything real [alles Wirkliche] contains in itself opposing

determinations” (EL § 48A).16

We will return to this first objection in section 6.3, after we have considered Hegel’s second and less

mysterious charge. The second charge is that Kant’s treatment of the antinomies is question-begging.

Hegel expresses this criticism in the following passage from the Encyclopedia Logic:

[T]he proofs that Kant brings forward for his theses and antitheses must be regarded as pseudo-proofs

[Scheinbeweise], because what is supposed to be proved is always already contained in the

presuppositions that form the starting point. (EL § 48A)

Hegel repeats this complaint in his more expansive discussions of Kant’s antinomies in the Science of

Logic. We can convey the basic motivation for his complaint by considering his comments on just one of

the proofs. Our focus will be the thesis of the Second Antinomy, which we reviewed a moment ago. This

time, however, we will lay out Kant’s presentation of the argument in greater detail.

Kant formulates the thesis of the Second Antinomy as follows: “Every composite substance in the world

consists of simple parts, and nothing exists anywhere except the simple or what is composed of simples”

(CPR A 434/B 462). The proof for this thesis employs the reductio strategy of drawing out the

implications of affirming its contradictory. To ease our comprehension of the proof, we will break it down

into five steps:

Step One: First, we are to deny the thesis and assert that “composite substances do not consist of simple

parts.” (Here Kant provides an abbreviated denial of the thesis. It is clear from Step Two that he means

this first step to also deny the very existence of simples.)

Step Two: In this step, Kant asks us to consider the implications of denying the existence both of simples

and of composite substances. If we deny the existence of simples and also remove composition, he says,

then “nothing at all would be left over” and “no substance would be given.” Kant intends this remark to

alert us to the fact that since the thesis of this antinomy presupposes the existence of substances, it must

also be committed to the existence either of simples or of “what is composed of simples.” If we affirm the

thesis but deny the existence either of simples or of composite substances, we land in self-contradiction.

Step Three: Kant asks us to consider the possibility that no simples exist but that composition remains.

He asks us to assume, in other words, that it is not possible to remove composition “in thought [in

Gedanken].”

Step Four: Kant proceeds to argue, however, that we can remove composition in thought. As he writes,

“composition is only a contingent relation” of substances. Substances are “beings persisting by

themselves.” Apart from composition, which is “only a contingent relation,” substances “must subsist.”

Step Five: If we assume with the thesis that substances exist, however, and if we in addition grant that it is

possible to remove composition in thought, then it must be the case that once we remove composition in

thought, something is “left over that subsists without any composition, that is, the simple.” In Kant’s

words: “From this it follows immediately that all things in the world are simple beings, that composition

is only an external state [äußerer Zustand] of these beings” (CPR A 436/B 464). The assumption with

which we began in Step One is false, and its contradictory, the thesis, is thus demonstrated to be true.

Returning our attention to Hegel’s critique, he tells us that Kant’s proof for the thesis of this antinomy is

“entirely correct” but a “tautological superfluity [tautologische Überfluss]” (SL 193/WL I 220). The

conclusion of the proof states that all things in the world are simple beings and that composition is a

merely a “contingent” or “external state” of substances. In Hegel’s words: “Here we see…the contingency

of composition put forward as a consequence after it had already been introduced parenthetically and

used in the proof” (SL 194/WL I 221). No doubt, Hegel has in mind Kant’s parenthetical note in what I

identified as Step Four, where he defines composition as “only a contingent relation” of substances.

Hegel’s charge is that composition is simply defined in the proof as not “in and for itself one” but as an

“external” collection of other things. Composition is in other words assumed to be dependent on the

existence of prior self-subsistent parts, and this assumption is not itself defended. Substance is

presupposed to be what remains, what is self-subsistent, while composition is defined as an accidental

property. Given these definitions, Hegel claims, there is no need to go to

the trouble of providing a proof. “[T]he claim of the simplicity of parts,” in his words, is “only tautological”

(SL 194/WL I 221). As he writes,

the proof…is at fault not so much for sophism [Blendwerk] as for its unnecessary tortuous complexity

[Geschrobenheit], which serves only to provide the external form of a proof rather than make transparent

the fact that what was supposed to appear as a consequence, is in fact given in parenthesis as that upon

which the proof hinges. We are given absolutely no proof, but only a presupposition [Voraussetzung].

(SL 194f./WL I 222)

Hegel’s charge, then, is that proof is “tautological” because the truth of the conclusion is presupposed in

the proof’s premises.

It would seem, however, that a defense of Kant in response to this charge is ready at hand. As some have

suggested, Hegel appears to ignore the fact that the proofs Kant lays out in the Critique—not just of the

thesis of the Second Antinomy but of the arguments of all four antinomies—are not his.17 As we observed

earlier, Kant underscores the “unavoidable” and “entirely natural” character of the conflicts (CPR B

433f./A 407). He never characterizes the cosmological conflicts as his own invention; he represents them,

instead, as standing for “pure empiricism” or “Epicureanism,” on the one side, and for “Platonism” or the

“dogmatism of pure reason,” on the other (CPR A 466, 471f./B 494, 499f.). So even if we grant with Hegel

that the proofs are “tautological superfluities,” it cannot be claimed that it is Kantwho is guilty of

tautology.

But this effort to come to Kant’s rescue is ultimately unsatisfactory. If we can demonstrate how, we can

perhaps win for Hegel’s critique a more sympathetic hearing. Two points are worth emphasizing here:

First, while it is true that Kant never claims that the arguments are his own invention, he affirms the view

that their long history reveals an important feature of the nature of reason itself. The antinomies concern,

in his words, “not an arbitrary question that one might raise only at one’s option, but one thatevery

human reason must necessarily come up against in the course of its progress” (CPR B 449/A 422;

emphasis added). Antinomy, he furthermore tells us, is a “wholly natural antithetic…into which reason

falls of itself and indeed unavoidably” (CPR B 433f./A 407). Indeed, Kant predicts that the conflicts will

persist even after he has exposed the illusion upon which they rest (CPR A 422/B 449f.).

Second, while it is true that Kant finds the arguments defective because of their commitment to

transcendental realism, it is not the case that he judges the arguments

wholly unacceptable. As we noted in section 6.1, he identifies the proofs on both sides as “well grounded”

(CPR B 535/A 507). Each of the arguments, in his words, “is not only without contradiction in itself but

even meets with conditions of its necessity in the nature of reason itself” (CPR A 421/B 449).

It is therefore inaccurate to suggest that in presenting the proofs of the four antinomies, Kant is simply

recording the arguments of others and is completely neutral with regard to their respective merits. Taken

as they are—in abstraction from the illusion upon which they are based—the theses and antitheses of the

arguments are contradictories, on his account. Kant identifies the arguments as contradictories because

he accepts the definitions of key concepts on which the arguments depend. Did he not accept the

definitions as they are, and did he not find the arguments “well grounded,” he would have had no reason

to judge the antinomies a serious threat to the vocation of reason.

6.3 Hegel’s critique revisited

A careful look at Hegel’s discussion in the Science of Logic of Kant’s treatment of the antinomies reveals

that his complaint about the tautological nature of the proofs is indeed not merely directed at features

internal to the arguments themselves. Hegel in addition seeks to convince us that Kant’s reasoning is

tautological in some way. In some way, Kant’s treatment of the antinomies is question-begging and as

such insufficiently critical.

An important piece of evidence in support of this reading is Hegel’s remark in the Logic that Kant’s

solution to the antinomies, “presupposes that cognition has no other forms of thought than finite

categories” (SL 191/WL I 216). Commenting on the Second Antinomy in particular, Hegel complains that

the argument begins, on the side of the thesis, with the “one-sided” assertion of discreteness, and on the

side of the antithesis, with the equally “one-sided” assertion of continuity or infinite divisibility (SL

190/WL I 216). The “whole antinomy,” he writes, “reduces to the separation of the two moments of

quantity and the direct assertion of them as absolutely separate” (SL 197/WL I 225).18 “The Kantian

antinomies,” in his words, “contain nothing more than the entirely simple categorical assertion of each of

the two opposed moments of a determination, each taken as for itself isolated from the other” (SL 192/WL

I 218).

In these remarks, Hegel suggests that the question-begging nature of Kant’s discussion is tied to his

failure to entertain the possibility that the opposed concepts could be understood as something other than

“finite categories.” It is because Kant accepts the definitions according to which each of the concepts is

“one-sided,” that he identifies the arguments as contradictories. His treatment of the arguments reveals

itself to be uncritical, in Hegel’s view, in just this respect. With regard to the Second Antinomy,

Kant does not consider the possibility that, rather than “absolutely separate,” “the moment of the atom is

contained in continuity itself” (SL 197/WL I 225). Kant does not consider this possibility, Hegel suggests

in the Encyclopaedia Logic, because of his more general failure to appreciate that, “antinomy finds

itself…in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts and ideas [Vorstellungen, Begriffen und

Ideen]” (EL § 48).

In taking for granted that the concepts of discreteness and continuity must be understood as “absolutely

separate,” Kant thus reveals his commitment to “finite categories.” He rules out from the start what Hegel

sometimes refers to as the “dialectical” nature of concepts.19 Were we to suppose instead that, as Hegel

says, “contradiction is in everything that surrounds us [alles was uns umgibt],” we would not be inclined

to judge the antinomies a threat to the employment of reason (EL § 81A1). We would not need to direct

our efforts, then, to discovering a solution for the arguments. Kant’s search for a solution to the conflicts;

his conviction (perhaps because of his “tenderness for things of the world”) that the solution must be

“subjective” and thus expose a fallacy of reason; his purely negative result, that is, his discovery that we

solve the conflicts by denying that we can know things in themselves—all of this is predicated, in Hegel’s

view, on a failure to appreciate the “true and positive meaning” of the arguments. Their “true and positive

meaning,” Hegel writes, is that “everything real contains in itself contradictory determinations” (EL § 48–

48A).20

6.4 Kant’s question-begging treatment of the Third

Antinomy

I have argued that Hegel’s charge of “tautology” is directed, not just at the individual proofs for the theses

and antitheses of the four antinomies, but (and more significantly for our purposes) at Kant’s own

treatment of the arguments as well. In particular, Hegel’s charge is directed at Kant’s understanding of

key concepts of the conflicts and at his insistence that the conflicts demand a solution. I provide further

evidence in

defense of this interpretation in this section. Before turning directly to that task, however, I want to

propose the following reformulation of Hegel’s critique: For Hegel, Kant’s treatment of the antinomial

conflicts is uncritical or question-begging in that it reflects his own philosophical allegiances; it reveals his

ties to a particular intellectual tradition. Kant’s treatment of the arguments reflects these allegiances

despite his insistence that, in employing his skeptical method, his role is that of an “impartial referee.”

Kant’s philosophical preferences are evident in the solutions to the conflicts he does not consider. In the

case of the Second Antinomy, he does not consider the possibility that, “the moment of the atom is

contained in continuity itself” (SL 197/WL I 225). In the case of the Third Antinomy, it does not occur to

him that, rather than absolutely opposed, neither freedom nor necessity “has any truth if separated from

the other” (EL § 48A). Because of his commitment to “finite categories,” Kant does not entertain the

possibility that, in Hegel’s words, our comprehension of an object amounts to our becoming “conscious of

it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations” (EL § 48A).21

I turn my attention in this section to the Third Antinomy because it is with reference to that argument

that I can most effectively provide further support for the interpretation I have just laid out. Once again,

we will see that Hegel discovers uncritical elements in Kant’s analysis of the arguments.

As in the case of all four antinomies, Kant claims that the two sides of the Third Antinomy are locked in

contradiction. The antithesis asserts that, “everything in the world takes place solely in accordance with

laws of nature” (CPR A 445/B 473). The thesis asserts the contradictory of the antithesis. It claims that in

addition to a causality of nature, there is a “causality through freedom” (CPR A 444/B 472). As with all

four antinomies, Kant holds that it is possible to demonstrate the merely dialectical or illusory nature of

the opposition by identifying the false assumption upon which each side rests. The opposition turns out to

be merely dialectical, in his view, because each side is committed to the illusion that we can know things

in themselves. Each side, in other words, is committed to transcendental realism.

Although Kant is convinced that the thesis and antithesis of the Third Antinomy are defective for the

above-mentioned reason, he finds the claims of both sides otherwise

compelling. We can see that this is so if we simply compare the claims of both sides of this conflict with

similar assumptions he defends in the first Critique. Notice, first, that if we remove the transcendental

realist commitment underlying the antithesis of the Third Antinomy, what remains is a principle Kant

argues for in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique as a necessary condition of possible experience:

the principle he refers to as the “Second Analogy.” The Second Analogy, like the antithesis of the Third

Antinomy, affirms the causality of nature. It states that everything that happens in nature occurs, “in

accordance with the law of the connection of cause and effect” (CPR B 232/A 189). The only respect in

which the Second Analogy differs from the antithesis of the Third Antinomy is that it does not in addition

claim that, “there is no other causality than that in accordance with laws of nature” (CPR A 444/B 472).

Unlike the antithesis of the Third Antinomy, that is, the Second Analogy does not endorse the view that

our experience of nature is the only form of experience there is. The Second Analogy is identical to the

antithesis of the Third Antinomy, then, minus the latter’s transcendental realist assumption that our

knowledge of appearances is in effect equivalent to knowledge of things in themselves.22

Kant is equally committed to the thesis side of the Third Antinomy. His defense of a causality of freedom

is already evident in his Prefaces to the first Critique, where he outlines his general objectives in that work.

A key motivation of his entire Critical project, he tells us there, is to save freedom (CPR B xxvii–xxx). The

freedom he sets out to save, moreover, is in essential respects identical to the freedom defended in the

thesis of the Third Antinomy. It is a “spontaneous” form of causality, a capacity to begin a state “from

itself” without standing “under another cause determining it in time according with the law of nature”

(CPR A 533/B 561).23 This freedom is distinct from the freedom defended in the thesis of the Third

Antinomy only in that it is not assumed to be a possible object of our knowledge. Kant argues that a

“spontaneous” form of causality is a necessary idea of reason; without it, in his view, we would have no

grounds for practical imputation.24 This particular form of freedom must therefore be saved. But although

this special causality of freedom is a necessary idea, we could not possibly encounter it in experience. It is

not a possible object of our knowledge.

The point worth emphasizing, again, is that Kant’s solution to the Third Antinomy does not involve a

wholesale repudiation of the claims of the thesis and the antithesis. He exposes the illusion of their

transcendental realist commitment, but he otherwise accepts the claims of the two sides as well as the

definitions upon which they rest. His solution to the conflict does not call for revision, then, in our

understanding of what is implied by the commitment of the antithesis to a causality of nature. His

solution

merely exposes the illusion underlying the assumption that a causality of nature is the only form of

causality there is. Nor does his solution to the Third Antinomy require us to revise the definition of

freedom, expressed in the thesis as a “spontaneous” form, a causality, a capacity to initiate a causal series

from a standpoint outside time. Far from requiring revision in this idea of freedom, Kant insists upon its

necessity as a condition of practical imputation. His strategy for defending or saving that freedom

requires only that we reject the transcendental realist assumption that it refers to an object we could

possibly experience or know.

6.5 The Kantian philosophy as a “cushion” for the

“indolence of thought”

The representation of Hegel’s critique I have just outlined might be taken to imply that his complaint

against Kant amounts to no more than this: The defect of Kant’s treatment of the antinomies is that it

does not enjoy the benefit of a Hegelian or dialectical understanding of the arguments’ key concepts. Kant

should have recognized the “immanent plasticity” of all our concepts (SL 49/WL I 30); he should have

understood, as Hegel says, that contradiction is in everything. In the case of the Second Antinomy, he

should have acknowledged that, rather than “absolutely separate,” “the moment of the atom is contained

in continuity itself.” In the case of the Third Antinomy, he should have recognized that neither freedom

nor necessity “has any truth if separated from the other” and that “the truth of necessity is freedom” (EL

§§ 48A, 158). According to this line of interpretation, Hegel is only interested in Kant’s treatment of the

antinomies because it offers him an occasion to voice his dissatisfaction with some particular Kantian

doctrines. It allows him to highlight limitations, for instance, in Kant’s account of the composition of

substance and of the nature of human freedom.

Hegel clearly regarded Kant’s treatment of the cosmological arguments as defective in the above-

mentioned respects. He was clearly convinced that philosophy in his own time had progressed beyond

Kant’s rigid oppositions and had come to embrace a superior understanding of, among other things, the

composition of substance and the nature of human freedom. Hegel indeed goes to great pains to defend

the superiority of these views in his various works.

Nonetheless, there is a further, and I think deeper, point to his critical remarks. In commenting on Kant’s

treatment of the cosmological arguments, Hegel means not just to take aim at Kant’s particular

metaphysical views (although this is surely one of his objectives). He, in addition, wishes to direct our

attention to the form of Kant’s arguments, that is, to their invariably question-begging character. As we

saw, Hegel holds that in considering the arguments of the antinomies to be well grounded and in

accepting the definitions of key concepts as they are, Kant lays bare his own philosophical commitments.

Regarding the antithesis side of the arguments, he reveals his

adherence to the empiricist conception of nature as a realm without freedom, a realm entirely determined

by causal mechanical laws, a realm that (as we saw in Chapter Two) Hegel characterizes as “essentially

determined and lifeless” (D 163, 139/69, 50).25 Regarding the side of the thesis, Kant presupposes that if

there is to be a first cause or unconditioned condition of the series of appearances, it must lie outside the

series itself. A causality of freedom is possible, he assumes, only if it is “transcendental,” only if it derives

from a standpoint outside time. Kant doesn’t subject these assumptions to question. He takes for granted

that, “[o]ne can think of causality with respect to what happens in only two ways, either according to

nature or from freedom” (CPR A 532/B 560; emphasis added). Kant in addition presupposes that the two

concepts of causality must be contradictories. It doesn’t occur to him that neither freedom nor necessity

“has any truth if separated from the other.” Nor does he imagine that the crisis he perceives to be

occasioned by the antinomies might be a consequence of assumptions he doesnot call into question.26

As I suggested in my introduction to this chapter, Hegel calls attention to the question-begging nature of

Kant’s discussions because he wishes to convey a message about the conditions of human reflection. The

message is not that Kant’s treatment of the cosmological arguments should have been free of unexamined

presuppositions and therefore should have been in that respect more consistently critical. Hegel’s aim, in

other words, is not to suggest that Kant is at fault for having allowed his reflections on the arguments to

be guided by his allegiance to a certain version of empiricism, on the one hand, and a certain version of

rationalism, on the other. Nor is Hegel’s message, even, that Kant’s treatment should not have reflected

his commitment to finite categories. In highlighting the questions Kant begs, Hegel cannot have had these

objectives in mind. As we know from our discussion in Chapter Five, Hegel holds that in thinking or in

undertaking critique, we cannot but take some definitions for granted, definitions we imagine to express

the “accepted and familiar” “object and aim” of our science (SL 49/WL I 42).27In beginning any inquiry,

that is, we invariably “

make a presupposition” (EL § 1). We make a presupposition, because it is not possible for us to abstract to

a standpoint that is entirely external or independent from common reality. In this respect, every starting

point is a “result,” as he says (EL § 13).

The problem, then, is not that Kant begs the question in his treatment of the arguments of the antinomies

(or in his derivations of particular duties from the categorical imperative, or in his account of the

composition of substance, and so forth). The problem, instead, is that Kant does not appreciate the

question-begging nature of his arguments. Expressed in another way, the problem is with the expectations

Kant brings to his critical reflections. These expectations are revealed, for example, in his unyielding

commitment to finite categories. In the context of the Third Antinomy, they are revealed in his insistence

that there are only two kinds of causality and that these must be contradictories. Kant’s expectations are

furthermore apparent in his assumption that since the causalities of nature and of freedom are

contradictories, their opposition represents a potential threat to reason, and hence a problem that must

be solved. He holds that these assumptions exhaust the possible options. It does not occur to him that his

own analysis of the conflicts is governed by presuppositions that escape his critical scrutiny.

The fact that Kant does not appreciate the question-begging character of his arguments is particularly

evident, Hegel believes, in the status he awards the results of his critical inquiries. For Kant, a critical

examination of the cosmological conflicts can lead to the discovery of features of human reason that are

absolutely fixed, features that have universal and necessary validity. Critique can lead to the discovery,

once and for all, of the proper objects and absolute limits of our knowledge. Kant is confident about all

this only because he is insufficiently sensitive to conditions of his own philosophizing. He believes he can

know before he knows. He is convinced that as a critical thinker he can assume the role of a wholly

impartial referee.

Hegel’s message, then, is not that Kant’s treatment of the antinomies should have been presuppositionless.

The message is rather that Kant was wrong in expecting that his analysis could be presuppositionless.

Kant should not have assumed that, in undertaking critique, he could make the conditions governing his

own philosophizing completely transparent. He should not have supposed it possible to perform critique

from a vantage point wholly on the “other side” of content. He should therefore not have expected that his

critical reflections would yield timeless truths, truths revealing the nature and limits of human reason

once and for all. Hegel never calls into question the sincerity of Kant’s efforts to carry out his critical

inquiries in a thoroughly rigorous and self-conscious manner. But he does charge Kant with a certain

“indolence”—an indolence or laziness of thought that, for all its noble intensions, is insufficiently self-

conscious or self-critical, and “comforts itself with the conviction that everything is already proved and

settled [bewiesen und abgetan]” (SL 62n./WL I 59n.).

If our analysis in these chapters is accurate, it suggests that the same account of the powers of thought

that Hegel holds responsible for the subjectivity of Kant’s idealism is

also responsible for what he takes to be Kant’s unrealistic estimation of the achievements of critique. The

same account of the powers and forms of thought that leaves us no means of avoiding “contingency” in the

relation between our concepts and things, is also at the basis of Kant’s claim to have gained insight into

immutable features of our faculties of thinking and knowing. Despite Kant’s repeated warnings against

the speculative flights of reason, despite his unwavering insistence upon modesty in our estimation of our

cognitive powers, he was nonetheless too confident in the resources of critique. He was too confident in

his own capacity as a critical thinker to abstract to a standpoint wholly “external” to “common reality.”

Notes:

(1) Hegel makes this charge, for example, in § 135 of his 1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right. See also

his discussion in his Natural Law essay of 1802–3 (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungen des

Naturrechts, seine Stelle in der praktischen Philosophie und sein Verhältnis zu den positiven

Rechtswissenschaften), NL 77f./461f.).

(2) On Kant’s “uncritical” derivation of the categories, see also SL 51/WL I 46, SL 595/WL II 268f. As

Stephen Houlgate notes, Hegel complains, not just that Kant borrows the forms of judgment from

traditional (Aristotelean) formal logic, but that he also takes over from traditional logic the assumption

that the form of judgment is a form of truth. See Houlgate’s discussion in The Opening of Hegel’s “Logic,”

13–16. For a further rich analysis of assumptions Hegel believes Kant inherits from traditional or

“common” logic, see Robert Hanna, “From an Ontological Point of View: Hegel’s Critique of the Common

Logic,” The Review of Metaphysics 40 (1986): 305–38.

(3) To fill in the details of this critique a bit: Hegel is responding to Kant’s claim in Proposition 5 of the

Second Chapter of his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science that although both attraction and

repulsion are “equally” forces belonging to the “concept of matter,” our sensation of objects of outer

intuition justifies the conclusion that only repulsion (but not attraction) is “immediately” contained in

that concept (MFNS 508–10). What Hegel argues is that our sensation of outer objects offers no more

evidence in favor of matter’s repelling force than of its tendency to offer resistance when pulled apart.

Kant’s differential treatment of the status of the forces of attraction and repulsion demonstrates, then,

that despite his effort to provide an alternative to the Newtonian conception of matter, he remains

committed to the Newtonian definition of matter as essentially impenetrability. Kant’s Newtonianism

thus determines what he takes the data of sensation to reveal. See Hegel’s discussion in the “Attraction

and Repulsion” section of the Science of Logic, SL 174–184/WL I 195–208. I lay out these issues in,

“Hegel’s Critique of Kant on Matter and the Forces,” Proceedings for the VIII. Internationaler Kant-

Kongreß, vol. 1, part 3 (1996), 963–72.

(4) Preface to the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (G 389).

(5) Preface to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (PR 21/26).

(6) Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759–99, transl. and ed. Arnulf Zweig (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1967), 252. In Akademie volume XII, 255.

(7) Kant, in addition, asserts that there are “only four” sets of antinomies corresponding to “the four

headings of the categories” (CPR A 415/B 442).

(8) “[A]ppearances are considered here as given, and reason demands the absolute completeness of the

conditions of their possibility” (CPR B 443/A 416).

(9) See also CPR B 529/A 501 where Kant writes that each side is “justified [eine Recht hat].” At CPR A

421/B 449, he tells us that each side rests on “valid and necessary grounds [gültige und notwendige

Gründe].”

(10) See also Prolegomena 338: “all the metaphysical art of the most subtle distinction cannot prevent this

opposition.” A bit further on, he writes that the antinomy is “unavoidable and never ceasing” (Proleg 339).

(11) Kant says of the antinomies that they are “not arbitrarily invented but founded in the nature of human

reason” (Proleg 339). See also his remark at CPR 〈B〉 24.

(12) Kant refers to the thesis of the Second Antinomy, for example, as that of the “monadists” or

“Leibnizians” (CPR A 439–442/B 467–470). For a discussion of reasons for not interpreting Kant as

narrowly preoccupied with the views of Leibniz and Newton in his treatment of the antinomies,

seeMichelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2001), 182ff.

(13) In his words, the “empirical intuition” of such an object would contain, “absolutely no manifold whose

elements are external to one another and bound into a unity” (CPR A 438/B 466).

(14) For another expression of praise, see SL 190/WL I 216.

(15) In the Science of Logic, Hegel puts the point in this way: “It shows an excessive tenderness for the

world to remove contradiction from it and then to transfer the contradiction to spirit, to reason, where it

is allowed to remain unresolved” (SL 236f./WL I 276). See for similar remarks, SL 191/WL I 217. In

his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that, according to Kant, it would be “a pity, if

[things] contradicted themselves” (LHP 451/VGP III 359).

(16) Sometimes Hegel puts the point by saying that every “concept [Begriff]” is a unity containing opposed

determinations (see e.g. SL 191/WL I 217). At EL § 48, he writes that, “antinomy finds itself…in all objects

of all kinds, in all representations [Vorstellungen], concepts and ideas.” For further similar passages, see

EL § 81A1; SL 238/WL I 276.

(17) This defense of Kant is put forward, for example, by Henry Allison. According to Allison, Kant is not

presenting his “own arguments”; rather, he is presenting arguments of the “rational cosmologist” who is

“in the grip of transcendental illusion.” In Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and

Defense, 503, note 16. The point that the arguments of both sides of the antinomies are not Kant’s but

rather those of his transcendental realist opponents is also defended by Martial Gueroult in his paper,

“Hegels Urteil über die Antithetik der Reinen Vernunft,” in Seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels,

ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 287. I discuss the arguments

of Allison and Gueroult beginning in section II of my article, “Hegel’s Strategy and Critique of Kant’s

Mathematical Antinomies,” History of Philosophical Quarterly 8, no. 4 (October 1991), 423–40.

(18) Hegel makes a similar comment about Kant’s treatment of the First Antinomy: “This simple, ordinary

dialectic rests on holding fast to the opposition of being and nothing” (SL 103/WL I 109).

(19) Hegel tells us at EL § 81, for example, that dialectic is the “true nature” of our “thought determinations

[Verstandsbestimmungen].”

(20) I have just implied that when Hegel complains that Kant’s treatment of the antinomies is limited by

his “tenderness for things of the world,” his point is this: Kant is unwilling to grant that antinomy is in

“everything real.” This is why Kant’s solution has to be “subjective”; he must in other words locate the

source of the contradictions in reason. There is more to be said, however, regarding Hegel’s claim that

Kant’s discussion of the arguments is limited because of his “tenderness for things of the world.” Hegel

also seems to imply by this that Kant’s treatment of the arguments suffers from its preoccupation with the

question of the concrete application of the arguments. That is, Kant’s chief concern is to determine

whether the arguments on both sides make claims that are valid for objects of experience. He ultimately

judges the arguments deficient because their claims fail in this respect. One result of Kant’s narrow focus

on concrete application, Hegel says, is that the “content of the thought, on its own account, doesn’t come

under discussion” (EL § 47). To consider antinomy in its “purity,” Hegel writes in the Logic, “the

determinations of thought must not be taken in their application to and entanglement in the general idea

of the world, of space, time, matter, etc.” (SL 192/WL I 217; emphasis added).

(21) Along these same lines, it might also be argued that Kant’s analysis of the arguments reflects his

philosophical preferences in the following sense: He brings to his consideration of the arguments what he

calls “transcendental” versus merely “logical” reflection (CPR A 269/B 325). The task of transcendental

reflection, according to Kant, is to determine the kind of object to which our knowledge claims refer; it

determines whether our object is an object of pure understanding or an object given in empirical intuition.

It might be argued, then, that in relying on the resources of transcendental reflection, Kant’s treatment of

the antinomies presupposes this distinction between two kinds of object. His treatment in other words

presupposes his transcendental idealist distinction between things in themselves and appearances. I

discuss this line of criticism in, “Hegel on Kant’s Antinomies and Distinction Between General and

Transcendental Logic,” Monist 74, no. 3 (July 1991), 403–20. The view that Kant presupposes the validity

of transcendental idealism in his treatment of the antinomies is defended by Paul Guyer in Kant and the

Claim of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 410f.

(22) Kant identifies the antithesis of the Third Antinomy as a principle of empiricism that has become

“dogmatic” because it assumes that the causality of nature is the only form of causality there is. The

antithesis, in his words, “boldly denies whatever lies beyond the sphere of its intuitive cognitions” (CPR A

471/B 499).

(23) See also CPR B xxviii where Kant refers to freedom as a non-temporal form of determination.

(24) Regarding the connection between transcendental freedom and practical imputation, see especially

Kant’s discussion at CPR A 533f./B 561f.

(25) See Chapter Two, section 2.4. The “empiricist,” Hegel claims, treats nature as a “pure objective” versus

as “subject-object” or as “identity of concept and being” (D 163/69). Hegel contrasts this “empiricist”

conception with the view of nature as an “immanent ideality,” as self-determining versus determined by a

form that is “external” (D 165f./70f.).

(26) In his discussion of the Third Antinomy, Paul Franks also emphasizes the point that Kant accepts only

“one solution” to the conflict. As Franks puts it, Kant’s solution requires ensuring the “heterogeneity of

the absolute unconditioned to every member of the series of conditions.” That is, Kant’s solution requires

us to grant that the absolute or unconditioned conditioned lies outside the series of appearances. Precisely

because the unconditioned condition (in this case, transcendental freedom) has its ground outside the

series of appearances, outside the realm of the empirical, it does not contradict the laws governing the

realm of the empirical. Franks explores another possible solution to the conflict, namely, Jacobi’s

“Spinozistic” solution, according to which the absolute or unconditioned condition is not “transcendent”

to the empirical series as a whole but “immanent within the series as a whole.” See Franks, All or Nothing:

Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2005), 102f.

(27) The passage in full: “the definition with which any science makes an absolute beginning cannot

contain anything other than the precise and correct expression of what is imagined to be

the acceptedand familiar object and aim of the science” (SL 49; WL I 42; first emphasis added).

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Index

absolute, the 64, 67, 78, 94, 131

knowledge of 72, 97 n.

agency 2–3 see also freedom

Allison, Henry

20 n., 28 n., 30 n., 31 n., 39 n., 73 n., 102 n., 172 n.

Ameriks, Karl 72 n.

antinomy

of reason 34, 36–8, 46, 135, 143, 166–80

of teleological judgment 38–40

appearance 1, 5, 9 n., 10, 15, 28, 83, 114

deflationary interpretation of 73, 92

empiricist account of 74–5

Kant’s definition of 10, 34–5, 35 n., 74–5, 83 n.

versus thing in itself 5 n., 35, 74–

5, 79 n., 160, 175 n. see also restriction

thesis; thing in itself

apperception

empirical versus transcendental 103–4

as the “I think,” 99–118, 121–3

synthetic unity of 18, 99–118, 123 see also self-

consciousness; subjectivity

Aquila, Richard 51 n., 55 n.

artifact 49–50

autonomy, see freedom

Baum, Manfred

19 n., 33 n., 55 n., 113 n., 114 n., 116 n.

Beiser, Frederick C. 15 n., 64 n., 72 n., 74 n.

Bird, Graham 54 n., 73 n.

Bristow, William 92 n.

Carson, Emily 147 n.

categorical imperative 1–7, 164

categories

as a priori 11, 19, 75–6, 87–

8, 96 n., 100, 103, 139

contingency of 12, 22 n., 73, 76, 119

as dialectical 12, 174

as empty 79n.

as finite 173–9

and forms of judgment 7, 164

subjectivity of 73, 136

transcendental versus empirical deduction of

76, 93, 100, 139–40 see also concepts

causality

category of 28, 144

of freedom versus nature 6, 13, 36, 168, 175–9

of purposes 31, 33, 39, 48–55, 54, 58, 73

reciprocal 50–2, 63, 94

spontaneous 5, 13, 36, 39, 168, 176

character, empirical versus intelligible 4–6

cognition

as a means 131–7

mathematical 18 n., 143–4 see also intellect

concepts

as analytic (or discursive) universals 18–

20, 22, 26, 30, 32, 41, 45, 72, 86 n.

as contingently related to objects 21, 24, 30, 82–

8, 159, 180

empirical 22 n., 26–7

as empty 10, 99, 118–22, 137–40

as external 11, 83, 88, 118, 120, 125, 130, 137–

40, 150–5, 159–60

heuristic 28 n.

versus intuitions 16–23

plasticity of 159, 165, 177

as subjective 73, 136, 147

as synthetic universals 18–20, 32, 33–

40, 45, 52, 55, 126

consciousness, natural (or ordinary) 131–

9, 140, 150, 160

contradiction, dialectical versus genuine 167–

9 see also antinomy

Copernican revolution 84, 124, 135

cosmological conflict, see antinomy

critique

as exercise in self-knowledge 142–3

Hegel’s conception of 147–57

Kant’s conception of 134–5, 140–7, 149–51

in Locke and Kant 93, 133–4

standpoint of 165, 179–80

Descartes, René 78, 78 n., 142

method of 156

Dewey, John 128

dialectical inference, see antinomy

dualism, see heterogeneity, of concepts and

intuitions

Düsing, Klaus 15 n., 19 n., 50 n., 52 n.

empirical character, see character, empirical

versus intelligible

empiricism

Epicurean 167, 172

Hegel’s reductive 9, 57, 128

of Hume 75, 77, 81, 88–92, 94, 123

as implying skepticism 71, 81, 84, 88–97, 136

of Kant 60, 71, 76, 77–92, 178

of Locke 75, 77, 81–2, 88–92, 123

empty formalism, 1–7, 165

Epicureanism, see empiricism

epigenesis 52

explanation, mechanical versus teleological 39–

41, 44, 49, 50–3, 59, 63, 66–7

Feuerbach, Ludwig 9 n.

Fichte, J. G.

and empirical psychology 75–8

and the metaphysics of subjectivity 77–

82, 130, 156 n.

and mishandling nature 60–3

pessimism of 6 n.

subjective idealism of 48, 60–2, 66–7, 126

finitude

of cognition 77–82, 94

of concepts 72 n.

Enlightenment philosophers of 97

human 4, 6

of Kant’s philosophy 71–82, 107

of reason 4 n., 43, 78–82

formalism

of Kant’s practical philosophy 1–7

of Kant’s theoretical philosophy 7, 10–11, 165

Forster, Michael 12 n., 137 n., 157 n.

Förster, Eckhart 16 n., 19 n., 20 n., 42 n., 61 n.

Franks, Paul 178 n.

freedom

Hegel’s conception of 160–3

laws of 4, 5

realm of 6

of the will 5 n., 23 see also causality

Friedman, Michael 28 n.

Garve, Christian 166

God 20 n., 23, 29, 32, 33 n., 96–7, 160

cognition of 97, 80, 133 see also supreme being

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 15, 20, 42, 61

Ginsborg, Hannah 31 n., 50 n., 53 n.

Graeser, Andreas 134 n.

Gueroult, Martin 172 n.

Guyer, Paul

17 n., 19 n., 26 n., 31 n., 51 n., 72 n., 107 n., 175 n.

Hahn, Songsuk Susan 12 n., 61 n.

Hanna, Robert 164 n.

harmony

pre-established 52 see also identity

Harris, H.S. 15 n., 64 n.

Henrich, Dieter 106 n.

heterogeneity, of concepts and intuitions

8, 11, 16, 44–6, 56–9, 61–2, 68, 82–5

Hegel on avoiding 94–6, 111, 161

Hintikka, Jaakko 17 n.

Horstmann, Rolf-Peter 62 n., 73 n., 92 n.

Houlgate, Stephen 12 n., 156 n., 164 n.

human nature

empirical 3–4

intelligible (or rational) 3–5 see

also character, empirical versus intelligible

Hume, David

and concept empiricism 75, 77, 81, 123

as critic of Locke 90, 136

and metaphysics of subjectivity 78, 91–4, 136

on the principle of permanence 144–5

and skepticism 77, 81, 84, 88–92, 95, 99–

100, 105, 123, 136

and thesis of absolute opposition 71–2, 92

hylozoism 51

idea

dialectical 36 see also antinomy

of reason 19 n., 20, 28 n., 33–6, 46 n., 59

speculative 99, 108–9, 122

idealism

absolute or genuine (or Hegel’s) 9 n., 10–11, 58–

9, 98, 119, 122, 125

empirical 71

Fichte’s transcendental 60–2, 67 n.

Kant’s transcendental 35–7, 60–2, 67 n., 71–

6, 81, 84, 93, 169

subjective 10, 47, 61–2, 67 n., 68–71, 71–

6, 84, 93–5, 118–26, 127 n., 128–30, 159–60, 179

identity

of concept and being 8, 13, 84, 119, 160

principle of 61

of Schelling’s absolute 61–2, 64 n., 68

of universal and particular 31–3, 43–7, 52–

67, 70

illusion, dialectical 36 see also antinomy

imagination

productive (or transcendental) 108–18, 122

reproductive 114

intellect

archetypal (or intuitive) 8–10, 14–15, 15 n., 16–

23, 20, 23, 32, 33 n., 40–7, 52–

5, 85, 86 n., 87n., 93, 160

discursive 8–10, 14–15, 16–24, 30, 33–

44, 46 n., 58, 72, 85, 108, 158 see also cognition

intelligence, science of 47, 64–7, 126

intelligible character, see character, empirical

versus intelligible

internalism 96, 129–30

intuition

as blind 10, 98, 111 n., 117–19, 127 n.

formal 111–17

forms of 17, 34–5, 75, 83, 102, 108–

18, 141 n., 146 n.

as immediately related to objects 17

intellectual versus sensible 16–23, 53, 79, 81, 86

as singular 17, 90, 146

Jacobi, Friedrich 75, 77–

82, 94, 115, 130, 156, 178

judgment

determinative 30

forms of 7, 164

reflective 30–1, 41–2, 98 n.

synthetic a priori 99–103

Kitcher, Patricia 113 n.

laws

empirical 27, 31–2

mechanical versus teleological 38–9, 48–

50, 53, 178 see also maxims; principles

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 8, 9, 99, 146, 167

Locke, John

as empirical idealist 71–5

as engaging in critique 76, 93, 135, 139

on origin of concepts 9, 79, 86, 88, 90 n.

as realist 86–90, 133–4 see also metaphysics, of

subjectivity

logic, Aristotelean 152 n.

logical possibility, see possibility, logical versus

real

Longuenesse, Béatrice 19 n., 96 n., 113 n.

McCarney, Joseph 12–13 n., 158 n.

McDowell, John 13 n., 73 n., 127 n., 161 n.

Makkreel, Rudolf A. 20 n., 50 n.

Marx, Karl 9 n.

maxims

logical 24–7, 30

regulative 27–8, 38–9, 52, 54, 58–9, 98 n.

transcendental 25–7 see also laws; principles

mechanical explanation, see explanation,

mechanical versus teleological

mechanism of nature 48–9, 55 n., 59 n., 176 see

also causality

Meerbote, Ralf 23 n., 30 n.

metaphysics

crisis of 36, 40, 46, 93 n., 144, 151–2, 178

Kant’s definition of 144 n.

of subjectivity 71–97, 130, 136, 160

monadism 167 n.

nature

empiricist conception of 60, 66, 68

as immanent ideality 10, 61–2, 65, 128

as purposive, see purposiveness of nature

science of 47, 64–7, 100, 126

unity of, see systematic unity of nature see

also causality

Newton, Isaac 146, 164–7

noumenon, see thing in itself

occasionalism 52

O’Neill, Onora 4 n.

opposition, absolute, see heterogeneity, of

concepts and intuitions

organism

as cause and effect of itself 49–50, 68, 126

as model of object of intuitive intellect’s

knowledge 55

as natural product (or purpose) 48–52

Parsons, Charles 17 n.

phenomenon, see appearance

Pinkard, Terry 12 n., 13 n., 64 n., 72 n., 157 n.

Pippin, Robert 12 n., 16 n., 47 n., 62 n., 96 n.–97

n., 127 n., 162 n.

Plato 19

Platonism, see rationalism

Pluhar, Werner S. 19 n.

Popper, Karl 9 n.

possibility, logical versus real 21, 35, 56, 100, 147

principles

constitutive versus regulative 27–9, 38–

9, 140, 141 n.

heuristic 32, 53 n.

objective versus subjective 27, 31–2

practical 145

of purposiveness 32–2, 53 n.

of reason 26 n., 27–8, 32, 144

transcendental 27, 30–1 see also laws; maxims

purpose

concept of 33

natural 48–52 see also purposiveness of nature

purposiveness of nature 24–33, 48–52

rationalism

Hegel’s reductive 8, 57, 129

Platonic 167, 172

realism

abstract 9 n.

empirical 74–5

representative 32, 89

transcendental 169, 172, 175–6

real possibility, see possibility, logical versus real

reason

as author of principles or laws

24, 26 n., 27, 32, 58

common human 145

as dialectical 12, 36, 167, see also antinomy

dogmatism of 172

as finite 43 77–82, 94, 107

as free, see causality

ideas of 33–40, 43 n., 46 n., 169

as impure 162 n.

interest of 27, 29

practical, for Kant 4–5

as pure 5–7, 13, 92–7

as self-sufficient 92–7, 126, 130–

1, 138 n., 150, 156–7, 157 n., 159

space of 127 n.

speculative employment of 94–7, 180

unity of 24–33

vocation of 23, 25, 27, 36, 167, 173–4

receptivity 10–11, 17 n., 116

as containing spontaneity 127 n.

as species of spontaneity 111, 113–18

reciprocal determination, see causality, reciprocal

Redding, Paul 12 n., 162 n.

respect, feeling of 3–4, 6

restriction thesis 1, 15, 35, 37, 45–6, 71, 169

Schelling, F.W.J. 15, 47, 58–62, 64, 67–70

Schiller, Friedrich 60 n.

self-consciousness

as purely (or originally) apperceptive

103 n., 105–6, 109, 121

empirical 104

identity of 104–5, 107, 109

as the “I think” 1–5, 109

as originally synthetic 121–4, 130

as related to desire 161–2, 162 n. see

also apperception; subjectivity

self-knowledge 142–3, 154, 156–7

sense certainty 149, 155

sensibility, see receptivity

Siep, Ludwig 64 n.

skeptical method 146 n., 167, 175

skepticism

of empiricism 81, 91

of Hume’s philosophy 84, 89, 91, 95, 99–

100, 136

of Kant’s philosophy 1, 10–11, 71, 80–1, 82–

5, 95, 136, 152, 159

space, see intuition, forms of; intuition, formal

speculative philosophy 112, 125

as description of Kant’s philosophy 43, 109, 122

Spinoza 64

spontaneity

as form of causality 13, 36

of intuition 19, 20 n., 45

as original synthetic unity of apperception

104 n., 122–3

as partially receptive 160–2

as responsible for synthesis 102, 107

subjectivity

as empirical 6, 104

as empty 101, 107, see 4.4, 126

as identity of subject-object 62–3, 67–

9, 122, 130

as immanent reality 10, 47, 62, 69

as intelligible 6 see

also idealism, subjective; metaphysics, of

subjectivity; self-consciousness

supersensible realm 54–5, 61, 63 see also thing

in itself

supreme being 19 n., see 1.2–

1.3, 37, 44, 52, 141 see also God

supreme moral law, see categorical imperative

synthesis

as act of combination 102, 107

of apperception 99–108

figurative (or productive) 108–18

intellectual, 109–10

systematic unity of nature 15, 24–

33, 42, 44, 46, 54, 58, 60

teleology, see explanation, mechanical versus

teleological; purposiveness of nature

thing in itself 5 n., 35, 46, 71, 73–

5, 79 n., 80, 89, 140 n., 144 n., 168–9, 170, 174–

6 see alsoappearance

time, see intuition, forms of; intuition, formal

transcendental

apperception, see apperception, empirical versus

transcendental

transcendental deduction of

categories, see categories, transcendental

deduction of

transcendental

idealism, see idealism, transcendental

transcendental reflection 175 n.

unconditioned condition

28, 144 n., 149, 166, 178

understanding, the, see intellect, discursive

universals, see concepts

Westphal, Kenneth R. 15 n., 19 n., 91 n., 95 n.

Wolff, Christian 76–7

Yovel, Yirmiyahu 162 n.

Zammito, John H. 52 n.

Zoeller, Guenter 113 n.

Zuckert, Rachel 31 n., 50 n.