Robert Pippin, amongst others, has claimed that “many references to Kant’s critical idealism are indispensable for a proper understanding of Hegel’s positions,” for Hegel “is committing himself to the necessity of nonempirically derived ... conditions for the intelligible experience of any object.” Following Pippin’s suggestion, the question arises as to what extent Hegel’s philosophy ought to be aligned to positive claims of transcendental idealism, for it is surely not the case that Hegel’s relation to Kant can be expressed solely in negative terms.
I shall argue that since Hegel was not a transcendental idealist, we need to discern in what sense, if any, might we still understand his philosophical position as a broadly Kant-inspired one. I shall like to (I) briefly go through recent scholarship (Pippin (1989), Longuenesse (2007) and Bristow (2007)) that aims to place Hegel within the transcendental tradition; and (II) suggest an alternative argument that we can see a possible Kantian influence in Hegel’s mature work by looking at his argument for the conceptual interdependence of infinity and finitude in relation to one version of Kant’s argument in the Refutation of Idealism.

I

(i) Pippin:

Pippin has argued that the best example of Hegel working within transcendental philosophy is that “[Hegel] proposes to alter the aspect of Kant’s idealism that he found so otherwise attractive: Kant on the apperceptive nature of experience”.
Recognising Kant’s development of transcendental psychology, Hegel wrote,

“It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognised as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.” (SL, p.584.)

Moreover, in the subsequent passage, it is clear that Hegel agrees with Kant that there must be a unity of apperception in any subject-object relation:

“There can be no consciousness without self-consciousness. I know something, and that about which I know something I have in the certainty of myself [das wovon ich weiss habe ich in der Gewissheit meiner selbst] otherwise I would know nothing of it ...” (BP, p.55.)

The first sentence sounds Kantian. The remaining claims, moreover, may support the interpretation of the First Critique that argues that transcendental critique (i.e. critique of the a priori forms of intuition and judgement) reveals how all knowledge of objects is structured in accordance with the mind’s conceptual framework, and in this respect, all knowledge is self-knowledge.

(ii) Longuenesse:

Longuenesse argues that we should understand Hegel as a descendant of Kant. Whilst Pippin emphasises Hegel’s debt to transcendental apperception, Longuenesse suggests that Hegel’s dialectical logic is “the true successor to Kant’s Transcendental Logic”. Her principal argument for this claim is (i) that like Kant, Hegel believes that a concept has a unifying function; and (ii) that Hegel’s ‘ground’ ties him closely to Kant’s transcendental epistemology.
Looking at a passage from the first Critique,

“The concepts that give this pure synthesis [of the manifold by means of the imagination] unity, and that consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetic unity, are the third thing necessary for cognition of an object that comes before us ...” (CPR, A79/B104.) [Emphasis added.]

Comparing this with a claim in the Logic,

“Now the Notion is that absolute unity of being and reflection ...” (SL, p.578.)

Despite the differences between Hegel’s concept (or ‘Notion’) and Kantian concepts, namely that Hegel’s does not only operate on sensible intuition but also on thought-determination, “what remains essential, then, is the fact that both Hegel and Kant characterise the concept as having a unifying function”. In other words, “... Hegel’s [dialectical] Logic is literally nourished by Hegel’s discussion of transcendental philosophy ...”
With regard to Hegel’s ‘ground’, i.e. “... one of the determinations of reflection of essence; but it is the last, or rather it is that determination which consists in being sublated determination” (SL, p.444), Longuenesse suggests that this too has a unifying function, insofar as it is what provides unity to determinations and objects. As she writes,

“Ground is the unity of thought that stabilises the constant flux of determinations present in the moment of “difference”. As such, it is also the source of the objectivity of determinations, i.e. of their relation to an object, their unity in an object. The source of the unity of determinations is also the source of the unity of objects”.

Such an understanding of the Hegelian ground seems to echo Kant’s remark about ground. Viz.,

“Every necessity has a transcendental condition as its ground. A transcendental ground must therefore be found for the unity of the consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of all our intuitions ... without which it would be impossible to think of any object for our intuitions [...]”. (CPR, A106.)

“... all appearances of nature, as far as their combination is concerned, stand under the categories, on which nature (considered merely as nature in general) depends, as the original ground of its necessary lawfulness”. (CPR, B165.)

In other words, for Kant, ground is that which establishes unity amongst the plethora of intuitions as well as concepts.
However, though Longuenesse offers a clear Kantianised account of Hegel’s ground, she appears to gloss over sublation. Moreover, such a glossing over sublation, with sublation being essential to Hegel’s ground, seems to create an explanatory gap: we have tried to explain Hegel’s ground by relating it to Kant’s ground. This seems reasonable. However, Hegel’s ground is also tied to the notion of sublation, a notion, though, which is non-existent in Kantian logic. As a result, our (Kantian) explanation for Hegel’s ground seems to be incomplete. Consequently, it would seem that our explanation for this relation between Hegel’s dialectics and Kantian transcendental logic must be found elsewhere. In Section II, I hope to illustrate where it can be found.

(iii) Bristow:

Like Pippin and Pinkard, Bristow treats the Phenomenology as a work of epistemology. He argues that we ought to understand Hegel’s critical project in the Phenomenology as an epistemological project rooted in Kantian critique. As he writes,

“Hegel’s Phenomenology consists in a sequence of stages on the journey of the knowing subject that beings at the standpoint of ‘natural’ or ordinary consciousness and ends at the standpoint of philosophy ... The knowing subject reflects on its knowledge and compares its claims to knowledge with its criteria for knowledge claims”.

However, the difference between his reading and that of Pippin and Pinkard is that Bristow focuses on the thesis that the requirement of critique is necessarily preparatory for a science of metaphysics (Wissenschaft der Metaphysik). He focuses on what he calls the self-transformational aspect of Hegelian critique, in that

“the path of critical reflection is self-transformational in the sense that our self-conception and our conception of the ultimate rational norms change radically through the inquiry”.

Bristow then goes on to claim that “the self-transformational ambition of Hegel’s method is motivated by his attempt to meet the epistemological demand expressed in Kant’s criticism ...” In other words, we ought to understand Hegel’s Phenomenology and self-transformational critique in the following manner: like Kant regarded the First Critique as an organon or ‘metaphysics of metaphysics’ that comprises a critique of knowledge, to put metaphysics on the “sure road to science” (CPR, Bxv), Hegel regarded the Phenomenology as the introduction to his system that comprised a critique of knowledge that paved the way for the new science of metaphysics.

II

Whilst it seems clear that the three accounts presented demonstrate a positive Kantian transcendental influence on Hegel, I believe that they have all neglected another possible positive characterisation.
Consider the following passage:

“[It is said that] the infinite, one the one side, exits by itself, and that the finite which has gone forth from it into a separate existence …; but it should rather be said that this separation is incomprehensible ... But equally it must be said that they are comprehensible, to grasp them even as they are in ordinary conception, to see that in the one there lies the determination of the other … is to see the simple insight into their inseparability … This unity of the finite and infinite and the distinction between them are just as inseparable as are finitude and infinity.” (SL, pp.153-154.)

From the previous passage, we can construct the following argument.

(1) If the finite is separate from the infinite, then there is something outside of the infinite.

(2) There is nothing outside of the infinite.

(3) Therefore, the finite is not separate from the infinite.

Consider now two versions of Kant’s transcendental argument in the ‘Refutation of Idealism’.

First version: (The standard version)

(1) “I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time.” (CPR, B275.)

(2) “All determination in time presupposes something permanent in perception.” (B275.)

(3) “This permanent cannot, however, be something in me, since it is only through this permanent that my existence in time can itself be determined.” (B275.)

(4) “Thus perception of this permanent is possible only through a thing outside me; and consequently the determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of actual things which I perceive outside me.” (B275-6.)

Second version: (The BC [bound up concept] version)

(1) “Consciousness [of my existence] in time is necessarily bound up with consciousness of the [condition of the] possibility of the time determination.” (B276.)

(2) “And it is therefore necessarily bound up with the existence of things outside me, as the condition of time-determination. In other words, the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me.” (B276.)

In their respective arguments, both Kant and Hegel hold that there is a necessary condition for something, p, being possible: for Kant, the necessary epistemic condition of self-consciousness is awareness of something permanent outside of the mind; whereas for Hegel, as we have seen, the necessary ontological condition for the infinite’s being infinite is that it is not separate from the finite. Above all, both Hegel’s thesis and Kant’s BC argument claim that concepts that are claimed to be ‘bound up’ with each other in some way are contrasting concepts and since such arguments are uniquely transcendental, it seems to follow that for Hegel to adopt such argumentation binds him to transcendental philosophy.
In Section I, we previously referred to sublation as a key concept in Hegelian logic. It is to be regarded as the motor of Hegel’s dialectic, in that it is the process which starts the mediation between concepts via their determinate negations, i.e. their contraries. Such logical movement, for Hegel, is logically preservatory. This means that, in the case of the phenomenological subject, the sublation of a previous form of consciousness reveals aspects of that gestalt are false, whereas other aspects have some truths; and these truths are pre-requisites for moving onto the next form or stage. Establishing the logic of sublation can enable us to see how ground fits into the transcendental picture: the dialectical changes in concepts and objects require a unifying permanent if they are to be determinate changes in those concepts and objects. Determination requires a (structural) principle of unity. As such, this unifying permanent seems to be a necessary condition for the sublated determination of concepts and objects. In this respect, we can call Hegel’s science of metaphysics transcendental.
However, the fact that Hegel uses this kind of argument with regard to the metaphysics of infinity does not entail that Hegel’s understanding of infinity is Kantian, for Hegel and Kant are not in agreement about the nature of the infinite. The point that I wish to make is the following:

(i) that the Hegelian programme of determining genuine statements about infinity and finitude is formally similar to Kant’s negative (transcendental) programme of demarcating between ‘dogmatic’ and ‘critical’ propositions. Hegel is concerned with dismissing claims of pre-Kantianism as metaphysical conjecture, since if the infinite were understood in opposition to the finite, then the infinite would be finite itself, because it would be limited by the finite. “There would then be per impossibile a greater reality than the infinite. Hence, the true infinite must therefore include the finite.”
(ii) Given our discussion of the two arguments, it seems that we can better understand the dialectical movement of consciousness, the dialectical account of logic and Hegel’s account of a ground, by understanding the second version of the argument in the Refutation:

(a) With regard to Hegel’s ground, the unity of the infinite and the finite is the ground of the two concepts. Their unity, moreover, is the result of sublation, namely the sublation of our understanding of infinity. By critically reflecting on what the infinite and the finite are, our understanding of the infinite and its relation with the finite has moved from claiming that the former is something completely separate from the finite to understanding the infinite as something necessarily bound to its contrary. There is a difference in unity, but at the same time a unity in difference.
(b) With regard to Hegel’s dialectics, let us define dialectic as “the form of movement of concepts, in which development takes place through opposed or contradictory stages”. The development in question pertains to the subject-matter of the Phenomenology, i.e. to the forms of consciousness, and it is internal to them: it is self-development through self-criticism. Such self-development and self-criticism, particularly in the movement from consciousness an-sich to consciousness an und für-sich, i.e. the movement from mere potentiality to actuality, requires determination, negation, and relations with other things that are both contrary to yet bound up with the subject. And since these notions form the backbone of Hegelianism, it seems then that to fully appreciate Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic, we are required to focus not only on Kantian apperception, but on Kant’s ‘Refutation’ as well.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary texts:

Hegel, G. W. F. 1969. Science of Logic. Miller, A. V. trans. London.: Allen and Unwin.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Miller, A. V. trans. Oxford.: Oxford University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1981. The Berlin Phenomenology. Petry, M. J. trans. Dordrecht.: Riedel.

Kant, I. 1929. Critique of Pure Reason. Kemp Smith, N. trans. Palgrave Macmillan.: St. Martin's Press.

Secondary texts:

Beiser, F. C. 2005. Hegel. New York & London.: Routledge.

Bristow, W. F. 2007. Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique. Oxford.: Clarendon Press.

Longuenesse, B. 2007. Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics. Simek, N. trans. Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press.

Pippin, R. E. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge.: Cambridge University Press.

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctyseg/germanidealism.pdf

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