“in this work,” Hegel states in the first published volume of the Science of Logic, “i make frequent references to the kantian philosophy (which
7 see longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique, 16. also Robert pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The
Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (cambridge University press 1989), 175–77. 8 cf. longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique, esp. 165–81.
to many might seem superfluous) because, whatever might be said in this work or elsewhere of its precise character or of the various parts of its exposition, it constitutes the foundation and the starting point of recent german philosophy, and this is a merit of which it can boast undiminished by whatever faults may be found in it” (gW 11:31n.). as he then explains, the content of what he calls “objective logic,” that is, the examination of the categories of Being and essence that com- prises the first part of the Logic, corresponds pretty closely to kant’s “transcendental logic,” and that he will therefore be making frequent reference to the latter.
it is easy to see that many of the so-called pure thought-determinations of Hegel’s objective logic correspond directly to the transcenden- tal analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. of course, in light of the influence Wolffian logic exercised on Hegel’s generation as well on kant’s, this high degree of correspondence between their respect- ive treatments of logic and metaphysics should not surprise us. Both philosophers must be seen engaged in a critical transformation of a living logico-metaphysical tradition in which both were reared. this transformative aspect of their relation to the tradition is especially manifest in the relation between Hegel’s subjective logic (Logic of the Concept) and kant’s transcendental logic. in the section entitled Der Begriff im Allgemeinen, Hegel again makes direct reference to kant’s path-breaking achievement: Whereas pre-kantian expositions of logic treated concepts as representations that are merely had or possessed by minds, kant is said to have “gone beyond this superficial relation of the understanding as the faculty of concepts and of the concept itself” and to have recognized them as essential functions or modes of activity of the i: “it is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized here as the originally synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the ‘i think’ or of self-consciousness” (gW 12:17–18).
it would be easy to extend discussion of the parallels between the Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Science of Logic. However, the import- ant point within this preliminary comparison of the two is simply to recognize that both for Hegel and for kant, the pure concepts of the understanding are not in the first instance possessions of thought, but modes of synthetic activity. in other words, the actual ground of the con- tent of categorial representations is a self-directed activity constituting the unity of thought. Yet despite the massive parallels between the two,
there are equally substantial aspects in which kant’s transcendental idealism is also absent from Hegel’s methodological reflections. to these i now turn.
Robert pippin’s landmark study, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, is based on the premise that “the basic pos- ition of [Hegel’s] entire philosophy should be understood as a dir- ect variation on a crucial kantian theme, the ‘transcendental unity of apperception.’”9 as pippin explains in a related text, not only in the Phenomenology of Spirit (which is directly concerned with so-called shapes of consciousness), but also in the Science of Logic, Hegel is “still adhering, roughly, to the kantian strategy on how to establish basic or fundamental components of any conceptual scheme (or rules for any objective judgment about determinate objects), one that makes essen- tial reference to the possibly self-conscious nature of all judgment.”10 pippin’s influential approach explicitly breaks with a long tradition of viewing Hegel either as an extravagant metaphysician who refused to heed kant’s critical admonitions or as a historicist philosopher con- cerned exclusively with the development of society, state, and culture.11 Hegel is represented instead as a transcendental epistemologist, dedi- cated to uncovering the conditions of possibility under which we can lay claim to objective knowledge (or even formulate such claims), and committed to the unity of self-consciousness as the most basic condi- tion of all.12
pippin’s interpretation has not been without its critics. in an early discussion, terry pinkard observed that Hegel’s mature system, com- prising speculative logic and philosophy of nature in addition to the philosophy of (human) mind and spirit, cannot be reconciled with the thesis that Hegel placed apperception at the center of a transcenden- tally oriented project.13 more recently, Robert stern has insisted on the
9 pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 6, with reference (in note 14) to the passages from the Science
of Logic quoted above (Vom Begriff im Allgemeinen), gW 12:17 and 23.
10 Robert pippin, “Hegel and category theory,” Review of Metaphysics 43:4 (June 1990): 839–48, here 843. the article appeared as a response to pinkard’s critical discussion of Hegel’s Idealism in the same issue, cited below.
11 cf. pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 3ff.
12 cf. terry pinkard’s characterization of pippin’s view in “How kantian was Hegel?”
Review of Metaphysics 43:4 (June 1990): 831–32. ameriks, “Recent Work,” documents the epistemological shift in Hegel studies that took place around the turn of the dec- ade, 1989–1990.
13 pippin, “How kantian was Hegel?” 833–34. pippin might well rejoin by insisting that Hegel’s philosophy of nature must be jettisoned from any successful attempt to appropriate Hegelian insights in a contemporary philosophical context, informed
weight of pippin’s own observation that Hegel “slips frequently from a ‘logical’ to a material mode, going far beyond a claim about thought or thinkability, and making a direct claim about the necessary nature of things, direct in the sense that no reference is made to a ‘deduced’ rela- tion between thought and thing.”14 stern also argues that if the upshot of Hegel’s radicalization of kant, as pippin sees it, is to deny any sense to a mind–world dichotomy, then there is no reason left to “think of an investigation into the categories as an investigation into the conditions of self-consciousness at all.” the i loses any real significance as the ground of the enterprise, and as a further consequence the anti-realism pippin attributes to Hegel loses purchase: after all, the motivation for the alleged anti-realism comes mainly from the thesis that critical explor- ation of the categories is an exploration of how we as self-conscious cog- nizers must take the world to be, not how the world really is.15
in my view, the balance of the textual evidence is in favor of the opinion that Hegel accorded a distinctly metaphysical significance to the Logic (and a fortiori to the parts of the system comprising the Realphilosophien of mind and nature). consider for example what Hegel has to say about the value of the transcendental approach as such:
now because the interest of the kantian philosophy was directed to the so-called transcendental character of the thought-determinations, the treatment itself of such determinations came up empty. What they are in themselves apart from their abstract relation to the i, a relation which is the same for all, their determinateness and relation to each other was not made into a subject of consideration, and therefore knowledge of their nature was not in the least advanced by this philosophy. What alone is of interest in this connection comes only in the critique of the ideas [sc. of pure reason]. (gW 21:48)
Hegel immediately goes on to say that adequate knowledge of the cat- egories will only be achieved once the form of “the i, consciousness” has been “shed” (gW 21:48).
by modern empirical science and philosophy of science. sebastian Rand has recently argued, however, that Hegel’s philosophy of nature plays an indispensible role in securing his currently more attractive views on human freedom and autonomy. see “the importance and Relevance of Hegel’s philosophy of nature,” Review of
Metaphysics 61:2 (2007): 379–400. objections to placing apperception at the center of Hegel’s project have also been raised in Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, 139. 14 pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 187, quoted in stern, Hegelian Metaphysics, 49–50.
15 for the quotation and the line of argument sketched above, see stern, Hegelian
in a similar vein, Hegel suggests that kant’s philosophy was one- sided in being focused exclusively “on the origin of our cognition insofar as it cannot be ascribed to objects” (gW 21:46; cf. enc §§42a1– 3). even apperception, as conceived by kant, is not allowed to stand as an unqualified result of transcendental philosophy. the “i think” is said by kant to “accompany” all my representations; but to accompany all my representations, sensations, desires, actions, and so forth, says Hegel, is to be merely common (gemeinschaftlich) to them all, and this is to reduce the i as “the universal in and for itself” to an external and superficial form of universality (enc §20; cf. B131–36). so while kant did go further than any thinker before him by grasping apperception itself as the ground of the categories, he also went no further than the i, “the concrete existence of the entirely abstract universality, of that which is abstractly free.” “nothing then remained but this appear- ance of the ‘i think’ that accompanies all my representations – and of which we do not have the slightest concept” (enc §20; gW 12:194; cf. B403–5).
as mentioned previously, Hegel followed a general post-kantian trend in criticizing kant for having failed to give a systematic deriv- ation of the categories. this aspect of his criticism, taken in itself, is of course compatible with an intention to carry out and complete the kantian project, somewhat as Reinhold or fichte had hoped to do. the same is true of Hegel’s more drastic charge that kant failed even to investigate the nature and content of the categories as he takes them up. kant himself says that in the Critique of Pure Reason he purposely omits “definitions of the categories, although i may be in possession of them … in a system of pure reason, definitions of the categories would rightly be demanded, but in this treatise they would merely divert attention from the main object of the inquiry” (B108–9). However, Hegel’s remark (quoted above) that it is only in regard to the ideas of pure reason that kant gives any account of the determinate content and relation of concepts to one another, indicates that he does not have definitions in mind but rather what it means for the categories to have content at all, that is: what it means for them to have a relation to an object. in Hegel’s eyes, therefore, kant not only failed to derive the categories in any scientific, systematic way; he also failed to do just- ice to the minimal requirement of a transcendental logic, that is, to investigate concepts “that refer a priori to objects, and not to abstract from all the content of objective cognition” (gW 21:47). But here again, even this drastic charge is compatible with an intention to carry out
the transcendental project that kant perhaps envisioned, but failed to execute in a satisfactory way.
By contrast, some of the other passages quoted above indicate a fundamental incompatibility between speculative logic and kantian transcendental logic. kant’s critical project is defined by the epistemo- logical question concerning the origin, the scope, and the limits of human cognition. it is just this defining question that Hegel rejects as the fundamental error of transcendental philosophy. We must keep this fact in mind when for example Hegel characterizes the objective logic (i.e. the doctrines of being and essence in the Science of Logic) as “tak[ing] the place of the former metaphysics.”
logic, however, considers these forms [sc. of pure thought] free of those substrata, which are the subjects of figurative representation, consid- ers their nature and value in and for themselves. the former metaphys- ics neglected to do this, and it therefore incurred the just reproach that it employed the pure forms of thought without critique, without previ- ously investigating whether and how they could be the determinations of the thing-in-itself, to use kant’s expression – or more precisely, of the rational. – the objective logic is therefore the true critique of such determinations – a critique that considers them, not according to the abstract form of the a priori as contrasted with the a posteriori, but in
themselves according to their particular content. (gW 21:48–49)16
When, therefore, Hegel promises to deliver the “true critique” of meta- physics he cannot mean a transcendental critique that would go beyond kant merely by supplying the premisses he failed to formulate or the definitions he never gave. Hegelian critique is not kantian critique. its aim is not to vindicate the a priori objective validity of the categories, on the one hand, and to determine the scope and limits of that validity,
16 Rand (“Hegel’s philosophy of nature,” 385–86) takes this passage to show that Hegel explicitly rejected the a priori/a posteriori distinction itself as irrelevant to (his) phil- osophy. it is true that if Hegel’s Logic is not primarily an epistemological undertaking, then the epistemic distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori is irrelevant to its content. But this cannot mean that the distinction itself is irrelevant to phil- osophy in general, since otherwise Hegel would not have criticized kant’s “merely empirical” manner of deriving the categories from a given table of judgments. in my view, Rand’s interpretation misplaces the emphasis of the passage. Hegel is objecting not to the distinction between the a priori and a posteriori, but to the view (attributed to kant) that a genuine critique need do no more than vindicate the categories as legitimate a priori possessions of the understanding. Hegel’s point is that this formal treatment of the categories, which considers them only in their epistemic relation to a finite subject, fails to address the more important question of their content, taken in itself.
on the other. Hegel intends a critical derivation of the content of the ontological categories of traditional metaphysics that will effectively dis- qualify them as forms of authentically scientific cognition at all.