“philosophy is not yet at an end. kant has provided the results; the premisses are still lacking. and who can understand results with prem- isses?”1 schelling’s dictum, formulated in a 1795 letter to Hegel and frequently cited in literature, follows a pattern already well established by kant’s less orthodox heirs in Jena. karl leonhard Reinhold was the first to claim that kant had failed even to hint at the basic prem- isses of his philosophy, much less to formulate them with the clarity appropriate to a rigorously scientific exposition.2 fichte adopts both Reinhold’s criticism and his ambition of providing a foundation and systematic exposition of kant’s unwritten (and perhaps incompletely conceived) philosophy.3 common to all three is an attitude of ambiva- lence toward kant’s achievement: with the critical turn, kant has ini- tiated a new period in philosophical thought, but in the published critiques he has given no more than the fragment of a system whose principles and method have yet to be found. this attitude, perhaps more than any specific doctrines held in common, qualifies the Jena
1 schelling to Hegel, letter from January 6, 1795. on the topos of “conclusions with- out premises,” which was first introduced by Reinhold, see Horstmann, Grenzen der
Vernunft, 76–77, 85–91.
2 see Reinhold, Beyträge 1:274. cf. Über das Fundament des philosophischen Wissens (Jena: mauke 1791), 5.
3 cf., e.g., ga i, 2:67, 335.
idealists as genuinely post-kantian. they directed their energies nei- ther toward an elaborate and detailed criticism of the kantian “letter,” as did kant’s detractors in the empiricist, rationalist, and popularphilos- ophische camps, nor toward commentary, exegesis, and apology, as did kant’s orthodox disciples in königsberg and Halle. Rather, kant’s thought was for them indicative of a new set of conceptual possibilities that could and ought to be explored and developed independently of kant’s specific example.
that Hegel shares this attitude need hardly be emphasized. When analyzing and appraising his views on specific kantian doctrines, we must never forget that, from the outset, Hegel approached kant’s the- oretical philosophy through the mediation of distinctly non-kantian perspectives. Hegel’s earliest documented, independent discussion of kant’s theoretical philosophy takes place relatively late in his philo- sophical development, in the fragment Glauben und Sein from Hegel’s frankfurt period (1797–1800), during which his thinking was strongly influenced by his association with Hölderlin and sinclair.4 there his approach to the kantian antinomies is informed by Jacobi’s concept of “faith” or “belief” (Glauben) in the Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza, as well as by Hölderlin’s concept of “unification” and his philosophy of life.5 Hegel’s selection of topics and passages from kant’s three critiques in the critical writings from his early Jena period (1801–3) is also clearly dictated by the programmatic interests he pursued in common with schelling, and even his characterization of specific kantian doctrines sometimes betrays the direct influence of fichte (for example his con- sistent identification of reason with the pure i).6 somewhat differently, therefore, from Reinhold, fichte, or schelling, whose post-kantianism was to a far greater degree shaped by unmediated study of the letter of the kantian texts, Hegel may be said to have approached kant’s philosophy with a post-kantian perspective on its strengths and weak- nesses already in place. it would be untenable to deny the importance
4 see manfred Baum, Die Entstehung der Hegelschen Dialektik (Bonn: Bouvier 1986), 48–73. there are reasons to believe that the earlier Manuskript zur Psychologie und
Transzendentalphilosophie from 1794 (gW 1:167–92) depends on a compilation
of lecture notes taken by some third party, and not on direct study of kant’s text: see Riccardo pozzo, “Zu Hegels kantverständnis im manuskript zur psychologie und transencendentalphilosophie aus dem Jahre 1794,” in m. Bondeli and H. linneweber-lammerskitten (eds.), Hegels Denkentwicklung in der Berner und
Frankfurter Zeit (munich: fink 1999), 15–29.
5 this is most evident in the early text Glauben und Sein (tW 1:251). 6 cf., e.g., gW 4:359, 434.
of kantian philosophy for the understanding of Hegel’s thought or to suggest that Hegel was simply dependent on his predecessors for the content of his views on kant; yet neither must we underestimate the extent to which his understanding of the stakes involved in the critical reception of kant was determined by the advanced state of play when Hegel entered the game after considerable delay.
these remarks are made by way of prefacing discussion of the role played in the Science of Logic by kant’s conception of transcenden- tal logic. the importance of the kantian template for understanding Hegel’s Logic has rightly been emphasized, most recently by Béatrice longuenesse, who argues that down to its minutest details, “Hegel’s Logic is literally nourished by Hegel’s discussion of transcendental philosophy. it’s relation to kant’s philosophy is certainly not the only source of intelligibility for Hegel’s Logic,” she concedes, “but it is the most important.”7 longuenesse has shown the extent to which key Hegelian notions (concept, reason, truth, critique, and others) are to be understood as transformations of kantian terms.8 the result is an illuminating analysis of the aims and methods of Hegel’s Logic, not least the notoriously difficult Doctrine of Essence. Yet though my inter- pretation here owes a debt to longuenesse’s acute reconstruction, i disagree with her judgment that kant is the single most important source of intelligibility. as i pointed out in chapter 1, Jacobi’s very different critique of rationalist metaphysics is of equal importance for understanding the architectonic of the Science of Logic as well as its methodology and Hegel’s basic motives for developing it.
for the present, however, i intend to focus on kant’s transcendental logic, reviewing some of the very persuasive reasons for seeing it as a kind of template for Hegel’s speculative logic. i will later turn to a dis- cussion of why, nevertheless, Hegel’s logic cannot properly be said to be a transcendental logic, or Hegel to be pursuing a transcendental project in anything like the kantian sense.