Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant

First, some word about the journal itself. The word about creating a scientific-philosophical journal had been around from 1798, but it only gained steam in 1800 when Schelling asked of the publisher Johann Friedrich Cotta to assist him in realizing such an enterprise. Schelling made the suggestion to Fichte that they should edit it together, and Fichte accepted the offer, who himself had entertained ideas about a journal independent of Schelling and Cotta. It was during this time, from 1800 to 1801, that Hegel himself was immersed in Fichte’s own works, an effort which will ultimately culminate in the Difference essay.

However, the original plan was not realized for a number of reasons. Leaving aside the atheism controversy Fichte was embroiled in, there were theoretical disagreements (Fichtean criticism of Schelling’s Absolute, Schelling’s criticism of Fichte’s one-sided view of Nature) as well as personal (Schelling’s private insults, Fichte’s uncharitable interpretations despite Schelling’s direct explanations of the problematic passages) — their correspondence between 1800 to 1802 shows that the once friendly relationship was no more, in part, thanks to Hegel himself and the publication of the Difference essay. Here it must be remarked that while the Difference essay was successful in pointing out the clear divergences between Fichte and Schelling, some of which Schelling and Fichte were unaware of up to that point, the two philosophers, albeit awkwardly, were already aware prior to that that their respective paths were irreconcilable. The essay solidified Hegel’s continued collaboration with Schelling and it served as a blueprint for the Faith and Knowledge essay as well.

The introduction begins with a dichotomy that is the lynch-pin of the entire work: faith and knowledge. Hegel states that his time had risen above the “ancient antithesis” of Reason and Faith since the opposition between the two was transferred to the domain of philosophy itself (the age of Enlightenment). No longer the handmaid of faith, as it was during the Middle Ages, Reason asserted its absolute autonomy and proved that Faith’s miracles and its “positive” elements (dogma and superstitious beliefs) were null and void. The Enlightentment was victorious in dispelling the falsehoods of religion, proving Reason’s power. Here however Hegel notes that this victory might not have been a victory after all, because what Reason fought against was, in his analysis, a limited conception of Faith that Reason created in order to make the opposition and enlightened Reason’s own identity in this opposition meaningful. This is explained by an analogy: Reason has suffered the same fate that barbarians suffer after they triumph over civilized nations — they take over them and become their rulers, but they eventually assimilate and succumb to those same conquered nations spiritually — in other words, they are defeated from inside out. The end-result of Reason’s struggle is that it realized that the positive elements which it took to be the essence of Faith were in reality not what Faith was; and that because of this, not only “Faith”, the opponent, but also the very conception enlightened Reason that it formed through this struggle had in fact never existed to begin with. For Hegel, this state of affairs resulted into:

“The new born peace that hovers triumphantly over the corpse of Reason and faith, uniting them as the child of both, has as little of Reason in it as it has of authentic faith” (F&K, 55)

This “new born peace” uniting the corpses of Reason and Faith, are “reflective philosophies of subjectivity”, i.e. Kantian, Jacobian and Fichtean.

“Religion builds its temples and altars in the heart of the individual. In sighs and prayers he seeks for the God whom he denies to himself in intuition, because of the risk that the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber. Of course, the inner must be externalized; intention must become effective in action; immediate religious sentiment must be expressed in external gesture; and faith, though it flees from the objectivity of cognition, must become objective to itself in thoughts, concepts, and words. But the intellect scrupulously distinguishes the objective from the subjective, and the objective is what is accounted worthless and null. The struggle of subjective beauty must be directed precisely to this end: to defend itself properly against the necessity through which the subjective becomes objective. That beauty should become real in objective form, and fall captive to objectivity, that consciousness should seek to be directed at exposition and objectivity themselves, that it should want to shape appearance or, shaped in it, to be at home there-all this should cease; **for it would be a dangerous superfluity, and an evil, as the intellect could turn it into a thing**(zu einem Etwas) “

Here is an another inversion at play. Earlier it was remarked that the Enlightenment’s reconciliation amounted to the claim that there is no need to have the knowledge of the eternal — reconciliation is knowing this world, and this is the standpoint of enlightened Reason. Within the domain of Protestantism, however, this attitude gives birth to subjectivities of longing. Since the finite = nothing, that which is necessary, the infinite and the Divine must be a perfection beyond this world and Reason’s comprehension. On the other hand, the subject is aware that it cannot access God through commandments or miracles. Reason rebels against anything which would portray itself as true and yet hide its essence and characterize it as something mysterious beyond Reason’s grasp. This is why enlightened Reason according to Hegel fought to refute the superstitions and the supposed miracles, because it saw they were vacuous concepts. It is precisely here where the problem resides. Something is true insofar as it is objectified, meaning the truth cannot hide itself. Intellect therefore knows that the inward must be externalised, intention must be actualized, faith must become objective to itself in thoughts. But because the objective world is finite, all knowledge of it, including the world itself, since it is opposed to a perfect Beyond are worthless. Therefore this subjectivity finds itself in a contradiction — one knows that the truth of intentions and faith not only reside in them having been felt, but also actualized in the objective world, but because the objective world is worthless they are rendered into things and their worth is diminished as a result of it. Actualizing them, externalizing them, from the purview of Protestant consciousness is evil. This Protestant consciousness will give birth to the reflexive philosophies that are the theme of Hegel’s text. And as we saw the Reason which previously fought to eliminate the vacuous concepts of Faith clad in the robes of miracles and mysteries now fully accepts the Beyond which likewise cannot be conceptualized.

If we go back to the Enlightenment, Hegel’s problem is that it absolutizes the empirical instead of the other pole of the antithesis, the Beyond. However the immersion into the empirical, or reconciliation with ordinary life for Hegel is a fall into a vulgar eudaemonism. The only upshot is the Enlightenment’s striving toward ,,justification and good conscience”. But if the Absolute is transformed into the empirical Reason cannot truly achieve reconciliation nor justify its striving. As Hegel says: only the objectivity of the intellect (intellect which is externalized) can attain the concept, which has presented itself in its most highly abstract form as so-called pure Reason (which is the standpoint of reflexive philosophies). This is why he favors Kant, Jacobi and Fichte to the philosophers of Enlightenment, like Hume.

“If the highest bliss is the highest Idea, it is the union between infinite and finite — rational action and feeling. Both of these things are contained within the Idea — the highest Idea cannot be, as the highest being (Dasein), if there is no unity between the two. When Reason **cognizes this, these two things in unity, both of these moments vanish and are absorbed into one another*. “ The Enlightenment separates one pole from the other — it emphasizes feeling* — so it only knows sensual and not ,,the bliss of eternal vision”, which is the unity of feeling and rational action. On the other hand, the culmination of Protestant alienation are the reflexive philosophies which, as we will see later on in Kantian and Fichtean philosophies, emphasize rational action at the expense of feeling.

With all of this in mind we can approach the criticism of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte. Hegel identifies certain elements that are common to all of these philosophies whose roots we’ve explored in the previous section.

“For this infinite is itself not the truth since it is unable to consume and consummate finitude…If the absolute were put together out of the finite and the infinite, abstracting from the finite would indeed be a loss. In the Idea, however, finite and infinite are one, and hence finitude as such, i.e., as something that was supposed to have truth and reality in and for itself, has vanished. Yet what was negated was only the negative in finitude; and thus the true affirmation was posited.” (F&K, 65–66)

One of the things Hegel commends Kant for is for being forthright. At the beginning of his critique he states:

“Because the essence of the Kantian philosophy consists in its being critical idealism, it plainly confesses that its principle is subjectivism and formal thinking. Secure in its standpoint, which makes the unity of reflection supreme, it reveals what it is and aims at, by telling its story quite frankly. The name of Reason which it gives to the Concept may, at the worst, impede the disclosure or mask it. “

“ Now no cognitions can occur in us, no connection and unity among them, without that unity of consciousness that precedes(my emphasis) all data of the intuitions, and in relation to which all representation of objects is alone possible. This pure, original, unchanging consciousness I will now that of the a name transcendental apperception. That it deserves this name is already obvious from this, that even the purest objective unity, namely priori concepts (space and time) is possible only through the relation of the intuitions to it. The numerical unity of this apperception therefore grounds all concepts a priori, just as the manifoldness of space and time grounds the intuitions of sensibility. “ (CPR: A 107)

“ Just this transcendental unity of apperception, however, makes out of all possible appearances that can ever come together in one experience a connection of all of these representations in accordance with laws. For this unity of consciousness would be impossible if in the cognition of the manifold the mind could not become conscious of the identity of the function by means of which this manifold is synthetically combined into one cognition. Thus the original and necessary consciousness of the identity of oneself is at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances in accordance with concepts, i.e., in accordance with rules that not only make them necessarily reproducible, but also thereby determine an object for their intuition, i.e., the concept of something in which they are necessarily connected; for the mind could not possibly think of the identity of itself in the manifoldness of its representations, and indeed think this a priori, if it did not have before its eyes the identity of its action, which subjects all synthesis of apprehension (which is empirical) to a transcendental unity, and first makes possible their connection in accordance with a priori rules. “ (CPR: A 108)

While the intuition is immersed in the manifold and sensibility gives us forms of intuition, the intellect goes through the appearances and finds laws through them — or, in Kant’s terms, the intellect (understanding) is:

“…itself the legislation for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all, i.e. synthetic unity of the manifold of appearances in accordance with rules, for appearances… exist only in our sensibility.”

It is here we must ask ourselves the obvious question — why are they identical? What is the prerequisite which enables the contact in the first place? With this in mind, since apperception is that which underlies the possibility of all and any knowledge and precedes all data of intuition, we have to inquire into what the form of that knowledge is. This is what Hegel especially praised in Kant: the transcendental unity of imagination. This is the pure form of all possible knowledge and through which all objects must be represented a priori. In this way, the genuine speculative dimension for Hegel consists in the fact that the original synthetic unity of apperception presupposes an originary synthesis — meaning, it presupposes a synthesis prior to itself which is absolutely posited; and this is precisely the “productive imagination”, the pure form of the knowledge that the apperception presupposes, since it is itself the condition of knowledge. If the apperception is to be a priori, then this presupposition as well must be considered necessary and a priori. In other words, this is the positing of presuppositions — through deducing the apperception, Kant discovers that this itself contains a presupposition that is necessarily a priori if the former is to be a priori.

It is important to explain what positing of presuppositions mean. Kant’s deduction of a necessary originary synthesis is something that he arrived through the very process of deducing apperception — meaning, he did not presuppose it from the beginning (in which case it would not count as a speculative insight for Hegel). Kant’s discovery amounts to realizing that this presupposition can only be reached through the process itself — this presupposition thereby incorporates the process in itself as something that is not external to its content, but immanent, and this necessity is retroactive. This is what it means to be self-determining — the greatest speculative insight in Kant is precisely this transcendental imagination. As Kant himself states:

“The principle of the necessary unity of the pure (productive) synthesis of the imagination prior to apperception is thus the ground of the possibility of all cognition, especially that of experience. “

So what does the transcendental imagination do? It is the very connection of the manifold a priori. Kant is then capable of recognizing that the unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of the imagination is the empirical understanding, while the unity of apperception in relation to transcendental synthesis of the imagination is the pure understanding — the cognitions that are a priori conditions of the ordinary understanding, and which themselves contain the synthesis of pure (productive) imagination. These cognitions are the categories of pure understanding, the very same understanding (or intellect) described above.

In order to understand the crux of Hegel’s critique, we need to inquire into how does this manifest itself? This is where it is necessary to turn to judgements, or as Kant says “the power of judgements” (CPR: B: 177/A: 138) to show the possibility of, and how, pure concepts of understanding are applied to appearances. As Kant goes on to prove the necessity of a mediating term between the previously mentioned two (transcendental schema: CPR A: 139/B: 178), the next question that concerns us is what is the relation of the pure principles of the understanding and the forms of judgements. Hegel notes that the absolute identity (the imagination) in the judgement is the copula “is, without consciousness” (my emphasis) (F&K: 72). Because the judgement implies separation and difference, the absolute identity is something that is immersed in the absolute antithesis, and not something that truly unites them — since it’s not cognized. Instead of uniting them, because it’s utterly unthought as being merely the copula, it just delineates and sharpens the difference between the subject and predicate (which, if you’ll recall, is opposed to Hegel’s thesis). The latter two are all that is posited within the judgement as that which may be thought (or, as objects of thought) — while the identity of the universal and the particular, the “is”, is the “non-conscious­” element of the judgement.

“As can be seen, it is for the sake of dear mankind and its cognitive faculty, that Kant so little esteems his thought that maybe the two kinds of things are not so heterogeneous in themselves, but only in appearance. He regards this thought as a chance idea about a maybe and not as a rational thought at all.” (F&K: 78)

For this reason Hegel disapproves of the differentiation between empirical and noumenal self — it does not achieve, by its own standards, what it set out to do. The erroneous nature of Kant’s critique can be most seen in his refutation of the ontological proof for Hegel. Because Kant’s perspective is finitist and does not grasp the nature of the Idea (recall that Hegel considered that the Idea remains empty in Kant), Hegel wholly rejects his refutation.

“This critique positively asserts the absolute opposition of freedom in the form of concept and necessity in the form of being, and brings about the complete victory of nonphilosophy over the horrible delusion that deranged and blinded previous philosophy…Kant made his triumph even more brilliant and comfortable for himself by taking what used to be called the ontological proof of the existence of God in the worst form it is capable of which is the form given to it by Mendelssohn and others. They turned existence into a property so that the identity of Idea and reality was made to look like the adding of one concept to another. Altogether-especially in his refutations-Kant showed a pervasive ignorance of philosophical systems and a lack of any information about them that went beyond purely historical data” (F&K: 85)

Lastly, we must consider the second great speculative insight Hegel detected in Kant — the reflecting judgement from the Critique of Judgement (F&K: 86).

“Does judgment, which in the order of our [specific] cognitive powers is a mediating link between understanding and reason, also have a priori principles of its own? Are these principles constitutive, or are they merely regulative (in which case they would fail to prove that judgment has a domain of its own)? Does judgment give the rule a priori to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, the mediating link between the cognitive power [in general I and the power of desire (just as the understanding prescribes laws a priori to the cognitive power and reason to the power of desire)? “

Kant states that this is necessary because:

“For though these judgments do not by themselves contribute anything whatever to our cognition of things, they still belong to the cognitive power alone and prove a direct relation of this power to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure according to some a priori principle… aesthetic judging is directly referred to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure distinguishes it from a certain kind of) logical judging of nature: when experience manifests in things a lawfulness that understanding’s concept of the sensible is no longer adequate to help us understand or explain, judgment can find within itself a principle that refers the natural thing to the uncognizable supersensible (my emphasis), though judgment must use this principle for cognizing nature only in relation to itself.” (CoJ: 169–170)

Hegel’s problem with this standpoint is that while Kant does recognize that the antitheses need to vanish, his insight is negative, because he situates this vanishing within his concept of the supersensuous, which, as we’ve established, is uncognizable, and from a Hegelian perspective, is itself negative and finite. Kant did succeed in conceiving beauty as the Idea that is experienced, but again he did not grasp that because there is an antithesis between the sensuous and the supersensuous, the supersensuous is unknowable, not the other way around. The non-intelligibility does not come from the limitations of the understanding, as Kant himself had thought — but when the understanding reifies the difference between a supposed unattainable Beyond and the sensuous realm (recall what was remarked at the beginning of the section; Hegel thought oppositions are necessary, but that they are not the final word). So even though we’re necessarily driven to the Idea, the systematic unity of the Reason, no reality can be predicated of it. According to Hegel, what Kant was unable to realize is that, ironically, he had Reason in its true totality all along in front of him. First, the issue of separation between the empirical and the noumenal: Hegel notes that the most important fact of this separating is that Kant himself was aware of this separation between these two realms, and not only appearance as a product of this separation. What this means is that Kant was implicitly aware of the totality that bonds both the sensuous and the supersensuous. Then he conceived of an intuition that is capable of transcending this boundary. He was also cognizant of the separation between Reason and in-itself; he has the Idea of Reason where the opposed elements are absolutely identical. He even recognized that, as Hegel states, in and for itself it may be possible that nature may truly follow both legislations of freedom and causality grounded within a transcendental principle that reconciles both legislations, something which was considered impossible in the first Critique (Kant explores this question when inquiring into teleology). What Hegel is saying is that there is no distance between the understanding and the empty, but necessarily generated Idea of Reason — the moment you generate the Idea of infinite Reason, you are already within the domain of infinite Reason. So each time Kant is faced with two viewpoints: finite or truly infinite, in Hegel’s terms, he opts for the former every time — rational knowledge always transcends Reason, and in the case of Nature, the concord between these legislations is a postulate whose guarantee lies in a transcendent deity incomprehensible to man. Let us also here recall the example that Hegel himself doesn’t cite, but encapsulates this point clearly: In the Anthropology, Kant himself had thought that if God entered into the phenomenal world, and revealed himself in all of his splendor, the subject’s freedom in that moment would vanish — from a Hegelian perspective, this position is untenable because it implies an opposition between freedom and necessity. This is why the subjective insight is always made absolute — and yet Kant was also the one who recognized in the intuition of beauty the supersensuous (F&K: 91). This is why Hegel states:

“The truly speculative aspect of Kant’s philosophy can only consist in the Idea being thought and expressed so definitely, and the pursuit of this side of his philosophy is the only interesting aspect of it. This makes it all the harder to see the Rational being muddled up again, and not just that, but to see the highest Idea corrupted with full consciousness, while reflection and finite cognition are exalted above it.” (F&K: 92)

“…it is only a confession that there ought to be a Reason. And it is all [the middle] posited in a faith, whose content itself is empty because the antithesis, which as absolute identity could be its own content (my emphasis), has to remain outside it; expressed positively, the content of this faith would be Reasonlessness, because it is an absolutely un-thought, unknown and incomprehensible Beyond (my emphasis).” (F&K: 94)

The inability to allow the absolute identity to be its own content because of the unawareness of the Idea is the hallmark of Kantian philosophy for Hegel. His critique essentially does the opposite of what it claims: by limiting the intellect he also makes the whole world dependent upon it (case of determination of the things-in-themselves), by exalting it as absolute in man he simultaneously shows its contingency in face of the Beyond (reflecting judgement), and in conceiving the autonomy and spontaneity of the Practical Reason, the infinite freedom of the individual, by abstracting from the empirical world he makes that freedom empty and vacuous (erroneous equation of Idea = intellect, which is just one element within the unity of the Idea). Kant is the prime example of the philosophy of reflexive subjectivity from within the domain of Protestantism — he declares that it is enough to know this world, and yet the structure he adopts in order to do so says otherwise. Hegel’s account of Kant essentially consists in that his critique failed to do what it promised it would do. The inequality, contradictory nature of the Kantian system that manifests as a result, encapsulated in the example of imagination-judgement we’ve explored above, is due to the fact he did not grasp what the middle term is. And as we’ve seen in Hegel’s criticism of Protestantism — like the Protestant consciousness, which is aware that the inward must be externalized in order for it to be true, but rejects the external world — the Kantian system does exactly the same. It knows that the inward must be externalized, and yet the external is always something that is foreign to the subject and something that also depends upon the consciousness of man (thing-in-itself) even though the whole system’s supposed point is that it is a critique of man’s cognitive faculties. We’ve also seen how in the last stroke it inverts this thesis by also simultaneously positing that the supersensuous realm, instead of being a non-identity, is made transcendent of human intellect, even though this contradicts Kant’s thesis that the intellect is absolute in man, since it makes this very same intellect contingent. Kant’s critical edifice, in Hegel’s eyes, becomes dogmatic. But we’ve also seen that Hegel recognizes genuinely speculative insights that Kant had made in transcendental imagination and the reflecting judgement. Even if he did opt for finitude at every stroke, Kant did stick to his postulates — something that Fichte, according to Hegel, although he advocated that he was expounding the true spirit of Kantian philosophy, did not do (which is why, paradoxically, in Hegel’s account he will represent the culmination of reflexive philosophy). Kant’s Reason is pure negativity that is still limited by the positivity of the empirical world. Nonetheless, it is also in discovering this absolute opposition between the concept and the world that:

“…we shall find nothing else expressed in it but the Idea that Reason does have absolute reality, that in this Idea the antithesis of freedom and necessity is completely suspended, that infinite thought is at the same time absolute reality — or in short we shall find the absolute identity of thought and being (my emphasis).” (F&K: 94)

Originally published at https://adein.substack.com.