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Kant, Hegel, and the Bounds of Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Katerina Deligiorgi
Katerina Deligiorgi*
Affiliation:
APU, Cambridge

Abstract

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Hegel's relation to Kant is often portrayed in terms of epistemic impatience. For W.H. Walsh, for example, whereas Kant seeks to ‘demonstrate that certain kinds of thing [cannot] be objects of human knowledge’, and thus that there are ‘limits to men's cognitive aspirations’, Hegel issues the ‘demand that thought be free to range unchecked wherever it chooses’ and claims the ‘Absolute’ as an object of human knowledge. There are two flaws in this standard account. First, it underestimates the cognitive confidence of Kant's project of a critique of pure reason. Central to this project is the idea that reason has the resources to adjudicate its own claims and thus to know itself. Second, it neglects Hegel's conception of dialectic as the inner discipline of thought. I shall deal with each of these issues in turn. The first part of the paper examines the intellectual commitments entailed by the very idea of a critique of pure reason; the second part addresses the boundary-determining function of dialectic. A fuller understanding of what is meant by ‘critique’ and ‘dialectic’ should enable us not only to re-assess Hegel's relation to Kant, but also to retrieve their shared conception of philosophical reflection as rational self-knowledge. The aim of this paper therefore is to highlight the common ground between the two projects, rather than to emphasise their critical distance. I seek to show that Hegel shares Kant's conviction that ‘philosophy consists in knowing its bounds’ (seine Grenzen zu kennen), even though he accords such knowledge a different status from Kant.

Type
Hegel and Kant
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 23 , Issue 1-2: number 45/46 , January 2002 , pp. 56 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2002

References

1 Walsh, W. H. ‘The Idea of a Critique of Pure Reason’, in Priest, Stephen (ed.), Hegel 's Critique of Kant (Clarendon: Oxford, 1987), p. 119, and p. 125 Google Scholar.

2 Walsh, ibid., p. 125.

3 Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Smith, N. K.. (London: Macmillan, 1964), A727/B755 Google Scholar. Cited according to the standard ‘A’ and ‘B’ pages of the first and second editions; henceforth CPR. In the following, I employ ‘bounds’ to translate ‘Grenzen’ and ‘limits’ to translate ‘Schranken’. This is to acknowledge a slight but consistent difference of use in Kant, and in Hegel. Kant tends to use Schranke to mean restriction or external limitation, while giving Grenze a more positive sense of a boundary that is established to reason's own satisfaction. In Hegel, the use of the two terms is more localised but the difference is even more pronounced, with Grenze having again the more positive sense of determination of a thing, whereas Schranke (also translated as ‘limitation’) signifies a limit to be overcome.

4 On Strawson's account, the tradition of what he terms ‘classical empiricism’ stretches to include exponents of twentieth-century radical empiricism, as is evident in his attempt to illuminate Kant's position by employing a version of A. J. Ayer's ‘criterion of significance’.

5 Strawson, P.F., The Bounds of Sense (Methuen: London, 1966), p. 17 Google Scholar.

6 Strawson, ibid., p. 16; emphasis added.

7 CPR A 239/B298; see also CPR B145, A 240/B299. Although in B 149 Kant claims that ‘our sensible and empirical intuition alone can give them [i.e. the concepts] sense (Sinn) and meaning (Bedeutung)’, he makes clear that the concepts are not thereby nonsensical. They are ‘empty’ (leer) and lacking ‘objective reality’ (objektive Realität). The employment of the term ‘objective reality’ has a polemical edge here, because realitas objectiva was employed in scholastic philosophy to mean precisely an idea in the mind and not a feature of the external world. Just in the previous paragraph, in the process of distinguishing between what can be thought and what can be known, Kant makes a similar point with reference to mathematical concepts, which, he claims, are not knowledge ‘by themselves’ (B 148), yet clearly not meaningless either. Strawson's employment of the principle of significance tends to conflate the Kantian distinction between thinkable and knowable. A better way of capturing Kant's critical intentions, I suggest, is by paying attention not only to the conditions of the proper use of concepts, but also to the conditions of abuse, which Kant explores in the Antinomy of Pure Reason.

8 CPR A 51/B 75; see also A 19, A 69/B 93.

9 CPR A 244.

10 CPR B 165.

11 CPR B 166n.

12 Strawson, P. F., Skepticism and Naturalism; Some Varieties (Methuen: London, 1985), p. 20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Strawson's reasons for endorsing this position is that he considers it as a potent anti-sceptical weapon, one that defuses, rather than answers sceptical doubt. However, the Humean thesis is derived from a premise that we are not constrained to accept, namely that reason is limited to knowledge of relations and of matters of fact. Kant's argument about a critique of reason requires that we entertain a different conception of the role and capacities of reason.

13 CPR A 5/B 9.

14 CPR Bxx, emphasis added.

15 The Critique of Pure Reason opens, of course, with the idea that human reason by nature overreaches itself: ‘Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer’, Avii.

16 CPR Bxiii.

17 CPR A 727/B755.

18 CPr A 727/B755n

19 See also CPR A 713-4/B741-2; A 719/B747; A 837/B865; A 239-40/B298-9; see too, the Preamble of the Prolegomena. On mathematical construction, see Friedman, M., Kant and the Exact Sciences (Harvard, 1992), esp. pp.90ffGoogle Scholar.

20 Kant fully admits that empirical concepts are revisable, arguing that ‘new observations remove some properties and add others; and thus the boundaries of the concept are never assured’ CPR A 728/B756.

21 CPR A 729/B 757.

22 CPR A 728/B 756.

23 CPR A 712/B 740.

24 CPR A xi.

25 CPR B 128.

26 Letter to Garve, Christian, Zweig, A. (ed.), Kant's Philosophical Correspondence, (University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 252 Google Scholar.

27 Bennett, Jonathan, Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge University Press, 1974), p. 3 Google Scholar. Bennett is not alone in his negative estimation of the antinomy of pure reason; see also Strawson, and more recently Guyer, Paul, The Claims of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 385–415 Google Scholar. Henry Allison is a notable exception here. I discuss his position below.

28 Allison, Henry, Kant's Transcendental Idealism; An Interpretation and Defense (Yale: New Haven, 1983), pp.35–61, here p.56Google Scholar.

29 CPR Bxx.

30 CPR Bxviii.

31 CPR Bxviiin.

32 CPR Bxixn.

33 CPR A 477/B505.

34 CPR A 537/B565.

35 Walsh, W. H., Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh, 1975), pp. 197ffGoogle Scholar. I rely here on Walsh's excellent discussion on the relevance of the principle of sufficent reason to understanding the antinomies.

36 Al-Azm, S. J., The Origins of Kant's Arguments in the Antinomies (Oxford University Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

37 See, Leibniz, Third Paper: ‘The author grants me this important principle, that nothing happens without a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise. But he grants it only in words and in reality denies it. That shows that he does not fully perceive the strength of it’; in Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.), G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings (Everyman, 1995), p. 211 Google Scholar.

38 Leibniz, Second Paper, ibid., p.207.

39 CPR A 409/B435.

40 Hegel, G. W. F., The Science of Logic, trans. Miller, A.V. (Humanities Press, 1989), p. 25 Google Scholar; henceforth SL. References to the German are to Hegel, G. W. F., Wissenschafi der Logik Bd.I,II (Suhrkamp, 1986)Google Scholar.

41 ‘Hirngespinste’, SL 25 Google Scholar.

42 SL 27.

43 CPR Bxiii.

44 SL 50.

45 SL 28.

46 SL ibid., emphases added; see also SL 37, 45.

47 Rosen, M., Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism (Cambridge, 1984), p. 106 Google Scholar.

48 Rosen, ibid., p. 179.

49 Rosen, ibid., p.77.

50 Rosen, ibid., p. 32-3.

51 SL 110.

52 SL 117.

53 SL ibid.

54 SL 129.

55 SL 118.

56 SL 120.

57 SL 126.

58 SL 123.

59 SL 128.

60 SL 134.

61 SL 135.

62 SL 134.

63 SL 384.

64 Hegel's contemporaries accused him of inconsistency and worse. In his History of Modem Philosophy, Schelling argues that Hegel confuses the ‘is’ of predication with the ‘is’ of identity, a criticism later repeated by Russell; see ‘Hegel’, trans. Bowie, A. in Hegel: Critical Arguments (Routledge: London, 1993)Google Scholar. Schopenhauer considered it a ‘colossal mystification [which] will furnish posterity with an inexhaustible source of sarcasm’ ( Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Bd. 4.2., p.xix)Google Scholar. Among the exceptions, which also contain some of the best accounts of Hegel's views on contradiction, are Aquila, R., ‘Predication and Hegel's Metaphysics’, Kant-Studien 64 (1973), 231–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pippin, R., ‘Hegel's Metaphysics and the problem of Contradiction’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 3 (1978)Google Scholar; and Dulckeit, K. ‘Hegel's Revenge on Russell: The ‘is’ of Identity versus the ‘is’ of Predication’, in Desmond, W. (ed.) Hegel and his Critics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

65 SL 128; see also SL 129, 133, 136.

66 SL 441; see also SL 439, 442.

67 Tugendhat, E., Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung. Sprachanalytische Interpretation (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1979), p.318 Google Scholar.

68 CPR A 503/B 531.

69 CPR A 502/B530.

70 SL 626.

71 There is an asymmetry in essential predication in that the subject can change, in which case a different predicate will be appropriate: if, for instance, my help to the needy friend consists in helping him cheat someone, the ‘essence’ of the action can be re-considered and re-described.

72 SL 623.

73 SL 624.

74 CPR A599/B627.

75 SL 630.

76 Hegel's concern with essential predication helps also explain why he does not count as a judgement the proposition ‘Aristotle died at the age of 73, in the fourth year of the 115th Olympiad’ (SL 626, see also SL 657-8). What he is after is judgements in which ‘a is F’ where F is an essential predicate of a and ‘Fa’ is genuinely informative.

77 SL 623.

78 SL 826.