§d Hegel’s Objection: The Separation of Thought and Being

§d Hegel’s Objection: The Separation of Thought and Being

Before looking at Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theory of apperception, experience, and position on the possibility of metaphysics, I want to first establish Hegel’s general critique of Kantian idealism. Hegel’s main discussion of Kant’s idealism appears in Faith and Knowledge, the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In the latter text, the following passage is arguably the clearest general criticism of Kant’s idealism:

However, Hegel is not claiming, contra Bird’s view of his critique of Kant, that the subjectivism amounts to some kind of phenomenalism or Berkeleyeanism. Rather, the subjectivism of formal idealism, for Hegel, consists in holding that the structure, order, and unity of empirical reality are all derived from us and that thought and being are fundamentally separate from one another. This reading is supported by Sedgwick, who writes that “[h]ere Hegel challenges not Kant’s insistence that the categories derive from the faculty of spontaneity rather than from sensation, but the restrictions he places on their validity. More precisely, Hegel challenges Kant’s inference from the fact that the categories must be the contribution of the thinking subject to the conclusion that they cannot therefore also be ‘determinations of objects themselves’. Hegel makes this point again when he writes that, ‘according to Kant, thoughts, although they are universal and necessary determinations, are still only our thoughts, and are cut off from what the thing is in itself by an impassable gulf’”.⁵⁷ In other words, Hegel sees Kant as incorrectly separating thought from being, by regarding the world as only having its conceptual structure by virtue of the application of certain forms, namely the Categories, whose origin lies in us.⁵⁸ For Hegel, what Kant should not have argued was that the necessity and universality provided by conceptual form that constitutes the formal unity and order of empirical reality is not inherent to the world itself. This seems to be supported by the following passage:

What I have suggested therefore allows for the following approach: in wishing to conceive of the Categories as derivable from the world, Hegel is recommending here that we reject transcendental idealism, particularly the idea that there is a distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves insofar as the Categories only have validity for appearances and have no validity for things-in-themselves. By consequence, then, the whole Critical project is rejected, which may then appear to return us to a pre-Critical/dogmatically metaphysical position which views all objects of philosophical enquiry as knowable by theoretical reason, and so unfettered categorial reflection.

However, in response to what I have argued about Hegel’s position on our cognitive faculties, it can be suggested that claiming that Hegel regarded our thought to be both intuitive in a special way yet also discursive ascribes to Hegel an incoherent position; as Sedgwick writes: “Perhaps all this suggests is that Hegel wishes to award us incompatible cognitive capacities. The intuitive model, he says, is implied by an accurate interpretation of the transcendental deduction and best captures the nature of our form of cognition; yet he also grants that in its cognitions of experience, human spontaneity must be affected by a given sensible content”.⁶⁰ To claim, though, that Hegel is simply inconsistent misses the point, as the only way one can justifiably call Hegel’s position ‘incoherent’ here is if we have compelling reason to think he believes that human cognition is both intuitive and discursive simpliciter, that human cognition shares the same properties as both the intuitive intellect and the discursive consciousness. But, as I have argued, Hegel does not suggest anything like this, because whilst we do rely on a given content that affects us, the only thing we share with the intuitive intellect, he believes, is spontaneity. Though by ‘spontaneity’ here, Hegel does not mean the same kind of cognitive activity that the intuitive intellect possess - rather, he only means that a discursive consciousness is able to reflect on their environment and change their conceptual structures where appropriate to adequately grasp external content.

Returning to the previous passage from the Encyclopaedia, we can now see that what the separation of thought and being signifies for Hegel is that on Kant’s account, the objectivity of representation provided by the pure concepts is not a full-blooded objectivity, i.e. the objectivity is in some sense artificial and contingent: the Categories confer on objects the formal characteristics of objectivity (such as causality, substantiality, etc.), but leave us cut off from things in themselves. In this way, the empirically real character of the world depends on this important aspect of transcendental idealism. By extension, the laws of natural science, because they rely on the Categories, also depend on this important aspect of transcendental idealism. And it is because the formal characteristics of ordinary objects and the formal structure of empirical reality are derived from us that the Kantian account of the objectivity of representation, for Hegel, is not a full-blooded one. Thus, Bird is correct to note that Hegel criticises Kant for failing to secure a strong conception of objectivity; however, how Bird understands this claim, as a form of Berkleyean phenomenalism, is I believe mistaken. Having seen that Hegel’s critique of Kant does not involve any kind of charge of phenomenalism, we can also reject Bird’s claims that “... there can be little doubt that Hegel’s discussion was in moulding that tradition [of regarding Kant as a phenomenalist]”,⁶¹ and that Hegel misunderstood Kant.

Another way of understanding Hegel’s argument here is that Kant’s formal idealism fails to adequately respond to the Humean challenge of how experience can be the source of our knowledge of necessity, i.e. how, if possible, we can establish that the world is necessarily ordered. However, two points need to be made for the sake of clarity: (a) Hegel’s conception of experience is very different from Hume’s conception of experience, cf. “the empirical is not only mere observing, hearing, feeling, perceiving particulars, but it also essentially consists in finding species, universals and laws” (LHP, XX 79/III: 176). In this sense, it can be suggested that Hegel is talking past Hume. (b) Hegel’s appeal to experience does not amount to the idea that there can be an impression of necessity, because to make that claim would conflate thought and sensation. For Hegel, Kant was correct to believe that the Categories could not be derived from sensation, but that Kant’s first error here was acknowledging Hume’s contention that necessity, etc. could not be derived a posteriori. Indeed, Kant himself writes the following, which suggests that he accepted Hume’s claim about what experience could provide:

For if this representation of space were a concept acquired a posteriori, which was drawn out of general outer experience, the first principles of mathematical determination would be nothing but perceptions. They would therefore have all the contingency of perception, and it would not even be necessary that only one straight line lie between two points, but experience would merely always teach that. What is borrowed from experience always has only comparative universality, namely through induction. One would therefore only be able to say that as far as has been observed to date, no space has been found that has more than three dimensions. (A24/B39)

In this passage, what Kant is claiming, I believe, is that all that experience can provide us with is knowledge (or at least awareness) of actuality; experience cannot provide the content of necessity in certain knowledge-claims. However, according to Kant, because the truths of geometrical propositions would be contingent if these truths were derived a posteriori, and because geometrical truths are necessary, these truths must be about objects that have their character conforming to our cognitive structure. The price, then, that Kant has to pay to maintain the idea of necessity against Hume’s sceptical empiricism – i.e. the appeal to apriority – is, for Hegel, a non full-blooded concept of objectivity. Under Hegel’s account, it is not just the case that Kant agreed with Hume, but also that Kant’s second error, his response to Hume, was a subjectivist response, which failed to do justice to the concept of objectivity.

In contrast to Kant’s subjective idealism, Hegel aims to develop an objective idealism, one which claims that the rational structure of empirical reality is an intrinsic property of empirical reality, rather than something contributed to an indeterminate content by human discursivity.⁶² In other words, one of Hegel’s fundamental philosophical aims is to bring thought and being together, by rejecting Kant’s thesis that form is a priori: the subjective origin of (conceptual) form, the principle of determinacy and order, on the Kantian account, signifies for Hegel that reality in itself is not determined, ordered and unified, i.e. that thought is separate from being. The main task of Hegelian metaphysics is to explain how the world is in itself determined, ordered and unified.

The final question I wish to address in this section is whether the separation of thought from being fits at least one of the interpretations of formal idealism that I discussed earlier. It is clear that Hegel takes issue with the idea that without a discursive mind, empirical reality lacks the features of unity, order, regularity, and necessity. Prima facie, this may suggest that Hegel was supportive of the Imposition Model’s reading of formal idealism. However, it is not clear at all that Hegel had this oversimplified interpretation of Kant, which would mean that ascribing to Hegel the Imposition Model would be premature. I think that it is fair to say that Hegel did not favour the Articulation Model, simply because there is nothing really in his writing that would suggest some kind of espousal of that interpretation. It is more difficult, though, to see if Hegel adopted the Filtration Model that I developed: this model, as I argued, regards the world as having its structure due to the interaction between our conceptual framework and the properties of a set of objects that exist mind-independently, but whose nature we can never cognise. However, if we remember what Hegel’s critique involves – the charge that Kant derived the principles that govern formal unity of nature from us and not from the world itself – Hegel is opposing any argument that the world is not itself the source of formal unity; because of this, I think it is reasonable to conclude that Hegel’s argument can be directed at both the Imposition Model, because this claims that the mind imposes form on an indeterminate world, and my Filtration Model, because this claims that the mind and certain properties of objects determine the formal structure of reality.

Thus far, I have shown that Hegel’s critique of Kant’s subjective idealism is not based on an erroneous view of Kant. I now wish to move on to other central and related aspects of that critique, beginning with Hegel’s critique of Kant’s view of transcendental apperception.