Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object

Robert Stern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134973736
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel's holistic metaphysics challenges much recent ontology with its atomistic and reductionist assumptions; Stern offers us an original reading of Hegel and contrasts him with his predecessor, Kant.

Chapter one

Kant and the doctrine of synthesis

Kant’s way of accounting for the existence of ordinary concrete objects is, in essence, to show how the content of our experience must exhibit a definite connectedness and relational structure, and to argue that objects are nothing more than ‘centres’ of such connectedness. None the less, he holds that these relations and forms of connection are not inherent in reality per se:¹ he argues that they rest on the synthesizing activity of the transcendental subject, which organizes our experience using certain a priori categories. If Kant’s position is to be made comprehensible, something must be said about the background to his doctrine of synthesis and an outline must be given of his general philosophical project; I will then discuss his account of the categories as the source of relational unity in our experience, and show how he uses the unity of the subject to ground this relational unity of the object.

THINGS, QUALITIES, AND RELATIONS

In order to understand the evolution of Kant’s doctrine of synthesis, it is first necessary to see how he inherited a pluralistic conception of the object from Locke and Hume, and an idealistic account of relations from Leibniz. Instead of treating ordinary individual objects as the primary, ontologically basic entities, in the Aristotelian manner,² Locke and Hume began the empiricist tradition of viewing the object as a bundle of qualities, by reducing it to a plurality of simple ideas that are treated as self-subsistent and independent of one another and of the whole. At the same time, Leibniz had raised doubts over the reality of relations, and gave them ‘only a mental truth’,³ I will argue that in developing his doctrine of synthesis, and deriving the relational unity of the object from the synthesizing activity of the transcendental subject, Kant took advantage of both these conceptions, and that they lie behind his own philosophical position. In this section I will first analyse the pluralistic model of the object developed by Locke and Hume, and then discuss Leibniz’s theory of relations, as a background to my account of Kant in the remainder of the chapter.

Locke’s account of the constitution of things is embedded within his representational theory of knowledge; he does not talk about objects as such, but about our ideas of objects. None the less, his account of how we come to represent objects in our experience implies a certain doctrine about the structure of objects, and of how objects must be if we are to perceive and know them.

The idea of an object for Locke is a complex idea, made up of an aggregate of simple ideas to which it is reducible. These simple ideas are treated as basic elements out of which the representation of the object is constituted. The question arises, however, as to how these simple ideas come to form a unity. As we shall see in what follows, Locke was never really able to answer this question satisfactorily, because while on the one hand he dismissed any notion of substance as a substratum underlying and unifying the object, on the other hand he never really developed a theory of relations capable of explaining the unity of simple ideas.

Locke’s attack on substance as an underlying basis for the unity of simple ideas is well known. He argues that our conception of this unifying substratum only arises because we treat the collection of simple ideas which represent an object as if they formed one single totality, with the result that we are led to project a substratum as a ground for this unity:

The Mind being, as I have declared, furnished with a great number of the simple Ideas, conveyed in by the Senses, as they are found in exteriour things, or by Reflection on its own Operations, takes notice also, that a certain number of these simple Ideas go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and Words being suited to common apprehensions, and made use of for quick dispatch, are called so united in one subject, by one name; which by inadvertency we are apt afterward to talk of and consider as one simple Idea, which indeed is a complication of many Ideas together; Because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple Ideas can subsist by themselves, we accustom our selves, to suppose some Substratum, wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call Substance.⁴

Locke bases his rejection of substance on its apparent unknowability, as a hidden support for unrelated sensible attributes. He therefore dismisses substance as ‘a supposed, I know not what’,⁵ and suggests that it can be excluded from our ontology as an unverifiable postulate of our overactive imaginations.

However, having dismissed the concept of substance in this way, as the ground of unity for the various attributes united in an object, Locke then needed to give some other account of how this unity comes about, if he was to treat it as anything more than an arbitrary aggregation. The account Locke gives, however, is notoriously ambiguous, as it contains both subjective and objective elements.

The source of this ambiguity lies in a distinction Locke draws between modes and substances. Modes are defined as being either homogeneous or heterogeneous complex ideas (i.e. complex ideas made up out of the same sort of simple ideas, which he calls simple modes, or complex ideas made up of different sorts of simple ideas, which he calls mixed modes). Modes are also defined as being predicable or dependent on substances. Substances are defined as complex ideas that are independently existent.⁶ Now, whereas Locke is happy to talk of mixed modes as complex ideas that are related together or compounded together by the mind, he is less happy to talk of the unity of the complex ideas of substances in this way. Thus, while the unity of a mode is subjective in origin and relational in structure, the unity of a substance is not, but seems to be given to us in experience.⁷ Locke’s account of the activity of mind in relating together simple ideas therefore only answers half of the question of unity: it answers the question with respect to modes, but not with respect to substances, which appear to have a unity independent of our subjective activity of ‘compounding’.

What, then, is the source of the unity of substance, if it is neither the underlying but mysterious ‘substratum’ postulated by traditional metaphysics, nor the result of the compounding activity of mind? The answer Locke gives to this question arises out of his doctrine of sortal concepts or natural kinds, and is an answer closer to the substratum model, in its objectivity, than his own subjective account of the unity of modes. This comes about as follows.

According to Locke, the names of natural kinds (such as ‘gold’, to use his favourite example) stand for complex ideas, made up of a conjunction of simple ideas (yellowness, malleability, being of a certain weight, and so on). These complex ideas constitute the nominal essence of the natural kind.⁸ Now, the co-existing simple ideas that make up our complex idea of gold ‘carry with them, in their own Nature, no visible necessary connexion, or inconsistency with any other simple Ideas, whose co-existence with them we would inform our selves about’.⁹ That is, the simple ideas in themselves have no necessary relation to one another: ‘there is no discoverable connexion between Fixedness, and the Colour, Weight, and other simple Ideas of that nominal Essence of Gold.’¹⁰ The simple ideas that make up the nominal essence of gold are in themselves self-subsistent, and ontologically independent of one another.

However, this account of the nominal essence leaves unexplained the regular unity of properties that we find in objects which are members of a natural kind. It is in order to explain this unity that Locke puts forward his doctrine of real essence:

By this real Essence, I mean, that real constitution of any Thing, which is the foundation of all those Properties, that are combined in, and are constantly found to co-exist with the nominal Essence; that particular constitution, which every Thing has within it self, without any relation to any thing without it.¹¹

Now, this postulation of a real essence (based on a distinction between observable qualities and microscopic structures) is used by Locke to replace what M. R. Ayers has called the ‘dummy concept’ of substance with something apparently more intelligible as an explanation for the unity of attributes that we find in the object: that is, insensible particles on which the observable qualities of objects are based.¹²

The doctrine of real essence therefore makes the unity of properties in the object independent of the ‘compounding’ activity of the subject: but does it make it intelligible? The difficulty Locke’s theory faces is that although he insists on the emptiness of substance as an explanation for the unity of the object as a bundle of simple ideas, he seems merely to have replaced the unknowable substratum of metaphysics with the unknowable substratum of contemporary physics. Moreover, the success of Locke’s theory as an account of the unity of the object depends on accepting that the structure of insensible particles on which it is based is itself unified and cohesive: but given Locke’s insistence that this cohesion of particles is itself unknown, this objective account of the unity of the object remains unstable.

With Hume’s more consistent acceptance of the consequences of an atomistic theory of representation, this instability is revealed even more clearly. We have seen that the unity of the object had threatened to fall apart as a consequence of Locke’s attack on substance, and that this unity was only restored via the ambiguous re-introduction of the quasi-substratum of real essence as the new basis for the unity of the object. Locke had taken the object to the brink of a crisis, only to return to something like the status quo. It took Hume’s more thoroughgoing radicalism to repeat the crisis, and this time not to draw back from its consequences; for, unlike Locke, Hume never accepted the postulation of any ground of unity underlying the object (be it an indeterminate substratum or Locke’s real essence). Instead, Hume insisted that the object is nothing more than a bundle of simple qualities, which only seem to be grounded in some unity as a consequence of being associated together by the imagination. Let us examine Hume’s position in more detail.

Hume was as convinced as Locke that substance as a substratum is unknowable, and for that reason of dubious ontological status:

I wou’d fain ask those philosophers, who found so much of their reasonings on the distinction of substance and attribute, and imagine we have clear ideas of each, whether the idea of substance be deriv’d from the impressions of sensation or reflexion? If it be convey’d to us by our senses, I ask, which of them; and after what manner? If it be perceiv’d by the eyes, it must be a colour; if by the ears, a sound; if by the palate, a taste; and so of the other senses. But I believe none will assert, that substance is either a colour, or a sound, or a taste. The idea of substance must therefore be deriv’d from an impression of reflexion, if it really exists. But the impressions of reflexion resolve themselves into our passions and emotions; none of which can possibly represent a substance. We have therefore no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we talk or reason concerning it.¹³

Hume’s point is that as we have no experience of substance, this idea cannot explain why it is that we think a particular collection of qualities forms a unity in an object. Instead, Hume believes that he can explain our feeling that these qualities constitute one object in some other way.

The way he chooses is to argue that we take various qualities to form a unified object if, when we think of the object, our minds move from one of its qualities to another without any sense of ‘transition’. It is the fact that we feel no ‘transition’ in thinking of these qualities which he uses to explain why we take them to be attributes of a single, unified object:

The imagination conceives the simple object at once, with facility, by a single effort of thought, without change or variation. The connexion of parts in the compound object has almost the same effect, and so unites the object within itself, that the fancy feels not the transition in passing from one part to another. Hence the colour, taste, figure, solidity, and other qualities, combin’d in a peach or melon, are conceiv’d to form one thing; and that on account of their close relation, which makes them affect the thought in the same manner, as if perfectly uncompounded.¹⁴

According to Hume, therefore, because the connection between various qualities in the mind (or imagination) is very strong, we are not aware of any transition between them, and take them to constitute one object.

Now, Hume explains this close connection between qualities in our minds using his theory of association. According to this theory, the relations that we feel to hold between simple ideas or impressions are based on what Hume calls the three ‘uniting principles’ or ‘principles of association’, viz. resemblance, contiguity in time and place, and cause and effect. Hume’s theory is that these ‘associating qualities’ make up a ‘gentle force’ that operates on the mind, and leads it to connect together various perceptions into a unity, of the sort that we feel when we look at a unified object, such as (to use the above example) a peach or a melon.¹⁵ Hume therefore argues that in the case of a thing that we take to be a substance (as opposed to a mode), there is no ‘unknown something’ in which the collection of simple ideas inhere, but rather a collection of ‘particular qualities’ which are ‘closely and inseparably connected by the relations of contiguity and causation’.¹⁶ Hume therefore hopes to have explained why we feel that an object is one unified object, on the grounds that the qualities that make up the object are very strongly related together in our minds, without any ‘transition’; and he hopes to have explained this relation by appealing to the mind’s association of ideas on the basis of its three ‘uniting principles’. In this way, Hume tries to do without the need to postulate any substratum in which the qualities of the objects inhere.

The difficulty with Hume’s account, however, is that while it seems to explain why it is we might take various qualities to constitute one object, it does not show how these qualities are related together in the object, but only how perceptions are connected together in our minds; furthermore, it fails to explain why certain qualities are invariably found to be united together in our experience of the object. Now Hume was of course notoriously sceptical in his approach to these kinds of questions: he held that no real relation can be discovered between matters of fact, and that the relation is only felt by us to be objective and necessary as a result of our habitual association of certain ideas, based on the regular but contingent and external association of the cor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on editions and conventions
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Kant and the doctrine of synthesis
• 2 Hegel contra Kant
• 3 Ontology and structure in Hegel’s Logic
• 4 Unity and structure in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature
• 5 The unity of the object and the unity of the subject
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index