Understanding Hegel's Mature Critique of Kant
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Understanding Hegel's Mature Critique of Kant

John McCumber

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Understanding Hegel's Mature Critique of Kant

John McCumber

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Hegel's critique of Kant was a turning point in the history of philosophy: for the first time, the concrete, situated, and in certain senses "naturalistic" style pioneered by Hegel confronted the thin, universalistic, and argumentatively purified style of philosophy that had found its most rigorous expression in Kant. The controversy has hardly died away: it virtually haunts contemporary philosophy from epistemology to ethical theory. Yet if this book is right, the full import of Hegel's critique of Kant has not been understood. Working from Hegel's mature texts (after 1807) and reading them in light of an overall interpretation of Hegel's project as a linguistic, "definitional" system, the book offers major reinterpretations of Hegel's views: The Kantian thing-in-itself is not denied but relocated as a temporal aspect of our experience. Hegel's linguistic idealism is understood in terms of his realistic view of sensation. Instead of claiming that Kant's categorical imperative is too empty to provide concrete moral guidance, Hegel praises its emptiness as the foundation for a diverse society.

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Year
2013
ISBN
9780804788533
CHAPTER 1
HEGEL AND HIS PROJECT
TWO CENTURIES OF STRENUOUS EFFORT at understanding the nature of Hegel’s philosophical project have generated two main families of views—one, indeed, for each century. Both are predicated on views of Hegel’s relationship to Kant’s critical project, but their stances on this are opposed: the older view sees Hegel as revoking Kant’s critique of metaphysics, while the younger one, closer to mine, sees him as continuing it. My next tasks, then, are to sketch these two general understandings of Hegel, to show why they are defective, and to indicate with what they might be replaced. A general account of that replacement will occupy the rest of the chapter, with the specific payoffs concerning Hegel’s critique of Kant reserved for the rest of the book.
That Hegel’s “philosophical vision” differs from Kant’s is obvious enough; even to a nonphilosophical eye, a page of Hegel does not look at all like a page of Kant, nor of anyone else, for that matter. What is not obvious, to say the least, is just what Hegel’s way of doing philosophy amounts to. That it represents some kind of comprehensive philosophical system is clear just from the tables of contents of his major works; but what more can we say?
I will call this the “nature of philosophy problem” in Hegel. I have treated it at length elsewhere (CW) and will confine myself here to an updated sketch of the overall argument. My most general presupposition is that any proposed solution to the nature of philosophy problem in Hegel runs into trouble if it is (a) at variance with Hegel’s own statements; (b) impeaches the overall unity of his thought; (c) employs problematic reading strategies; and/or (d) violates what I will call the “plausibility constraint.”
These criteria deserve some preliminary comments, of which the first is that they are advanced only to serve as indications of problems with a proposed solution. They are not definitive, if only because overall accounts of Hegel’s project (with some exceptions) are not subject to up-or-down judgments on their validity. Hegel interpretation is inherently pluralistic, and its major strands are all illuminating and worthy of continued pursuit. But none, including surely my own, is wholly right.
Criterion (a), in particular, furnishes indications of trouble, rather than trouble itself, because quotes from Hegel almost always have counter-quotes. Hegel was not only a voluminous writer with diverse interests but a supremely difficult one as well, many of whose texts have been heavily edited by others. The dialectical nature of his philosophy, moreover, repeatedly leads him to state contradictory views, often at some length, before subsuming them into some sort of speculative unity.1
It must also be said that Hegel is often—too often—devious. To take an example which will be important for my own view of Hegel (and its deficiencies), in the Science of Logic he refers to it as “the exposition [Darstellung] of God before the creation of nature and of finite Spirit” (5:44/50; emphasis removed). This single line has been cited innumerable times as a warrant for various “theological” readings of Hegel.2 But it cannot serve as that, for it turns out to be an unattributed citation from Spinoza’s On the Improvement of the Intellect.3 Spinoza refers to the presentation of the thoughts of God before the creation of the world as a thought-experiment for a philosophical project; but it is not something that could actually be carried out because for Spinoza—as well, prima facie, for the Hegel who quotes him—the very idea is counterfactual. The God who is nature (deus sive natura) cannot have created nature.4
It is not surprising, then, that in the next paragraph—in a passage quoted rarely, if ever, together with the first—Hegel slips in a retraction, while ostensibly talking about Anaxagoras: “What we are dealing with in logic is not a thinking about something which exists independently as a basis for our thinking and apart from it; . . . on the contrary, the forms and self-determinations of thought are the content and ultimate truth itself” (5:44/50).
On this basis, Hegel’s logic would not be the “exposition” of God but God himself—and Hegel turns into a self-deifying maniac, unless we know enough Spinoza to uncover the hidden reference to him in the earlier quote and realize that it cannot have been intended literally. Then we see that Hegel is not maniacal but devious: he is trying to invoke God for his philosophical project while covertly signaling, both in the invocation itself and immediately after, that the invocation is hollow. The deviousness can readily be explained if we surmise that Hegel was, philosophically anyway, not a traditional theist and wanted to cover his tracks. Atheism was broadly defined at the time; it was repeatedly confused with another departure from orthodoxy, pantheism, in the Pantheismusstreit of the late eighteenth century.5 It was also unpopular with German authorities; thirteen years before the first edition of the Science of Logic, Fichte had been fired from his position at Jena for espousing what they considered to be atheism.6 Hegel, who still did not have an academic position when he was writing the Science of Logic, would hardly want to endanger his chances of getting one.
This is not the only occasion on which Hegel was devious in such ways. The lesson, from this as well as the other problems with his writing that I have noted, is that isolated quotes must be used with care.
Criterion (b) will be clear enough when I deploy it, as long as we keep in mind that the unity in question is not over time: on the view I will advocate here, Hegel’s thought changes in important ways over the course of his life, but in its final expression it is a single, unified philosophical system.
Criterion (c), the avoidance of problematic reading strategies, requires slightly more detailed preliminary comment. The two standard families of solutions to the nature of philosophy problem in Hegel, simply because they give such prominence to Kant, show themselves to be deuteroi ploi (“secondary sailings”7) in that instead of going directly to Hegel’s texts to understand his philosophical project, they use a selected group of other texts to understand the ones he actually wrote and published. This is tempting, of course, in virtue of the obscurity, difficulty, and trickiness of Hegel’s texts; you cannot simply sit down with them and hope to get anywhere. It is therefore entirely reasonable to go to more readily comprehensible texts and thinkers, such as Kant, and then read Hegel as either criticizing or carrying forward their insights. But this inevitably risks reading foreign notions into Hegel rather than developing one’s understanding of him from his own texts. Depending on which other texts are selected, this approach can ramify into a whole panoply of reading strategies.
Finally, criterion (d), which I will call the “plausibility constraint,” requires that any account we give of Hegel’s way of doing philosophy should not only be grounded in Hegel’s texts but should also be plausible enough to make Hegel’s project worth pursuing. Introducing this constraint on a solution to the nature of philosophy problem in Hegel raises ancient, profound, and complex issues concerning the nature of philosophical interpretation itself. Should we strive for the most accurate statement possible of Hegel’s views on philosophical plausibility, no matter how ridiculous they appear to us? Or should we try to reshape his thought into something acceptable by our current lights? The former suggests that we should try to jump over our own shadow, eliminating all traces of ourselves and our culture from our interpretation; but if all traces of ourselves are gone, why should we hope that the results will be useful to us? The latter implies that we and our kind constitute a court of final instance before which Hegel must bow—and if he must bow, so must all others but ourselves. Trapped between the Scylla of antiquarianism and the Charybdis of arrogance, our only recourse here seems to be to feel our way into the middle, hoping for some sort of Gadamerian “merging of horizons” to broaden us while reshaping him.8
I will take a slightly more determinate middle way, arguing that both families of Hegel interpretation fail both types of plausibility constraint: they do not yield accounts of Hegel’s project that Hegel himself would likely have thought worth pursuing, and some of what they yield is implausible to us.
HEGEL AS A REVOCATION OF KANT
The first family of solutions to the nature of philosophy problem in Hegel holds that Hegel is restoring metaphysics after Kant’s critique of it.9 What these views have in common is that they all take Hegel to purport, like his pre-Kantian predecessors, to inform us about fundamental things which we cannot experience, such as God, the soul, and freedom of the will—what Kant called “things in themselves” or noumena. Such views of Hegel were originally propounded by some of his own students10 and have remained traditional. According to this family of views, Hegel aims to produce a philosophical system of the kind brought forth by such philosophers as Aquinas, Leibniz, and Spinoza; the different members of this family of interpretations represent different choices as to which of these predecessors the interpreter thinks is the most important. We thus get Hegel presenting us, as Frederick Beiser (1993) puts it, with “inverted Spinozism,” “dialectical neo-Thomism,” or “monistic Leibnizianism.” These approaches, in Beiser’s words, take Hegel’s metaphysics as a “fait accompli” (2); his philosophy in general rests upon, and so restores, some version of metaphysics after its Kantian critique. It therefore amounts to a revocation of that critique.
The metaphysics thus restored, however, cannot be exactly the metaphysics which Kant attacked. For one thing, it was evident during Hegel’s lifetime that he was not doing metaphysics in any sort of traditional way. Metaphysics has always been a matter of argument, while Hegel’s mature writings move along from section to section and from volume to volume without so much as a “therefore.” Moreover, when Kant characterizes metaphysics as claiming knowledge of a supersensible realm, he is viewing it in terms of a dualism so intense that he eventually had to write the whole Critique of Judgment to overcome it. Such a view is profoundly uncongenial to Hegel’s monistic instincts, which means that for him metaphysics and reality—thought and being—are somehow one from the start. As Dieter Henrich has unpacked this view, “it belongs among Hegel’s most fundamental convictions that the conceptual form of thinking does not only arrive at reality, but that it enables and even constitutes reality. In this way the world is only the self-unfolding of logical form.”11
One might think that this approach would lead to a lot of works comparing Hegel’s thought to that of Aquinas, Leibniz, or Spinoza, and it has;12 but in fact scholars need not go so far afield. One of Kant’s ablest successors in German philosophy, Schelling, attempted a restoration of metaphysics on an intuitive basis after Kant’s critique of it. Hegel’s early allegiance to Schelling was strong and is evident throughout his writings up to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Thus, this approach encourages the reading strategy of explaining Hegel’s view by focusing not on previous philosophers but on Hegel’s own presystematic, deeply Schellingian writings.13
This family of views, like the other family (which I will discuss in the next section), runs into serious problems. First, in line with (a) above, there are specific indications in Hegel’s texts that he does not view his philosophy as a restoration of metaphysics. Second, it violates the unity of Hegel’s thought by separating theoretical and practical reasoning. Third, it depends on questionable reading strategies. Fourth, and most seriously of all, it fails the plausibility constraint in both senses.
The first indication of trouble for this family of views is the large number of unkind things Hegel says about pre-Kantian metaphysics. To be sure, arguments from quotes are never definitive, and there is no shortage of passages where Hegel endorses metaphysics. But that is only what we should expect: given his views on the nature of refutation, which I noted in the Introduction, his philosophy should contain metaphysics as a subordinate moment (as he often says; see 5:61/63–64; Enz. § 24 and Zus., 114 Anm.; etc.).
Just how it does this will be clarified shortly. For the moment, whatever Hegel says about metaphysics as he has comprehended it, the number and intensity of his negative comments on the “older” (or pre-Kantian) metaphysics remain impressive. It was “no free and objective thought” (Enz. § 31 Zus.), for example, and exhibited a “tendency to substance” (20:122–123)—a characterization which is not only unkind but hostile from the man who, in the preface to his first published book, proclaimed himself to be trying to “grasp the true not as substance but equally as subject” (3:23/10). More indicative still is Hegel’s dismissal of the philosophical efforts of many of his own contemporaries because “seen in the light, [they] are nothing more than the procedure of the older metaphysics, an uncritical thinking on and on, as is given to anyone” (Enz. § 41 Zus. 1). If Hegel is criticizing his contemporaries for pursuing “uncritical,” that is, pre-Kantian, metaphysics, how can he think he is doing the same?
Calling pre-Kantian metaphysics the “point of view of the understanding on the objects of reason,” as Hegel also does (Enz. § 27), is hardly an invitation to it: Hegel is accusing metaphysics in general of ignoring the Kantian distinction between reason and the understanding, thereby separating the objects of metaphysics—God, the immortal soul, and the like—from our minds and supposing them to exist in their own right. To go on, as Hegel does, and say that metaphysics retains any contemporary presence at all only because of this wholly mistaken undertaking is to say that it is intellectually dead.
It was, Hegel tells us, Kant who “finished off” the old metaphysics of the understanding because of its “objective dogmatism” (hat der Verstandesmetaphysik, als einem objektiven Dogmatismus, ein Ende gemacht; 20:333). But if Kant finished it off, he was not the first to attack it: modern skepticism and empiricism were the “downfall” (Untergang) of at least the metaphysics of Spinoza, Locke, and Leibniz (20:70). Precritical metaphysics is not only dead but cannot be revivified, or so Hegel suggests in a Berlin fragment:
The philosophy of spirit can be neither empirical nor metaphysical, but rather must examine the concept of mind [Geist] in its immanent, necessary development out of itself to a system of its activities. (11:524)
Pre-Kantian metaphysics, then, is dead because it was unfree, uncritical, tended to substance, absolutized the point of view of the understanding, and was objective in its dogmatism (as well as dogmatic in its objectivism). These complaints are not only numerous and intense but also consistent: they all amount to the claim that metaphysics did not restrict itself to mind in its “immanent necessary development” but took as its standard accuracy to things which were assumed to exist outside us. It is easy to see in this that Hegel has accepted, not revoked, the main traits of Kant’s critique of metaphysics.
Second, attributing such a metaphysical or theological turn to Hegel also violates (b) abo...

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