5 - Avoiding German Idealism: Kant, Hegel, and the Reflective Judgment Problem

Summary

In the following, I want to suggest two different ways of understanding the relation between Kant's Critique of Judgment and the later German Idealist tradition. The first might be considered the received or standard view about that relation. I shall summarize it in Sections I and II.

The second presents a different picture, and I shall begin defending it in the remaining sections. The main issue raised by both possible directions is whether they represent internal developments of Kantian arguments in the third Critique, or whether they are motivated by non-Kantian, even non-“critical” commitments of Schelling and especially Hegel. My claim will be that the suggested alternate formulation of Kant's influence does rely on an internal criticism and development. That claim will require a defense of the reading of Kant's text suggested by that appropriation.

Many German philosophers of the last decade of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century interpreted the Critique of Judgment in the light of what they perceived to be the great problem created by the Kantian revolution in philosophy. That problem, as they saw it, was, once “inside” the Kantian project, to find one's way “out” again.

To enter the project seemed to many simply unavoidable. It was to share in the spirit of Kant's revolutionary modernism, to destroy dogmatism, to assert the autonomy of human reason, its sufficiency in being a law unto itself.