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Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Material Conditions of Possible Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Kenneth R Westphal
Kenneth R Westphal*
Affiliation:
University of New Hampshire

Abstract

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For both methodological and substantive reasons Hegel owes us a thorough internal critique of Kant's transcendental idealism. He did not, however, set one out. I have become convinced, however, that Hegel's reading and re-thinking of Kant during his years in Jena is far more thorough and insightful than has generally been recognized, and that he was clearly aware of some very important main lines of internal criticism to which Kant's philosophy is subject.

Here I want to develop one case of an obliquely indicated but nevertheless sound objection Hegel makes to Kant's transcendental idealism. The issue concerns what Kant calls the “transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition.” This phrase denotes the necessary degree of regularity among the content of empirical intuitions such that we are both able and stimulated to comprehend that content under our general concepts and categories in empirical judgments. Kant is quite clear that this is a transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. It is also a formal condition, since it concerns the ordering of something, in this case, of the contents of empirical intuitions. Kant contends that transcendental idealism, and it alone, can account for the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. Against Kant, I shall contend that transcendental idealism cannot account at all for the occurrence of the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition. Before turning to some of the details of Kant's views, I shall show that this problem is very much on Hegel's mind in Jena. Afterward I shall show that understanding Hegel's concern about Kant's views on the transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition sheds light on some of Hegel's otherwise rather puzzling claims and aims.

Type
Hegel and Kant
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 17 , Issue 1: number 33 , Spring/Summer 1996 , pp. 23 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1996

References

1 For a brief statement of Hegel's principles of justification, which rest entirely on internal criticism, see my entry “Dialectic (Hegel),” in: Sosa, E & Dancy, J, eds, A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 98–99 Google Scholar. A fuller discussion is contained in “Hegel's Solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion,” The History of Philosophy Quarterly 5 No 2 (1988), 173–88Google Scholar; rpt in: Stewart, J, ed, The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader: A Collection of Critical and Interpretive Essays (Albany: SUNY, 1996)Google Scholar. I explore and defend Hegel's views in full detail in Hegel's Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer, 1989)Google Scholar; hereafter abbreviated “HER”.

2 “Glauben und Wissen. Oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjektivität, in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen, als Kantische, Jacobische, und Fichtische Philosophie” (in: Pöggeler, O, ed, Hegel: Gesammelte Werke, Hamburg: Meiner, 1968 Google Scholar; abbreviated “GW”; GW TV 315-414; Harris, H S & Cerf, W, trans, Faith and Knowledge, Albany: SUNY Press, 1977 Google Scholar; hereafter abbreviated “G&W”), G&W, GW IV 337.26-32/84 (my tr). Line numbers of GW are indicated by decimals. Page references are given first to Hegel's German and then to the translation. The “negative solution” to which Hegel here refers is Kant's claim that the Antinomy is not necessarily a contradiction, if transcendental idealism is true.

3 G&W, GW IV 396.11-18/165; my translation.

4 “Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral World View,” Philosophical Topics 19 No 2 (1991), 133–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I should like to note that the two tenets Hegel ascribes to “the moral world view” which I could not find again in Kant (ibid, note 2) Hegel explicitly ascribes to Fichte in the Differenzschrift. See “Differenz des Fichte'sehen und Schlling'sehen Systems der Philosophie”, GW IV, 59–60 Google Scholar; Harris, H S & Cerf, W, trans “The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy,” Albany: SUNY, 1977, 150–51Google Scholar; abbreviated hereafter as “D”. A sixth objection Hegel makes concerning Kant's view of God as an ens realisimum is discussed by Allen Wood and decided in Kant's favor in Kant's Moral Religion (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 135–145 Google Scholar. On Hegel's objections to this doctrine in his Dissertation, see Fulda, Hans Friedrich, “Hegels Dialektik und die transzendentale Dialektik Kants,” Giornale di Metaftsica, Nuova Serie 9, 1987, 265-94, esp 282–85Google Scholar. Regarding the issues Fulda raises also see Wolff, Michael, Der Begriff des Widerspruchs. Eine Studie zur Dialektik Kants und Hegels (Königstein/Ts: Hain, 1981), 129–41Google Scholar. In §IX of “Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral World View” I show that some important elements of Hegel's critique of Kant applies to O'Neil's, Onora Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. In “How ‘Full’ is Kant's Categorical Imperative?” (Jahrbuch für Recht und Ethik/Annual Review of Law and Ethics 3, 1995, 465–509 Google Scholar) I make a similar case regarding Herman, Barbara, The Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

5 D, GW IV 69.36-70.4/164.

6 I have worked out these problems on grounds strictly internal to Kant's philosophy in the following essays: “Does Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science Fill a Gap in the Critique of Pure Reason? ” (Synthese 103 No 1, 1995, 43–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar); “Kant's Dynamic Constructions” (Journal of Philosophical Research 20, 1995, 381–429 CrossRefGoogle Scholar); and “Kant's Proof of the Law of Inertia” (in: Robinson, H, ed, Proceedings of the 8th International Kant Congress; Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1995; II. 1, 413–24)Google Scholar. I have set out the basis for ascribing this objection to Hegel in “On Hegel's Early Critique of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science ,” in: Houlgate, S, ed, Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature (Albany: SUNY, 1996)Google Scholar. I should like to note that my essay on Kant's treatment of the law of inertia is not quite adequate. First, Kant's statement of Newton's law includes the term 'speed” (“Geschwindigkeif”), which Kant likely understood in Newtonian, proto-vectorial terms. If so, his statement of Newton's law is correct. However, that would make Kant's statement redundant, since he states beforehand sameness of direction (“Richlung”). Translating Kant's term ” “Geschwindigkeif” by “Velocity,” as I followed Ellington in doing, may read too much Newton into Kant's actual formulation. Most importantly, though, my main objection does hold, that Newton's law does not follow from Kant's second law of mechanics. Second, insofar as my examples show that the errant billiard balls I describe are alive, where life, according to Kant, “is the capacity of a substance to determine itself to change” (MAdN IV 544.7-10), my examples show that billiard balls could be alive even though they consist solely of external spatial relations and utterly lack any psychic states. This highlights the crucial way in which Kant's key premise, that “we know of no other internal principle of a substance to change its state but desire …” etc. (MAdN IV 544.10-14), concerns empirical ignorance. Moreover, my examples of non-Newtonian collisions do not require that billiard balls be alive, only that they respond to collisions in ways that violate Newton's Second Law, say, by spiraling away. In this regard, my examples underscore the crucial way in which Newton's law is based on an empirical, physical postulate concerning inertia and the rectilinear nature of inertia! motion, rather than on any metaphysical principle of the sort Kant seeks to justify. In these regards, my objections may require more careful and thorough presentation, but I submit that they are basically sound. I thank William Harper and Steven Palmquist for raising these points with me.

7 Hegel clearly cites the B edition in G&W, GW IV 328.22/71, 364-66/120-24; and in the first edition Logik (1816) GW XII 18.9, 26.5.

8 “Affinity, Idealism, and Naturalism: The Stability of Cinnabar and the Possibility of Experience,” Kant-Studien (forthcoming). The sketch I give below of Kant's views draws from my much more extensive treatment in this essay.

9 See Beiser, Frederick C, The Fate of Reason; Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press, 1987 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Hegel's Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801-1806); Oxford: Clarendon, 1984 Google Scholar.

11 HER. For a précis see my entry, “Hegel”, in A Companion to Epistemology, op cit, 167-170.

12 D, GW IV 8.8-10/3.

13 G&W, GW IV 388.26-35/155.

14 “… the absolute judgment of idealism as expounded by Kant may, and on this level, must be grasped in such a way that the manifold of sensibility, empirical consciousness as intuition and sensation, is in itself something unintegrated, that the world is in itself falling to pieces, and only gets objective coherence and support, substantiality, multiplicity, even actuality and possibility, through the good offices of human self-consciousness and intellect” (G&W, GW IV 330.21-27/74-75; quoted more extensively below, note 20).

15 “Because of the absolute subjectivity of reason and its being set against reality, the world is, then, absolutely opposed to reason. Hence it is an absolute finitude devoid of reason, a sense-world lacking organization [unorganische Sinnenwelt]” (G&W, GW IV 406.9-11/179; contra Fichte).

16 G&W, GW IV 333.24-26/78.

17 G&W, GW IV 341.11-13/89; Cf KdU §76, V 401.34-35, KdrV A50=B74, A51-52=B75-76, A65=B89-90, III 74.9-18, 75.5-26, 83.18-19. I refer to the volume, page, and line numbers of: “Kants Gesammelte Schriften,” Königlich Preußische [now Deutsche] Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: G. Reimer [now De Gruyter], 1902-; ususally referred to as “Akademie-Ausgabe.”

18 For Kant “The phenomena must be given, and they are filtered by the categories. Now this filtering may produce all sorts of correct concepts, to be sure, but it does not confer any necessity on the phenomena; and the chain of necessity is the formal aspect of what is scientific in the construction. The concepts remain contingent with respect to nature just as nature does with respect to the concepts. For this reason correctly constructed syntheses by way of the categories would not necessarily have to be corroborated by nature itself. Nature can only offer variegated displays that could count as contingent schemata for laws of the understanding, exemplary by-plays whose living peculiarity would fade away precisely because only the determinations of reflection are recognized in them. And conversely the categories are only impoverished schemata of nature” (D, GW IV 70.4-13/164).

19 “One might be tempted by this semblance of identity into regarding this thinking as reason. But because this thinking has its antithesis (a) in an application of thinking and (b) in absolute materiality (Stoffheit), it is clear that this is not the absolute identity, the identity of subject and object which suspends them both in their opposition and grasps them within itself, but a pure identity, that is and identity originating through abstraction and conditioned by opposition, the abstract intellectual concept of unity, one of a pair of fixed opposites” (D, GW IV 18.34-19.2/97; contra Reinhold; cf D, GW IV 82.20-33/180-81).

“What is opposite to thought is, through its connection with thought, determined as something thought = A. But such a thought, such a positing = A is conditioned by an abstraction and is hence something opposite. Hence, that which is thought, besides the fact that it has been thought of = A, has still other determinations = B, entirely independent of being merely determined [as something thought] by pure thought. These other determinations are brute data for thought. Hence for thought as the principle of the analytic way of philosophizing, there must be an absolute stuff. We shall discuss this further below. With this absolute opposition as foundation the formal program, in which the famous discovery that philosophy must be reduced to logic [ Reinhold, , Beiträge I, 98 Google Scholar] consists, is allowed no immanent synthesis save that provided by the identity of the intellect, i.e., the repetition of A ad infinitum. But even for this repetition the identity needs some B, C, etc. in which the repeated A can be posited In order for A to be repeatable, B, C, D, etc. are a manifold, in which each is opposed to the other. Each of them has particular determinations not posited by A. That is to say, there exists an absolute manifold stuff. Its B, C, D, etc. must fit in [Bardili] with A, as best it can” (D, GW IV 26.34-27.12/108-09).

“For even the slight synthesis called application involves a transition of the unity into a manifold, a union of thinking and matter, and hence includes what is called the inconceivable. To be capable of synthesis, thinking and matter must not be absolutely opposed to each other; they must be posited as originally one, and so we would be back with that tiresome identity of subject and object in transcendental intuition …” (D, GW IV 88.14-19/188; contra Reinhold or Bardili).

“In addition to the postulated matter and its deduced manifoldness, [Bardili's] Outline [of Logic] also postulates an inner capacity and suitability of matter to be thought. Besides the materiality that is to be annulled in thinking, there must be something that cannot be annulled by thinking; and even the perceptions of a horse do not lack it. It is a form that is independent of thinking, and since by the law of nature form cannot be destroyed by form, the form of thinking has to fit itself into it. In other words, besides the materiality that cannot be thought, besides the thing in itself, there must be an absolute stuff which can be represented and is independent of the representing subject, thought in representation it is connects with the form” (D, GW IV 88.23-31/188).

20 “Imagination, however, which is reason immersed in difference, is at this level raised only to the form of infinitude and fixated as intellect. This merely relative identity necessarily opposes itself to, and is radically affected by, the particular as something alien to it and empirical. The in-itself of both, the identity of this intellect and the empirical, ie, the a priori aspect of judgment, does not come to the fore; philosophy does not go on from judgment to a priori inference [A298-309=B3 55-66], from the acknowledgement that the judgment is the appearing of the in-itself to the cognition of the in-itself. It is for this reason that the absolute judgment of idealism as expounded by Kant may, and on this level, must be grasped in such a way that the manifold of sensibility, empirical consciousness as intuition and sensation, is in itself something unintegrated, that the world is in itself falling to pieces, and only gets objective coherence and support, substantiality, multiplicity, even actuality and possibility, through the good offices of human self-consciousness and intellect. All this is an objective determinateness that is man's own perspective and projection. Thus the whole deduction gets the easily grasped meaning that things in themselves and the sensations are without objective determinateness – and with respect to the sensations and their empirical reality nothing remains but to think that sensation comes from the things in themselves. For the incomprehensible determinateness of the empirical consciousness comes altogether from the things in themselves, and they can be neither intuited nor yet cognized In experience, the form of intuition belongs to the figurative synthesis, the concept to the intellectual synthesis [B151]. No other organ remains for the things in themselves but sensation; for sensation alone is not a priori, or in other words, it is not grounded in man's cognitive faculty for which only appearances exist. The objective determinateness of sensations is their unity, and this unity is merely the self-consciousness of an experiencing subject. So it is no more something truly a priori and existing in itself than any other subjectivity” (G&W; GW IV 330.8-331.4/74-75).

“Identity of this formal kind finds itself immediately confronted by or next to an infinite non-identity, with which it must coalesce in some incomprehensible way. On one side there is the ego, with its productive imagination or rather with its synthetic unity which, taken thus in isolation, is formal unity of the manifold. But next to it there is an infinity of sensations and, if you like, of things in themselves. Once it is abandoned by the categories, this realm cannot be anything but a formless lump, even though, according to the Critique of Judgment, it is a realm of beauteous nature and contains determinations with respect to which judgment cannot be subsumptive but only reflecting. Objectivity and stability derive solely from the categories; the realm of things in themselves is without categories; yet it is something for itself and for reflection” (G&W, GW IV 332.16-27/76-77).

“In this way, then, the objectivity of the categories in experience and the necessity of these relations become once more something contingent and subjective. This intellect is human intellect, part of the cognitive faculty, the intellect of a fixed ego-point. The things, as they are cognized by the intellect, are only appearances. They are nothing in themselves, which is a perfectly truthful result. The obvious conclusion, however, is that an intellect which has cognizance oniy of appearances and of nothing in itself, is itself only appearance and is nothing in itself (G&W, GW IV 332.34-333.2/77).

Cf “… this form [Fichte's formal idealism] does not alter the common and incomprehensible necessity of empirical existence in the slightest. Whether reality appears to us as the qualities of things or as our sensation, we cannot think for a moment that we have here a genuine ideality of actuality and of the real side [of experience]” (G&W, GW IV 389.17-20/156).

“What this formalism [in Jacobi and Fichte] comes down to basically is that either the pure concept, the empty thought, supervenes incomprehensibly upon a content, a determination of the concept, or vice versa: the determination supervenes incomprehensibly upon the indeterminateness [of the pure concept]” (G&W, GW IV 389.26-28/156).

21 D, GW IV 6.11-15/80-81. Cf “In Kant, too, nature is posited as absolutely determined But it cannot be thought of as determined by what Kant calls understanding, for the variety of particular phenomena are left undetermined by our human discursive understanding; so they must be thought of as determined by another understanding. However, this determination by another understanding is to be taken merely as a maxim of our reflecting judgment. Nothing is asserted about the actual existence of this other understanding” (D, GW IV 53-28-34/143-44).

“This is, finally, the place to exhibit the most interesting point in the Kantian system, the point at which a region is recognized that is a middle between the empirical manifold and the absolute abstract unity [KdUPreface, §III]” (G&W, GW IV 338.35-37/85).

22 Cf Allison, Henry, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 250 Google Scholar.

23 H J Paton recognizes that the matter of sensation must result from the sensory affection due to things in themselves ( Kant's Metaphysic of Experience; London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936; I 139–40Google Scholar). I have argued that he is quite right about this in “Noumenal Causality Reconsidered” (forthcoming). Hegel recognized that this must be Kant's view (G&W, GW IV 330.34-37/74-75; quoted above, note 20).

24 KdrV M 12-13, IV 85.3-10; A653-54=B681-82, III 433.14-29.

25 KdrV A121-123, IV 90.6-91.2; some emphases added; tr Smith, Kemp, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martins, 1929), 144–145 Google Scholar; translation emended

26 KdrV A653-54=B681-82; III 433.14-29; emphasis added; tr Kemp Smith, 539-540; translation emended

27 Kant states this most directly in the Prolegomena: “Even the main principle expounded throughout this section, that the universal laws of nature can be known a priori, leads of itself to the proposition that the highest prescription of laws of nature must lie in ourselves, that is, in our understanding; and that we must not seek the universal laws of nature in nature by means of experience, but conversely must seek nature, regarding its universal conformity to law, merely in the conditions of the possibility of experience which lie in our sensibility and understanding. For how were it otherwise possible to know these laws a priori, since they are not rules of analytic knowledge but are true synthetic extensions of it? Such a necessary correspondence of the principles of possible experience with the laws of the possibility of nature can only proceed from two causes: either these laws are drawn from nature by means of experience, or conversely, nature is derived from the laws of the possibility of experience in general and is utterly one with the latter's strict universal lawfulness. The first [cause] contradicts itself, for the universal laws of nature can and must be known a priori (that is, independently of all experience) and can and must be the foundation of all empirical use of the understanding; therefore only the second [cause] remains” (Prol §36, IV 319.11-30; translated by Beck, L W, Kant Selections [New York: Macmillan, 1988], 199–200 Google Scholar; translation emended). Cf B41, A23=B37-38, A26-28=B42-44, A195-96=B240-41, III 54.21-27, 52.8-14, 55.1-56.19, 171.25-172.9; A101-02, A113-14, A121-123, A125-26, IV 78.20-33, 85.10-28, 90.6-91.2, 92.14-24.

28 KdrV A113-14, IV 85.10-28; tr Kemp Smith, op cit, 139-140; translation emended Kant makes essentially the same argument again at A101-02, A122, A123, A125-26; IV 78.20-33, 90.26-30, 90.37-91.2, 92.14-24.

29 KdrV A114, quoted above, p 9.

30 KdrV A123, IV 90.37-91.2.

31 Cf Paton: “I believe that the empirical differences in the shapes and sizes of objects, like their empirical qualitative differences, must be ascribed to the ‘influence’ of things-in-themselves. … Only what is strictly universal is imposed by the mind upon objects. Empirical differences are particular determinations of the universal, but their particular¬ity is not due to the mind and must be due to things. If this view be given up, I do not see how the Critical Philosophy can be made intelligible” (op cit, I 139-40). Affinity consists in regularities among the particularities of the contents of sensations.

32 Contra KdrV A101-02, A113-14, and A122; IV 78.20-33, 85.10-28, 90.26-30.

33 Contra KdrV A101-02, A113-14, and A122; IV 78.20-33, 85.10-28, 90.26-30.

34 KdrV A125-26, IV 92.14-24.

35 KdrV A112-13, IV 85.3-10; A653-54=B681-82, III 433.14-29.

36 Contra KdrVA A113-14, IV 85.10-28; quoted above, p 9.

37 Cf “Reason, having in this way become mere intellect (Verstand), acknowledges its own nothingness by placing that which is better than it in a faith outside and above itself, as a beyond. This is what has happened in the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte. Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of faith once more” (G&W, GW IV 315.28-316.1/56). On the epistemological significance of Hegel's opposition to this kind of faith, see my “Harris, Hegel, and the Truth about Truth”, in: Browning, G, ed, The Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996)Google Scholar.

38 “The immediate product of this formal idealism as we have seen it arise [in Fichte], has, then, the following shape. A realm of experience without unity, a purely contingent manifold, on one side, is confronted by an empty active thought on the other. If the empty thought is posited as a real, active force, then like everything else that is objective, it must be recognized as something ideal. Or, in order to put the antithesis of the thought and the manifold realm of empirical necessity in its pure form, the thought must not be posited as a real active force - ie, in the context of reality -but purely for itself, as empty unity, as universality completely set apart from particularity. Kant's pure reason is this same empty thought, and reality is similarly opposed to that empty identity, and it is precisely the lack of concordance between them that makes faith in the beyond necessary” (G&W, GW IV 395.23-33/164).

39 Cf Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie III (Werke in Zwanzig Bänden; Moldenhauer, & Michel, , eds; Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1970) XX 341 Google Scholar; Enz §§254 Anm(1817: §197), 448 Zusatz.

40 I argue that Allison's “tiefense” of Kant's arguments for idealism fails to meet this objection in HER, ch 3. There I developed this objection independently; here I show that Hegel had the grounds to develop it internally to Kant's principles.

41 Vaihinger, , Commentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Stuttgart, Berlin, Leipzig: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1892), II 142 note 2, 143, 144 note 1, 307, 312ff., esp 323 Google Scholar. He concludes that the objection is sound (ibid, 148, 289-90, 310).

42 G&W, GW IV 365.18-367.27/123-25.

43 Wissenschaft der Logik (GW XII; hereafter “WL”) II 17–18 Google Scholar/ Miller, , tr, Hegel 's Science of Logic (New York: Humanities, 1969; hereafter “SL”), 584 Google Scholar; Cf HER, ch 11, esp §111.

44 G&W, GW IV 334.18-27/79; cf 341.2-8/89, WL (GW XII) II 20.11-18/51 586. I discuss these latter passages in “Hegel, Idealism, and Robert Pippin” (International Philosophical Quarterly 33 No 3, 1993, 263-72), 268–69Google Scholar.

45 §11, B109-113; III 95-97. This passage is new in the second edition, thus again suggesting which edition Hegel used Regarding Hegel's early attention to Kant's Table of Judgments, see my “Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of ‘the’ Intuitive Intellect,” in: Sedgewick, S, ed, The Idea of a System of Transcendental Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

46 D, GW IV 8.8-10/3. I sketch Hegel's ontology in HER, ch 10. In response to my criticisms (“Hegel, Idealism, and Robert Pippin,” op cit) of his book ( Hegel's Idealism; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Robert Pippin made the counter-objection to my interpretation of Hegel's ontology that I attributed to Hegel an idealism like that of the British idealists, an attribution Rolf-Peter Horstmann had conclusively refuted ( Ontotogie und Relationen: Hegel, Bradley, Russell und die Kontroverse über interne und externe Beziehungen; Königstein/Ts: Athenäum/Hain, 1984 Google Scholar). (Pippin's charge is made in “Hegel's Original Insight,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33 No 3, 1993, 285-295; 290.Google Scholar) Pippin is quite mistaken in contending that I ascribed such an ontology to Hegel. Although Horstmann and I emphasized different aspects of Hegel's ontology, we are quite agreed that Hegel's ontology is not at all of the kind found in the British Idealists, although it does share a very few broad similarities with it (Horstmann, 248), and we agree that it is not touched by Russell's objections to British idealism. Horstmann summarizes one central line of Russell's argument as follows: “If Monism and Monadism are untenable, then the only alternative is some kind of pluralism. And if Monism and Monadism cannot be established without the assumption of internal (irreal, mental) relations, then it follows, that the assumption of non-internal (external) relations implies a,non-monistic, non-monadistic (pluralistic) position” (Horstmann, 195; my tr). As Horstmann notes, it is simple to develop a slightly more subtle ontology which would admit, for example, some but not exclusively “external” relations (ie, relations which are not essential to the relata). This would immediately escape Russell's objections (cf Horstmann, 193-94). Hegel held such a view, and his view reveals an important fallacy in Russell's argument. Russell's argument equivocates between two senses of “internal”. “Within the one monistic substance” vs “essential to the relata.” The controversy about “internal” relations in Bradley's sense concerns this second sense of “internal,” which Hegel rejected as an exhaustive or exclusive class of relations. I ascribe to Hegel the view that some, indeed many relations are essential to objects, namely, their causal properties. These properties are modal in the sense that they constitute classes of possible particular causal relations. They are further questions, which of these possible causal relations are in fact realized as actual causal interactions during the history of any particular object, and which of these actual causal interactions are in fact essential to that object (Cf Horstmann, 225). It is still another question which contingent circumstances a thing happens to occupy during its history. All three of these questions were left open in my sketch of Hegel's ontology. In no way did I ascribe to Hegel the view that every relation, or even every particular causal interaction, is essential to a thing and thus in this sense is internal” to it. Hegel certainly did not undertake, nor did I ascribe to him, the supposed “monistic reduction” of multi-place to single-place predicates which Russell criticized (Cf Horstmann, 216¬20, 228-31). Hegel also didn't conclude from its supposed “internality” that a relation is “Unreal.” These facts distinguish Hegel's ontology fundamentally from Bradley's, and also removes Hegel's ontology from the scope of Russell's objections (cf Horstmann, 103-05). Finally, for his whole career Hegel criticized the cognitively impassable cleft between appearance and reality which is basic to Bradley's philosophy, and at least from 1804 onward Hegel propounded a discursive theory of knowledge of the absolute, an absolute which consists in the systematic totality of all appearances. In all these regards, too, Hegel fundamentally opposed Bradley's philosophy. In sum. Pippin's objection to my interpretation of Hegel's ontology is entirely unfounded.

47 The use of Kant's arguments in the Transcendental Analytic, especially in the Analogies and the Refutation of Idealism, in service of realism is a common theme in Neo-Kantianism and in Analytic interpretation of Kant since Strawson. Most recently, Paul Guyer has argued that Kant's only successful transcendental arguments are to be found in the Analogies, and that these arguments support realism ( Kant and the Claims of Knowledge; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.