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The Problem of Kant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

H. S. Harris
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Abstract

For years I have repeated to the students in my seminars the programmatic assertion that “Hegel was the greatest disciple Kant ever had.” My object in saying this has always been to remind them as forcibly as possible that for Hegel and everyone in his generation, Kant was the master of them that know, the German philosopher, the thinker who had raised German thought to a new level, and had given it a decisive primacy over the earlier achievements of modern (or ‘scientific’) Reason from Bacon and Descartes to Hume and Rousseau. For this reason alone, I wished to affirm, it was in the highest degree unlikely that Hegel's ‘speculative’ philosophy, his theory of the ‘Idea’, was a reinstatement of the ‘dogmatic’ tradition that Kant so decisively overthrew. On the contrary, the theory of the ‘Idea’ must be seen as that ‘completion’ of the Kantian philosophy of which Hegel spoke prophetically in a letter to Schelling when he was approaching his twenty-fifth birthday.

It took Hegel several years to discover that Kant could not be ‘completed’ simply by the process of turning his revolutionary ‘insight’ into universal ‘Enlightenment’. At the time when he first appeared before the learned public as a philosopher in his own right Hegel was convinced (mainly as a result of his ten-year intimacy with Hölderlin) that “Truth is the whole”; and that a direct experience of that divine wholeness had actually been achieved by the poets of Greece (especially by those of Athens between the Great War with Persia and the Great Civil War). He was vividly aware that those same Greek poets were articulating the life of a world which had perished irretrievably.

Type
Symposium on Pippin
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 10 , Issue 1: number 19 , Spring/Summer 1989 , pp. 18 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1989

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References

1 Letter 11 (16 April, 1795); Briefe I, (Butler and Seller, p. 35). Pippin begins from this letter in his Hegel's Idealism 6 (see p. 16). But he does not attend properly to the fact that Hegel — even in his most obviously ‘Kantian’ phase — chose to look at the Kantian achievement from its point of climax (the book on Religion of 1793), not in its own theoretical perspective. From the first, Hegel's vision of Kant's achievement implicitly entails that the ‘completion’ of it will require its inversion. Hegel's concern is with God — and with God as the object of ‘actual’, not merely ‘possible’, experience.

2 For Schiller, virtually any page of one of his theoretical essays will testify to this. For Hölderlin see especially the letter to his mother in which he remarks “Kant and the Greeks are almost my only reading now”; and the letter to his half-brother in which he expounds his vision of Humanität. This last is inspired by Herder, rather than Kant. But it expresses perfectly the reason why Kant had to be read beside the Greeks (GSA VI. 92-93).

3 See Krause, K. C. F., Briefwechsel, ed. Hohlfeld, and Wünsche, (Leipzig, 1907)) II, 157 Google Scholar. Compare my Night Thoughts, pp 26-27.

4 GW IV, 5-6; Harris and Cerf, pp 79-80.

5 GW XXI, 46-47; Miller, SL, pp 61-2.

6 Rosenkranz,p 190; Cerf and Harris, p 9. The original which Rosenkranz transcribed will appear in GW V. This fragment can now be identified securely as the introductory lecture for Hegel's first logic course (October 1801).

7 Cerf and Harris, pp 67-96. Pippin has dealt with this very ably. He had grasped the centrality of the ‘unity of apperception’, and its relation to the activity of ‘productive imagination’. No one whom I have read, has made the difference between ‘speculation’ and ‘reflection’ so clear. But, as Pippin also shows clearly, this advance was part of ‘Fichte's Contribution’ to Hegel's development. (See Hegel's Idealism, chapters 3 and 4).

8 Pippin is very much aware of Hegel's antipathy for ‘intellectual intuition’; and he has identified some of its earliest manifestations (see his Chapter IV). But — as far as I can remember — he never alludes to Hegel's own record of this antipathy. Hegel remarked upon it in the biographical notes that he supplied for the first account of his career and his work ID appear in a Konversations-Lexikon. See Nicolin, , Berichten, report 550, pp 363-71; or Hegel-Studien 7, 1972, 116–22Google Scholar. The Lexicon article has been translated by C. Butler in Clio.

9 See GW IV. 484-5; Knox and Acton, pp 132-3.

10 Pippin does not notice this, because he is not interested in ‘aesthetic intuition’, and does not attend to its absolute function. But he ought lo have attended to it, because it is the key to the doctrine that Truth is the whole'. And, of course, if he had paid as much attention to that thesis as he does to the ‘Substance-Subject’ thesis, he would not have been able to divide the Phenomenology into two separate books as he does (see pp 166-7).

11 Pippin talks often of the ‘conditions of possible experience’ being the object of Hegel's concern. But when he comes to deal with the relation of the ‘actual’ and the ‘possible’ he shows some awareness of the ambiguity involved; he seems to understand that the ‘actuality’ that is ‘rational’ is one which comprehends all real ‘possibilities’ (see pp 175ff). It is not altogether inaccurate to take the Logic as the transcendental science of real possibility. But I do not mink that it is completable under that description (a negative conviction which was the upshot of Peirce's twenty year quest for a ‘longer list of the categories’). So when we are looking for the sense in which Hegel's Science of Logic is a complete ‘whole’ we ought not to look in that direction (not because Hegel necessarily knew what it took Peirce twenty painful years to discover, but because Hegel was quite prepared to abbreviate the Science of Logic in the Encyclopaedia. A ‘comprehensive’ list of the categories was not what he was seeking).

There is, of course, another school of Hegel interpreters who believe that incompletability is an essential characteristic of Hegel's Logic; and there is no reason why the dialectical method should not be taken over and used in an open-ended way. A committed Hegelian may well wish these ‘Socratic’ Hegelians every success. Peirce was already expressing scepticism about ‘dialectic’ being a logical method at all, because no-one except Hegel seemed to be able to use it. It would be nice to see him refuted. But he will not be refuted by talking in this way about the dialectical method as Hegel himself used it.

Thus, all mat is achieved by Pinkard, for instance, when he asserts that “A speculative argument is similar to a transcendental argument, except mat it cannot claim its solutions are unique or necessary” (Hegel's Dialectic, p. 15) is the turning of the Kantian tradition in a new direction. ‘Uniqueness’ we must leave aside, because Hegel holds that there have been many ‘speculations’ and their ‘oneness’ is a long story. But without some kind of “necessity” speculation could only be what Kant finds it to be in Swedenborg (and that is, after all, one of its most familiar commonsense meanings). So offering this as the ‘speculative’ interpretation of Hegel (i.e. the most logical one available) means either being condemned out of one's own mouth, or condemning Hegel out of his own mouth. If there is a Hegelian tradition — i.e. one that has truly progressed beyond Kant — this interpretation is quite certainly (necessarily, logically or ‘speculatively’) not destined to triumph within it.

12 Yet this is what we find Pippin doing. He does not agree with Haym that the two sides merely bring one another to ruin and confusion (Haym, 1857, p 243). But he pursues his own analysis only as far as the Unhappy Consciousness. Then he claims that the definition of ‘Reason's Certainty’ is an anticipation of ‘Hegel's own idealist position’ (p 167). This is correct so far as it goes, because what we have here is the definitive reconstruction of Kant's concept of the rational self in ‘speculative’ terms. But, as this rational self is destined to discover, it is precisely not the Hegelian ‘spirit’, not the ‘subject’ that is ‘substantial’. If Pippin had pursued his analysis further he would have come to the evident ruin of his formal Kantian hypothesis. Instead, he leaps over this part of the book, and moves (quite illegitimately) straight to the standpoint of Absolute Knowing. He is so interested in Hegel as a disciple of Kant, that he completely ignores the Hegel who was so evidently a regnant master on his own account.

13 Hegel's Idealism, p 161. Pippin's note ascribes the question to Wildt and says that he is attempting to show that “it is completely inappropriate in the context of the PhG's account of recognition”. But an unwary reader who does not attend to footnote signals would never know that the question and answer are not Pippin's — even if they are irrelevant to the ‘recognition’ problem. Pippin himself seems to think that the development of rationality is through surrender; and that is a mistake. The question is not, in fact, irrelevant to the ‘recognition problem’. Wildt's ‘obvious’ assumption is a mistake.