From Kant’s ‘Goodwill’ to Hegel’s Reason of History
G.WF. Hegel, on the other hand, saw in Kant's work the ultimate frustration of Reason and Enlightenment. Whereas Kant was widely respected for his logical rigour, Hegel thought it was precisely Kant’s formal logic that led to the cul-de- sac of his political theory.
Hegel embraced elements of Kant’s epistemology at the same time as he repudiated its inherent dualism. He took Kant’s frustrating conclusions as the starting point for his own dramatically more ambitious enterprise: to replace Kantian subjective idealism with the dialectical philosophy of objective idealism. To move beyond the dualism of what Kant thought, first required a philosophical critique of how he thought. Before turning to Hegel’s response to Kant, therefore, a brief commentary on the general form of Kantian thought is in order.We have already considered Kant’s view of how moral judgements must be made. Equally important was his view of objective empirical judgements. In both types of judgement, Kant aspired to a Copernican revolution in philosophy. Copernicus had shown that the apparent movement of heavenly bodies is partly due to the movement of the earth-bound observer. Kant claimed that what we know of the world is likewise dependent on the internal movement of thought. We experience through the senses, but sense impressions acquire meaning only through the activity of mind.
Kant began with space and time. All experience occurs in space and time, yet we cannot experience space or time as such. Pure space would be nothingness, and nothingness cannot be experienced. Space and time are a priori pure forms of intuition, wholes that make it possible to situate specific parts of experience in a meaningful way?6 Every empirical judgement likewise presupposes the logical categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality,77 and it is the mental activity of applying these categories that synthesises appearances into knowledge of phenomena.
If all knowledge of the world is ‘formed’ by logical categories, then the world, as we know it, must be a product of our own consciousness.The result is a fundamental similarity between moral and empirical judgements. Practical reason makes moral judgements according to the universal moral law, which we know a priori, and theoretical reason judges phenomena by reference to its own rules for the coherent application of logical categories. The origin of natural laws, therefore, as with the moral law, must be mind itself: ‘The understanding is thus not merely a faculty for making rules through the comparison of the appearances; it is itself the legislation for nature, i.e., without understanding there would not be any nature at all’.[163]
The necessary result of this argument is another dualism. If all that we know of the natural world is formed by our own understanding, we can never have direct knowledge of ultimate reality, only of our own experience of the world, which is mediated through the activity of our empirical judgements. The price that Kant pays for moral autonomy is the impossibility of the kingdom of ends: some will always choose to violate ethical duty. Similarly, the price paid for the activity of mind in empirical judgements is that the thing-in-itself, as the cause of sense perceptions, is inaccessible. A noumenon - whether it be God or the thing-in-itself - does not exist in space and time7[164] and can never be ‘an object of the senses’[165] It is as if the world were in darkness, and we experience its movements only through the ‘radar’ of our own minds[166] But even though we cannot directly know noumena, Kant believed we can know that the world has a moral purpose. The human being, a being with moral consciousness, exists in the world and thus imparts purpose to it. This is why reason can hope to improve the world. The ‘pure idea’ of freedom is a supersensible concept that proves its objective reality in nature by its ‘possible’ effect there[167]
The purpose of Hegel’s dialectical logic was to transcend these limits that Kant imposed upon reason.
Hegel aimed to prove that the ideals of reason are actually realised (objectified) in the phenomenal world, and that reasoning beings can therefore know the reason of history. The kingdom of ends would then be both possible and necessary, for reasoning beings would make the world rational. Kant's ‘hidden plan of nature' would then become reason's own plan, and history would become a movement towards the rule of reason.Kant said the unknowable thing-in-itself is the cause of sensations. Hegel replied that if cause itself is a category of thought, then the very notion of a thing-in-itself made no sense. In The Philosophy of Right he ironically commented that ‘Even an animal has gone beyond this... philosophy since it devours things and so proves that they are not absolutely self-subsistent'.[168] In the Logic he wrote:
Thoughts, according to Kant, are only our thoughts - separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge... But the true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must at the same time be the real essence of things...8[169]
For Kant, the proper standard for reasoning was consistency - the law of non-contradiction.8[170] Contradiction was evidence of faulty reasoning[171] But if thoughts and things are different - yet at the same time essentially the same - they must somehow be dialectically joined. For Hegel, contradiction pointed to the need for a higher logic, not of what is but of the movement from what is to what reason ultimately requires.
The decisive step in Hegel's dialectical logic was to transform Kant's epistemology into ontology, which addresses the properties and relations of being; that is, of everything that has existed, does exist, or ever might exist. Whereas Kantian judgement always involves separation of thought from what is being judged, Hegel said that reason restores their unity. This meant that the Kantian categories of thought - quantity, quality, relation, modality and all of their subcategories - must in fact be the forms not of experience but of being itself.
The categories, in other words, ‘form' being, not just our sense impressions. If the world is formed by the categories of reason, then it must ultimately conform to the requirements of reason.[172] [173] [174] [175] The phenomenal republic must then become the noumenal republic; the real must become the ideal.Hegel described Kantian dualism this way:
On one side there is the Ego. But next to it there is an infinity of sensations and. of things in themselves. Once it is abandoned by the categories, this realm cannot be anything but a formless lump. A formal idealism, which in this way sets an absolute Ego-point and its intellect on one side, and an absolute manifold, or sensation on the other, is a dualism.88
Hegel objected that it is impossible for being to be merely a formless lump. If being had no determinate characteristics, it would be nothing (no-thing). Being and nothing are abstract opposites, but their opposition sets in motion the dialectical movement of becoming. Dualism, the end of Kant's theory, then becomes the beginning of Hegel's. In Hegel's Logic, The Doctrine of Being derives all forms of being from one another (the movement from Quality to Quantity to Measure). When categories of thought are thus shown to be the real essence of things, the Doctrine of Essence deals with paired opposites in their unity. What holds being and essence together is the force of thought, which Hegel explains in the Doctrine of the Notion. The realised end of the Logic, therefore, is ‘the overt unity of subjective and objective'^9 which is the Idea, or the whole of being as it is formed by dialectical logic.
The Idea may be described in many ways. It may be called reason subject-object; the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite, of soul and body; the possibility which has its actuality in its own self. the Idea contains all the relations of understanding. in their infinite self-return and self-identity.
The Idea itself is the dialectic.90In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel turned from logic to the forms of sensuous existence. Nature was ‘mind asleep', since on its own it has no ethical consciousness. But since nature is implicitly rational, reason must consciously make the natural world conform to its own standards. Kant said nature has moral purpose because it includes humanity; Hegel added that humanity's purpose it to make the natural world into a habitat in which reasoning beings enjoy the objective reality - not merely the Kantian ideal - of self-determination. This means that history also becomes a kind of logic; not a ‘hidden plan' (Kant), but a process whose meaning is both revealed and determined through conscious reason.
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is a logic of the appearance of reason (or Spirit) in the world. Consciousness first appears as the consciousness of an individual (Kant). When one individual cancels (or negates) the other, the result is the master-slave dialectic, which was Hegel's model of the antagonistic egoism described by both Smith and Kant. In Kant's ‘hidden plan', history brings civility through external laws, meaning that history happens to us. Hegel says history is the ‘story' of our own consciousness and its active role in making a civilised world.
The process begins when Spirit (consciousness) asserts its superiority by risking mere biological life (its opposite) in mortal combat. When one self enslaves the other, the master wins recognition of his autonomy by negating the slave. The problem is that the master in fact remains dependent upon the labour of the slave, while the slave regains his sense of self by imposing his will upon nature. Through work, consciousness comes to itself, yet the slave remains a slave. For each to gain self-possession - the autonomy of will that Kant described as freedom - requires mutual recognition. Each consciousness must assert itself while also restraining itself, the condition that Kant described in terms of a ‘good will' and Smith in terms of a socialised conscience. Unlike Kant, however, Hegel argued that a good will is formed within history, not by an a priori command of reason. The ‘hidden plan' of nature must then be our own plan. By recognising all others as ends, we move towards the end of history, which is an ethical world of objective spirit, consciously formed by reason. The reason of history thus turns out to be the emergence of Kant's ethical community through lived experience.