Dennis Schulting
M.A. Classical Theology,
Ph.D. Philosophy
Independent philosopher and specialist in the study of Kant & German Idealism. Former Assistant Professor of Metaphysics & the History of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam
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Robert Pippin, The Culmination. Heidegger, German Idealism, and the Fate of Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 2024 (review forthcoming in Marginalia Review of Books)
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DRAFT
It is striking that Kant’s views on the mediating role of the imagination in cognition inspired two major opposite strands in the development of post-Kantian philosophy. On one side, early on Hegel saw in Kant’s idea of the productive imagination the seeds for absolute idealism. In Faith and Knowledge (1802), Hegel zeroed in on how, for Kant, the imagination acted as the intermediary between our capacities for sensibility and the understanding, and praised Kant for recognizing that the imagination is what connects both at the ground level. According to Hegel, Kant showed that the apparent gap between the givenness of our intuitions of objects in sensibility and the acts of the understanding in our cognitive judgments about those same objects is in fact not indicative of an absolute distinction but is revealed to be what Hegel calls an “absolute identity.” This absolute identity is established by the imagination. The idea of absolute identity comes to play a major role in Hegel’s later thought, where he often simply refers to it as the Absolute or the Concept. Already in Faith and Knowledge Hegel associates this absolute identity, and the productive imagination that exhibits it, with reason itself and with Being. There is no discrepancy between what we understand something to be and what that something is in itself. Hegel credits Kant with this original insight into the unity of cognition and object, which is conveyed by the role of the imagination in the grounding of cognition. However, at the same time he criticizes Kant for squandering this genuine “speculative” thought by relegating the imagination to merely being the adjutant of the understanding. The imagination becomes a function of the understanding and mediates between the deliverances of sensibility and our intellectual cognition only insofar as we take these deliverances of sensibility to be subject to the conditions of our intellectual cognition. The understanding thus determines the constraints under which something can be known. The imagination is the means by which something is known, but it is not an independent means.
It appears that for Kant – and this is a correct interpretation by Hegel – there can be said to be an identity between our intuitional access to beings and our intellectual cognition only from the perspective of the latter, that is, only subjectively, or only insofar as we humans have knowledge of objects. Hence, Hegel’s criticism that Kant’s idealism remains a subjective idealism. Kant does argue that our cognition is genuinely objectively valid but it is also clear that he stops short of identifying our cognition of objects, and thus how things are for us, with how things are in themselves. For Hegel, Kant relativizes his original insight into the a priori unity of thought and Being to a dependency on the understanding. This is why Hegel thinks Kant’s critical idealism is not radical enough, and rather unnecessarily limits reason to the subjective constraints of human cognition.
Nevertheless, for both Kant and Hegel there is a close bond between thought and Being to the extent that both take the world of beings to be available in principle for our intelligibility. Hegel goes so far as to think that Being itself is intelligible. As Heidegger aptly puts it in a comment on Hegel’s Logic in Pathmarks, for Hegel the “movement of principles circling within themselves” is “itself the absoluteness of Being” (Wegmarken, 465). While he does argue that this idea of the system of principles as Being originates in Kant, Heidegger shows that for Kant, contrary to Hegel, Being can be addressed or determined only to the extent that a necessary distinction between possibility and actuality is made: our understanding can only “think an object in its possibility” (Wegmarken, 470, emphasis added). To be able to know the object “in its actuality” we need to be affected through the senses. Being is determinable only “from positing [vom Setzen her] as [an] act of human subjectivity” (Wegmarken, 471). In Hegel, this limitation is lifted. Being’s intelligibility is no longer relativized to merely human subjects. Hegel in fact radicalizes Kant’s insight into the necessary reciprocal relation between thought and object by identifying the absolute identity that lies at the heart of this reciprocal relation, Kant’s productive imagination, as Being itself – not in any pre-critical, substantivist sense, but in the sense of Being as reason, as pure intelligibility.
Noticeably, as the main protagonist of that other strand of post-Kantianism, Heidegger sees Kant’s idea of the productive imagination as a source that might point in the direction of a view that addresses Being as neither relativized to a subject nor identified with pure intelligibility. Unlike Hegel, Heidegger does not have a problem with Kant’s approach not being radically “rationalist” enough, as Hegel argued, but rather with it being still too “intellectualist,” in the sense of relativized to the human understanding. Being is considered by Kant only in the relation “Being and thought,” not as such. For Heidegger, Hegel only exacerbates this by identifying Being and thought. In his early reading of Kant, Heidegger makes much of the fact that in the A-version of the Transcendental Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant has not yet identified the power of the imagination with the understanding. It brings to light a way in which Kant can be seen as a thinker who considers our human cognition to be fundamentally dependent on an “attunement,” a “disclosure” towards what is given, what is made available to us as cognizers, rather than us being the sole agents that posit Being from within our determinative judgments. For Heidegger, Kant’s cognitive finitism is significant, not a systematic flaw, as it is for Hegel. The function of the imagination in the A-Deduction as a self-standing principle of sensibility or intuition provides a possible avenue to opening up a less intellectualist address to Being, or at least that is how Heidegger reads Kant.
These two contrary perspectives originate both in Kant’s position in the Critique of Pure Reason, more specifically in the Transcendental Deduction, but with each focussing on a different version of that famous argument. Both represent radically divergent developments of a lingering ambiguity in Kant, which is conveyed by the different foci of the A- and B-versions of the Deduction. Nevertheless, for Heidegger, both Kant and Hegel represent a similar metaphysical position in that both their philosophical outlooks are marked by what Daniel Dahlstrom has called the “logical prejudice” in German Idealism (cited by Pippin, 48), not in the sense that they are beholden to a merely formal logic, but in the sense that conceptual thought is considered the paragon of philosophical thinking.
In his rich new book, The Culmination, Robert Pippin paints an engrossing and, in my view, convincing picture of Heidegger’s reading of German Idealism – mainly Kant and Hegel, and a bit of Schelling, who is sometimes said to be a precursor to Heidegger (Fichte is mentioned only occasionally) – as the “culmination” of a “rationalist” or “logicist” understanding of metaphysics that started with Plato and Aristotle. In Heidegger’s view, in this understanding of metaphysics the question of Being, central to Heidegger’s own thought, is addressed solely or chiefly in terms of the question of logical or conceptual intelligibility, not in its own right.
In his previous work that focussed on Hegel, first in his classic Hegel’s Idealism from 1989 and most elaborately in his recent captivating account of the Science of Logic in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019), Pippin argued – and, as he shows in his new book, Heidegger concurs with this view – that Hegel is merely the most radical of all the rationalists in claiming an absolute identity of Being and thought insofar as all that can be thought in principle is all that Being can possibly be. To be is to be intelligible, to be knowable (16). Being itself is logos, spirit, or a self-knowing (8). The meaning of Being is taken to be “discursive intelligibility” (9). But this view is based on the Kantian idea that there is a strict reciprocity between the necessary conditions that determine what I can know and the necessary conditions for something being the possible object of my cognition. In essence, it is the paradigmatic Kantian adage that “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them” (Critique of Pure Reason, Bxviii). Hegel merely brings this fundamental Kantian principle to its logical conclusion. To put it in Heidegger’s terms: what characterizes the Kantian turn encapsulates the “logical prejudice” par excellence, since it shows the completion of a “logocentric” approach to Being in metaphysics, where what is central is what we can say about Being.
Heidegger’s critique of philosophy, in particular of idealism, is not that of most others who argue that there cannot be “pure” thinking, or that there is something else determining pure thinking. Heidegger’s thinking is itself in a way a form of “pure” thinking, “in the sense of not empirically guided.” Rather, traditional philosophy is “blind” towards itself as thinking and what philosophical thinking “requires” (13). This blindness is not a “simple mistake, a philosophical error that can be corrected by some clarification” (13). Heidegger often talks about “forgetfulness” as a chief characteristic of Western philosophy, a forgetting of its own requirements. This forgetfulness is central to the question that occupies Heidegger throughout his work, namely the question of the meaningfulness of Being. This question pivots around the idea that the most crucial issue in metaphysics should be the question how Being itself makes itself available, “manifests,” or “presences” itself to us and how we care about our being primordially “attuned” to this “presencing” of Being in ways that are not, or at least not primarily, cognitive or conceptual.
In this context, it is interesting to note that, contrary to the standard reading, Pippin emphasizes also the continuity of Heidegger’s core idea about the meaning of Being through the so-called Kehre: Heidegger does not abandon the analysis of Dasein after Being and Time, presumably in favour of an account that centers the history of Being as such. Rather, Dasein’s meaningfulness continues to be “mutually” implicated in the meaningfulness of Being as such. Dasein thus remains the focal point of the question of the meaning of Being, for “being’s manifestness requires a being to whom it is manifest, to whom it can mean something” (27). Things “only matter for Dasein, as uniquely a thrown being-in-the-world” (120).
Pippin dedicates two large chapters to Heidegger’s work on the theoretical Kant, and a shorter chapter to Kant’s practical philosophy in relation to the theme of finitude. The three main works by Heidegger that are dedicated to Kant, the famed Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics from 1929, the later more critical The Question Concerning the Thing based on lectures from the 30s, and the late 1961 essay ‘Kant’s Thesis About Being’ are all analyzed in some detail. Heidegger reads Kant in the light of his own interest in the question of the meaning of Being, and thus he interprets Kant’s a priori synthesis as the meaning of Being. The original unity of apperception, “the ego,” as Heidegger says in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, is the “fundamental ontological condition of all being” (quoted by Pippin at 82.n2). “The significance of any being ... is its availability as the object of judgments, or positings” (84). Though Heidegger is right that “objectness in Kant’s sense is the primordial meaningfulness of Being” (91), Pippin rightfully brings to light a few oddities in Heidegger’s reading of Kant. The unity of apperception is not merely subjective, as Heidegger seems to suggest, but genuinely objective, and Pippin also criticizes an impositionist reading of Kant in that “the deduction is not about ‘stamping’ [the forms of the understanding on intuitional content] but about demonstrating that there cannot be any intuited content (i.e., any cognitively relevant content) that is incongruent with the required a priori conditions of experience, of empirical knowledge, or, generally cognitive intelligibility” (90). Heidegger tends to equate Kant’s view of Being with what is cognitively available for judgment, but, as Pippin points out, for Kant, cognitive intelligibility is not even primary. Rather practical intelligibility, what concerns the moral noumenal self, is what is primary. But as Pippin writes referring to his Basics Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger also understands that “true sense of significance in being human does not for Kant reside in being a knowing subject” (122).
We should be aware that Heidegger is not so much interested in the correct interpretation of Kant (98–100) as in centering the discussion around certain themes that he thinks are foregrounded in Kant, such as an appreciation for the finitude of our cognition. Heidegger frames the Kantian project in such a way that it tallies with his own idea about the “availability of the meaningfulness of being” (99). For one thing, Heidegger insists, controversially, that the Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with epistemology. While he disputes Kant’s core idea that all thinking is judging, he also claims that all thinking is merely in the service of intuition. Heidegger sees the “originary thinking in the uptake of intuitions as the work of the imagination,” and not judgment as the primary form of thinking (102). He thereby draws on the account of synthesis in the A-Deduction, where it seems that the synthesis of the imagination, or the so-called threefold synthesis, is a synthesis that is prior to and independent of the intellectual synthesis on the level of judgment. Heidegger wants to clearly separate out the synthetic activity in the manifold in intuition and any judgmental, conceptually determinate activity. He views the faculty of the imagination as “pre-ontological” since “it is an exercise of a non-discursive nonconceptual imagining” (109). This interpretation makes sense as such an emphasis on the pre-discursive role of the imagination in intuition fits with “Heidegger’s own view on our dependence on an original manifestation or meaningful disclosure that cannot itself be the product of thinking” (105). It is however not the case that Heidegger thinks that there is just some sensible intuiting, for “both intuition and understanding are derivative functions, distinguished within an original unity, which is the activity of the imagination” (111).
This is just like the early Hegel’s interpretation of Kant’s a priori synthesis, with the crucial difference that for Hegel this activity points to reason itself, not to some pre-conceptual meaningfulness or “attunement” to the availability of beings. There is “no role to play for the understanding and intuition conceived as distinct capacities,” but in contrast to Hegel, who sees the interdependency between the two as having to do with our fundamentally conceptual capacity to take up sensible content as significant, their interdependency rests on “an original imaginative projection of a horizon of possible encounterable beings” (111). The imagination “forms the horizon of availability as such in advance” (114).
As Pippin notes, Heidegger’s “emphasis on the imagination in the first edition is a kind of stalking horse for his own claim that a laying of the foundation for a genuine metaphysics must be a ‘Daseinsanalytic’” (115). It is clear that Kant cannot fully fulfill the role, since he “‘shrank back’ from the implications of his own claim about the imagination” (116), especially with respect to finitude and the question of time. Heidegger also questions the purity of the categories, for if they “can play a role only in the projection of a horizon of ‘really possible’ objects as modes of time consciousness, then they are dependent on how time is possible, rather than vice versa” (117). Time is paramount, so much so that Heidegger thinks that time “already lies within pure apperception,” and so time “first makes the mind into a mind” (quoted at 118). In conclusion, Heidegger thinks that Kant does not carry through the broad metaphysical implication of his own views, and thus in the end remains trapped in traditional metaphysics.
Pippin devotes two long chapters to Hegel, in Section Three of the book. He first rehearses, in a clear and succinct manner, his well-known reading of Hegel. It is here where the central claim of the book comes to the fore most clearly, that Heidegger challenges the “founding principle of Greek metaphysics ... thought through to its culmination in Hegel,” namely the idea that “to be is to be rationally intelligible,” that “there can be nothing alogos, or unintelligible” (141). It is the idea that what matters most to us is the fact that the world “as it matters to us is available because of our conceptual and explanatory capacities” (141), that “nothing is in principle unknowable” (143), and the form under which we know beings in the world is fully determinable. This is what Heidegger criticizes as the priority of logic in traditional metaphysics. For Heidegger, the idealist claim that it is pure thinking which defines the determinability of anything shows an errancy, namely the “unthought” question of “how it is” that anything is at all available for discursive thought (143-4). It is not that Heidegger disagrees with the particular content of Hegel’s claims. He rather challenges the idea that the meaningfulness of Being is “originally its knowability,” that Being is identical to its cognitive intelligibility, whereby ‘cognitive,’ in Hegel’s case, should be understood as rational, not just intellectual as with Kant (144-5).
Pippin points out that, despite his at times “tendentious” and “quite limited” assessment of Hegel (169), Heidegger’s reading of Hegel’s is in fact, in its centrality, very accurate in that he faithfully – at least on Pippin’s reading of the Hegel of the Science of Logic, and I think it is the proper reading, rather than a lot of so-called “objectivist” readings of the Logic – characterizes Hegel’s main premise that the Concept is giving itself its own content and thus accounts for Being’s ground, and that basically this Concept is apperception (163), “thinking thinking thinking” (169), that is, that metaphysics is “everywhere logic” (163). Heidegger and Hegel are in some important sense on the same wavelength: both are concerned with “pure thinking’s reflection on its own possibility” (166). The key difference is that, as Heidegger points out, “pure thinkability” cannot be “one of the determinate moments of the Logic.” “The ‘science of pure thinking’ does not and cannot count pure thinking itself as one of its moments” (168-9). The Concept as the intelligibility of any being is not something like “Being as intelligibility itself.” Put succinctly, the Logic cannot itself be included inside the Concept Logic (169). And it is this inescapable fact of logic, this fundamental difference, that Heidegger tries to cash in on, a fact that Hegel just assumes for the project of the Science of Logic. The question “What is logic?,” which for Heidegger is closely intertwined with the question of the meaningfulness of Being, “remains unasked, even unthought” (169). More concretely, Heidegger claims that Hegel’s Logic is not “presuppositionless” (177). Hegel has assumed, in the very first move of the Logic, that the meaning of beings is our “care” about their discursive determinability: it is an unwarranted assumption about what the meaningfulness of Being amounts to, and it limits the notion of meaningfulness to “determinate conceptual content” (177). But one could wonder, as Pippin points out, “So what?” Why ask a question that is “irrelevant to [the Logic’s] purpose” (178), namely to elaborate the determinate moments of any claim about any being, which completely specify what it could mean for anything to be? Hegel’s project is just different from Heidegger’s, one could say.
In his essay ‘Hegel and the Greeks,’ published in Pathmarks, Heidegger puts the finger on the central issue in the Logic’s first step: supposedly, Hegel “is not able to release einai, being in the Greek sense, from the relation to the subject, and set it free into its own essence. This essence ... is presencing, ... an enduring coming forth from concealment into unconcealment. In coming to presence, disclosure is at play” (quoted at 187). By contrast, Hegel argues in the first few paragraphs of the Being section of the Logic that pure Being is unavailable for discursive determinability, and hence it is completely identical to Nothing for the generality of Being is such that it dissolves into something that is determinately unavailable, and this is the first step from immediate indeterminacy on the long methodological road of developing all the moments of determinacy of the Concept. But, as Pippin dramatically points out, Hegel “draws exactly the wrong lesson from the unthinkability of Being as such,” for, as Heidegger claims, Being’s “unavailability to discourse” is “precisely the point” (187). The beginning in Hegel’s Logic is not in fact Being, but already a “discursive differentiation” (187). Hegel cannot properly think Being and its “original manifestation” (188) without subjecting it to this principle of discursive thinking.
For Heidegger, we must attempt “a new understanding of thinking – not ratiocinative, discursive or propositional,” and avoid thinking of the meaning of Being as having to do with the standing presence of determinable beings which are supposedly “originally available” to discursive cognition (206), the dogmatic assumption of traditional metaphysics to which Kant and Hegel too, despite their revolutionary new way of thinking, are beholden. Such a “new thinking” must be conceived of on the basis of an early Greek notion of truth as aletheia, as “unconcealment,” rather than as “correspondence” between subject and object (206–7). It is unclear what form such new thinking should in effect take, and in a last chapter entitled “Poetic Thinking?,” Pippin considers various attempts by Heidegger in his later work to engage poetry and art as a way of making clear that such a question about the form of a new thinking ex hypothesi cannot demand clear and definite answers. As Pippin notes, making sure that he is clarifying the Heideggerian position, not stating his own, it is “worth taking” Heidegger’s claim that “metaphysics as unconditioned thinking on thinking”, as Hegel and mutatis mutandis Kant conceive of it, is an illusion, “more seriously than it has been” (219).
The Culmination is in many ways also the culmination of Pippin’s own development as a thinker in the tradition of German Idealism and beyond. His major monograph from the late 1980s, Hegel’s Idealism. The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, laid the groundwork for his well-known central thesis that Hegel’s absolute idealism was not in some way a return to a substantivist metaphysics in the Spinozan vein, but rather built on Kant’s revolutionary change in the way of thinking in metaphysics. The basic Kantian idea is that all our thinking about what there is must be accounted for in terms of our conceptuality as there is no way in which we can point to something presumably more basic outside it for verification. Hegel’s contribution to this was that, properly thought through, Being is nothing but the set of its conceptually developed determinations. In numerous essays in the years following, some of which were compiled in important paper collections such as Idealism as Modernism. Hegelian Variations (1997), The Persistence of Subjectivity. The Kantian Aftermath (2005), Interanimations. Receiving Modern German Philosophy (2015) and Die Aktualität des Deutschen Idealismus (2016), Pippin expanded on this idea and its aftermath and brought it to bear on other thinkers in the German tradition, in particular Heidegger. The latter’s relation to Hegel was already the topic of two of these earlier articles, even presented under the section title of “the Culmination.” But in a 2005 essay “The Necessary Conditions for the Possibility of What Isn’t. Heidegger on Failed Meaning” Pippin presented the outline of a more sustained reading of Heidegger’s problematic of the meaningfulness of Being that now finds its definitive and expanded version in The Culmination.
However, I think it would be a mistake to read the book as Pippin’s own adieu to German Idealism, or to Hegel in particular. Heidegger’s philosophy is not a competitor to German Idealism. Nor is it a question of an exclusionary choice of either subscribing to the one or the other. Such a reading betrays a much too simplistic approach to philosophy. What Pippin has amply shown in The Culmination is that there is an almost necessarily conceptually or reflectively uncapturable aspect of German Idealism, of rational metaphysics or philosophy in general for that matter – hence “the fate of philosophy” in the subtitle – that Heidegger attempts to disclose in his account of the question of the meaning of Being. This question is not the traditional philosophical question about what there is, or what kinds there are, or what the necessary conditions of knowledge are, etc. It concerns rather the question about intelligibility as such, how it is the case that sense is made of anything in the first place, or why sense-making matters or indeed that there is the concrete possibility of radical failure of meaning. Unlike the German Idealists, Heidegger’s thought is not concerned with mapping out a priori transcendental or conceptual conditions for such sense-making or its failure. Rather, the sense making happens, and it is this that cannot in its turn be made sense of in a conceptual logic of sense. The happening of sense making can be reflected upon in such a logic, but the happening itself is not reflectively grounded. The fact of the mattering of the logic is not itself part of the logic.
In his critique of Hegel, Heidegger draws attention to an ineradicable limit of absolute idealism, not because of any inherent logical flaw, or failure of conceptual account-taking, but because it presupposes its own significance that must remain unthought. With The Culmination Pippin has impressively shown what this limit entails for our understanding of German Idealism and indeed for philosophy in general.
© Dennis Schulting, 2025
Alain Séguy-Duclot, Kant, le premier cercle. La déduction transcendantale des catégories (1781 et 1787), Classiques Garnier, 2021 (review forthcoming in Kantian Review, Cambridge UP)
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DRAFT
While it is not obvious from the main title, the focus of this book is squarely on Kant’s transcendental deductions (hereafter Deduction for short) of the categories in both the 1781 and 1787 editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. The reference to a circle in the title follows from Séguy-Duclot’s interpretation of the function of the Deduction as the foundation of knowledge in the human subject. He thereby understands Kant as pursuing a similar task to Descartes with the cogito. Insofar as Descartes regarded the latter principle as insufficient to ground any claims about being, the subject must resort to a second principle, that of a non-misleading God who ensures that the epistemological evidence reveals truths about being. But the reliance upon a second principle would appear to amount to a circularity making the Cartesian project vulnerable to the sceptic.
Kant’s project, insofar as it abandons the ‘ontological project of traditional metaphysics’ (9), is set up to avoid such circularity by grounding knowledge exclusively upon the subject. At its heart lies the Deduction, which must ‘prove the legitimacy’ (21) of the categories as conditions of the possibility of objective experience. Central to Séguy-Duclot’s interpretation is a focus upon the role of the imagination: absent from the Duisburg Nachlass (1775), the imagination forms a crucial part of the A-Deduction, but is again rather occulted in the B-Deduction (23). Neo-Kantian interpreters such as Hermann Cohen view this faculty as addressing psychological questions irrelevant to the main thrust of the Deduction, but Heidegger on the contrary understands it, together with temporality, as key to transcendental subjectivity (23). This interpretative bifurcation is reflected in divergent attitudes among scholars to the dichotomy of the so-called objective and subjective deductions. In the preface to the first edition of the Critique Kant writes that, while the main task of the Deduction is showing the objective validity of the categories in that objects cannot be conceived other than by presupposing the categories, the Deduction will also shed light upon the very possibility of the understanding (A xvi–xvii). But the operative question here is: Is this second task, i.e. the subjective deduction, a mere speculative add-on (Cohen) or rather essential (Heidegger) to the Deduction, despite what Kant seems to be saying? All depends upon whether it is understood as merely psychological or of transcendental import: Séguy-Duclot argues for the latter interpretation insofar as it is required for the objective reality of the categories (28–30), and indeed for the chapter on schematism (32), while not siding with Heidegger who thinks that the objective deduction is thereby made superfluous: both deductions have their essential function within the whole (33). In fact, Séguy-Duclot argues that the subjective deduction is foundational to the objective one (164).
In analysing the three syntheses which form the core of the subjective deduction in the A-Deduction, the synthesis of apprehension, of reproduction, and of recognition, Séguy-Duclot sheds important light upon the synthesis of reproduction (45ff.) whose structure is misleading insofar as Kant begins by describing the empirical synthesis whereas all he needs is the pure one which is to ground the pure synthesis of apprehension. To explain how it grounds it, Séguy-Duclot draws upon the Axioms of Intuition and the description of the process of generating a line. A further problem with Kant’s inclusion of the empirical synthesis of reproduction is that, while the example he takes pertains to the connection of a heterogeneous manifold (e.g. events in time), what is at stake here can only be the composition of a homogeneous manifold (50). However, in concluding upon the pure synthesis of reproduction, Kant deliberately focuses upon the latter (mathematical) case, insofar as the concept of objectivity has not yet been introduced (54). The latter concept is however essential to the dynamical case which requires the introduction of objective time. This leaves the dynamical synthesis of reproduction unexamined at this stage: Séguy-Duclot thus claims a distinction between the treatment of the mathematical and dynamical syntheses, although this is not spelled out by Kant. The synthesis of recognition leads to the introduction of the unity of consciousness as necessary for the unity of the synthesis (A106–7). Séguy-Duclot further argues that the unity of consciousness is so far merely subjective: to get to the transcendental unity of apperception, the notion of object must first be introduced at A105 as a condition of rule-governedness (77ff.). And with this, Kant can now consider dynamical connections and thereby provide the missing ground for the dynamical synthesis of reproduction and the law-governedness of phenomena (87ff.).
Séguy-Duclot’s reading of the structure of the A-Deduction is one of the intriguing aspects of the book, of which scholars should take note. There is hardly any scholarly consensus about the proof structure of the A-Deduction, but it is noteworthy that for Séguy-Duclot the subjective deduction is not just the second section of the Deduction, running from A98 to A111 or as some argue until A114, but crosses over into the third section until A119 (67–71), while the actual objective deduction of the categories only takes effect well into the third section (towards the end of A119) (113). It is at A119 that the faculty of understanding is first introduced, where it is defined as the relation of the unity of apperception to the imagination, and since it is thereby related to sensibility, this is where the subjective deduction ends. Séguy-Duclot’s reconstitution of the structure of the A-Deduction clearly shows the intertwining of the subjective and objective deductions which is to be expected insofar as the ground of objectivity lies in the unity of apperception (114). Kant speaks of two deductions merely provisionally for the deduction will have been completed only at the end.
One of Séguy-Duclot's principal claims is that the principle of the objective deduction is to be found in the subjective one. The subjective one ‘becomes’ objective (114). To illustrate the importance of acknowledging the exact place of the juncture between the subjective and objective deductions in the A-Deduction Séguy-Duclot addresses two historical interpretations that reflect the diverging readings of the relation between the subject and objective deductions. On the one hand, Cohen (129ff.) struggles to ensure that the imagination’s productivity belongs to the understanding and turns to idealism in rethinking the role of the given in Kant’s theory: givenness is an activity of sensibility upon the matter of phenomena (135). By contrast, Heidegger (144–5) introduces a notion of pre-giving of this matter in space and time, again an activity of sensibility. As an alternative, Séguy-Duclot proposes that the subjective deduction leads to the ‘principle of the necessary unity of synthesis’ (156) which expresses the ‘necessary reciprocal presupposition of the unity [of apperception] and the synthesis’ (ibid.). The unity of apperception and the synthesis of the imagination thus condition each other ‘reciprocally’. From his perspective, Cohen’s error is to take the unity itself as ground, leaving no room for the distinction between unity and synthesis since the latter is resorbed under the understanding; and Heidegger’s privileges synthesis, thereby making it impossible for him to appreciate the independence of the unity of apperception with respect to temporality (157).
However, Séguy-Duclot’s verdict is that the relation between unity and synthesis is problematic insofar as the very units which are brought together by the imagination’s synthesis of apprehension have a unity which could not, on pain of regress, arise from a synthesis under the unity of apperception; this problem arises ultimately because of the unresolved status of the imagination between the understanding and sensibility flagged at the outset (168–73). The B-Deduction must therefore address these issues if the Deduction is not to flounder on a vicious circle between unity and synthesis.
Although the threefold synthesis no longer features in the B-Deduction, intriguingly, Séguy-Duclot submits that sections 15–17 in the B-Dedcution effectively amount to a subjective deduction, with the ‘possibility of the understanding’ established at B137, where similarly to the A-Deduction the subjective deduction ends. But, as Séguy-Duclot observes (180ff.), the subjective deduction seems much simpler here than in the A-Deduction, and this is because Kant abstracts from the way in which the manifold is given. What is given in sensibility is thus considered from a purely logical point of view, whereby compared to the A-Deduction account of the subjective deduction temporality no longer plays a role and the understanding is solely responsible for the synthesis. It follows that the reciprocity between unity and synthesis is now no longer between transcendental apperception and imagination as in the A-Deduction, but between apperception and the understanding, two faculties that are homogeneous and even identifiable (187–9). Whereas in the A-Deduction, the understanding still served as ‘third intermediary term’ between unity and synthesis, as a ‘priniciple of necessary unity of the synthesis’, in the B-Deduction this latter principle is identified as the synthesis itself: ‘the understanding becomes identified with the synthetic unity of apperception’ (188).
The equivalent of the objective deduction in the B-Deduction extends from the third paragraph of §17 to the end of §21. Séguy-Duclot argues that the B-Deduction is incomplete insofar as human knowledge requires taking into account how the manifold is given to our particular type of sensibility, i.e. a spatio-temporal one (197–8). Here, it is somewhat disappointing to see the author not engage with the multifarious interpretations (e.g. Allison 2004, Brouillet 1975, Evans 1990, Henrich 1969) that address the way in which the so-called ‘two steps’ of the B-Deduction are related, if the second step is not to be seen as dispensable insofar as it can just be inferred from the argument of the first step. Nevertheless, Séguy-Duclot converges with Allison (2004) in understanding the objective deduction in §20 as establishing the objective validity rather than the objective reality of the categories, i.e. their validity for objects of thought rather than the knowledge of real objects (202ff.).
The issue of not specifying in what way the second step is not merely based on an analytical inference from the argument in the first step appears to resurface when Séguy-Duclot describes the key type of synthesis of the second step, namely the figurative synthesis, which is responsible for the ‘knowledge’ (Erkenntnis) of an object, as a ‘specification’ of the intellectual synthesis, which is concerned with the ‘thought’ of an object only (207–8): if the knowledge of an object is just a specification of the thought of an object, why could it not be inferred from the first step once the type of sensible intuition, i.e. spatio-temporal, was specified? But it is important to see, as Séguy-Duclot indeed argues (212), that the intellectual synthesis of the first step is not just any synthesis, but is already a synthesis that requires a sensible intuition; it is merely the case that in the first step the argument abstracts from the specific human intuition, as Kant himself indicates at B145, in the transitional §21. This abstraction is subsequently lifted in the second step in that it is now shown how the synthetic unity of apperception which defines the concept of an object is applied in human sensibility itself, namely to the human-specific forms of space and time. It is thus, Séguy-Duclot argues, that the synthesis of the imagination is a ‘specification’ of the ‘non-sensible’ (208) intellectual synthesis in sensibility.
Séguy-Duclot’s focus is however rather upon the change in Kant’s theory of the imagination, with its synthesis now serving the understanding, while in the A-Deduction it was independent of it (209). The conclusion of the objective deduction then follows insofar as the a priori synthesis of apprehension is a figurative synthesis, thereby guaranteeing that all synthesis of apprehension conforms to the categories (215f.). This involves an account of the unities of space and time as presupposing synthesis as Kant claims in the footnote to B160–1 which has generated much debate. Séguy-Duclot examines this, stressing again the Cohen/Heidegger interpretative bifurcation (217–20) which he sees as reflected in the ‘Anglo-Saxon literature’. It also involves the two examples Kant uses at B162–3 of which Séguy-Duclot shows the key role in relation to the unity of time (224–7).
For Séguy-Duclot, the B-Deduction as a whole is incomplete however as it only shows the possibility of the understanding understood in a narrow sense as a faculty of concepts or rules which can be identified with the unity of apperception, whereas in the objective deduction, Kant draws upon a notion of the understanding defined as the ‘power of cognition’, which is not identifiable with the synthetic unity of apperception but rather dependent on it (230–1). It would appear that his argument for this difference is rather flimsily based on a passage at B137, which Séguy-Duclot reads as indicating a difference between the unity of consciousness and the understanding. He takes Kant here to be arguing for a different view of the understanding that is not identifiable with the synthetic unity of apperception, in contrast to what Kant said in the preceding section of the B-Deduction (which argues for the identity of the understanding and the unity of apperception). The ‘enlarged definition’ of the understanding (231) is said to avoid any dependence of the unity of apperception upon that of the imagination, and thus the problem of circularity can be addressed (231–4). Séguy-Duclot seems to believe that the act of the understanding, in its narrow sense, presupposes as ‘its own condition of employment’ ‘some empirical representation’, and thus the B-Deduction, despite the imagination being relegated to an act of the understanding, ‘does not succeed in eliminating the presupposition of the operationality of the transcendental imagination’ altogether. The imagination continues to be present, but in an ‘occult’ manner (234).
Now Séguy-Duclot argues that, while if a concept is assumed given judgement is determinative and the role of the imagination is thereby subordinated to the understanding, for the sake of completeness reflective judgement — when no concept is given — will also have to be considered, thus requiring a role for the imagination independently of the understanding. The problem with the relation between the understanding and the imagination is therefore not only that of an apparent circularity that was flagged earlier, but also of the need to account for the pre-conceptual unities that will be synthesised under the categories (237–40). To address these lacunae, Séguy-Duclot’s interpretation takes the reader into an unexpected examination of aesthetic judgement in the Critique of Judgement (243ff.).
But is Séguy-Duclot right to demand that the deduction of the categories address the question of the applicability of the categories when no concept is presupposed? To show the objective reality of the categories is to show that they apply to real objects, and there is only an object insofar as there is a concept of it, so is addressing the question of the possibility of forming such a concept a task that belongs to the Deduction? It is arguably not, in which case the B-Deduction has addressed the issue of a circle between the unity of apperception and the imagination’s synthesis from the A-Deduction by showing how the imagination is subordinated to the understanding.
Séguy-Duclot thinks not, and his excursus into the third Critique creates an opportunity for interesting novel interpretations of key sections of the Analytic of the Judgement of Taste (243–61). His overall verdict about the Deduction is that, in systematic terms, it avoids circularity but at the cost of a restricted ambition, which does not explore the sources of knowledge lying outside consciousness (272–3). Whether one agrees with this overall verdict, there is no doubt that this book presents Kantian scholars with a novel interpretative approach which is solidly grounded in a careful analysis of especially the A-Deduction. Though on a first reading the structure of the book itself appears somewhat fragmented with lots of reprises, the overall systematicity of Séguy-Duclot’s interpretation is impressive, as several problems concerning the detail of the Deduction are related to the issues he identifies in the overall structure of the Deduction.
References:
Allison, Henry (2004), Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. An Interpretation and Defense, revised & expanded ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Brouillet, Raymond (1975), ‘Dieter Henrich et «The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction». Réflexions critiques’, Dialogue 14 (4): 639–48.
Evans, J. Claude (1990), ‘Two-Steps-in-One-Proof: The Structure of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (4): 553–70.
Henrich, Dieter (1969), ‘The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction’, Review of Metaphysics 22 (4): 640–59.
© Christian Onof & Dennis Schulting
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Till Hoeppner -- Urteil und Anschauung. Kants metaphysische Deduktion der Kategorien, De Gruyter, 2021 (review forthcoming in the Kantian Review, Cambridge UP)
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DRAFT (UPDATED)
The chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason that is usually referred to as the "Metaphysical Deduction" has long been the subject of discussion in the context of book-length interpretations of the Transcendental Deduction as it is the necessary preliminary to that chapter. It formed an important part, for instance, of Béatrice Longuenesse’s masterful Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998). But there aren’t many self-standing book-length treatments of the Metaphysical Deduction alone, separately from the Transcendental Deduction. The classic monographs on the Metaphysical Deduction as such are Klaus Reich’s Die Vollständigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel from 1932 (reprinted various times, and translated into English in 1992), Reinhard Brandt’s Die Urteilstafel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft A67-76;B92-101 (1991) and Michael Wolff’s Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel (1995). A fourth major monograph can now be added to this list: Till Hoeppner’s Urteil und Anschauung. Kants metaphysische Deduktion der Kategorien. Crucially, unlike those aforementioned three books, but like Longuenesse, Hoeppner includes an extensive, separate account of the all-important third section of the Metaphysical Deduction, that is, the section leading up to the table of categories (§10, A76–80/B102–6).
Hoeppner does not spend time on the question whether Kant’s arguments do make any sense in the context of developments in logic after Kant. He specifically attempts to provide a precise interpretative reconstruction of the arguments so as to present them as coherently and persuasively as possible given Kant’s premises. Hoeppner also thinks that the argument of the Metaphysical Deduction, if we read it in the way he does, can be considered successful, including its ill-famed “completeness” claim. Wolff’s book, and in its own superbly obscure way, Reich’s too, of course also attempted to present the Metaphysical Deduction in a positive light but, unlike many contemporary Kantians, it is refreshing to see Hoeppner painstakingly and rigorously reconstruct Kant’s own arguments, over close to 400 pages, without impatiently framing it in the terms of contemporary philosophical concerns.
It is noteworthy that Hoeppner is not so much interested in issues of a more philological concern, such as the question why the chapter in the Critique that is at issue is standardly called “Metaphysical Deduction” in the first place, or, more precisely, why Kant casually gives it that label only much later, towards the end of the Transcendental Deduction. Nowhere in the actual chapter, which runs from A66/B91 to A80/B106, does the name in fact appear. None of the chapter headings of the three main sections that make up the actual deduction (§§8–10) contain the words “Metaphysical Deduction”. Instead Kant consistently speaks, in all three headings, of a “guiding thread” to the “discovery” of the concepts of the understanding, or also, in the heading of the third section, the categories. The very term “Deduction” only first appears at A84/B116, at the start of the second chapter of the Analytic of Concepts, which is where the transcendental deduction of the categories begins, or at least the first of the two introductory sections that lead up to the Transcendental Deduction proper. This is of significance, I think, and a recent (yet unpublished) paper argues indeed that what we usually call the "Metaphysical Deduction" isn’t actually a deduction in the narrow sense of the term, if we take seriously Kant’s account in §13, where Kant conceives of the Deduction analogously with how jurists required proofs of both the quaestio facti and the quaestio juris. Only the quaestio juris would strictly speaking, that is, legally speaking, be a deduction, whereas the quaestio facti, which according to this paper would be equally as important, isn’t.* This goes against the grain of the received interpretation, since most scholars, the present reviewer included, think that the quaestio facti is irrelevant to Kant’s argument, or merely a foil for it (with Ian Proops being an important exception). I’m not sure if that argument is right, but if indeed what usually is called the "Metaphysical Deduction" isn’t a deduction in the strict sense of the term but concerns the quaestio facti as integral part of a larger argument for the objective validity of the categories of which the Deduction strictly speaking is also part, then this has repercussions for accounts of the argument in the so-called "Metaphysical Deduction".
For one thing, though it is entirely legitimate to delimit one’s object of study for the purposes of a book, on that account it would be difficult to maintain that the Metaphysical Deduction is a perfectly self-contained set of arguments. And indeed, while he does not go as far as Reich who for the most part of the evidence for his reading looked outside the actual sections that make up the Metaphysical Deduction, or in fact frequently outside of the Critique altogether in Reflection notes, Hoeppner seeks support for one of his main claims about what constitutes the categories in the subjective deduction in the A-edition of the Transcendental Deduction,** and for support of his, in my view, questionable reading of the famous passage at A79/B104–5 (about which more below) he looks to a section in the Transcendental Dialectic as his best evidence. I for one am not against reading the claims in the Metaphysical Deduction in the light of later treatments in the Transcendental Deduction or indeed by resorting to other sections in the Critique or to Reflection notes. But this goes to show that it is hard to present a self-contained reading of the Metaphysical Deduction and not to run ahead of the argument for e.g. “synthesis” in §10, as a crucial component of the derivation of the categories from the functions of judgement, by looking at the arguments for synthesis in the Transcendental Deduction for major interpretative support, as does Hoeppner.
Nevertheless, the interpretative support, internal and external to the actual text of the Metaphysical Deduction, that Hoeppner does muster in support of his reading is impressive. His analysis of Kant’s arguments for the central claim that the elements that make up the conditions of thought are exactly congruent to the functions of judgement, as well as his intriguing and, at first pass, persuasive account of the categories as having the threefold act of synthesis as their representational content (330 et passim) are rigorously argued, exceedingly detailed and frequently illuminating. I am also in complete agreement with Hoeppner that the whole of the Metaphysical Deduction is part of transcendental logic (27, 60n.143, 331), so from the start of the chapter at A67, whereas often it is thought, mistakenly, that the arguments especially in the first two sections, which concern the elements of thought and the table of the functions of judgement, are part of general logic. He is also right of course that the relative tasks of the Metaphysical Deduction and the Transcendental Deduction can be fairly easily distinguished, respectively, as an argument that shows what the necessary conditions of thinking and thus judging are and an argument that shows that these conditions are sufficient for certain concepts also to be objectively valid (23). But I was not always sure Hoeppner was consistent in differentiating these tasks, while he often talks about objective validity and “objectiven, wahrheitsfähigen Urteile” (64, 178 et passim) in the context of the Metaphysical Deduction, an ambiguous notion he does not define nor really explain, but just assumes. It is true that Kant later, in the Transcendental Deduction, defines a judgement as an objectively valid unity of representations (B141–2), but this definition cannot already be assumed without further argument in an account of §§8 and 9 of the Metaphysical Deduction.
In a short review of such a monumental book on such a complex theme, I cannot possibly detail every theme or aspect that Hoeppner discusses nor flag all the potential problems and apparent contradictions that I encountered. But the one major issue I have with his take on the Metaphysical Deduction, in particular his reading of §10, cannot remain unmentioned. Based on his distinction between the "logical" and "real uses" of the understanding--the main textual evidence for this he gathers from A299--he sharply distinguishes between analysis and synthesis as irreducible acts of the understanding. This ties in with his view that the acts of synthesis of the manifold in an intuition aren't judgements, even though they are acts of the understanding (79, 119, 210, 353). First, this would appear to conflict with Kant's explicit claim that "we can trace [zurückführen] all actions of the understanding back to judgments, so that the understanding in general can be represented as a faculty for judging" (A69/B94); this was why the functions of judgement could be derived so neatly from the understanding as the capacity to think in the table of judgement in §9. Of course, acts of synthesis aren't themselves judgements, but this does not imply, as Hoeppner seems to believe, that acts of synthesis can take place outside or independently of judgements; these acts being conditions of judgement (295)--Hoeppner speaks somewhat incongruously of them as the Seinsgrund of judgements that in turn are themselves the Erkenntnisgrund of these acts (325)--they are an inseparable part of judgements nonetheless.
Secondly, and perhaps even more importantly, this sharp distinction between analysis and synthesis threatens to undermine what Hoeppner himself calls the "Identitätsthese" (348ff.) that Kant puts forward in the famous Leitfaden passage at A79/B104–5. Why is that? Hoeppner reads the identity claim that is expressed by Kant's phrases "dieselbe Funktion", "derselbe Verstand" and "dieselben Handlungen" non-reductively, namely, as not amounting to the claim that one of each act is to be seen as the other and can be reduced to it (353). Hoeppner argues that the identity that is meant here is a "generic" identity, namely, both acts, the act that is responsible for the form and unity of a judgement (analytic unity) and the act that is responsible for the unity of an intuition (synthetic unity), are different species of the same genus, whereby genus is the understanding in a higher form; they are not identical in the sense that they would literally be the same act. Hoeppner translates Kant's phrasing, somewhat awkwardly, by speaking of the "generisch dieselbe Funktion bzw. generisch dieselben Akte generisch desselben Verstandes" (354). The problem with this, it seems to me, is twofold.
First, while Hoeppner focusses on the fact that the understanding has two different uses or applications ("logical" and "real"), on the level of the form of judgement and on the level of the representational content in intuition, which justifies the distinction between the means of analytic unity and the means of synthetic unity respectively, he skirts around the real question about the identity claim in the passage, namely to specify what "dieselbe Funktion" or "dieselbe Handlungen" are that have these distinct applications or uses. Just saying that there is such a higher genus of which the distinct means (analysis and synthesis) are species, namely a higher, generic concept of the understanding that contains what is common to the logical and transcendental concept of the understanding (355), is not the answer to the question what that same function is, which manages to achieve two distinct aims and yield two distinct results. It is just a shifting of the question. Longuenesse and others claim that this identical function is the logical function of judging, given that the understanding is basically the capacity to judge. But Hoeppner explicitly rejects this reading (371).
Secondly, given that Hoeppner supports the claim that the categories, which have the acts of synthesis as their representational content, are exactly correspondent to--he uses the term "entsprechen" (286)--the functions of judgement (341–2), and given that he argues that the logical use of the understanding requires the real use of the understanding (179, 322) and the latter is in fact the "Seinsgrund" of the former, then how is it that the acts of synthesis that constitute the categories, as Hoeppner himself argues quite rightly, are not to be seen as that which also constitutes the forms of unity in judgements? Hoeppner of course believes that the categories, and hence the acts of synthesis that form the original content of the categories, also have their origin in the understanding, that is, in the same understanding in virtue of which we judge. But the strong sense of correspondence between the act of synthesizing and the act of judging is lost when Hoeppner cannot explain by which "same" acts, on Kant's own account in A76/B104, the understanding achieves this dual performance other than by saying it is the same understanding that does it in two different modes. By denying that it is the act of judging, he seems to believe that a judgement is just the formation of the forms of unity on the conceptual level by means of an analytic unity, and not also and at the same time, in virtue of the categories, a determination of the manifold in an intuition, which would appear to contradict his other view that the logical use of the understanding does require its real use, in that manifolds with "real" representational content need to be determined for it. It seems that synthesis and the act of judging are kept strictly separate in Hoeppner's account; judgement and synthesis of intuition are merely "generically identical" (360). But it is difficult to see how this comports with Kant's clear belief that the "categories are nothing other than these very functions for judging, insofar as the manifold of a given intuition is determined with regard to them" (B143). It seems to me that Hoeppner fails to grasp the real strong identity claim that lies in Kant's Leitfaden passage at A76/B104–5, which says that our capacity to judge really is our capacity to determine objects that we intuit for our judging.
From a significant note towards the end of his account (363n.660), in which he criticizes James Conant on this point, it becomes clear that Hoeppner believes that, quoting Conant, the "generic form of unity" that judgement and synthesis of intuition have in common cannot be the "original synthetic unity of the understanding" or "the original synthetic unity of apperception", as Conant believes, as this would be tantamount, in Hoeppner's view, to the reductive reading of the Leitfaden passage, for apparently it reduces analytic unity to a synthetic unity. I think Hoeppner here mistakes the synthesis in intuition for the ground of this synthesis, namely the original synthetic unity of apperception, which is in fact the spontaneity of the understanding (B130). I submit it is this original act of synthesis that is "dieselbe Funktion" that unites, "by the very same actions", the representations in a judgement, its logical form, and the representations in an intuition, a judgement's transcendental content. This is not a reductive reading, it seems to me, given that Kant himself makes it quite clear that analytic unities of representations too require this original synthetic unity of apperception as their transcendental-logical ground of possibility (B130, 132–5).
Much more of course can be said about Hoeppner's excellent book, and I am certain many scholars of Kant will benefit from its extensive and detailed analyses of an often still largely misunderstood chapter in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
* I'm indebted to Rob Watt for this line of argument (in an unpublished paper).
** Hoeppner’s turn to the so-called subjective deduction of the A-Deduction is reminiscent of Heidegger’s claim that ‘these sections present what Kant only programmatically predelineates in §10 of the Critique' (Heidegger 1995:336).
© Dennis Schulting, 2023.
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Robert Pippin -- Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic, University of Chicago Press, 2018 (review forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin, Cambridge UP)
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DRAFT
One of the persistent conundrums in Hegel scholarship concerns the precise relation between Kant and Hegel. It is clear from Hegel’s many pronouncements, from early on in his Faith and Knowledge until the last edition of the Doctrine of Being from 1832, that Kant features prominently among the central influences on Hegel’s thought. However, commentators have more often sought to divorce Hegel’s logic from transcendental philosophy than trying to explain the precise nature of Hegel’s allegiance to Kant. Nobody of course denies that Hegel is a post-Kantian in some sense, but one has the impression that generally this is explained away in temporal terms without it being qualified what is specifically post-Kantian about Hegel’s thinking in any meaningful sense. One prominent exception in the literature is, as is well-known, the work of Robert Pippin, starting with his magisterial Hegel’s Idealism from 1989. Pippin has often been criticised, mistakenly, for propounding an a-metaphysical reading of Hegel, or indeed for a ‘Kantianising’ reading of Hegel, as if this meant that the real, speculative, or, if you will, ontological Hegel had to be bowdlerised for a modern philosophical public less enamoured of good old metaphysics.
In his new book, Pippin makes it clear that his reading of Hegel is neither ‘Kantianising’, nor a-metaphysical. This is not a correction of his earlier views in light of the criticisms, but rather a further elaboration on and clarification of the claims already made in Hegel’s Idealism. Pippin’s Hegel is as much of a metaphysician as you would want, albeit one that has fully taken on board Kant’s ‘revolution in the way of our thinking’ (cf. 123). One of the central claims of Hegel’s Realm of Shadows is in fact that the Science of Logic is a metaphysics full stop, in the sense of Aristotelian metaphysics, an account of the intelligibility of Being itself, but importantly, ‘not an account of any special ontological domain or object’ (299). At the same time, more than any other commentator, Pippin is able to parse in detail those passages in Hegel—––which are too often taken at face value by other commentators—––that show the intimacy between Kant’s and Hegel’s thinking and demonstrate that Hegel is, in spirit if not the letter, a Kantian through and through. In other words, there is no need for any ‘Kantianising’. Explaining this seeming paradox, Hegel as both an Aristotelian and a Kantian, lies at the heart of Hegel’s Realm of Shadows.
A central tenet of Pippin’s reading of the Logic is the idea that it concerns an account of ‘the determinate moments of “any thinking of the knowable”, such that they count as the determinate moments of the knowable itself’ (8), that ‘what I think when I know (think truly) that something is the case is simply what is the case’ (47), that “‘thinking in its immanent determinations and the true nature of things are one and the same content” (SL 21.29)’ (48), or simply put that ‘the forms of thought are the forms of things’ or ‘the forms of being’ (47, 276). The idea here is not that thinking isomorphically maps onto or corresponds to some self-standing, prior given, independent being or reality (51), or that reality and thinking are, as somehow independent entities, co-determining, but rather that reason’s own determinations are what Being, or any thing, truly is. A thing is not something outside its being determined by reason. Rather, ‘what a thing is, in truth, is its intelligibility’ (257), and ‘to be anything is to be a determinate something’ (59), hence an intelligible something.
Secondly, Pippin stresses the notion that Being is an activity, in both the Aristotelian (energeia) and Kantian (apperception, spontaneity) senses of ‘activity’. This is the element where Hegel’s Aristotelianism and Kantianism come together. The central Aristotelian idea that the truth of a thing is its intelligibility also informs Kant’s transcendental thought, albeit that given his focus on the possibility of modern scientific knowledge, Kant is more modest in respect of the idea that the forms of our knowledge are ‘the forms of being’ simpliciter (265) and therefore restricts possible knowledge to what can be linked to empirical experience. This latter aspect is of course where Hegel departs from Kant.
But the point on which Hegel absolutely agrees with Kant is the idea that reason is self-legislating (148)—––Pippin interestingly argues that Kant’s principle of heautonomy, first introduced in the Third Critique, is for Hegel in fact applicable to the whole of philosophy (262)—––and that it is reason that thus, in virtue of its own activity, provides an account of the determinacy of any particular thing. It is from within thinking accounting for its own determinate moments, i.e. functions of thought or categories, that any object or thing can be determined as what it truly is. Pippin aptly puts it thus: ‘It is in thinking thinking thinking that thinking thinks anything that can be thought, or being’ (258). The ambition of Kant's Deduction, after which mutatis mutandis Hegel’s own account is modelled, at least in spirit (see 48, 57, 61, 122, 267–8), is to account for the minimally required conditions for the possible knowledge of objects in virtue of an analysis of the capacity to judge. The clue which Kant had presented already in the mid-70s, in the so-called Duisburg Nachlass, on the basis of which such an analysis should proceed is the idea that ‘the principles of the possibility of experiences ... are at the same time principles of the objects of experience’ (Refl 4757, Ak 17:703; cf. CPR, B197/A158 and A111). The central philosophical insight that is expressed in nuce here, and what makes up the Kantian revolution in the way of our thinking about reality, concerns the identity claim that is contained therein, an identity of thought and object, mind and world. And this identity claim, taken up again in the well-known clue-section of the Metaphysical Deduction and argued for in detail in the first half of the Transcendental Deduction in its B-version, has Hegel’s particular interest: ‘Objectivity is what the object [der Gegenstand] ... has in the concept, and this concept is the unity of self-consciousness ... its objectivity or the concept is itself none other than the nature of self-consciousness, has no other moments or determinations than the “I” itself’ (SL 12.18–19). The objecthood of any thing is nothing but the unity of its concept and therefore a determination of the ‘I think’, i.e. the unity of apperception: an object is truly how it is conceived, grasped in its intelligibility as such. There is nothing subjectivistic, in the psychological sense, about this. It concerns conceivability or intelligibility. Though most Kantians would baulk at this identification of object and apperception or self-consciousness, this is in fact exactly the argument in §§16 and 17 of the B-Deduction. Hegel understood this early on and better than anyone else.
Of course, Hegel finds fault with Kant’s focus on the role of pure intuition, but this is—––and herein I disagree on some points with Pippin’s reading—––more a question of perspective than a fundamental disagreement about determinacy: pure intuition is never meant to provide an external warrant for our knowledge claims, in addition to the activity of judging. It is the prerogative of the understanding, in virtue of its function as figurative synthesis, to provide determinacy, never intuition, empirical or pure. The real divergence between Kant and Hegel circles around the question of real possibility: for Hegel the actuality that conceptual determinacy generates out of itself (‘the concept... gives itself its own actuality’, 296) is all the actuality that we need, the actuality of the categorially determinate thing as what it in truth is, whereas for Kant actuality must be connected to what is empirically perceivable. Objective validity is, for Kant, real possibility only if it is connected to empirical intuition. For Hegel, real possibility is a result of complete a priori conceptual determinacy (Hegel obviously does not think that the Logic generates the world materialiter (319)).
But isn’t this all too much ‘Kantianising’ after all? Can this apply to the first book of Hegel’s Logic which in the first instance concerns the logic of being itself, and don’t judgement, self-consciousness, thought etc. appear only much later in the Logic, i.e. in the Doctrine of the Concept? Are we not trying to foist a transcendental conception of knowledge on the Doctrine of Being? The ‘movement’ of concepts is suggested by some commentators to be internal to the concepts themselves insofar as the concept ‘being’ itself shows that it is, or ‘becomes’ (in the logical sense) the concept ‘nothing’. Sometimes it is even suggested that it is Being itself that ‘becomes’ Nothing, but this is unintelligible, as if ‘we ha[d] Hegel inviting us to watch being think about, go into, itself’ (53n.32). Either way, it is thus these commentators argue that ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ are basically equivalent, which leads immanently to consecutive concepts and gets the dialectic going; no thinking or judging on the part of a subject is at issue at this point. This ‘objectivist’ (131, 135) way of reading the movement of concepts is explicitly opposed to a strategy that ostensibly considers thought or judgement to be the ‘vehicle’, as it were, of this transition between concepts, as such a strategy seems to fail to capture the immanent logic at work and to be too external, creating a gap between thought, on the one hand, and being, on the other, that was supposed to have been closed by the account in the Phenomenology.
However, this gap is illusory. These concepts are not self-standing abstract entities (93) as if they could be observed independently or from some ostensibly neutral perspective. Pippin says: ‘The Logic is [not] something like the “pure” manifestation of the objective dependence and implication relations among “pure essentialities”, thoughts in the objective sense, logical entities that are in those relations in ways that have nothing to do with anyone "thinking them"’ (131). ‘We don’t observe what happens when one step in a proof “becomes” another; the inference has to be drawn, and drawn for a reason’ (133). Thus, ‘concepts ... are possible "moments" in judgment’ (137). The ‘objectivist’ objection to this is that surely judgements are about objects and not identical to them, again creating a gap between subjective thought and the object, which would be incompatible with the rationale of the Logic. But, against this objection, at issue in the Logic are of course not judgements per se or even possible judgements per se whereby each empirical judgement is seen to be separable from the object judged. The judgements that feature in the Logic’s account are speculative judgements, and they function much like Kant’s synthetic a priori judgements, expressing a progressively determinate analysis of the identity that lies in this ‘synthetic a priori’ that constitutes any judgement about an object.
But there is another way of challenging the ‘objectivist’ reading that opposes the possible knowledge/apperceptive activity reading that Pippin espouses: it is itself not capable of explaining how the transition or movement between the categorial concepts is supposed to work if not in virtue of the unity of apperception. Surely, these concepts do not generate the movement or dialectic between them out of themselves on pain of circularity. But suppose they do, then it would have to be the very first concept, ‘being’, which out of itself sets in motion the movement or transition to the next contrary concept, ‘nothing’, and so onwards to all subsequent concepts. But we know that Hegel writes that ‘being has passed over’, ‘not passes over’ ‘into nothing’ (SL 21.69). So it is not literally a transition between two apparently self-standing, contrary or even contradictory concepts that have nothing in common, a relation between two wholly ‘different’ concepts. This points to the fact that the relation between them is internal to both of them, i.e. ‘becoming’ takes precedence over the concepts in separation. But it also implies that the transition is not actually a movement from ‘being’ to ‘nothing’. ‘Being’ and ‘nothing’ are meaningful only in their relation, i.e. in virtue of the successor concept ‘becoming’. It is this realisation in thought of the interdependence between the two concepts or their equivalence—––whilst semantically different, both concepts express the same pure indeterminacy—––that constitutes the transition, and thus between this and any subsequent, more determinate concept. The transition doesn’t just happen, it is conceptually grasped in thought. The ‘identity within difference’ of the relation between ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ is their unity in thinking them, that is, in their unity of being apperceived. The unity of apperception is the principle of their differentiability. The contrastive relation between the concepts is a function of the unity of apperception; without that unity there is no transition between the concepts, but nor would there be the concepts since they are not self-standing and only have meaning in their relation. This is why Pippin is absolutely right to say that the unity of apperception is the Concept (73–4n.80, 189), or the absolute idea (45, 319), and that categories are moments of the unity of apperception as this activity, and nothing apart from this (127) (Pippin helpfully points, in his discussion of the role of determinate reflection, to the ‘mutually presupposing relation’ between the analytic and synthetic unities of apperception, quoting B134 (237), and shows that ‘the “principles” of identification and differentiation are deeply intertwined’ (240)).
Hegel himself, from very early on, identified the original-synthetic unity of apperception with the absolute: in Faith and Knowledge, he called it ‘absolute identity’, which is the identity of identity (sameness) and difference, that is, the unity of the thought about some content and the content thought. What is important to note here is that the conceptual content is not separable from the activity of thinking it: ‘The apperceptive or inherently reflexive determination of conceptual content ... is no more external than the ‘I think’ is external to a content thought’ (131). Form and content are formally separable in the analysis of the logic of knowledge, but not in an actual judgement about some object. There is an identity between thought and object insofar as the object’s conceptual determinacy is concerned; and conceptual determinacy is what, as was Kant’s insight that Hegel takes over wholesale, constitutes the objecthood of an object (303). There is nothing more objective about an object than what is determined in virtue of the unity of the object’s concept, i.e. in the unity of apperception.
Similarly, to return to the relation between ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ at the start of the Logic, the thought of the relation or transition between those concepts is what constitutes the relation between 'being' and 'nothing'; there is nothing over above that thought. And given that 'being' and 'nothing' are nothing apart from their relation, the thought of the relation constitutes what ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ are (inadequate norms for object knowledge, as it happens), and so on for all other subsequent, ever more determinate thought determinations which define a possible object’s determinacy. To then claim that ‘being’ (or ‘nothing’) is still something apart from that thought is to fail to understand what conceptual determinacy is, and what constitutes it. Hence thought’s own determinacy is what an object or a being’s determinacy can be. There is no intelligible being beyond its thought determination, in the same way that it would be nonsensical to ask about the object’s objecthood as apart from how Kant says objectivity is a function of the unity of apperception.
Much more can of course be said of Pippin’s outstanding book. I found for example the discussion of the Wesenslogik and his account of real opposition (243–5) particularly illuminating. In my view, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows is the most important monograph on Hegel’s Science of Logic since the seminal work carried out in the 1970s by the likes of Klaus Düsing, Hans Friedrich Fulda, Dieter Henrich, and Michael Theunissen.
© Dennis Schulting, 2021
See also appendix
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