John McCumber is Distinguished Professor of Germanic Languages at UCLA. His most recent book is On Philosophy: Notes From a Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2013).

UNDERSTANDING HEGEL’S MATURE CRITIQUE OF KANT

By JOHN McCUMBER

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8545-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………viiABBREVIATIONS……………………………………………………..ixA NOTE ON THE TEXTS………………………………………………..xiA SHORT INTRODUCTION TO AN ENDLESS TASK………………………………11 HEGEL AND HIS PROJECT…………………………………………….152 HEGEL CONTRA KANT ON PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUE AND THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE..433 TRANSCENDENTAL VERSUS LINGUISTIC IDEALISM…………………………..774 THE NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF WILL…………………………………1115 HEGEL’S CRITIQUE OF KANT’S MORAL THEORY…………………………….147NOTES…………………………………………………………….173REFERENCES………………………………………………………..195INDEX…………………………………………………………….205

CHAPTER 1

HEGEL AND HIS PROJECT

TWO CENTURIES OF STRENUOUS EFFORT at understanding the nature ofHegel’s philosophical project have generated two main families of views—one,indeed, for each century. Both are predicated on views of Hegel’s relationship toKant’s critical project, but their stances on this are opposed: the older view seesHegel as revoking Kant’s critique of metaphysics, while the younger one, closerto mine, sees him as continuing it. My next tasks, then, are to sketch these twogeneral understandings of Hegel, to show why they are defective, and to indicatewith what they might be replaced. A general account of that replacementwill occupy the rest of the chapter, with the specific payoffs concerning Hegel’scritique of Kant reserved for the rest of the book.

That Hegel’s “philosophical vision” differs from Kant’s is obvious enough;even to a nonphilosophical eye, a page of Hegel does not look at all like a pageof Kant, nor of anyone else, for that matter. What is not obvious, to say theleast, is just what Hegel’s way of doing philosophy amounts to. That it representssome kind of comprehensive philosophical system is clear just from thetables of contents of his major works; but what more can we say?

I will call this the “nature of philosophy problem” in Hegel. I have treatedit at length elsewhere (CW) and will confine myself here to an updated sketchof the overall argument. My most general presupposition is that any proposedsolution to the nature of philosophy problem in Hegel runs into trouble if it is(a) at variance with Hegel’s own statements; (b) impeaches the overall unityof his thought; (c) employs problematic reading strategies; and/or (d) violateswhat I will call the “plausibility constraint.”

These criteria deserve some preliminary comments, of which the first is thatthey are advanced only to serve as indications of problems with a proposed solution.They are not definitive, if only because overall accounts of Hegel’s project(with some exceptions) are not subject to up-or-down judgments on theirvalidity. Hegel interpretation is inherently pluralistic, and its major strands areall illuminating and worthy of continued pursuit. But none, including surelymy own, is wholly right.

Criterion (a), in particular, furnishes indications of trouble, rather thantrouble itself, because quotes from Hegel almost always have counter-quotes.Hegel was not only a voluminous writer with diverse interests but a supremelydifficult one as well, many of whose texts have been heavily edited by others.The dialectical nature of his philosophy, moreover, repeatedly leads him to statecontradictory views, often at some length, before subsuming them into somesort of speculative unity.

It must also be said that Hegel is often—too often—devious. To take anexample which will be important for my own view of Hegel (and its deficiencies),in the Science of Logic he refers to it as “the exposition [Darstellung] ofGod before the creation of nature and of finite Spirit” (5:44/50; emphasis removed).This single line has been cited innumerable times as a warrant for various”theological” readings of Hegel. But it cannot serve as that, for it turns outto be an unattributed citation from Spinoza’s On the Improvement of the Intellect.Spinoza refers to the presentation of the thoughts of God before the creationof the world as a thought-experiment for a philosophical project; but it isnot something that could actually be carried out because for Spinoza—as well,prima facie, for the Hegel who quotes him—the very idea is counterfactual. TheGod who is nature (deus sive natura) cannot have created nature.

It is not surprising, then, that in the next paragraph—in a passage quotedrarely, if ever, together with the first—Hegel slips in a retraction, while ostensiblytalking about Anaxagoras: “What we are dealing with in logic is not a thinkingabout something which exists independently as a basis for our thinking andapart from it; … on the contrary, the forms and self-determinations of thoughtare the content and ultimate truth itself” (5:44/50).

On this basis, Hegel’s logic would not be the “exposition” of God but Godhimself—and Hegel turns into a self-deifying maniac, unless we know enoughSpinoza to uncover the hidden reference to him in the earlier quote and realizethat it cannot have been intended literally. Then we see that Hegel is not maniacalbut devious: he is trying to invoke God for his philosophical project whilecovertly signaling, both in the invocation itself and immediately after, that theinvocation is hollow. The deviousness can readily be explained if we surmise thatHegel was, philosophically anyway, not a traditional theist and wanted to coverhis tracks. Atheism was broadly defined at the time; it was repeatedly confusedwith another departure from orthodoxy, pantheism, in the Pantheismusstreitof the late eighteenth century. It was also unpopular with German authorities;thirteen years before the first edition of the Science of Logic, Fichte had beenfired from his position at Jena for espousing what they considered to be atheism.Hegel, who still did not have an academic position when he was writingthe Science of Logic, would hardly want to endanger his chances of getting one.

This is not the only occasion on which Hegel was devious in such ways.The lesson, from this as well as the other problems with his writing that I havenoted, is that isolated quotes must be used with care.

Criterion (b) will be clear enough when I deploy it, as long as we keep inmind that the unity in question is not over time: on the view I will advocatehere, Hegel’s thought changes in important ways over the course of his life, butin its final expression it is a single, unified philosophical system.

Criterion (c), the avoidance of problematic reading strategies, requiresslightly more detailed preliminary comment. The two standard families of solutionsto the nature of philosophy problem in Hegel, simply because they givesuch prominence to Kant, show themselves to be deuteroi ploi (“secondarysailings”) in that instead of going directly to Hegel’s texts to understand hisphilosophical project, they use a selected group of other texts to understandthe ones he actually wrote and published. This is tempting, of course, in virtueof the obscurity, difficulty, and trickiness of Hegel’s texts; you cannot simplysit down with them and hope to get anywhere. It is therefore entirely reasonableto go to more readily comprehensible texts and thinkers, such as Kant,and then read Hegel as either criticizing or carrying forward their insights.But this inevitably risks reading foreign notions into Hegel rather than developingone’s understanding of him from his own texts. Depending on whichother texts are selected, this approach can ramify into a whole panoply ofreading strategies.

Finally, criterion (d), which I will call the “plausibility constraint,” requiresthat any account we give of Hegel’s way of doing philosophy should not only begrounded in Hegel’s texts but should also be plausible enough to make Hegel’sproject worth pursuing. Introducing this constraint on a solution to the natureof philosophy problem in Hegel raises ancient, profound, and complexissues concerning the nature of philosophical interpretation itself. Should westrive for the most accurate statement possible of Hegel’s views on philosophicalplausibility, no matter how ridiculous they appear to us? Or should we tryto reshape his thought into something acceptable by our current lights? Theformer suggests that we should try to jump over our own shadow, eliminatingall traces of ourselves and our culture from our interpretation; but if alltraces of ourselves are gone, why should we hope that the results will be usefulto us? The latter implies that we and our kind constitute a court of final instancebefore which Hegel must bow—and if he must bow, so must all othersbut ourselves. Trapped between the Scylla of antiquarianism and the Charybdisof arrogance, our only recourse here seems to be to feel our way into the middle,hoping for some sort of Gadamerian “merging of horizons” to broaden uswhile reshaping him.

I will take a slightly more determinate middle way, arguing that both familiesof Hegel interpretation fail both types of plausibility constraint: they do notyield accounts of Hegel’s project that Hegel himself would likely have thoughtworth pursuing, and some of what they yield is implausible to us.

HEGEL AS A REVOCATION OF KANT

The first family of solutions to the nature of philosophy problem in Hegelholds that Hegel is restoring metaphysics after Kant’s critique of it. Whatthese views have in common is that they all take Hegel to purport, like hispre-Kantian predecessors, to inform us about fundamental things which wecannot experience, such as God, the soul, and freedom of the will—what Kantcalled “things in themselves” or noumena. Such views of Hegel were originallypropounded by some of his own students and have remained traditional.According to this family of views, Hegel aims to produce a philosophical systemof the kind brought forth by such philosophers as Aquinas, Leibniz, andSpinoza; the different members of this family of interpretations represent differentchoices as to which of these predecessors the interpreter thinks is themost important. We thus get Hegel presenting us, as Frederick Beiser (1993)puts it, with “inverted Spinozism,” “dialectical neo-Thomism,” or “monisticLeibnizianism.” These approaches, in Beiser’s words, take Hegel’s metaphysicsas a “fait accompli” (2); his philosophy in general rests upon, and so restores,some version of metaphysics after its Kantian critique. It therefore amounts toa revocation of that critique.

The metaphysics thus restored, however, cannot be exactly the metaphysicswhich Kant attacked. For one thing, it was evident during Hegel’s lifetimethat he was not doing metaphysics in any sort of traditional way. Metaphysicshas always been a matter of argument, while Hegel’s mature writings movealong from section to section and from volume to volume without so muchas a “therefore.” Moreover, when Kant characterizes metaphysics as claimingknowledge of a supersensible realm, he is viewing it in terms of a dualism sointense that he eventually had to write the whole Critique of Judgment to overcomeit. Such a view is profoundly uncongenial to Hegel’s monistic instincts,which means that for him metaphysics and reality—thought and being—aresomehow one from the start. As Dieter Henrich has unpacked this view, “it belongsamong Hegel’s most fundamental convictions that the conceptual form ofthinking does not only arrive at reality, but that it enables and even constitutesreality. In this way the world is only the self-unfolding of logical form.”

One might think that this approach would lead to a lot of works comparingHegel’s thought to that of Aquinas, Leibniz, or Spinoza, and it has; but infact scholars need not go so far afield. One of Kant’s ablest successors in Germanphilosophy, Schelling, attempted a restoration of metaphysics on an intuitivebasis after Kant’s critique of it. Hegel’s early allegiance to Schelling wasstrong and is evident throughout his writings up to the Phenomenology of Spirit.Thus, this approach encourages the reading strategy of explaining Hegel’s viewby focusing not on previous philosophers but on Hegel’s own presystematic,deeply Schellingian writings.

This family of views, like the other family (which I will discuss in the nextsection), runs into serious problems. First, in line with (a) above, there arespecific indications in Hegel’s texts that he does not view his philosophy as arestoration of metaphysics. Second, it violates the unity of Hegel’s thought byseparating theoretical and practical reasoning. Third, it depends on questionablereading strategies. Fourth, and most seriously of all, it fails the plausibilityconstraint in both senses.

The first indication of trouble for this family of views is the large numberof unkind things Hegel says about pre-Kantian metaphysics. To be sure, argumentsfrom quotes are never definitive, and there is no shortage of passageswhere Hegel endorses metaphysics. But that is only what we should expect:given his views on the nature of refutation, which I noted in the Introduction,his philosophy should contain metaphysics as a subordinate moment (as heoften says; see 5:61/63-64; Enz. § 24 and Zus., 114 Anm.; etc.).

Just how it does this will be clarified shortly. For the moment, whateverHegel says about metaphysics as he has comprehended it, the number andintensity of his negative comments on the “older” (or pre-Kantian) metaphysicsremain impressive. It was “no free and objective thought” (Enz. § 31 Zus.),for example, and exhibited a “tendency to substance” (20:122–123)—a characterizationwhich is not only unkind but hostile from the man who, in thepreface to his first published book, proclaimed himself to be trying to “graspthe true not as substance but equally as subject” (3:23/10). More indicative stillis Hegel’s dismissal of the philosophical efforts of many of his own contemporariesbecause “seen in the light, [they] are nothing more than the procedureof the older metaphysics, an uncritical thinking on and on, as is given to anyone”(Enz. § 41 Zus. 1). If Hegel is criticizing his contemporaries for pursuing”uncritical,” that is, pre-Kantian, metaphysics, how can he think he is doingthe same?

Calling pre-Kantian metaphysics the “point of view of the understandingon the objects of reason,” as Hegel also does (Enz. § 27), is hardly an invitationto it: Hegel is accusing metaphysics in general of ignoring the Kantian distinctionbetween reason and the understanding, thereby separating the objectsof metaphysics—God, the immortal soul, and the like—from our minds andsupposing them to exist in their own right. To go on, as Hegel does, and saythat metaphysics retains any contemporary presence at all only because of thiswholly mistaken undertaking is to say that it is intellectually dead.

It was, Hegel tells us, Kant who “finished off” the old metaphysics of theunderstanding because of its “objective dogmatism” (hat der Verstandesmetaphysik,als einem objektiven Dogmatismus, ein Ende gemacht; 20:333). But if Kantfinished it off, he was not the first to attack it: modern skepticism and empiricismwere the “downfall” (Untergang) of at least the metaphysics of Spinoza,Locke, and Leibniz (20:70). Precritical metaphysics is not only dead but cannotbe revivified, or so Hegel suggests in a Berlin fragment:

The philosophy of spirit can be neither empirical nor metaphysical, but rathermust examine the concept of mind [Geist] in its immanent, necessary developmentout of itself to a system of its activities. (11:524)

Pre-Kantian metaphysics, then, is dead because it was unfree, uncritical,tended to substance, absolutized the point of view of the understanding, andwas objective in its dogmatism (as well as dogmatic in its objectivism). Thesecomplaints are not only numerous and intense but also consistent: they allamount to the claim that metaphysics did not restrict itself to mind in its “immanentnecessary development” but took as its standard accuracy to thingswhich were assumed to exist outside us. It is easy to see in this that Hegel hasaccepted, not revoked, the main traits of Kant’s critique of metaphysics.

Second, attributing such a metaphysical or theological turn to Hegel alsoviolates (b) above—the systematic unity of his thought. How can he come atKant’s moral theory from the kind of concrete perspective that we associatewith him, if he has landed both epistemologically and metaphysically in a conflationof God and the philosopher worthy of Plotinus? Can he somehow begoing in both these directions at once? If he is not, then what is he doing inhis critiques of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy?

Third, if one thinks that Hegel is trying to philosophize in the manner ofAristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, and the rest, one should go to their texts to understandhis; and as I have noted—(c) above—such a reading strategy, though oftenhelpful, always risks introducing foreign elements into his thought. More promising,and more common, is to use Hegel’s own earlier, Schellingian writingsto explain the later texts; but this, too is problematic, because it often amounts toobscurum per obscuriorum. Hegel’s Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Jena writings,including many sections of the Phenomenology, are notably confused. Preferringthem to the later writings of his mature period is much like preferring thenotebooks of a particularly brilliant graduate student to her later publications.

Moreover, this reading strategy also presupposes a dubiously unitarianview of Hegel’s thought over time. To say that Hegel’s philosophy incorporates,early and late, a Schellingian revocation of Kant’s critical philosophy ignores,for example, the Phenomenology‘s criticisms of Schelling, which were strongenough to end their friendship and which constituted—as Schelling himselfprotested—a rejection of Hegel’s own previously Schellingian approach. Noris the turn from Schelling at the Phenomenology‘s beginning its only philosophicalswerve; a second and even more decisive one comes at its end, when Hegelmoves from introducing the system to actually constructing it. Assuming continuityfrom the Phenomenology into the later works is thus to discount anydifferences between the “ladder” to the system (3:29/14) and the system itself.
(Continues…)Excerpted from UNDERSTANDING HEGEL’S MATURE CRITIQUE OF KANT by JOHN McCUMBER. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.