Full text of one of Aadi Arya Karthik submissions for a class at Oxford.
Hegel’s Idealism With Respect To That of Kant
I offer two characterizations of Hegel’s idealism, both as situated in metaphysics
generally and as situated relative to Kant’s critical philosophy: a more orthodox account of its
emergence out of a critique of Kant’s everywhere-mediation, and a slightly odder account
involving Roman Jakobson’s metonym-metaphor dyad. The positions that (a) Kant was a thinker
whose radicalism was missed by Hegel and (b) Kant was radicalized by Hegel are in the
orthodox account suggested to be mutually exclusive; I would like to suggest that both are in fact
true, that Hegel comes to his properly radical critique of Kant by eliding what is more subtly
radical in Kant—what in Kant deviates from what one ought to expect of an idealism.
[i]
Let us take the word metaphysics in the Kantian sense, as denoting the entire system or
scaffolding of a priori truths which the I (I avoid subject because of its overtones involving
subjection, hierarchy, which I believe are not present in the German, and self because such a
notion only comes about when the I has already been taken as an object) takes with her into her
experiencing.1 Familiarly, a metaphysics is called idealist if it asserts the mind-dependence of
reality, though it has been pointed out that really the word should designate any theory that is
realist about some entities that might fairly be described as “mental”—whether this denotes the
inside-the-mind-ness of a belief or idea or the impenetrability to anything but mind of, say, a
Platonic Idea.2 I would however like to here work with a stricter conception of the word, as
denoting a metaphysics which posits a total structural congruency between the I and her
environment (i.e. Umwelt, which is to be distinguished from the world). What exactly the nature
of this structural congruency ought to be is up for debate, but might for example be posited to be
a grammatical congruency: any true statement analyzing the I may be converted into a true
statement analyzing the environment simply by substituting some terms for their coordinates in
the other regime. (Robert Brandom, for example, seems amenable to a procedure much like this
one, with coordinateness further explained as reciprocal sense dependence.3)
We may further elaborate this definition, along Hegelian lines,4 into a distinction between
subjective and objective idealism: the former writes structural congruency as unidirectional,
mechanistic, the I constructing or bricolaging her environment into the only structure she
intimately knows, i.e. her own; while the latter writes structural congruency as an imperative
visited upon both I and environment “from beyond,” though of course this beyond may denote an
entity either transcendent or immanent. In both cases, three parties are involved: the I, which is
never part of its environment insofar as it is traditionally agent, but also insofar as it has the
faculty to encounter, to look upon this environment as an environment, and so “from outside” in
some sense; the environment as a manifold which is always in some measure fallen, which has a
component of mere appearance rather than actuality, contingency and coincidence rather than
necessity (fallen also in the sense that there exists no imperative to render the system back into
actuality—that actuality will only exist inside it and not of it, through it);5 and some entity which
establishes a relation between the I and her environment, whether this relation is one of
construction, as for the subjective idealists, or one of subjection to some order, as for the
objective idealists. A characterization of this third entity as nous would be conceding the point to
the objective idealists, and a characterization as apprehension would be conceding to the
subjective idealists; I prefer the term language, which, though certainly rather suggestive, allows
for the conception of the entity as both something that may be wielded by the speaker and
something that imposes its own exigencies upon speech, lays out a finite list of permitted
motions within it. Hegel does in fact gesture toward language so traversing, so defining a
perpendicularity through I and environment alike: for him, what each sentence appropriates to
itself are precisely universals, which are the waypoints of thought.6 Language, that is, traces
thought.
It is important to make clear that in Kantian subjective idealism the I’s construction of the
environment is not free in any substantive sense: she is laborer rather than artisan; she is working
by a plan which has already been provided to her. After all, she is modelling the world upon
herself, and she did not model herself. This patently fails to betray any meaningful subjectivism
in the Kantian schema. What Hegel finds “subjective” in Kant really reduces to Kant’s idea that
language has two clearly separate functions: aesthesis and analysis; narration and thought; prose
and poetry. First I come upon a description of the world—an intuition—then I think with this
description, take the sensory data that is given to me by it and come to universals or universal
judgments, “do literary criticism.” For the first step of this two-step process to be valid,
language, contra Hegel, must be suitable for the recounting of representations, particulars, and
not solely universals; it is this first step which ensures that any operation by which one is-in-the-
world, which in our current scheme is a linguistic operation, would by the nature of language be
mediated.
For Hegel, too, the study of thought in itself, and so the study of language, will result in
the production of a complete account of the workings of all three components of the world (I,
environment, language). Both thinkers agree on the necessity of some sort of thinking into
thought or arriving at language: for Kant, this is analysis; for Hegel, thinking over. But for Hegel
a thinking into language in its accessibility to us is already a thinking into the environment
insofar as the latter is actuality and not appearance, insofar as the latter partakes in the same
Absolute as I do, given that the Absolute is self-similar.7 After all, in Hegel’s words, “was
vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich, und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig”:8 here, vernünftig does
not comfortably correspond to its usual translation rational, given that the latter indicates taking
what one might call a statistical perspective, a coming to structure thanks to reasons, to
arguments—mediatedly—while the former indicates a more conceptually primitive, pure, total
grasping, taking up, perhaps of a literary or mathematical nature. There is a univocity between
language as it is taken up, worked over, and happenings as they play out.
Thus, while language in Kant is an inherently private thing which I use to make my world
livable and at least have an understanding with myself, language in Hegel is a reliably
communicatory entity, a coin valid wherever one might go. After all, Hegel does not tolerate the
Spaltung between the problematic (that which demands treatment by thought) and assertoric (that
which permits treatment by thought)—the Spaltung, the Grenze named the noumenon, which is
defining of the topology of Kantian metaphysics;9 by the grace of the Absolute, by its ever-
willingness to cooperate with us,10 we are free of epistemological limitation: our conceptual
space is unbounded, not finite. I would argue this to be equivalent to the (seemingly
indefensible) claim that what may be explained in poetry will always also be explicable in prose,
since poetry is language’s mechanism for coping with a terrain it can grasp and wield but not fill
in, populate; explicate but not explain: a pure antinomy, for example, like the Trinity. Epistemic
conditions,11 on the other hand, are promulgated during and as a consequence of aesthesis—the
one practically private (because not dealing with universals) mode of language—for the
constraining by form of formless manifoldness is a placing of constraints upon the forms of
knowing more broadly. Then, Hegel’s argument against the form-content dyad—against that
formless content which is to make up the environment, and which is then aesthesized, given form
—against manifoldness at large—functions by promulgating a labeling of aesthesis a fictional
process.12
Under this interpretative regime, the Hegelian advancement upon Kant is suggested to be
precisely a rejection of the admittedly attractive thesis of epistemic conditioning in exchange for
the thesis of the inherent structuredness of nature and the immediacy of our access to such, also
attractive in its jettisoning the manifoldness concept, its evading thereby the standard realist
criticism of constructivist metaphysics: of what do we construct our worlds? what is this entity
called manifoldness, this isolated and unparalleled residue betraying the failure of Kant’s system
to be entirely systematic? (Goodman, I think, had the right idea in characterizing this
manifoldness out of which we hew our own world-versions as simply a clutter of already-made
alien world-versions,13 a solution obviously in no way anticipated by Kant.) In other words,
Hegel eliminates a “good residue”—the noumenon—in his eliminating from metaphysics of
residuality entirely, which for him is both good in itself and does away with a particularly sticky
“bad residue”—manifoldness.
Of course, characterization of the noumenon and manifoldness as residua is already
conceding the point to Hegel; an account that is fair to Kant will point to the residuality of the
concepts obscuring some vital function of theirs, one that Hegel elides. I briefly and broadly
sketch an attempt at this in the sequel.
[ii]
Hegel’s attack on Kant’s maintaining of the form-content dyad is, I claim, really an attack
on Kant’s maintaining of the far more immediately defensible I-environment dyad. After all,
what we call objects attain their objecthood, their over-against-ness, in their standing in some
sense between I and environment; and this betweenness is in no case symmetric. Consider, for
example, the body: I do not think it possible to draw a dividing-line between the body and the I,
though patently the body is not felt to be exactly the I; but clearly one can mark where the body
terminates in skin and what is environmental begins. An encountered, foreign object, on the
other hand, presents as clearly distinguishable from me, but cannot be so distinguished from the
environment, being enworlded. We might call the object an interface between the I and the
environment; then it is clearly an important philosophical question to characterize the
interfaciality of the interface.
Obviously, the interface can only exist if there exists a heterogeneity between whose
poles it might interface; in Hegel, then, there are no interfaces: no ob-jects. Kant, on the other
hand, implicitly and cleverly characterizes14 the interface as that which broadcasts closure to one
pole and openness to another: the body, for example, is closed to the environment and open to
the I with which it is correlated. A more deflationary and reciprocal restatement: the interface is
simultaneously one pole’s openness to the other and the other’s closure against, rebuff of the one;
the body is my openness to the environment taken together with its closedness against me, and
the foreign object is the environment’s openness to me (perhaps in the sense later explicated by
Heidegger) taken together with my closedness against it. It may, I think, be demonstrated that
manifoldness in this conception takes its station as articulation of the openness between the
foreign object and the environment, and that the noumenon is some idea of this environment; it
may more radically be argued that the closednesses in this model, which I call skins, are
structurally congruent, homeomorphic to the conceptual skin which is the Spaltung between
problematicity and assertoricity, the noumenon considered as limit to pretension.15 That is to say,
what to Hegel are mere residua in the Kantian system are really Kant’s way of accounting for the
residua—Hegel’s appearances—that do seem to populate our world.
Of course, the openness-closedness (content-form) dyad only emerges if there is already
an I-environment dyad for these opennesses and closednesses to exist along. Perhaps this is the
most profound sense in which Kant’s metaphysics is a “metaphysic of grief and longing”:16 Kant
conceptually begins at a substantial alienation of the I from her environment which Hegel (who,
at least in Brandom’s interpretation, holds the current alienation of the I to be purely contingent17)
is not willing to concede.
Roman Jakobson has observed that work in any discipline whose medium is the word
(and perhaps in certain other disciplines: art, film…) may be classified as either primarily
metonymic, grounded in relations of contiguity, explication between words and syntagms
(Jakobson gives the example of a hut being associated with the phrase burnt out), or metaphoric,
grounded in relations of synonymy between words and syntagms (Jakobson gives the example of
a hut being associated with the phrase is a poor little house).18 It is clear from the above analysis
that Hegelian absolute idealism is entirely metaphoric; as I have suggested, I believe that it is in
this capacity that Hegelian thought is an idealism in the first place. It might seem that the
metonymic pole is occupied by the most truculent physicalisms, those which seamlessly
integrate man as part of a mechanistically functioning natural whole; however, in this very
integration the part-ness of man is lost: in a real metonym, there always exists a skin
circumscribing the part and defending it against—a process distinct from the Hegelian dividing it
from—the whole. The skin, that is, appears precisely in a metonymic theory; and, as I have
implied, critical idealism might be said to be that out of which emerged the original and
exemplary skin. This suggests, in my view, that Hegel is an idealist exactly insofar as he is against Kant.
——
1 This is, at least, the conception Kant lays out in the Groundwork (4:388); Beiser reads a different definition (54).
2 See Dunham, Grant, and Watson, Idealism: The History of a Philosophy, 6-8.
3 See Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 194-199.
4 See The Encyclopedia Logic, 90.
5 The Encyclopedia Logic, 33-4.
6 The Encyclopedia Logic, 52-3.
7 See The Encyclopedia Logic, 43.
8 The Encyclopedia Logic, 33.
9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A255/B310-11.
10 Phenomenology of Spirit, 47.
11 The term is Henry Allison’s.
12 This broadly follows Sally Sedgwick’s apprehension of the Hegelian critique of Kant.
13 Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 6.
14 The argument I have for this is very long and oblique and so I will not present it here. It’s possible that there’s a more directly exegetical one I’m not aware of.
15 A phrase Kant actually does use for the notion (which he claims is not even a concept but something more
exotic: a boundary-concept), See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A255/B310.
16 Sedgwick, Hegel’s Critique of Kant, 85.
17 See e.g. Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, 472.
18 Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Questions of Literary Theory.
Aadi Arya Karthik 