Logic and Content

Some Additional Remarks About Pippin’s Reading of Kant

This text was previously posted on CritiqueRedux

In this appendix, I want to briefly reflect on some aspects addressed in the chapter ‘Logic and Metaphysics’ (Chapter 2) in Robert Pippin’s masterful Hegel’s Realm of Shadows for which there was no space in my review of the book. I have written before about similar material in my Apperception and Self-Consciousness in Kant and German Idealism, ch. 8. Below remarks are not fully worked out, rough ruminations that must be seen in that context. Pippin’s philosophically rich account warrants a more expansive exploration.

Often it is said that Hegel’s Science of Logic is an improved version of Kant’s Metaphysical Deduction (MD), and that though in some sense Hegel’s logic is modelled after Kant’s logic, it is typically not a transcendental logic. Pippin writes: ‘…It can be useful to think of Hegel’s science of pure thinking as … classifiable neither as what Kant calls pure general logic, nor a transcendental logic (tied as it is to the pure forms of receptivity)’ (2018:40–1), but as a logic of cognition. Somewhat later he writes: ‘Thought through carefully, according to Hegel, general logic must already be transcendental logic, at least in nuce’ (2018:76). The standard bifurcation into a general logic and a transcendental logic can no longer be upheld. Pippin says to build on Rosenkoetter’s (2014) claim that in the MD Kant already makes a distinction between a purely formal logic and a logic of content that is not yet a transcendental logic or content. Pippin thinks that this putative distinction within Kant’s MD can be seen as support for seeing Hegel’s Science of Logic as a modified metaphysical deduction.

I don’t think Rosenkoetter’s claim can be true. There is no undeniable textual evidence and no good dialectical reason for such a distinction. The claim can be seen as understandable given the standard view even among Kant scholars that the MD is concerned merely with Kant’s view of general logic (or a formal logic in Kant’s pre-Fregean sense), and that transcendental logic is only first the topic of the Transcendental Deduction (TD), since the latter—and thus a transcendental logic—is putatively merely about the justification of the application of the categories to empirical intuition (something that Rosenkoetter affirms by introducing his third distinction). But Kant clearly says that the table of categories in the MD is in fact a ‘transcendental table’ (B115). Already in the MD (B97/A71) Kant talks about a ‘transcendental’ logic, and that has got nothing to do with merely the involvement of space and time (pure intuition) in the use of the categories. 

The transcendental logic that Kant is interested in already in the MD concerns a logic of content, precisely what Pippin wants to highlight in his reading of the intimate relation between Kant’s and Hegel’s metaphysical logics. Rosenkoetter’s interpretation of the MD is an artificial construct premised on the mistaken assumption that a transcendental logic concerns only the application of the categories to spatiotemporal content, and is therefore not  yet at issue in the MD. (In fact, a transcendental logic has an even broader scope than the Transcendental Analytic, which to be sure includes the MD as much as the TD, for it includes the Transcendental Dialectic too—see e.g. the heading of Section IV at A62/B87.) This is often the assumption with readers of Kant, namely that the TD merely concerns showing the objective validity of the categories insofar as they apply to spatiotemporal intuitions; but this is only the second part of the Deduction (in its B-version). Indeed, Pippin himself, later on in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, links the connection with pure intuition to the second-step of the B-Deduction—this is only half of the TD.

Of course, unlike general logic a transcendental logic presupposes that objects are given for thought in intuition, to which pure cognition is applied (see A62/B87). But the demonstration of objective validity also, and primarily, concerns the a priori derivation of the categories from the unity of apperception, i.e. an a priori demonstration of the identity between the logical functions of thought and the categories for which in the MD Kant merely provided a broad classification in a table, a »clue«, but which was not yet demonstrated there as in a transcendental proof. This is a point that is relevant to Pippin’s idea that Hegel modifies Kant’s metaphysical deduction as a logic that is already a logic of cognition, and that Hegel is interested in Kant’s idea of object-determinacy.  

At any rate, for the central argument in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows Pippin needs the argument about the identity of self-consciousness/apperception and the unity of the object/object, which is first argued in the first-step of TD, not yet in MD—Pippin himself, in earlier work, says that Hegel’s account in the Science of Logic is comparable to the first-step of the TD, which strikes me as precisely right. The unity of apperception is not yet a topic of the MD, though it is hinted at via the notion of the unity of thought. Of course, Pippin talks about a modified version of Kant’s MD which would include apperception but sans pure intuition since there is no need for an account of the application of the categories to empirical intuition. But it would be better to let go of this rigid distinction between the MD and the TD; it is mistaken to think, like most commentators (and sometimes Pippin too, but see 2018:74) appear to do, that the relation between the MD and the TD maps nicely onto the distinction between a general and a transcendental logic respectively. The relation between the MD and the TD, whatever it is, is one that falls wholly within the domain of transcendental logic (as said, one need only look at the way the Transcendental Analytic is subdivided). The account in the MD is a blend of perspectives, both from the perspective of a general logic in particularly the Erster Abschnitt and the perspective of transcendental logic, from the Zweiter Abschnitt onwards. (One should also be reminded of the fact that the very distinction between general and transcendental logic is only intelligible from within the transcendental perspective; it is not a distinction that can be made by the parameters of general logic.)

Pippin’s critique of Kant in this regard mainly revolves around the Hegelian question of thought providing itself its own content, which contrasts with Kant, who says that thought is reliant on content from outside (2018:89 et passim)—yet, as Pippin rightly notes, right at the start of the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, Kant too talks about reason self-gendering its own content (B1: ‘…was unser eigenes Erkenntnisvermögen [durch sinnliche Eindrücke bloß veranlaßt,] aus sich selbst hergibt…’). The reliance on content from outside (‘…was wir durch Eindrücke empfangen…’) should be qualified. For Kant, too, mere content is never a sufficient warrant for determinacy. The determination happens always endogenously from within thought in virtue of apperception/the understanding (cf. B151–2), though the determinable, i.e. empirical content, is given exogenously.

Moreover, as Pippin points out elsewhere, ‘Kant himself had demonstrated that [the claim that thought can provide itself with no content] was not so, since, in the metaphysical deduction, he had himself shown that pure thinking »gives itself« content, its own necessary logical moments, the categorial features without which judging could not be judging’ (2019:357). Indeed, in the MD ‘Kant had already himself indicated that discursive thought must have »an intuitive moment« in itself in being able to lay out the elements of the Metaphysical Deduction’ (2018:89). On A79/B105, the well-known Leitfaden passage in §10 of the MD that is central to the idea of an identity between the functions of thought and the categories establishing the possibility of objective knowledge, Pippin comments that ‘the passage brings us very close to formulations frequent in [Hegel’s] Logic that the concept gives itself its own actuality. The »same function« passage could even be read as a gloss on that claim’ (2018:81).

The Kantian claim that thought can give itself no content, but must be ‘»supplied« extraconceptually’ (2018:89), is a claim made from the perspective of general logic, which abstracts from content (B102). There is a sense in which this is true of course: the discursivity thesis means that concepts are mere functions of unification of prior given material (representations, intuitions) (A68/B93). But this is of course on the empirical level of a general logic (the section heading of the Erster Abschnitt of the Leitfaden sections therefore reads: ‘Von dem logischen Verstandesgebrauche überhaupt’). However, Kant’s focus throughout is on thought’s own objective content, how that content can be a priori deduced from an analysis of the functions of thought themselves. This is the ‘transcendental content’—of which Kant speaks at A79/B105—that thought has before itself, which is basically ‘its own’ content (see Pippin 2018:81); this transcendental content is never merely empirical content, but rather determinate content as determined and determinable by thought itself. This determination of thought’s own transcendental content happens in the very deduction of the categories from the mode of thought, the unity of apperception, in the TD, where it is shown that the combination of the manifold in intuition (in general), i.e. of the content of any ‘I’ thought, is a function of thought itself. Transcendental content is thus never merely external (sensations, say, though they are presupposed), rather it is thought’s own determinable thought content insofar as a thinking agent’s representations are categorially structured. To put it succinctly, transcendental content is categorial thought content.

General logic is empty in that it abstracts from all content of cognition (A55/B79) because it looks merely at logically valid relations between (empirical) concepts, but not at thought itself, and its cognitive functionality, the fact that thought is capable of structuring concepts such that they have objective validity (cf. B97/A72). When Kant says that a concept without intuition is empty, he means, not that the categories don’t have semantic content—despite saying they too would be ‘völlig leer’ at B102/A77, he can’t mean they are literally völlig empty since each of the categories has at least a determinate logical meaning: ‘substance’, ‘cause’, ‘existence’ etc.—but rather that concepts have true objective validity only when applied to (spatiotemporal) sensible intuition.

This latter claim is of course a premise that Hegel readily dismisses, since arguably it’s not integral to Kant’s argument, in the first step of the B-Deduction, for conceptual determinacy or objective validity; it is not integral to the first-step argument because it relies on the additional assumption that only sensible knowledge can be objective knowledge—though the argument in the first-step already excludes intuitive forms of knowledge, which seems logical given the premise of discursivity, but it’s hard to see how Hegel could be criticising this on pain of allowing intellectual intuition of the sort that Kant rejected and thus reverting back to a pre-Kantian naïve ontology. 

That Kant thinks that the categories have true objective validity only when applied to sensible objects might look like Kant appealing ‘to the form of the extraconceptual as if to a distinct contribution’ to cognitive determinacy, and this would be, Pippin argues, ‘misleading and unnecessary’ (2018:82), even on Kant’s own terms. But what could be meant by ‘distinct contribution’? For Kant, while it must be assumed to be given independently of the understanding sensibility is certainly not a truthmaker or even a warrant, rather it is merely the determinable (cf. B151–2). Solely apperception is the determining factor for cognition, so there is no appeal to the extraconceptual for warrant or justification. All that the categories can mean, i.e. the analysis of the concept of an object or conceptual determinacy, has been completed by the end of the so-called first step of the B-Deduction.

For Kant, too, what is important is to see that the determinacy of a given object is ‘a further specification by thought of its own actuality’ (2018:82), ‘otherwise the question of the relation of forms of thought to objects turns out to have a quasi-empirical answer’ (2018:82). That’s an important thought, but Kant already holds this position. The question about conceptual determinacy and objective validity can never, neither for Kant nor for Hegel, be answered empirically. (There is a quite widely shared assumption, also among Kant scholars, that in the second-step of the B-Deduction argument Kant attempts to »bridge a gap« between our concept of an object and any empirical object, or that Kant’s view about the relation between concept and intuition is somehow »impositionist«. Pippin is careful not to charge Kant himself with the impositionist picture: ‘I do not mean that this impositionism is Kant’s view; I mean that Hegel, in his critical moments, fastens onto passages that could suggest that [as have generations of commentators] ….’ (2018:80). But the imposition picture of Kant’s argument in the TD is completely wrongheaded.

Nevertheless, Pippin may have a point that there is something inconsistent around the issue of objective validity in Kant’s argument: on the one hand, objective validity is exhausted by categorial determinacy in terms of the concept of an object, the analysis of which is completed by the end of the first step, and on the other, solely the relation to sensible intuition provides true actuality. Objective validity and actuality (real possibility) do not overlap in Kant, whereas conceptual determinacy is actuality in Hegel: the actual (wirkliche) realisation of a thing’s concept, what a thing qua thing intelligibly can be; there is nothing further to add.

But, it should be noted that also for Kant nothing is ‘added’ to the conceptual content in the second-step Deduction argument, other than showing that it is the same function of apperception that, in the guise of the productive imagination, combines the representations in sensibility; but sensibility does not thereby add anything to the determination of the conceptual grasp of the object. The determinacy is the transcendental content that is brought to the concept, in virtue of transcendental apperception. The two-step procedure is therefore not concerned with providing content to empty categories. The categories have already been deduced in the first-step, where the transcendental content of thought itself is shown to be the unity of the object, i.e. all the objective determinacy or objective validity that can be determined. The second-step doesn’t provide the content that wasn’t yet there, but important though it is for Kant’s purpose in the TD, merely shows how transcendental content and empirical, spatiotemporal content match up, or put differently, how apperception determines sensibility inwardly. 

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​Pippin, R. (2018), Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Logic as Metaphysics in the ‘Science of Logic’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). 

————— (2019), ‘Idealism and Anti-Idealism in Modern European Thought’, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 349–67. 

Rosenkoetter, T. (2014), ‘The Logical Home of Kant’s Table of Functions’, Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus, Band 12, pp. 29–52.

© Dennis Schulting, 2021