On Hegel's Critique of Kant's Subjectivism
Part I
The review posted below, of William Bristow’s Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique (Oxford UP 2007), was first published in Hegel Bulletin 59/60 (2009), pp. 82–8. I wanted to revive the review because I think Bristow’s book is an important book that addresses persistent issues in Hegel scholarship, in particular with respect to Hegel’s relation to Kant. Whilst I have written much more, and in more detail, on this aspect (e.g. here, here, here, here and here) since the review appeared and I would formulate some aspects differently now (e.g. the unfortunate notion ‘a-metaphysical’, an oft-used characterisation of Pippin’s reading of Hegel, can be misleading), I still stand by the general thrust of what I wrote back then, though I wish I had emphasised the merits of Bristow’s book more, especially with respect to his pioneering work, in the English language at least, on such early works of Hegel’s as Das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik and Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie. I will certainly revisit the book myself in the context of writing on Hegel’s logic for my Hegel’s Transcendental Logic project. This post is one in a series of posts on Hegel’s relation to Kant. The next one will be a review of Alfredo Ferrarin’s Thinking and the I. Hegel and the Critique of Kant (forthcoming in the Hegel Bulletin).
It is a perennial question of Hegel scholarship to what extent Hegel must still be considered a Kantian. For some commentators, most prominently Robert Pippin, Hegel is a thoroughly transcendental philosopher, who builds on Kant’s thinking whilst also going beyond its limitations. For others, such as Stephen Houlgate, there is undoubtedly a way in which Hegel must be seen as a post-Kantian thinker, at least in the temporal sense, but this does not mean that Hegel is, primarily, a Kantian. According to this interpretation, Hegel goes entirely beyond Kant’s transcendental project, for Kant’s transcendentalism is firmly based on uncritical assumptions regarding the status of the subject as the normative and exclusive perspective from which reality is accounted for. Without having Hegel straightforwardly go back to pre-Kantian metaphysics, Houlgate’s interpretation sees Hegel’s philosophy as a metaphysical realism rather than as some form of a-metaphysical normative theory, as Pippin sees it.
Although Hegel interpretation comes in many flavours, most interpretations fall under the general rubrics of either the post-Kantian metaphysical or Kantian a-metaphysical readings, both of which approaches can claim to be backed up by text passages in the Hegelian corpus. This new book by William Bristow is novel in that it, in some sense, transcends the need to make a choice between reading Hegel as an a-metaphysical, basically Kantian thinker or as a committed, albeit post-critical, metaphysician. Without so much addressing the issues surrounding Hegel’s metaphysics per se and whether it amounts to a form of realism or not, the topic of Bristow’s book concerns the way in which Hegel’s thought, viz. mainly his early thought in the Jena works up to and including the Phenomenology of Spirit, is a form of critique. In particular, Bristow argues that in his early work—and he addresses in detail arguments from the Criticism and Scepticism articles from the Jena period (i.e. Das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik and Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie)—Hegel grapples with the conundrums of modern epistemology and tries to overcome the inherent limitations of types of philosophising that are based on unfounded, dualist, assumptions that prevent them from being true philosophy.
Bristow’s main thesis could be summed up as the claim that in the Jena period Hegel rejects Kant’s form of critique, only to rehabilitate again a form of Kantian critique in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The reasons for Bristow’s ostensibly contradictory claim lie in particular in the subjectivism of Kant’s critique, which Hegel tries to overcome and which in the early Jena work he sees as inextricably linked up with any form of critique, and which Hegel knows how to avoid whilst proposing an amended form of critique in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Bristow’s thesis is, in general and as an interpretation of Hegel, an illuminating way of reading Hegel’s early development in the Jena period, which also provides a clear motivation for the project of the Phenomenology as, in some sense, an epistemological account of how we come to regard ourselves, as modern individuals, as having some right to take a particular perspective on reality, on the world.
Nevertheless, as Bristow is at times perfectly aware, there are some tensions that cannot, or at least not entirely, be eliminated. Without in the least detracting from the richness of Bristow’s account, I think Bristow’s book is vulnerable to the same tendency by which almost all Hegel interpretations have been dogged, that is, to offer a very global perspective on Hegel’s philosophy and his relation to his contemporaries without providing an impartial specified account of the philosophical arguments themselves, which would make it possible to weigh up Hegel’s particular claims against his contemporaries and for his own particular position. This has to a large extent got to do with the type of philosophy Hegel’s is, namely a wholesale theory, a meta-philosophy, which lays claim to be able to do philosophy presuppositionlessly and always with everything at stake at once. This makes it hard for any interested, unprejudiced reader to evaluate or assess Hegel’s specific claims without in fact already submitting to the general background claim that we should be able to do philosophy presuppositionlessly (whatever that implies), and without thereby already, implicitly, accepting Hegel’s claims abouth the Absolute, or, the unconditioned that is presupposed by any type of philosophy, although in his later philosophy, as Bristow points out with regard to the Phenomenology, Hegel is careful not to start from the idea of the Absolute, as he appears to be doing in the early Jena work. However, Hegel scholars are also themselves clearly too easily, and uncritically, taken by Hegel’s grand assertions to be worthy of the detailed attention of, specifically, Kantians, who bear the biggest brunt of the criticisms from Hegel and his followers. As a Kantian, I must confess that I can’t (yet) see why Bristow’s claims, which deal in particular with the relation Kant–Hegel and present Hegel clearly as the better philosopher, should convince me to give up my Kantianism.
The problem—and this I shall focus on in the brief space that I have here—with Bristow’s account is his typically slanted account of Kant, despite Bristow’s claim that he offers a reading ‘on behalf of Hegel [which] builds on recent work on Kant’s thought’ (p.9). It is important for Bristow, as it seems to be for any interpreter of Hegel, to stage Kant in such a way that Hegel is seen as the rightful critic and successor of Kantian metaphysics (and/or epistemology). This means that he must read Kant in such a way that Kant’s philosophy fits in with the overall purpose of Hegelian metaphysics (and/or epistemology). I am not saying that Hegel has no (potentially convincing) arguments on offer that might be worth assessing regarding the relative merits of, or problems with, the Kantian view on the thing in itself, say, as Hegel takes on to criticise, in the Science of Logic, the notion of a thing in itself that would have no relation to what is outside it. But as here Hegel mounts his criticism against Kant based on a slanted, particular view of Kant’s own view of the thing in itself (as supposedly wholly abstract and non-relational), inherited from other post-Kantians, Bristow’s account of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s subjectivism, important for the theme of Bristow’s book, is based on what I believe is a flawed view of Kant’s alleged subjectivism as well as what is, in essence, a dogmatic assertion against subjectivism as such. The question is: what is so wrong with Kant’s subjectivism that we should accede to Hegel’s (and Bristow’s) criticisms against it?
An important consequence of Bristow’s general approach—and in this sense, again, Bristow unfortunately does not go beyond the limits of much existing Hegel scholarship—is that he is not able to precisely indicate what, in his very criticism of Kant, it is that Hegel does pick up from Kant. It is one thing to be able to say, in very general terms, what distinguished Hegel from Kant, or also to say that to some extent Hegel builds on certain Kantian themes, the theme of critique, focussed on by Bristow, one among them. But what we want to know is how Hegel can claim that a central aspect of Kant’s epistemology, its foundational notion in fact, is a principle that is at the same time propounded and not strictly adhered to by Kant. This is one advantage of a reading that Bristow summarily dismisses (e.g. p.170n.1), namely Pippin’s, which argues that Kant’s principle of transcendental apperception is what Hegel finds hugely interesting and which he, together with Kant, regards as the highest principle of philosophy. The interesting—and, in terms of what has been achieved in Hegel scholarship, I would say unhintergehbare—asset of Pippin’s reading of Hegel’s critique of Kant (regardless of its flaws, which have to do with Pippin’s anti-realism [??]) is that he is able to point out Hegel’s disillusion with Kant’s restriction thesis—a disillusion which Hegel in fact already in the Jena works, in particular in Faith and Knowledge, illuminates in extensive detail, and which I believe, in contrast to Bristow, continues to inform all Hegel’s later work—whilst at the same time emphasising the centrality of apperception for Hegel’s own developing system of thought. Hegel does have a problem with Kant’s subjectivism (in one sense), but not in the radical way that Bristow thinks, namely so as to reject subjectivism out of hand (he rejects Pippin’s reading of Hegel as a Kantian of sorts as too subjectivist, p.10n.15). Hegel’s problem is not with the subjective side of Kant’s thought per se, but with the alleged fact that this same subjectivism does not amount to objectivism, in other words, falls short of providing an objective account of reality tout court.
Another consequence of Bristow’s reading of the ostensible radical change in Hegel’s thought, namely that he first, in the early Jena works, e.g. in the Criticism and Scepticism essays but also, most paradoxically, in Faith and Knowledge, rejects Kantian critique and subsequently latches on to it again, in a modified form, in the Phenomenology, is that Bristow must hold, counter-intuitively, that there is a sharp discontinuity in Hegel’s own development. Whereas the earliest text fragments (from the Bern and Frankfurt periods) show that Hegel is very much influenced by Kant and Enlightenment thought, in the Jena period, perhaps under the unfluence of the Romantic movement in general and Schelling in particular, he would ostensibly be firmly in the camp of Anti-Enlightenment thinkers, only to return again to his earliest convictions in the Phenomenology. This strikes one somehow as a forced, if not uncharitable, reading of the textual evidence.
Bristow is right to point out that in the mentioned works of the Jena period Hegel shows signs of (apparent) anti-Enlightenment thinking, is dismissive of modern epistemology (which he calls reflection philosophy) and seems to be appealing, without further ado and argument, to the ‘Idea’ of philosophy, or the Absolute, as the unconditioned ground of all philosophy, of everything finite and human. But I think Bristow goes too far in seeing in this a resolute rejection of reflection philosophy as such, in particular of Kantian epistemology. For this neglects Hegel’s important appreciation of the core of Kant’s thought (he calls it even the ‘speculative aspect’ of Kant’s thought), which is at the same time part and parcel of Kant’s subjectivism (at least in some sense), namely ‘the original-synthetic unity of apperception’, an appreciation of which remains at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy ever since.
Bristow’s interpretation, as asserting clearly that Hegel rejects Kantian critique entirely in the Jena period, also in Faith and Knowledge (p.159: ‘in this early Jena period […] he simply rejects the epistemological project of Kantian critique’ [emphasis added]), cannot account for this continuity. For Bristow, in the early Jena publications,
there is an unbridgeable gulf, a hiatus, between the standpoint of reflection and the standpoint of philosophy. We are confronted with an either-or-structure: either we begin with subjectivity in self-reflection, in which case we implicitly confine ourselves to a subjectively constituted realm in our knowing, or we begin in what Hegel later calls “the element of philosophy”, an element in which “the Idea” or “the absolute” is at least implicitly present, in which case we work to make the absolute as explicit for thinking as possible. (p.211)
This is not the place to pursue it [meanwhile see here], but an extensive account of Faith and Knowledge would show that Hegel does not think in those starkly Manichean terms about his relationship with specifically Kant (and neither with Fichte) but rather wants to demonstrate how a proper reading of Kant shows up that Kant’s own reflections about the synthetic a priori principle of apperception itself, his very reflective mode of thought, expresses ‘the absolute’ or what he there calls ‘absolute identity’. Again, for Hegel—and I mean already the Hegel of Faith and Knowledge—it is not the subjectivism of Kant per se, his principle of apperception and the necessary subjective construal of our access to objective reality per se, that he objects to, but the supposed and unwarranted psychological reductionism that clouds again the fundamental Kantian insight; or so Hegel thinks.
Even apart from its relation to Hegel, there is much in Bristow’s interpretation of Kant’s alleged subjectivism that I cannot agree with. For example, he states that
Kant’s criticism implicitly presupposes subjectivism—thereby begs its own question and fails to fulfil its own epistemological demand—exactly because the criticising subject occupies a fixed and immovable stance, over against the standpoint of metaphysics. (pp.14–15)
And further:
Kant’s subjectivism is an expression of the failure of the method to put the standpoint of the reflecting subject equally at stake in the critical procedure with the possibility of metaphysics. (p.15)
Bristow’s problem with Kant’s criticial procedure is to do with the alleged fact that the ‘highest order norms of the [norm-governed] activity have their source ultimately in us’ (p.19). At the end of his book Bristow concludes that what prevents Kant’s critique from being fully critical, that is, presuppositionless, is that ‘behind its back’, as an indelible presupposition, lies Kant’s restriction thesis, namely, ‘Kant’s conclusion that we can know things only as they are for us, not as they are in themselves’ (p.215; cf. p.51).
Regarding the first two quotes, I note this: to see Kantian critique in terms of a reflecting subject, say the transcendental subject, as somehow occupying a place that is distinguishable from metaphysics or philosophy proper, or more precisely, from the critical procedure itself, is to mistakenly psychologise and thus subjectivise Kant’s critique of pure reason. Although Kant does seem to hold the view that the critique of pure reason precedes a metaphysics proper, in which, very much in the style of the school metaphysics, an entire system of predicates and predicables is systematically catalogued, the critique that Reason itself enacts with regard to the speculative claims that it itself puts forward, is very much a self-critique, so a reflexive mode of Reason itself, and not at all some arbitrary subjective point of view taken up by some psychological subject (any thinker) with regard to some body of claims external to it.
Furthermore, one must be careful to distinguish Kant’s account in the famous B-preface, which Bristow considers (pp.57–8), where Kant appears to be saying that a critique is indeed something that is antecedent to metaphysics, from how the proof procedure works in the body of the Critique itself (cf. Bxxii footnote). To speak of a ‘fixed and immovable’ ‘criticising subject’, as Bristow does, fails to take seriously the progressively structured proof in the Transcendental Deduction from the principle of apperception, which is not a psychological principle or fact about our human psychology (as Reinhold, and perhaps Schulze believe, who[m], as Bristow shows very illuminatingly, Hegel criticises severely), but, given the discursive nature of our thinking, a principle of logical thought itself, from which the categories of objective thought can and must be derived. If this is the incontrovertible principle of the determination of objective thought, which in a way is subjective in that it is the principle of Reason reflecting on its own capacity, and so is the principle of critique, how then should this principle, as ‘the standpoint of the reflecting subject’, put itself ‘equally at stake in the critical procedure’, as Bristow thinks it must, without moving in a circle? A similar apparent circularity threatens Bristow’s belief, as shown in the last above-quoted remark from the end of his book, that Kantian critique suffers from subjectivism: if Kant’s restriction thesis is the conclusion of his epistemology—and indeed it is—how then can it be the presupposition of his epistemology?
Of course, Hegel could (and ostensibly does) opt for the approach which dismisses Kant’s undeniable basic premise of discursivity altogether, and this is what Bristow appears to have in mind when he argues that Kantian critique is not presuppositionless, but it is hard so see how a critique may be fashioned which does not take discursivity as basic premise, let alone a critique which claims to be more critical than Kant’s, if we grant Kant’s critique is based on that premise; it would seem that such a critique simply begs the question in favour of the Hegelian non-discursive approach.
There is one final point I would like to highlight, and this is related to Bristow’s—and I believe unfounded and unfair—criticism of Karl Ameriks’s account of Kantian idealism (pp.38ff.). I cannot go into any detail here, but Bristow mistakenly exploits an apparent ambiguity in Kant with regard to the status of the pure categories (cf. the account in the Phenomena/Noumena chapter in the first Critique, which Bristow refers to), of which Bristow says, against the majority of Kant scholars, that they also already betray Kant’s subjectivism. That is to say, the categories of pure thought are as much subjective (in the bad sense), dependent on us, as are our sensible intuitions. ‘[N]othing so expresses our subjectivity or our finitude as pure thought. Pure thought is purely subjective’ (p.48). ‘The limitation is that we think at all, that we know through thinking, through general concepts’ (p.49).
It is important for Bristow’s account of Kant’s subjectivism to show that Kant’s thought is subjective through and through, not just with regard to our sensibility but also with regard to the categories as pure functions of thought. The problem with this portrayal of the categories as dependent on us and thus subjective in the same way that sensible intuitions are is that it assumes that categorial determinations do not apply to things in themselves, as sensible intuitions do not, supposedly revealing that on the Kantian reading the categories do not determine absolute, unconditioned or objective reality tout court. This view overly subjectifies the categories or relativises them to the object (p.47), when categories, according to Kant, are concepts of an object in general, and do apply to the very thing in itself that is the substrate of the appearance determined in experience.
Bristow is right to insist that, other than in the account of Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation, the pure categories as such, independently of sensibility, have no object for themselves, a thing in itself to which the categories, as unschematised, would be applicable. However, Bristow does not understand that, for Kant, even though the categories are indeed not directly applicable to things in themselves (as they were for Wolff and others), but only in a schematised form, the categorial determination as a whole does pertain to the underlying thing in itself or things in themselves nonetheless. What else could [they] pertain to? If the categories would not be determinations of really existing things, Kant’s epistemology would not be worth its salt. What we know in experience is the thing in itself, even if only qua appearing, but it is important to stress the point that it is the thing in itself that appears to us in our experience.
Also in this respect, then, Bristow shows himself to be a fairly old-fashioned, even phenomenalist interpreter of Kant, who has not yet taken on board the newest insights from Kant scholarship regarding Kant’s idealism. This makes it all the more difficult to take his reading of Hegel’s criticism of Kant really seriously. The reading of Kant’s idealism I just outlined might not be standard, but Bristow must take note of developments in Kant scholarship if he is to fairly weigh up Hegel’s criticisms against Kant, even if Hegel’s own interpretation is unsubtle or outdated.
All this is not to take a dim view of the astuteness and commendable clarity of Bristow’s interpretation of the Phenomenology but also of less studied works such as Das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik and the Jena ‘Scepticism’ essay, which are rich sources for evaluating the broad implications of Hegel’s thought for epistemology. Despite my reservations about Bristow’s claims regarding Kant’s subjectivism and Hegel’s reasons for rejecting it, his book is one I will in future return to for illumination on Hegel’s position in the aforementioned works.
© Dennis Schulting, 2009, 2022