KANT VERSUS HEGEL 'I' Yo 'Ill which both I's release their opposed existence, is the The reconCl mg es, " ,' , f' I 1Il'ch has expanded into a dualIly, and thercll1 remams eXistence 0 an W ' . 'd ' I WI'th 'Itself', and, in ' its complete externalization and OppOSite, pmI enttca .' t l' 'Itselfsesses t IIe ceHam y () , , it is God appearing among those who know themselves as pure knowledge,7:,

75 PhG, p. 472; PhS, p, 4 oR ,

[)

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM: KANT, HEGEL, AND THE REFLECTIVE JUDGMENT PROBLEM

In the following, I want to suggest two dillercnt ways of understanding the relation between Kant's Critique ofJlldgmel1l and the later Genna!l Idealist tradition, The first might be considered the l'Cceived or standard view about that relation, I shall summarize it in Sections I and II. The second presents a difl"t>['ent picture, and I shall begin defending it in the remaining sections, The main issue raised by both possible directions is whether they represent internal developments of Kantian arguments in the third Critique, or whether they are motivated by non-Kantian, even nO!1"critical" commitments of Schelling and especially IIegel. My claim will be that the suggested alternate fonnulation of Kant's influence does rdy Oil an internal criticism and development. That claim will require a defense of the reading of Kant's text suggested by that appropriation,

I

Many German philosophers of the last. decade of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth ccntUlY interpreted the Critiqu.e oflwlgment in the light of what they perceived to be the great prohlem created by the Kantian revolution in philosophy, That problem, as they saw it, was, once Minside" the Kantian pr~jeCl, 10 lind one's way "oUI" again, To enter the project seemed 10 many simply unavoidable. It was to share in the spirit of Kant's revolutionaty modernism, to destroy dogmatism, to

KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

assert the autonomy of human reason, its sufliciency in being a law Ill\to itself. To be able to see all cOllscious, intentional relations to natllre or allY normative relation to others as primarily a "self~detennillation" in relaliOlI to nature and others would establish that free self-determination as tltc

challenge than a damning criticism, all invitation to formulate an internal criticism of Kant that. accepted cenlral aspects of his an ti-empiricism and his attack on transcendental realism, hut that avoided these putative skeptical problems. 4 They shared none of Jacobi's counter-Enlightenment, religious worries about transcendental philosophy; preferred to see t.hemselves, in the biblical terms I1rst formulated by Reinhold, as avoiding the "letter," but embracing the "spirit" of Kant's philosophy; and were all spectacularly confident of success. But everyone seemed to see a diHcl'ent sort of way out of the Kantian wilderness, and, even tually, ad ilfcr-cll t philosoph Lcal promised land. Ticket.s were soon being sold to an NCllil'nlmj,hilosoj)hir-, a lYi.um,w:ha/l.\·[fhm, an fdPntitiitsphilosophie, a Wi.uf-1Hdzajl fi('" iJ'f!,ih, and so on. In my own view, the most interesting and philosophically suggestive of t.!tese journeys began with Fichte's radicalization of KaIlt.'S claims about the apperceptivc or selfconscious nature of human experiencc and action. The direction of this transformation would eventually lead to a revision of Kant's founding distinction between spontaneity and receptivity (as OIle between conceptual and wholly non-conceptllal content) and so to an anti-skeptical argument for the "absolute" (or unconditioned, not exogenously limited) status o[the mind's spontaneous self-positing. This dit-cclion, tormulated by Fichte roughly between 1790 and 1797 or so, would form a key clement, even, I think, the heart of Hegel's eventual absolme idealism.'> (It is also. we shall see later, a key element in Hegel's understanding of the third Critique.)

supreme condition of intelligibility and action. Finding some way out, however, quickly seemed necessary to many. The main problem: Kant's transcendental skepticism, his denial that any knowledge of things in themselves was possible; that, instead, we knew only appearances. For some, laking their bearings from Kant's own remarks at the end or the first Critiqur-, I this restriction still len the possibility or "Spinozism" unacceptably open and so did not sufficiently secure the ideal at the heart of the Idealist aspirations: the absolute reality of human freedom. For others, this restriction meallt that Kant's account of the merely subjective conditions of experience could not finally be distinguished from an epislemologically inconsistent and still unsystematic psychologism; that philosophy had not really advanced much beyond Locke,~ and that it must. For still others, Kant's skepticism meant that the essentially practical proof j(n' tIlt' efficacy of pure practical reason, and the transcendental case for the sul~jer­ tive conditions necessary fClr nature to be a possible o~ject of experience, could be integrated into no systcmatic whole. And without such a systematic account, Kantianism amounted to faith (Glaubm) , not knowledge (WiSSfl1), finally just an expression of faith that the wholc is as it must be, if we are to be able to act as we ought. For the young Fichte, the young Schclling, and the young I legel, the prominent charge that there was finally no way out of Kant's skepticism (most memorably formulated hy the devious Jacobirl was much more a

I

It

ARo'l = BR')l. For a good sense of the importance of these problems for the cad) Ideal ish. espe~ially ihe Spinolism issue, see Karl Ameriks, "Kant, Fichte, and Short ArglllnclIts \0 Idealism," Archiv Fi.T Geschirhte da Ph;{osophie 7 2 (199 0 ): G:,-HS' ' I It had of course advanced to some degree, since Kant proposed wbat later Ideahsts \1'0111, I ongin ,. an d'In t ell..e I Cl t'1( HI of ('once})", • I It- had characterize as an "iullnanent " account 0 f' (1(,

insisted on the nonderived .~tatlls of pure concepts (withollt a theory of innate knowledge) and so had at least proposed a theory of synthetic a priori knowledge, See the 'I[lOt":,,,n from Locke in (;/ntlben. 11nri WiJsm, (hereafter (;tl"l') , Gfsalllll,,'lIe Wai1e, IV (~l
1.\,:;

Eine Unl.er.mchul1/!: %1/ Zielfll lind Milthlell df., J)mtsr!um ldfali.II/llIs (Frankfurt 'tm M.: Anton Hain, '99'), narratcs the hi.story oj' post-Kallli"n philosophy in a way that rt'veab the importance ofJacobi. See also Frederick Beiser, The Fale of RI'fl,mn: Ger~an PhiLomf,/tJ from Kant 10 Fichte (Cambridge: lIa,vard l.'lIi"er,ity Press, 19H7). 4 One strategy fOl' achieving this goal: to rethink and r.tdicalize the Kantian beginning, the su~reme ep~stetllic condition withol\t which there could 1)1" no experience, by explication of whIch a vanety of determinate conclllsions ahom possihle objects of experience cOlllrl be deriv~d. This is roughly the strategy adopted by Fi<:hte alld Reinhold. Another strategy w~ulQ be to follow 11I0l'e closely what I am calling hen: "!{;.ll1t"s own way Ollt of Kattt" in the thll'd Critique, or his reflections 011 the neees,sil), of ,m illtnitive intellect. This is the path pursued by Schelling anrl Hegel. See the s"mmal} in Horstmann, {)ip (;rellzl'I/ der l'fmttl1{1, eh. 4, "Kant's 'Kritik der Urteilskl,]It' illl Urtcil sdneT" idealistischcn Nachfolgcr," pp. IC);221.

'

.

5 (:f. my Hegel's ldfi1/ism: 17,. Sali.llacliollS of SdlCol1.1rioll.mrss (Cambridge: Cambridge Univers~ty Press, t989). Thl" idea that Hq~d's position is best assessed in tenns of his interpretatIOns of, and his claims against. KalIl is 1I0t. or course, a lIovei one and is prominenl in llIuch of the best contemporary work on ) legel. sl1Ch as that by Klalls Diising. See his Hegd lind die Geschlrhle tier PhilO.
my

KANT VERSUS HEGEL But this Kantian-Fichtean heart is not the whole Idealist body.1i And it is also tme that the publication in 1790 of Kant's Critique o/judgment COllvinced IIlany that Kant him~ellhad found a way out of Kantianism, that Kant had conceived a way of defending a systematic or holistic position within which the possibility of moral agency and ofliving or organic beings, as well as of law-governed, dynamically moving matter, could all be understood consistently. Somehow, our ability to appreciate natural beauty (in a "sul~jec­ tive" but "universally valid" way) and the indispensability of our "estimations" of life could help defend the possibility of the systematic philosophy devoutly pursued by the post-Kantians. However, although there is widespread agreement that Kant's position in the KUwas at least as influential in the development of later Idealism as his theory of self-consciousness, transcendental deduction, or theOl), of autonomy, and substantial consensus about the terms and issues that formed the core of that influence, there does not, at least on the surface, appear to be much in the consensuS account that is very philosophically interesting. The question, in other words, has pretty much become a wholly historical OI~C, a question simply of the proper formulation of an episode in Jdeengeschlrhte, an episode without much contemporary or perennial relevance. This is so because the standard picture looks like this. Both Schelling and Hegel directly identify the passages and themes that are supposed to mark out Kant's way out of Kant. They both cite two sections from the Dialectic of Teleological Judgment, sections 76 and 77, which attempt to explore the implications of the unavoidability of the appeal to purposiveness in explanations of nature, or the unacceptability of the t'aclical and infinitely detailed contingencies we would have to face in 'wholly mechanistic explanations. To have to conceive of nature as purposive is to conceive of parts as existing "for the sake of" wholes (or to think of the effects of causes as also the causes of those causes) (sections 6;~ and 64), or is simply to conceive of nature as intelligently designed. (Or, perhaps said in a more Schellingean way, as intelligently designing itself.)7 When Kant comes to explain what thinking of nature this way amollllts to, he says that, true, I want to shoW, with respect to the question of his appropriation of thinl C"iliqup themes.

6 In Hegel's case, for olle thing, a filial account of his trajectory would obviously also have to

include his complex commitments to variolls dements of classical Greek ph~losophy and to

7

Christian theology. . Kant himself says, "Nature organizes itself." hut he is quick to stay dear of the hyloZOlStIl he would see io Schelling'S formulations. See Kritik der [hteilykrafi (hereafter ~U), AA: V, p. 288. In this chapter, [ have mainly consulted the translation by Werner Pluhar, 1 he C1'1/1que ojjwlgment (hereafter (Jr) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), though I have often made

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

133

reason forever demands that we assume somethin~ or othel' (the original basis [den Uwund]) as existing with unconditioned necessity, something in which there is no longer to be any distinction between possibility and actuality. (402)

This "necessity" appears to require that nature be conceived as the product of an "intuitive intellect" (4oG); not, like ours, an understanding that must discursively judge, organize, and systematize "material" that pure thought itself cannot supply, but an absolutely "active" intellect, a "complete spontaneity of intuition" (40(), an intellertus an1wtyjms (408) or "intellectual intuition" (40g)R whereby "wholes" are not thought as dependent Oil, or as aggregations of, prior "parIS," but parts as dependent on, only intelligible in their existence and fUliclioning by reference to their relation to, already thought "wholes."!'

changes. (Page n~fCrences to the unpuhlished introdllction are to Bd. XX of the Akadrmie edition.) See, also, p. 374. For a study ofllle ,·eJevance of the pantheism, life philosophy, and hylozoism controversies to the composition of I\U, see John H. Zammito. 'fhl' Genesis oj Kant's Critique oj.Judgmenl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, l
KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

Now on one reading, this could all certainly sound as if Kant might be claiming that human reason can detennine what there really is or must be (the Urgrund); that it must be a living, sclt:organizing nature, and so in some sense a "spiritualized" nature. This approach would defend a conception of such an "original basis" or Urgrund that transcended the gl-eat Kantian dualism of Geist and Natur (such a nature mllst exhibit a purposively designing intelligence). And this direction would appear to have greatly revised the first Critique's picture of reason's subjectively regulative function. We now appear, in other words, not to be making some claim ahout how "we must think" or nature such that our explanatory demands can be met, but how nature must be, such that our conceivings and demanding-s, not to mention our very "living," could be possible in the first place. 10 This version of the direction is especially stressed by those (like Burkhart Tuschling) who ~re particularly worried about the development of Kant's views about systematicity (after around 1787) and who sec in Kanl's own work increasingly strong claims that a non-human intuitive intellect is required to account for empirical concept formation, organic unity, and a system of scientific laws. 1I Tuschling even, rather startlingly, suggests that these claims in sections 76 and 77 represent the beginnings of a major turn in Kant's thought, leading him toward an acceptance of a Schellinge
What is clear is that the young Schelling, in the kh-Sdlri[t, was certainly vety much excited by this versiOlI of a third Critique revision of the first: "The completed Science does not rely on dead faculties, which have no reality and exist only in an artificial abstraction; it rather much more relies on the living unity ofthe I, one which remains the same in all the external manifestations of its activity; in it all the diflerent faculties and activities, which philosophy has always set out, become only one faculty, only one activity of the same identical 1."13 Hence no transcendental skepticism; no unsystematic dualism, or lifeless mechanism, or mere faculty psychology; but a holistic, speculative philosophy; a nat ure conceived of as actively intuiting itself (purposively organizing itself) with human thought as a manifestation of this activity, not a classifying, legislating machine, operating on "dead," passively received matter. Hence, too, the great enthusiasm in commentaries on these passages. Here is Schelling again:

134

Spinoza. J2

10

11

12

A~ we shall see, the exact difference hetween thcse fonnlltatiotls. of crucial importance to Schelling's insistence that the "system of idealism" include bolita philosophy olnatnre an:1 transcendental philosophy as coequals, is extremely diffiCllit to fOllnlllate. Cf. Schelling s

attempt in the preface to S'/1, III, p. 330; 51; p. I. Tuscbling takes his bearing.; from passages in the published introduction to KUthat ll1ake claims tike "particular empirical laws, must, as regards what the universal laws h,~ve Ielt undetennined in them, be viewed in tenns of such a unity as if they too had heen glvcn hI' an understanding (e,'en though not ours) so as to assist our cognitive powers by making possible a system of experience in tellllS of particular natural laws" (p. 180). s"t' 1~ls account in "The System of Transcendental Idealism: Questions Raist'd and Lcft Open III the Kritih der Urteilskrajl," SOllthem.1ownal oll'hilo.w/)h), 3 D , SIIPPI. (I C)9 1): 113· See the quotations from the Opus postllmum in Tuschling, "System of Transcendental Idealism," pp. t 21-2, and sec al,o his "IntuitiveI' Verstalld, absolutc IdentH:it. Idet'. T\](,SC:l zu Hegels friiher Rezeption der 'Kritik der Urteilskraft." In Hegel lind die 'Kritii1 r/':r I rteillkmjl. 'ed. by Hans-Friederich Fulda and Roll~Petcr Horstmann (Slungart: K~e!l-(.oll'~. 1990). pp. 171-88. In the laltel; Tuschling discusses a numher of important (hner~l\l(s. between Hegel and Schelling on tlw "logic" of SHch a self-positing intellect, but as wIll he clear later. I disagree with the way he lopes Hegel and Schelling together. Morem'e!-, wlwn

135

There have perhaps never been so many deep thoughts pressed tugether Oil so few pages as occlIITed in the Critique of Teleological Jlldgment, paragraph

76 .1 4 In an 1801 letter to Ficht(', Schelling formulated his own "idea of the Absolute" as the "identity of thinking and intuiting," abollt which he says that this is "the highest speculative idea, the idea of the Absolute, the intuiting of which OCCUI'S in thinking, the thinking orwhich occurs in intuit-

Tuschling asks whether this whole diret:lion represents a "regress" into a prc-eJ'itical metaphysics or an "ontologization" of logiC, he answers UO, for two reasom, neither of which seems to me persuasive. First he claims thaI, internally, Kant himself had not solved the problem of the "detemlinahility" of the cmpirical manifold, as if this alone in some way supports the Divine Substance solution. Kant's difficlllties could be addressed in any number of ways, as we shall see, apart fmlll ,\ full-blown, metaphysical philosoph)' of nature. and, anyway, there is no philosophicill jllstitication for an\, claimed connection between Kant's putat~ve failure and a romantic !I1l'taphysics solution. The second reason Tuschling presents IS that we should not underst'lild Hegel's metaphysics as a kind of absolute apriorism, or as the derivation of analytic Iruths !i'om concepl analysis. The concept is supposed to be demonstrated as the "illllllanf'nt strncture of empirical ('xistf'nce," which "unites in itself the moment< of identity with itselfalld relation 10 othel's" (I'. 187). This might suggest that the JOlt of metaphysics to which Tuschling's analr';s commits Hegel is unprecedentt'd, btlt that, .as far as I call see, does not addrt'ss Ihe "regTess"
l3 Sw, I, p. 238. 14 Ibid., I, p. 242. See also SlI; I, p. 18,.

KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

ing," and that he is, in articulating this idea, simply "relying" on paragraph 76 of the KU l!i Hegel too, in GZfluben und Wissen, identifies sections 76 and 77 as the place where Kant expresses most fully "the idea of Reason," the basis for a truly speculative, not merely reflective philosophy. He too notes with great enthusiasm that Kant was "led" (by the internal logic of his own position) to the idea of an "intuitive intellect" and led to it "as an absolutely necessary idea."It; And he goes on to claim:

interesting philosophical direction, or instead toward a romantic metaphysics, even a hylozoism, or " panlogicism or wild apI'iorism, and so on?

So it is he himself who establishes the opposite experience, that of thinking a nondiscursive intellecl. He himself shows that his cognitive faculty is aware not only of the appearance and of the separation of the possible and the actual in it, but also of Reason and the In-Itself. Kant has here before him both the idea of a reason in which possibility and actuality are absolutely identical and its appearance as cognitive faculty wherein they are separated. In the experience of his thinking he tinds both thoughts. However in choosing between the two his nature despised the necessity of thinking the Rational, of thinking an intuitive spontaneity and decided without reservation for appealance. 17

It is clear from these and from many other enthusiasts (especially Schiller) that many post-Kantians were not content to interpret the Critique ofjudgment as a limited critical account of the "conditions for the possibility" of some possibly objective status for distinctive sorts of pleasure-pain responses to the world, or as a kind of expanded account of how we IIlllst, subjectively, think of nature if an appreciation of its beauty and an estimation of the living beings within it are to be possible. Aside from Schiller's insistence on its importance in supposedly revising Kant's moral theOlY, the direction suggested by these quotations points to the even more ambitious belief that Kant's analysis implied revisions and expansions in Kant's core transcendental project. As we have seen, that claim rests on putatively revisionary implications of the "necessity" for postulating an "intuitive intellect. " Hence the questions, Do these remarks by Kant in sections 7(i and 77 suggest such revisions and expansions in any central doctrines of the Transcendental Aesthetic and Analytic of the Critique oIPure Reason? If they do, what are such revisions? And even if they do, do those revision,S lead in any

15 Quoted in Horstmann, Die Grmzen. pp, 1!) r.uw. p. 311; FK, p. 89. 17 r.ttw, p. 341. I'K, pp. 90-1.

214-15,

II Officially of course the answer most prominent in the text itself is no. The idea of an intuitive intellect selves a very limited, still basically regulative, subjectively required function. It may indeed be that Kant, in his account of teleologicaljudgmellts and rel1cctivejudgmellts in general, is going further than the. first ClililJue's aCCOUll t of regulative ideas, treating the problem now n~tJust. as on~ of the organization of the results of empirical inquiry, but as mvolvll1g a dIfferent sort of formation, subsmnption, and application of concepts. Appeals to nature's PUI-poses are not ways of systematizing the results of our empirical inquiries abollt efficient causation, and are not heuristic principles necessary lo regulate sllch inq uiries. There are phenomena, he now claims, that will never he adequately explicahle mechall istically. The problem is nol now just systematization, hut the possibility of subsumption under concepts in the first place, and a new model for such subsumption. IH And he may he "upping the stakes" in introdUcing this topic, beyond what was claimed for similar issues in the appendix to the "Dialectic of Pure Reason," suggesting now that without a legitimate warrant for such reflective judgments (its "a priori principle"), "our empirical cognition could not thoroughly cohere to fonn a whole of experience" (23).19 But whatever argument Kallt presents for the "necessity" of teleological explanation, and howrver he resolves the apparent dialectic of teleological and mechanical judgments, the invocation of the idea of an intuitive intel18 For discu~~i(~ns of this difference, see Palll Guyer. "Rea,uII and Ref1ectiveJud~melll: Kant on the Slgmficance of Systematidty." N(l1/,' :!4 (1990): 17-4:1; Hannah Ginsboq;, "Reflective judgment and Taste," NUllS 21 (I ~)90): (;3-78; Geurge Schrader, "The Slatus of TeleologicalJudgmenL~ in. the Critical Philosoph)'." Kallt,Sturiien 4' (IQ'3-4): 204-3" L W B k "Ka . . .J .. J ,.J' . ,,' ec. '. nt on the ~l1lfonnity 01 Natlll'e." S,1l1hr.
KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

lect appears of narrow, explanatory significance. In the first place, it can he introduced this way only because Kant is dearly wedded to a general intentional model of teleology, on the strict model of an agent doing A in order to achieve B. When he considers teleological fUllctions in organisms, since hearts do not act in order to circulate blood, he mllst revert to that model by requiring that the heart be intentionally designed hy an agent in order to circulate blood. And he claims that the analysis of such an intentional designer reveals it must be a non-discursive intellect. 20 In other words, Kant's position seems designed more to avoid the metaphysically idealist direction than to invite it. Where then (where, at least in Kant) is Schelling getting the idea Ihat hy introducing this idea of an intuitive intellect Kant has also reformulated his notion of human su~iectivity itself, proposed a new view of "the living I," or even an unconditioned condition of all intelligibility, an absolute, the "producings" of which involve a collapsing of the key Kantian distinction be-

tion."22 But a vague echo is the most that could he said, and the standard view of this point d'a/JjJUi for Ger1JJan Idealism would seem confirmed. Whether the move in question is to a divinely productive nature, or to some even more obscure claim ahout our divinely productive intellect, the moves seem motivated by Ilon-Kantian commitments and nOll-cd tical expectations. This view is well stated by lliising, who in summing up the issue writes, All the foundational principks and doctrines of Kantian aesthetics in the Critique a/Judgment arc accordingly transfol1lwd anri exported into a different metaphysical system of meaning l lkdeuI 11 n,/iIS)'.1 femJ . The critique made against Kant is therefore not immanen1, but presupposes the soundness of flegel's own conception, which Kant, as the opponent of doctrinal metaphysics, would have criticizcd.2~

III

tween thinking and intuiting? Where especially is Hegel basing his even more extravagant assertion that Kant's discussion in sections 76 and 77 has something t.o do with the human intellect?

So, it appears that one way ()fthinkillg about the possibility ofa purposively ordered world (as intelligently designed by an intuitive intellect) is somehow being inflated into a thesis about the sllpers('nsible substrate of nature itself (Le., Kant's warnings about the sul~jective, regulative Chal
Kant also recognizes that we ar'e necessarily driven to the Idea (of a nondiscursive intellect). 'I he Idea of this ardzetY/HlI intuitive inteilerl is at boltmn I/othillg else but the same idea o/the transcendental irlwf!}.natiun Ihal WI! cunsidaed above. FCII- it is intuitive activity, and yet its inner unity is no other than the unity of the intellect itself, the category immersed in extension, and becoming intellect and category only as it separates itself out of extension. l1ms tm.nscendentnl imagination is itself intuitive inleUn:l. (Myemphasis)21

There is not, I think, any particularly guud reason [or Kant to think that a\1 such teleological explanation must be cashed out in the intentional sense. Aristotle did not and Hegel'S Al"istotelianism provides him the basis fOI" several ellective niticislIls of Kantian or subjertivist teleology in the Science otLoKic. See Willem de Vries's article, "The Dialectic of Teleology," Philo.IO!)hiral Topirs 19 (1991): 51-70; Klaus Dilsing, "Naturldeologie und Met~phl'sik bei Kant und Hegel," in IfeKel ttndDil" K,-ili" der [hteilskmJl.· pp. 141-157, and especially his Die 1;'lmloKie in Kmlf.' Wrllbegriff{Bonn: Bouvier, 19(8).

21 GulV, p_ 341; I'K, p. 89.

Fo: ~n exploration of the position on the illlagination that emerges h-olll the first and third Cntlquf!s, see Rlldolf Makkreel, Imagillflliml alld [/lfe/pre/alion in Kant: 17w HermmplItiral Import of the Ghliq!u' OfJlul?,lne/lt (Chicago: Uni\'ersity of Chicago Press, 1990), pI. 2. Makkreel's .general position is that whereas Kallt d~ill1s that rhe human IInderstanding categonally. sets the conditions fill' tIlt' possibility of all experience of mume. and that reason se\~-Imposes laws for action. it is a reflective imagination that makes possible the ~pprehenslon of'l wholen('s.'\ and "l;1Il o\,('rall meaning ill experience (this by way of what IS called "r~f1ectiv~_specincatiol1"). Makkrt'ellinks t.his orienting activity, especially in the ~pprehenslOn ot hfe, to the henneucutical tradition. Hegel is close enough to Kant still to lmk such possibl(' "meaning apprehension" with tmlh, and so is illtel-ested, with Kant in th~ nature and basis of the claim Ihat all others ought to apprt'l'iate the healltiflll ~nd esumat~ life (or "orient themselves llIeaninghllly") as I rio. Cf. also the rlisClission in]. M. Ber.nstem, 17le F(lle of An: Aest/wl;r Alienalion /i'O//I Kanl 10 Denida aud Adamo (Cambridge: Pohty Press, 1992), ahoul the \'ariolls ways ill which the re(1ectivejudgmentdoctrine strains tit: ~aslC faculty di\'isions of the first Critique, pp. 41-55. 23 D~ls~ng, HeWI wul die Grsrhi,.hle, p. It 2. S("t'
It might. be possible here to detect in this take on the issue of an intuitive intellect something vaguely Kantian, an echo of the first edition of the first Critique and its suggestion of "a common root" out of which, or by original reference to which, the dualism between understanding and sensibility can be understood, a common root suggested to he the "productive imagina20

139

j -

.

;

.

i; . '. .~

'0

1i

KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

on some independent commitment to the view that Kant's transcendental account mnst already rest on a prior theory of some absolute world process posing or dividing itself from itself and then identifying with itself ill some act of supreme self·realization, as in many standard views of Fichte, Schelling, and of course Hegel. Why else, apart from such a commitment, would sections 7(j and 77 be read in this way? Dilsing's view would appear confirmer!. What is noteworthy, however, about Hegel's treatment of these passages in Glauben und Wi,uen is that he does not frame his discussion of sections 76 and 77 in any way informed by the specific problem of mechanism and teleology or cven the philosophy of nature in generaL 24 A., we have se~n, the issue that seems to be suggesting to Hegel some "inflation" of thc lin portance of the idea of an intuitive intellect is not the problem of organic wholes or functional explanation. In a way that can indeed be said to fi]Uow Kant's treatment without distortion, what interests Hegel throughout these passages is what is involved in our capacity to "estimate" (schatzm) nature as living (and, originally, to appreciate it as beautiful). His remarks make clear that it is this capacity for estimation and appreciation, and the rdation between such a capacity and our capacity for determinative judgment and discursive systematization, that will require a revision in the intellectsensibility relation originally proposed. This is why he says that it is the issue of rejledivejwlgment (nol "nature") that "exhibits the most interestinp; point in the Kantian system"2[, wherein the "reality of reason" (not its subjective regulation) is demonstrable, exhibiting as it.s "subjective side" the aesthetic judgment., and as its "objective side," organic nature. 2G Ourcapadty to ex/m1ence a beautlj11l and living natW"l! is what requires a revision in understanding

21

2"

2(i

Becau~e

I am interested here in the question of the early reception of KU ill Gennall idealism, I shall concentrate on Hegel's Glaubi'll Itl1d Wissm! comments. In Hpgel'" posthumously published f~ecl1l1es on Fin"A,t, he interprets KUin both a ~\Ore fi-i,,~"dly and a more critical way and concentrates (appropriately) more on the aesthNIC theory Itself than on its implications for his OWII systematic philosophy, which is the topic I wallt to purs~le here, His accoullt there does, though, make clear the importallce to him of the way In which "ideas" can be said to he "embodied" in, rather than applied to or derivcd from.
the general relation between "the empirical manifold" and the "absolute abstract unity." And this is why he suggests that it is in our being driven or required to think of t.he possibility of an aesthetic appreciation of nature, ~n.d our being dri~en or required to think through the implications of a hvmg nature, both 111 ways with some binding nonnative status, that the idea of r~ason as organizing or syslematizing data breaks down, and, let us say, the Idea of a reason (non-arbitrarily, non-subjectively) detnmininK its own data, or an intuitive intellect, becomes lmavoidable.27 What is also interesti~g is ~hat so mUCh. of what lIegel discusses in Gil W is inspired by Kant's dISCUSSIon of ae.llhell( experience, aesthetic judgment, and "aesthetic ideas," topics th~t, in I~nt's presentation, st.and far away logically and textually from sectlOns 76 and 77. The Hegelian claim is the following: This [Hegel has heell expludng various ver,~ions 01' the "authentic idea of Reason" in Kant] shows that the Kantian forms of intuition and the forms of thought cannot be kept apart al all as the particulm; isulated faculties which they are usually represented as. One and the same synthetic unity, . , is the principle of intuition and of tlte intellect. (70)

Clearly Hegel is claiming that Kant is introducing something in his treatment of aesthetic judgments that in a fundamental way alters the empil-ical rea~ism-regulative idea theory of the first Critique; that this claim requires an mtcllect that does not only conceptualize data in a passively received manifold or organize the results of empirical inquiry in a system, but can itself be conceived as intuitive; and that this alternative way of conceiving the mind-world issue is most visible in Kant's doctrine of the productive imagination, Kant's "truly speculative idea" (7 I).

~t is of course still tnIe that lIege! is in some sellse conHating what Kant is saymg about the idert of nature's origins and a putatively divine intellect with a claim ~bout the p~"oper relation between the human intellect and sensibility. But thIS s,o~t ~f dann ~bout the divinity of t.he human is certainly not foreign to Hegel s IdIOsyncratic theology, aud it is a tleast clear that the issues of life and .b~~uty rais.e directly fot" Hegel questions about the Kantian conceptsenSibilIty relatIOn, and not about the possibility of a pre-su~jective Urgrund

,"y.

~7

Kant himself or Course is hunously given to .·cmark., abont how "n·ason" in investigating nature is really "illvestigating itself." And ill the tirst Crili'llle, his cOllcept-intuition divid~ does not prevent him fi-orTt caHill)!; "ppercrption itself an "indrte'TIlinate intuition." Cf 842211.

AVOIDING

KANT VERSUS HEGEL

problem of our cognitive capacities.

On the face of it, this is still a sort of "frying pan into the fire" interpretation. It docs not seem to help matters much to argue that Hegel is not leading \IS "out of Kant" toward a romantic monism, but is instead making use of the analysis of aesthetic judgments to establish that our intellect really IS inlUitive. If we focus on what seems of most relevance to Hegel, the Kantian account of beauty, the questions suggested by this version of "the influence of sections 76 and 77" are straightfOlward. (i) Of what consequence for the core Kantian position on the intellect-sensibility relation is the general case for the "su~jective universal validity" of aesthetic judgments? (This quest~on is really dual; it involves the direct issue of the possibility of such intcrsul~Jcc­ tively valid judgments, based as they are on sensible pleasures, and the separate issue of the implications of such a possibility for Kant's position on the general possibility of the intelligibility of the world for a human mind. It may in other words be possible that aesthetic objects are simply uniquf'ly intelligible.) And (ii) assuming Kant got something right about the rad~ca) and general implications of aesthetic intelligibility, did Hegel get somethmg right in extending the implications in the way suggested? These are the questions involved, at any rate, in such typical Hegelian claims as the following: 28 These two questions are of course not incompatible and Hegel could he raising both issu~s. but the body of evidence. I am suggesting. shows that he only considers stich. an lhgml1d 111 terms of our intellectual activity. The question is treated differently by Schellmg and would require a separate treatment. On the one hand. in a work very much like Hegel's lJiUrr('l!l'e essay, his 1797 'heat~,eExplicalory orthe Idealism in the Wi.!sensc/tajislehle, S.rheIHn g al:~o slresse~

the way in which Kant himself was supposedly led to the idea of OW' actively mlUlUVC ~aC1.'It~. and really did not intend, for us, any "ntter separation of the l.mderstan,din g ~nd sens.lJIht)' (Stv, I. p. :)59; Idealism and the Endgame of Themy: Three nssays by I'. WJ. Srhdltng, tl'l1~~ Thomas Pfau lAlbany: SUNY Press, 19941, p. nl; on the other hand. he begms. to stl< s. that in order to account for such an activity, \ve must aSSllllH! a "pro(hlCtiv,e force" lnher~~nl in all things (pp. 387; 9:-1); and so "it is a fundamental mistake to attempt a th{'orctll'al grounding of theoretical philosophy" (pp. 3Sl9; 10 1). Hcgel never gave up sue,h a g(.,,~1. III general the issue of Schelling, and the relation between S(,helling's and H~gel 'pnSlll(lm, is too complicated to discuss here. The "Hegelian direction" I am defeIldm.g he~:. IS not, though, in any great opposition to the carly Schelling, as is clear from pl. h of S 11.

IDEALISM

143

Since beauty is the Idea as experienced, or more con'ectly, as intuited, the form of opposition between inl uition and concept falls away. Kant recognizes this vanishing of the antithesis negatively in the concept of a Sllpersensuous realm in general. But he does Hot recognize that as beauty, it is positive, it is intuited, or, to lise his own lan~lIagc, it is given in experience. (87)

expressing itself in human actions and thinking. 2R And he is also at least purporting to point to issues in Kant that justify this turn to the broad

IV

(~ERMAN

In this extraordinary phrase - "the form of opposition between intuition and concept falls away" - Hegel's overall interests begin to emerge. He is interested in the possibility of some intelligible appreciation of nature, understanding nature we might say, even, in genenll, grasping a meaning, all with some normative validity, without that normativity (= "all others, suitably situated, ought to understand in the same way") being a function of the application of a concept (or the imposition of an ideal) to a passively received manifold (or "on" a set of empirical concepts or regularities), and he is apparently interested in the implications of such a possibility for intelligibility as 5uch. 29 If, in other words, a common intelligibility, a shareability of experience, is possible in some way inconsistent with the general critical model of conceiving a passively received content, and if that intelligibility requires a different model for the engagement of our intellectual activity in such an intelligible experience, thell, so goes this "direction," we are in effect proposing a different critical model of the relation of thought to reality in our experience, one of potelltially wide relevance. 3o (Or: as we might expect in a Kantian idealism the content of aesthetic experience itself should not be cleanly distinguishable from our actively "making sense" of what is occurring to us, or frolll Ihe aesthetic judgment and its shareability. To be in a mental state, even to experience a feeling of pleasure, is to have taken up a positioll, to have evaluated or judged. But now, it is being sug~9

"Intelligibility," ill this context, admittt'dty ('o\'ers a ,'elY great deal of tenitory. It is a more general tenn fm what a Kantian would recognize as the qucstioa of the possibility of experience or a possible representation of content at all. where experience is understood as the possibility IIfjudgments, and understanding such a possiblejucigment is uuderstandingwhat it would be for ajudgment to be tl1Ie. Cf. the best account of this dimension ofthe Kantian theory in Gnold PrallSs, Frs('h~inultg /"i Kalil (Berlin: de Gntyter, 1971). 30 The general suggestion toward which such I'evisiom in the classic Kantian picture is leading is familiar: that what it is fur any thinking to be about something, to be constrained in a way common to all, ('an not be said simply til he the n'sHlt of, OJ' based on, the direct impingement of the external world, 01' "its" .illst occasioning in sOllie distinct way a pleasure. Since even receptivity or the passivity of acSl hetic experience rcquirt's tilt' acti\;ty ofspolltaneily, that constraint and so shareability is a mattcr oj' integrability into some whole. Se .. the recent book by John McDowell. Mind rllul I-V,,,ld. (Cambridge: lI~lvard University Press, 1994), especially his criticisms (in \\ hat s(,elll to me a Hegelian spirit) of Davirlsoncan holism, on the one hand. and "bald naturalism," on the other.

145

KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALlSM

gested, the possibility of the latter no longer can appeal to concept application, to regulation, or to an empirically given, common, non-conceptual

much contested terrain. COllsider first the ramolls details of Kant's

144

content.) Now, this reading, as we shall see, highlights something clear from the surface of Hegel's remarks. Hc does not comment much on the problcm of pleasure, or the affective dimension of Kant's case, suggesting that it is in appreciating, or in being rcflectively aware of, the harmony of our faclllties that we experience plcasure, thus shifting a great deal of weight to the reflective evaluating supposedly going on in aesthetic experience.:11 Hegcl does not note that this all implies that it is by means of this reflective appreciation that we are taking pleasure in the formal suitability of nature to our rational ends, or that pleasure can be intentional, and that we are therewith evaluating our experience in a way that can be shown to be universally subjectively valid. 32 Since there is conflicting evidence about Kant's meaning, with many passages suggesting that, for him, harmony simply produces pleasure, that pleasure is a qualitatively identical, 110nintentional state, and that su~jective universal validity involves an expellation about another's feeling, and not a claim about a warranted evaluation of nature, this is all extremely controversial if considered as an exercise in Kant scholarship. 33 My own view is that Hegel is very much on the right track in reading Kant, but I can only sketch the case for that here. Such a sketch must at least indicate what reading of the (ledllction of aesthetic judgments Hegel must have had in mind to suggest this direction. And posed this way, with so many issues at play, it is hard to see how any sort of economical discussion is possible. We can, I think, begin to defend the extension Hegel is pursuing, but that will first reqllire some giant steps oyer

3 1 This emphasis is what allows him to shift attf'ntion somewhat frolll Kant's concern with the more formal issue of the exercise of ollr faculties in aesthetic t,xperience. the "play" of the imagination and the "striving" of the understanding, to the concepts or ideas suppmedly expressed in such "material." This shift is especially ob,~o\ls in his treatment ()fKa~t ill the LeeluTes on Fine Alt, trans. T M. Knox (Oxitnd: Clarendon Press. 1975), pp. 5!i-htL 3 2 A way of explaining the intentionality of pleasme, one of much relevance to this "dir('etion," is presented by Richard Aquila, "A New Look at Kant's Aesthetic ./udgmenl.<' ill f;ssays in Kant's Aesthetic.!, cd. hy Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University ofCllH:ago Press, 19 82 ), pp. 87-114. See also the lIseful formulation byJens KlIlenkampEJ, KanIs [.0,(1" de.! iLlthetiHhen Urteils (Frankfurt am M.: Klostermann, 1~78), p. RR. 33 I defend the broader reading of Rant's strategy in "The Significance ofT,~ste: Kant. Aesthetk, and ReflectiveJlIdgment~," jomnal of the Histmy oj l'hi/o.mph)" f(,rthullning. The nalTUwcr and wider views also reflect what would become, in the post·Kantia n Enropean tradUlOn. basic differences about the l1utonom)' of art. on the olle hand, and ils ever accelerating coguitive, moral. and political signiticance in later modernity on the other: all 01 which ,u c the subject of Bernstein's valuable study, Fate oj An, especially pp. l-()S·

account~.

According to Kant, the claim "This is beautiful" has a misleading suriace stJUcture. It appears to be a standard application of all cmpi,-ical predicate to an o~ject, bUl it is not. [t really involves the claim that (i) I am in a certain mcnlal state, I feel something in the presence of an object, and, Kant wants to show, by being in sllch a state, under certain conditions, am ipso facto warranted in claiming all others would be too, "if they had taste" (as I am justified in assuming they could). (ii) That state is a jJll'a.l'Ure ("consciousness of a representation's causality, with respect to that state, so as to keep mc in it"). (iii) It is diJinlr-resled (does nol incite any desire directed at existence of the object occasioning such a state). (iv) This pleasure is attendant to, or in Kant's somewhat clumsy phrase "attaches to," a reflective
AVOIDING (~ERMAN IDEALISM

KANT VERSUS HEGEL reflective judgment guided by, in some way, such a common sense. This assumption, he argues, is warranted because experience itself would not be possible without such a capacity. I am therefore entitled not only to assume the universal communicability of my mental state, but to demand ([ordem) that all others appreciate the beautifiJI, that they "ought" to find this beautihtl ("as a duty, as it were"). The experience of beauty, in other words, involves a norm, binding 011 all with subjective universal validity. And again, for the purposes of our discussion, the important point is, Without such normativity involving the aIJjJlic{(tion of a norm to fl content, nor the idea of a possible norm that we "mllst think" applies. These are the bare details. And, with this skeleton of the theory in mind, it is not hard to find passages, particularly in the published and unpublished Introductions, that show that Kant himself did believe that such an analysis was relevant to the larger issues that Hegel summarizes as the "authentic idea" or "reality" of reason. Those passages are all hased on the claim that aestheticjudgments are a species of "reflective" judgments (given the part.icular, find, formulate, construct the universal) as opposed to determinative (where one has a concept and seeks to apply it) and on the genera) claims made on behalf of reflective judgments. The principle of such judgments is "purposiveness" and the claims made arc very great. The Kantian language also calls to mind Hegel's remarks abollt our own reason?s spontalleously "giving itself its content," as if an intuitive intellect. For example, Judgment ... provides nature's supersensible substrate (within as well as outside us) with dctenninability [ReslimmbflTkeilJ by the intellectual power .. and sojudgment makes possible the transition from the concept of nat1lre to that of freedom. (37) Although Kant often claims that our intellectual powers "determine" nature, thus leading to the skeptically Idealist claim that we should consider nature only as determined by us, t.his sort of claim about our originally providing (lIerschafJl) nature with "detenninability" in the first place is unique, as Eu as I know, to the third Critique and later works. 34

And the direction of these rcmal·ks suggests that in appreciating the beautiful, we are providing ourselves with a sort of original "orientation" in experience that is not like reason's su~jective self~regulation (again we d on 't ".tmpose "ademan d on nature hut appreciate Ilature's suitability to our deman~s~ and 1:01 li~e empidcal apprehension (since we are talking about an o.ngll1al ~nentatlOn reqtlired for there to he coitet-ent empirical apprehe~slOn). It IS t.he rc\ation between a sul~jectively universally valid pleasure 111 the beautiful and this self-orientation that forms the core of Hegel's suggested direction. Perhaps the fullest Kantian statement of this direction occurs in the unpublished Intmduction: Hence we mnst consider ;.!esthelic J·Ilr! a ment "s a .,"l){'('t·'\l . '.,.,. «, .. , powel,_ necessan·1 y none ot~er ~h:lt1 l-e~lecth:c judgment; and we IlIllsl regard the feeling of pleasure ('~llIch I~ Identical WIth the r{'presentation ofsubjecti\'c purposiveness) as attachl11g neIther to the sensation in the empirical repl-esentalion of the object, nor to the concept of thaI ohject, but as attaching to - and as connected with, in tenlls of an a priod principle - nothing' but the reflectioll and its fo.r~ (t~e e~s~ntial activity orjlldglll!~rll) by which it strives to proceed fn}1l1 empmcalll1tUluons to concepts as such. (24U) Now, in his] 7S6 essay Was Iteiul, s£d~ im Drmken ol'ielilieren? Kant, discussing spatial orientation, had noted, "To this purpose, I require above all the feeling of a difference in my own person."3!) These remarks on the reflective character of aesthetic judgmeltt, and 011 the function of reflective judgment, suggest that hy the time of tlte third Critique, Kant had also realized that a more fundamental "orientation" in all the "activity of life" is needed, a~d cannot be the result of any ill{cTence or application of, or even obedlence to, a rule. 36 It turns out that this fundamental orientation is also ach~eved by a "feeling," although Kant still insists on a "critique" of such a feelmg and so on its universal nonnative force. Since, in sections 70 and 77, Kant appears t~ cl~im that the slIhsurnability or general suitability ofparticulars to the apphcatlOn of our concepts is itself the result of the original, nond t .. . e enn1l1atlve, active engagements of our judgment power (an original 35 AA, VIII, p. 131. 36

How~rd Caygill, in AI10fJ,u/pnent (Oxlc'HI: Basil Blackwell, . . .I .

1<)80), connects Kant's accollnt ' . one~tatlOn wit 1 very hload themes in the role played by considerations of taste in earh~r PO~I~lcal and civil society traditiolls, alld he cOllcludes with characterizations of Kant S pOSitIon that sound vet)" lTIuch like 1hose of the later Idealisls ( .•ee ch. I) especially :~d, for ex~mple, p: 299). Whether the histol'ical Kant could accept this positi~n (and the onnous ImplIcatIOns that follow from it) and remain the hisLorical KanL is, I think, another questlon, not settled by Caygill's speculatioll. of th

• IS

34 See again Tuschling's claims about the Opu, Im.lfllmutll in the artides cited previously. In the first C,'ilique Kant does say that "J'ea~OII thus prepares the field for the understanding." At158 = B685, although how that is supposed to happen (as opposed to reason's systematiling the results of the understanding's work) is not explored.

KANT VERSUS HEGEL

"seIForienting"), he seems to have at once conceded the general priori Iy of such reflective activity in any account of the possibility of experience, and, as Hegel and Schelling suggested, to have undermined his own stri:t d.istinction between the divine and the human intellect. The broadest claim IS al p.

Were the power ofjudgm{~nt not ahle to recognize purposiveness with resp{~ct to particulars, were it not to have its own universal law [the law he identifies as c purposiveness] under which to subsume particulars, it could not make any ddrr minatejudgment a/lOu.t pmtiwlars. 37

But now we come to the most specific of the difficulties involved in trying to read Kant in this Hegelian direction, this link between the normative status of the experience of the beautiful, and this reflective acti~ity, ~ll activity that supposedly undermines or bypasses the standard Kantlan PICture of non nativity (the application ofa concept or principle). As alluded to earlier, the problem with such passages and claims has always been to understand the role of such reflection in aesthetic judgments, which, on the face of it, seem so much a matter simply of sensible pleasure, albeit occasioned ill a unique way in the case of the beautifuP8 There is no question th~t ~nt himself goes very far in linking the experience of such pleasure with reflective activity" and so, apparently, with the themes Hegel is interested in. But the question has always been whether he is entitled to sHch claims. For example, in section 4, A liking for the beautiful must depend on the reflcction, regarding an objcc.l, that \ead~ to some concept or other (hut is indeterminate which concept II1Is is). This dependence on n~flec:tion also distinguishes the liking fm' the beautiful from the agreeable, which rests entirely on sensation. (2 0 7)

"7 The ~entence in which this claim oc("urs is extremely complicated, Pluhar has t.ried to help " , b . I ' I t at we wOllld by rearranging its order fairly radlcaIly. TI~e quoted passage . egms Jy S~Yl~~,.. I 'I' VC1'have no distinction between the mechamsm and the technic 01 natllle, \\,l1e IIllS{ , stand nicht von del' Art, dall cr vom Allgemeinem zllm llcsondern gehcn mutl. lind die, Urteilskraft also in Anschung des Besondern kcillC Zweckmalligkeit erkennen, 1IIUh!ll.'!f":', beslitnmen.de lhteile fallen. kann, ohne ein allgemeines Gcsctz zu hahen ,wonlllter SIC .JentS sub~lUnierien kilnn,," (my emphasis}.

. ' 38 The most intluential contemporalY accounts skeptical of such a connection are Jt",lS . Knlenkampfr, Kant, Logik de" ;;sthrtiJ,,'hen U11eil, (Frankf11rt am M: Kostenn
AVOIDING C;,ERMAN IDEALISM

In section 8 Kant calls OUl- aesthetic sensibility the "taste of reflection" to distinguish it from a mere taste of sense, and to emphasize further the role ofourintellectual activity in the possibility of such pleasure (beyond, that is, some sort of passive "activation" of the Hnderstanding and the imagination) he notes that this capacity, taste. can be culLivated, indeed, in section 32, that taste is precisely what stands most in need of examples regarding what has enjoyed the longest-lasting approval in the course of cultural progress in orcler that it will not become uncouth aRain ... and taste needs Ihis because its judgments cannot be determined by concepts and precepts. (28:~)

This "taste" is defined in seclioll '10 "as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation universally communicable without mediation by a cOllcept" and that "taste is ou!" ability to judge a priori the communicability of the feelings that (without mediation by a concept) are connected with a given presenlation" (29!)-6). Kant is undoubtedly very aware that by linking in this way aesthetic experience and the possibility of a distinct pleasure in the beaut.iful to some sort of reflective awareness of natural purposiveness, however non-standard and indeterminate such an awareness, he is in danger of intellectualizing the experience again (the "we get out of nature what we put there" model), or of making it very hard to see how, without a concept, the normative or common significance of sllch a vague appreciating can he preserved. 39 As noted, in addressing these concerns, he suggests that such a reflecting activity is not based on the a priori needs of reason, nor on a putative common "content," but is already and originally oriented from a "common sense," as if in appreciating the beautiful we already are appreciating its Shareability. This "sense" is a power tojudge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else's way of representing, in OI'Clcr as it were. to compare our own judgment with human reason in gent'lal, and thlls escape the illusion that arises from the case of mistaking subjective and private conditions for objective ones. (293) wI)' clear in 110. 9, at p. ~ t 8, insisting that it is most definitelv not "intellectually, through cOllsciot1snes~ of the- illtentional activity by which we bring ;hese powers into play" that we "become consciolls, in a judgment of taste, of a reciprocal subjective hannollY between the cognith'e powers," I discu'S this passage in "Significance of Taste."

39 He makes his concerns

:~~

KANT VERSUS HEGEL Most famously, these considerations are concentrated In the passage Kant calls "the key to the critique of taste," section 9, where the question is "whether in a judgment of taste the feeling of pleasure precedes the judging ofthe object, or the judging precedes the pleasure," and the answer, causing great difliculty to many commentators, but consistent with the directiol) Hegel is pursuing, is the latter. That section is quite a tangle, and although a detailed consideration of its claims is central for the direction Hegel is suggesting, I want to conclude with a more general consideration of the issues Kant himself raises with these claims about the role of reflective activity in our appreciation of the beautifu1. 40

v The point at issue is the suggestion of a "reflecting" activity that is not the conceiving of a content, but an activity alreaciy engaged in the taking up of a manifold and so not checked by some externally received content, a thinking 01' "ability to judge a priori the communicability of the feclings that (without mediation by a concept) are connected with a given presentation," which thinking somehow reveals this "a priori communicability" of om feelings and so the normative status of the experience of the bealllifili. According to Kant, "we have a merely aesthetic power ofjudgment, an ability to judgeJimnswithout using concepts and to feel in the merejudging of these forms a liking that we also make a rule for everyone, though ourjudgment is not based on an interest and also gives rise to none" (3°0; 167). Since this sort of reflective appreciating is not an application of a concept, nor a response necessitated 01' directed by some sensory impingemcnt, nor a postulated ideal, Hegel claims it is like a selforienting in relation to nature and others,41 or a kind of "intellectual intuition," intelleclllal be-

':J-

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM cause actively established, and intuiting because not the projection of an ideal, but an experience, an orienting "ill" an f'xperience. 42 I have already noted where, in the reading of Kant implied by Hegel's remarks, the controversial points of interpretation lie. They mostly have to do with the relation between rdlective judgment and aesthetic experience itself, and each would require an extensive separate discussion. It is also true that the general significance or aesthetic experience for the "system" problem so important to later Idealists, or the way in which the possibility of universally valid aesthetic judgments implies a possible, comprehensive account of morally free agents, mechanically moving matter, living beings, and scientific systems, is only suggested by this emphasis 011 the priority and centrality of such a reflective self-orienting, and its a priori principle, purposiveness, for any and all of these accounts. In the KU, ofcollrse, the specific "systematic" problem is the link between aesthetic and teleological judgments, and here again, Hegel only makes a suggestion: that the Kantian "sellse" of purposiveness required in both appreciating and estimating is not the postulation of an idea that we "require" in our experiene
its~lf [Jrei und doch VQn"elbsl gesetzlll/(i/1ig]," pp. 40 As noted, the interpretive problem stems from those passa~es, as insect. VII of the (lubIisherllntroduction, or at p. 224 ofthc tirst, whcl'c Kant seems to claim thatjllc!gments of taste are based on a sensation, which is itselfjust "brought about" [bewiIM] h)' thc harm 011)' of faculties. What I am suggesting is that Kant is not claiming that this harmony simply causes a pleasure, nor that it is "through" or by means of pleasure that we attend to this harmony, but that it is in appreciating such a hannon), as purposive that WI" fl"l"i p\l"a.;ure. This implics that without "taste," a certain hallllonious play could occur without pleasure in the beautiful, or could be appreciated onl)' as the agreeable. I tI)' to defend thi" reading independently in "Significance of Taste." . 41 When, in the "General Comment" after no. 22. Kant defines taste as "an ability tojlldge an ohject in reference to the free lawfulness of the imagination," he calls the activily of the imaginatioll "prnductive and self-active [sdbsttatigJ." or sa),s that it is "free and lawful of

240-1:

see Makkreel.ima/{inatio1/. and InlnjJ/'e-

taflOn, ch. 8, for a discussion of the hermeneutical aspects of such an "orientational" view of

reflective judgments. Cf. also Ca)'!(ill's remarks in A,i 0/ J1Ulgmenl, eh ..?' As l1otl"d e,lrliel~ Hegel would not agree with the reliance on an indetelluinate "common sense" to explain such common orientation and claims to be ahle to provide detemlinate content to such ~om.m::n orientation, a topic that would lead to his theo!}' of conceptual change and to his logIC: Cf. atso Zammito's discus.,inn of this "orientational" issue, Grne,,;.•, pp. 237 tf., e~peC1ally on the relevance of Kant's "Was hei[\t: sich im Denken orientieren" essay. 411 10 quote Hegel, "Kallt himselfl~cogl1izpd ill the bmllliful al1 illllliliol1 olher lilall the "enSUo/H. He characterized the substratum of nature as intelligible, recoRni7.ed it to he rational and identical with all reason. and klww that cognition in which concept and intuition are separated was sllbjective, finite eognitioll, a phenomenal co!(nition" (my emphasis) GuH( p. 343; J
KANT VERSUS HEGEL

AVOIDING GERMAN IDEALISM

other examples of a capacity for judgment for which no nIle can be given, this reflective activity is always indcterminate. 43 It yields no detenninate concept or concepts of purposiveness in this aspect or that,just an orienting and pleasing "sense." He does say in the Solution to the Antinomy of Taste that "a judgment of taste must refer to some concept or other," but this concept is "intrinsically indeterminate and inadequate for cognition" and is only the "concept of a general basis of nature's subjective purposiveness for our power of judgment" and may be considered the concept of the "super-

tion in the Kantian sense being a presentation of a concept in intuition"

sensible substrate of humanity" (34 0 ). It is in commenting on such passages that Hegel objects to this "merely negative" conception of the supersensible and insists that Kant does no! appreciate his own doctrine, that Kant does not recognize that as beauty, it [the supersensuous] is pOSItive, it is intuited, or, to use his own language, it is given in experience. Nor does he see the supersensuous, the intelligihle substratum of nature without and within us, the thing in itself ... is at least superficially known when the principle of beauty is given an exposition as the identity of nature and freedom, (88-9)

Because, supposedly, Kant does not sec a way of integrating what his exposition required into the standard transcendental Idealist picture, he retreats, and claims that the supersensuous, insofar as it is the principle of the aesthetic, is unknowable; and the beautiful turns into something strictly finite and subjective because it is only connected with the human cognitive faculty and a harmonious play of its variolls powers. (88)

Exactly as one might expect, Hegel is much morc interested in that side of Kant's exposition of aesthetic experience that does allow for the possibility of some reflective grasp of determinacy, the expression of aesthetic ideas in fine art. 44 In Kant's presentation, although the "expression" of Juliet'S love or Iago's jealousy allows for a great deal more det.erminate "play" in our "ret1ective powers," the possibility is still understood on an analogy with natural beauty and so an indeterminate play of such reflection is still all that is allowed. The aesthetic idea remains a representation of the imagination for which 110 conceptual exposition or definition can be gi~en, just as an idea of reason is one for which no demonstration can be given, "demonstra43 Cf. the claim at p, 340, '14 Cf. the discussion in no, 49, pp, ~P4 tf.

(87)' Hegel goes very far in sUl1lming up what he thinks can be derived from the implications of Kant's case, contra Kant's official line: "As if the aesthetic idea did not have its exposition in the Idea of Reason, and the Idea of Reason did not have its demonstration in beauty" (87). At this point, such a claim remains a promissory note, a promise to be able to show that certain sorts of rational "self-detcrminations" in relation to the contents of experienCt~ are, in their various determinate forms (which we might imagine as the categorics of Hegel's Logic), not "empty forms" (but the famous "concrete universals") ,'IS any more than aesthetic ideas or organic wholes are empty f(XlllS or stll~iective regulations. This promise already suggests the problems we appear headed toward: (i) an extreme coherentism, a network of cat(;gories and principles "unchecked" by intuitions or the pure forms of inluition because ollr intellect itself is already, supposedly intuitive, and (ii) how to explain the detemlinacy in sllch selfdetermination if we take the idea of such an "unboundedness of the conceptual" seriously. These are serious problems, still "cty much with us in allY of the many forms of philosophy that could be called post-Kantian hy virtue of a common rejection of any comprehensive empiricism or "absolute" l'ealism or naturalism. My point ill this chapter has been to show how Hegel must have been reading the Critique offudgment in order to sec such a promise implied in our capacity to appreciate the beautiful and to estimate lite, and to suggest that his reading has a great deal to be said for it. 45 There is an interesting discllssion "rtlle rdation between the Kantian notion of "aesthetic object" and Hegel's "ronnete ttllivn"ll" ill G, Wohlfahrt, J)cr "/,ekul([.tive Sn/z: Bnne/Rungen d£1' Sj)ekulatinn /)f.i Hegel (Berlin: de (;rllyter, 19B I ),