Houlgate, Stephen. “G.W.F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. Eds. Solomon, Robert C. and David Sherman, 2003. 8-29. Print.
Hegel’s Relation to Kant
It was, after all, Kant who first argued, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, second edition 1787), that categories allow us to conceive as an object that which we perceive through he senses and that such categories are therefore the necessary conditions of objective experience.
Kants merits particular praise from Hegel, however, for noting the special role categories play in lending objectivity to our perceptions. Categories for Kant (as later for Hegel) are what permit us to say of what we see, hear and touch, not just that it is a collection of sensations (colors, sounds, and tactile impressions) but that it is a real object with identifiable properties and of measurable size standing in causal relations with other similar objects.
Categories thus constitute the conditions of the possibility of experience because “only by means of them can any object of experience be thought at all.”
Kant’s other great insight, in Hegel’s view, is that the fundamental general categories, through which what we preceive “become[s] an object for me,” are a priori concepts generated “spontaneously” and independently by pure thought.
In other words, Kant saw (as Hegel himself puts it), that “the thought-determinations have their source in the I (Ich)” and in the I alone.
Categories, such as “reality,” “quantity,” “substance,” and “cause” are thus not abstracted from what is given to the senses in the manner of empirical concepts: we do not first encounter a variety of colors and sounds, gradually notice that they all have in common the quality of being “real,” and then formulate the general concept of “reality” as we formulate (or at least might be said to formulate) the empirical concept “red” by comparing and contrasting the various shades of red that we see. Rather, the category of “reality” is produced spontaneously and independently by thought and then employed to understand as real the red that is given to us.
In the area of theoretical philosophy, however, one of the Kantian ideas that most impressed Hegel is clearly this claim that “the original identity of the ‘I’ within thinking (the transcendental unity of self-consciousness) [constitutes] the determinate ground of the concepts of the understanding.” Hegel will take up this idea and make it the cornerstone (albeit in an amended form) of his whole philosophy.
One important difference between Kant and Hegel is that Hegel in his lectures on the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy argues —contra Kant— that the categories are not all produced at the same time by thought or employed together in every period of history. Kant understands the categories discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason to be the universal conditions of the possibility of objective experience for any rational being endowed with a discursive, finite intellect. For Hegel, by contrast, human thought generates the basic categories over a period of time, so they are not all to be found —or at least not all given the same prominence— in every epoch of history or in every culture. Consequently, although Hegel believes that all the catgories discussed in the Logic will be familiar to the inhabitants of our post-reformation Western world, they would not necessarily all be familiar to ancient Egyptians or Greeks. Yet Hegel agrees with Kant that the source of the categories is always and only the spontaneous activity of pure thought itself. Thought certainly produces its categories in response to changing situations, but the categories with which it responds are wholly its own and a priori.
The purpose of the Logic is not just to describe and analyze how we understand categories in everyday life but to determine how they are supposed to be understood, how they are to be understood in truth.
Hegel thus will not describe the way concepts operate in concrete speech situations or given language games (in the manner of J.L. Austin or Wittgenstein), nor will he examine the way concepts operate in given texts (in the manner of Derrida). Such descriptions may well reveal that we do not actually understand and employ concepts as we imagine we do. But as descriptions of the way concepts happen to be used in given verbal or textual practices, they would not be able to establish how concepts should be understood (13).
How then is Hegel to proceed in his task? The way forward is indicated by Kant. If, as Kant argues, the categories have their source in and are generated by pure thought alone, then pure thought alone must determine how those categories are properly to be conceived (just as it must explain our ordinary understanding of the categories, which may or may not overlap with the proper understanding). The way to determine the proper understanding of the categories is thus to consider how pure thought itself requires categories to be conceived. This is what Hegel will endeavor to do in the Logic: that text will seek to determine which categories are necessitated by, and so are inherent in, thought, as well as the form that these categories must take. In this way, it will set up a standard —the proper understanding of the categories— in relation to which we can determine to what extent our ordinary understanding is rational and appropriate.
Hegel’s Logic will thus not only clarify the categories of thought for thought but also offer a thorough critique of our ordinary conception of them to the extent that the conception falls short of what the Logic reveals them to be (14).