I think that debates about Hegel's attitude towards Kant really ought to be wary of the distinction between the young, Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel's attitude, and the older Science Of Logic/Encyclopedia Hegel's attitude. The young Hegel I see as being sympathetic to Kant, but ultimately wanting to beat Kant by letting "experience speak for itself", as opposed to developing a Kantian epistemology (which IMO the young Hegel saw as ultimately a glorified Lockean epistemology, which IMO it appears as in the first edition of the Critique) whereas the old Hegel is concerned with sublating what he saw as correct in Kant's critical philosophy, namely, Kant's discussions of teleology in the Critique of Judgment.

As for my own awareness of Kant, I think that I am rather well acquainted with the content of his doctrines, but ignorant of the material itself. (I've finished reading the Phenomenology, but haven't completed a solid reading of the Critique of Pure Reason itself.) My understanding of Kant is admittedly abstract, but I do see Kant (and his philosophical predecessor) Hume as being prototypes for the kinds of thinking we see alive in cognitive science today. 

Tracing out the details of how Hegel parts with, yet also preserves aspects of Kantian doctrine is an ongoing battle which I think we readers of Hegel will never reach a satisfying grasp of, but we shouldn't be expected to I don't think, because I don't even think Hegel himself saw his own attitudes toward Kant as conclusive, though he does write confidently about this or that aspect of Kant's thought as correct or incorrect across many different passages. I think that if we read Hegel in a Hegelian spirit, we should never forget this particular one of his many mantras "The battle of Reason is to overcome the contradictions to which the Understanding has subjected everything." Our contemporary understanding of Hegel, IMO, is by Hegel's own lights forever incomplete and unsatisfying. That doesn't mean that a respectful reading is impossible, though it does mean that understanding the differences between Kant and Hegel will remain for us an "ongoing battle."

-Chuck 

On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 7:34 AM, stephen theron stephentheron@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Hello Bruce,

Thanks for yours. Just now, still pursuing how Hegel gets from mechanism and chemism via teleology to the Idea, I have had to have recourse to McTaggart´s commentary on the Logic, onlt to find that he too is sceptical here. his solution is to reject the category of chemism altogether in favour of another way he outlines of getting from Mechanism to Teleology which I can't quite reproduce here and now. he thinks in fact that one of the categories of chemism is simply the same as one of those of mechanism which, he points out, is against the "rule", so to say, of the dialectic. his vire alñso is that "means" and "end" are here both used quite differently from as in "ordinary" language. In particular, any thought of value in this connection gets quite excluded.

Here you might have your connection with the prqactical, except that i don't quite agree with Mctaggart, I almost think, on this. Namely, I think that for Hegel value is atomatically, or rather finally, totally absorbed in the "religious" or metaphysical, as it should be, which thus then, all the same, itself inevitably becomes "the Good". It is actually the same in Aquinas. the moral good or bonum honestum.is only called good by courtesy as leading to or necessary for obtaining the End, which has to be just one, McTaggart agrees.

So, "the primacy of the practical". Well, just now I can onoly say, as what impresses me, is that in Logic the End is treated after the Subjective Notion and formal logic and the means and end complex is at least, theoretically, about the practical. Similarly will or the good as a category is put as an advance (it comes after) "cognition proper", the Idea being the synthesis of the two and of everything, in short. We can perhaps assume, I don't know, that Kant's Critique of Judgment comes after the other two critiques as fulfilling and not merely as an afterthought. Can we? I am not as engaged with Kant as I might be. Would you say the Critique of Judgment answers the criticism that Kant divorces practical reason ("nothing but the will")  from truth. We get "postulates", with which we can't "get on". Yet this itself can be transformed into a theoretical argument, given certain premises, such as Hegel, but not I think Kant(?), supplies. My feeling is almost that Hegel rather prefers Hume. But of course he uses and has profited from his study of Kant.

But you show me I miss something here, when you cite Kant as saying "Everything gravitates to the practical" (cp. Scotus: theology is a practical science) and you say the fecundity of Hegel's logic draws upon the fecundity of practical reason. I owuld appreciate your illustrating that a bit more. You seem to imply that theoretical reason is not self-thinking thought, though this is surely wrong if related to how that phrase first appears in Aristotle (as hegel cites)? Or you transfer its sense? yet Hegel himself uses practical metaphors to describe theoretical activity (grinding and pounding concepts) and the whole Logic is aimed at superseding, in Aufhebung, the definatory opposition of these two, theory and practice (whereas Kant seems rather to have over-stressed them, saying that practical reason is a separate faculty, I think he says, whereas Aquinas brings out how practical thinking is the same unitary reason but, on occasion, dedicated to a work (ordinata ad opus). Only so, incidentally, can philosophers hope to be kings, i would say!

I wonder how you make out that becoming is practical? Well, it might be. But then there would be no puzzle about it and no more Hegelian logic, one might think. Two reasons? No. Except for Kantians maybe.

For all these "intellectualists", such as myself, Hegel, Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz maybe, we have "realised end"., end as per se realised, which certainly puts the business of the world in a place of subordination

 hegel says that will make you much happier and that is certainly a practical statement, or isn't it? Isn't it rather a theor about praxis. The latter gets virtually nullified, as he also says.

Well, we obviously start from different presuppositions, as is normal and natural. I have never greatly cared for Kant, though I most admire his conception of a Kingdom of Ends, which seems almost to anticipate the whole of Hegelianism after all, though Hegel shows that these Ends must reduce to just one, the End, with which any rational subject is identical ("each to count for all and none for less than all": you can count for this only if you are this. Otherwise we are back to Kantian play-acting, if you'll excuse plain speaking).

I suppose it's clear that Kant "is not my cup of tea", as Elizabeth Anscombe used to say, though this could be used as an attempt to excuse a possible consequent ignorance. So I'm ready for further reading, instruction etc. and am anyway not averse to varying brands of tea.

Happy New Year!

Stephen.

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To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
From: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 14:55:34 -0500

Subject: Re: [hegel] Hegel vs. Kant, Christmas 2014

 

Hello Stephen,

Thanks for your typically generous reply.

I am away from my library. But in regard to Hegel and skepticism, there is a book on this topic by a fellow who has also written a book on the Phenomenology. perhaps entitled _Hegel's Idea of a  Phenomenology_. And also a book on Kant and Skepticism. I cannot recall his name, alas. What I recall about the first is that Hegel underlines his preference for the early, radical, Greek skepticism, as opposed to the moderate /mitigated skepticism of the modern era.

Care to say a bit more about Hegel and the primacy of the practical?

The phrase is Kant's, as found in the second critique. It is a teleological principle, in fact *the* teleological principle. The triadic relation of the three critiques is a extension of this primacy-- keep that in mind if you're about to reread the Critique of Judgment. Somewhere Kant says "Everything gravitates to the practical." Whereas Hegel begins with priority of the practical insofar as the fecundity of his logic draws upon the fecundity of Kant's practical reason (and Aristotle's), which actualizes the good. Whereas in Kant the fecundity of practical reason, an instance of self-thinking thought, is contrasted to the receptivity of theoretical reason which cognizes a given object, as opposed to giving rise to it. But the case that practical reason is more powerful, for being generative, and also epitomizes freedom, is crucial to its telic primacy. 

The Encyclopedia begins with the primacy of the practical (the fecundity of becoming) and also concludes with the same insofar as the very last triad reiterates the reunification of the two reasons: The true > the good > the absolute. (Unfortunately, I don't have the text with me.)

Are there other points in Hegel where we find the triad of the true > the good > the absolute?
Or 1) knowing the true > 3) actualizing the good > and 3) some other stage?

Bruce

PS It was Michael Forster who wrote that book on Hegel & Skepticism.

On Sat, Dec 27, 2014 at 3:10 PM, stephen theron stephentheron@... [hegel] <hegel@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

 

Thanks Bruce,
 
Something fresh here! I am due for a reading of the Critique of Judgment, so as to see just how Hegel thinks Kant has restored the Inner Design he, Hegel, attributes, rightly I generally think, to Aristotle. "The primacy of Practice", that certainly comes out in Hegel. I see it as an interpretation of Aristotle's almost throwaway statement that the conclusion of the/a practical syllogism is an action. This is something some minds just won't take seriously. Hegel seems to play on the word con-clude to this end, which of course means "closes" (claudere), Schlüss. Quite how this gets us to teleology's transcendence of its own intrinsic finitude, in favour of the Idea I am wrestling with just during these weeks. Mechanism and Chemism seem to me more or less to cover, so to say, the whole idea of a potential or pre-existing matter upon which anything and everything goes to work. Where this leaves Kant would be in part a historical question. I think Paul is right about their general relation, that of Hegel to the Kantian heritage I mean.
 
Just for the record, a hobby horse in case of interest, I think the Kant Hegel cleavage goes back between that between Jesuits and Dominicans culminating in the papal commission of 1607 which or who, rather, refused to decide between them on the question of human freedom and divine "grace", read the cunning of reason or realised end. The Dominicans, including Thomas Aquinas three centuries before, or the Bible(!), were much more like the Calvinists, whereas the Jesuits, as good renaissance humanists, stood out for human freedom in the face of absolute divine claims. The position is that the Absolute, which Hegel identifies as the absolute, percipient and active Idea, makes our actions free, when they are that. We don't so to say clash on the same level, which you end up thinking if you take the drama of the inspired narratives too literally and which leads, eventually, in my view, to modern atherism. As Sartre put it, "Either God exists or man does". This is both wrong and right. One can say either that man does not exist because he is absorbed in God or that God does not exist because existence as a predicate is unworthy of God (Hegel says this latter).
 
Needless to say, this has not much to do with today's Jesuits (well, here and there maybe...). But there lies the root, I believe, of the modern atheist movement, and that's why it can be interpreted as the rejection of a finite notion of God without finding another one, which is quite proper so far, in my particular view. We don't anyhow need to talk much of God as Eckhart made clear long agao and anyway the Jews were always against it, the naming, in some important way. But Hegel certainly talks about God and quite functionally. Re Nietzsche, one could suspect he lived too much in God to countenance any view of God.
 
Hegel, by the way, goes out of his way to praise scepticism, here and there, does he not?
 
Stephen.
 

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To: hegel@yahoogroups.com
From: hegel@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 08:24:52 -0500
Subject: Re: [hegel] Hegel vs. Kant, Christmas 2014

 

Hello Paul and Stephen

Another way of putting this distinction: In Kant God arrives as a component of systematic reason. In the Critique of Pure Reason, as an extension of the legitimate function of reason, set out in second half of the appendix to the Dialectic. Then in the Critique of Practical Reason, as a function of the primacy of practice, the primacy that guides the systematic reunification of the two reasons (knowledge & practice.) Similarly in the Critique of Judgment.

God is honored insofar as Kant's entire system gravitates towards theology, and concludes with theology, but on the other hand, God arrives as functional, on behalf of systematics, the unification of reason. 

Whereas Hegel is keen on the notion of a climactic direct apprehension of God-- something like that.

That said, I don't know much about the current history of academic philosophy, but I doubt that it is the same epic battle that Hegel supposed during his lifetime. If there is a predominant skepticism that is opposed to Hegel's confidence, comparable to Kant's skepticism concerning the thing in itself, I suspect that it has more to do with Nietzsche than Kant. (There is a book by Houlgate that takes up this confrontation.)

Tho there is a direct lineage here: Kant's skepticism > Schopenhauer's skepticism > Nietzsche. But the latter's drastic global skepticism is hardly Kant's.

Bruce

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