Post-Neo-Kantian Idealism

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There is no doubt that Hans-Ludwig Ollig’s orienting work on neo-Kantianism in the 1980s made a considerable contribution to the revival of neo-Kantianism  [1–3]. At the time, neo-Kantianism seemed always forgotten. Ollig also coined the term “neo neo-Kantianism” [1. S. 94 ff.], referring to philosophers such as Rudolf Zocher, Wolfgang Cramer, and Hans Wagner. Werner Flach, himself a philosopher who could be categorized in terms of Ollig as a neo neo-Kantian, rightly criticized this [4. S. 29 f.]. After all, in its appropriation of neo-Kantianism, transcendental philosophy after 1945 certainly went beyond what was present in neo-Kantianism in the fashion of a theory of principles. Not every continuation of transcendental idealism is a rebirth of neo-Kantianism.

The organizers of the special issue “Post-Neo-Kantianism,” RUDN Journal of Philosophy, seem to recognize this as according to the Call for Papers the issue will be devoted to “the problems of the revival of systematic transcendental philosophy, the study of its recent past and continuity in critical philosophy.” Concerning this recent past and continuity, among others, also the editor of the special issue, i.e. Kurt-Walter Zeidler [5; 6], and Christian Krijnen [7] could be added to the list of the philosophers mentioned. They all represent a type of “post-neo-Kantian idealism.” In the following, I scrutinize in which philosophical form post-neo-Kantian idealism has a future.

 The Future of Philosophy and Transcendental Idealism

Kant had once predicted a great future for transcendental philosophy: in the face of metaphysics and empiricism, he could only conclude that “the critical path alone is still open” [8] (Vol. III. B 884). As a rigorous science, philosophy is either transcendental idealism or it is not.

Kant’s immediate idealist successors were very enthusiastic about Kant’s transcendental revolution in philosophy. Nevertheless, Kant’s implementation of the transcendental idea failed to convince them. Whether Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, they were all convinced that Kant’s transcendental philosophy had to be brought into a form that would do justice to the claim of its own transcendental idealism.

For the neo-Kantians, at least for the two most important schools of Marburg and Southwest Germany, the same applies ceteris paribus. They conceive of philosophy as the philosophy of the determinants of human behavior, i.e., to put in the terminology of the Southwest Germans, the philosophy of values, or to articulate it in terms of the Marburg school exponent Ernst Cassirer, the philosophy of symbolic forms, or the doctrine of ideas, to use a term used across the schools. As a comprehensive philosophy of such determinants, philosophy proves to be a philosophy of culture: philosophy develops the concept of the foundations of culture. This conception of philosophy is not least the result of an appropriation of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, aiming at its renewal to overcome the philosophical problems the neo-Kantians were facing in their time.

According to the neo-Kantians, philosophy is a science of foundations. In this respect, neo-Kantianism takes up the original concern of metaphysics to determine the foundations of the human understanding of the self and the world. From the point of view of a history of philosophical problems, Plato should be mentioned here in the first place. The neo-Kantians in particular have dealt extensively with Plato’s philosophy. They learned from Plato that philosophy is idealism. According to the neo-Kantians, however, Plato’s conception of the realm of ideas was inadequate. In the background of Plato’s theory of ideas is a metaphysics of the transcendent, i.e. a doctrine of supersensible beings. Logic and ontology, thought and being, are, as the neo-Kantians learned from Kant, insufficiently differentiated or related to each other.

According to the neo-Kantians, Kant’s transcendental philosophy put an end to a reification of ideas. The sphere of philosophical foundations proves to be a sphere of principles that constitute the ground of human thinking and acting. Principles are not to be understood as a kind of being but as a whole of basic determinants of validity, i.e. as conceptual (‘logical’) conditions that make the object reference of our thinking and acting possible in the first place. Generally speaking, an ontology always presupposes a logic of its object. Kant accordingly grounds cognition in the cognitive relation itself qua the whole of a priori conditions that underlie both our cognition and the objects of our cognition. Transcendental philosophy as a doctrine of principles of cognition does not find the ground of validity of cognition in a concrete contentual knowledge of objects but solely in the pervasive validity structure of cognition itself.

For the Kantian type of transcendental philosophy of the post-war period, paradigmatically for the very advanced positions of Wagner [9; 10] and Flach  [4; 11], this orientation of philosophy qua comprehensive doctrine of the principles of the validity of human performances has proven to be decisive. Although important doctrines of neo-Kantianism are adopted, they are not simply continued. Rather, transcendental philosophy is enriched by, for example, the integration of insights from Husserl’s phenomenology in Wagner and of analytical philosophy in Flach.

In short, transcendental philosophy as established by Kant has endured to this day. Hegel once said in wise foresight that the main effect of Kant’s transcendental idealism was to have awakened the awareness of the absolute inwardness of thought as the principle of objectivity; the “principle of the independence of reason, of its absolute self-sufficiency within itself, must from now on be regarded as a universal principle of philosophy and equally as one of the prejudices of our time” [12]  (§ 60 N).

Which Transcendental Philosophy?

1. As the term ‘Kantian type of transcendental philosophy’ already suggests, the development of transcendental philosophy is heterogeneous in itself. A Kantian type of transcendental philosophy, to take up a common and very general phrase, conceives of subjectivity as the ground or foundation of objectivity. It can thus be distinguished not only from intersubjectivity-theoretical forms of transcendental philosophy, such as those known from Karl-Otto Apel’s [13] or Jürgen Habermas’ [14], but also from the subjectivity-theoretical transcendental philosophy founded and elaborated by Edmund Husserl as phenomenology. Husserl’s phenomenology developed into a competitor of a Kantian type of transcendental philosophy. Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology undoubtedly both conceive of subjectivity as the foundation of objectivity, i.e. they each hold on to the ‘inwardness of thought’ in their own way. But where do they separate? Phenomenological or critical idealism?

Apart from occasional remarks by the masters themselves, the question of the appropriate profile of transcendental philosophy was initially tackled in the works of disciples like Friedrich Kreis [15] and Rudolf Zocher [16] on the part of southwest German neo-Kantianism and Eugen Fink [17] from the ranks of phenomenologists. After 1945, there were still isolated continuations of the discussion, albeit in a completely different intellectual and philosophical climate [4; 9; 11; 18–24]. Recently, the question has enjoyed renewed attention [25–28].

As far as a systematic evaluation is concerned, a figure of thought can be identified from Kant and the neo-Kantians right up to contemporary types of Kantian transcendental philosophy, on which the programmatic foundational deficit of phenomenology can be hung. On the one hand, phenomenological and critical idealism, with Kant, conceive of objectivity as founded in subjectivity. On the other hand, it is crucial for an adequate determination of the positions within this idealist camp how the constitution of objectivity through subjectivity is conceived of. In contrast to Kant, for Husserl, it amounts to a primacy of the noetic over the noematic dimension. This primacy has motivated the development of phenomenology from Brentano to Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and others. Husserl’s phenomenology is a science of activities. Thus it is of the essence to grasp those noeses, as the subjective ‘origins’, that make up the foundation of objective achievements. The determinations and the being of real objects must always be understood from the performance of actual acts of thought. In comparison to Kant and his Kantian successors, Husserl therefore reverses fundamental foundational relations [29; 30].

Kant leads the transcendental cognition of knowledge back to a whole of grounds (reasons) of validity. These grounds can be identified and demonstrated by reflecting on the cognitive relationship itself. The cognitive relationship is what underlies cognition and, in this comprehensive sense, characterizes its subjectivity. Subjectivity is the ground of the validity of any objectivity as it is the objective (objectivity enabling) condition for the possibility of cognition and its objects.

Although objectivity is from the outset related to the condition of subjectivity, it is already apparent in Kant that a philosophical justification of knowledge in terms of its subjectivity involves two themes that mutually imply each other intra-gnoseologically, i.e. within transcendental idealism. It concerns the theme of objectivity in the sense of an ‘analysis of the object’ (Gegenstandsanalyse, the noematic dimension) and that of subjectivity in the sense of an ‘analysis of the act’ (Aktanalyse, the noetic dimension).

The objective-logical aspect of cognition concerns ‘synthesis’ as a relationship between pure understanding and pure sensibility. Their cooperation constitutes the object of cognition. It transpires that concerning its form or objectivity, the object of cognition is constituted by rules, namely by rules of thought. This objective-logical issue also contains a subjective-logical issue, for Kant addresses the validity-functional accomplishment of the constitution of the object by “powers of cognition” (Erkenntniskräfte), that is to say, that he considers “understanding” (Verstand) “from a subjective point of view” [8] (Vol. IV. A XVI f.). The subjective-logical theme of cognition concerns knowledge as a performance (Vollzug), and therefore not the objectivity of the object but the directedness of thought (thinking) towards the object. Here, the subject proves to be the intentional ground of cognition. This subjective-logical dimension is for Kant only of secondary interest. Accordingly, it plays a significantly stronger role in the first edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft than in the second.

Kant is not so much interested in determining the structure of the performance of cognition but all the more in justifying the objective validity of the concepts that govern this performance as the cognition of objects. Such concepts govern the cognizing subject. They are the foundation for the objectivity of cognition. Consequently, Kant designates the so-called objective deduction, which is the deduction that ought to demonstrate their validity, as “essential” for his task [8] (Vol. IV. A XVI, 111, 128). The reason being that the intentional, subjective activity is not to be performed arbitrary but must be objective (i.e. related to an object). Therefore, the performance of the subject requires the object as the instance that stands “against” (dawider) any hegemony of subjective arbitrariness [8] (Vol. IV. A 104, cf. 105). The subjective, performative dimension of cognition obtains its objective value and validity only based on the objective transcendental conditions. Without the unity that “makes up the concept of an object” [8]  (Vol. IV. A 105) anything but a concept of an object has been produced. The subjective performance of cognition by the power of ‘understanding’ presupposes objective lawfulness of judgments, whereby pure understanding itself (in the objective sense) functions as the law of synthetic unity. Kant’s consideration takes the subjective sources of cognition in their ‘transcendental quality’ and ascends from the ‘subjective’ to the ‘objective’ conditions. This consideration, however, presupposes from the start the objective conditions as the point of reference of the subjective performance. Thus the concept itself, as the factor in which the subjective ascent culminates and in which the preceding forms of synthesis are included, makes this ascent possible. The consciousness of the concept leads to the concept of the object, the subjective dimension ascent to the objective dimension: to the concept not in its function of uniting but in its function of being the concept of an object that governs the unifying performance. ‘Understanding’ in its objective meaning is the foundation for the possibility of the subjective ‚usage‘ of its powers.

Whether with a view to Heinrich Rickert’s distinction between a transcendental-logical, i.e. validity noematic, and a transcendental-psychological, i.e. validity noetic, path of epistemology [31], Wagner’s conception of validity reflection, in which the noematic validity reflection functions as the only possible foundation of a general doctrine of reflection [9] (§§ 6 f. with 29 ff.), or Flach’s connection between the self-constitution of cognition and its validity-noematic structure [4] (179 f. with 206 and 216), the objective deduction always takes priority over a subjective deduction because the latter is only possible based on the former.

2. Finally, the talk of a Kantian type transcendental philosophy allows another point to be made. It concerns Hegel’s speculative idealism, i.e. also an attempt to perfectionize Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The point is all the more obvious as none other than Wilhelm Windelband, in his later years, advocated a “renewal of Hegelianism,” [32] thus promoting the so-called Hegel renaissance in neo-Kantianism [33] (ch. 5.1) and paving the way for Rickert, whose ‘heterology’ was groundbreaking not only for southwest German neo-Kantianism but also for the Kantian type of transcendental philosophy of the post-war period.

The studies of the early Flach, which were based on Wagner’s doctrine of reflection, set the tone for the debate on Rickert’s heterology after 1945. They also reveal how the principle of dialectics is integrated into the framework of transcendental philosophy, following, so to speak, Windelband’s critical dictum that despite all renewal of Hegelianism “dialectics as a whole” should not function as the “method of philosophy” [32. S. 288]. Although in his conception of transcendental philosophy, Wagner integrates essential aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, the perspective of Kantian philosophy serves as the guideline. He develops a transcendental form of idealism, not to a Hegelian, speculative form. The principle of dialectics therefore receives a different function and significance in Wagner, and subsequently also in Flach, than in Hegel. It does not function as the method of philosophy par excellence but is methodically narrowed to that principle which is responsible for the “relations of justification in the realm of concepts (Begründungsverhältnisse im Bereich der Begriffe)” as Wagner expresses himself [9. S. 118], or the “justification in the determination (Fundierung in der Bestimmung)” as Flach says in his late epistemology [4. S. 285, 288] (cf. ch. 3.1).

The debate thus concerns not least the method of philosophy and therefore the peculiarity of idealism, i.e., philosophy as transcendental or speculative idealism. Scholars usually treat this problem in such a way that the structure of the origin of thought is in question: is the origin to be conceived of heterothetically, as in Rickert, or negation-theoretically, as in Hegel?

The protagonists of a Kantian type of transcendental philosophy essentially reject Hegel’s speculative conceptual development and instead orient themselves primarily towards Kant’s fashion of thinking in terms of correlations. Nevertheless, the label ‘Kantian type of transcendental philosophy’ suggests that Hegel’s philosophy can also be interpreted as transcendental philosophy. Insofar as Kant’s transcendental revolution of philosophy to conceive of objectivity as grounded in subjectivity is unavoidable for Hegel and Hegel’s philosophy is oriented from the beginning towards the perfection of what Kant achieved in his project of  ‘self-knowledge of reason’, this is the case.

However, Hegel not only treats “critical philosophy” as one of the (inadequate) “attitudes of thought to objectivity” [12] (vol. 20, §§ 40 ff.) and harshly criticizes Kant’s and Fichte’s “subjective” idealism already in the “Introduction” to his Logic [12] (vol. 21. S. 31, cf. S. 29–31, 35), but it is precisely Hegel’s radicalization of the critical method of philosophy and the architectonics of reason that, from the perspective of a doctrine of principles, mark serious modifications of Kant’s philosophy. They make it problematic to determine Hegel’s philosophy as transcendental philosophy and apply the historically more comprehensive distinction between a Kantian and a Hegelian type of transcendental philosophy. Regardless of this, both types of philosophy are validity-reflective idealism (and therefore not metaphysics or ontology). The adjective ‘validity-reflective’ thus includes Hegel’s speculative method. Although Hegel’s speculative idealism is a radicalization of a Kantian transcendental reflection, it is in any case ‘immanent deduction’ and thus a reflection of meaning or validity qua meaning or validity that renders cognition explicit in terms of its principles and does so in a process of a continuous justification. Although the term ‘speculative’ creates no less confusion than ‘idealism’, the distinction between transcendental idealism and speculative idealism might be the most accurate, even if it levels out the differences to the original doctrines that have arisen in the course of their further development by later generations.

Hegel’s radicalization of Kant’s transcendental philosophy modifies transcendental philosophy methodically and architecturally in such a fundamental way that it leads to a different form of idealism. Yet it is important to note that Hegel’s transformation does not pass by Kant but goes through him. It leads Hegel not to a speculative transcendental philosophy but to speculative idealism.

In the following, I want to scrutinize an aspect of Hegel’s modification that, even though grounding objectivity or validity in subjectivity is a fundamental characteristic of idealism, leads to a fundamental break with transcendental philosophy. It indicates the misery of transcendental philosophy.

The Formalism of Transcendental Philosophy

1. The aspect in question is that of formalism. Powerfully, Hegel accused Kant’s moral philosophy, like his transcendental philosophy in general, of formalism [34]. The strategy of Kant’s defenders consists primarily in showing that and how the categorical imperative determines the content of the moral will, and hence that it is certainly not merely formal but essentially relates to content. This defense, however, is itself based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegel’s criticism. Hegel does not at all deny that according to Kant the categorical imperative relates to content. Rather, he denies the legitimacy of this relatedness.

What is at issue here is the meaning of Sittlichkeit (i.e. the facticity of freedom) itself. Kant’s relating of the categorical imperative to content turns out not to be the solution but the problem. The general point of Hegel’s criticism is that Kant’s conception of morality hinders it nolens volens from comprehending the existence (Dasein) of freedom; seen conceptually, there emerges no existence, no realization, no actualization of freedom. Due to its abstractness or formalism, Kant’s conception of the good misses, as Hegel says, a “principle of determination” [12] (vol. 20.  § 508). Kant’s transcendental philosophy misses exactly the methodical moment – decisive for Hegel’s speculative idealism, sublating any externality between oppositions – that is the ‘realization of the concept’ (by moments intrinsically belonging to the concept itself: universality, particularity, and singularity). For this reason, ‘form’ and ‘content’ (‘matter’) remain opposed to each other externally.

Such formalism is the Achilles heel of transcendental philosophy. Nota bene: Hegel’s reproach of formalism in no way falls prey to the reproach that forms are merely empty shells, a reproach that is repeatedly brought up against a Kantian type of transcendental philosophy. This reproach fails to recognize the content-logical character of principles understood in transcendental philosophy as ‘conditions of the possibility’. In contrast, the reproach of formalism makes sense as a methodical problem of transcendental philosophy, a philosophy that addresses the conditions of the possibility of the concrete. Formalism should not be understood in a crude sense, which would be completely contrary to the idea of ‘making the concrete possible.’ Rather, it concerns a sublimated formalism that addresses the correlation-theoretical constitution of transcendental philosophy itself. This sublimated formalism not only appears in various transcendental doctrines but also has a methodical reason that emerges from the form of reflection of transcendental philosophy.

2. This is why, for example, the so-called fundamental axiotic relationship (gr. ἂξioς = value) – which is supposed to be a solution for Kant’s architectonic of reason, assessed as very problematic already in early post-Kantian German idealism and also in neo-Kantianism – perishes because of its methodical profile. According to the fundamental axiotic relationship, the basic relation in the development of the system of philosophy is the triad ‘values (ideas, principles of validity, etc.) qua orientation determinants, subjects (agents) qua instances of actualizing these determinants, and culture (cultural goods)’ as the result of shaping reality by subjects guided by values’ [35]. Seen more closely, the order of the system of philosophy is organized in terms of self-formation, that is to say of self-formation of the concrete subject that as such is related to absolutely valid values: to values that are absolute because they are determinants of its own subjectivity (agency). Self-formation is conceived of by a Kantian type of transcendental philosophy as a relationship between subjectivity’ as conditional fulfillment, and objectivity’ as the unconditional task the subject is subjected to. This implies that Kant’s conception of freedom as a power of the subject to subject itself to its own causal laws of self-determination is extended to all areas of application of reason. These areas, i.e. the various spheres of culture or validity, are determined as specifications of the fundamental axiotic relationship. As a consequence, transcendental philosophy perpetuates the formalism already associated with Kant’s conception of freedom as a conception that is oriented towards the subject and its causal determination. Despite all its talk of ‘self-development’, ‘self-determination’, and ‘self-justification’, transcendental philosophy is unable to comprehend freedom as the manifestation of the One that is self-differentiated in itself and is and remains with itself in the other. Rather, the relationship of the one to the other, that is the relationship between the moments or relata of the fundamental axiotic relationship, is characterized by externality, regardless of whether in its general form or any of its specifications.

Against this, Hegel shows that freedom is a qualification already of the concept: “the concept is that which is free” [12] (vol 20. § 160; vol. 12. S. 16). That which is originally free is not a practical subject, an ‘I’, a (self)consciousness, or a value-related activity of a subject that forms itself. In contrast to transcendental philosophy, freedom is not primarily a validity-noetic qualification, a qualification of the subject. Freedom is being with itself in its other, in the first instance, being with itself of the concept in its other. Although Hegel highly praised Kant’s conception of the “original-synthetic unity of apperception” as the pre-figuration of this thought, he also sharply criticized it for its dualism [12] (vol. 12. S. 17 f.): Kant’s fundamental correlations form a merely abstract relationship. This is precisely the incriminated ‘formalism’, the issue of the missing ”principle of determination”, a principle that in Hegel is the realization of the concept through itself.

3. The fundamental axiotic relationship suffers from formalism. In methodological terms, it is the result of an external reflection, as Hegel described the form of reflection typical of transcendental philosophy. A detailed analysis of the basis of the fundamental axiotic relationship would confirm this. For the sake of the matter at hand, however, it is more interesting for now to trace the origin of formalism, as the reference to Kant’s original unity of apperception already alluded to. Regarding the form of reflection, it then becomes clear that also the concepts used by Kantian transcendental philosophy to qualify the origin of objectivity and thus the basic relationship of thought in general (such as form and content, subject and object, the one and the other) are not demonstrated in the course of a validity-functional deduction, i.e. a self-constitution of knowledge.

Even Rickert’s heterology, that is the doctrine of the origin of thought conceived of as heterothesis, suffers, again paradigmatically for transcendental philosophy, from the fact that the logical beginning of philosophy is conceived of as the origin, in Hegel’s parlance, as the ‘absolute idea’. In transcendental philosophy, the beginning as the beginning of the determination of the origin is not specifically considered [36]. As a result, and this is consistently the case in transcendental philosophy, a difference between the matter at issue and the representation of the matter remains alive. Such a difference is completely incompatible with the program of a self-constitution of knowledge. If the unity of representation and matter is broken, then the claim of philosophy to be a ‘science of the whole’ (Ganzheitswissenschaft) must remain unfulfilled. The progress of its determination does not result from the process of the self-constitution of the origin, the “advance” is not at the same time a “return to the ground.” On the contrary, it is an advance from it to logically subordinate relations of objective meaning.

The model of a layered apriori (gestufte Apriorität) is typical of transcendental philosophy in this respect. It arises from the origin of thought qua original synthetic unity and extends from the principles of the origin to the singularization of thought. Seen systematically, it is the result of an “external reflection.” Since an external reflection has its legitimate meaning only as a moment of a deeper reflection, one should say more precisely that transcendental philosophy’s model of the apriori is the result of an absolutized external reflection. Hegel’s logic of thought, in contrast, takes place in an immanent process of determination from the beginning of thought as ‘being’, via thought as ‘essence’, to the completion of the self-movement of thought in the comprehension of its movement, which is thought qua ‘absolute idea’.

4. By letting the Logic of Essence emerge from the Logic of Being, Hegel copes with the problem of introducing fundamental logical determinations merely in the mode of an external reflection. Already the beginning of the Logic of Being must develop all determinations from itself. The matter at issue (Sache) of thought is no longer different from the thought of the matter at issue. A speculative beginning is indifferent concerning such a distinction. Despite its relationism, Rickert’s transcendental philosophical conception of the beginning remains caught up in the ‘opposition of consciousness’. Hegel’s remarks at the beginning of the Logic of the Concept about Kant's doctrine of transcendental apperception [12] (vol. 12. S. 17 ff.) also apply to Rickert’s heterology, so important for transcendental philosophy.

With the development from being to essence, Hegel comes to a new conception of reflection, fundamentally different from that of transcendental philosophy. In transcendental philosophy, reflection is primarily conceived of as the reflection of a cognizing subject on the principles that determine the objectivity of the concrete on which it reflects. Reflection is reflection on something present, on what happens to be coincidentally so or so given. Hegel, however, thematizes the meaning of reflection as such that logically precedes the transcendental concept of reflection. Its meaning arises in the course of the foundational determination of being as the immediate. Reflection turns out to be a pure relation of immediacy and mediation of thought.

The being (given, starting point of reflection, fact of culture) that is presupposed by transcendental philosophy as absolutized external reflection is in its immediacy withdrawn from its determination by reflection. However, it is only a substratum that is before reflection because reflection in its activity of presupposing disregards its own role of positing the presupposed [12] (vol. 11.  S. 252 ff.). Due to this externality of the given as well as its determinations, the philosophical reflection fails in its task of being founded in the origin in the fashion of a reflective constitution. Rather, it proves to be the activity of a cognizing subject that refers to an immediately given using immediately given determinations.

Hegel, in contrast, develops the determinations of logic from the thought of the beginning. It is a long way to the absolute idea as the origin of everything, in Rickert’s words: to the original heterothesis. In the course of Hegel’s development of thought, it comes to concepts that characterize the relation of thought as reflective. Rickert, on the other hand, too rashly turns the beginning into the origin. Accordingly, a Logic of Being, as a Logic of Being that emerges from making the meaning of thought in its beginning explicit, is missing. It is missing for methodical reasons as well: transcendental philosophy’s reflection on validity does not advance from the thought of the beginning but is accomplished by considering the content in its original determinacy. As a consequence, this original determinacy is itself determined by concepts that are not justified by the process of reflection. Despite the claim of transcendental philosophy to develop a radical foundation, such concepts do not emerge from thought that constitutes itself.

5. Not only does essence emerge from being, but Hegel also transforms essence into the concept. How does the foundational deficit of transcendental philosophy manifest itself in terms of Hegel’s Logic of the Concept? Formally, the concept-logical dimension of foundations is missing in transcendental philosophy qua absolutized Logic of Essence. Topics that belong to the Logic of the Concept such as ‘concept’, ‘judgment’, ‘conclusion’, ‘idea’, and the like are of course dealt with by transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless, they are not dealt with in their conceptual-logical determinacy. Transcendental philosophy conceives of the concept as an essence, not as a concept. From Hegel’s Logic of the Concept, it also becomes clear that transcendental philosophy cannot be a radical doctrine of foundations. It should be replaced by a speculative logic. The Logic of the Concept in particular renders the competence of thought to be radical self-determination explicit, while transcendental philosophy is and remains cognition under what Hegel calls the “theoretical idea” [12] (vol. 12. S. 199 ff.; vol. 20. § 225). This is why it cannot get rid of its formalism. It lacks the methodical moment of the “realization of the concept.” “Forms” are not primarily conditions of the possibility for what is made possible; rather, they must first be determined in themselves in terms of their truth content.

This determination culminates in Hegel’s concept of the “idea,” i.e. reason (Vernunft) as the unity of concept and reality, of subject and object [12] (vol. 12. S. 173 ff.; vol. 20. §§ 213–215). Subject and object function as moments of comprehending thought, whereby the idea ultimately proves to be the absolute idea as the unity of subject and object that knows itself in the concept. This becoming-for-itself of the concept takes place as a “process” of the idea to overcome the mentioned “most stubborn opposition in itself” [12] (vol. 12. S. 177; vol. 20.  § 215). In transcendental philosophy the opposition is retained, even if Kant’s apperception-theoretical profile of the “original unity” is replaced by a (validity-noematic) structure of thought in neo-Kantianism and in later transcendental philosophy, just as it is in Hegel. Unlike in transcendental philosophy – even in its sublimated variants that overcome the Kantian dualism of the stems of sensibility and understanding in favor of an intrinsic relationship of thought –, Hegel develops objectivity purely from the concept. As a pure relationship of self-determination, the concept has abandoned any onticism. The concept is that which comprehends, that which is comprehended its concept. The concept gives itself its reality.

While transcendental philosophy conceives of the principles of what is cognized in terms of a layered apriority that constitutes it, covering the entire spectrum of determination, Hegel’s logical doctrine of constitution is divided into being, essence, and concept. The Logic of the Concept thematizes the pure self-determination of the concept. This dimension of pure self-determination is explicated in transcendental philosophy as heterology. Accordingly, the original synthesis, the synthesis of the origin, is characterized by the self-application and self-generation of its moments, by, formulating it with a term of post-war transcendental philosophy, reflective constitution [37. S. 42 ff., 75; 38. S. 26 f., 31]. Only in this way does the reflection of transcendental philosophy on validity gain the absoluteness of its meaning (at least in terms of its claim).

For Hegel, the concept is just such a reflective constitution, pure self-determination: determination as an infinite relation of the concept to itself [12]  (vol. 12. S. 33). The Logic of the Concept is a reflective constitution that thematizes and thus determines itself. The respective determinations of thought are thematic as forms of the realization of absolute self-determination. Here, Kant’s insight is taken into account that the concept is not only a determination of itself but at the same time a determination of the determined. Also following Kant’s philosophical exploration, which arrives at the pure concepts of understanding as principles of objective determination via the forms of judgment as principles of thought, Hegel develops the determinations of the concept via its subjectivity as forms of comprehending [12] (vol. 12. S. 31 ff.; vol. 20. §§ 163 ff.) to the adequation of subjectivity and objectivity in the idea as absolute self-determination: as self-determination that has passed through both and is therefore self-mediated self-determination [12] (vol. 12. S. 173 ff.; vol. 20. §§ 213 ff.). What distinguishes Hegel from transcendental philosophy fundamentally, however, is that the determination of pure self-determination of the concept is achieved without any recourse to external conditionality.

Although the transcendental philosophical model of a layered apriori makes the singularization of the origin visible, the origin does not singularize itself into itself but into something else. In contrast, with Hegel’s transition from the Logic of Essence to the Logic of the Concept, the substance is comprehended as the subject [12] (vol. 12. S. 15). A self-referential relation of “absolute negativity” is established. Hegel qualifies it not only as freedom but also as “manifested” identity [12] (vol. 12. S. 15). The mediation of the concept has become a “mediation of the concept with itself” [12. S. 34 f.] Hence, not only is the development of the Logic of the Concept from the concept to the idea conceived of as a manifestation of the concept, but nature and spirit, as the parts of the system of philosophy that follow on from logic, are also manifestations of the concept in a specific way. Thus they are manifestations of freedom as a manifesting self-relation: being-and-remaining-with-itself of the concept in the other.

In contrast, in the apriority model of transcendental philosophy, the relationship of form to content remains characterized by externality or foreignness, despite all attempts to overcome Kant’s stem dualism through a pervasive structure of the validity of knowledge that is supposed not to be an abstract universality but a constituent of all objectivity. The form does not determine itself to content; the content remains non-form, regardless of its form-determinacy as content.

Mirabile dictu, this becomes particularly clear in the very paradigmatic doctrine that claims to articulate the intrinsic synthesis structure of thought transcendental philosophically, i.e. Rickert’s heterology. Although here content proves to be form and the relation of thought to content to be the self-reference of thought to content, Rickert feels compelled to distinguish from the form “content” the “content of content,” which, as it is said, we can only “experience” (Erleben), “see,” or otherwise “grasp alogically” [39. S. 53 f., 62 f.; 40. S. 13, 15], even if form may belong to it because of its thinkability. The content is therefore not conceived of as a manifested self-relation; rather, it contains a perennial other that eludes form. In this respect, Kant’s stem dualism remains logically intact. There is no such dualism in Hegel. Here, singularization is thought of as a manifestation of the universal through the particular to the singular, not as a form of external foundation, how sublimated it may be, of reflection on something other. In general, the constellation of content that “we” can only grasp alogically is not of a logical nature but belongs to the philosophy of spirit. From a logical point of view, the concept has emerged, at the end of the Logic of Essence, as absolute self-determination; everything else in the system of philosophy is a manifestation of the concept in the “elements” of the logical, nature, and spirit.

By completely mediating its moments with one another, the “objectivity of the concept” is achieved [12] (vol. 12. S. 127 ff., cf. 92; vol. 20. §§ 192 f.). Here, the concept as the subject has not united (zusammenschließen) with another but with itself. It is precisely this realization of the concept that Hegel conceives of as the “object.” [12] (vol. 20. § 193) The concept determines itself as objectivity [12] (vol. 12. S. 127, 130). Hegel’s line of argument from the subjectivity of the concept to its objectivity is in this respect quite Kantian. Both for Kant and Hegel, something is an object only through the “unity of the concept [12] (vol. 12. S. 14), [8] (vol. III. B 137).

Speculative Idealism Sublating Transcendental Idealism

The development of transcendental philosophy following the Kantian idea that subjectivity constitutes objectivity cannot be understood without taking into account the motive of a “renewal of Hegelianism.” In addition to rejecting the dialectical method in favor of the critical method, Windelband saw Hegel’s positive methodical relevance for philosophy in the doctrine of the fact of culture, so important for transcendental philosophy: Hegel’s brilliant achievement is supposed to consist in the orientation of philosophy towards history. By working out the content of philosophy (i.e. the “universally valid values”) from the activity of rational consciousness in history, Hegel conceived of history as the organon of philosophy [32. S. 280 ff.; 41. S. 540; 42. S. 133] History, or as it is also called, culture, provides the material for philosophy and thus for the application of the “critical method.”

Seen systematically, however, the methodical relevance of culture cannot be reduced to the fact that in the initial phase of the self-knowledge of reason, philosophical thought has to start with something concrete, as the doctrine of the fact of culture holds [33] (ch. 1.3). The phenomenological moment of philosophy would be overstretched. It was not least Hegel himself who emphasized the relevance of the phenomenological moment in the method of philosophy. Nevertheless, the determination of thought in its beginnings can only be made with (pure) “being” as the immediate, regardless of whether one enters the philosophical discipline of logic via Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or through a resolve to consider thought as such [12] (vol. 21. S. 53–56). The project of a phenomenology is necessary either way to get into the system of philosophy. As such, it has only a relationship to the subject (agent) who decides to philosophize, not to the system of philosophy itself. It is indeed “not saying much that philosophy owes its first emergence to experience (the a posteriori)” [12] (vol. 20. § 12 N). Using the methodical meaning of experience against Hegel’s idealism just misses the point; rather, the phenomenological reduction, to use Husserl’s term, needs to merge into the eidetic reduction.

The problem is not the “fertile bathos of experience” (Kant), the “fact of culture” (neo-Kantianism) as the starting point of philosophy, but to comprehend the fundamental rationality of experience. That is to say that the problem is the form of reflection of philosophical cognition. A renewal of Hegelianism as a synthesis of transcendental and speculative idealism would have to face up to this in all the radicality of philosophy as science. The concepts with which philosophy accomplishes its comprehension must also be sufficiently grounded. In line with Kant’s requirement to identify and demonstrate them as principles of the determinacy of the determined, the beginning of conceiving of the subject matter of philosophy (idea, value, principle, etc.) cannot be made in numerous ways, as not only Schelling [43. S. 143] but also transcendental philosophers such as Rickert or Wagner [9. S. 135 f.] believe. It can only be made in one way: with the self-explication of the meaning of beginning.

About the authors

Christian Krijnen

Author for correspondence.
Email: c.h.krijnen@vu.nl
Dr. habil., Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities 1105 De Boelelaan, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, The Netherlands

References