Volume 8, Issue 1

In this paper I want to compare and contrast Kant and Hegel on reason. While both emphasize the close connection between reason and its ends, motivations and needs, and denounce a futile understanding of reason as a formal, instrumental, or simply logical reasoning, they diverge on how to interpret reason’s restlessness, teleology and life. After a section illustrating some uncritical assumptions widespread among readings of Kant, I move to a treatment of their respective views on reason’s self-realization (the relation between thought and the I, concepts and intuitions, faith and history), and conclude by showing the main differences in their respective understandings of method, dialectic, limit and ideas.

Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1823) is hailed as one of the most influential thinkers of early post-Kantian philosophy. He is best known for popularising critical philosophy through his Letters on the Kantian Philosophy, first published in the Teutsche Merkur (1786), and for restructuring it into a kind of axiomatic-deductive system in the Elementarphilosophie (1789–1794). An axiomatic-deductive system is based on one or several self-evident principles from which all subsequent principles are deduced. Reinhold’s restructuring of Kant’s critical project was highly influential for Fichte and the early Schelling, and thus, for the transition from Kantian critical philosophy to German Idealism. Most Reinhold scholars interpret the system of the Elementarphilosophie as belonging to the pre-critical tradition. Counter to this view, I consider the possibility that Reinhold was influenced by the idea of a philosophical system put forth by Kant in the Architectonic. I proceed by first discussing Kant’s criteria of both a pre-critical and a critical system, before assessing which the Elementarphilosophie can best be described as. I conclude that although Reinhold’s system is more adequately classified as a critical than as a pre-critical system, it must ultimately be viewed as something new.

Hegel argues that Kant’s antinomies of pure reason are important because they implicitly show the categories of thought to be contradictory. In so doing Hegel disregards much of what interests Kant about the antinomies and interprets the latter “against Kant’s intention”. He also gets Kant wrong when he claims that Kant’s “trivial” resolution of the antinomies simply shifts contradiction from things in themselves to appearances. Nonetheless, I contend that Hegel’s interpretation is defensible, insofar as the antinomies do, indeed, show (what Hegel regards as) the categories of the “infinite” and the “finite” to be both opposed to and inseparable from one another. I also argue that Hegel is right to maintain that Kant’s proofs of the theses and antitheses in the antinomies assume what they are meant to prove and that Kant’s resolution of the antinomies is unsatisfactory.

In contrast to the current tendencies in secondary literature to interpret the notion of the Absolute of the Early Romantics and Schelling from either an epistemological or an ontological perspective, I argue that these philosophers found in Kant’s notion of genius in the third Critique a model for the Absolute that combines both perspectives in the act of the artist’s free creation. However, I contend that Schlegel and Novalis followed more closely the modesty of Kant’s Critical philosophy, both epistemologically and ontologically: epistemologically as a lack of our capacity to know and ontologically as a lack of our capacity to fully realize the Absolute. With their conceptions of the Absolute as an infinite becoming and an endless oscillation, they defied philosophical systems with an absolutely certain principle as its basis and embraced Kant’s doctrine of the ignorance of things as they are in themselves. In contrast, Schelling’s philosophy from its early beginnings was marked by ambition to extend Kant’s notion of the Unconditioned from both epistemological and ontological perspectives. For him, an act of genial creation was equivalent to a full realization of the Absolute, which presupposed and afforded its theoretical transparency.

In this paper, I want to zero in on the Kantian idea that,whilst things in themselves must logically be presupposed as the ground underlying appearances and things are not reducible to their representations, (1) objects as appearances are not properties of things in themselves, and (2) things in themselves or the thing in itself cannot properly be represented or even thought. To do this, I turn to one of the earliest defenders and champions of the Kantian philosophy, Karl Leonhard Reinhold, and specifically to his first major work Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, published in 1789. I am here interested neither in the extent to which Reinhold’s interpretation of Kant is correct or even adequately represents Kant’s thought in all of its aspects, nor whether Reinhold’s attempt to present a systematic philosophy based on a rigorous deduction from a single principle (his strong foundationalism) stands up to scrutiny. I am here solely interested in some of Reinhold’s positive insights, in the Versuch, concerning elements of his representationalism that may shed light on Kant’s idealism, specifically, the relation between appearances (as objects of knowledge) and things in themselves, i. e., points (1) and (2) described above. I read the early Reinhold of the Versuch as confirming the Kantian view that objects as appearances are not properties of things in themselves and that we are radically ignorant of things in themselves, in the sense that we can neither know things in themselves (through the senses) nor even intellectually grasp things in themselves through the understanding alone.

This paper argues not only that Schelling, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel are reacting directly to Kant (rather than simply to each other and to other post-Kantian figures), but also that they are responding in complex ways to one particularly prominent and distinctive line of thought in Kant, namely his account of reason, conditions, and the unconditioned. Though Kant argues that we cannot have cognition of unconditioned objects, he none the less thinks that reason demands that we accept the existence of such objects. The paper argues that the German Romantics take over this general line of thought, though they do so in different contexts and to different ends. Specifically, focusing on this dimension of Kant’s thought allows us to see both how the logic of conditioning relations can be seen to be driving their arguments for the Absolute, and how Kant’s particular conception of conditioning relations gives rise to important differences from the views of the German Romantics. For whereas he distinguishes different kinds of real conditioning relations, they operate with a generic conception of conditioning that leads to their distinctive Romantic views.