Hegel and Idealism

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Ttulo: Hegel and idealism. Por: Ameriks, Karl, Monist, 00269662, Jul91, Vol.
74, Nmero 3
Base de dados: Academic Search Elite
HEGEL AND IDEALISM
Recently, much discussion of Hegel has focused on the nature of his idealism, and especially
on its relation to Kant's transcendental idealism--a doctrine whose meaning is itself still much
in dispute.[ 1] It is clear enough that Hegel calls himself an "absolute idealist," and that he is a
major figure in the "German idealist" tradition, but the precise meaning and value of falling
under the idealist label is not so clear. Moreover, some recent interpretations have suggested
ways in which Hegel can be termed a realist,2 and for all interpreters it is conceded that there
is a peculiarly "objective" nature to Hegel's idealism that serves to set it apart from most other
versions.
In approaching this interpretive issue, one should keep in mind a feature of the intense
contemporary debate about realism (the traditional shadow of idealism) spawned by the work
of philosophers such as Dummett, Putnam, and Mackie. That debate quickly revealed that
one need not take an across-the-board position on realism, that attitudes toward
metaphysical ("transcendent" or "abstract") or scientific (quantum, or simply "theoretical") or
ethical "objects" can differ considerably, even for one and the same philosopher.[ 3] Similarly
with respect to Hegel, one need not insist that his idealism has one meaning or applies with
equal strength across all domains. Nonetheless, Hegel's encyclopedic efforts clearly invite
parallel treatments of idealism in diverse realms such as metaphysics and ethics? His
systematicity suggests that a natural desideratum for at least one main line of approach to
what Hegel's idealism means would be that it be an interpretation which allows that idealism
to have a maximal range.
For this reason alone, Robert Pippin's impressive new work, Hegel's Idealism, deserves
special attention because of its argument that throughout the early essays, the
Phenomenology, the Logic, and the mature system, Hegel's work can be seen as dominated
by a modification of a fundamental idealistic principle taken over from Kant. Using Pippin's
claims as a chief point of departure, I aim to assess the value of construing Hegel's work in
such a broad idealistic way. My own conclusions will diverge from Pippin's, for where he
contends that Hegel's idealism is most intelligible through its relation to Kant, I will argue that
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Hegel's conception of this relation is fraught with serious misconceptions, and that what is
distinctive in his idealism has regrettably little to do with Kant.
Hegel's understanding of "idealism" would appear to be not very difficult to determine. His
Logic devotes a whole "Remark" explicitly to this topic,s and in a fairly concise and
straightforward fashion (after somewhat mysteriously introducing "ideality" as the "quality of
infinity"), he makes the following claims:
( 1) An "idealist" is one who holds that "the finite" is ideal.
( 2) To hold this is to hold that the finite "has no veritable being."
( 3) All significant philosophy holds and has held this, even if it has not developed the claim
adequately--and hence there is no genuine conflict of "idealistic" and "realistic" philosophy.
( 4) For, to hold otherwise is, absurdly, to assign "absolute being" to finite existence, to hold
that things "as they immediately present themselves in their sensuous immediacy" are not to
be explained by (or, perhaps, regarded as "moments," parts of, or abstractions from)
something else, such as the "thoughts" or "principles" or "universals" or "ideal entities" of,
e.g., atomism or other traditional cosmologies.
( 5) As "sublated," i.e., explained, finite existence ("individual, sensuous things") is itself to be
called "ideal," although, in another sense (one connoting systematicity), that which explains,
viz., "the principle" or the "universal," or "spirit," can also be called "ideal."
( 6) "Subjective" or "formal" (i.e., Kantian) idealism uses yet another meaning of "ideal,"
applying it to anything that is representation (Vorstellung), even that which is only
representation ("even fancies"). This is fitting insofar as what is present in representation, "the
content," is not "so-called real existence" but rather something "sublated" "in the simplicity of
the ego," i.e., something understood as "for me."
( 7) However, this subjective idealism consists in merely distinguishing the "form for me" from
the "external existence" of the contents of mind, and in abstracting from all the specifics of
those contents--which thus remain "finite" insofar as they remain otherwise unconnected and
unexplained.
( 8) This distinction leaves one (in Kant) with a finite subjectivity opposing a finite objectivity,
and with a set of finite contents, so that even if the contrast between subject and object were
overcome (perhaps in an "intellectual intuition"), the contents would remain finite, i.e., not yet
the "true" or "affirmative" infinite of a full, self-explanatory system,s
These claims indicate that if the question of idealism is discussed in Hegel's original terms
(claim 4), it is not much of an issue. The alternative to idealism is such a straw man that here
the real issue becomes simply what specific variety of idealism one should develop. Whereas
idealism often is taken as primarily a negative thesis, a startling denial or reduction of the
being of some commonly accepted entities entities, the idealism Hegel starts with is rather a
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hard-to-deny positive thesis, an assertion that immediate appearances point to something

else, some non-immediate things or relations.7
In this context, Hegel is obviously concerned with distancing himself from his predecessor,
Kantian idealism. Hegel is certainly willing to credit Kant in some respects, for he admits
"Kantian philosophy.., constitutes the base and the starting point of recent German
philosophy, and thus its merit remains unaffected by whatever faults may be found in it."8
Nonetheless, Hegel clearly is not willing to credit Kant with generating the impetus to idealism
as such, for he regards that impetus to be as old as philosophy itself. And, as claims ( 6) to
( 8) above show, Hegel also objects to the specific "subjective" nature of Kant's idealism,
which allegedly remains stuck in the "finite" and blocks the path to a properly developed
"absolute" idealism. Hegel's objections concern more than the familiar point that Kant errs in
requiring unknowable things in themselves beyond appearances; what they stress here is the
idea that Kant's notion of appearances is already deficient, that it is blind to their underlying
systematic or "infinite" content. For all these reasons one would hardly expect that the best
way to understand the specific nature of Hegel's idealism is to see it as a development of
Kant's, and yet that is precisely what many interpreters have proposed--now, most notably,
Pippin.
Pippin's strategy is to argue that all experience is "inherently reflexive," that this idea was
central to the development of Hegel's position, and that it remains as the common core in
Kant's doctrine of apperception and Hegel's idealism. Hence, to understand Hegel's idealism
one must first determine what the doctrine of apperception means, how Kant's idealism is
related to it, and then how Hegel's philosophy is related to both.
On Pippin's interpretation, Kantian idealism consists essentially in a "doctrine of
apperception" that is taken to mean "for anything to count as a representation of mine, I must
be self-consciously representing such an object, implicitly taking myself to be representing
thusly."[ 19] A difficult systematic problem with this formulation is that the doctrine appears
defensible only when reduced to an analytic form. Leaving that aside, the crucial interpretive
claim here is that Hegelian idealism consists largely in taking over this doctrine while
dismissing Kant's claim that there are "forms of intuition" which restrict us from knowing things
in themselves. This claim is designated as a distinct and especially questionable "restriction
thesis." It is sharply distinguished from the use of "the doctrine of apperception" in the
transcendental deduction of the categories, its use in supposedly showing what, and only
what, is necessary for there to be self-consciousness. Transcendental arguments--and thus
Hegel's system, which is presented as a string of arguments of this form[ 10]--are therefore
said by Pippin to be already idealistic simply because they rest on "reflexive" (which Hegel
equates with "infinite" and "ideal") determinations, i.e., determinations following from the idea
that "consciousness can be said to be in relation to an object only to the extent that it takes
itself to be."[ 11] A corollary to this idea is that there is no sense to "noumenal," or wholly
transcendent, claims.
Whether one agrees with Pippin in seeing Hegel's idealism as largely following Kant's, or
whether one rather sees it as basically a departure, depends on what is taken as the kernel
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and what is taken as the shell of idealism. There are a number of possibilities here, since we
already have such a proliferation of meanings for "idealism." Clearly, Pippin's own
understanding of the term is made to fit his claims, but those claims become vulnerable if a
more traditional understanding is employed. In particular, if Kantian idealism is taken
metaphysically rather than epistemologically, then its argument for the ideality of space and
time, as based on the "antinomies" of realism, is most naturally understood as not just
meaning that concepts as we theoretically employ them apply "only" to the domain of our
experience,[ 12] but rather as also making the ontological claim that there is something
beyond that domain to which we cannot (with theoretical warrant) apply them, viz., a nonspatio-temporal thing (or things) in itself.[ 13] Otherwise, the statement that they apply "only"
to the domain of experience could be quite consistent with a full-blooded realism which takes
there to be nothing beyond this domain. In other words, unless we take as fundamental
something like the "restriction thesis" rather than the mere doctrine of apperception, the
metaphysical point of Kant's insisting on being an idealist seems lost. Whatever the case is
with Kant, it would seem that with Hegel this possible consistency with traditional realism
need not bother Pippin, let alone other interpreters who want to say that Hegel's philosophy is
"objective" and compatible with many versions of realism. For Pippin, Hegel can still be called
an idealist as long as his argumentative strategy is "reflexive" in a special way--thus even if,
as I believe, this happens not really to be Kant's reason for calling his own philosophy
idealistic, and even if, therefore, Hegel cannot be simply taking over from Kant his reason for
regarding himself as an idealist. In one sense, we already know this to be true in any case,
since the Remark discussed earlier from the Logic shows Hegel had independent reasons for
calling himself an idealist. But since it must be admitted that elsewhere he also tended to link
his idealism with considerations of reflexivity, it could be argued that these considerations still
show there is one important sense (even if not Kant's or Hegel's original sense) in which
Hegel does take from Kant something crucial that he calls idealistic.
However, to stop here would be to do injustice to the departures Hegel wants to make from
other idealists, especially Kant. These departures contern the very point that is supposedly
borrowed from Kant, namely the idea of reflexivity. Hegel notes that for Kant "the determining
of an object by the ego . . . is to be regarded as an original and necessary act of
consciousness," but Hegel insists "this objectifying act, in its freedom from the opposition of
consciousness, is nearer to what may be taken simply for thought [as opposed to mere fancy]
as such."[ 14] Kant is given historical credit for thereby "introducing" the "abstract relation of a
subjective knowing to an object," thus the "infinite form" of the Notion, but he is criticized for
not yet treating its content as infinite, i.e, as a self-determined, necessary system.[ 15] Kant is
not even credited with "reaching" the Notion's infinite form; he merely "introduces" it, for "that
form has still to be relieved of the finite determinateness in which it is ego, or
consciousness."[ 16] Later Hegel adds "the actual development of the science which starts
from the ego shows that in that development the object has and retains the perennial
character of an other for the ego, and that the ego which formed the starting point is,
therefore, still entangled in the world of appearance and is not the pure knowing which has in
truth overcome the opposition of consciousness."[ 17] Kant is neither the explicit nor the sole
object of this criticism, but Hegel clearly meant his remarks here to be applicable to Kant, and
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especially to Kant's idea of the thing in itself and the restriction of our theoretical knowledge to
a merely phenomenal domain.
These passages cause obvious difficulties for any proposal that Hegel's idealism is to be
understood as a straightforward development of the "inherent reflexivity" of experience. If
one's prime model for reflection is Kant's own idea of apperception, and if that idea is
characterized by Hegel as essentially finite, then it would seem that following Kant's
philosophy impedes rather than facilitates access to Hegel's idealism. As long as that
philosophy is characterized simply by its doctrine of apperception, then, just as with the
traditional "restriction thesis," we have a standpoint that Hegel's idealism is set up to reject
rather than accept. Moreover, Hegel even proposes (see again claims ( 7) and ( 8) above)
that these doctrines are linked in an unfortunate way, that taking apperception precisely as
Kant develops it leads to the restriction thesis, to an idealism cut off from knowledge of reality.
[ 18]
Hegel's objections to focusing on the subject of experience, or self-consciousness, have been
stressed in criticisms of Pippin by Terry Pinkard.[ 19] From Pinkard's perspective, "in Hegel's
eyes what is important in the Kantian philosophy is not its attempt to derive everything from
the conditions of self-consciousness, but its attempt to construct a self-subsuming, selfreflexive explanation of the categories. Self-consciousness is only an instance of such a
structure."[ 20] This may not seem to be a radical criticism insofar as it still allows that an idea
of "reflexivity" is at the core of Hegel's system, and even that its origin might be found in
Kant's philosophy. However, this reflexivity no longer has a necessary relation to traditional
meanings of "ideality," let alone to Pippin's apperceptive sense.[ 21] Furthermore, even the
limited role in Hegel's system that Pinkard tries to allow for self-consciousness is
questionable. Pinkard says Hegel saw Kant's notion of apperception as a "single principle that
could explain... the 'whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental
philosophy."[ 22] Yet Kant himself does not speak of "explaining," but simply says, "the
synthetic unity of apperception is therefore the highest point, to which we must ascribe all
employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic ...."[ 23] Kant means that no logic
or philosophy, indeed none of our knowledge, can violate this unity, but he hardly believes
that the specific propositions of logic, for example, are to be derived from it. Since Hegel
obviously understood this as well,24 it is still not clear exactly what he did see in Kant's idea
of apperception, and how he meant to relate this to his own idealism.
What is clear is that even in his early works2s Hegel was very fascinated by this idea. In a
high point of the Logic, the account of "The Notion as Notion," he comes back to dwell on it,
claiming "one of the profoundest and truest insights" of the Critique to be "that the unity which
constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognized as the original synthetic unity of
apperception."26 Hegel understands that this unity corresponds to the objective (judgmental)
rather than to the mere subjective (associative) unity of consciousness, but he also says that
"this objective unity is the unity of the ego with itself," so that "the comprehension of an object
consists in nothing else than that the ego makes it its own."[ 27]
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It is tempting to take this passage as a demonstration that Hegel means to reduce his central
and mysterious idea, "the Notion," to the relatively familiar idea of apperception But such a
reduction appears both naive and directly contrary to the just-reviewed objections in Hegel to
the strategy of relying on the idea of self-consciousness as fundamental. Yet the text goes on
in a way that can seem oblivious to those objections: "The object therefore has its objectivity
in the Notion and this is the unity of selfconsciousness into which it has been received;
consequently its objectivity, or the Notion, is itself none other than the nature of selfconsciousness... we are justified.., in referring to the nature of the I to learn what the Notion
is." 28
By itself this is a mysterious passage, because it would seem that the mere relation of any
arbitrary content of mind to the "I" that can have it, is a relation that is too simple to account
for what a Notion is--especially since, as Hegel stresses, we do have feelings and intuitions
which are not raised to the level of "thought" or the Notion. The mystery begins to unravel
when we see what Hegel immediately goes on to say: "But conversely, it is necessary for this
purpose to have grasped the Notion of the I as stated above."[ 29] What is "stated above" is
that the ego "makes something its own" by pervading it and bringing it "into the universality
that is immediately a determinateness."[ 30] I take this to mean that, just as with Kant, an
ordinary ego's possession of something is epistemically relevant only insofar as it exercises
the general qualities of conceptualization.
It is also true, as Hegel no doubt means to stress here, that the "ego" has a special
"universality," since for any and all contents that we can have, that can arise for "a" mind,31
these can, upon abstraction, be seen as instances of a universal, "mind." This is why Hegel
can give Kant credit for "introducing" the "infinite" abstract form of the Notion: the "I" of
apperception has a special inclusiveness, encompassing, although not really modifying or
internally determining, all other universals that can arise for consideration. But all this still
does not mean that the full extent of the Hegelian relation between "universality" and
"determinateness," the relation that reappears in all instances of the Notion, can be discerned
from a consideration of the "I" alone. So while it is true that in looking at the "I" we "learn what
the Notion is," i.e., what an especially inclusive universal is, this still leaves us with the work of
"reaching" the Notion in its objective form by uncovering the sytematic ("infinite") structure of
all the fundamental universals.
It is therefore only appropriate that when Hegel goes on in this section to explicate the nature
of his idealism, the doctrine of apperception enters in only indirectly. His main claim here goes
back to his basic definition of idealism: "It is only as it is in thought that the object is truly in
and for itself; in intuition or ordinary conception it is only an appearance."[ 32] This claim is
thoroughly acceptable to a modern realist, especially a scientific realist, and it is just another
way of saying again that idealism consists in taking "finite existence," i.e., given sensible
particulars merely as given, to be not absolute, to require something else to explain them. But
while Hegel had said earlier that it is simply non-philosophical, even if common, to deny this
idealism, it is remarkable that here he goes on to claim that, like "ordinary psychology,"
"Kantian transcendental philosophy," specifically in its doctrine of apperception, fails to
appreciate this point, and so commits the error of falling short of idealism.[ 33] This is
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supposedly because, on its view, "it is the material that is regarded as the absolute reality...
the empirical material, the manifold of intuition and representation, first exists on its own
account."[ 34] That is, the understanding, or apperception, is taken to add a unity or cognitive
content to data that are presumed to be what they are prior to and independent of this activity:
"the very expression synthesis easily recalls the conception of an external unity and a mere
combination of entities that are intrinsically separate."[ 35] In other words, Hegel is charging
Kant with "the myth of the given."
From Hegel's ultimate perspective, it thus turns out as we originally suspected, viz., that
Kant's own doctrine of apperception is not what makes Kant into an idealist but in fact is
rather what keeps him from being one in the most basic sense. However, if it can be shown
that Kant's doctrine of apperception is not subject to the "myth" imputed to it, then it can be
shown that, despite Hegel's own view, this doctrine alone does not constitute a real difference
between Kant's philosophy and Hegel's. In showing that this is the case, I will also be arguing
indirectly that the essence of Hegel's own idealism here turns out not to be tied very closely to
what it supposedly borrowed from or corrected in Kant.
It is odd that, despite his great interest in apperception, Hegel seems to have missed how
much Kant's account shares with his own. Like many other readers, Hegel often took Kant's
account of perception to be fundamentally Humean. A contemporary Hegelian, Robert Stern,
has expressed Hegel's reading this way:
... Hegel's fundamental objection to Kant is that his subjective idealism begins from his
empiricist standpoint, not in the sense that Kant accepted the representationalism and
phenomenalism of the latter, but rather in the sense that he accepted its reductionist atomism;
Hegel argues that Kant failed to see that the individual exists as the exemplification of a
substance-universal, and began with the assumption that the object is reducible to a plurality
of sensible properties that are combined together by the experiencing subject.[ 36]
The basic charge here is simply that Kant's talk of "synthesis" can make sense only if the
items synthesized by the mind are presumed to be individuals not exemplifying, or at least not
understood to be exemplifying, any kind terms. But this charge falsely presumes that Kant
believed synthesis is that which first makes items subject to conceptualizability (which is not
to deny that synthesis is present whenever items are known). In fact, when Kant speaks of
the "synthesis of (objective or pure) apperception," his direct concern is not with concepts but
rather with what makes judgment possible for beings like us. The conditions of such judgment
are not identical with the bare conditions of conceptualization. For this reason Kant can hold
that the transcendental ideality that affects the domain of our judgment does not automaticany
attach to the latter. And thus he can, and does, also hold that it is possible even for us to have
coherent (even if not theoretically assertible) concepts of non-phenomenal properties or
beings, e.g., the categories in their pure meanings, or the concept of God as specified in
"transcendental theology."37 Nothing in Kant's account of concept formation need conflict
with traditional realist theories of the reference of the categories, or theories of abstraction
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according to which there are universals really to be discovered, even if not immediately
recognized, in the items of experience.
It is true that many contemporary "Kantians" (e.g., Hilary Putnam) have tried to develop an
anti-realism grounded on a general theory of concepts, and that they have gestured toward
Kant as a source of this theory. This connection is accepted even by those who criticize the
theory. Thus when Nicholas Wolterstorff argues against those who assume that "since goose
is one of our concepts, reality apart from us does not come with geese in it," he traces this
assumption back to Kant's talk of concepts as rules "for ordering experience."38 He then
notes that we can reject anti-realism about geese if we "suppose that concepts, instead of
being rules that we follow for introducing unities and divisions into reality, are graspings of
properties."39 But Wolterstorff does not provide any evidence that Kant himself took his
theory of concepts to be incompatible with such "graspings of properties." Moreover,
Wolterstorff, like many other contemporary readers, ignores the obvious consideration that if
Kant had believed in such a "short" road to anti-realism (and had been willing to accept its
radical consequences), then he could and would have saved himself the effort of all his
distinctive and complex arguments for transcendental idealism. This unfortunate interpretive
tendency can be found already in Hegel, who did take note of the "complex arguments" but
was not above reducing Kant's position to a "short argument," e.g., when rejecting Kant's
"realism" about things in themselves as supposedly tied to the notion of something beyond all
concepts.[ 40]
To say that Kant's idealism is not meant to follow directly from his idea of concepts as such is
not to deny that a more radical and appealing "Copernican" theory of concepts might be
developed by someone.41 And, Kant would agree with the idea that items cannot be
understood apart from thought; he just would not agree with the contemporary notionreformulated by Pippin in Hegelian terms--that insistence on this simple idea is a good way to
define or argue for (or counter) "idealism" in any significant sense. But whether they hold to
this simple definition, or stress the more basic metaphysical one in the Logic, Hegelians must
live with the fact, noted at the beginning, that in many contexts their notion of idealism does
not mark a contrast with traditional realism. Thus Stern is forced into odd formulations like
this: "According to Hegel, therefore, we are driven towards idealism and a realist account of
universals if we seek to escape from the fragmented and confused world of sense."[ 42]
So far, it has been argued that Kant's notion of synthesis does not entail a non-Hegelian view
(i.e., a "non-realist" view, where "realism" is Platonism about universals, and a "non-idealist"
view, where "idealism" is non-atomism about perception) that concepts are mere "extrinsic"
unities. But problems for the notion of synthesis could still arise as long as there are some
items, some intuitions, that are' 'intrinsically separate." In particular, the Kantian notion of
sensible intuition might appear to block the defense of his philosophy from the Hegelian
charge of falling prey to the myth of the given and thus to the crude "subjective" idealism that
goes along with it. That is, one might think that, whatever his general view of concepts,
Kantian sensible intuitions are precisely real and individual but unconceptualized items-43and thus items that are thought, naively, to depend on our "rule creating" mind to give them
any form. However, Kant stresses that every intuition relevant to us must immediately fall
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under certain forms, the forms of time and (if "outer") space. And although these forms are
supposed to have various special features, it is clear that everything within them is also
necessarily an instance of at least the concepts of time and (if "outer") space,44 and thus
hardly unconceptualizable. Kant's main question is never whether these individuals originally
can occur independently of all properties and concepts, but rather whether they might be
perceived by us without falling under pure concepts, or at least pure non-sensible concepts.
(This is not yet to say that Kant must disallow unconceptualizable individuals; the point is just
that they are not relevant as such to his epistemology, they are not really "given." But it is also
quite unlikely that Kant's metaphysics could allow individuals beyond everyone's
conceptualization, for that would conflict with his own conception of God.)
What this implies, ironically, is that the very doctrines which many have seen as separating
Kant from Hegel, the doctrines of "givenness" in intuition and of forms of intuition, are
doctrines which disclose fundamental points where Kant and Hegel are in agreement. Kant's
philosophy is no more subject to a myth of a given than Hegel's is subject to the denial of any
contingent, empirical input; in other words, the former is not as "subjective" and the latter not
as "absolute" as is often alleged. The universality of the form of sensibility for our intuition
implies that for both Kant and Hegel there must be givens, but not "bare" givens for which we
create an initial form by merely imposing rules. These points of agreement are thus also
points which reveal a common acceptance of traditional realism in its perceptual and
ontological senses even if in other distinctive ways Kant and Hegel can also be said to be
idealists.
From what has been argued so far, Hegel has failed in his energetic efforts to set up Kant as
a philosopher who managed to fall short of idealism in what Hegel regarded as its "basic"
sense, i.e., the one defined at the beginning of the Remark in the Logic. This should be
understandable, since this idealism was introduced as so innocuous that denying it would
seem absurd. And surely it should not be surprising if Hegel also did not succeed in the
baroque project of showing that the very tool which supposedly earned Kant credit for a major
development in the history of idealism, viz., the doctrine of apperception, is also something
that was so misused by Kant that it left him in a position beneath this basic idealism.
The weaknesses here in Hegel's critique of Kant still leave him with other means for
distinguishing his position from Kant's (e.g., see again claims ( 7) and ( 8) above). Many of
these means are tied to Hegel's objections to the peculiarities of transcendental idealism and
especially to specific grounds for the restriction thesis. These objections will not be discussed
here because they are not directly relevant and they have been evaluated (as inadequate)
elsewhere.45 The question that remains here is simply whether there can be found any other
means, i.e., ones independent of these ultimately unprofitable relations to Kant, that can be
used to determine a significant form of idealism in Hegel.
If there is an interesting direct contrast to be set up between Hegel and realism, it is certainly
not one that involves the denials typical of radical epistemologieal idealism. As many
interpreters have pointed out, Hegel's position has nothing to do with a rejection of perceptual
realism. Whether or not Hegel succeeds here in defeating the traditional skeptic? his intention
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is clearly that "empirical realism" is not to be rejected, and that private "representations" of
alleged mental substances are to be denied epistemic and ontological primacy.
The positive doctrine that Hegel himself stresses as distinguishing his idealism from what he
regards as the basic doctrine of idealism in general, viz., that "the finite" requires something
else, involves the specification of the relations that immediate appearances supposedly
require. This is where Hegel's apriori teleological holism, his Notion of the "true infinite,"
enters in, and it is also where Hegel's contemporary apologists take leave. Willem de Vries
has done perhaps the clearest work in articulating this holism, but he says nothing in defense
of its crucial principle, viz., "the world-whole is a kind, the ultimate kind; it is the universal
objective purpose. Because it is the universal objective purpose, all other purposes are
subordinated to it." 47 Pippin explicitly wants to avoid such "metaphysical" interpretations; he
wants Hegel's idealism to appear attractive on "critical" grounds. But can an interesting form
of Hegelian idealism be found that is true to the text, that is not clearly extravagant, and that is
not subject to the charges of triviality made earlier?
An obvious move here is to transform Hegel's questionable ontological holism into a
contemporary epistemological holism, i.e., a coherentist theory of knowledge,ns Elsewhere I
have discussed some of the epistemic difficulties of several recent interpretations along this
line.49 Here I will end by asking just what such interpretations have to do with the issue of
idealism.
On Pippin's terminology, it was Hegel's apriorisin, his belief in the validity of certain kinds of
transcendental arguments, that was definitive of "idealism." It has already been noted that this
definition is at odds with traditional views (since it appears so compatible with common-sense
realism) and much of Kant's and Hegel's own work, but what is striking now is that it also
appears consistent with either epistemological holism or its denial. If some kind of primitive
foundationalism could be resurrected, so that the evidential weight of some propositions could
be considered independently of the whole of experience with which they are compared, that
still appears quite compatible with either the denial or the affirmation of all the various kinds of
idealism discussed so far.
Of course, Hegel's work does appear in many ways to be directed against such a
foundationalism, but not simply on the ground of either his basic notion of idealism, or his
mere notion of a teleological world-whole. The basic notion does require that immediate
appearances not be regarded as a separable foundation of knowledge, but that notion, like
the general notion of a teleological world, leaves open other possible foundations of
knowledge. Hegel is usually treated as a coherence theorist, rather than as a foundationalist,
but coherentism is not to be established by simply accepting that "the finite" is not absolute, or
by saying only that it is part of some teleological whole. Hegel's own definitions of idealism
thus leave it logically independent of epistemological holism.
A final relevant connection between such holism and traditional idealism may seem to arise,
however, if one takes the former to correspond to Hegel's system, and the latter to
correspond to a rejection of the traditional "realist" worry that, as Pippin puts it, "even if our
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best criteria for "knowledge of X" are fulfilled, we still have no way of knowing whether such
fulfillment does tell us anything about X."[ 50] Everything hinges, however, on how this worry
is dismissed. Hegel does not think, like an epistemological idealist, that although there could
be an inaccessible X beyond our "knowledge," the worry is dismissable precisely because
such an X is inaccessible. This is not even a possibility for Hegel because he does not allow
that we should say we are dealing with what is "only our" best criteria. Hegel's claim is that
the relevant "best criteria" are determined by the Notion itself, by what really is, and that they
are something for which we have no coherent reason to think we lack access in principle,51
Even more radically, he aims to show, as Michael Forster has noted, that all skeptical
attempts to hold that we lack such access can be proven to be "selfdefeating." [ 32]
One can surely challenge Hegel's particular arguments here, as well as his claim to
completeness,53 but all this still concedes that he takes his system to represent reality itself
and not "just our view" of things. And this means that he turns out to be on the "realist" side of
the debate on holism; a system of knowledge that was fully coherent "internally" would not
thereby be sufficient for him. What complicates matters is that he does not really believe that
any "partial" system (i.e., any alternative to his own) can be truly coherent, but this is not to
say that the full coherence which he ascribes to his system is what makes him call it
knowledge. Rather, it is considered knowledge, indeed "absolute knowledge," because it
supposedly agrees with the Notion that captures reality itself.
In sum, we have yet to find a simultaneously accurate, substantive, and appealing sense in
which Hegel should be regarded as an idealist (let alone a Kantian idealist)--although there
surely are many reasons to treat him as an idealist if one does not insist on such a threefold
demand.
NOTES
[1]. See S. Priest, Hegel's Critique of Kant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), as well as my
"Recent Work on Kant's Theoretical Philosophy," American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982),
1-10; Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1984), and my review, Topoi 3 (1984), 181-85.
[2]. See especially Kenneth Westphal's Hegel's Epistemological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1989), and my discussions in "Hegel's Critique of Kant's Theoretical Philosophy," Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 46 (1985), 22, and "Recent Work on Hegel: The
Rehabihtation of an Epistemologist?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
(forthcoming).
[3]. See, e.g., the general remarks by Alvin Plantinga, "How to be an AntiRealist,"
Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 1982, pp. 47-70. A
direct connection between Hegel and this contemporary debate is made by Nicholas
Wolterstorff in "Realism vs. Anti-Realism," in Realism, Proceedings and Addresses of the
Catholic Philosophical Association 59 (1984), 182-205.
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[4]. Cf. R. B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 41.
[5]. Hegel, Science of Logic, tr. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), Bk. 1,
ch. 2, Transition, "Remark Two"; cf. also Bk. 1, ch. 3, A. b. "Remark," and Bk. 3, "The Notion
in General," 587-88, and Hegel, Encyclopedia, [section]95, and [section]45, "Zusatz."
[6]. The reflexive character of what is self-explanatory allows Hegel at this point to make his
transition to the third and final specification of the "quality" of being, viz., to what he calls
"being-for self" or "absolutely determined being," i.e., being which is not longer determined by
mere "imperfect" qualities, such as "in itself," where a division between thought and being
remains fundamental.
[7]. For a similar interpretation, see Westphal, Hegel's Epistemological Realism, p. 142:
"something is ideal if (and only if) it is ontologically dependent on something else." If and only
if it is independent, it is called "infinite." Westphal's interpretation adds that Hegel's full
idealism includes the assertion that this "something else" involves a teleologically ordered
system. Cf. also Paul Eisenberg, "Was Hegel a Panlogicist?" Nous 24 (1990), 160-61, who
concludes: "Hegel's own idealism turns out to be a very strong form of metaphysical holism,"
and M. J. Inwood, Hegel (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 411-12.
[8]. Science of Logic, p. 61 n.
[9]. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, p. 132. This claim is discussed further in my "Recent Work on
Hegel."
[10]. I will bracket a familiar problem here which R. C. S. Walker has stressed, viz., that
"Hegel can use arguments which look like transcendental arguments, but... what is required
are the principles of Hegel's own dialectic; and the assumption that these are required cannot
be regarded as too minimal to be interestingly denied." The Coherence Theory of Truth
(London: Routledge, 1989), p. 96.
[11]. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, p. 114.
[12]. Cf. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, p. 267, n23.
[13]. This interpretation has been challenged by Allison and others; see above note 1. An
opposing view can be found in P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 385ff.
[14]. Science of Logic, p. 62.
[15]. Science of Logic p. 63. Cf. Encycloopedia, [section]41, "Zusatz."
[16]. Science of Logic, p. 63. Here differences between the terms "consciousness" and "selfconsciousness' will be ignored.
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[17]. Science of Logic, p.

[18]. It is argued below that Hegel goes astray at this point, so that, ironically, it is largely just
because he misinterprets Kant that Hegel comes to feel he must reject him here.
[19]. T. Pinkard, "The Categorial Satisfaction of Self-Reflexive Reason," Bulletin of the Hegel
Society of Great Britain 19 (1989), and "How Kantian Was Hegel.9" Review of Metaphysics
43 (1990). In those issues there are also discussions by Pippin of Pinkard.
[20]. Pinkard, "Categorial," 8. Robert Stern has recently expressed an even more radical
interpretation: "Hegel's metaphysics is rightly called idealist because universals are used to
account for the structure of the object; but it is opposed to Kantian idealism because this
structure is not tied in with the synthesizing nature of any subject." Hegel Kant and the
Structure of the Object (London: Roufledge, 1990), p. 112. For the opposite view, see, e.g.,
Charles Lewis, "Recent Literature on Hegel's Logic," Philosophische Rundschau 28 (1981),
115: "Hegel's Logik is a logic of subjectivity; its categories describe the structure of the `ich'."
[21]. Pinkard himself presents Hegel's system as an "alternative to realism" only by defining
realism in a peculiar way as the doctrine that "we cannot say whether or not certain
substructures appear to us" (Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility [Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1988], p. 57). He has in mind the rejection of a specific kind of
epistemic agnosticism about Kantian things in themselves which hardly amounts to a
complete alternative to traditional realism. On Pinkard's terminology, the doctrine that
"essences must appear" (and that we know that) is called "Hegel's alternative to realism," and
yet it appears equivalent to what on Westphal's terminology is called the "epistemological
realism" that Hegel accepts (cf. above, n7).
[22]. Pinkard, "Categorial," 7. The internal quote is from Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B
134n.
[23]. Critique of Pure Reason, B 134n.
[24]. See, e.g., Science of Logic, p. 789.
[25]. Cf. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, tr. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1977), p. 73.
[26]. Science of Logic, 584. Cf. Encyclopedia, "Lesser Logic," [section]42. Pippin rests the
defense of his position largely on this passage in "Hegel's Idealism: Prospects," Bulletin of the
Hegel Society of Great Britain 19 (1989), 30-31.
[27]. Science of Logic, pp. 584-85.
[28]. Science of Logic, p. 585; cf. pp. 777-78, 789.
[29]. Science of Logic, p. 585. Last emphasis added by me.
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[31]. Elsewhere I have argued that this is an important restriction, and that it explains why
Kant also calls his principle of apperception analytic. See "Kant and Guyer on Apperception,"
Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, 62 (1982), 174--86.
[33]. Science of Logic, p. 587; cf. pp. 489-90, and p. 780, where Kant's treatment of the I is
said to "cling to phenomena and the mere conceptions [blosse Vorstellung] given in everyday
consciousness... to renounce the Notion and philosophy."
[36]. R. Stern, Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, 112-13. (I will ignore a problem
with part of Stern' s formulation, the problem of how sensible" properties" could be thought to
be understood apart from universals.) Cf. Hegel, Encyclopedia, [section]41, "Zusatz."
[37]. See especially Kant's Lectures on Philosophical Theology, tr. by A. Wood and G. Clark
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).38. Wolterstorff, "Realism and Anti-Realism," 62.
[39]. Wolterstorff, "Realism and Anti-Realism," 62. The "instead" is controversial, for if
Wolterstorff allows that geese could be one of our concepts and geese still part of reality, it
would seem he should also allow that concepts could be rules for ordering experience and
still involve gaspings of properties.
[40]. Cf. Science of Logic, p. 593, which claims that for Kant "reality lies absolutely outside the
Notion." Another version of a "short argument" would tie transcendental ideality immediately
to the feature of intuitability rather than conceivability. See Science of Logic, pp. 590-91: "[it
is] maintained that we cannot know things as they truly are... on the ground that the content is
only the manifold of intuition." Cf. my "Kant, Fichte, and Short Arguments to Idealism," Archiv
fur Geschichte der Philosophie 72 (1990), 63-85.
[41]. See in particular the work of Gerold Prauss, who has argued for a radical Kantian, i.e.,
"Copernican," theory of reference.
[42]. Stern, Hegel, Kant and the Structure of the Object, p. 113. My emphases. Cf. Inwood,
Hegel, p. 417: "Hegel, however, believes that there actually are dogs, animals, men, and so
on quite independently of the particular conceptual system which I or my cultural system
happen to employ."
[43]. Cf. R. Rorty, "Strawson's Objectivity Argument," Review of Metaphysics24 (1970), 20744.
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[44]. Of course, Kant does consider these concepts (and all our merely empirical concepts) to
be transcendentally ideal, but this is something which is to follow from considerations other
than their simply being concepts.
[45]. See again my "Hegel's Critique of Kant's Theoretical Philosophy."
[46]. See the discussion of Forster's Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1989) in my "Recent Work on Hegel."
[47]. Willem de Vries, Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988), p. 16. Cf. n7 above.
[48]. One might also focus on considering Hegel as an advocate of a coherence theory of
truth. Ralph Walker has argued Hegel cannot succeed with such a theory since he must admit
at least that something's being a belief does not depend on its being believed to be a belief.
That is, to escape a vicious circle, "Hegel takes it for granted that we know quite
unproblematically that certain things are believed, but this cannot be the case if to know that p
is a belief is to know that 'p is a belief' coheres with a rational system" (The Coherence
Theory of Truth, p. 100). I am not sure that Hegel does begin with such "unproblematic"
knowledge, but given the earlier discussion of his realism about universals, it is likely that he
can allow a correspondence theory of truth, as Westphal has argued (Hegel's Epistemological
Re,ism, p. 110).
[49]. See my "Recent Work on Hegel."
[50]. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, p. 39.
[51]. Cf. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, p. 83, "what, prior to a full speculative understanding might
have seemed the merely subjective specification of the ways the world is divided up, is the
way the world is divided up."
[52]. M. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism, p. 105. Cf. my discussion in "Recent Work on Hegel."
[53]. Cf. my remarks in "Recent Work on Hegel," n54.
~~~~~~~~
By Karl Arneriks University of Notre Dame
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HEGEL AND IDEALISM

hard-to-deny positive thesis, an assertion that immediate appearances point to something

[4]. Cf. R. B. Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge:

[17]. Science of Logic, p.

[30]. Science of Logic, p. 585.

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