Adam Widawski

MA Philosophy
Birkbeck, University of London
adwidawski@gmail.com

Is Hegel’s system immune to Kant’s critique of metaphysics?

Introduction
I. Exposition
A. Overview: Hegel, Kant and Metaphysics.
1. What is Kant’s critique of metaphysics?
2. What is Hegel’s system of absolute idealism?
B. Argument summary
1. Critique of the metaphysical interpretation.
2. Critique of the non-metaphysical interpretation.
3. Support for the revised metaphysical interpretation.
II. Why the revised metaphysical interpretation is right.
A. Critique of the metaphysical interpretation.
1. Hegel’s Absolute is not transcendent.
2. Hegel as a Heraclitean.
B. Critique of the non-metaphysical interpretation.
1. Critique of Pinkard’s interpretation of Hegel’s sense-certainty.
2. Critique of Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel’s self-consciousness.
C. Support for the revised metaphysical interpretation.
1. Hegel’s system is incompatible with Kant’s dichotomous ontological
standards; whatever exists, exists in and through perception.
2. Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ‘concepts of the pure understanding.’
III. Does the revised metaphysical interpretation offers an account of Hegel’s system
that is immune to Kantian critique of metaphysics?
Conclusion

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 INTRODUCTION

The question as to whether G.W.F Hegel’s system fulfils the criteria of the Kantian
critique of metaphysics is an argument for the desired purpose of contemporary philosophy
as a whole. Since the Kantian critique of knowledge is the standard by which the validity of
contemporary philosophy is gauged by, the discussion about the metaphysical dimension of
the Hegelian system is effectively a question about Hegel’s relevance as a modern
philosopher. It seems, that in order to prove the Hegelian system’s immunity to the Kantian
critique, one ought to prove that Hegel does not claim knowledge of the absolute. This is
because, according to ​ Immanuel Kant’s (1998, 2004) ​Transcendental Dialectic, such
metaphysical knowledge is impossible. The matter, however, is more complicated than that
because, as I demonstrate in my argument, Hegel’s concept of ​the Absolute is
idiosyncratically naturalistic; it is raised out of the philosopher’s critical awareness of Kant’s
own project (Beizer, 2015 and 2008; Houlgate, 2003; Stern, 1999 and in Beizer, 2008;
Sedgwick in Bristow, 2015). In light of this, I support the conclusion of Beizer, Houlgate,
Stern and others, that Hegel’s system is metaphysical but not in the sense critiqued by Kant.
Therefore, I purport that Hegel’s system is not only immune to Kant’s critique of
metaphysics, but that Hegel radicalises the Kantian critique by critically interrogating the
faculty of reasoning itself.
I purport that Hegel’s system is entirely immune to the charges of the traditional
metaphysical interpretation but for different reasons than suggested by the
non-metaphysical commentators. By this I mean that Hegel’s account remains immune even
though its subject in essence is metaphysics, but not metaphysics as knowledge of
extra-sensory transcendent entities. I endorse the revised metaphysical interpretation,
which, in my view presents the most accurate, although also most nuanced, reading of
absolute idealism.
At the heart of the present inquiry lie two sets of distinctions that allow us to
distinguish between Kant’s and Hegel’s respective ideas about what metaphysical
knowledge is. The connections and incompatibilities between these distinct elements, as

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demonstrated in my argument, constitute my conclusions. The first set of distinctions
concerns the structural model of each system, or more specifically, Kant’s and Hegel’s
respective definitions of reason, the Absolute, and the their different approaches to
ontological categories of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. The second set of differences regards their
methodology, in particular the fact that Hegel applies the Kantian critical design, but, unlike
Kant, not within the Cartesian framework of inquiry understood as a causal progression of
deductive proofs (Holmes, 2015). Hegel instead undertakes an immanent critique of
concepts through a dialectical process. These disparities between the systems of
transcendental and absolute idealism lead my inquiries to partial paradoxes and
incompatibilities which further complicate the argument. Nevertheless, despite this, I
maintain that Hegel’s position is neither anachronistic nor ignorant of the criteria of the
Kantian critique, but at worst the system of absolute idealism is partially incompatible with
Kant’s strictures against metaphysical knowledge. Most importantly, however, for a number
of reasons explained further, Hegel’s application of critical rigour is more thorough than
Kant’s own, because Hegel (Bonevac, 2017; Stern in Beiser, 2008: 26; Houlgate, 2003: 10)
effectively critiques what Kant had taken for granted, i. e. the universal character of ‘the
pure concepts of the understanding’.

I. Exposition

A. Hegel, Kant and metaphysics

I begin with an assessment of the Hegelian system as a critical metaphysics, i.e. one
that aims to provide an account of reality as it truly is by reason alone, while avoiding a
reversion to a pre-Kantian form of metaphysics as professed by the Leibnizian-Wolffian
school. Thus, my argument is in line with the revised metaphysical interpretation. Through
this lens I critically evaluate the former two readings of Hegel - the traditional metaphysical
and the non-metaphysical one, respectively - both of which, I purport, offer misconceived
interpretations of the relationship between the Hegelian system and the Kantian critique of
metaphysics.
Kant’s critique of metaphysics, as articulated in his ​Critique of Pure Reason, has
reduced the concept of knowledge to one which designates only the subjective experience
of the world and not the world as it is in its objective reality. Kant argues that in order for a

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proposition to be epistemically true one has to be “apodictically certain” of its factuality.
Hence, because we can only access the world via the senses that are subject to time-space
contingency, there is no way of assuming any knowledge whatsoever of the things as they
are ​in themselves. One only has access to the appearances of things as delivered subjectively
through sensory perception, i.e. as distorted. Therefore, no metaphysics (i.e. knowledge of
the reality as it is in itself) is possible. Consequently, all philosophy after Kant is bound to be
understood in a reductionist sense - as a critique of knowledge.
Hegel’s system, as a reaction to the Kantian project, is a maximalist vision of
philosophy where all previous philosophical doctrines, including that of Kant’s, are
incorporated into a greater whole - a rationally governed totality of self-becoming,
sovereign, creative world-thought: ​Geist. As a reaction to Kant’s critique of metaphysics,
Hegel in his ​Phenomenology of Spirit and in ​The Science of Logic, seeks to reconcile the
‘sundered unity of knowledge and perception’, but aims do it in a critical manner, i.e. so that
it would not entail reverting to a pre-Kantian form of metaphysics. Hegel agrees with Kant’s
strictly rigorous criteria of the scientific method of philosophical inquiry, but the philosopher
seeks to test this method by discussing the absolute dimension of the forms of thinking
themselves, thus redefining the concept of the Absolute, so that the science of it could fulfill
the criteria of Kant’s critique. This means that Hegel’s system, as he intends it to be, is an
immanent kind of metaphysics that is a science of phenomenology - in other words, it is a
study of the ​Logos structure (of the phenomena of thinking), or indeed, a study of the
psychic life of ​Geist (Holmes, 2015). The system’s idiosyncrasy rests on the monistic
principle of subject-object identity where, in their absolute dimension, both subject and
object become a self-reflective one: self-consciousness ​(Hegel, et al., 2013: 58-66)​. Absolute
idealism’s ultimate claim is that the Absolute does not transcend the natural world but is
immanent to it, and therefore is rationally comprehensible ​(ibid.: 479-493). This claim,
however, coincidentally appears to stand in direct contradiction with the Kantian critique of
metaphysics, because it presents Hegel’s idealism as a doctrine which is supposed to deliver
knowledge of ​the Absolute. Therefore, the more specific inquiry into the two philosophers’
conceptions of ​the Absolute are key to understanding in what sense Hegel’s system may be
metaphysical in a non-Kantian sense, which is what I argue for in this work. Contrastingly to
Kant’s notion of the absolute - conceived as ​ens realissimum of the ​Transcendental
Dialectic, i.e. the underlying ultimate principle of all reality (Pasternack, et al.: 2014), the

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Hegelian ​Absolute 'is not something underlying the phenomenal world, but the conceptual
system embedded in it' (Gardner). In other words, the Absolute of the ​Phenomenology and
Logic, is the mental reality of ​Geist as sublated, i.e. as the purified essence of the universal
reason developed into its ultimate truth through its experience of itself as the collective
self-consciousness of mankind.
Hegel’s claim about the possibility of absolute knowledge becomes the point of the
argument about whether Hegel’s system is, or is not, immune to the Kantian critique of
metaphysics, given Hegel’s idiosyncratic idea of the absolute. The traditional metaphysical
interpretation answers negatively to this, purporting that Hegelian philosophy is a dogmatic
metaphysical speculation in the pre-Kantian sense. Contrastingly, the non-metaphysical
reading defends Hegel on the grounds of him being essentially a misunderstood
post-Kantian philosopher, who is not a metaphysician at all. Below I claim that both of these
assessments are flawed. I will now summarise the main points of my argument against each
of the readings from the standpoint of the revised metaphysical interpretation. Then I will
explain why this interpretation provides the best horizon for my conclusions, since its
argument is more balanced and faithful to what Hegel himself meant his philosophy to be.

B. Argument summary
In the first section I explain and then critique the traditional metaphysical
interretation. According to this reading Hegel’s system is a metaphysical theory of the
Leibnizian-Wolffian kind, i.e. one that speculates about transcendent supernatural entities. I
object to this reading on various grounds. Most importantly, Hegel’s employment of the
Aristotelian doctrine of universals, i.e. for Hegel universals exist only in objects, but their
meaning is not reducible to mere objects (Beizer, 2005: 57), advocates for the immanence
of the absolute in the objects of the natural world and therefore there is no supernatural
implication whatsoever stemming from the Hegelian notion of the absolute. Moreover,
Hegel stresses (ibid.: 56) the Aristotelian principle of ‘the order of being’ as something
distinct from ‘the order of explanation’; the Absolute is logically prior, but onto-logically
secondary, to the natural world - the infinite subsists within the finite. Therefore, on the
basis of just these two points it is evident that Hegel’s absolute is not meant in the Kantian
way at all. While Kant’s ​unconditional is meant in a Parmenidean/Platonic sense, i.e. a
perfect, unchangeable and eternal entity beyond the realm of the sensible, the Hegelian

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Absolute develops in time and is subject to experiential contingency, thus echoing the
Heraclitean metaphysics of becoming (Houlgate, 2003: 14). By being such, the Hegelian
being-becoming could not possibly serve as a blueprint for a classical theological model of
the divine. From this it follows that wherever Hegel asserts the theological aspirations of his
own philosophy, one ought to be critically aware of the naturalist idiosyncrasies of his
theism as distinct from the transcendent claims of traditional monotheist dogma. In
conclusion, the traditional metaphysical interpretation is wrong, because it treats Hegel’s
system as if it was based on Platonic dichotomy of the natural and the ideal, thus ignoring
absolute idealism’s conception of the Hegelian unconditioned, divine, or Absolute, as
immanent in the natural world of becoming.
In the second section I move on to the non-metaphysical interpretation and explain
why its account is also flawed. Contrastingly to the metaphysical reading, the
non-metaphysical interpretation defends absolute idealism against the charges of the
traditionalist metaphysical reading by claiming that Hegel’s metaphysical language seeks to
articulate notions which are implicitly non-metaphysical, or simply humanist in nature
(Redding, 2017; Pinkard, 1994). In light of this view, Hegel is considered to be Kant’s
continuator who fully complies with the Kantian critique of metaphysics. In my argument
against this polarised reading, I demonstrate how the idiosyncratic metaphysical features
that are definitive of the Hegelian system would need to be ignored in order to hold this
non-metaphysical view. Thus, the non-metaphysical interpretation is also flawed as it
applies Kantian standards where they are not contradictory to, but incompatible with the
Hegelian system.
The two non-metaphysical arguments I examine are Pinkard’s (1996: 33-34)
interpretation of the Hegelian account of sense-certainty and Pippin’s interpretation (in
Stern, 2009: 3) of Hegelian self-consciousness as the Kantian principle of the unity of
apperception. I argue that both Pinkard and Pippin in their arguments try hard to ‘force
Hegel into a Kantian mould’ in order to make him meet the criteria of the Kantian critique of
knowledge, thus distorting some of the fundamental Hegelian ideas.
Pinkard’s dichotomous use of language in which the subjective perception of things
is opposed to their “inner nature” or to the “true picture of the world”, indicates the
thinker’s misunderstanding of the metaphysical principle, essential to Hegel, of
subject-object identity. The whole point of Hegel’s system is to reconcile the sundered unity

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of knowledge and perception (Hegel, 2013: 76-77; Beizer, 2005: 63) and so here Pinkard
clearly errs, because for Hegel the universal is construed out of a totality of individual
experiences of the particular (Bonevac, 2017) and so no knowledge can exist independently
of perception. Here Hegel further differs from Kant, however, in that the sense-perceived
reality is the true reality, because no other reality exists (Beizer, 1999: 8). According to this,
Hegel views Kant’s ‘pure principles of understanding’ as a ​thing-in-itself, and so, because
these principles, in Kant’s view, do not come from experience, one cannot assume them at
all, let alone use them to deduce statements about the validity of knowledge. Hegel
therefore makes these ​a priori principles subject to the immanent critique, identifying them
as forms of the experience of thinking. This, however, paradoxically makes him appear to be
vulnerable to the Kantian critique of knowledge, because in Kant’s terms he logically
examines what Kant had considered to be non-empirical content. The bottom point of my
argument remains, nevertheless, that Hegel undertakes a meta-critical stance to Kant’s
critique of metaphysics - author of the ​Phenomenology somewhat critiques Kant with the
critical tools devised by Kant himself. This observation ultimately demonstrates the
irrelevance of Pinkard’s argument.
Similarly, stemming from the same false dichotomous-Platonic interpretation of
Hegel’s phenomenology as that of Pinkard’s, is Pippin’s comparison of the Hegelian idea of
self-consciousness to Kant’s doctrine of the unity of apperception, i.e. Hegelian categories of
thought, as Pippin argues, are not categories of reality, but merely ways in which the subject
perceives the world. Again, the same neglectful treatment of the principle of subject-object
identity is evident in this flawed perspective. It precisely is the main difference between
Kant and Hegel that for Hegel categories of thought are also categories of reality, i.e. the
phenomena of ​Geist experiencing its own psychic life as the process of the world (Holmes,
2015). So the philosopher’s principle of self-consciousness is an explicitly metaphysical idea,
only perhaps not metaphysical in the sense meant by Kant, as I argue further. The difficulty
of the matter is that Hegel ascribes ontological status to thought, while Kant does not. I
argue, therefore, that the key to solving this is an insight into how each of the thinkers
defines reason (ibid.). While Kant subscribes to Cartesian model of reason as a conception of
deductive proofs, whose reasoning unit is proposition (judgement), Hegel instead
understands reason as a conception of ​thinking whose unit of thought is ​concept (​Begriff).
This insight sheds light upon the quintessentially different objectives of each philosopher’s

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method and aim of inquiry. This in turn impacts the philosophers’ respective definitions of
the key terms, such as ‘metaphysics’, ‘the real’ and ‘the unconditioned’, and the role these
three concepts play in their respective systems. Because Kant’s reasoning method is
analytical and Hegel’s method is dialectical, these concepts bear different meanings in each
philosopher’s system. The Cartesian protocol that Kant adapts is based on a ​causal
progression of isolated and binary logical steps, whereas Hegel’s concepts are defined
holistically, by an ​interaction of historically bound forms of thinking - the concepts can only
exist in relation to one another and the whole. Therefore, the entire philosophical project is
of a different ‘species’ in each case. What Hegel presents as a sensory manifestation of what
really is, is for Kant merely a ​subjective appearance of an unknowable reality of things. Such
dichotomous reasoning is therefore incompatible with Hegel’s ‘dialectic of reconciliation.’
This discussion then leads us to a clearer understanding of the motivations underpinning
Hegel’s basic claim that thought​ is, i.e. ascribing ontological status to thinking.
Essentially, both accounts - Pinkard’s and Pippin’s, suffer from the same
fundamental error of trying to justify Hegel’s system on the grounds that it complies fully
with the Kantian critique. This would have to mean that, in the non-metaphysical view,
Hegel does not claim to describe reality as it is in itself, but either as mere appearances of
things, or as mental categories of thought. Such a thoroughgoing non-metaphysical reading
is therefore textually inconsistent and thus flawed.
The main point of the argument which I make in the third section, however,
becomes evident when the common flaw of the former two interpretations is identified. The
central error from which both the traditional metaphysical and the non-metaphysical
interpretation suffer is their uncritical application of transcendental idealist standards to
Hegel’s system, i.e. applying the Kantian dichotomous reasoning as compatible with Hegel’s
meaning. This is inconsistent, because the whole point of Hegel’s philosophy was to
reconcile the Kantian residual dichotomies into a unified whole, which, to an extent, was
also Fichte’s and Schelling’s project. So the point I make in this chapter together with Beizer,
Houlgate, Stern and others, is that Hegel’s system is a kind of secular metaphysics of its own
unique species, i.e. not of the Leibnizian-Wolffian kind, which Kant had critiqued, but
arguably not immune to the Kantian critique either, as it does postulate the existence of an
absolute after all, just not a kind of absolute that is supernatural in any way, although one

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that does implicate a teleological structure of nature as verifiable by experience, which Kant
of the first ​Critique would not agree with (Houlgate, 2003: 9).
Here I focus on the paradoxical nature of the reasons behind Hegel’s postulating of
the Absolute in order to save Kant’s philosophy from its own dualistic aporiai, i.e. Kant not
being able to explain empirical knowledge due to creating too great a gap between ​nous and
phenomenon (ibid., 10). The necessity of the ontological reality of the Hegelian Absolute is
thus investigated, the structure of ​the Absolute itself explained, and finally, the way in which
Hegel attempts to make the whole project fulfil the criteria of the Kantian critique of
metaphysics is followed through. This results in a paradox: Hegel’s ​Absolute becomes the
criterion to explain the possibility of empirical knowledge, but at the same time the creation
of ​the Absolute arguably makes Hegel vulnerable to the Kantian critique. The question here
is: are Hegel’s ​Absolute and Kant’s critique of metaphysics mutually exclusive, given the
discrepancies between their respective ideas of fundamental concepts of reason and
knowledge, as discussed in my critique of the non-metaphysical reading? These
discrepancies surely make Hegel’s system and Kant’s critique at least partially incompatible
with each other while remaining neutral to the immunity issue. So, If Hegel’s system and
Kant’s critique are not entirely mutually exclusive, then the real question is to what extent
are they not? It is clear that Hegel’s method of inquiry is consistently critical (in the sense
prescribed by Kant) but on its own terms. In fact it is perhaps even more radically critical,
but this radical criticality leads the philosopher to enter the area which Kant would consider
unexaminable due to Kant’s dualistic terminology, such as opposing reason to experience,
which Hegel, however, rejected. Such paradoxical ambiguities are indicative of the intuition
that we are reaching the extremes of the human capacity for abstract reasoning while
banging our head against a wall of linguistic impotence.
The only way out of this is to contextualise the argument within a broader
social-cultural perspective that was key for Hegel’s insights and decisions about the shape of
his philosophy, as distinct from Kant’s ‘empty formalisms’ (Sinnerbrink, 2002). Here we
obtain a better horizon of the matter - when we get our “hands dirty” and apply the concept
of ​the Absolute to the day-to-day routine of human beings, which is what Hegel would have
preferred we started with. Therefore, the chapter ends with a Heideggerian accent of
trying to make sense of how the true reality of the absolute plays an essential role in
shaping the identity of human beings and their cultural activities as the expression of

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world-​Spirit. The conclusive point here is that, for Hegel, creative meaning-making of
contingent human experience has superior value to the formal certainty of abstract
quantitative knowledge professed by Kant, because it directly applies to lived life.

II. Argument

A. Critique of the metaphysical interpretation

The metaphysical reading of Hegel emerged in circles of early analytical philosophers
at the end of the nineteenth century (Redding, 2017). According to this reading, absolute
idealism is an explicitly metaphysical attempt to investigate the foundational principles of
reality by reason alone. This approach was seen as a regression to a pre-critical philosophy
such as Lockean Empiricism or Cartesian Rationalism. In the ​Critique of Pure Reason Kant
famously rejected any possibility of metaphysical knowledge as such; we can only ​know the
world as it appears to us, not as it is ​in itself (Grier, 2012). From the perspective of the
classical metaphysical interpretation, Hegel reverts back to the metaphysical paradigm
which Kant had made redundant, by claiming that the abstract categories of the Idea laid
out in his ​Science of Logic can be known and understood on their own abstract terms (by
reason alone) as ontological principles of the process of Geist.
According to Taylor (1975: 77), one of the main proponents of this reading, Hegel
seeks to undermine the said Kantian distinction between ​appearance and ​thing in itself:

Thus Hegel will often protest that the Kantian idea of a thing in Itself ​is incoherent,
in that the philosopher in using this term is positing something that is out of
the reach of his mind, but which at the same time cannot be out of reach in that
he is positing it.

Taylor (ibid.) argues that Hegel rejects the Kantian claims in order to overcome the dualistic
reasoning of modern Western philosophy. The argument follows, that Hegel’s project does
seem to reconcile in the holy unity the world that is fragmented by the scientific reason of
the Enlightenment. The unity being that of the cosmic Spirit progressing through history.
This conception of spirit monism (Redding, 2017) is seen as speculative and dubious.

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Further, in the view of this reading, Hegel’s theological language disqualifies his philosophy
in the eyes of the increasingly secularised academic world of the twentieth century.
Hegel however, against what the traditional metaphysical commentators suggest,
fully endorses Kant’s critique of Leibnizian-Wolffian style metaphysics, although for a
different reason. As Beizer (1999: 8) points out, it is “not because the supernatural is
unknowable, as Kant thought, but because the supernatural ​does not exist”. The key charges
waged against Hegel’s idealism by the traditional metaphysical commentators suggested it
to be a form of anachronism tainted with theological speculations about transcendent
beings (Redding, 2017). One may argue that Hegel himself does not help his case, claiming in
his Berlin lectures ​(ibid.) , that philosophy ​“has no other object but God and so is essentially
rational theology”. Taylor (​1975: 83) interprets Hegelian Geist as a self-positing ‘cosmic
spirit’ underlying the material world. Elsewhere, he (​ibid.: 83) ​describes the Hegelian
universe as a totality of the ‘life functions of God’ and he even identifies Hegelian ​Geist as a
monotheistic ​God. However, as we shall see, this is clearly a result of a flawed
understanding of the Hegelian absolute.
Although Hegel insists on continuing the metaphysical project, by going further than
Kant himself, he attempts to achieve the result by involving a critical evaluation of the
“​concepts of understanding that are used in metaphysics” (Houlgate, 2003: 8). It is precisely
at the point of Hegel’s rejection of the transcendental idealist notion of the thing-in-itself
that the traditional metaphysical interpretation fails to apply to his system. Hegel is
evidently not a metaphysician in the sense meant by the traditional metaphysical
commentators since his reason is immanent in the empirical world, not occupying some
noumenal realm outside of it.
Hegel’s immanentist approach is a radical break with the age-old Parmenidean
distinction between ​being and ​non-being (Houlgate, 2003: 16). The distinction, which finds
its subsequent mutations throughout the history of ideas, starting with Plato’s theory of
forms, continued through the Cartesian mind-body problem, and finally finding expression
in Kant’s transcendental idealism. The common denominator of all three doctrines is their
presumed substance dualism initiated by Parmenides. The Parmenidean ​being is defined as
eternal, unchangeable and perfect (Palmer, 2016) and this concept served Plato as a
prototype for his world of forms (or ideas understood as a transcendental divine blueprint
as opposed to finite, changeable and imperfect reflections of them in the profane material

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reality down below). Analogically, Kant’s separation of the world of contingent experience
from that of pure reason becomes the founding logic of his transcendental reduction. Hegel
(in Beizer, 1999: 11) recognises, that both Descartes (also in Russon, 1997: 31-32) and Kant
(also in Bristow, 2015: 4-5) encounter an unsurpassable problem with their dualistic
doctrines - neither of them could explain how two heterogeneous substances, body-mind
and understanding-sensibility, respectively, can interact with each other. The philosopher
therefore reaches out to both Spinoza’s ​Natura Naturans and Aristotle’s theory of
categories to inform his metaphysical design based on subject-object identity and thus, to
solve Kant’s dualistic stalemate (Beizer, 2005: 66).
By making ​Geist a Spirit of ​becoming instead of Parmenidean ​being, Hegel attempts
to naturalise the definition of the divine by merging the spiritual with the temporal. Drawing
from Spinoza’s concept of the absolute as the movement of the natural life itself, but
making it a result of a dynamic process rather than an abstract ideal, Hegel identifies the
becoming of the world with the spiritual force of ​Geist. This force, however, cannot possibly
be ontologically prior to the world since the universe is the chronologically determined
condition of its existence by its development towards ever greater rationality and freedom.
Here Hegel shares a monistic identification of the noumenal with the physical with Schelling
who held that “mind is the most organised and developed form of matter, and matter is the
least organised and developed form of mind” (Beizer, 2008: 6). This, however, calls for a
radical reconstitution and redefinition of some of the most fundamentally metaphysical
concepts fixed in the post-Platonic philosophical consciousness. The ambiguity of whether
Hegel can actually withstand the Kantian critique of metaphysics arises again, when in the
Science of Logic he develops the concepts of ‘necessity’, ‘Idea’ and ‘Notion/Concept’
(​Begriff), all of which he claims to be ​ontological principles in a strongest possible sense
(Houlgate, 2003: 12; Holmes, 2015​)​, since Spirit is thought and as such thought exists in the
same way that matter does. This appears to make Hegel vulnerable to charges about his
apparent subscription to some kind of pre-ontological absolute principles-entities which
have determined the structure of the world before it came to its physical being.
This, by a traditional metaphysical interpreter, would imply that the Hegelian
absolute is ontologically prior to the world (Taylor, ​1975: 96, 97, 110)​. Nevertheless, this
flawed judgement comes from ignoring at least two facts. First, that Hegel does not adapt
the Platonic concept of the idea, but rather uses it in an Aristotelian sense, where the

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universals exist only in objects, even though their ​meaning is not reducible to mere objects
(Beizer, 2005: 57), and second, that Hegel stresses the importance of the Aristotelian
distinction between the order of being and the order of explanation; “According to Hegel,
the universal is first in order of explanation, the particular first in order of existence” (ibid.:
56). As early as in 1801’s ​Differenzschrift, Hegel (in Houlgate, 2003: 41-42) anticipates his
dialectical programme as a cure for the flawed centuries-old polarised reasoning of dualism;
“The sole interests of Reason is to suspend such rigid antitheses.”, “...to comprehend the
achieved existence of the intellectual and real world as becoming.”, ”...to posit being in
non-being, as becoming, to posit dichotomy in the Absolute, as its appearance; to posit the
finite in the infinite, as life.” It is evident therefore that Hegel’s metaphysical project is to be
understood as a result of Hegel’s critical understanding of the Kantian critique of traditional
metaphysics and therefore is not a form of rationalised theology as purported by the
traditional metaphysical commentators.
By his critique of Kantian dualistic reasoning, Hegel commits to both radical and
even, one may argue, sacreligious (from the traditional theological point of view) act of
identifying the sacred with the profane. Like the mythical Prometheus, Hegel steals the
flame of divinity from the age-old religious superstition and lodges it in the human realm,
claiming that here is where the divine feels “at home in the world”, not as a celestial
abstraction empty of human content, content which is determined by duration,
contingency, and the necessary contradictions they implicate. If Geist is to be interpreted as
a God, then this God is not a divine sanction of the Judeo-Christian dogma. Rather, it is an
entity which is neither superior to the world nor transcending it in any way. It is an
imperfect subject comprised of its own ​becoming through which it is self-actualised as a
total inter-relational process of the human world as it is in its organic and finite nature. The
pious Kant was still not daring enough to incorporate the light of the absolute into the
contingent realm of phenomena whereas Hegel by applying it to temporality is seeking to
overcome the problems caused by the dichotomous logic behind the heterogeneity of the
thing-in-itself and phenomenon, mind and body, the physical and the psychic, the sacred
and the profane.

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 B. Critique of the non-metaphysical interpretation
This heretical dimension to Hegelian philosophy, i.e. one that elevates ‘becoming’ to
the status of ‘being’ seems to cause the subsequent interpretation emerge in the latter
decades of the last century. This new reading focuses on the secular significance of Hegel as
a direct continuator of Kant, although at cost of ignoring the metaphysical claims of the
Hegelian system. According to this interpretation, even if Hegelian ideas are expressed in
metaphysical terms, their objectives are implicitly non-metaphysical (Redding, 2017; Pinkard
1994). In other words, even if Hegel appears to be claiming to know the principles upon
which the nature of the world rests, what he is really doing is trying to find a way out of
metaphysics while largely remaining stuck in its anachronistic vocabulary (Redding, 2017).
Although Hegel uses theological terminology, which may indicate metaphysical character of
the inquiry, his ideas about the divine or absolute are secularised as an expression of
ultimate concern of humanity, in comparison with those of Kant, who still believes God to
be a transcendental entity outside nature.
The even stronger variety of the non-metaphysical reading holds that the entirety of
Hegel’s philosophy is immune to the Kantian critique of metaphysics, because absolute
idealism is essentially free of “teleological Spirit monism” as described by Taylor. Essentially,
the proponents of this reading believe that the Hegelian system was compliant with the
anti-metaphysical claims made by Kant and that what Hegel meant was something else from
what Kant had critiqued (ibid.). ​Kant has limited the competence of pure reason, although
the concept of pure reason, it is argued, is not quite compatible with the Hegelian system,
because for Hegel, reason and its experience of itself are, really, a single internally dynamic
ontological compound, which leaves no room outside of it for any transcendental realm of
things in themselves. It is claimed that Hegel by bypassing Kant’s transcendental project
with a notion of Geist has thus addressed the flaws of Kant’s own system. As Longuenesse
(2007, in Pinkard, 2009: 146) states, "Hegel attributes solely to reflection a unity that Kant
attributes to divine intelligence." Therefore, according to the post-Kantian interpretation,
Hegel agrees with the Kantian claims against the possibility of metaphysical knowledge as
far as Kant meant it. Nevertheless, for Hegel it is unacceptable to treat the domains of sense
and of reason separately. This, arguably, undermines the locus of the Kantian critique, which
is structured upon this distinction. Since for Hegel all reality is ultimately a synthesis of

14
reason and appearance, the Kantian critique becomes incompatible with Hegel’s
fundamentally distinct model of philosophy, which denies the existence of the
transcendent, and therefore, it is argued from the post-Kantian perspective, that Hegel’s
philosophy was not a metaphysics at all.
Despite the differences between the two thinkers, however, the proponents of the
non-metaphysical interpretation first and foremost emphasise the kinship between Kant
and Hegel. Nevertheless, I argue in line with the revised metaphysical perspective, that this
is done at cost of ignoring the fundamental distinction between the two thinkers’ respective
ideas of acceptable metaphysics. The error of the non-metaphysical interpretation is its
underlying thesis that Hegel’s system is a linear continuation of the Kantian transcendental
idealist project (Beizer, 2005, 1999; Houlgate, 2003; Stern, 2009). Although, the
post-Kantian scholars are right to recognise the essentially critical character of Hegel’s
philosophy, they nevertheless seem to distort or ignore significant idiosyncratic features of
it in order to make Hegel compliant with the Kantian critique of metaphysics.
Pinkard, (1996: 33-34), demands that in order to prove the metaphysical status of
the Hegelian account of sense-certainty, one ought to explain how the particular instances
and the universal “inner nature” of things both become synthesised in the subject into a
“true picture of the world”. This is a pivotal point of our argument, because the way Hegel
interprets sense-certainty defines the objective for his entire system. Namely that of
reconciliation of reason and perception into an epistemic-ontic whole, and as such, it is the
point of Hegel’s departure from Kant and therefore his act of rejection of the latter thinker’s
critique of metaphysics.
Hegel (2013: 76-77) is critically assessing such polarised reasoning: opposing the
“merely perceptible” particular to the “objectively true” universal is erroneous, because the
universal concepts are construed in the subject on the basis of the repeated experience of
the particular (Bonevac, 2017) and so there is nothing ​pure (in the Kantian sense) about the
universals. The particular and the universal are to be considered a unity, despite their
illusory appearance as two separate objects. Neither can exist independently of the other:

These pure determinatenesses seem to express the essential nature itself, but

15
 they are ‘being-for-self’ that is burdened with ‘being-for-another’. Since, however,
both are essential in a single unity, what we now have is unconditioned absolute
universality, and consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of
the Understanding. (Hegel, 2013: 76-77).

Pinkard’s (1996: 33-34) argument where he asks us to explain how the “direct
acquaintance” with the object links with the representation of it to form a “true picture of
the world” is incompatible with the Hegelian view of the matter: the one and only existent
true “picture of the world” is the one mediated by perception and so, firstly, from the
Hegelian perspective there is no implication of “direct acquaintance” with objects going on
here as suggested by the Kantian, and secondly, there is no question of linking the
representation with an abstraction of the “true picture of the world”, because this kind of
dualistic reasoning is precisely what the entire Hegelian philosophy is devised against - the
purpose of Hegel’s system is to provide a conceptual apparatus for the reconciliation of
dualisms in order to restore the unity of knowledge and perception (Huddleston, 2017) - no
knowledge is independent of a subject shaping it through perception, and therefore no
thing-in-itself can exist independently of the subject (ibid.; Beizer, 2005: 63). At the same
time, unlike for Kant, this is a true representation of what is, since it is ​all that there is.
Pinkard fails to acknowledge this point; he applies the transcendental idealist framework to
Hegel’s radically distinct epistemic-ontic structure and this renders it incompatible with
Pinkard’s argument.
One could instead ask Pinkard to explain the reason why one should see perception
in this dualistic Platonic way, without having the preliminary Kantian ‘​pure categories of
understanding’ axiomatically available for the task. As far as Hegel is concerned, starting the
inquiry with ​unconditioned absolute universality and analysing the unconditioned on its own
terms in order to reveal logical truths about it through internal critique of its dialectically
unfolding concepts is a more rigorous approach to the problem than Kant’s own. Where
Kant declares a priori that his principles of thought are necessary and universal, importing
them ‘ready-made’ from the Aristotelian metaphysics (Hegel and di Giovanni, 2010: xxxiv;
Thomasson, 2016), Hegel puts these very categories under a scrutiny of critical analysis in
his ​Logic. There he demonstrates dialectically by reason alone how in the process of
becoming, the concepts of categories are sublated through the subject’s experience of the

16
multiple particular instances of phenomena (Bonevac, 2017). The process leads from
unconditional abstraction towards ever more concrete concept of the universal. As the
contingent features get cancelled out in the process, the universal which the particulars
ontologically contain as their essence becomes ever clearer conceptualised in the
consciousness of the perceiving subject. The most concrete stage of a concept is considered
to be a culture (Holmes, 2015).
Thus Hegel uses the Kantian method against Kant’s own unfounded assumptions
about the principles of understanding (Houlgate, 2003: 11). Hegel (ibid.) therefore points to
the unconscious dogmatism of Kant and argues for the terms such as ‘singleness’,
‘universality’ or ‘essence’ to be “empty abstractions”, which, although by Kant are ​assumed
to be pre-determined in some way, are really of an entirely “non-essential” and
“undetermined” character as concepts. By being such, Hegel would argue, they provide no
epistemic ground upon which they could be used for forming truth-assessable claims about
knowledge.
Similarly to Pinkard, Pippin’s explicitly Kantian reading of Hegel clearly omits the
crucial point of Hegel’s departure from Kant’s epistemic design (i.e. separating reason from
sensibility). Pippin (in Stern, 2009: 2) claims that Hegel’s form of metaphysics is immune to
the Kantian critique on the grounds that the role of Hegel’s exegesis of self-consciousness is
analogical to Kant’s principle of the unity of apperception, i.e. the concepts do not
categorise reality itself, but only relate to subject’s self-reflective picture of the world. This
implicates that one is supposed to interpret Hegelian conception of thought in the Kantian
sense, which is simply not textually consistent with what Hegel means (Beizer, 2005: 62-63).
Stern (2009: 3) rightly objects to this by saying that inquiring about the world and inquiring
about the thinking about the world are two separate kinds of inquiry. In his view, Pippin
alienates Hegel’s own view from its ontological claims in order to make it fall within the
bounds of what Kant had considered to be an acceptable (i.e non-metaphysical) philosophy.
In order to demonstrate why this cannot be the case, we must look into the differences
between Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of reason.
What for Kant are merely categories of thought, for Hegel are also categories of
reality (Holmes, 2015). This is because, as it has been demonstrated above, rationality for
Hegel is what exists in the strongest possible ontological sense (Houlgate, 2003: 13). Hegel’s
reason, therefore, is not merely a human faculty by which subject categorises the

17
experienced world as it is for Kant, but this categorising is a component of the reality itself,
the reality which is interactively comprised of reason and experience. When Hegel employs
reason to play a role in his inquiry into the principles of what is real he does not mean to
prove some sets of hypothetical propositions as Kant does. Reason for him, rather than
being a ‘conception of deductive proofs’, is simply a ‘conception of thinking’ (Holmes, 2015).
So while Kant remains “committed to the Cartesian conception of unit of thought as
‘proposition (judgement)’” (Houlgate, 2003: 11, 17), Hegel instead identifies unit of thought
as ​concept (Begriff). Unlike Kant, he begins his inquiry with the most abstract and
undetermined concept of ‘being’. Hegel is not satisfied with the Kantian identification of
understanding with the faculty of judgement. His minimal starting point is that thought ​is -
the identification of ‘thinking’ with ‘being’​. At this embryonic stage of beholding the abstract
undetermined ​being, it would take a long way of ​meandering and struggling with conceptual
inconsistencies for the Hegelian ​Geist before it may critically arrive at what ‘understanding’
and ‘judgement’ mean. Therefore even in light of the Kantian reduction of ontology to what
he calls ​the analytic of pure understanding, the Hegelian project maintains its own
meta-critical stance - the Kantian concept-tools of the critique of metaphysics are raw and
empty abstractions.
By forcing Hegelian system into the Kantian mould, distinctive features of it must be
ignored. These features, although often conflicting with the Kant’s criteria are definitive of
Hegel’s system and so in order to give justice to Hegel, one must rather admit the
incompatibility of Hegel’s system with Kant’s critique of metaphysics rather than sacrifice
what is unique in Hegel merely in order to make him compliant with the ‘great master
Kant’. Broadly speaking, the non-metaphysical perspective is flawed, because it ignores
Hegel’s own declaration of his philosophy to be an immanentist phenomenological kind of
metaphysics where objects of knowledge are construed through being perceived, while at
the same time the system is a metaphysics that is post-Kantian in the sense of being
conducted as an internal ​critique of concepts (see Houlgate’s distinction between
metaphysica generalis and ​metaphysica specialis), in fact critical not only of the pre-Kantian
metaphysics, but of the Kantian structural premises of his own critique. Pinkard (1996) and
Pippin (1989) fail to address this fundamental insight.

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 C. Support for the revised metaphysical interpretation
Thus, the view of Hegelian idealism as purged of all metaphysical elements appears
to be far-fetched, mainly due to Hegel’s own critique of Kant and the fact that Hegel
considered metaphysics (although not explicitly) to be the purpose of all true philosophy
(Beizer, 2005: 53). The revised metaphysical reading of Hegel’s system appears to offer the
most balanced view of the matter as it focuses on how Hegel charged Kant for not being
critical enough in his won critique of metaphysics. It is noted that, where Kant axiomatically
sets the categories of pure thought to be the faculty of judgement (Houlgate, 2003: 11),
Hegel insists that the categories themselves must be investigated prior to any such an
assumption, which the philosopher does do in ​The Science of Logic: there he starts from
interrogating pure thought as the unconditioned (ibid.).
Thus, the reading endorses Hegel as a proponent of the critical reading, only as a
more radical, one who seeks to extend the critique beyond pure reason and into the domain
of experience - Hegel understands his Logic in a strong ontological sense (ibid.: 12), which
unfortunately makes it coincide with metaphysics. In other words, what Kant considers to
be categories of thought, Hegel considers to be, in addition to that, the categories of reality
itself. This inquiry into the nature of things, conducted by thought alone, is supposed to be
achieved by Hegel, however, by rejecting the transcendental idealist model which Kant had
employed. Hegel therefore disagrees with the structural set up of the Kantian definition of
metaphysics by claiming that the transcendental status (not being accessible to perception)
of the ​thing-in-itself is an abstraction and thus an empty concept (Houlgate, 2003:13) since
it has no direct bearing of the lived life.
The problem with the previous two readings is that Hegel is viewed as either a
metaphysician in the sense meant by Kant or as not a metaphysician at all (Beizer, 2005:
55-56). However, it is clear from the accounts of Stern, Beizer, and Houlgate (some of the
most prominent proponents of the revised metaphysical reading), that Hegel, was a
metaphysician, but on his own terms. Hegel bypasses the dualism implied by Kant’s
transcendental arguments through an Aristotelian conception of the universal as existing
only in objects, but as irreducible to mere objects in terms of its meaning. The locus of the
Hegelian metaphysical foundations stands in direct opposition to those of Kant’s; “Hegel’s
own concept of the infinite or unconditioned is entirely immanent: the infinite does not
exist beyond the finite world, but only within it.” (ibid.: 55) It would follow, therefore, that

19
Hegel rejected the transcendental status of the Kantian ​thing-in-itself, since for Hegel the
‘itselfness’ of a thing (if one must insist on its existence at all) already belongs to the world
of appearances and is not locked out of access to perception as Kant would have had it. This
Kantian creation of ​thing-in-itself is interpreted from the revised metaphysical perspective
as Kant assuming the existence of beings beyond our experience of this world, which falls
under Hegel’s suspicion, namely that of Kant not being self-critical enough in his own
critique (Houlgate, 2003: 13).
Although Hegel recognises Kant’s critique as true on its own terms, and so agrees
with the Kant’s assessment of pre-critical forms of metaphysics, he feels compelled to
devise a new metaphysics, which (for Kantian reasons) would not involve the notions of the
transcendent, supernatural or the purely noumenal (Beizer, 2005: 55; Houlgate, 2003: 8).
His answer to the challenge is his dialectical method which involves the corrective (as Hegel
believed) merging of the dualistic concepts of the infinite and the finite, subject and
substance, the universal and the particular, reason and sensibility (Beizer, 2005: 64) into an
organic and internally dynamic all-inclusive temporally structured whole: ​Geist. In the
Hegelian absolute these seemingly opposing properties coexist in a monistic
self-identification. The subject-object identity as foundational to the Hegelian project is the
key of the meta-critique of the Kantian schism between ​nous (pure reason as understood in
the Parmenidean sense) and ​phenomenon (appearance), upon which distinction the Kantian
critique of metaphysics had been raised
The point made by the revised metaphysical interpretation about Hegel’s critique of
Kant, explains why neither the traditional metaphysical nor the non-metaphysical
interpretation represent the Hegelian system accurately in context of the Kantian critique of
metaphysics. As has been shown, the common interpretative distortions contributing to the
failure of these perspectives ensue mainly from the transcendental-idealist lens through
which both readings view the Hegelian system. This lens ignores Hegel’s objection to Kant’s
distinction between ​nous and ​phenomenon, mind and sensibility. Therefore, the very fact
that absolute idealism is an immanentist doctrine where thinking itself is considered to be a
form of experience (Beizer, 1999: 20) calls for rejection of both the traditional metaphysical
and the non-metaphysical interpretations. Both of these interpretative camps, however
distinct with regards to their assessment of absolute idealism, misread the crucial point,
which the revised metaphysical interpretation alone addresses. Namely, how the Hegelian

20
idea of the absolute is the necessary result of an attempt to overcome the dualistic ills of
the Kantian epistemology (i.e. the lack of sufficient explanation of how a priori concepts
apply to experience). Below, supported by Beizer (2005, 1999), Houlgate (2003) and
Sinnerbrink (2002), I will examine why Hegel finds it necessary to postulate the existence of
the absolute, how he defines the absolute, and how he attempts to make it fulfil the criteria
of the Kantian critique of metaphysics.
The notorious problem of explaining the possibility of synthetic ​a priori judgements
was the unwanted heritage Kant had left to his successors: Fichte, Schelling, and indeed,
Hegel. Their fundamental task at hand was to answer the question “How is empirical
knowledge possible if it requires a universality and necessity that cannot be verified in
experience?” (ibid.: 10) The principle of subject-object identity originally prototyped by
Fichte was supposed to provide the answer. By collapsing the mind-body dualism into one
substance he attempted to explain how the concepts of understanding could apply to
experience. Since mind and body are two attributes of the same ‘interface’ one could finally
explain the causal relationship between them. But according to Schelling and Hegel, Fichte
remained too Kantian in maintaining that the unity of the two attributes is a merely
regulative principle, not a constitutive one (ibid.: 13). In other words, according to Fichte,
we may assume the absolute to be an abstract idea helpful in clarifying epistemological
doubts, but it cannot be granted an ontological status due to our inability to explain it
empirically. This is because we are bound to experiencing the objective reality dualistically
(i.e. as human-subjects encountering world-objects) and, according to the Kantian critique
of knowledge, know nothing beyond it.
Now, Schelling and Hegel would argue against Fichte that granting a merely
regulative status to the principle of subject-object identity is insufficient, because this way
the dualism cannot be overcome - it must therefore be made constitutional in order to
justify the possibility of empirical knowledge (ibid.: 14). But in order to also fulfil the criteria
of the Kantian critique of knowledge, the noumenal would have to be demonstrated to be a
form of experience. At this critical point the present argument collapses into a paradox: (1)
one cannot explain the possibility of empirical knowledge without proposing an ontological
existence of absolute consciousness comprised of both the noumenal and phenomenal - as
a single unity. (2) But in order to claim the existence of the absolute, one has to either reject
the ​a priori status of the noumenal, or revert to a pre-critical understanding of metaphysics.

21
 Hegel chooses the only available way forward, which is to consider the noumenal as
an experience of the mind, just as the phenomenal is an experience of the senses. Thus, the
philosopher is testing a possibility of a critical form of metaphysics, a possibility that has to
work out, should Kant’s essential insights, as Hegel sees them, be saved from the
mechanistic-dualistic aporiai. Hegel justifies this with his principle of absolute identity where
the subject identifies with the object despite the day-to-day experience of the two being
separate. Thus, the philosopher departs from Schelling; by incorporating the formal
non-identity of subject and object into a greater scheme of the absolute, where this
non-identity becomes contained within the temporally mediated unity of both elements,
Hegel advocates for the inclusion of contingent factors of particular features of things into
the essential structure of the absolute whole. This results in an absolute that is experienced
in our daily life in the form of duality yet its absolute essence is realised in the dialectical
movement towards the ever more consolidated unity of the two. This ​Absolute is not a
transcendent unconditioned ‘beyond’, but a concrete essentiality of the world-subjectivity
that becomes increasingly conscious of its objective worldhood through its progressive
realisation that the difference between the two, although real, is subordinate to the
overarching unity of universal interconnectedness. As it marches through time, the Hegelian
Geist becomes less divided and more reconciled into itself as an ever more liberated and
rational world-self whose ​telos is gradually realising ​the Absolute or ​Idea (​Idee). This process,
as demonstrated in ​The Science of Logic, is a pure metaphysical speculation, although one
that is fully consistent on its own terms and, by being such, the work’s main merit, I would
argue, consists not in the systems relation to reality as it really is, but how original and
logically consistent an attempt has Hegel made in an unbelievably strenuous task of solving
the issues of Kant’s own system, which Kant himself failed to address. Consequently, Hegel
had to reject certain features of Kantian thinking in order to try and facilitate the possibility
of critical philosophy free from the notorious dichotomies standing in the way of explaining
how universal concepts of understanding apply to particular and contingent experiences.
It is clear that Hegel and Kant have different ideas on how to understand critical
metaphysics. According to the revised interpretation, Hegel’s idea is more radical as he
rejects the Kantian assumption about the concepts of understanding belonging to a faculty
of judgement. Instead, he makes these concepts subject to the immanent critique in the
Logic. By doing this, Hegel extends the Kantian critique outwards by applying it to what Kant

22
had taken for granted - to abstract universality. However, because Hegel thus effectively
examines the undetermined, this may look to a Kantian as if Hegel was conducting a
pre-critical kind of metaphysics, even though the purpose of the task is to demonstrate that
the concepts in question cannot exist as separate from experience; that “what something is
in itself has actually to be conceived as inseparable from its relations to other things and
from the way it appears.” (Houlgate, 2003: 13).
That subject and object are inextricably intertwined in the process of progressive
self-knowledge of ​the ​Absolute is Hegel’s answer to the age-old distortion of epistemological
Platonic dualism. By doing this, Hegel undermines the Kantian project by showing that the
concept of the ​thing-in-itself is an empty abstraction and as such should be considered
redundant. Paradoxically, however, the reasoning strategy (i.e. the dialectic) that facilitated
the arrival at such an assessment would be, by Kantian standards, uncritical, because it
involves speculating on what Kant considered to be​ a priori.
It has been demonstrated in the course of the present argument that if we look into
the theoretical details of the matter we are eventually led astray, ending up in paradoxical
ambiguities, which prevent the possibility of conclusion. Moreover, in the light of these
ambiguities, the matter of whether Hegel’s system is immune to Kantian critique of
knowledge has to be further qualified, i.e. the assessment will differ depending on whether
one views the problem through a dichotomous transcendental idealist or
immanentist-monist lens.
If the meaning of ‘Kant-Hegel-and-metaphysics’ kind-of-discourse is to assess the
validity of Hegel’s legacy in contemporary philosophy, then one should rather ask three
more specific questions: 1) Why would Hegel be ready to critique Kant in order to liberate
what is most valuable in transcendental idealism, i.e. its critical method, from its flawed
dualist logic even at the cost of risking failure to meet the criteria of the Kantian critique of
metaphysics? 2) Should Hegel fail to meet the criteria of the Kantian critique, would it
disqualify him as a modern thinker in the post-Kantian philosophical paradigm?, and 3) Does
assessing Hegel’s system by Kantian standards even make sense at all in the light of the
above critical reasons for the existence of the Hegelian ​Absolute?
Surely, even if it is decided that these questions cannot be answered decisively, they
redirect our inquiry and present it from another angle, perhaps more significant than the
original question of Hegel’s immunity to Kantian strictures on the possibility of metaphysical

23
knowledge. If one agrees that Kant is the philosophical epitome of the Enlightenment, then
Hegel, despite endorsing the the Enlightenment’s leading virtues of scientific reason,
scepticism and individual liberty, goes beyond Kant by recognising the limits of the positivist
epistemology (which Kant had prototyped). The detrimental implications of such an
epistemology manifest in terms of real pragmatic moral and cultural conditions: the epoch’s
diremption (​Entzweiung) and the ensuing crisis of subjective consciousness (Sinnerbrink,
2002). It is against the sundered unity of knowledge and perception that Hegel feels
compelled to devise his own system - a system that would be a critique of what in
modernity is responsible for isolating thinking from life, of abstracting concepts from their
contingent experiential origins and so, ultimately, a critique of the widespread acceptance
of dry formalism of mere objectivity as the standard of knowledge (Sinnerbrink, 2002: 69).
In ​Differenzschrift Hegel (in ibid: 65) asserts the purpose of his future project:

When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose
their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of
philosophy arises. From this point of view the need is contingent. But with
respect to the given dichotomy the need is the necessary attempt to suspend
the rigidified opposition between subjectivity and objectivity;

Seeing through the cultural developments in his time, Hegel anticipates the detrimental
implications of the analytical positivist consciousness. Thus, the thinker evokes a
proto-postmodern vision, which in the 20th Century would be made explicit in the accounts
of his heirs: Husserl, Heidegger and Gadamer, and further, dispersed throughout the
discourses of the Frankfurt School, Sartre and Derrida. The Hegelian deconstruction of the
Kantian critique of metaphysics has opened doors to an alternative mode of philosophising,
one that has learnt from the shortcomings of the post-Kantians’ stultifying regime of
quantitative understanding, instead offering the way of philosophising through a narrative
and subjective interpretation. Narrative that allows philosophy to return to the question of
the place of human self within the technoscientific instrumentalism of modernity where the
currency of meaning is losing a battle with the currency of information. The revised
metaphysical interpretation recognises Hegel’s early diagnosis of the increasingly
secularised Western society. Thus, the revisionist metaphysical view manages to break away

24
from the impotent grappling between the classical metaphysical and non-metaphysical
misreadings, and thus allows a broader-minded perspective where absolute idealism is
assessed in light of its contemporary influence, as well as Hegel’s original and daring
attempt at solving the ills of the Kantian critique.
For Hegel, only conceptual and subjective meaning-making represents the true
interest of reason (​Vernunft), whereas a merely objective understanding (​Verstand) of
scientific facts is insufficient for a definition of knowledge that would meet the absolute
need of human beings - the need for reconciling the individual and the world into a
rationally consistent whole. Through an act of human engagement with objects the sacred
life-force is brought into being and catalysed in the absolute moment of self-actualisation.
The meaning of a culture is demonstrated via the instruments by means of which, its very
identity is asserted in history. ​The Absolute achieves itself in the transient act of the
dissolution of the subject-object dichotomy, and so in the coexistence of the two, the
absolute dwells: a passionate musician is defined by their relationship with the instrument,
a master carpenter’s absolute being is realised through the tools and timbre, a thinker is at
home in the world during the experience of conceptual understanding, sensuously mediated
by language and cognition. The absolute dimension of the human world comes to life only
when we passionately engage in the experiences that meaningfully shape who we are.
Objects grant us access to the world as it is, because there is no other world but that of
appearances. In this way Hegel makes a statement that all knowledge is phenomenological.
Even that which Kant would see as the noumenal - internal psychic life of subjects - is
comprised of sensuous experiences of the mind; it has to, because otherwise we would have
no way of making sense of the world. In order for the world to be perceived as a meaningful
whole (one that facilitates the coexistence of the rational and the spiritual), a culture must
surpass sterile mechanistic trap of positivism and commit to the task of conceptual
self-comprehension where its identity is realised as its most sacred, real in the strongest
ontological sense, ​Absolute.

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III. Does the revised metaphysical interpretation offers an account of Hegel’s system that
is immune to Kantian critique of metaphysics?

We have shown that from the perspective of the revised metaphysical

interpretation, the Hegelian system is an idiosyncratic form of metaphysics that aims to
reconcile knowledge with perception. It seeks to meet the criteria for the possibility of
empirical knowledge by postulating an idea of the absolute as inherent in the world of
becoming. Such a reconciliation of knowledge with experience was for Hegel the necessary
condition of all future philosophy, implicitly understood as critical metaphysics. Hegel
attempts to meet the condition of criticality by framing the inquiry within the Heraclitean,
rather than Parmenidean model of ontology, i.e. by incorporating the contingent dynamism
of organic life into a greater structure of the universal and necessary whole - that what truly
is. This allows the philosopher to conceptually demonstrate how the opposites shift into one
another, thus realising ​the Absolute’s infinity in the transient moment of becoming.
But the identification of being with thinking is the key point where the Hegelian
criticality and Kantian pre-criticality paradoxically coincide. For Hegel, thought itself is an
ontological component of reality; upon it the true reality of worldly objects depends (thus
Hegelian idealism is a stronger form of idealism than that of Kant’s who still retains the
realist notion of the ​thing-in-itself). Therefore, the “objective” reality exists through its
“subjective” perception, as within the bounds of temporal-spatial contingency. But, in truth,
reality is neither subjective nor objective, but their synthesis: a timeless spacelessness
immanent in the infinite act of becoming. According to Wittgenstein’s (2002: 6.431)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration
but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” Such secular
interpretation of the undetermined (e.g. the eternal, infinite or, indeed, the absolute), freed
from traditional theological implications, is the key to understanding the truly contemporary
meaning of metaphysical consciousness that Hegel means to foster. Contrastingly, the
Kantian understanding of the metaphysical as the transcendent or supersensory, appears
anachronistic in comparison, as it seems to be still derived from the Platonic/Judeo-Christian
idea of the metaphysical. Hegel seems to be aware of this and so he strives for a new
secular definition of metaphysics that would be compatible with the modern paradigm of
Enlightenment while solving the Kantian problems.

26
 The problem of the residual transcendent dogmatism of Kant’s philosophy is made
explicit by another Heraclitean philosopher who was also concerned with the spiritual
condition of modern West - Nietzsche (1990: 49), who asserts that “To divide the world into
a ‘real’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of
Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian -) is only a suggestion of décadence - a
symptom of declining life….” It is evident that Hegel himself sees Kant’s mechanistic
dichotomies as harmful to life, which is why he frames his system in organic-monistic terms.
Further, in ​Der Antichrist, Nietzsche (1990: 133) insists that “One had made of reality an
‘appearance’; one had made a completely fabricated world, that of being into reality. . . .
Kant’s success is merely a theologian’s success (...) . . .” I purport after Nietzsche, that the
transcendental idealist model of Kant’s epistemology is a ​metastasis of Judeo-Christian
transcendent metaphysics; that the opposition of the noumenal and the phenomenal has its
roots in the monotheistic schism between the supernatural world of the divine and the
profane realm of nature.
Taking the abstraction of ​a priori truths as the only certain basis of reasoning, Kant
pulls the definition of the real away from life itself. This is because the organic dimension of
life’s contingency would compromise the certainty that Kant is after. But by doing that, Kant
consequently rules out particular instances of the forms of thinking as they are concretised
in experience, because such particular instances are mediated by the senses. As such they
cannot represent the real as it is in itself, and thus metaphysics on Kant’s account fails the
critical test of ‘apodictic certainty’ required for knowledge. By doing this, Kant, as it were,
pours the baby out with the bathwater. This is precisely where Hegel recognises the germ
of nihilism in Kant and Fichte (Houlgate, 2003: 42, Sinnerbrink, 2002: 64).
For Hegel the true standard of knowledge is not set by its apodictic certainty, if that
is to mean abstracting it from the ‘messy’ environment of nature. One should instead, in
Hegel’s view, be ready to ‘get one’s hands dirty’ and apply theoretical knowledge to action
in order to see whether its abstract truth lives up to life itself - life understood as the messy
world of human experience, which is the absolute world of knowledge, because here is
where it breathes and serves human needs. Otherwise knowledge remains a mere
abstraction, perhaps more certain in itself, but such a static formal certainty proves to be an
obsolete tool in trying to explain the dynamic process of life. According to Holmes (2015, my
italics), “if the difference between appearance and reality is abstraction, then [​one should

27
take] immediate appearances as real (in degree). Appearances, i.e. the immediate
awareness of things, provide one with an awareness of reality, but with an imperfect
conceptualisation.” In other words, the difference between Kant and Hegel’s ideas of
metaphysical knowledge is this: Kant interprets sensory distortion of knowledge as a breach
of the knowledge’s critical status, and consequently as loss of its epistemic value. The
consequence follows, that no metaphysical knowledge is possible. Contrastingly, Hegel
interprets such sensory distortion as one of infinite instances of absolute reality ‘shining
through the veil of sense’, i.e. tainted with experience, the senses being the factor that
impedes the perfect conceptualisation of ​the Absolute but allows the transmission of ​a
degree of absolute reality’s true essence, despite this sensory ‘filtering’. Hegel finds it
necessary to go beyond the abstract formalisms professed by Kant as certain (e.g. the
non-temporal ​a priori ‘pure concepts of the understanding’) in order to save metaphysics
from sceptical doubts, but he is more radical than Kant in what he considers necessary. Take
for example the Aristotelian law of identity, which Hegel relativises in his ​Logic by
contextualising it within the time-bound and contingent conditions of organic existence
(Hegel, et al.; 2010: 11.248). By doing this, Hegel temporalises abstract idealities, which now
become concrete objects of empirical-rational investigation. Such an ‘immanent critique’
proves the law self-contradictory due to the organic contingencies of life, e.g. ‘Am I the
same as I was yesterday? Yes and no.’ Formal logic is internally consistent only as an
abstract ideality, but Hegel is not interested in abstract idealities at all. He is interested in
the organic process of flowing life. Therefore, accusing Hegel’s ​Logic of metaphysical claims
in the Kantian sense is, yet again, inconsistent with the core objectives of Hegel’s project as
distinct from those of Kant’s.
In truth, one may say, that neither Kant nor Hegel fully endorse each other’s criteria
of criticality. At best the Kantian critique does not fully apply to Hegelian system; it is
partially incompatible with it. However it would also be reasonable to say that Hegel has
gone as far as his intellectual integrity has allowed him to, in order to meet the criteria of
the Kantian critique while in some ways Hegel went even further than Kant would have
expected it of himself. Hegel’s major objective, however, was to reestablish a universal
dimension of philosophy, which essentially means to revive its metaphysical status without
compromising its modern virtues of scientific reasoning via critical interrogation.

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 CONCLUSION

In sum, if the problem of metaphysics is to be understood ultimately as the question

of the relevance of Hegel for contemporary philosophy, a twofold answer is possible. If the
Kantian ​Critique of Pure Reason is a critique of reason understood in mechanistic terms,
namely as a unidirectional causal progression of deductive proofs conducted with logically
consistent propositions, which produce apodictically certain results - abstract truths free of
contingency, then the Hegelian system of absolute idealism at worst fails the critique or, at
best, is incompatible with it. Being a careful critical scholar, Hegel returns to early
pre-Socratic philosophy, Aristotle, and Spinoza as well as to Kant himself to seek resolution
of the Kantian problem of dichotomous heterogeneity. He achieves this through avoidance
of the Cartesian conception of reason that Kant had used, and writes a narrative of ​Geist
where he critically examines the meandering and erring process of consciousness as
embedded in not merely casual, but holistically interactive, life-process. The ​Geist’s direct
awareness of reality is not supposed to be understood in a way of proving judgements, but
instead ​Geist is presented as trying to find a way in the world to gain an ever clearer mental
picture of itself - the process terminating in absolute knowledge. This interpretation of
absolute knowledge as a terminus of thinking is hard to grasp and it is unclear whether
Hegel meant it this way. If he did, then this would undeniably make his system fail the
Kantian critique. Alternatively, if one considers Hegel’s absolute knowledge more like a
framework of reasoning where everything, including the erring of the mind caused by
organic contingency, is subjected to universally applied immanent critique of the dialectic,
then the case of absolute idealism could still be argued further.
The strongest point of my argument, which defends Hegel’s system against the
Kantian criticisms is that the Hegelian ​Absolute is a notion entirely naturalistic and not
transcendent. On the other hand, defending Hegel is most difficult where the Hegelian
teleological claims about the nature of the dialectic fail the test of empirical verification
which is demanded by the Kantian critique of knowledge.
In any case, the main lesson learn from Hegel’s attitude to the Kantian critique of
metaphysics, as stated in the introduction to ​Phenomenology (2013: 47), is that the fear of
error may be the error itself and that in order to live a meaningful existence as human

29
beings we have to make do with what absolute meaning we may ascribe to our world of
organic contingency, which does not always provide certain results. In the negative and the
erroneous there lies an opportunity of challenge to achieve a reconciliation of a higher
order. Even if the absolute stage of such a movement is never to be achieved, the very
concern with ​the Absolute, as Hegel meant it, should be the chief concern of philosophers,
especially in the post-God contemporary age and its suicidal plight of sterile technoscientific
rationality.

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