Notes for reading along §§37-60 of the Encyclopedia Logic

Notes—written for the Hegel Circle (of Circles) meeting 5—for reading a chunk the ‘preliminary conception’ of the encyclopedia Logic, "B. The Second Position of Thought Towards Objectivity," which includes "I. Empiricism" (§§37-39, pp. 78-82) and "II. Critical Philosophy" (§§40-60, pp. 82-109). Since it’s mostly a critique of Kantian critical philosophy, I’ll list some of Hegel’s most provocative criticisms here. Rather than trying to make my own argument or offer my own defense of Hegel’s reading, I will do the opposite and summarize the criticisms as briefly and polemically as possible. (I promise a real piece on Hegel’s Kantkritik soon.)

Core of the Kantian Problem

(A) Facts and Givens: Kant assumes the empiricist 'fact' of experience--namely, that objectivity (universality and necessity) is found in knowing and not in sensory experience--and, in Hegel's words, "has merely put forward a different explanation of that fact." (§40) Because of Kant's failure to derive the categories (Hegel, following Fichte, accuses Kant of merely 'finding' them by assuming the truth of classical logic), this means that Kant's philosophy takes both the content of intuition to be a brute given and fails to account for the sheer fact of the categories. (Hegel, like many readers of Kant's first Critique, is skeptical of Kant's claim to have 'deduced' the determinations of the categories from the indeterminate 'I,' also known as the transcendental unity of apperception.) (§42) 

(B) The Ground of Unity: The ground of unity that allows for synthetic a priori judgment, the activity through which the 'I' relates the intuited manifold within itself as representation through the pure concepts of the understanding, is nothing other than the original identity of the 'I' in thinking. This means the determinate unity of experience depends on the indeterminate unity of the abstract 'I'. (§42)

(C) The Thing-in-itself: For Hegel, the thing-in-itself is a necessary result of Kant's commitment to the empiricist 'fact.' For Kant, this 'fact' has the consequence that any 'objectivity' must be attributed to the a priori cognitive activity of the transcendental subject. As a result, both the categories, as forms of subjective consciousness, and the matter of intuition are merely subjective. Though Hegel doesn't get into Kant's reasons for invoking things-in-themselves (cf section 3 on transcendental idealism here for a history of different interpretations: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/), he does argue that Kant is self-consistent in denying that the categories can be determinations of things-in-themselves, as the fact of their application by the activity of the transcendental subject depends on the givenness of the intuitive manifold to the receptivity of the transcendental subject. In short, once all determinations of objectivity are stripped from the object, what remains is the thing-in-itself. Hegel's difference with either the metaphysical reading of the thing-in-itself, which holds it to be a distinct entity from a phenomenal object, or the epistemological reading of the thing-in-itself, which holds it to be a 'standpoint' of thought human cognition cannot occupy because of its conditions, is to claim that the thing-in-itself is just the product of a process of abstraction. Regarding it either as an entity beyond phenomena we cannot access (metaphysical reading) or a possible/hypothetical standpoint of knowing that we cannot access because of constraints on human cognition (epistemological reading) commits the same mistake. For Hegel, the thing-in-itself is neither an entity or standpoint we cannot access, but the residue of an abstraction we can trace back to a mistaken position on objectivity in thought. As he says, polemically, 

One can only wonder, then, why one sees it repeated so often that one does not know [wissen] what the thing-in-itself is, when there is nothing easier to know than this. (§44)

(D) Summary: Given his fidelity to the empiricist fact, inside of which Kant attempts to recover objectivity, Kant is required to locate the unity of experience (given the formal constraints on possible experience) between the unknowable object (thing-in-itself) and the unknowable subject (the abstract 'I' as ground for unity of all representation). Knowledge, for Kant, is the conjunction of the mere fact that the 'I' determines through categories with the brute given of the manifold in intuition. (§§40-44, see also §52) In the 'Addition' sections under §41 and §42, Hegel suggests that the alleged significance of the difference between 'subjective' and 'objective' is overstated. 

One could also say that according to subjective idealism human beings can imagine that a lot rests on them. And yet, if his world is a mass of sensory intuitions, he has no reason to be proud of such a world. Nothing at all, therefore, depends on that difference between subjectivity and objectivity. Instead, it is the content on which everything depends, and this is equally subjective and objective. (§42)

Consequences

(1) Understanding and reason: Kant should be credited for distinguishing between Verstand (understanding) and Vernunft (reason), but by defining reason as a mere 'beyond' the conditioned activity of the understanding into some 'unconditioned,' reason is thereby conditioned (or, in other words, by defining reason as a mere stepping outside of finite experience into infinity, reason is finitized). (§45)

(2) Soul: Kant was right in his polemic against the reduction of the soul to a thing in the old metaphysics, but doesn't understand why this is the case because Kant fails to distinguish between things and activities (or the claim that the soul is knowable as a substance from the claim that the soul is knowable as an active self-relation). (§47)

(3) Antinomies: Kant artificially restricts antinomies (i) to our thinking, and does so out of 'a tenderness for worldly things' Kant tries to contain 'the blemish of contradiction' in our thought alone, saving the world from this corruption); (ii) to an ultimate end-point of thought beyond which it cannot venture given the apparent undecidability of the antinomical claims, when antinomy is only the point-of-departure for dialectical thinking; (iii) to four cosmological ideas, when 'antinomy' in its positive significance, as it applies not to four ideas but is implicit in all finite objects and all finite thoughts, propels us toward speculative thought of the unity-of-opposites. (§48)

(4) Ontological Proof: Hegel argues that Kant's criticism of the ontological proof shows us that, contra Kant, there no content of thought more trivial than being. (§51) 

(5) The Lazy Ought: Kant misunderstands his own insight into the unity of freedom and nature in the third Critique and, rather than thinking this unity-in-difference through, falls into a pattern of 'laziness of thought' and suggests yet again that the unity of nature and freedom is a mere ought, the achieving of which is another impossible, infinite task for us (the kind modern dualistic thinking ends in after it tries to combine what it had just a moment ago declared to be incompatible). (§55-60)