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Hegel's Concept of Recognition As the Solution to Kant's Third Antinomy

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Hegel's Concept of Recognition As the Solution to Kant's Third Antinomy Chapter 12 Hegel’s Concept of Recognition as the Solution to Kant’s Third Antinomy Arthur Kok 1 Introduction In his Lectures on the history of philosophy, when discussing Kant’s third antin- omy, Hegel reproaches Kant for having “too much tenderness for the things”.1 In this contribution, I endeavor to explain what Hegel means by this criticism, and why it makes sense. Hegel values very much about Kant’s doctrine of the antinomies that it exposes the fundamental contradictions of reason. He calls this “the interest- ing side” of the antinomies.2 What is ‘interesting’ about them is that we cannot conceive of the absolute (uncaused) spontaneous origin of things, i.e. tran- scendental freedom, right away. The thesis that every causal chain of events presupposes a cause that is itself not caused contains the contradiction that an absolute spontaneity cannot take place according to rules, and hence can- not be understood in terms of causality.3 The antithesis, which rejects absolute spontaneity, makes this explicit, but it results in contradiction too: it is undeni- able that every causal chain posits an uncaused origin. The complete problem of the third antinomy thus is that we are forced to accept the assumption of transcendental freedom, but by doing so we postulate a contradiction. Kant argues that his transcendental idealism can resolve this contradic- tion. We shall see that Hegel does not accept Kant’s solution. I argue, however, that Hegel’s refutation of transcendental idealism does not mean that he does not take seriously the distinction between appearances and the Thing-in-itself. By assessing Hegel’s concept of recognition in the self-consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, I show that Hegel develops another perspective on the relation between the appearances and the things in themselves.4 1 Lit.: “zuviel Zärtlichkeit für die Dinge”, Hegel, Werke 20, 500. 2 Idem, 499 (my translation, ak): “The necessity of these contradictions is the interesting side, which Kant has brought into consciousness.” 3 Cf. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (CPuR), B 474: “… transcendental freedom is contrary to the causal law …”. 4 Hegel, Werke 3. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/9789004383784_013 Hegel’s Concept of Recognition 189 2 Transcendental Idealism Kant develops his central thesis about transcendental idealism in the tran- scendental esthetics.5 He says about sensible intuition that it has an empirical side and a pure one. Intuition in general is the immediate relation of a subject to an object. It is pure insofar as the immediate relation implies a connection with the object, and it is a priori insofar as the relation is innate to the subject. In other words, pure intuition a priori articulates that the relatedness of the subject to the things in general. Furthermore, intuition can be defined as either intellectual or sensible. The sensible intuition implies that the object is not given a priori by intuition, but it exists independently from it. It is an otherness for the subject of intuition. Kant never doubts that the immediate relatedness, or intuition, of the sub- ject to the things-in-themselves might be unreal or delusional, like for example solipsism does. His dualism should not be confused with Descartes’ dualism of mind and body. On the contrary, we can regard Kant’s claim that sensible intu- ition is nonetheless a pure intuition a priori exactly as a confirmation that the mind forms an integrated whole with the body. The transcendental character of the human mind has everything to do with the subject’s embodiment. For example, Kant derives his specification of the transcendental use of logic as distinct from its general use also from a distinction that follows from sensible nature of the human mind, viz. the distinction that objects are given either empirically or pure.6 Basically, Kant argues against empiricism that sensible intuition can- not provide any qualitative determination, unlike what Hume’s doctrine of 5 Kant, CPuR, B 31 ff. 6 In the introduction to the second part of the Transcendental doctrine of elements, viz. The idea of a transcendental logic, Kant explicitly refers back to the result of the transcendental aesthetics: “But now since there are pure as well as empirical intuitions (as the transcenden- tal aesthetic proved), a distinction between pure and empirical thinking of objects could also well be found.” (CPuR, B 79–80) Following this remark, he argues that to understand the meaning of the distinction between a ‘general’ and a ‘transcendental’ logic, it is necessary to abstain from fully abstracting from objects, because we have to consider how objects are given. Whereas a general logic accounts for objects only as representations, a genuinely tran- scendental logic also has to account for the origin of the object (which is, according to Kant, twofold: it is either pure or empirical). Therefore, it makes perfect sense, when Kant says: “Hence neither space nor any geometrical determination of it a priori is a transcendental representation, but only the cognition that these representations are not of empirical origin at all and the possibility that they can nevertheless be related a priori to objects of experience can be called transcendental.” (CPuR, B 81) The very notion of a ‘transcendental represen- tation’ contradicts the meaning of ‘transcendental’, viz. to be concerned with the origin of representations. .
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