The Idealism of Life: Hegel and Kant on the Ontology of Living Individuals

The Idealism of Life: Hegel and Kant on the Ontology of Living Individuals by Franklin Charles Owen Cooper-Simpson A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of PhD Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto © Copyright by Franklin Charles Owen Cooper-Simpson 2017 The Idealism of Life: Hegel and Kant on the Ontology of Living Individuals Franklin Charles Owen Cooper-Simpson PhD Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2017 Abstract My dissertation, The Idealism of Life: Hegel and Kant on the Ontology of Living Individuals, investigates the significance of the concept of life for Kant’s and Hegel’s respective forms of idealism. In Chapter 1, I argue that Kant’s account of the subjective origin of the a priori forms of cognition requires that when we judge something to be a living individual, we only suppose it to be so (or, in other words, that these judgments do not determine anything in the object being judged). In the remaining chapters, I argue that Hegel’s account of life as objectively real (i.e. rather than a supposition we make) depends on his development of the concept of the individual as self-determining self. I trace this development in the Science of Logic through three stages. In Chapter 2, I argue that any minimal notion of self depends on Hegel’s logic of the Infinite as described in the Doctrine of Being. In Chapter 3, I argue that this minimal account of selfhood is possible only if that self is immanently, rather than externally, determined—that is, that a self cannot be defined from without—by tracing Hegel’s account of ‘Determining Reflection’. In Chapter 4, I show how, for Hegel, the logic of self- determination gives us the resources to describe the concept of individuality, which Hegel develops as the ‘Concept’. In Chapter 5, I conclude that Hegel’s account of life depends on the ii claim that the ideal relations immanent to it (relations between, e.g., self and other, or organism and organ) both constitute and are constituted by the material determinations of the living thing. This, in turn, suggests that any idealism that attributes ideal forms and material determinations to distinct sources will be unable to describe life as objectively real. iii Acknowledgments My experience writing this dissertation has been both taxing and rewarding (in roughly equal parts), and I would not have been able to meet the challenges it posed, nor to appreciate the rewards it offered, without the guidance and support of many. I would like to thank, first, Rebecca Comay, whose supervision and guidance first made this project possible. I have been incredibly fortunate to have a supervisor in Rebecca who was willing to challenge me to see new possibilities, both in Hegel’s writing and in my own, all while expressing staunch support for the idea I meant to develop. I would also like to express my deep gratitude for the mentorship and support of John Russon, without whom this project could not have been completed. From each of our many conversations about Hegel, I have come away with both a richer understanding of Hegel’s thinking and of what it means to do philosophy in the first place. I would like to thank Margaret Morrison, whose advice and support first encouraged me to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy, and who helped me develop, over the course of two years, the argument that would become the first chapter of this dissertation. I would like to thank, too, Nicholas Stang, whose careful reading and invaluable comments helped me develop a much more nuanced argument. I am also extremely grateful for all those who helped my nascent sense of what is true while at the University of Toronto. In particular, I would like to thank Arthur Ripstein, whose undergraduate course on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason convinced me that I would need to spend the rest of my life thinking about Kant’s philosophy; Evan Thompson, who introduced me to both the phenomenology of life of Hans Jonas and his own work in Mind in Life, which inaugurated my thinking about the concept of life as self-determining; and to Ulrich Schlösser, whose attentive reading of Kant’s first and third Critique shaped my understanding of those texts to this day. My intellectual development also owes a great deal to the many instructive (and deeply enjoyable) conversations I have had with G. Anthony Bruno, Sean Michael Smith, Michael Blezy, and Dave Suarez. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my parents, Anne and Peter, whose unconditional support, guidance and teaching has, in many different ways, made me the person— and scholar—that I am. Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Lucy, who has lived with me in the trenches for the past three years, and whose continual encouragement, inspiration and love made this whole thing seem possible. iv To Lucy v Table of Contents Acknowledgements iv Introduction: The Idealism of Life 1 Chapter 1: Kant’s Conception of Life and the Limits of a Discursive Intellect 24 1.1 The Life of Transcendental Philosophy 24 1.2 Two Kind of Chaos 27 1.3 Empirical Chaos and the notion of Purposiveness 33 1.4 From Purposiveness to Life 40 1.5 The Limits of the Discursive Intellect 57 Chapter 2: Hegel’s Concept of the Infinite 64 2.1 From Finite to Infinite Idealism 64 2.2 The Infinity of Being 68 2.3 The Idealism of the Finite 82 Chapter 3: Reflection and the Self-Determination of Being 101 3.1 Introduction: From Being to Essence 101 3.2 The Logic of Reflection 104 3.3 Positing Reflection 107 3.4 From External Reflection to Determining Reflection 124 3.5 The Origin of Difference 135 vi Chapter 4: The Self-Determination of the Concept 145 4.1 The Concept in General 145 4.2 The Moments of the Concept 148 4.3 The Universality of the Now 165 4.4 The Concept as Logic of the Self 170 4.5 The Concept as Subject-Object: The Idea 176 Chapter 5: The Logic of Life 187 5.1 What Is ‘Logical’ Life? 187 5.2 The Idea of Life 194 5.3 The Idea of Life and the Judgment of Natural Ends 209 5.4 The Idealism of Life 217 Conclusion 223 References and Abbreviations 226 Bibliography 227 vii Introduction The Idealism of Life Hegel’s Early Reception of Kant’s Theory of the Organic In Hegel’s first published philosophical work, the Difference essay of 1801, he makes a brief and curious remark about Kant’s theoretical treatment of nature: Kant…views nature as Subject-Object in that he treats the product of nature as an end of nature, as purposeful without a concept of purpose, as necessary without being mechanistic, as identity of concept and being. But at the same time this view of nature is supposed to be merely teleological, that is to say, it only serves validly as a maxim for our limited human understanding whose thinking is discursive and whose universal concepts do not contain the particular phenomena of nature. This human perspective is not supposed to affirm anything concerning the reality of nature.1 Hegel is here clearly making reference to Kant’s “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” the latter half of the Critique of Judgment famous, especially among the German Idealists, for Kant’s characterization of the “intuitive understanding”. It is clear, too, that here Hegel celebrates Kant for regarding in nature’s ‘purposefulness’ the “identity of concept and being,” while lamenting the fact that, for Kant, to regard nature in this light is merely to adopt a “maxim for our limited human understanding,” one that does not allow us to know “anything concerning the reality of nature”. In other words, for Hegel, Kant has arrived at some important expression of the ‘Subject-Object’ in nature, but he nevertheless fails to regard it as actually true of nature, or as actually describing 1 DS 163. 1 2 nature’s reality apart from how we, as discursive thinkers, merely subjectively understand it. Though the terms of his analysis change somewhat, Hegel makes a similar point in his next major philosophical work, Faith and Knowledge: In his reflection upon [organic nature] in the “Critique of Teleological Judgment,” Kant expresses the Idea of Reason more definitely than in the preceding concept of a harmonious play of cognitive powers. He expresses it now in the Idea of an intuitive intellect, for which possibility and actuality are one… An intuitive intellect would “not proceed from the universal to the particular and so to the singular (through concepts); and the concordance of the particular laws in nature’s products with the intellect will not be contingent for it.”2 It is an “archetypal (urbildich) intellect” for which “the possibility of the parts, etc., as to their character and integration is dependent on the whole.”3 […] The Idea occurs [to Kant] here only as a thought. Notwithstanding its admitted necessity, reality must not be predicated of it. On the contrary, we must once for all accept the fact that universal and particular are inevitably and necessarily distinct.4 Here, as before, Hegel identifies a significant idea in Kant’s theorizing on purposive or teleological nature which, he feels, has been unduly relegated to a subjective status, or which has been denied reality. Here, the reference to Kant’s notion of an intuitive intellect5 is explicit. We are 2 CPJ, 5: 405-408. 3 Ibid., 5: 405-408.

Load more