The dissolving force of the concept : Hegel's ontological concept

I OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES many attempts have been made to defend Hegel's philosophy against those who denounce it as crypto-theological, dogmatic metaphysics. (1) This was done first of all by foregrounding Hegel's indebtedness to Kant, that is, by interpreting speculative science as a radicalization of critical project. This emphasis on Hegel's Kantian roots has resulted in a shift from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic. Robert Pippin's Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness can be considered as having made of the most influential contributions to this shift. (2) Pippin's interpretation of Hegel rightly contends that the Science of Logic does not pertain to a reality existing independently of thought, but to attempt to determine a priori what can be a possible thought of anything at (3) For Pippin this entails that Hegel should be regarded as appropriating Kant's claim about the 'self-conscious,' ultimately the 'spontaneously' self-conscious, character of all possible (4) I agree with Pippin that cannot understand Hegel unless one understands the Hegelian investment, the engagement with critical (5) I would hold, however, that Pippin's interpretation of this engagement threatens to lose sight of the proper achievement of Hegel's philosophy. By arguing that the unity of self-consciousness constitutes the original source of Hegel's hermetic claim about thought's self-determination, (6) Pippin to my mind ignores, first, that Hegel takes the Kantian notion of self-consciousness to be nothing more than the concrete manifestation of the pure concept and, second, that transcendental philosophy, though radically critical of the dogmatic metaphysics of his day, does all but abandon the possibility of a critical ontology. Defending Hegel against his antimetaphysical critics, Pippin is right in taking Hegel into the Kantian camp, but he does this by sacrificing the question as to the possibility of ontology, a question I believe to be pivotal for both Kant and Hegel. In his article Ontologie nach Kant und Hegel, Hans Friedrich Fulda moves in the opposite direction. Fulda puts transcendental philosophy in perspective by pointing out that Kant himself saw the Critique of Pure Reason as preparing a new ontology. (7) He distinguishes, in line with Kant, between a precritical and a critical ontology and determines these modes of ontology as two different ways of investigating the conditions of possibility of any object of experience, (8) Arguing that Hegel in the Science of Logic adopts not only critique of dogmatic ontology but also his conception of a critical ontology, Fulda comprehends transcendental and speculative logic as two different postdogmatic modes of ontology. These modes do not pertain to reality as it is in itself but merely to the a priori concepts that constitute something as a knowable object at all. I fully endorse Fulda's claim that the basic difference between Kant and Hegel lies in the fact that Kant develops his critical ontology primarily by means of a transcendental examination of the human understanding, while Hegel examines the pure concepts as they are in themselves. (9) One might view Pippin and Fulda as interpreting Hegel with regard to two different tendencies in critical philosophy, tendencies which Kant himself sought to reconcile: on the hand the tendency to conceive of transcendental apperception as the ultimate principle of any judgment, on the other, the tendency to develop an ontology pertaining to the pure concepts that constitute the whole of possible objects of experience. I agree with Fulda that Hegel reduces the first tendency to a subordinate moment while accomplishing the latter in a much more radical manner than Kant could have possibly done. It is quite understandable that interpreters who have argued for a nonmetaphysical interpretation of Hegel have tended to ignore the ontological intentions of transcendental and Hegel's speculative logic. …