From Hegel to Kant: The Thing-of-Itself German Idealism

O ne of the central tenets of Žižek’s reconstruction of German Idealism is not only the rereading of Hegel through the Lacanian lens that detects the real Ungrund as a stain in the middle of the Hegelian eye, but also the inversion of the development between the four figures of German Idealism—Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. This quadruplicity has at its core the relation between Kant and Hegel, or rather Hegel and Kant: because it is not that Kant left problems unsolved, which he was not able to tackle appropriately, and then Hegel changed the perspective so that it became possible to overcome Kantian limitations. Rather, it is that only via Hegel do we get to the inner kernel of Kant, and Kantian limitations in the end are the limitations Kant approved with a certain willingness but was not willing to spell out. One formulation of this is given in Absolute Recoil , in a chapter that is somewhat irritatingly entitled “From Kant to Hegel,” in footnote 27: The traditional defence of Kant against Hegel’s critique is that Hegel brutally simplifies Kant’s thought and thereby misses its true point. However, this “true Kant,” the Kant missed by Hegel, is as a rule a strangely Hegelian one. In a properly Hegelian reversal, “Hegel” (the Hegelian insight) resides in exactly what we construct as the point which escapes Hegel.… Typically, one concedes that Kant was often ambiguous, not fully aware of what he effectively did—but what Hegel does in his critique is precisely and only confront Kant with the full scope of what he did. 1 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.