On Practical Sense: Hegel vs. Kant

Basing on his own translation, the author analyzes Hegel’s work Faith and Reason, which helps to understand the formation of the Hegelian philosophy. The article is devoted mainly to criticism of Kant’s philosophy, which, according to Hegel, does not go beyond the Enlightenment. Hegel considers Kant’s philo­sophy as “an extension of Lockeanism”. The latter has not been overpassed by Kant, but has been only counterbalanced with apriorism. In the Critique of Pure Reason, sense and reason are linked externally. But, as the author maintains, Hegel underestimates Kant’s transcendental force of imagination, which repres­ents the synthesis of sense and reason. In Kant, imagination becomes ultimately irrational, but the schematism of imagination is, at the same time, a logical form. The author believes that Hegel did not appreciate Kant’s definition of judgment of taste which is provided by education, so this concept overcomes Kantian apri­orism. Kant distinguishes two kinds of sense – sensation (perception) and experi­encing (apperception). Apperception is the moral and aesthetic sense, love, con­science, honor. In Kant, within the practical reason, belief is connected with morality, and the author sees here the preconditions of Hegel’s conception of practical human senses. In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel sublates the opposition between sensitivity and reason in their organic synthesis due to the category of the particular. Hegel exposes the peculiarity of the practical sense, which unites the sensation and experiencing. For instance, a sense of beauty, even if it is not tied to the perception, combines visual sensation, studied by physiology, and beauty as a vision of something inexplicable by physiology, as it is related to the experiencing the world, involved into human activity and communication. The practical sense, as Marx shows, occurs only in the universal practice of human communication, so it is not granted to us at birth.