Hegel's Logic of Actuality

IT HAS BECOME COMMON in discussions of post-Kantian idealism to put forth the thesis that Hegel completes Kant, that Hegel completes the Kantian critical project by transforming transcendental idealism into absolute idealism. (1) Such readings generally tend to focus on the great similarities between Kant and Hegel in their attempts to work out how the conditions of possibility of knowledge depended upon coming to an understanding of our forms of thinking and our capacities of rather than tracing the origins of knowledge to impressions, sensations, or other empiricist notions of unadulterated sense experience. Knowledge and truth are not to be found by asking questions about the object, but by seeking knowledge and self-knowledge of the capacities and activities of thinking itself. Unlike precritical metaphysics, which sought knowledge of being as such, critical philosophy equates knowledge with the activities of reason and thinking. What Kant and Hegel share in common then, is the task which results from the Copernican turn: what are the necessary forms of thinking that are required for determining any object, given that objects must conform to our very forms of thinking, or more precisely, that objects are only given in experience as objects that are thought? Famously for Kant, the supreme principle of the necessary conditions of possibility for knowledge of a possible object is the synthetic unity of apperception. For Hegel, objectivity and truth are expressed by the development and activity of the Concept (Begriff). In his book, Hegel's Idealism, Robert Pippin argues that what Hegel means by the and what absolute idealism is, should be understood with respect to the ways in which he develops the Kantian or self-consciousness theme, for it is Hegel's development and extension of this theme that completes the Kantian project. (2) The logic of the Concept completes transcendental logic and Pippin cites the following in order to show the continuity between Kant and Hegel in their attempt to ground knowledge in forms of thinking rather than in empirical experience: It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the think, or self-consciousness. (3) What makes Kant and Hegel both idealists is their insistence that knowledge and truth are grounded upon the unity of the activity of thinking and not in mere sense experience. By allying his Concept with the unity of apperception, Hegel reveals how much he has in common with Kant and how the categories of the Science of Logic can be seen as a rethinking of transcendental logic. This version of the Kant/Hegel relationship demonstrates the importance of understanding Hegel's idealism as an extension of Kant's, and indeed, Kant's presence, even if not by name, can be found on almost every page in the Science of Logic. And yet, this certainly cannot be the whole story, since Hegel, in completing Kant, also transforms every facet of his predecessor's philosophy so radically that words, concepts, and the very nature of reality itself, take on fundamentally new meanings. The Concept, the absolute, the idea, judgment, actuality, finitude and infinity, consciousness, the I--all of these terms are unrecognizable in the Kantian system according to Hegel's definitions and cannot fit seamlessly into the broader project of a transcendental idealism that only seeks the formal conditions of possibility for experience in general. (4) To take just one example, Hegel's Concept cannot be easily identified with Kant's unity of apperception or the unity of the think because the Concept for Hegel cannot be unequivocally attributed to an I or to consciousness, especially at the level of logic. (5) Unlike the external reflection of the think that must synthesize and be applied to a manifold of intuition, the movement and urge (Trieb) of the Concept is an immanently developing process, one that has actuality and objectivity, without thereby being permanently conditioned by a manifold of intuition. …