Hegel's critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy, the focus of Sally Sedgwick's book, is a topic which seems to have traditionally inspired two fundamentally contrasting reactions: on the one hand, Hegelians have in the past regarded this topic as Hegel's immense philosophical victory over his modest and cautious predecessor. As such, for them, Hegel's critique of Kant warrants praise. On the other hand, Kantians have usually reacted to Hegel's critique with either apoplectic incredulity or regarded Hegel's various rebukes of Kantianism as comical in showing little or no understanding of Kant's doctrines and arguments. Given that for years one would either treat Hegel or Kant as either hero or villain, it seems hardly surprising that there has been really no systematic work on the relationship between Hegel and Kant on the nature of cognition.
The challenges that Sedgwick's book undertakes are very daunting: her account must take seriously Hegel's critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy and avoid casting either Kant or Hegel in embarrassing lights, whilst at the same time provide reasons to regard this topic as of great importance and interest to contemporary scholarship. Sedgwick primarily argues that Hegel offers us a compelling critique of, and alternative to, the conception of cognition Kant defends in his critical period. This centrally involves examining important features of Kant's view that human cognition is discursive. Sedgwick argues that Hegel takes these features to inevitably lead to unacceptable dualisms as well as scepticism. However, whilst these criticisms made by Hegel are fairly well-documented in contemporary scholarship and should be familiar to those interested in Kant and German Idealism, Sedgwick does not take Hegel's critique to be entirely negative. For, according to her, in criticising Kant, Hegel hopes to derive from certain Kantian doctrines specific clues to a superior form of idealism, an idealism which better captures the nature of human cognition and its exact abilities, as well as the relation between our cognition and objects.
Sedgwick begins with a discussion of Kant's discursivity thesis and Hegel's reflections on that topic in his early Jena period. Kant is well-known for claiming that human cognition requires both concepts and ‘given’ intuitions. She contrasts this model of cognition with the notion of intellectual intuition, which by itself creates the content or objects of knowledge. She notes that Hegel was fascinated by the idea of the intuitive intellect, to the extent that Hegel used that idea to criticise Kant's separation of form and matter and concept and intuition. However, as Sedgwick claims, this criticism of Kant does not mean that Hegel considers the human mind to possess the power of intellectual intuition: whilst Hegel agrees with Kant that human cognition is discursive and that we do not have the capacity to generate content in the process of thought, he is critical of the way that Kant specifies the exact relation between our concepts and the content of our thinking. According to Sedgwick's account, Hegel admonishes Kant for conceiving of the relation between concept and intuition as one of absolute heterogeneity even though Kant insisted that the two elements of human cognition are also intimately connected.
Importantly, the idea of regarding form and matter and concept and intuition as identical (in a way) is not meant to be explicated in terms of either a quasi-Leibnizian intellectualisation of sensible intuitions or a Lockean sensualisation of concepts. Rather, as Sedgwick argues, the identity of concepts and intuitions is achieved by means of reciprocal determination. In this way, we can make sense of Hegel's explicit commitment to Kant's discursivity thesis and the difference between concepts and intuitions without having to resort to either a reductionism of sorts or a strict dualism.
Sedgwick's concerns then move to Hegel's (in)famous charge of subjectivism when he discusses transcendental idealism. She argues that we ought to understand this charge in terms of Hegel's worry that Kant's transcendental or subjective idealism leads to scepticism. This worry is understood to parallel McDowell's critique of Kantianism in Mind and World.
The theme of explicating Hegel's critique of Kant as an internal one continues in Sedgwick's discussion of Hegel's engagement with certain features of the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories and her treatment of Hegel's critique of Kant's arguments in the Antinomies of Pure Reason. Siding with Hegel, her abiding worry is that Kant cannot successfully abstract from assumptions that are contingent or historical so as to achieve an external vantage point.
I earlier claimed that the challenges facing Sedgwick's book and the entire ambition of this work are very great. Sedgwick succeeds not only in meeting those challenges and in engaging with both Kant and Hegel at a very sophisticated level, but also in writing with great clarity and eloquence on a topic which is notoriously difficult.
Hegel's Critique of Kant is a truly exemplary work of scholarship and will hopefully become regarded quickly as a classic study on one of the most interesting yet difficult philosophical relationships one can encounter. Both Kant and Hegel emerge from the work as figures whose specific and seemingly historically context-sensitive disagreements are of lasting philosophical relevance. What will be very interesting to see over the next few years is how Sedgwick is going to connect her interpretation of Hegel's critique of Kant's theoretical philosophy with Hegel's critique of Kant's practical philosophy. For, as she correctly writes, the various objections to Kant's metaphysics and epistemology that Hegel makes bear on his various objections to Kant's conception of autonomy and the categorical imperative. I, like many I am sure, eagerly look forward to such an account.
