Hegel as identity philosopher

In the opening pages of HRS, Pippin presents what he takes to be the distinctive philosophical problem of German Idealism; by understanding the difference between the Kantian and Hegelian solutions to this problem, we acquire the means to understand the difference between Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of logic and idealism. This basic problem, according to Pippin, is the demand to reconcile the following two claims, both (according to Pippin) core commitments of German Idealism: (1) ‘a priori knowledge of the world, the ordinary spatio-temporal world, is possible’, and (2) ‘this a priori knowledge, while, in some sense to be specified, about the world, consists in thinking's or reason's knowledge of itself, thinking's determination of thinking’ (HRS: 4–5).

The problem is thus how the a priori self-determination of thought could be understood as a priori knowledge of the world, of what is—how to adequately characterize the relationship between thought and reality (and so, consequently, logic and metaphysics). According to (Pippin's) Kant, a priori thought does determine itself (whence the categories as forms of thought), but this a priori thinking only comes to be about the world, about reality, on the intervention of some sensibly intuited manifold, which has its own a priori form. For this reason, we require a Transcendental Deduction—a demonstration that what is given via the forms of sensible intuition are likewise thinkable according to the forms of thought. Once we have established such a fit, we are forced to conclude that what we cognize by means of the combination of these forms (forms of the thinkable, forms of the intuitable) is therefore to be grasped as appearance, not reality in itself, for its cognizable character depends on a determination of the cognizing subject: the forms of sensible intuition, forms that are, in their significance, merely for us, merely how we represent objects.Footnote ⁵

On Pippin's reading of Hegel, this last conclusion is untenable, because it evinces a kind of philosophical ‘parochialism’ in characterizing knowledge as a knowing of what is only as it is for us, and thereby presents a contradictory account of knowledge (since what is known is not what is in reality, but only in appearance).Footnote ⁶ From this perspective, we move from Kant's transcendental (subjectivist) logic to Hegel's absolute logic by agreeing that the forms of thought are the forms of things, but at the same time removing Kant's subjectivist ‘to us’ qualification. We accomplish the latter by denying that thought depends on a content supplied from without, one supplied according to a subjective (‘to us’) form.Footnote ⁷

It is thus only for the Kantian that there is a possible ‘gap’ between the forms of things and the forms of thought, a gap that Kant attempts to close via the Transcendental Deduction (though he manages to do so only for appearances); for Hegel, by abandoning the appeal to intuition's independent contribution, there is no such gap:

For this reason, Pippin says, with Hegel, logic and metaphysics coincide, are one project; the forms of thought and the forms of being are identical:

We see how this identity claim is rendered, according to Pippin, consistent with the second commitment—that the forms of thought are the product of thought's self-determination—when we reflect on the self-consciousness of judgment. On Pippin's reading, Kant and Hegel both held that judgment is self-conscious in the sense that, in judging p, I know that I so judge, and so that the judgment p is at the same time the recognition of the reasons that constrain me in so judging (the reasons for judging p), such that the judgment p and the judgment that it is right to judge p are one judgment. Pippin appeals to Fichte's 1796/99 Wissenschaftslehre to show how this self-conscious aspect of judgment gives us a reading of Hegel's identity claim that meets the desiderata sketched above, bringing together thought's a priori knowledge of itself with the a priori knowledge of the world, of what is:Footnote ⁹

Thus: because judging is a necessarily self-conscious activity, judging that p is at once the consciousness of the reasons for judging that p—the thought of the object is at once the thought of the subject's reasons for so thinking. We can therefore say that the object, insofar as it features in our thinking, is equivalent to the reasons for determining our thinking in just this way. We can also understand the ‘determination’ talk at a formal level, and when we do, we get something like Hegelian logic: the formal determinations of thought are ‘what is presupposed and required’ for the thought not of this or that object, but any possible object of judgment, and thus the ‘reasons for determining our thinking in this way’ are due to thought's own formal character, from the fact that thinking must be determined in this way, i.e., as directed towards objects meeting a certain formal description.

When Pippin writes in the passage above, though, of ‘the determination of the object as that object or that kind of object’, he means, and can only mean, determination in thought: how our thinking is determined such that it is of an object, because only in that sense could it be ‘at the same time the determination of the reasons (the subject's reasons) to so determine it’. And if we think of these determinations in the formal, logical sense, they emerge as ‘what is required […] to think determinately any content’. But then, it would appear, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the way we think about objects descends from what is required of the subject if it is to so think.

How, then, do we get from the forms necessary ‘to think determinately any content’ to the forms of ‘whatever can be truly said’? It appears that the forms in question are the forms of what can be truly said because they are the forms of coherent thought. If that is right, then Pippin would appear to read Hegel as inferring from the necessary form of judgment, as a subjective activity (in the sense that reasons for judging are ‘the subject's reasons’, developed within that autonomous, self-conscious activity), what the necessary forms of being or reality are—precisely the inference Pippin disavows.Footnote ¹⁰ But otherwise, the reference to ‘what is the case’ or to ‘reality’ would appear to be a non-sequitur,Footnote ¹¹ for in this argument, Pippin has spoken only of thought's self-determination. What, then, warrants the connection between how we must think and what must be the case, between the determinations necessary for judgment about a construction in thought we call ‘objects’ and those necessary for true judgment?Footnote ¹²

The presupposition of logic

There is no argument supplied that leads us to conclude that the necessary forms of thinking are the forms of what can be truly said or thought (because they are the forms of what is). Instead, the identity of ‘the forms of thought’ and ‘the forms of being’ appears to be presupposed throughout. It may seem uncharitable to suggest that this identity is simply presupposed, but this is what Pippin tells us:

On this reading, the Logic is able to assert the identity of logic and metaphysics not by inference from the character of thought (thereby ‘closing a gap’ between thought and being from within pure thought alone), but by rejecting as adventitious and unjustified the Kantian parochialism, the suspicion that the intelligibility conditions derived in the logic would be merely for us. Once we reject that mistaken scepticism, we return to what Aristotle already knew, that to be is to be intelligible, since there is ‘no reason to suspect’ otherwise.Footnote ¹³ Pippin thus claims that, in abandoning the Kantian parochialism of subjective idealism, ‘a rigorous Metaphysical Deduction, properly conceived, is all we need’ (HRS: 122). We can do away with the Transcendental Deduction and the sceptical quid juris question regarding the applications of the forms of thought to what is apart from our thinking because we have no reason to ask it in the first place: there is no reason to suspect that the categories of pure thought need to be applied to an intuited manifold with its subjective form. The categories, derived as ‘characteristic and necessary features of judgment’ just are the forms of what is, meaning that they are not only necessary forms of judgment, but necessary forms of true thought.

If, however, we merely presuppose (or assert) the identity of the forms of thought and being, since the forms of thought are derived according to the a priori character of thought (or emerge out of thought's self-determination), we have no answer to the seemingly reasonable question of why (or in what sense) the forms of thought and being are identical.Footnote ¹⁴ Naïvely, we might suppose either that the forms of being are as they are because the forms of thought are as they are (the ‘object dependence on subject’ option, which Pippin rules out), or independently of the forms of thought being as they are.Footnote ¹⁵ If this latter were the case, though—if the identity were not itself indicated in thought's original self-development—then a priori knowledge of what is, the agreement of pure thought with reality, would be impossible, which violates one of the original premises Pippin takes Kant and Hegel to jointly hold. (Of course, it cannot be that the forms of thought are as they are because the forms of being are as they are, since we know, ex hypothesi, as it were, that the forms of thought are products of thought's self-determination.) Moreover, this latter option is ruled out by Pippin when he speaks of the identity in question as ‘a conceptual identity, not an ontological identity’ (HRS: 62); if the identity between the forms of being and thought is a (pure, since not empirical) conceptual one, it must be included in the Hegelian logico-metaphysics. (And yet: does not the invocation of a ‘conceptual identity’ as distinct from an ‘ontological identity’ suggest a difference between the order of thought and of being? By which concepts should we think this difference? Should those concepts not themselves feature in the science of logic? Would this not mark the non-identity of logic and metaphysics?) In other words, we have yet to be given a genuine Hegelian alternative to Kant's attempt to reconcile the ‘core commitments of German Idealism.’

There are, of course, a number of alternative readings of Hegel's Logic that, one might think, sidestep this issue, precisely by denying the role that Pippin assigns to Kant's (or a suitably Kantian) theory of apperceptive judgment in Hegelian logico-metaphysics. To take two recent and prominent examples: Robert Stern (Reference Stern2009) and Stephen Houlgate (Reference Houlgate, Illetterati and Menegoni2018) argue that Pippin's Hegel is, we might say, not metaphysical enough, to the extent that his (Pippin's) account of the Logic is still articulated in terms of the conditions for the intelligible representation of objects.Footnote ¹⁶

According to Stern, Hegel recognized the question that pushes Kant towards transcendental idealism—the quid juris question—as valid, but rejects Kant's transcendental idealist answer and argues, rather, that:

Beyond that, Stern argues, it is only Kant's concern that the categories are merely our way of thinking (a version of Kant's supposed ‘parochialism’) that motivates any scepticism about this claim to conceptual realism, and that concern is itself only a presupposition absent some compelling argument that this parochialism is warranted:

In this last justification of Hegel's metaphysical position, however, Stern approaches the difficulty facing Pippin: it is not enough to say, for Hegel, that the metaphysical project of the Logic is justified by ‘showing that a series of particular arguments a sceptic might give to suggest the world is unknowable are based on questionable epistemological and metaphysical assumptions’ (Stern Reference Stern2009: 52).Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, as we have seen, Pippin rejects this idea that the categories of logic are merely our way of thinking about or representing objects, and thus takes himself to reject the scepticism regarding the possibility of Hegelian metaphysics. Unless we have principled grounds to reject the question of why it is that a priori concepts developed through thinking's self-determination bear on or agree with or are about reality, the world, being, etc., then, we must find an answer.

Stephen Houlgate, by contrast, argues that by focusing on conditions of intelligibility, Pippin's account of the Logic misses ‘the directly ontological dimension of the logic’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Illetterati and Menegoni2018: 114), one that is given in the consideration of ‘pure being’ that forms the beginning of the Logic. Houlgate first observes that on Pippin's account of the metaphysics inherent in Hegel's Logic, the latter appears to provide us with ‘what thought considers to be “intelligible” being or objectivity, and so surely discloses only what being must be for thought, rather than being itself’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Illetterati and Menegoni2018: 112)—by now a familiar argument. By contrast, Houlgate writes:

On Houlgate's reading, then, we should take the indeterminacy of the putative starting point of the Logic (‘being, pure being’) to characterize not only what the thought with which we begin is of, but that thought itself: the thought at the beginning of the Logic is itself manifest to us as pure being, and is so as an intellectual intuition.Footnote ¹⁹ There is thus no gap between being and thinking because the being of pure, logical thought is manifest to us in the very act itself. Thus ‘what thought begins with is not just the thought of being, or being for thought, but thought as being itself’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Illetterati and Menegoni2018: 116).

This reading would certainly furnish us with an answer to our question, namely, how the self-development of pure thought could furnish us with a concept or form of thought that bears on ‘what is’ taken in the most general sense. Rather than presenting us with being only as it is for thought, logic presents us with thought as it is in its being, thereby lending Hegel's project a ‘directly’ metaphysical dimension. To the extent that this reading of Hegel's Logic stands up, then, it offers a rival conception of the metaphysical status of logic than is presented here.

Apart from any exegetical concerns regarding the opening of the Logic, though, this reading would appear to support an insufficiently weak metaphysical program for the Logic: if the argument is that the bearing of pure thoughts on being is demonstrated via intellectual intuition, because ‘pure thought, in abstraction from all it is normally taken to be, is itself nothing but sheer being’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Illetterati and Menegoni2018: 102), this would seem to support the conclusion that the Logic provides us with a series of conceptual determinations or forms of thought, but that their metaphysical purport is exhausted by the sense in which they are grasped as they are in the element of pure being, which metaphysical element we know about first hand, through the ostensive gesture of the opening of the Logic. The relation, that is, in the first case, between the being of pure being and the thought of pure being, appears accidental (since it is just the case that pure thought ‘is itself nothing but sheer being’), or at least seems to obtain independently of the object of that pure thought.

The worry, then, is that the further thought determinations would be only modifications of thought within the element of pure being, rather than increasingly determinate and true ways of conceiving being. We would thus still be in need of a way to justify the claim that the progress of the Logic ‘discloses the true nature of thought and of being at the same time’ (Houlgate Reference Houlgate, Illetterati and Menegoni2018: 103). It is no doubt true that we can speak of the ‘being’ of the Concept or Idea, but to do so is to fail to adequately describe what is truly thought therein. What we need to demonstrate, if we take seriously the claim that Hegelian logic coincides with metaphysics, is that the increasingly sophisticated terms through which thought articulates itself likewise describe ‘what is’. As an interpretive desideratum, we should expect that if the science of logic has a metaphysical dimension, the relevant metaphysics (and its relation to the self-determination of pure thought) would be articulable only, in the final analysis, in terms of the concept of that science deduced as a result of its progress: the Absolute Idea.

The challenge, in other words, is to explain how we can understand the self-determined forms of thought to bear on the forms of things, on ‘what is’, while also holding both that ‘no form of “object dependence on subject” is at stake’ in Hegel's Logic (such that we could infer from the character of thinking to the character of being), and that the forms of thought described in the Logic emerge out of thought's self-determination. Kant's version of this story is ruled inadmissible because he takes thought's bearing on ‘what is’ to depend on an extrinsic element. If the alternative, then, is to comprehend how thought of its own character bears on ‘what is’, this bearing must be demonstrated from within thought, or as a consequence of thought's character, rather than merely presupposed—and, so, must fall within the science of logic.

What we must demonstrate, then, is how the difference between ‘what is’ and ‘the thought of what is’ is comprehended by the pure determinations of thought themselves, how the difference between being and thought falls within thought itself (or is intelligible)—even if just for the sake of articulating the ground of their identity. But in this case, what we need sounds very much like a Transcendental Deduction—an account of how the pure determinations of thought establish their relation to the object, to ‘what is’, thereby giving this expression ‘what is’ the only possible meaning it could have, as a moment in the self-articulation of pure thought.

Pippin seems to acknowledge, in one passage, the need for something like this demonstration, writing that Hegel ‘came to see that the concept-intuition relation was at its heart a logical or conceptual problem…’ (HRS: 75), but the implications of this crucial observation are never discussed. If, as Pippin (rightly, I think) asserts, the relation of concept to intuition is properly speaking a logical problem, this means both that a) we should expect a strictly logical account of the Transcendental Deduction's core argument—logical in the sense that it identifies the relation of a differentiated manifold and its thinkable unity, and thereby the relation of the ‘I think’ to the object of thought, as thinkable strictly by virtue of the form of thought—and b) that the distinction between unifying concept and differentiated manifold (and so form and content of thought) is, properly conceived, a difference that falls within the concept, or thought, itself,Footnote ²⁰ and that the question of the ‘fit’ between the form of thought and its content is therefore internal to logic. But in that case a Metaphysical Deduction, a derivation of the distinct thinkable character of the categories, would not be ‘all we need’. And yet, Pippin insists that we need no Transcendental Deduction, so long as we, following Pippin's Hegel, reject the idea of a ‘gap’ between the forms of thought and being:

It is true that the Phenomenology of Spirit demonstrates the incoherence of the sceptical supposition that reality might not be inherently thinkable (the supposition of the possible impossibility of knowledge). But it would be a mistake to conclude, from this fact, that the relation between thought and its object—the precise relation treated by Kant's Transcendental Deduction—does not remain a problem for logic, for the rejection of this scepticism establishes only that the relation between thought and object is thinkable, not how we might adequately do so. Rather, if being (what is, or reality) is inherently thinkable or intelligible, that it is so must be thinkable a priori (it cannot be an empirical claim), and so must be demonstrated as necessarily true within logic itself.Footnote ²¹

What we ought to conclude, then, is that the still necessary Deduction would lose its psychologistic character, in that it would no longer be an account of how the subjective forms of thought relate to the extra-conceptual evidence of an extra-conceptual reality. It would provide, rather, the demonstration and justification of the thinkable relation of the spontaneous activity of thought and of the posited unity of the object as that which is, and this in virtue of the original character of thought. But, in acknowledging that this relation is a logical problem, and thus that the difference between the activity of thought and the object of thought falls within that activity, we are forced to acknowledge the crucial non-identity between the form of thought and the form of being, of ‘what is’, in the sense that the original, self-determining activity of thinking first gives meaning to the difference (and so connection) between thought and ‘what is’.Footnote ²²

The logic of the ‘I think’

If the distinction between intuited manifold and conceptual unity truly is a logical one, how should we comprehend thought's relation to its object, to that of which it thinks ‘it is’?

It is with this question in mind that I believe we can best approach Hegel's discussion, at the beginning of the Subjective Logic, of the role of pure apperception in Kant's Transcendental Deduction. Since the science of logic, in explaining the form of thought, cannot make any reference to sensible intuition, Hegel's appeal to Kant's conception of the ‘I’ must treat it in a way that abstracts from its connection, in Kant's thought, to the deliverances of sensibility. By developing an account of Hegel's invocation of the Kantian ‘I’, and of the Transcendental Deduction, we can see, I think, what it means for Hegel to treat the difference between concept and intuition as a logical difference.

Hegel introduces the discussion of Kant and pure apperception as a heuristic designed to guide the reader in comprehending the Concept, which Hegel nevertheless emphasizes is:

Hegel does not simply identify the concept—the category of the Logic—with the ‘I’; he says that the ‘I’ is the concept ‘when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free’ (SL: 12.17). So, too, we might seek to elucidate Hegel's discussion of the ‘idea of cognition’ by discussing Hegel's analysis of Spirit from the Philosophy of Right (as Pippin does (HRS: 309–12)). The idea of cognition, however, should be no more identified with the actuality of Spirit, for example, than the concept should be identified with the ‘I’ I think in thinking anything, in virtue of which my thoughts are mine, as Kant says.

Hegel's own treatment of this heuristic is as follows: the ‘I’ is thinkable in terms of the very moments (constitutive ways of conceiving) that Hegel identifies as the moments of the determinate unity that is the concept: universality, particularity, singularity.Footnote ²³ The ‘I’ is, Hegel tells us, ‘in the first place purely self-referring unity, and is this not immediately but by abstracting from all determinateness and content and withdrawing into the freedom of unrestricted equality with itself’ (SL: 12.17). I would not have grasped the distinct character of the ‘I’ that is thought in everything I think if I did not grasp it as the same ‘I’ in every thought, regardless of what is thought, regardless of the determinate character of each thought in virtue of which each is different from the next. To grasp the self-consciousness of thought is to grasp the fact that in every thought I think the ‘I think’. This is the universality of the ‘I’—a sameness across many, and so a particular way of thinking the unity of some differentiated manifold, or of thinking its ‘simple identity’ (SL: 12.16).Footnote ²⁴

Hegel continues: ‘In the second place, the ‘I’ is just as immediately self-referring negativity, singularity, absolute determinateness that stands opposed to anything other and excludes it—individual personality’ (SL: 12.17). I likewise would not have grasped the distinct character of the ‘I’ if I did not grasp it as absolutely unique, the individual personality that I am in virtue of which I mark myself off, in thought, as different from, opposed to, reality, the world, etc., terms that gain their significance only through their naming the ‘all’ to which I stand opposed in the consciousness of myself as ‘I’. Grasped in this way, I am not merely one thing among many, I am the subject, the singular point of (inward) reference of all my thoughts—and the ‘I’ has this singular significance by virtue of the way in which, qua universal, it is ‘contained’ in every thought. But, finally, grasped in this way, as both universal and singular ‘I’, there is nevertheless some determinate way in which I think my own character as ‘I’, in virtue of which I have the particular determinacy of the ‘I’, and am thus marked off as one particular way of being (just as I grasp universality and singularity themselves as particular ways of conceiving of the unity of pure self-consciousness). The I is some thinkable thing (‘thing’ here used in the broadest possible sense), distinct from other thinkable things such that there is something it is to have thought it as opposed to something else; though the ‘I’ is present in each of my thoughts, it is not simply identical with what is thought in each.

We should consider here the broader purpose of this heuristic appeal to the ‘I’. Hegel is introducing the concept as a distinctive logical category, but one that, when adequately comprehended in the absolute idea, will be the concept of logic, or the concept of the character of thought, the concept of the thinkable.Footnote ²⁵ The adequate comprehension of the concept, then—the absolute idea—must be a distinctive thinkable thing (it is not simply equivalent to everything thinkable in abstraction from all difference—that is the thought of pure being) that is nevertheless in some sense yet to be specified ‘inside any thought’ as part of what is thought without thereby being the explicit ‘content’ or ‘object’ of thought.

If we strip Kant's account of the ‘I’ of its appeal to the manifold delivered by sensibility—and so of its psychologistic presupposition that we are thinking of a finite subject confronted by the sensible evidence of an independently existing reality—we see that the thinkable character of the ‘I’ likewise involves the way in which it is ‘inside any thought’, or on the way in which the ‘I think’ ‘must be able to accompany all my representations’ (CPR: B131).Footnote ²⁶ The ‘I’ is the thought of the posited or thinkable unity of, at once, a particular, determinate manifold, and of all such manifolds (‘for otherwise I would have as multicoloured, diverse a self as I have representations’ (CPR: B134)). Thus, as Hegel writes, ‘we find in a fundamental principle of Kantian philosophy the justification for turning to the nature of the “I” in order to learn what the concept is’ (SL: 12.19). It is the identity of the thinkable grasped as thought.

The concept and the object

But—and this is at the heart of Hegel's invocation of Kant—the ‘I’ is not the only way to grasp the identity of the thinkable; there is also the object:

What Kant understood and explained in the B Deduction was that the thought of both the object and the subject of thought—the object as determined by the categories, the forms of the thinkable, and the subject, the ‘I’—was identical with, made possible by, the spontaneous thought of the unity of a manifold, the unity of the thinkable.Footnote ²⁷ The object is what is thought in judgment, since:

This lesson of Kant's is obscured in his own presentation because he mistakenly appealed to the sensible provision of the manifold—that without which no combination, and hence no contentful thought, is possible—which we, following Hegel, recognize as an original determination of thought.Footnote ²⁸

The thought of the concept, properly comprehended, is thus the thought of the thinkable unity of the ‘I think’ and the unity of the object in their difference, and hence of their relation, their unification in thought (the relationship articulated in Kant's B Deduction).Footnote ²⁹ Accordingly, we could say that the concept is the principle of their difference as much as it is the means for thinking their identity, and indeed we must say this if we do not rely—as Hegel does not, and as Pippin rightly emphasizes—on a human faculty of sensibility for the psychologistic presupposition of the difference between thinking and its object. If Hegel rejects this presupposition, as I agree he does, then thought, the concept, must itself account not only for the unity but the difference between thinking and what is thought; otherwise, this difference would not be thinkable, and logic and metaphysics would not even be notionally separable (such that we could advance the thesis of their identity). And so the Logic must render intelligible the unity of thought in virtue of which the terms ‘concept’, ‘subject’, and ‘object’ have their proper, logical meaning.

Hegel's revision of Kant's conception of logic, then, consists not in treating the Transcendental Deduction as responding to an unjustified scepticism about thought's possible relation to reality—a scepticism driven by the mistaken doctrine of the distinct mental faculties—and thereby in simply pursuing a rigorous ‘metaphysical’ deduction. It consists, rather, in recognizing that Kant's treatment of the apperceptive character of thought (and so of thought's relation to its object) in the Transcendental Deduction was burdened with an inappropriate psychologism, and, so, that the same relation needed to be articulated as constitutive of the character of thinking itself.Footnote ³⁰

Hegel's Absolute Deduction

A purely logical Deduction would have the task of demonstrating, not that what is given in sensibility has the form of the thinkable (as in Kant's case), but that all determinacy in what is thought (including the distinction between thought and being, subject and object, combination and manifold determinacy, etc.) expresses the original character of thought itself (that is, that it has the form of the thinkable), from what Hegel calls the ‘absolute idea’, and how the thinkable character of this determinacy establishes the sense of the object and subject of thought, in virtue of which alone we can coherently refer to ‘beings’ or ‘things’ as distinct from our thinking.

In Kant's account, the forms of thinking need to be established as the forms of the represented unity of the object, where what is to be unified is furnished according to its own form—hence there is a putative sceptical question of how what is given via sensible intuition could be given as thinkable (by the categories), a scepticism, ultimately, about the contingent way in which we represent reality. For Hegel, if we do not mistake the determinacy in what is thought for something supplied to the mind by its sensible contact with reality, and recognize it instead as the determinacy of thought itself (or: if we recognize that the distinction between concept and intuition is a logical one), the Kantian question must be amended. The question would not be whether the (given) intuited determinacy of the object agrees with the (antecedently identified) forms of thought, but rather what conception of the form of thought agrees with (expresses the unity of) the determinations necessary for the articulation of that form—and thus whether and in what sense any category, any pure form of thought, truly captures the unity or form of thought as such. (Accordingly, we can call this an ‘absolute’ rather than a ‘transcendental’ Deduction.) To the extent that ‘subject’, ‘thought’, ‘reality’, ‘object’, etc., do not draw their meaning from facts of consciousness but are thinkable a priori (such that we could make sense of the projects of either metaphysics or logic in the German Idealist sense), they must be derived from this form of thought. This absolute Deduction would then answer the following quid juris question: what justifies the use (or what is the true use) of concepts like being, object, subject, etc., in expressing the unity of the determinacy of a given thought? The justification, in this case, would be the articulation of their relation to the absolute form of thought, the absolute idea.

In the B Edition of the Transcendental Deduction, Kant articulates thought's relation to its object, the object given in intuition, in two steps.Footnote ³¹ In the first step, he demonstrates that any manifold in an intuition must ‘stand under’ the original unity of apperception, and so must be thinkable by the categories (or must exhibit their unity). This articulates a more precise version of the problem the Deduction is meant to solve: we now know that, if some intuited manifold is to be representable or thinkable by me, it must be thinkable according to the categories a priori. This does not yet explain how this could be the case for what is in fact intuitable by me (that is, what is represented according to the forms of sensible intuition), but only that it must be.Footnote ³² The second step establishes how this is the case: the pure form of time, as the a priori form according to which all intuitable manifolds are given, itself exhibits the unity of the categories, the unity of thought. Thus, Kant concludes, every manifold representable by me is thinkable by the categories because the form of everything intuitable by me, the form of time, is itself thinkable by the categories (CPR: B161).

The sceptical problem Kant raises could have no significance for Hegel's conception of logic, because it is intelligible only with the psychologistic presuppositions about thinking that Kant holds, which Hegel does not share. We can, however, recast this two-step argument in abstraction from Kant's psychologistic appeal to distinct faculties. In the first step, we establish that any determinate manifold is thinkable only by virtue of (insofar as it expresses) the unity of thought, what is indicated by the pure ‘I think’. In the second step, we establish the relationship between the pure unity (or form) of thought and the thinkable manifold, in virtue of which the manifold is thinkable a priori according to that form. We cannot, however, presuppose that the manifold determinacy, essential for the unifying function of concepts, is simply given to thought, meaning that we cannot presuppose an a priori character for that manifold; the thinkable manifold, Hegel recognized, is not given, but thought, and so the form according to which it is available for thought is a form of thinking, and is that in virtue of which alone we could think or refer to such a manifold in the first place. We must therefore provide a description of the form of thought from which we could derive both the a priori form of the thinkable manifoldFootnote ³³ and the a priori form of the unity of that manifold.Footnote ³⁴

This means that the Hegelian equivalent of the Deduction would not truly have two steps, since we could no longer appeal to the thinkable manifold, first, and then, second, the form according to which it is given. How, then, should we conceive the single step? What must be discovered is the character of thought such that every thought is thinkable in virtue of this character, or such that every thought has this character as the principle of its unity (such that this is what it is to be a thought). What must be shown, then, is how every available (original, pure) determination of thought is thinkable (i.e., what it is to think each severally, a ‘rigorous Metaphysical Deduction’) and what determination is adequate for the comprehension of the determinacy and unity of the thinkable as such (the ‘second step’ proper). This Deduction would be presuppositionless to the extent that it does not presuppose an available catalogue of pure concepts but derives them as necessary for thinking the pure determinacy articulated in thought. Thus, in the Logic, each category (with the exception of ‘pure being’, the putative thought of the ‘absolutely indeterminate’) is a distinctive way of thinking the unity of the necessary, pure determinations of thought that have been antecedently derived.

With the exception of the absolute idea, each category is shown to presuppose a further thought in relation to which alone it is intelligible.Footnote ³⁵ The ‘second step’, then, is only resolved with the absolute idea, in which Hegel demonstrates the (original, pure) character of thought as that in virtue of which anything (that is, not merely any intuitable manifold) is thinkable.Footnote ³⁶ But this means that the ‘Metaphysical Deduction’ of the absolute idea, the exposition of its content, must also function as the purely logical or absolute Deduction, as it must explain how it is the adequate comprehension of the determinations of thought already considered, in virtue of which it is the adequate unity of that manifold of thought determinations. And this is what Hegel shows: from the absolute idea, we comprehend in what sense every thought determination described in logic exhibits the character of thought, where that character is the method of their serial generation (differentiation). For this reason alone is it ‘absolute’. (In the idiosyncrasy of his presentation, Hegel calls this character of thought ‘negativity’.) As Hegel writes:

The ‘determinateness’ of the absolute idea constitutes the subject matter of logic precisely because it is the comprehension of the form of thought in virtue of which all the heretofore investigated categories are thinkable. Thus comprehended, the determinacy of thought is not a supplied content but a consequence of the form, the pure character, of thought itself, and so we can say that the concept of that form is the ‘absolutely universal idea’, or that it is ‘contained’ in every thought, as that in virtue of which each is thinkable. Thus, we can capture Hegel's conclusion by modifying Kant's characterization of the second step of the Transcendental Deduction (CPR: B145): in the science of logic, it will be shown from the (pure) way in which anything is thinkable that its unity can be none other than that of the negativity, or method, of the absolute idea.Footnote ³⁷

Since, however, as Kant showed, the unity of thought is necessarily articulated in terms of the subject of thought, the ‘I’, and the object of thought (and thus that the difference between them is essential to the thinkable unity of the thinkable), this character—described in Kant's ‘first step’—must now be seen to emerge out of the account of the form of thought (since it, too, must be thinkable). Hence this Hegelian Deduction would likewise make reference to a subject and object, but in their strictly logical capacity (i.e., stripped of their psychologistic character), as different, necessary manners of conceiving of the unity of what is thought (in Kantian terms: the posited unity of the object, the spontaneous, synthetic activity of the subject). We only begin to describe the logical subject in the ‘Subjective Logic’ of the ‘Concept’ because the Concept is the minimal adequate conception of the thinkable character of the ‘I’. But what is being described in the ‘Subjective Logic’, as in the ‘Objective Logic’, is only ever the original character of thought. As Pippin rightly says, Hegel understood that the distinction, in Kant's account of objective cognition, between concept and intuition is, properly speaking, a logical one. So too, we should say: Hegel understood that the distinction between the manifold, the object, and the ‘I’ that Kant drew in the B Deduction is a logical distinction, a distinction made in the self-articulation of thought, and the ‘Subjective Logic’ is the exposition of the thinkable character of that distinction, and the demonstration of its necessity in thought.Footnote ³⁸

The ‘idea’ of Hegel's Logic is absolute, then, in this sense: there is nothing that can be thought about either the object of thought—being, reality, the world, etc.—or the subject of thought—the identity of the ‘I’ that thinks, mind, soul, etc.—that does not emerge as a consequence of the self-related (so apperceptive) character of thinking as such, the character explored in logic. (More concisely: thinking is its own self-comprehension.) The differences that we think, in virtue of which we are able (or take ourselves to be able) to distinguish between subject and object, mind and world, thinking and being, are logical differences (meaning: differences in thought that are not empirically derived), and are to be accounted for, or have their final justification in, the Concept, the concept of thinking, the subject matter of logic.Footnote ³⁹ The absolute idea thus furnishes us with a concept of pure thought to which the concepts of being, object, reality, etc., are subordinated (as moments in its articulation) rather than identified. There is no being that is itself adequate to the absolute idea, because to call it a being in the first place is to indicate the way in which it abstracts from the absolute universality of the absolute idea.

This means, though, that there must be, in the science of logic, more than the exposition of those concepts necessary for the thinking of objects, or that express the intelligible character of objects.Footnote ⁴⁰ This must be so, since without a deduction of these concepts, we would have no way of articulating in virtue of what these determinations of thought are determinations of anything other than thought itself—and, if Hegel is right, we would not even have that, since we would have obscured the actual character of thought. On this conception of the science of logic, then, we would have no answer within that science to the basic problem of German Idealism that Pippin identifies. We could say, of course, that we presuppose this answer, the necessary relation between the self-determination of thought and the intelligible character of what is independently of its being thought (claiming, perhaps, that this is what is demonstrated in the Phenomenology of Spirit). In saying this, however, we could not explain in virtue of what this relation is originally thinkable (since, if it were so, it would necessarily feature in the logic, as the account of the pure determinations of thought, or of what is thinkable a priori). For that reason, it could have no bearing on the self-articulation of thought that comprises the science of logic, as it would be a consideration of something external to the character of thought.

In other words: unless the science of logic adopts this task of an absolute Deduction—by demonstrating how the form of thought makes the thought of the object first possible, and so by demonstrating the relation between the pure determinations of thought and what is (being, reality, object, etc.)—this relation must be presupposed as falling outside the thinkable a priori, and so as something merely given. Taking the science of logic to eschew such a demonstration, then, is an expression of the pre-critical faith in rationalist metaphysics, the mere ‘belief that through thinking things over the truth comes to be known’ (EL: §26). By contrast, once we recognize the role of the Deduction argument in the Logic, we can see that Hegel solves the ‘basic problem of German Idealism’ by demonstrating how thinking's self-determined character provides the method for the articulation of the difference between thought and being, between subjective act and object (a difference internal to thought, and comprehended in the absolute idea), such that reference to ‘reality’ or the like is meaningful.