Over the past few decades Anglophone Hegel scholarship has undergone a kind of renaissance, in large part due to Robert Pippin's Hegel's Idealism: Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. The ‘non-metaphysical’ readings of Hegel defended by influential interpreters like Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and John McDowell, have had the effect of reintroducing him in an era when metaphysical systems are dismissed as indefensible. The ‘deflationary’ tendency in Hegel scholarship has downplayed his lofty onto-theological language and emphasized his ‘continuity’ with Kant's transcendental epistemology. This has made him more appealing to a philosophical culture that remains very much shaped by the anti-metaphysical bias of Neo-Kantian positivism. In recent years, some interpreters have turned against these non-metaphysical readings. Unsurprisingly, this recent turn has involved questioning the metaphysical/non-metaphysical distinction. In a related manner, the fairly broad consensus that Kant intended to break decisively with the metaphysical tradition has also received critical attention. Brady Bowman is part of this growing countertrend of metaphysical readings and indeed one of its most ambitious representatives. In his account, Hegel's speculative science represents at once a radical transformation of philosophical critique and a compelling rehabilitation of rationalist metaphysics. Whereas Bowman insists that Hegel is ‘post-Kantian,’ he takes this in a very different sense than do most of Hegel's deflationary defenders. He establishes Hegel's continuity with Kant, while nevertheless denying that Hegel has any specific doctrinal loyalties to him. Bowman notes that, ‘For Kant and a fortiori for Hegel, diagnosing the fatal weaknesses of classical metaphysics is a step towards its rehabilitation, not its elimination.’ The Hegel-Kant continuity that Bowman establishes concerns the spirit of critique (11).

Bowman frames Hegel's ‘metaphysics of absolute negativity’ as a response to Kant and Jacobi's complementary critiques of metaphysics. While Kant's critique shows that the content of this metaphysics leads to irreconcilable antinomies and thus can be maintained only on the pain of dogmatism, Jacobi shows that it leads, in Bowman's words, to ‘a particularly extreme version of formalism and thence to determinism and nihilism’ (158-9). In short, Kant and Jacobi show that traditional metaphysics is unconsciously tied to what Bowman calls ‘finite cognition’ and that, as such, it ‘is marked by an essential negativity which […] divides reason against itself’ (2). According to Bowman, however, Hegel argues that the problems they identify must be traced not to theoretical reason's transgressions of the supposed limits of intelligibility, but rather to the tradition's exclusive reliance on ‘the ordinary logic of the understanding’ (1). Because the logic of the understanding is concerned with ‘relations among finite things’ (ibid.) it necessarily distorts, as Hegel puts it, the true character of ‘freedom, that is, the Concept and hence everything that truly is’ (32). In Hegel's reinterpretation of their significance, Kant and Jacobi demonstrate the necessity for a ‘completely altered view of logic’ (1). Bowman argues, however, that, for Hegel, they represent merely the threshold ‘between pre-critical logic and metaphysics and a new form of critical philosophy’ (8). ‘A truly critical philosophy’ Bowman says, ‘would elaborate a deeper logic (a logic of “reason”) on whose basis the logic of the “understanding”, toward which Kant and Jacobi were exclusively oriented, could be genetically derived and its scope defined, even as its incapacity for cognizing the real is systematically exposed’ (9). For Bowman, Hegel's logic of absolute negativity represents such a deeper logic and, as such, provides the key to both his transformation of philosophical critique and his revision of the metaphysical tradition.

According to Bowman, Hegel takes Kant and Jacobi to represent the ‘critical self-consciousness’ of finite cognition. In complementary ways, they demonstrate the necessity with which contradictions arise in pre-critical metaphysics and, moreover, how this leads to the problems of dogmatism and nihilism. As Bowman notes, Hegel regards early modern metaphysics as the highest form of finite cognition in that it develops the contradictions of the philosophical tradition into ‘absolute contradictions’ and indicates their ‘absolute resolution’ in God, i.e., the unconditioned (95). This development, however, reproduces the aporiae of the tradition in an absolute opposition between an infinite ground that remains wholly abstract and a finite sphere of concrete and determinate objects. This early modern solution falls under what Hegel calls ‘spurious infinity’ because it fails to develop the self-determination of the infinite and leaves it to be determined precisely by its opposition to the finite. Bowman notes that Hegel conceives Kant's ‘single greatest contribution to the critique of metaphysics’ (58) as having demonstrated that ‘the infinite cannot be made out with finite categories’ (98). At the same time, as Bowman writes, Hegel regards Kant's notion of the regulative function of the ideas of the unconditioned as a wholly abstract attempt at a ‘unification of the unconditioned and the conditioned,’ (98) which only reproduces the problem of spurious infinity. According to Bowman, ‘So far as its positive results go, Kant's (and Jacobi's) critique of metaphysics ends up at the same place as metaphysics’ (99) in that they remain ‘unconsciously tied down to a position internal to finite cognition itself’ (168). The crucial task for the critique of metaphysics, as Kant and Jacobi both recognized, is the overcoming of Spinozism. While Spinoza's substance monism represents a solution to the aforementioned opposition between the unconditioned and the conditioned, it seems to lead inevitably to the baleful consequences of pantheism, fatalism, and ultimately nihilism. Bowman attempts to show how Hegel's speculative metaphysics overcomes these problems while simultaneously rejecting the post-metaphysical alternatives of Kant and Jacobi.

The overarching thesis that frames Bowman's account is that the logic of absolute negativity is identical with the Hegelian Concept: ‘The Concept and absolute negativity are two sides of a single “speculative” coin, one structural, one dynamic; and their unity is the at the same time the unity of Hegelian metaphysics and methodology’ (56). Drawing on Rolf-Peter Horstmann's analysis of the Concept, Bowman defines it as ‘a self-relational structure which has for its elements relations that are isomorphic to the whole.’ As a pure structure, it is ‘constituted wholly by relations which themselves are metaphysically prior to any relata that may appear to realize those relations’ (37). Bowman argues that this bare structure of the Concept can be completely derived from the dynamic logic of absolute negativity. He draws on Dieter Henrich's analysis of Hegel's Grundoperation as ‘autonomous negation,’ a wholly self-relational logical dynamic that does not presuppose any external positive terms for its operation. This logical dynamic produces a ‘“positive” pole’ (i.e., affirmation, identity, immediacy, and relation-to-self) and a ‘“negative” pole’ (i.e., negation, difference, mediation, relation-to-other). As these poles are contained within the self-relation of autonomous negation, they stand in a relation of speculative identity and difference.

The task of Hegel's speculative science, according to Bowman, is to demonstrate how the Concept is ‘released’ from this purely formal structure and realized through the forms of finite cognition on the way to the Absolute Idea. The realization of the Concept hence requires the finite logic of the understanding. As Bowman explains, it is by design that the positive and negative poles of autonomous negation ‘fall asunder to appear as two fully disparate, merely externally related terms’ (232), for this allows Hegel to derive the classical logic of the understanding from his speculative logic of absolute negativity. Instead of offering a close textual reading of the Logic, Bowman reconstructs Hegel's critique of ‘finite cognition’ in the forms in which ‘it achieves its most explicit highly explicit consciousness,’ (62) namely, the a priori sciences of metaphysics, pure natural science, and mathematics. His aim is to show how Hegel's critique points beyond the forms of finite cognition to the Concept in which they are embedded.

Bowman contrasts his metaphysical reading of Hegel's critique of finite cognition with two prominent interpretations in contemporary scholarship. Robert Pippin takes Hegel's thought to represent a continuation of Kant's transcendental epistemology, while John McDowell interprets Hegel as radicalizing Kant's epistemological realism by way of ‘discarding the frame’ of transcendental idealism (McDowell Reference McDowell2009). Bowman agrees with McDowell that ‘it is more accurate to describe Hegel as a realist than as an anti-realist,’ (103) but he diverges from McDowell by arguing that Hegel's position is best described as ‘metaphysical idealism’, which he defines as

Bowman's discussion focuses on the consequences of Hegel's position, which ‘rejects Kant's doctrine of transcendental idealism while retaining his views on the relationality of finite, conditioned objects and the antinomies of pure reason’ (102). He argues that this should be understood in connection with the Phenomenology of Spirit's project of a ‘self-perfecting skepticism’. He cites Hegel's characterization of the ‘path of despair’ as being meant to produce ‘the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge for which the supreme reality is what is in truth nothing but the unrealized Concept’ (130). Bowman argues that Hegel's aim is not to overcome skepticism, as in epistemological realism, nor to limit it to the noumenal thing-in-itself, as in transcendental idealism, but rather to achieve metaphysical certainty regarding the ‘non-being of the finite’ (114). For him, Hegel's radicalization of Kant consists in recognizing that the dialectic is immanent in the categories themselves and not exclusively in their application to the unconditioned. Bowman's reading pairs Hegel's view that things are essentially finite — ‘ontologically depotentiated, merely relative,’ wholly negative entities with no genuine reality of their own’ (124) — with his insight that the understanding qua finite cognition is intrinsically antinomial. Bowman takes note of the fact that by ‘discarding the frame’ of transcendental idealism, Hegel rejects ‘the only thing separating Kant from Spinozist monism is transcendental idealism’ (ibid.). Hegel's metaphysics of the Concept must therefore confront the task of grasping the absolute ‘not only as substance, but equally as subject’ and hence of overcoming the problems in both Spinozist monism and Kantian idealism.

In chapter 4, Bowman goes on to explore the implications of Hegel's unmitigated skepticism for the foundations of natural science. He notes that ‘Hegel courageously accepted the idea that we will never complete empirical science, but he interpreted this failure as a reflection of the fact that nature itself is incomplete and, within it own sphere, incompletable’ (156). Bowman argues that from the Hegelian point of view ‘the classificatory vagueness, gaps, and nomological underdetermination’ that plague empirical science should be understood as ‘immanent features of nature itself’ (15). He then turns to McDowell's thesis that empirical science is a medium for actualizing rational freedom. He notes that McDowell's reconstruction of Hegel as an epistemological realist who ‘drop[s] the frame’ of transcendental idealism is ‘supposed to be the answer to the heterogeneity problem that confronted Kant's rigorous dualism of activity/passivity, concept/intuition’ (140). Bowman argues, however, that this does not capture Hegel's deeper concern with the fundamental heterogeneity between the ‘self-externality’ of nature and the self-relationality of the Concept. He draws attention to passages where Hegel expresses the view that ‘empirical science as such locks reason into an element heterogeneous to it, an element ruled by difference, finitude, relation-to-other and self-externality, and therefore an element which excludes identity and infinite self-relation in principle’ (142). Bowman reaches the conclusion that, for Hegel, ‘not only natural science, but the very realm of nature points beyond itself — to the Concept’ (157). His central point is that Hegel's true radicalization of Kant consists in regarding the dialectic as an essential feature of our finite categorical scheme and the realm of nature itself.

In Chapter 5, Bowman puts forth the thesis that ‘geometry is, for Hegel, the highest form of finite theoretical cognition, and speculative explication of this form shows that when geometric cognition becomes fully self-reflexive, . . . it thereby passes over into speculative cognition’ (170). His account shows how Hegel's speculative explication of geometrical cognition appropriates Jacobi's notion of the ‘intuition of reason’, which he developed in attempts to avoid what he identified as the nihilistic consequences of rationalist formalism. This involves elaborating a ‘second mode’ of cognition that reflects on the first mode of geometric cognition proper in order to develop a speculative picture of cognitive activity. In addition to injecting self-reflexivity into rational demonstration, Hegel aims to overcome the problem of self-externality in geometric cognition. Bowman argues that Hegel appropriates a mathematical property that he calls ‘real definition’. Contrary to nominal definitions,’ he observes, ‘they produce the external reality of the relevant mathematical objects from their concepts’ (159). According to Bowman, ‘they parallel the work of speculative science […], which consists in demonstrating the necessity with which the Concept undergoes a process of ideal logical genesis and self-realization’ (ibid.). While the self-externality of natural science and geometry is sublated in speculative science, the self-externality of their objects (e.g., finite things and spatial figures) remains irreducible. Although the forms of finite cognition are mediums for the realization of the Concept, they ultimately fall short of the infinite self-relation that characterizes the fully realized Concept.

In Chapter 6, Bowman develops Hegel's ‘metaphysics of absolute negativity’ in terms of his speculative logic of content. He begins with a discussion of ‘determinate intentional content’. On his interpretation, both Kant and Spinoza fail to provide a satisfactory metaphysical account of determinacy. Spinoza ‘indicates no internal principle or ground of determination for substance’ (19), while Kant fails to clarify how the sensible manifold is supposed to be the material factor in determining objective reality (215). To grapple with ‘these strictly analogous problems’ (201), Bowman appropriates the Cartesian terms of formal reality and objectivity reality, which he defines as ‘the being of a substance taken in itself’ and of ‘the being peculiar to mind-dependent representational content,’ respectively (202). Spinoza's account gives privilege to the former and Kant's account gives privilege to the latter. According to Bowman, their respective one-sided approaches fail to grasp that formal reality and objective reality are ‘metaphysically dependent’ on one another (210). He shows that their mutual metaphysical dependency can be accounted for with Hegel's speculative logic of content, which, he claims, ‘just is the logic of absolute negativity’ (17). He further argues that this allows Hegel to take formal reality and objective reality, substance and subject, as two aspects of an underlying reality he calls the Concept.

Bowman presents a fascinating, albeit dense and challenging, account of Hegel's ‘metaphysics of absolute negativity. He makes a compelling case for reading Hegel's speculative logic as a metaphysics that overcomes the Kantian problem of dogmatism and the Jacobian problem of nihilism. His book is sure to make an impact on the current debates over how to interpret Hegel's Science of Logic and how it relates to other components of Hegel's system, such as the philosophies of spirit and nature. In addition to its contribution to the debate between metaphysical and non-metaphysical readings of Hegel, Bowman's book also seems to be relevant to debates shaped by Hegel's ‘continental’ critics, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, who are committed to the deconstruction, not the rehabilitation, of the metaphysical tradition.