Hegel’s Science of Logic, the principal focus of James Kreines’s engaging monograph, is one of those philosophical works that tend to inspire wildly contrasting reactions. To Kantians, Hegel’s investigations into the logico-metaphysical structure of discursive thought have an insulting whiff of the metaphysical tradition Kant had painstakingly criticised. To many Hegelians, the work represents the crowning glory of speculative idealism over Kant’s transcendental idealism. And to analytic philosophers not especially au fait with nineteenth-century German philosophy, reading the Science of Logic constitutes an especially brutal and unforgiving journey to linguistic Calvary.
Kreines, however, aims to illustrate the significance of Hegel’s understanding of Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic in a way which is impressive both as a work of German idealist scholarship and as a way of contributing to contemporary philosophical concerns. For Kreines, as a member of the revised metaphysical reading of Hegel school of thought, making sense of the Hegel–Kant relationship on the scope for a post–dogmatic metaphysical project is a way of breaking with the seemingly perennial oscillation since the 1920s between vilifications and robust defences of metaphysics. Both philosophers have principled positions about how to do metaphysics after subjecting it to the critique of pure reason which are not simply Third Way hypotheses of historical interest; they also have ‘great philosophical appeal’ (22).
As is well-known, one of Kant’s principal aims in the Critique of Pure Reason is to establish the limits of human cognition, and thereby provide a new foundation for metaphysical enquiry: he sees metaphysics as being dependent on certain epistemological principles about what human beings can and cannot know. The error of general metaphysics consists in holding that the unschematized use of categorial concepts, i.e., the application of concepts independently of the conditions of sensibility establishes determinate cognition of objects. A consequence of acknowledging this mistake, as Kant famously states, is that ‘the proud name of ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognitions of things in general … must give way to the more modest title of a transcendental analytic’ (A247/B304). Given the failure of general metaphysics to justify synthetic a priori knowledge, the only viable means of justifying synthetic a priori knowledge is a transcendental analysis of our cognitive capacities.
With regard to special metaphysics, the error of this area of metaphysics consists in infecting judgements concerning God, the world and the immaterial self with transcendental illusion—the conflation of our cognitive interests and the conceptual features of certain phenomena with the determination of things-in-themselves. For example, our determinations of the self as a simple, immaterial substance are based on the illegitimate conflation of conceptual properties of the notion of the self—that of simplicity, unity and subjectivity—with a metaphysic of the self as something simple and substantial.
However, for Kreines, it is not the case that Hegel’s philosophy is either continuous with transcendental idealism or merely aims to tweak certain elements of Kant’s transcendentalism to make sure that metaphysics is properly laid to rest. Post-Kantianism does not simply replace the a priori science of being-qua-being with the a priori science of transcendental judgement—which one can take to be the spirit of the Copernican turn in philosophy—but rather aims to revise traditional metaphysics so as to make metaphysics tout court worth pursuing once more. According to Kreines, for Hegel, Kant’s devastation of dogmatic metaphysics did not signify the destruction of metaphysics tout court. His analysis and systematic undermining of traditional rationalism rather opened the path to an approach to philosophy that is totally critical: Hegel pursues ‘the aim of turning Kant’s Dialectic critique of metaphysics toward the end of the systematic reconstruction of metaphysics, now in the form of a non-foundationalist metaphysics of reason’ (9).
Hegel’s project of detailing a metaphysics of reason is elegantly articulated by Kreines as the Concept Thesis: ‘the reasons that explain why things are as they are and do what they do are always found in immanent concepts, akin to immanent universals or kinds’ (22). In what follows, Kreines takes his reader on a thought-provoking journey deliberating the philosophical viability of the Concept Thesis in contemporary analytic metaphysics, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology.
For example, Kreines takes the Dialectic of Mechanism to show that naturalistic positions which aim to render higher-level kinds or powers or explanations superfluous fail, because the lower level phenomena and properties which natural science discovers are themselves relational and dispositional. In this way, Simon Blackburn’s contemporary critique of reductivism and eliminativism can find an unlikely bedfellow in Hegel.
Likewise, Kreines invites us to conceive of Hegel’s Concept Thesis as a significant challenge to the Humean claim that the world is just an aggregate of loose objects and that laws only refer to observed patterns or empirical regularities. Firstly, Humean empiricism is unknowingly metaphysical despite its claims to eschew metaphysical concepts and vocabulary. For not only is the Humean making substantive claims about the general structure of reality, but also metaphysical language is indispensable for the Humean position to be coherent on its own terms. As such, there is something self-undermining about anti–metaphysics, much in the same way that it is self-undermining to reject the Law of Non-Contradiction, where one must presuppose what one seeks to deny. Secondly, a metaphysics of dependence is required for Humean simplicity to be coherent on its own terms. Finally, in his very detailed discussion of Hegel’s defence of natural teleology, Kreines argues that concrete universals provide an alternative to currently popular neo–teleological and anti–teleological models of explanation. For why an ‘individual living being is what it is goes not on account of what is contained within a local region of space and time, but in virtue of its connections with others of its type. The concept or Begriff—not the underlying matter—is the “substance” of life’ (99).
On this account, all human beings are part of the human species by having the species ground the existence of each individual human being. Conceived in this way, universality seems to be fundamentally related to nomological relation which, in turn, construes Hegel’s talk of concrete universals such as ‘man’ realistically à la David Armstrong. This plays a central role in the originality of Kreines’s approach to the conceptual realist reading of Hegel.
Kreines devotes the rest of his monograph to articulating his understanding of Hegel’s critical response to Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic. As he sees it, Hegel aims to use Kant’s insight into the necessary conflict of metaphysics in the Dialectic for the purpose of constructing a positive metaphysics of reason. Hegel argues that the upshot of the contradictions uncovered by Kant is not that our knowledge is limited, but that we should understand completeness of explanation or the unconditioned in a manner that overcomes the metaphysics of rationalist substance ontology. Hegel’s alternative, revisionary metaphysics is committed to the notion that the categories of traditional metaphysica generalis must undergo systematic and reflective critique and that our categorial conceptual structure is ultimately supplanted by a speculative form of cognition and a dialectical form of logic.
The distinction, therefore, between reason (Vernunft) and understanding (Verstand) is going to play a significant role in the development of the right kind of metaphysics. Kreines convincingly explains the transition from transcendental idealism to absolute idealism in terms of a re-articulation of the form of subject–predicate judgement which Hegel deems to lock metaphysics in the one-sided perspective of the understanding. ‘[A]ttention to the contradictions is supposed to allow reason to elevate itself above the limits of the understanding, into a better conception of reasons’ (198).
By thinking dialectically, reason provides consciousness with the means to avoid the pitfalls of dualisms and the problems of analysis proper to the perspective of the understanding: we can best make sense of the uniqueness of individuals by construing them in terms of the logico–metaphysical relations of concrete universality. This provides Hegel with a way of rejecting both the bare particular theory and the bundle theory. The problem with the bare particular theory is that a bare substratum with no properties of any sortal variety does not appear able to individuate objects. The problem with the bundle theory is that it is exclusively limited to referencing abstract universals, so much so that because these properties are non-essential and accidental properties of an individual, we are naturally led to regard the individual as something which underlies predication and thereby adopt the bare particular conception of objects. In other words, what explains the cognitive disquietude of the phenomenological subject in ‘Perception’—the antinomial conflict between the ‘One’ of the bare particular theory and the ‘Also’ of the bundle theory—is restricting the vocabulary of universality exclusively to abstract universality.
While there is plenty to agree with and admire about Kreines’s rich discussion of Hegel’s metaphysics of reason, I have two concerns: (i) there does not appear to be much engagement with a legitimate question regarding the Hegelian ambition of overcoming problems with the form of subject–predicate judgement. Given Hegel’s aim to replace the perspective of the understanding with the perspective of reason, does he not run the risk of replacing natural and ordinary language with a language that is unintelligible? In other words, is there not a danger that Hegel’s putative doubt over ‘whether the form of judgment is capable of being the form of truth’ (EL: §28R) is making the same formal error that Ideal Language Theorists made when expressing objections to natural language? Or is Hegel instead concerned with undermining a non–dialectical approach to dualities such as universality and individuality in subject–predicate judgements? If the latter is the case, then how clear is it that Hegelian metaphysics is a full-on revisionary metaphysics?
(ii) There does not appear to be much engagement with a philosophical challenge to the Hegelian standpoint of reason. Philosophical consciousness, whose criteria of explanans is the standpoint of reason rather than the standpoint of the understanding, is a form of explanation which conceives of Being as comprising a complex and interconnected whole in which the finite members are dialectically related. From this perspective, the aim of enquiry is not to focus on individuality, because our principal philosophical aim is always to seek what is fixed, persisting, and what governs the particular. However, for philosophers such as Adorno, since Begriffe function to seize the things they are directed at, the activity of making sense of things through the application of totalising rule-conforming concepts does not respect the integrity of Being. Rather, it violently forces reality to conform to concepts and seems to invite a form of eerie conservatism.
Overall, as a work of Hegel scholarship, Kreines succeeds in articulating a compelling and important revised metaphysical interpretation of Hegel. He both decidedly refutes non-metaphysical readings of Hegelian idealism and provides an important contribution to the conceptual realist approach. Moreover, Reason in the World is a strong example of work that carefully and authentically approaches the history of philosophy as a productive manner of dealing with contemporary philosophical problems.
