Hegel on Kant’s Antinomies and Distinction Between General and Transcendental Logic

Abstract

A common reaction to Hegel's suggestion that we collapse Kant's distinction between form and content is that, since such a move would also deprive us of any way of distinguishing the merely logical from the real possibility of our concepts, it is incoherent and ought to be rejected. It is true that these two distinctions are intimately related in Kant, such that if one goes, the other does as well. But it is less obvious that giving them up as Kant conceives them is as incoherent a proposal as many of Hegel's critics think. It has been the point of a recent account of Hegel's idealism to demonstrate that his critique of Kant's dichotomy between form and con tent or concept and intuition does not commit him to the view that human cognition is materially creative of its content in the manner of a God-like or intuitive intellect?does not, in other words, signify a return to a pre Critical metaphysics.2 This is the interpretative stance I adopt here as well, in hope of giving defenders of Kant reasons for taking Hegel more serious ly. In what follows I argue that Hegel does indeed uncover serious dif ficulties in Kant's form/content dichotomy and in the related distinctions between general and transcendental logic, and logical and real possibility. I focus on his critique of Kant's treatment of the Antinomies of pure reason, limiting my discussion to references to the mathematical Antinomies in par ticular. For Kant, antinomy is the key to the discovery of transcendental idealism; for Hegel, it reveals the inadequacy of that form of idealism, and the need for a more consistent alternative. I begin in Sections I-III by considering how the methodological strategy of Kant's approach to the Antinomies depends upon the distinction central to his Critical philosophy between general and transcendental logic. I review his conception of the respective roles of the two logics in order to draw out the sense in which for him one has a material or objective function while the other is supposed to be purely formal. In Sections IV and V, I in troduce a Hegelian perspective to argue that Kant fails to recognize in his own consideration of the Antinomies problems which undermine his distinction between the two logics and which therefore call into question the foundational assumptions upon which transcendental idealism rests. Finally in Section VI, I take a brief look at two implications of Hegel's critique for