Hegel's Break with Kant: The Leap from Individual Psychology to Sociology

Abstract

The author calls attention to and discusses certain basic but neglected and/or obscured features of Hegel's idealism. He treats these features as paradigmati cally sociological and uses them as a baseline with which to chart Hegel's critique of, and against which to measure, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Section 1 introduces Hegel's criticism of Kant's idealism; in contrast to his own objective idealism, transcendental idealism is individualistic. This criticism is elaborated in section 2, issuing in the quasi-Wittgensteinian indictment that Kant cannot account for the possibility of language and human thought. Section 3 argues that Hegel's criticism that mind is social and that objectivity cannot be understood in isolation from social interaction amounts to a sociological critique of Kant.