‘With What Must Transcendental Philosophy Begin?’

Abstract

In this chapter, I compare Kant’s methodological reflections on “nothing,” “something,” and the highest concept of transcendental philosophy at the end of the Transcendental Analytic to the more famous discussion of “nothing”, indeterminacy, and the beginning of philosophy in Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik. Although Hegel never presents them this way, we can see his methodological reflections there as responding to problems that arise purely immanently within Kant’s own theory. In the first half of this chapter, I examine Kant’s claim that the highest concept of transcendental philosophy is ‘object in general.’ I argue that the premises of this argument, when fully thought through to their consequences, pose a serious problem for the ‘beginning’ of Kantian transcendental philosophy. The highest concept of transcendental philosophy (“object in general”) is completely indeterminate, and this indeterminacy threatens to infect every more specific concept (“something” and “nothing”). In the second half, I turn to Hegel and explain why he embraces the conclusion that proved so problematic for Kant: the beginning of transcendental philosophy (Logic) is a completely indeterminate concept, not “object in general” but “pure being.” I then reconstruct why Hegel thinks, contra Kant, that the opposition between this completely indeterminate concept and its negation, “pure nothing,” is enough to generate the rest of the content of Logic.