Seminar Paper - Kant and Hegel

I promised you a seminar paper and today I deliver on that promise. Here's the magic.


Kant and Hegel were German Idealist philosophers, both writing around a similar time in the late 1700s to early 1800s. Their philosophies however were often at odds and Hegel in particular often wrote in reaction to the approach employed by Kant. Hegel also disagreed with the British Empiricists and their approach to natural law as, and this is a quote from the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, “Empiricism reaches conclusions that are limited by the particularities of its contexts and materials and thus cannot provide universally valid propositions regarding the concepts of various social and political institutions or of the relation of reflective consciousness to social and political experience.” I think what is meant by this is that Empiricism does not address certain social and political issues in its study of epistemology which Hegel believes you need to study.

Back to the differences between Kant and Hegel. Kant’s initial ideas, laid down in his 1781 book, The Critique of Pure Reason were a synthesis of the rationalism of Leibniz, which holds that all knowledge is derived from deductions based on existing ideas and Hume’s empiricism which holds that all knowledge is derived from observation alone. Kant therefore comes to the conclusion that we rely on the structure of our mind to form knowledge of the world, pure reason being something that is a priori. So the mind is not a blank canvas but instead it plays an active part in acquiring knowledge by processing the information it perceives. What we perceive then is more a result of our make-up as an observer than anything we do with the objects themselves. To this end he identifies objects such as time and space, which don’t exist externally and can’t be learned from experience so they help make up the basic concepts of the framework which enables us to make some sort of sense of the world.

The Critique of Judgment is the one I feel has the most relevance to our current work on Romanticism so I’m going to talk about that next. This particular work of Kant’s is most often remembered for its thoughts on aesthetics and with the previous lecture going into detail about first political and the aesthetic Prometheanism I felt it was appropriate to talk about it. Using the wonderful world of the Internet, I found an overview of the critique saying; Kant calls aesthetic judgments “judgments of taste” and remarks that, though they are based in an individual’s subjective feelings, they also claim universal validity. It goes on to say that our feelings about beauty differ from our feelings about pleasure and moral goodness in that they are disinterested. We seek to possess pleasurable objects, and we seek to promote moral goodness, but we simply appreciate beauty without feeling driven to find some use for it. Judgments of taste are universal because they are disinterested: our individual wants and needs do not come into play when appreciating beauty, so our aesthetic response applies universally. Aesthetic pleasure comes from the free play between the imagination and understanding when perceiving an object.

In Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, I was shocked to find scant mention of The Critique of Judgment but Russell has never particularly struck me as Romantic in any of the reading we have done so perhaps his bias should not surprise me. He does however go into some detail about Kant’s epistemology, stating in a round about way that whilst Kant believed ideas like arithmetic and geometry are synthetic in the Hume sense, they are also a priori. But how is this possible? Kant’s solution was that the outer world causes only sensation but our own mental apparatus orders this matter in space and time and supplies the concepts by which we understand experience. Essentially, we have some inbuilt thought processes which help us to make sense of the outer world and order our experiences. As a link to Hegel; Russell talks about Kant’s problem with ‘antinomies’ caused by applying space and time to things that are not experienced. Russell writes, “’The World has a beginning in time, and is also limited as regards space.’ The antithesis says: ‘The world has no beginning in time, and no limits in space; it is infinite as regards both time and space.’ The second antinomy proves every composite substance both is, and is not, made up of simple parts. The third antinomy maintains that there are two kinds of causality, one according to the laws of nature, the other that of freedom; the antithesis maintains that there is only causality according to the laws of nature. Finally, the fourth antinomy proves there is, and also, is not an absolutely necessary Being. This part of The Critique of Pure Reason greatly influenced Hegel who based his dialectic on antinomies.

We now move onto Hegel, viewed as more important than Kant by some, Russell included, because of the political implications of his writings. In Lesley Levene’s book, I Think, Therefore I Am: All the Philosophy You Need to Know she writes briefly on Hegellian Triads joking, “nothing to do with Chinese gangsters”; aside from the puns, she goes on to say there are the three parts of Hegel’s dialectical process. Using her example, first you have your thesis, being; then you come up with its antithesis, nothing; the resulting synthesis is becoming. Simply put, thesis and antithesis are reconciled into the concept ‘becoming’. Working off Kant’s ideas, Hegel reasoned that the world is not a collection of separate, contradictory units; despite appearances, these contradictory units are in fact part of the unified whole; the ‘Absolute’. Since these ideas can be refined and developed once combined, reality must be a rational idea with its fundamental structure mirrored in the structure of our thoughts as we try to unify contradictory ideas. I honestly really like this idea and so far agree with Hegel more than most philosophers, as the idea that we are a blank slate as in Locke’s Tabula Rasa never particularly appealed to me. The suggestion instead that we are using what are essentially a priori thought processes to come to terms with our experiences makes a lot more sense to me.

I made a passing reference to Hegel’s political importance and it was his posthumously published lecture notes on the philosophy of history which had such an impact. He saw history as a progression towards freedom; from the empires of the East, via the Greeks with their city-state, to the Protestant Reformation, when individuals realised they could achieve their own salvation. Imbued with this revolutionary spirit, Hegel had confidence in concepts such as progress and purpose. This had an enormous influence on German Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century and, with all this talk of historical progress, was central to the political theory of Karl Marx whilst Hegel’s dialectical reasoning, (minus all the spirit) became Marx’s dialectical materialism.

Thank you for listening.