Getting from Kant to Hegel (via Beethoven, Wittgenstein ... and Peter Singer!)
Channel: Loren King
Date: 2023-11-27

Immanuel Kant takes Rousseau's civic ideal of autonomy - that is, of us being both the subjects and authors of the laws we obey - and transforms that idea into the heart of a grand ethical system, the essentials of which are explained in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant gives us a way to justify our unease at the sacrifices consequentialists ask us to make in the name of aggregate happiness. We're not just being squeamish: when we sacrifice the one to save the many, we're failing to take them seriously as moral beings with dignity, a worth beyond price, beyond consequences. But Kant's heady doctrine leaves us with new problems, most obviously: where do we set the bar for rational moral capacity that generates dignity? And who gets to decide? A lot of philosophy since has involved tinkering either with Kant's demands, the mechanics of consequentialism, or both, but in sharp historical contrast, Hegel pushes reason even further: he believed that if we look “at the world rationally we will find that it in turn assumes a rational aspect,” but not because we construct knowledge by imposing a rational structure on the brute stuff of experience, as Kant thought. Rather, the world seems rational because it is rational!

Hegel is perhaps the last of the 'grand system' philosophers to whom a significant number of respectable scholars continue to grant credibility. Hegel believed that if we look "at the world rationally we will find that it in turn assumes a rational aspect," not because we construct or impose a rational structure on the brute stuff of experience, as Kant thought. Rather, the world seems rational because it actually is !

There are plenty of folks after Hegel who have peddled grand systems of thought that claim to explain everything, and that promise to achieve some sort of unity. We typically call these people grifters, cranks, and cultists rather than philosophers. Some would say Hegel deserves the same judgement. Others insist on his enduring importance. Given the influence he had over Germanic thought, and particularly over Marx, these scholars have a point, at the very least as a claim about intellectual history.

Hegel was a tremendously popular lecturer in his day, and while I think he was deeply confused and often incoherent (at the very least in translation) he was undeniably influential, even as the grander elements of his philosophical system were largely abandoned after his death.

In my judgement, Hegel's project is theological rather than properly philosophical: I'm inclined toward what is sometimes called 'the traditional metaphysical reading' of Hegel. There are, however, those who would argue that my distinction here - between theology and 'proper' philosophy - only makes sense because much of philosophy has taken a problematic turn in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, toward conceits of analysis and clarification, rather than reconciliation, deep understanding, and transcendence.

Ludwig Wittgenstein held to something like this critical view of popular currents in early 20th century philosophy (currents of thought that he helped initiate, then later repudiated). His sentiments were closer to Kierkegaard than Hegel, although strangely enough, while he would likely have rejected the grand rationalist conceits of Hegel's approach, Wittgenstein's efforts to dissolve the problems of philosophy do bear a certain ... family resemblance ... (that's a joke ... a philosophy joke) ... with Hegel's project.

I find both heroism and tragedy in what Hegel means to accomplish: he thinks philosophy can discover a deep rational structure that unfolds in history, and that this unfolding mirrors the development of consciousness in the world. Hegel's project is of a piece (but, to be sure, importantly distinct from) romantic currents of the late-eighteenth century in Europe, where artists and thinkers sought to overcome the dualisms - between mind and body, nature and freedom - that the rationalist enlightenment inherited from Descartes, Rousseau, and Kant.

Kant's project was one of reconciliation: of a mechanistic cosmos with human freedom, anchored in our rational moral will. The romantics, and Hegel, sought to overcome this distinction altogether. Their project was one of transcendence, not reconciliation. There is grandeur and hope to the vision, even as its expression, as a grand philosophical scheme, seems misguided to those of us who favour more modest, Humean pathways through the enlightenment.