The course offers a Hegelian reading of Kant, or more precisely, a mutual (mis)translation between Kant and Hegel. The starting point of this course is that the structure of Reason in Kant is mutual recognition. For both Kant and Hegel, mutual recognition in its ethical substantiality constitutes the condition of possibility of ethical life in modernity—the concrete universality. On the other hand, what renders the problem of mutual recognition—and its dirempted counterpart, relations of domination—especially acute is the novel character of the modern subject, namely its infinite freedom. The double bind of modern ethical life is therefore the reconciliation or articulation of the relation between mutual recognition and subjectivity, the universal and the particular, each endowed with infinite value: freedom without recognition leaves behind relations of domination, whereas recognition without freedom forsakes the gains of modernity.
The experience of modernity is the persistent failure of this project shared by Kant and Hegel. In suggesting that universal mutual recognition is the condition of possibility of Reason as such, where reason is the condition of possibility of experience, the failure of universal mutual recognition becomes the impossibility of experience. The result is therefore a strangely Adornian Kant: experience is impossible in this world. The critical question—how is experience possible?—becomes truly critical: how is experience hitherto impossible? Read in such a way, Kant—more than Hegel—offers the more lucid diagnosis of the aporia of modern ethical life, but this is a reading of Kant that is possible only after Hegel.
1. Kantian Reason and Mutual Recognition
The task of the first lecture is to foreground mutual recognition in the Kantian project. I argue that Kantian reason has the structure of universal mutual recognition; in fact, reason cannot be thought at all without a community of universally mutually recognizing subjects. The name Kant gave to this community is species—the species is the bond that ties the universal to each particular, yet the species in Kant remains an idea of reason without actuality. Tracing the presence of a rational idea of universal mutual recognition in Metaphysics of Morals and other writings, I will focus on the third critique to articulate how Kant envisions the mutually recognizing community as the condition of possibility of judgments in general and hence of experience as such.
Reading:
- Kant: What is Orientation in Thinking?; Critique of Power of Judgment (§§30-40); Metaphysics of Morals (p.68-82)
2. Kant’s Master/Slave Dialectics: Freedom and Domination
The second lecture focuses on the other pole of the dilemma: modern subjectivity with infinite freedom. Here particularity attains infinite dignity. Addressing the question ‘why must subjects struggle to death in the Phenomenology?’, I suggest the answer is: because they’re Kantians. The struggle to death, while one of many possible paths to recognition in Hegel, is determined by the shape of Kantian freedom as necessary and inevitable. For Kant, freedom is the freedom to legislate universally; to legislate universally, however, is to deny the legislation of all others. Therefore, a moment of transgression and non-recognition is structurally inevitable for Kantian freedom. This universality of each Kantian subject is what makes them appear to each other as enemies that must be subjugated. The master is the one whose legislation is obeyed: it is by virtue of our being Kantian, i.e. universally legislative subjects that we must struggle for dominance. The result of the struggle, however, is not true universality, but the usurpation of universality by a particular will, i.e. that of the master. The structure of master/slave therefore is the wound left behind by Kantian universal subjects.
Reading:
- Kant: Universal History, Perpetual Peace, MM p.123-50;
- Hegel, Phenomenology (§§166-96), Philosophy of Right (§158), fragment on love (recommended)
3. Hegel contra Kant 1
The third lecture continues to think through the aftermath of the master/slave dialectic in Kant. Kant believes that from the usurpation of universality by the master, a truer universality of lawfulness could emerge, and the resultant civil condition could function as the transition to a true ethical life. Hegel contests this model. As Kant thinks of civil condition merely in terms of external right and coercion, Hegel argues, Kantian right is nothing but relations of domination. Ethical life remains irredeemably separate from the state of legality. The truth of Kant’s civil condition, in Hegel’s account, is Roman despotism. Kant, however, I suggest, would agree with this assessment. The systematic implication of Hegel’s critique, moreover, is that Hegel cannot criticize the insubstantiality of Kant’s civil condition without turning the same accusation against his own account of civil society. We will address the ramifications of this in the final lecture.
Reading:
- Kant, MM (55-62,68-80, 123-50), Universal History, Perpetual Peace.
- Hegel, Phenomenology (§476-82)
4. Hegel contra Kant 2
The fourth lecture continues with Hegel’s critique of Kant. If Hegel polemicizes against the lack of actuality of Kantian philosophy, it is not only that it is not (yet) actualized, but that Kant’s concepts are thought of in such a way so that it is a priori unactualizable. I will focus on Hegel’s argument about particularity and universality: according to Hegel, Kant posits the particular wills as a priori opposed to the universal will, therefore the universal will or general will cannot be arrived at without infringing on particular wills. Insofar as particularity and universality are a priori opposed, their mutual articulation and reconciliation—the actuality of ethical life—remain impossible. Contra Kant, Hegel believes in the primacy of ethical syllogism, that particularity and universality are always already in concert with each other. It is this new conception of non-antinomian particularity-universality relation that constitutes the foundation of Hegel’s overcoming of Kant’s dualisms. But this reading of Kant is not necessarily correct: for a Hegelian syllogistic logic, I turn to the category of community in the first critique, and suggest that Kant is not unaware of Hegel’s innovation, and this is the problem that drove him to develop the intersubjective structure of reason in the critical project in the first place. The problem, then, cannot be solved by a simple Hegelian Aufhebung.
Reading:
- Hegel, Philosophy of Right (§29, 40, 257-8);
- Kant, remarks on the Sublime and the beautiful (109-10), Critique of Pure Reason (p.215-6, 484-9), .
5. Beyond Impossible
Hegel’s charge of Kantian non-actuality in the final analysis turns against Hegel as well. Kant, more than Hegel, provides us with critical perspectives to think about this predicament as embodied beings living in history without foreclosure or predestined reconciliations. What Hegel resolves, Kant problematizes. Our reading of Kant is thus: the first critique grounds objectivity in the subject, the third critique grounds subjectivity in mutual recognition. Only the community of mutually recognizing rational beings secures the intelligibility of experience, that is to say, experience as such. The fact of domination, however, exposes the groundlessness of this mutually recognizing community. This predicament applies to Hegel as much as Kant. The fault lines of this insubstantial mutual recognition bears the name of ‘remnants of state of nature’ in the Philosophy of Right, in the figure of the rabbles. Hegel’s critique of Kant forces us to think seriously about the precariousness of modern ethical life.
We return, once again, to Kant’s problematic universality of domination. The master not only claims for himself the universal, he simultaneously assigns to the slave a delegitimate particularity. Kant’s opposition of the universal and the particular has its genesis in the concrete relations of domination: it is not so much that particularity and universality cannot be reconciled, but that their reconciliation is a sham under present conditions. But the consequences of being denied recognition as a universal being are greater than expected: the predicament is most starkly revealed in the figures of women and slaves as embodied beings. Non-recognition becomes instrumentalization, instrumentalization, however, culminates in cannibalization. In a world where empirical non-recognition persists, the relation between particularities is one of cannibalism. Ethical life is impossible in this world.
Reading:
- Kant, MM 95-9;
- Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §200, 244, 253,
Recommended readings:
- Cristi, Renato. Hegel on freedom and authority . University of Wales Press, 2005.
- Fenves, Peter. A peculiar fate: Metaphysics and world-history in Kant. Ithaca , NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991.
- Geiger, Ido. The Founding Act of Modern Ethical Life: Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral and political philosophy. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007.
- O’Neill, Onora. Constructing authorities: Reason, politics and interpretation in Kant’s philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
- Shell, Susan Meld. The embodiment of reason: Kant on spirit, generation, and community. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
- Yovel, Yirmiyahu. Kant and the philosophy of history. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.