Hegel’s Immanent Critique of Kant?

It is a widespread view, held by protagonists of transcendental philosophy in general and Kant in particular, that Hegel’s critique of Kant is not immanent but based upon external grounds. A recent expression of it (Heidemann 2024) gave me the occasion to scrutinize this view from a systematic perspective. After all, Hegel’s philosophy is permeated by critical remarks on and analyses of Kant’s philosophy. Moreover, Hegel conceives of his critique to be justified in essential parts by a critical reflection on the presuppositions of Kant’s philosophy. That is to say that Hegel’s critique claims to be immanent. “Effective refutation,” as Hegel says, “must infiltrate the opponent’s stronghold and meet him on his own ground” (GW 12, 15).

Concerning Kant in this respect, see, for instance, Hegel’s

• discussion of the second position of thought to objectivity, in which Hegel elaborates on transcendental philosophy (GW 20, §§ 40 ff.);

• remarks at the beginning of the Logic of the Concept regarding Kant’s representation of the concept (GW 12, 17 ff.);

• elaboration of the idea of cognition as finite cognition (GW 20, §§ 223 ff., esp. 226 with 231 N; GW 12, 192 ff.);

• description of cognition as theoretical cognition under the idea of the true and practical cognition under the idea of the good, which seems to be a direct paraphrase of Kant’s conception. – Theoretical reason’s relation to an object consists in, as Kant says, the “mere determination” of the object, that is “theoretical cognition” of reason. Practical reason, by contrast, is concerned with “realizing” its object, that is “practical cognition” of reason (KrV, B IX f.). Kant’s view leads, of course, Hegel to the result that philosophical comprehension can neither be theoretical nor practical cognition but must be cognition of the absolute idea, that is cognition under the absolute idea (GW 12, 236 ff.; GW 20, § 236 ff.);

• critique of morality and its sublation in Sittlichkeit,Footnote ² which proves to be precisely a presupposition of Kant’s conception of morality (GW 20, §§ 503 ff.; GW 14,1 §§ 105 ff.);

• overcoming of Kant’s architectonic of theoretical and practical reason, as it proves to sublate itself into the absolute idea. This has the consequence that the absolute idea is not only the single theme of philosophy that completes itself in the course of a necessary process of self-determination of thought in the elements of the logical, nature, and spirit; rather, the Kantian distinction between critique and (transcendental) metaphysics is also shown to be inappropriate.

In short, the entire Kantian division of the system of philosophy is deficient to Hegel. This is because Kant insufficiently considers the ground of unity of the distinctions that make up the cornerstones of his system. Therefore, Hegel consistently reproaches Kant of “formalism.” From a methodical point of view, Kant’s transcendental idealism lacks what is for Hegel the realization of the concept through its own moments of the universal, particular, and singular. Accordingly, Hegel aims to transform transcendental idealism into speculative idealism, or more precisely, transcendental idealism’s claim to cognition sublates itself into speculative idealism. Thus it should also be added to the above list of examples of Hegel’s Kant critique that in his Logic of Essence, Hegel characterized the form of philosophical reasoning typical for transcendental philosophy as “external reflection.” (GW 11, 252 ff.) Indeed, this qualification is highly important. Taken by itself, transcendental idealism is an absolutized Logic of Essence. Consequently, it systematically lacks a speculative Logic of Being and a speculative Logic of the Concept.

In the following sections, this characteristic of transcendental philosophy and harsh judgment will be substantiated by detailed analysis. For now, it suffices to notice that the indications mentioned above usually do not worry the supporters of the thesis of a missing immanent critique in Hegel very much. For them, Hegel’s philosophy itself is based on problematic presuppositions, so an immanent critique is not convincing anyway.Footnote ³ According to me, this argument does not hold. Kant’s critical philosophy already in its foundations does not at all satisfy the standards of philosophy as science set by Kant himself – no matter how one thinks about the supposedly problematic presuppositions of Hegel or the validity of individual doctrines. Therefore, in this section, I shall try to make the reproach plausible based on a special, albeit fundamental and momentous problem, namely that of the beginning of philosophy. My thesis is: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and thus the first discipline in the system of critical or transcendental idealism, oriented towards “self-knowledge of reason” (KrV, A XI), does not fulfill the initial conditions of philosophy as science, to be sure, conditions also shared by Kant.

Enthusiasm and Disappointment: Towards Completing Kant

As far as Hegel’s engagement with Kant is concerned, it is first extremely important to keep in mind the general tendency that characterizes the German idealists’ treatment of Kant. With Kant, the German idealists are convinced that freedom is the core topic of modern philosophy. When viewed as a philosophical epoch, a new perspective arises concerning how humans conceive of themselves and their relationship to the world. In modernity, human thought and action are no longer held to be determined by external factors (heteronomy) but self-determined (autonomy), and hence freed from external factors functioning as determining grounds. The philosophical paradigm for mastering this impetus of freedom is reason. With his “Copernican turn,” that is to say, his transcendental revolution, Kant gave reason a form that suits the modern understanding of humans as self-determined agents. Reason transpires to be the source of all validity, and hence of any normativity of human thought and action. Objectivity, of whatever type, is from the start framed by the conditions of reason or, as it is also called in the philosophical discourse, of “subjectivity.”Footnote ⁴

On the one hand, philosophers like Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel hailed Kant’s transcendental revolution of philosophy and his conception of reason as the source of validity of human thought and action. On the other hand, they were also convinced that Kant’s transcendental philosophy lacks the proper methodical and systemic form to do justice to the claim of Kant’s project of critical philosophy. The post-Kantian German idealists were all of the opinion that Kant’s transcendental turn should not so much be stopped but completed.

This assessment of the state of affairs entails an innovative philosophical appropriation of Kant. It undoubtedly strains the difference between the spirit and the letter of Kant’s philosophy to the utmost. Nevertheless, the German idealist’s appropriation is intrinsically linked to self-enlightenment and thus to an immanent critique of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. The “presuppositions” or “foundations” of Kant’s transcendental philosophy also have to be comprehended. For Reinhold (Reference Reinhold1789, 67), the “premises” of Kant’s philosophy are missing. “Kant has the right philosophy,” writes Fichte (Reference Fichte, Gliwitzky, Fuchs and Schneider1962 ff., III.2, 28, cf. 20), “but only in its results, not according to its reasons.” And, as Schelling (Reference Schelling and Fuhrmans1962, II, 57) paraphrases, “who can understand results without premises?”

Such critical inquiring is quite in conformity with the idea of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant. Kant’s philosophy is an invitation to reason to take on “the most difficult of all its tasks,” namely that of the “self-knowledge of reason” (KrV, A XI). Against the dogmatics of empiricism and traditional metaphysics, Kant claims the lack of such a self-enlightenment. For Kant, it is a “customary fate of human reason in speculation to finish its edifice as early as possible and only then to investigate whether the ground has been adequately prepared for it.” (KrV, B 9) Also given Kant’s remarks in the “Architectonic of Pure Reason” (KrV, B 860 ff.) on the connection between science, architectural unity, and the concomitant necessity of an a priori division of the whole from its purpose, one may demand just as detailed information about the determinacy of the beginning of philosophy, as from a philosophy that sets out as transcendental philosophy not to determine the determinacy of the objects in the fashion of a direct-intentional relationship to objects but in terms of a validity-reflective approach to objects: transcendental cognition is “occupied not so much with objects but rather with our mode of cognition of objects insofar as this is to be possible a priori.” (KrV, B 25) This is particularly relevant when, in its fundamental part, the analysis of transcendental philosophy is supposed to take place “only as far as it is indispensably necessary in order to provide insight into the principles of a priori synthesis in their entire scope, which is our [Kant’s, CK] only concern.” (KrV, B 25 f.) Of course, this insight needs to emerge in the mode of necessity, which is inherent to transcendental philosophy as a science of principles and thus of “synthetic judgments a priori.” Transcendental philosophy is necessary cognition of what is necessary, namely of the principles of cognition; it is a priori cognition of reason.Footnote ⁵ The objective validity of the principles of objective determinacy is to be deduced, that is to be justified. According to Kant, the “entitlement” of the use of pure concepts a priori “always” requires a deduction, more precisely a “transcendental deduction”: a deduction that does not indicate how a concept is acquired through experience and reflection on it but clarifies the origin of its possession (KrV, B 118).

The Beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason as a Problem

Now it is striking that at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, there is no reflection on the beginning of philosophy as science. Kant neither discusses the arsenal of concepts he uses, which is oriented towards the so-called faculty psychology (Vermögenspsychologie), nor the necessity to articulate the problem of validity, which Kant is concerned with, by means of “faculties of the mind” (Vermögen des Gemüts). Also, he does not specifically discuss the necessity to begin the systematic determination of cognition with his much-discussed and disputed dualism of two stems of cognition. A justification of the beginning in § 1 with the distinction between intuition and concept or sensibility and understanding (KrV, B 33) is missing (also according to contemporary Kant scholars like Brandt (Reference Brandt, Mohr and Willaschek1998, 81 ff.), Caimi (Reference Caimi1996), Gloy (Reference Gloy1984), Heidemann (Reference Heidemann and Engelhard2002), Höffe (Reference Höffe1992, 72), Willaschek (Reference Willaschek and Enskat2015, 129), and Wolff (Reference Wolff1995, 60 f.)).Footnote ⁶

Rather, for Kant the cognitive relationship shows itself from the beginning as a twofold whole: It consists of the moments of intuition and concept or sensibility and understanding videlicet receptivity and spontaneity.Footnote ⁷ These “two stems” (KrV, B 29) of cognition constitute its fundamental determinacy. It is in and with these two principles that cognition constitutes itself. Cognition is a validity-functional whole of the principles intuition and concept, of aesthetic and logical conditions. This is Kant’s initial assertion about the content of the problem of transcendental philosophy.

Kant’s dualistic doctrine of the stems of cognition became the object of critical reflection early on in post-Kantian idealism, then in neo-Kantianism, contemporary systematic transcendental philosophy, and Kant scholarship. After all, in the Critique of Pure Reason there is no explicit justification of the dualism of the stems, although this dualism is fundamental to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. This is all the more important because Kant claims to consider the “subjective sources” of the mind, so to speak, not in their “empirical” but in their “transcendental” quality (cf. KrV, A 98 with AA IV, 304). He thematizes the faculties of the mind not in their natural determinacy but in their transcendental meaning: as principles of the validity of cognition. If this is the case, then they are also subject to the requirement of a transcendental deduction, since the legal ground of their philosophical use is to be clarified. However, Kant primarily takes his division of the faculties from the so-called German school philosophy of his time (above all Leibniz and Wolff).

Hegel’s Overcoming of Kant’s Dualism

As mentioned, in post-Kantian idealism, given Kant’s beginning of philosophy with a dualism of two cognitive stems, an intense debate has unfolded about the beginning of philosophy (cf., e.g., Vieweg Reference Vieweg2023). Hegel alludes to this several times in his Logic. At the same time, he leads the problem of the beginning to an original solution. Both neo-Kantianism and transcendental philosophy (in its subjectivity-oriented variants) of the post-war period and the present time have fallen behind. As this will be discussed in the coming sections, here it suffices to return to Hegel’s dealing with the beginning of philosophy as science.

In “more recent times,” according to Hegel, the awareness had arisen that it was “a difficulty to find a beginning in philosophy,” since the beginning had to be either something “mediated” or something “immediate” but could be neither one nor the other (GW 21, 53, 56 f., 62). Hegel has in mind the debate about the beginning of philosophy that was just ignited by Kant’s transcendental philosophy, as it developed especially through Reinhold’s Elementary Philosophy (Elementarphilosophie) and Fichte’s Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre).Footnote ⁸

Hegel solves the problem of the beginning in two steps.

1. (1) In the first step, it is a matter of leading the consciousness intending philosophical knowledge to an adequate attitude of cognition concerning its object as well as to this object itself as an object that needs to be scientifically determined. Hegel offers two possibilities to take this first step.

   1. a. The first variant of the first step is via Hegel’s introductory writings into philosophy as science. In terms of Hegel’s intellectual development, the Phenomenology of Spirit comes into question first. When it appeared in 1807, Hegel had intended it to serve as an introduction to the system of the philosophical sciences, especially to its foundational discipline: logic (GW 21, 8 f.). Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1st ed. 1817, 3rd ed. 1830), however, also offers an introduction both to philosophy as such (GW 20, §§ 1–18) and specifically to the discipline of logic (GW 20, §§ 19–83),Footnote ⁹ while the Phenomenology of Spirit is occasionally even dismissed here as a superfluous introduction to the logic (GW 20, § 78 N).

      The Phenomenology of 1807 aims to examine appearances of true knowledge so that subsequent forms of its appearance introduce natural consciousness into a scientific philosophy as pure, comprehending knowledge.Footnote ¹⁰ This introduction departs from the basic opposition of Hegel’s time: the opposition between subjectivity on the one side and that which restricts this subjectivity on the other: the subject-object dualism. The paradigmatic figure of this opposition, both for common sense and for philosophy, is consciousness.Footnote ¹¹ At the end of the history of its education, in “absolute knowledge” (GW 9, 422–433), consciousness has overcome the subject-object dualism. The appearing knowledge becomes actual; it becomes philosophical knowledge. This knowledge is now to be developed in the system of philosophy: at the end of the Phenomenology there is as a result a knowledge of the object of philosophy that is to be determined and in this respect immediate. From a purely systematic point of view, one can also say that the cognition of thought as the ground of objectivity must not be loaded with all kinds of presuppositions from the outset, but it is to be thought of only as a unity from which everything else is. As such a unity, thought is no longer thought characterized by an “opposition of consciousness.”

   2. b. The second variant of the first step leads to the same result: a kind of private phenomenology of the philosophizing subject, which Hegel calls the resolve to consider thought as such (GW 21, 53–56; 20, § 17). According to this, the project of phenomenology is necessary either way to get into the system of philosophy. However, as such it has only a relationship to the subject (agent) who decides to philosophize, not to the system of philosophy itself. Seen in relation to the philosophizing subject who decides to philosophize scientifically, the Phenomenology too is founded in a “resolve”: in the resolve to follow the course of development offered by Hegel in his Phenomenology and thereby to arrive at the insight into the necessity of the standpoint of speculative idealism. The resolve is subjectively the only beginning of philosophy. Hegel’s so-called “resolve to consider thought purely as such.” This resolve is by no means a groundless one, not an immediate knowledge shot as if out of a pistol. Rather, it is the resolve of a correspondingly philosophically pre-educated person,Footnote ¹² for instance of a philosopher who has realized that even Kant’s dualisms cannot have their end, since they can obtain their justification only as the result of the conceptual explication of a unity underlying them. In the resolve, the insight is manifested that thought caught in opposition fails if it is to be comprehended what objective, content-laden thought is. Thus if scientific philosophizing is to be done. Admittedly, it is not important how one gets into the Logic; the main thing is, as Hegel says, “that a pure beginning should be made” (GW 21, 59 f.). The Logic is supposed to be capable of justifying itself (GW 21, 32): The “concept of science” results from the Logic, and the determination of the method of philosophy is part of the Logic too (GW 21, 32; 20, § 17 with 25 A).

2. (2) With this, we are already at the second step: the treading of the determinacy of the beginning, and hence at the initial determinations of objective thought, of the “self-knowledge of reason.” It belongs to the nature of the beginning itself that it is “being” qua indeterminate immediacy (GW 21, 59). Then it is to be seen what determinations this beginning yields and how it expands to a system of determinations of thought. In this respect, the resolve of the philosophizing subject to think purely presupposes only the meaning of its own activity: it begins to think thought. It is decisive for philosophy as a science that its object and its method arise as the result of thinking thought in the first place. Philosophy has a beginning only in relationship to the subject that decides to philosophize; in itself, philosophy is pure self-determination of the absolute; its beginning is the self-explication of the standpoint where philosophy as philosophy always already was.

   While the other sciences may start with a subjective presupposition concerning their object and the method of its investigation, it is obligatory for philosophy as a science that both emerge first as a result of thinking thought. Otherwise, philosophy would violate the methodical demand of doing philosophy in a truly critical fashion: it would put what is to be justified in the place of what is justified already. A philosophical doctrine of objective thought can therefore not begin its determination of thought by recourse to any given, to something supposedly objective. What has to be determined at the beginning of philosophy as science is objective thought itself.Footnote ¹³

   It concerns thought that refrains from everything given and still has a content: itself. Therefore, thought is not thematic as merely formal, ignoring its content; rather, it is thematic as objective thought (GW 20, § 24), more precisely as thought that has its content not against but in itself. Towards any other beginning of philosophy, the question of justification repeats itself, since the beginning is always a result of thought. If thought thinks itself, then it has itself as content in the form of thought. The beginning of philosophy is the beginning of thought: thought in its beginning thus thought in the beginning of thinking itself. It thinks what necessarily belongs to thought: it thinks pure thought determinations. By thinking pure thought determinations, it develops its own determinacy. It develops it not via others but in itself. If it thinks what determinacy necessarily belongs to thought, then it is the content of thought itself that moves in the determination of itself from determinacy to determinacy.

   The beginning of thought that thinks itself is nothing but pure immediacy. It can only be the indeterminate, only simple immediacy, because the beginning, as a beginning, must not be anything mediated and further determined; it needs to be thought purely in the minimal determinacy of its indeterminacy (thus not something immediate, indeterminate). According to the nature of its beginning, thought is nothing but that which is to be determined (cognized), determinable (cognizable), and still undetermined (uncognized). In it, as the beginning, nothing is contained that distinguishes it from others but only simple, indeterminate immediacy. In the thought of the beginning, any reference to others is abandoned. As completely unrelated, the beginning is the most abstract, emptiest, and simplest: thought in its immediacy (GW 20, § 86; TWA 8, 184 A1). This thought of pure immediacy establishes the universal minimum of thought, which, however, is at the same time the maximum, the universe of what is thinkable. It is therefore presupposed in every other thought.

   The traditional term for this comprehensive concept of the thinkable is that of being: thought thinks being. Being is the most elementary and general determination of thought: indeterminate immediacy. If the beginning of thought is being, thought as being, then distinctions like those of cognition and object, thought and reality, subject and object, form and content, I and world, body and mind, immanence and transcendence, etc. do not play any role at all yet. All these would already be specific and thus determined beginnings, beginnings of a later order, none a pure beginning of thought. For whatever reasons the philosophizing subject decides to think purely, from this resolve always only immediacy results, something without content, without further determination; something, which, as the beginning, is the beginning of a process of determination out of which its determinacy first arises. If one takes pure being, the mere “is,” as this pure immediacy, then the thought which is suitable as the beginning of thought is the thought of being. The determination of its determinacy, the determination of the beginning, then drives the further determinacy of the object of philosophy in the mode of necessity. Only in this way is the progress of the determination of the beginning of thought as the thought of being at the same time a return into the ground of thought as the ground of everything (GW 21, 37; 12, 251). Instead of progressing from an alleged beginning to merely logically subordinated relations of objective meaning, Hegel presents a truly scientific determination of the philosophical object.

The Beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Diagnosis

If one looks at Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason from the point of view sketched above, then it is safe to say that a phenomenology is missing: a phenomenology that leads to the ground of unity from which everything else is and from which the contents of reason’s determinacy arise. It leads to this ground as something that is to be determined and thus is thought to be undetermined. Kant’s Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason does introduce the idea of transcendental philosophy. Starting from actual cognitive claims, via a problem-historical passage through empiricism and rationalist metaphysics of his time, he certainly makes plausible the task of self-knowledge of reason qua clarification of the principles of cognition. However, Kant’s Introduction does not establish the necessity to determine these principles in the way it is then done in § 1 of the Critique of Pure Reason. It does not provide the ground of unity from which the concepts qualifying the relation of cognition arise. Rather, Kant already has an arsenal of concepts at his disposal; these concepts are claimed in their validity but do not emerge from the task of self-knowledge, that is from the matter at issue. Thus, they are taken by Kant from elsewhere (from the German school philosophy of his age).

As said, in contrast to the non-philosophical sciences philosophy as a science lacks the possibility of presupposing its object as well as the method of its investigation as already given. This, of course, does not only concern Kant’s stem dualism but also concepts such as “form” and “matter,” with which Kant determines the object of philosophy. Hegel rightly spoke early of Kant being orientated towards empirical psychology of powers of the mind; put more drastically, of Kant possessing a “sack full of powers,” a “soul-sack of the subject” (TWA 2, 271 f.). Strictly taken, as is evident from Hegel’s philosophy, a determination of the philosophical object oriented towards powers (faculties) of the mind – notwithstanding the transcendental character of those empirical powers with which Kant is undoubtedly concerned – is not at all of a logical nature; rather, such phenomena belong to the philosophy of spirit. As Hegel writes, Kant’s philosophy can “most accurately” be regarded as conceiving of spirit as “consciousness” and as offering only determinations of a “phenomenology,” not of a “philosophy” of spirit; Kant does not come to the “concept and not to spirit as it is in-and- for-itself,” only as it is in relation to an other (GW 20, § 415 N). It is important to note that the “I” or “pure self-consciousness” is not at all the pure concept; rather, it is the pure concept that, as a concept, has come into a “determinate being” (Dasein), into a “free existence” (GW 12, 17). In this respect, thought is thought of an existing subject (agent), of a thinker, and the subject existing as a thinker is the “I” (GW 20, § 20). Hegel explains in more detail that the logical stages presupposed for the concept are being and essence, whereas in psychology they are feeling, perception, and representation in general (GW 12, 19). The latter determinations are not addressed in a speculative logic but belong to “self-conscious spirit” and thus to Hegel’s philosophy of spirit; the logical realm, however, is the “foundation and […] the inner sustaining structure” of the forms of spirit (GW 12, 19 f.). Consequently, not only did Kant not justify his initial concepts as the beginning of a philosophical logic (in the sense of a radical determination of reason), but according to Hegel’s analysis they cannot be justified at all as such a beginning, because they are adequately thematic only as forms of spirit (cf. esp. GW 20, §§ 445 ff.).

The reproach of uncritical use of concepts that are given from elsewhere does not only concern the object of philosophy; it also concerns the method of its determination. Closer, it concerns the method of “isolation,” which Kant also already claimed in § 1 to determine the principles of the respective cognitive stems of the cognitive relationship (KrV, B 36: sensibility; B 87: understanding; B 362: reason; B 870 ff.: method of isolation).Footnote ¹⁴ Isolation can, to be sure, only be carried out based on something present, on existing cognitions or cognitive claims; these are scrutinized to elaborate the principles of their validity; just as an aesthetic, receptive dimension and a logical, spontaneous dimension can only be identified in cognition when there is a reflection on the principles of what is present.

In this respect, Kant’s transcendental philosophical reflection is at the beginning a reflection on what is present, on given claims to validity. This applies regardless whether one thinks of the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, in which Kant shows, after he has presented the relevant concepts, that we as cognizing subjects possess not only cognitions a priori (KrV, B 3 ff.) but even synthetic judgments a priori (KrV, B 14 ff.), or of § 1, in which Kant states right at the beginning that in the relation of cognition to the object, perception and concept, sensibility and understanding, receptivity and spontaneity, given and thought, immediacy and mediation can be distinguished.

What we can learn from Hegel is that exactly such an approach to determine the subject matter of philosophy is inherently problematic. The approach is inherently problematic since it is contrary to the intention of the project of philosophical cognition itself: self-knowledge of reason. Philosophy as science pursued as reflection-on-present fails to fulfill its own claim. With the help of concepts that are already presupposed in their determinacy and validity, the principles of the (pre-) given are determined.

Interestingly enough, in the context of a critique of Reinhold’s beginning with something hypothetical, a validity claim, Hegel made clear that the outlined beginning does not suffice as a logical beginning – note: a logical beginning, not a phenomenological one! – of logic (GW 21, 56 ff.; GW 20, § 10 A, cf. already TWA 2, 126 ff.). As a science, philosophy claims apodictic knowledge. Therefore, the determinations must be necessary from the beginning. Their validity mode is not that of being problematic and hypothetical, as in these the ground of truth (speaking with regard to Reinhold: the original truth (Urwahre)) is already presupposed if the determinations of the beginning and the subsequent determinations are themselves to be true. A justification ex post would rest itself on the validity of the determinations of the beginning, so that at best it would turn out in retrospect that one was well advised to begin in such a way and not differently. If the beginning were only accidental, it would be impossible to see how true self-knowledge, true self-determination of reason could come about at all. On the basis of such contingency, and thus also of the mere subjectivity of the philosopher, the analysis of a validity claim never leads to the ground of validity.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, this ground remains the perennial other. In short, transcendental philosophy remains caught in the “opposition of consciousness.”

This also implies that it is not possible, as erroneously and with great effect claimed by Schelling (Reference Schelling and Schelling1856–1861, 143) against Hegel, that the basic alternatives of logic can be made “easily in ten different ways.” This idea of a possible multiplicity and disjunctive completeness of the basic alternatives to qualify thought has persisted up to the transcendental philosophy of our days (e.g. Wagner Reference Wagner1980a, 135 f.). In contrast, it is of the utmost importance that the logical beginning is without alternative. A contingent beginning with a factual possession of faculties, whose pure component is isolated and subsequently transcendentally deduced in its determinacy, does not satisfy the initial conditions of scientific philosophy.

Moreover, seen from a systematic perspective, Reinhold’s conception of justification, which intends to move from some problematic claim to the origin of validity, is decisive for the development of transcendental philosophy. Especially in neo-Kantianism, but then also in the transcendental philosophy of the post-war period, it becomes very clear that in the course of the philosophical “analysis” of the “phenomenologically” gathered initial fact (of a validity claim), philosophy passes over into the “synthesis.” Here, through the construction of a continuous connection of the principles, deficiencies and gaps that result from the collection of material and the phase of analysis of principles are supposed to be overcome. Hence, the historical conditionality and hypotheticality that characterize the fact as the analysandum of philosophy are to be eliminated. In transcendental philosophy, the determinations are never gained from the determinacy of the beginning itself.

This issue will be addressed extensively in the coming sections on contemporary transcendental philosophy, neo-Kantianism, and Fichte. For now, it has become clear that the methodical profile of transcendental philosophy, its type of validity reflection, apparently hinders that the project of self-knowledge of reason can be accomplished in a truly scientific way. The therapy can only be to turn transcendental idealism into speculative idealism. This is of the essence for Hegel. By confronting post-Kantian transcendental philosophy with Hegel, I shall show concerning all dimensions of Hegel’s Logic – the Logic of Being, the Logic of Essence, and the Logic of the Concept – that transcendental philosophy is in need of a methodical transformation.

Towards a Therapy

The methodical profile of transcendental philosophy has been as such touched upon in Hegel’s Logic of Essence. It takes center stage in the next section on contemporary transcendental philosophy. Yet to conclude the diagnosis with a view to the therapy, the following short indications will do.

Seen systematically, in his Logic of Essence Hegel qualified the form of reflection typical for transcendental philosophy as “external reflection.” It is precisely in Hegel’s discussion of external reflection that the presupposed opposition of consciousness, that is to say, reflection as reflection-on-present, is critically discussed. More precisely, this form of reflective knowledge is identified as external reflection. External reflection, however, makes sense only as a moment of absolute reflection, while absolutizing external reflection turns it into a logical impossibility (Hegel: transcendental philosophy as Verstandesreflexion, reflection in the mode of understanding (instead of comprehending)). Consequently, in external reflection the unity of immediacy and reflection gets into an external relationship to itself; it encounters itself as an immediacy (GW 11, 252). It presupposes a being, an immediacy, in order to be able to understand itself as its immanent reflection that aims to find the universal (rule, principle, law, etc.) of this initial fact. Thus, it is “merely an external reflection,” reflection “in a subjective sense” (GW 11, 254), not a moment of absolute reflection.

Reflection can be absolute only if it does not take its determinations from elsewhere but develops them from itself from the beginning. The advance from the beginning would then only be a further determination of the beginning, the beginning that what remains as the underlying ground of all that follows (GW 21, 58). The terms qualifying the cognitive relationship would not enter the process of reflection “from outside.” Reflection as absolute would be a reflective-constitutive determination of the beginning of objective thought. As a beginning, objective thought is still that what is undeveloped, without content, to be recognized, and insofar not yet cognized as what it is. The task of a scientific logic is just its cognition. The result of this process of cognition is the “absolute ground,” that which constitutes thought as the principle of objectivity. While the beginning is the purest, most abstract determination of the subject matter of philosophy, everything further consists only of more determinate, richer determinations (GW 21, 61). Therefore, the advance of determination is nothing at all hypothetical, provisional, problematic, but determined by the “nature of the matter at issue” and thus by the self-movement of the content of thought (GW 21, 59). The “nature of the beginning” (GW 21, 59; GW 20 § 86 N) is pure being, plain immediacy and indeterminacy. Only and solely from this logical beginning, everything else results: object, method, and consequently the determinacy of philosophy itself. Reflection is a reflection of the matter itself, not an activity of a philosophizing subject, referring to an immediately given by using immediately given determinations. In contrast, Hegel’s option only requires that the philosophizer makes a “pure beginning” (GW 21, 59 f.).

Kant’s project of philosophy as a science that is self-knowledge of reason is problematic from the beginning because it does not conceive of the logical beginning of thought in its ground. It does not think of the beginning as a beginning and from this thinking gains its determinations. Kant advances in the determination of reason without having well laid the ground for the advance. The transcendental building of the principles of cognition is, nolens volens, built on the sand of subjective arbitrariness. As indicated, in the following sections, I defend the thesis that this applies not only to Kant but also to other important representatives of transcendental philosophy, the reason being that the method of transcendental reflection does not suffice.

Formalism

At the end of his Logic of Essence, Hegel has philosophically-historically passed through Rationalism and Empiricism. He then, at the beginning of the Logic of the Concept, points out that the “original-synthetic unity of apperception” belongs to the “most profound and truest insights” of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (GW 12, 17 f.). According to Hegel, Kant had conceived of the “unity which constitutes the essence of the concept” as the original synthetic unity of apperception, of the “I think” or “self-consciousness.” Kant thus overcomes the externality of I and understanding or concept and object. However, Hegel continues, Kant’s return to the unity of self-consciousness as an absolute foundation is insufficient because the relation of the concept to “reality” qua “objectivity” is nevertheless “opposed” to the concept as “subjectivity” (GW 12, 19, cf. 19 ff.); the relation of intuition and concept, understanding and sensuality, form and content is understood by Kant as a merely abstract relation (“formalism”). Thus Kant lacks the Hegelian “principle of determination” (GW 20, § 508), that is the realization of the concept by its moments of the universal, the particular, and the individual, which sublates any externality. Therefore it is necessary to go beyond the mere “representation” of the relation of “understanding” and “I” or “concept” to a “thing and its properties or accidents” to “thought” (GW 12, 18). The concept in the speculative sense then proves to be the claimed absolute foundation.

Concerning Kant’s practical philosophy, the matter is not different in terms of formalism: For Hegel, Kant’s formalism is nolens volens incapable of comprehending the actuality of freedom. Also the good in the Kantian sense lacks, due to its abstractness or formalism, a “principle of determination,” that is the methodical structure of the “realization of the concept.” Consequently, form and content (matter), or more concretely and with regard to practical reason formulated, nature (drives and inclinations) and freedom (categorical imperative of morality) remain externally opposed to each other.

Moreover, the sketched formalism shows to be also characteristic of the fundamental axiotic relation (gr. ἀξία = value) of the later transcendental philosophy. It concerns the fundamental relation from which transcendental philosophy, in continuation of Kant’s thought of philosophical foundations, tries to understand culture as the world of humans: the correlation of value – subject – culture (Krijnen Reference Krijnen2001, chs. 2.3, 6.3, 7.2 f.; Reference Krijnen, Krijnen and Zeidler2017a).

About the foundations of cognition, Flach once addressed the relationship between transcendental philosophy and speculative idealism as follows. In Hegel’s conception of the concept, negativity becomes total, since the concept is the totality that accomplishes itself by self-mediation; mediation thus takes over the function of the original synthetic unity, so that Hegel unites the analytical and dialectical dimension, and hence two principles that remain strictly separated in Kant and Rickert: constitution and regulation. Heterology, that is Rickert’s sublimated Kantianism, in its analysis of the principles of cognition is able to come to the determination of the moments of the validity function of determination, ultimately to the proposition of the “correlation” of the moments of determination; however, it could not gain any “dynamics” from this relation (Flach Reference Flach, Pätzold and Krijnen2002, 18 f.). In contrast, Flach (Reference Flach1994, 289) notes, for Hegel, the “constitution-theoretical relations of judgment” are superimposed by the “methodological relations of the organization of cognition,” that is to say that constitutive and regulative principles of cognition are confounded. According to Flach, this results in an “exaggerated concept of the method.”

Admittedly, with the dynamics of determination, Flach mentions a systematically important thought. As far as in transcendental philosophy dynamics of principles can be brought into play, it lies in the correlative connection of the “stages of apriority.” These range from the original synthesis as heterothesis to the logic of judgment, and finally to the concrete determination of the object by methodical principles. The dynamics in determination are not conceived of speculatively but correlatively. Therefore, the ultimate moments of cognition are merely one moment in the whole of the determination of the object, namely its primary-constitutive apriority. To sufficiently qualify thought as the principle of objectivity, a multiplicity of additional, logically subordinated, principles is required. These principles are placed in groups or stages of transcendentality: the result is a network of principles ordered in a validity-functional way.

The transcendental philosophical dynamics of determination are distinguished from the speculative development of concepts. Speculative development is the self-determination of the universal over the particular to the singular. In transcendental philosophy, the dynamics of determination are heterothetic in nature; it does not have negative self-reference as an essential feature. Yet does it overcome the formalism that Hegel diagnosed concerning Kant?

In the following, I briefly discuss the transcendental philosophy of Rickert, Wagner, and the early Flach. Subsequently, Flach’s late theory of cognition is scrutinized. From here, elements of Hegel’s philosophy will be brought into the assessment. In this way, a new perspective on the problem of Negation and Otherness arises. It will be shown that the so-called validity-noematic structure of transcendental philosophy remains formal – notwithstanding that its formality, the formality of its principles, is supposed to be content-logical in nature. Indeed, the heterothetic principle moves too little after all. Given the development of Flach’s philosophy, a remarkable transformation of the doctrine of primary-constitutive apriority can be observed. It evokes the accusation of formalism quite casually. Methodically, Flach’s late theory of cognition is, put with Hegel, external reflection.Footnote ¹⁸

On the Transformation of the Doctrine of Primary-Constitutive Apriority

In Rickert, the origin of objectivity proves to be heterothetically constituted. According to this, the minimum of logical objectivity consists of the moments of the One And the Other.Footnote ¹⁹ Pure heterogeneity constitutes thought purely as a relation and contains only this pure sense of relation. This sphere of pure heterogeneity of an object as such logically precedes the sphere of determining thought, which for Rickert is the sphere of judgment. With regard to Wagner and the early Flach, one could call the former sphere that of primary-constitutive apriority. It determines thought purely as such, concerns objectivity in general, the original synthesis itself. Through this dimension of objectivity, there is something logical at all. Rickert explicates this primordial logical phenomenon as a correlation of form and content, whereby content here means not yet a particular (this or that) content but “content in general,” which must therefore itself be called formal; content belongs to thought, to the formal factors of what a logical (theoretical) object is in general. Thought involves a self-relation to content.

As a foundation of object determination, primary-constitutive apriority makes objective determination, judgment-logical determination of objects possible, but it is not itself object-determining, judgmental thought. It concerns, expressed in a judgment-logical fashion, the pure structure of positing something. With this, at the same time, it concerns the structure of the logical beginning of objective determination, namely the beginning of determining the posited something by others (predication). The stage of the principles of the origin itself is a moment in the whole of the principles of object determination. On this stage rests the, let us say, with regard to Wagner and the early Flach, secondary-constitutive apriority of object-constitution: the principles of objective determination in judgments. Hence, the judgment does not perform synthesis in pure heterogeneity but presupposes it. The Southwest neo-Kantians predominantly follow Rickert’s heterology. Always, a layering of principles of cognition, that is the stages of transcendental apriority, take the place of what is supposedly alien to validity. What is, is validity determination.

It is not different with Wagner and the early Flach. Wagner understands the doctrine of the a priori downright as an answer to the question of the determinacy of thought qua principle of objectivity, that is, of thought as the absolute (Reference Wagner1980a, §§ 15–17, 19, 22, 23). According to Wagner (Reference Wagner1980a, 128), the absolute is “self-relation to an other that is grounded by itself and different from itself, in order to determine itself in this self-relation to the other in this other.” As the absolute ground of all determinacy, it can have its determinacy only in itself. Expressed judgmental-logically, the absolute is the subject and predicate of itself. Thus, Wagner’s train of thought amounts to the original determinacy of the absolute predicate qua determining ground of the absolute. Wagner’s stages of apriority, that is the principles of cognition, are in the first place nothing else than the content determinacy of the absolute, thought as the principle of (in this case: theoretical) objectivity. Already the talk of stages indicates that there are different types of principles. They form a whole of completely disjunctive (Rickert: heterothetic) moments that imply and therein determine each other. They range from the primary- and secondary-constitutive apriority to the dimension of regulative and systematic apriority.

The outlined doctrine of the a priori is in the background of Flach’s early writings. Here, Flach emphasizes that the heterothetic principle constitutes the origin of pure logical objectivity as a relation of relations (Reference Flach1959, ch. 1, cf. 2). Negation belongs to the sphere of “determination,” that of “predication,” of “judgment,” of “determining thought” (Flach Reference Flach1959, ch. 3–4). The principle of heterothesis constitutes the cognitive relation itself; it underlies the logical principles of determining thought (Flach Reference Flach1959, ch. 4–7). These concern the principles of identity, contradiction, and dialectic, whereas the “original-synthetic unity of the ultimate logical moments of validity” constitutes the “origin” (Flach Reference Flach1963, 23). For Flach too, a sufficient justification of the logical origin can only take place intra gnoseologically, as Flach says, in a peculiar “reflective constitution” of the moments of the origin: the reflection is “self-explication and self-development” of the origin (Reference Flach1963, 23). Objectivity arises from the infinity of thought. It arises as the “immanent mediation” of the “pure structure of heterogeneity” (Flach Reference Flach1963, 34).

A Critique of Flach’s Outline of the Theory of Cognition

Interestingly enough, in Flach’s later Theory of Cognition, as far as the relationship of heterology, primary-, and secondary-constitutive apriority is concerned, there are serious differences compared to the early doctrine. Especially the problem of the original synthesis is systematically insufficiently treated. Thus, Flach’s theory of cognition (epistemology) loses much of its persuasive power, not least in its fundamental part. Indeed, a Kantian formalism of form and content becomes noticeable, which, for methodical reasons, can no longer be mastered formally via the continuity of determinations of thought founded in the synthesis of the origin. Of course, Flach’s (highly complex) epistemology is conceived of in a strictly validity-reflective fashion. It is supposed to lead in “self-analytical explication” to a “functional model of knowledge in its validity determinacy” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 33).Footnote ²⁰ In this model, however, heterology and thus the theme of primary-constitutive apriority, as far as its explicit thematization is concerned, is conspicuous by its absence.Footnote ²¹ Therefore, it is first necessary to reconstruct its thematic place. It should then be possible to show that Flach fails to do sufficient justice to his own approach to reflection: instead of self-constitution, he smuggles in external concepts.

Flach’s functional model of knowledge consists of four components characterizing the concept of knowledge in its validity (“intention,” “task,” “performance,” and “content”: Flach Reference Flach1994, 144). They are necessarily interrelated, more precisely, they correlate. Flach therefore defines the components as “moments” (Reference Flach1994, 156). Their connection is one of mutual exclusion, implication, and limitation of differentiated moments of knowledge, in short, of “correlative unity or unity through correlation” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 159). This certainly brings up aspects of heterology or primary-constitutive apriority. However, they are brought up only abstractly insofar as they are used to describe the determinants of the functional model of knowledge. The original synthesis, the synthesis of the origin itself is neither thematic in the functional model of knowledge nor in the determination of the nature of the necessity of the interrelation of its moments and their unity.

In a further step of reflection, Flach reaches from the model of knowledge via the discussion of the “validity qualification of knowledge” to the “definiteness of knowledge” (Reference Flach1994, ch. 2.3). In the discussion of the qualification of knowledge, it turned out for Flach that it is the validity-noematic structure of knowledge in which the self-constitution of knowledge can be accomplished. The validity-noematic structure is the structure that makes cognition possible. In it, the enabling of cognition (qua noema) takes place, and this is, of course, “self-enabling,” “self-constitution” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 180). The first, fundamental part of Flach’s epistemology, the Critique of Cognition (Flach Reference Flach1994, ch. 2), therefore centers around the determination of the validity-noematic structure (the structure of the noema [content] in its validity determinacy). It is the “central piece of the determination of cognition” and it then also offers the starting point for the “development of the whole content of the critique of cognition and the theory of cognition in general” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 182 f.).

The enabling structure of cognition is to be understood as a validity-noematic structure. Once again, aspects of the fundamental heterothetic relation come up in an abstract-descriptive way, that is without conceiving of them validity-functionally as the synthesis of the origin. The conception of enabling as self-enabling, that is self-constitution, contains for Flach three insights. First, the self-constitution of cognition in the validity-noematic structure contains in itself a relation of “ground and justification” (Grund und Begründung). Second, beyond this “one-sided foundational connection,” ground and justification also stand in a “reciprocal relation of condition,” (wechselseitiges Bedingungsverhältnis) that is, the validity-noematic structure is a relation of principles that is immanent to the validity-qualification of knowledge. Third, what functions as ground in self-constitution has the character of being a “principle” or, qua multiplicity of such constituents, a set of principles. This ground is validity itself.

Flach introduces here the concept of apodicticity: the principle is the validity as “apodictic” determinacy of cognition. It establishes cognition qua concrete cognition, that is to say, cognition as principiated cognition, “principiatum.” Principiated cognition is also cognition in its validity, namely as validity in its “contingent” determinacy. Principle and principiatum, according to Flach, stand opposite each other like apodictic and contingent determinacy and are at the same time bound to each other as the determinacy of validity. Consequently, Flach concludes that in epistemological justification the “mediation” of the apodictic and contingent determinacy of validity is decisive. The validity-noematic structure has exactly this function of mediation. In it, the self-constitution of cognition is accomplished.

With this, to speak with the early Flach, reflective constitution of the validity-noematic structure, it becomes visible that the validity-noematic structure forms the sought analog for Rickert’s heterothesis or Wagner’s primary-constitutive apriority insofar as it also has to cope with the problem of the constitution of the origin. If this is so, then a whole series of problems connected with Flach’s self-analytical constitution of the enabling structure of cognition must catch the eye.

First: The relation of apodicticity and contingency is a much more particular one than that of the moments of origin that characterize thought itself. The moment-determinacy, in the parlance of Rickert and the early Flach, of the One And the Other is obviously presupposed in the relation of apodicticity and contingency. Yet the relation of apodicticity and contingency is not developed “self-analytically” (“self-constitutionally”) out of this presupposed original unity, that is, in the way of an immanent explication of meaning. It is not “posed” in a validity-reflective way but only “presupposed.” Thus, the introduction of the relation of apodicticity and contingency does not satisfy the foundational claim of reflective constitution methodically. Presupposing is also posing (positing).

Second: Under the title of “definiteness of cognition” (Flach Reference Flach1994, ch. 2.3) it comes to determinations that are incompatible with the introduced determinations of apodicticity and contingency: The mediation of apodicticity and contingency brought about by the validity-noematic structure for Flach leads to a “proportion” (Reference Flach1994, 186). Only in their proportional union, apodicticity and contingency are characteristics of cognition, more precisely, in their union they are the one characteristic of cognition that is its definiteness. Obviously, Flach again expresses aspects of the original unity of thought as cognition, but at the same time he wants the moments of apodicticity and contingency to be understood more closely as the “dimensions of constitution” (Konstitutionsrücksichten) or “constitutive apriori” of “thought” and “intuition” (Reference Flach1994, 186 f.). The concept of thought stands for the apodicticity part of the definiteness of cognition and the concept of intuition for its contingency part. However, this identification of apodicticity and contingency with the constitutive dimensions of thought and intuition does not result from a self-analytical determination of the hitherto achieved determinations of apodicticity and contingency or their relation. It even contradicts them. After all, both were introduced not as constitutive dimensions or parts of cognition as the noema but as cognition qua the principle and the principiated, thus as the constituent and the constituted. The contingent, for instance, would then be once the principiated and once a part of the principiated, the apodictic once the principle, once a part of the principiated.

Third: This ambivalence of the basic determinations of the validity-noematic structure is not only continued in the historical part of Flach’s considerations on the definiteness of cognition, where Flach connects Kant’s doctrine of the apriority of intuition with validity-contingency and that of the apriority of thought with validity-apodicticity qua definiteness of cognition (Reference Flach1994, 187 f.). Rather, it is confirmed also in the following systematic considerations on the relation between intuition and thought.

Together, intuition and thought characterize, according to Flach, the definiteness of cognition, of every noema. They fulfill different functions of validity, which could be made fruitful for a closer articulation of the validity-noematic structure. Thought principles the noema as the “well-differentiated content of knowledge” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 190). In this respect, “unity and division (Gliederung)” are integral components of the definiteness of the noema. Thus Flach brings in again a decisive aspect of the fundamental heterothetic original relation: Thought is “relationality” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 190 f.). Accordingly, the noema is meaning (Sinn) that is both united and divided. In this context Flach introduces the concept of “synthesis”: meaning is synthesis, connection of a multiplicity to unity. Nevertheless, Flach does not conceive of synthesis as the synthesis of the origin, as original synthesis, that is the synthesis in its heterothetic or primary-constitutive dimension.

Although for Flach meaning is indeed a connection of a manifold, Flach takes this manifold directly as the “given of cognition,” as the given that is open to the “access” (Zugriff) of the synthesis. In this respect, synthesis connects what is “heterogeneous” to something “homogeneous.” However, this heterogeneous is not the heterogenous that characterizes the pure heterogeneity of the origin but that of the given. Seen from the perspective of the original unity, synthesis is a synthesis of unities that are already synthesized. In addition, Flach emphasizes – probably continuing Kant’s doctrine of the two stems of cognition – that the meaning of the noema is characterized by homogeneity, whereas the manifold as such lacks this order and is distinguished from it by its heterogeneity; in this respect, the manifold preserves its “independence” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 191) in relation to the synthesis. Flach therefore presupposes unities beyond the synthesis of the origin, units that must always already fulfill the condition of thinkability. While Rickert and the early Flach still acknowledge something like a form “content as such” that is the logical place for the a-logical, the late Flach comes to an opposition of form or apodicticity and content or contingency. Consequently, Flach can present the issue in such a way that the synthesis of the given brings “equally originally” with the apodicticity of validity, guaranteed by thought, and the contingency of validity, guaranteed by intuition, into the definiteness of the noema. The a priori of thought and intuition are necessary for the definiteness of the noema. This, finally, contains that validity contingency is not what it was originally supposed to be according to the late Flach: principled cognition. Speaking with Rickert and the early Flach, the late Flach always conceives of the validity-noematic structure as a structure of judgment; he conceives of it on the foundational level not of pure heterogeneity but on that of heterogeneity in homogeneity.Footnote ²²

Fourth: The same judgment-logical prefiguration can be found in Flach’s deliberations on the definiteness of cognition and intuition (Reference Flach1994, 194 ff, cf. 196 ff.). As an equally original constitutive counterpart to thought, intuition forms the definiteness of the noema with the former. Flach does not conceive of intuition in terms of the origin but in terms of judgment theory. Accordingly, it is “the many to the one, the manifold to the one, the heterogeneous to the homogeneous” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 195). All this is not deduced by Flach in his “abstracting consideration” (Reference Flach1994, 194, cf. 186) of intuition (as before of thought), that is not the result of a self-analytical constitution (validity-reflective clarification of meaning or the like), but presented. Nevertheless, it is plausible that the determination of the “givenness of the given” results from these determinations of intuition; the givenness of the given is nothing but “openness for the access of synthesis,” that is it is the validity-functionality of orderability. For thought, intuition is what is to be synthesized; for itself, intuition is without relation (unity, unification, homogeneity). It is merely material to possible meaning. From the perspective of a doctrine of the origin, however, this material to possible meaning must always already be about synthetic unity(ies), thus about something unified, relational. Otherwise, it would not be what it is supposed to be: material, that what needs to be synthesized, to be processed, given, pre-given, etc. This is one thing. The other is that intuition represents the constitutional dimension of contingency. Contingency is therefore also in this context not principled cognition. An encompassing determination of thought as the validity-noematic structure in which thought and intuition are not conceived of as opposites, but in which the validity function of intuition or contingency shows to be a moment of thought itself, is missing. The heterothesis or the original synthesis of thought as the pure relational meaning of logically equivalent moments, out of which judgment-logical relations can arise in the first place, is replaced by a dualism that as such still needs to be substantiated.

Five: This deficit on the level of the origin appears particularly impressively in the part of Flach’s Theory of Cognition that builds on the foundational layer, that is the “Critique of Cognition,” namely the “Logic” (Reference Flach1994, ch. 3). That the critical determinations of cognition do not arise in the way of a self-analytical constitution but of an external reflection, is documented right at the beginning of Flach’s Logic: While the Critique of Cognition has as its task the “basic separation” (Ausgliederung) and thus also the “rudimentary determination” of cognition (Flach Reference Flach1994, 133), the Logic, following the results of the Critique, is supposed to work on the problems of the “structure of cognition, which are first the problems of the ‘establishment’ of this structure” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 247). According to Flach, the Logic therefore has to determine first “how the validity-noematic structure forms (bildet) itself” (and then how it enriches its primary formation [ausbildet], that is which constitutive possibilities it includes). It ascertains the principles “from which the formation of the validity-noematic structure emerges” and exposes the “one fundamental structure” by which cognition “constitutes itself” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 247). The logical, so Flach pointedly, is the “validity-determinacy of knowledge in its principles, its validity-noematic structure.” Correspondingly, the Logic begins with the doctrine of the “principles that constitute cognition” since the validity-noematic structure can only be explained from its formation. The knowledge of the establishment of the validity-noematic structure makes up the “ultimate fundamental concept of the logical” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 248).

The thus exposed task of the Logic is strictly taken impossible. It not only confirms the foundational deficit of the determinacy of the validity-noematic structure but also makes visible its immediate orientation to judgment. Why so?

As said, the Logic needs first to clarify the establishment of the validity-noematic structure. For this purpose, in its “first” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 264), fundamental piece, it takes on the constitutive principles of cognition; the principle-analytical explication of the concept of the validity-noematic structure is even its “main task” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 265). The problem with this exposition of Flach seems to be that within the Critique of Cognition, the validity-noematic structure has already been established and, just there, its basic constitutive principles have already been explicated. Therefore, it is not at all to be determined by the Logic how the validity-noematic structure is formed; the principles to which the formation of the validity-noematic structure is owed are – at least in their basic constituent – already determined, namely pre-logically. The definiteness of the noema was the topic of a discipline founding the Logic. The validity-noematic structure was set forth as the relation of thought and intuition or apodicticity and contingency, or principle and principiate. The Logic would have to explain the further formation (Ausbildung) of the validity-noematic structure through subordinated principles, which, of course, result from the original principles via the self-constitution of cognition.Footnote ²³ The foundational deficit shown at the level of the Critique of Cognition thus remains in force. The Logic is not able to remedy it. It rather deals with subordinated principles, which, however, are founded on the original principles of the validity-noematic structure that themselves are deficient foundationally. The self-analytical progress of epistemic justification from the basic level of an epistemic critique to the level of logical determination of the validity-noematic structure is not specifically thematic because of the contamination of the problem of establishing the validity-noematic structure. The transition from the sphere of pure heterogeneity of the principles of the origin to that of homogeneity of the principles of judgment remains undetermined. Apparently, Flach claims implicit foundational structures of which it is questionable whether they can be rendered explicit in a consistent train of thought of reflective constitution.

The thematic principles constituting cognition in the Logic are directly those of judgment. Through the concept of judgment, the Logic comprehends the validity-noematic structure. The judgment is, as Flach (Reference Flach1994, 264) says, the explicandum of the explication of the validity-noematic structure. Accordingly, Flach then discusses the validity-noematic structure’s own determinacy as the structure of the subject of judgment (substrate of determination), whose establishment owes itself to the principle of identity (Reference Flach1994, ch. 3.1.1), the predicate of judgment (the determinant of determination), whose establishment owes itself to the principle of contradiction (Reference Flach1994, ch. 3.1.2), and the relation of judgment (unity of determination of substrate and determinant of determination), whose establishment owes itself to the principle of dialectics (Reference Flach1994, ch. 3.1.3). Since the relation of judgment stands for the constitutive unity of determination, with it the constitution of the validity-noematic structure, and thus also the theory of the principles of cognition, is “completed” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 285). As a result, the validity-noematic structure is entirely made explicit by the theory of the principles of cognition; the determinacy of the validity-noematic structure itself is determined; it is determined as the functionality of determination (Flach Reference Flach1994, 290 f.). As Flach sees it, everything logical has its “roots” in those three principles; by capturing the “formation” of the self-determination of the validity-noematic structure, the foundational task of the Logic is fulfilled (Reference Flach1994, 291).

Six: The logical dimension of judgment is preceded by a pre-logical dimension of the origin of judgment; at the same time, the establishment of the validity-noematic structure is an issue of the Logic; this issue, like the whole philosophy, is connected to the method of self-analytical constitution. Consequently, in Flach’s late epistemology, the principles that constitute cognition do not have their ground in themselves but in others. Therefore, the division of Flach’s Theory of Cognition becomes problematic, at least as far as the relationship between the Critique of Cognition and the Logic is concerned. It might have been pragmatic reasons that motivated the late Flach to this division. From the matter at stake, there is no reason for such a caesura. In Flach’s elaboration, it rather leads to serious systematic troubles because of the problem of establishing the validity-noematic structure.

Already in post-Kantian idealism, Kant’s narrow concept of “critique” as the ultimate foundational dimension of cognition, which precedes any doctrinal elaboration of the system of pure reason, is no longer taken up in the manner of Kant.Footnote ²⁴ The narrow concept of critique as the ultimate foundational level is, in a paradigmatic way in Hegel, sublated in the system of thought. Philosophy as science is possible here only as a total reflection. The foundational dimension of a Kantian “critique” is therefore dealt with too by the methodical structure of the speculative development of concepts, that is by the “realization of the concept.” Hegel’s program of accounting for philosophical foundations is that of an immanent (self-analytical, reflective-constitutive) self-production of comprehending thought, a self-production in which every progress in the further determination of the indeterminate beginning is at the same time a going into itself of the initial determination. It is a progression that is also a return into the ground of thought as the ground of all determination. Thus, according to the claim of Hegel’s speculative idealism, there are no externally infiltrated determinations: either a determination emerges from the self-analytical explication process of thought or it is introduced unjustified, that is groundless. As addressed in the section on Kant, Hegel once reproached Reinhold for his beginning with a hypothetical validity claim, and especially Flach does not tire of emphasizing that philosophy claims apodictic knowledge. The neo-Kantian doctrine of the fact of culture as the analysandum of philosophical validity reflection, which is also decisive for Flach, does not dissolve the philosophical reflection into cultural relativism, as in the course of the philosophical analysis of the initial fact, philosophy methodically passes from “analysis” to “synthesis.” Thereby it overcomes the historical conditionality and hypotheticality, which characterizes the fact as a fact of analysis. It is claimed that the initial fact of analysis is comprehended from its ground, which is thought, that is it is conceived of as the result of a reflective-constitutive analysis.

Seven: The critical remarks concerning Flach’s epistemology give reason to raise a final problem. It concerns a problem of the utmost philosophy-methodical significance: Flach’s external introduction of the basic determinations of the validity-noematic structure and the distinction between a Critique of Cognition and a Logic connected with it depends on a difference between the matter at issue and the representation of the matter at issue. This difference is incompatible with the program of a truly self-constitution or reflective-constitutive determination of cognition since it entails the introduction of states of affairs beyond a pure validity-functional deduction. Philosophy as a doctrine of self-constitution, however, is philosophy in terms of a well-conceived whole consisting of intrinsic parts. Speaking with the early Flach, philosophy brings to its concept the functional continuity of thought from the origin to the concrete.

Absolutized External Reflection: On Hegel’s Diagnosis of Transcendental Idealism as a Philosophy of Radical Foundations

The aim of this section is not to present Hegel’s criticism of transcendental philosophy. Rather, the process of immanent reflection on the presuppositions of contemporary transcendental idealism is continued with the help of Hegelian means. The self-explication of the foundational deficit of the origin, which has occurred so far, will be determined more precisely. As a result, the reflection-logical profile of the outlined validity reflection of transcendental philosophy comes to light: Methodically, transcendental philosophy is an absolutized Logic of Essence, more closely an absolutized external reflection.Footnote ²⁵

Hegel’s Logic is a doctrine of comprehending thought. The concept of comprehending thought is to be engendered within the framework of a process of self-determination. The moving force of this process is the dialectic that the concept possesses within itself (GW 21, 38), and the dialectic is the “nature of thought itself” (GW 20, § 11 N). Thus, instead of taking its determinations as determinations of “substrata” taken from “representation,” Hegel’s Logic thematizes the determinations of thought free from such being substrata of representation. That is to say that he considers the “nature” of the determinations of thought and their “value” “in and for themselves” (GW 21, 49). In this context, Hegel also immediately indicates what is important to him methodically, namely, that in philosophical comprehension it is the “nature of the content” itself that “moves”; it is the content itself that “posits and generates” its determination (GW 21, 7 f.). Such a logic is a logic of the (absolute) idea, that is of the concept that has come in agreement with itself in its objectivity. It takes place in an immanent process of determination from the beginning of thought as the indeterminate immediate, which is thought qua “being,” to the completion of this self-movement in the comprehension of its movement, which is thought conceived of as “absolute idea.” This self-movement or “realization” of the “concept” (and thus the unfolding of the relationship of the “determinations of thought”) is, of course, to take place in a way that “satisfies” reason and thus in a justified way: in the “form of necessity” (GW 20, § 9). Accordingly, philosophy has only one sole content and subject matter: the idea, more precisely: the absolute idea, which is the “concept that comprehends itself” (GW 12, 252), the “absolute truth and all truth” (GW 20, § 236, cf. GW 12, 236).

Especially the Logic of Essence determines thought not, like the Logic of Being, in its “immediacy,” that is the concept in its being-in-itself (Ansichsein), but in its “reflection and mediation,” that is the concept in its being-for-itself (Fürischsein) (GW 20, § 83; GW 12, 29 ff.). Here, first, in the logic of reflection, the mode of movement and relation of the determinations of thought themselves becomes thematic.Footnote ²⁶ The unrelatedness of the determinations, which is predominant in the Logic of Being because of the direct-intentional orientation of the thought of being, is thereby transformed in the Logic of Essence into relationality: That which is, is only within a relational structure of determinations; it has its ground in the essence as that which grants determinacy (posits, determines, mediates). This constellation results from the determination of being itself and is therefore immanent to it.

As the Logic of Essence emerges from the Logic of Being in the course of an immanent development of thought, Hegel copes with the problem of the difference of the matter at issue and the presentation of this matter diagnosed in transcendental philosophy. Already the beginning of the Logic of Being must develop all determinations from itself so that the matter of thought is not different from the thought of the matter but identical with it. More closely, the beginning is indifferent to such a distinction precisely as the beginning of a speculative logic is no longer developed on the “standpoint of consciousness.” Admittedly, the Logic of Essence leads to the Logic of the Concept; thus the determinations of essence are led back to the subjectivity of the concept, where the ultimate justification finally takes place on the logical level of the absolute idea. Hence, on the one hand, Hegel transfers the relations of the Logic of Essence into the concept itself. On the other hand, he develops them in the course of a process of determination that is a return into the ground; a process initiated at the beginning of philosophy with being as the indeterminate immediate. “Essence” is therefore “being that has gone into itself” (GW 20, § 112 N), being that mediates itself with itself through the “negativity of itself.” The determinations of essence are only “relative.” They are not yet (as in the concept) “absolutely reflected in themselves” (GW 20, § 112) and therefore an “imperfect connection of immediacy and mediation” (GW 20, § 114).

In fact, with this development from being to essence, Hegel elaborates a new concept of reflection that differs fundamentally from that of transcendental philosophy. For in transcendental philosophy, reflection is – despite all talk or claims of self-constitution – primarily conceived of as a reflection of a subject (agent) on the principles of validity that determine the concrete, as the phenomenon of validity that it is, in its objectivity or validity-determinacy:Footnote ²⁷ reflection is reflection-on-present. Hegel, however, thematizes the meaning of reflection as such, which logically precedes the concept of reflection of transcendental philosophy. The meaning of reflection as such emerges in the course of the foundational determination of being as the immediate, as being that mediates itself with itself through the “negativity of itself.” Reflection turns out to be a pure relation of immediacy and mediation of thought. Hegel qualifies the Logic of Essence downrightly as a “treatise on the unity of immediacy and mediation that posits itself essentially” (GW 20, § 65 N).

The thus conceived concept of “absolute reflection” is then differentiated in a speculative determination process as positing reflection, external reflection, and determining reflection. The concept of reflection consequently arises within the framework of an immanent process of determination. It results from a reflective constitution. Reflection proves to be a thematic result and therefore receives its determinacy through its function for comprehending thought. One could say that Hegel, speaking with Flach’s terminology, pursues a purely validity-noematic approach, that is Hegel’s Logic is about thought as objective thought. In the concept of reflection, the movement of objective thought itself becomes thematic. For Hegel, it is characterized by a self-referential negativity that develops in three forms. These range from an immediate form called positing reflection to external reflection and finally to the form reflected in itself, which is reflection as determining reflection. The concepts by which reflection is qualified in this way are justified by the fact that they emerge as intrinsic determinants of this development. Through this reflective-constitutive methodical profile, Hegel fulfills the claim of self-constitution.

This relationship of self-relation and negation, which is reflection, covers the whole spectrum of immediacy and mediation through the three forms of reflection mentioned. Here, there are no more independent substrata of relation but only a dynamic system of absolute relationality that generates its own determinacy. With regard to Flach, the validity-noematic structure is logically dynamized in such a way that the claim of self-constitution is satisfied. It is true that in the course of its historical development, transcendental philosophy wants to overcome the “opposition of consciousness” (subject-object, form-content, or the like) by its conception of heterology. However, the doctrine of heterology is, on the one hand, no longer integrated into the late Flach’s foundation of cognition but pushed aside by a judgment-logical approach, while just this judgment-logical approach is qualified by all kinds of determinations that do not result from the matter at issue itself, that is enriched externally.

In particular in Hegel’s discussion of external reflection, the presupposed opposition of consciousness as mere reflective knowledge (Verstandesreflexion), as reflection-on-present, is critically discussed and shown to be an external reflection. External reflection has its meaning only as a moment of absolute reflection, while it turns into a logical impossibility when it is absolutized itself. In this context, Hegel brings up issues that are relevant to the problems identified in Flach’s Theory of Cognition.

In positing reflection, immediacy proves to be constituted by reflection; reflection posits itself as immediacy and thus, in its positing, at the same time presupposes itself. Positing and presupposing are moments of the reflective movement of essence. Therefore, positing and presupposing can no longer be clearly distinguished from and determined against each other, having the consequence that positing reflection passes over into external reflection. While only determining reflection adequately conceives of the unity of immediacy and reflection insofar as it is posited by reflection itself, in external reflection the unity is initially lost in its extremes of immediacy and reflection (GW 11, 253). If this is so, then reflection gets into an external relation to itself, encounters itself as immediacy. It accordingly presupposes a being, an immediacy, to be able to conceive of itself as its immanent reflection. This is paradigmatically the case for Hegel in the so-called “philosophy of reflection (Reflexionsphilosophie).” Even in a note to the section on external reflection, Hegel criticizes that reflection refers to the immediate as a given to find the general (rule, principle, law, value) in it and thus is “only external reflection,” reflection “in a subjective sense” (GW 11, 254). Unlike in Hegel’s speculative idealism, in transcendental idealism external reflection is not a moment of absolute reflection. Rather, transcendental philosophy is itself absolute, absolutized external reflection.

It may be surprising to characterize the reflection on validity even of later transcendental philosophy as an external reflection. After all, neo-Kantianism had already opposed Kant’s dualisms, and Rickert’s powerful doctrine of heterology was not least the attempt to show an original relation of different moments in the origin of thought and to let this heterothetic relation become decisive for the system of philosophy. In addition, a more nuanced view of the beginning of philosophy emerges. In this respect, genetic, methodical, and logical aspects can be distinguished. Hegel’s logic is developed from the point of view of speculative thought. This point of view must first be reached by a philosophizing subject, be it that it comes into logic via Hegel’s Phenomenology or the so-called resolve to think purely (GW 21, 53–56). That philosophical comprehension in an initial phase of its self-knowledge of reason starts with something concrete, a factual validity claim, cannot be the point for a cogent criticism. The issue is rather that the concept of reflection itself needs a deduction: it needs to be “posited” in a justified way. Without doubt, in their conception of the “fact of culture,” the neo-Kantians worked out the relevance of given validity claims (whose epitome is culture) for philosophical reflection; yet, as shown by the example of Rickert, this beginning of philosophy is quite accompanied by an explanation of its origin from thought.

The late Flach, however, emphasizes the fact of culture as a necessary moment of reflection but neglects the explanation of the origin. From a methodical point of view, philosophy is reflective knowledge, reflection on the claim to validity, and thus, as far as cognition is concerned, self-knowledge of knowledge. Philosophy is this, as Flach holds, from the very beginning: As a theory of cognition, philosophy is consistently reflection qua “assurance of the determinacy of the validity of knowledge in knowledge,” “self-referential determination of the validity claim of knowledge” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 41, etc.).Footnote ²⁸ Reflective knowledge is thereby explicitly taken as the “other of positive knowledge” (Flach Reference Flach1994, 53). Flach thus wants to express both the intrinsic relation and the opposition as well as the complementarity of positive knowledge and reflective knowledge. Reflective knowledge thematizes the validity-determinacy of positive knowledge in its structure and principles (obviously, reflection thereby includes itself as the foundational knowledge that it is). The positivity of positive knowledge belongs to the reflective finding insofar as it is the qualification of validity at which reflection starts; philosophy has to comprehend it as the “result” of the validity-determinacy of knowledge (Flach Reference Flach1994, 54). Hence, reflection is conceived of as reflection-on-present. It has, as Hegel says, to find out the universal of it. This universal is indubitably also in transcendental philosophy, as Flach puts it, an oblique (indirect, reflective) and foundational issue.

The outlined transcendental philosophical reflection takes its beginning with an immediate presupposition – the fact of a claim to cognitive validity – and unfolds as reflection in such a way that it is also a positing of this presupposition. However, not only is this beginning of external reflection with the immediate for Hegel merely an apparent beginning (the initial fact, by the way, also proves to be something constituted, and hence posited, for transcendental philosophy), since the presupposed immediacy is regarded as unmediated, as the fact of the claim to validity, not as a presupposition and thus as a moment of reflection itself, as posited by reflection in this function of presupposition. The consequence of such a dealing with a merely presupposed immediacy is rather that reflection on this given only sets “external determinations” to it (GW 11, 253). The late Flach’s analysis of the validity-noematic structure and the method of validity reflection confirm this reproach: The reproach of the externality of determinations that are themselves not deduced and insofar externally given, their application to an immediately given substrate, while the validity-noematic structure is supposed to be, nevertheless, as Hegel says, “not anything external to it immediate but its true being” (GW 11, 254). Thus the concept of “absolute reflection” is presupposed, and within the framework of external reflection, characteristic of transcendental idealism, it necessarily remains a mere presupposition.

In its immediacy, the presupposed being is withdrawn from the determination by philosophical reflection. It is, however, only a substrate that is pre-given to reflection because this reflection in its presupposing forgets its own positing and leaves it unthematic. So it comes to the idea of an immediate presupposition, which is nevertheless the result of a positing and therefore of thought. Precisely because of this externality of the given as well as its determinations, reflection turns into something that it should not be, notably according to Flach: not self-constitution, self-assurance of knowledge, self-referential determination of the validity claim of knowledge. As Hegel would say, it is not the movement of the matter itself but the activity of a subject (agent) that refers to something immediately given by means of immediately given determinations. In Hegel’s speculative idealism, reflection itself takes the place of such a crypto-ontological foundation. Reflection is conceived of by Hegel, to take up Flach’s phrasing again, as reflective constitution: reflection posits a determination in such a way that it can itself be thought only under the condition that this determination is posited. Reflection is a unity of being-posited and being-reflected-in-itself, of immediacy and mediation.Footnote ²⁹

Formalism in Rickert’s Heterology as Conception of the Origin of Thought

In the context of the question about the origin of cognition, Rickert develops his so-called model of the object. As indicated in the previous section, this doctrine of the theoretical object in general thematizes the fundamental theoretical principles of validity. At the same time, the constitutive meaning of thought for, so to speak, “being,” is originally captured. By philosophically thinking of thought with regard to its content, the object is founded, more precisely it is founded on the level of the origin of thought. On this level, it is determined what it means that something “is” at all.

The origin proves to be heterothetic in nature. According to the heterothetic principle, the minimum of any logical objectivity consists of the three moments of the One And the Other. Thinking is relating one to the other, anything thought is a relation. Pure heterogeneity constitutes thought purely as a relation. The sphere of pure heterogeneity logically precedes the sphere of determining thought, that is to say of thought that determines something. The latter sphere, for Rickert and transcendental philosophy in general, concerns the sphere of judgment. With a view to Wagner and the early Flach, we called the sphere of the origin that of primary-constitutive apriority, the sphere of the original synthesis. Due to it, there is anything at all in a logical sense. Rickert makes this logical primordial constellation explicit as a correlation of form and content. Content thus does not come to thought externally but belongs to the formal factors of the theoretical object in general. Thought involves a self-relation to content. The moments of objectivity as such are the non-predicative, non-judgment type forms “form in general,” “and,” “content in general.”

As the foundation of object determination, primary-constitutive apriority furthermore enables object determination. Although it enables the determination of objects in conformity with the logic of judgment, it is itself not object-determining, that is judgmental thought. In the whole of the constellation of the determination of objects, primary-constitutive apriority concerns the origin as well as the beginning of a series of determinations. On this origin of thought rests the, in the parlance of Wagner and the early Flach, secondary-constitutive apriority of object constitution. The logical development of thought reaches, as Rickert puts it, from something thought at all – the object in general – to a determined object and hence to the structure of predication.

Thus it is not surprising that Rickert does not present his heterology in a judgment-theoretical context of the “production” of objectivity. He discusses it either in the context of a logic of numbers (Rickert Reference Rickert1924, 8) or in that of the development of the concept of the “world as a whole” (Weltganze: Rickert Reference Rickert1921, 50; Reference Rickert1934, 39). As the “general principle of cognition of the world” (Rickert Reference Rickert1934, 46), heterothesis is indeed effective in all thought. Nevertheless, just as for Hegel being as the beginning of logic and thus of the system of philosophy does not coincide with the absolute idea as the nature of thought, so for Rickert, heterology does not coincide with the problem of the “beginning of the system of philosophy” (cf. Krijnen Reference Krijnen2008, ch. 2–3). Basic disjunctive alternatives to think the world, like the correlations “form and content” or “subject and object” – which are themselves heterothetically (noematically and noetically) related to each other – are special cases of the heterothesis.

Since the usual approach to the relationship between Rickertian heterology and Hegelian dialectics is directed toward a discussion of the heterothetic or negation-theoretical structure of the original synthetic unity of thought, it tends to go unnoticed that Rickert himself develops a differentiated criticism of Hegel’s (GW 21, 53 ff.) conception of the beginning of philosophy. Like Hegel, Rickert thereby recognizes that the problem of “beginning” is complex in itself. As is common in Hegel criticism, Rickert too considers the constitution of Hegel’s beginning to be unsatisfactory, and hence, as Hegel expresses it himself, the “self-preserving foundation of all subsequent developments” (GW 21, 58) fails.Footnote ³¹ Interestingly enough, Rickert’s criticism reveals a philosophical-methodical point that is important for formalism and typical of transcendental philosophy concerning its profile of reflection.

Admittedly, despite Rickert’s urge to systematize, the fragmentation of his foundational approaches is striking. There is no continuous constitutional doctrine encompassing all aspects of the foundation of objectivity, integrating heterology as well as the doctrine of judgment and method, the objective-logical (validity-noematic) and subjective-logical (validity-noetic) dimensions. This observation is accompanied by the fact, significant in a reflection-logical sense, that Rickert is not able to justify concepts such as form and content, subject and object, the one and the other – concepts of fundamental relevance for the entire system of philosophy – in the course of a validity-functional deduction. They are not the result of a reflective-constitutive determination of cognition, that is of cognition constituting itself. Rather, they have more of an operative than a deductive status.

This is all the more astonishing since Rickert in particular endeavors to determine the beginning of philosophy while acknowledging its richness of meaning. Against the background of Hegel, however, it becomes clear that Rickert conceives of the logical beginning of philosophy as the origin and does not specifically consider the beginning as the beginning of the determination of this origin. Precisely by this, Rickert keeps alive – and this is consistently the case in transcendental philosophy – the difference between the matter (Sache) and the representation of the matter (its cognition) that is incompatible with the program of conceiving of cognition in terms of its self-constitution. Accordingly, Rickert must introduce states of affairs beyond a strictly validity-functional deduction. Since the unity of representation and matter is broken, the claim of philosophy to cognize the “world as a whole” just remains unfulfilled.

Rickert‘s reflections on the “beginning of philosophy,” which are also intended as a criticism of Hegel, may be seen as indicative of this (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b; Reference Rickert1934, §§ 31, 25). On the one hand, Rickert, like Hegel, distinguishes different meanings of “beginning”: the real, temporally primary beginning of concrete philosophical thought and a logical (conceptual, principled) beginning of thought, which in turn can be an ontological or an epistemological beginning. It becomes apparent that the epistemological beginning is something immediate insofar as it concerns a determinacy that is presupposed by all other determinacies. As an immediacy of thought, Rickert conceives of the beginning as the “universal minimum of thought” (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 14 ff.; Reference Rickert1934, 133 f.).

The immediate qua fundamental structure of thought is exactly what Rickert discusses in his heterology. The beginning, that is the immediate in an epistemological sense, as far as its content is concerned, is thus conceived of as origin. Accordingly, Rickert begins to distinguish pairs of concepts that are meant to cover the beginning qua minimum of what constitutes objective thought as such. In his essay on the beginning of philosophy, Rickert conceives of it as a subject-object relation (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 31). This results from a (historically saturated) reflection on the meaning of the immediate and, to that extent, from a reflection on pre-existing claims to validity (“cultural facts”). While Rickert argues from the meaning of “beginning,” he thinks of this beginning as the origin of all determinacy. Accordingly, he immediately emphasizes that the logical beginning as a whole is a “double” (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 19), a duality. That is to say, he stresses the heterothetic structure of the beginning. Rickert explicitly refers to his heterology to explain the implicative nature of radical foundational concepts, that is their “correlation” (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 23, cf. 31, 35 f., 38 f.). He also characterizes the I as the “form” of the I, as “I-form” (I-ness) in distinction from the content of consciousness qua entirety of all contents, from the “I-content” (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 32). With this, he uses another pair of concepts, quite decisive for his heterology: form and content.

Although Rickert knows that the duality of the beginning of the system of philosophy is effective in every step of the elaboration of the system, that is of the concept of the world as a whole, he does not gain the determining dynamics of the advance from the concept of the beginning itself. The connection between the beginning of thought and the cognition of the beginning of thought remains external. In conformity with this, Rickert operates with concepts that do not arise from the meaning of “beginning”; to that extent, they are merely claimed in their validity. Alluding to a criticism by Hegel of the traditional doctrine of powers or faculties – especially having Kant in mind – to come up with a “sack full of powers” (TWA 2, 271 f.), Rickert apparently has at his disposal a sack of fundamental philosophical terms that can qualify the beginning, although it is precisely the beginning that is supposed to be the immediate, the non-mediated, that is, the still undetermined. Expressed differently and concerning the form of reflection authoritative in transcendental philosophy, reflection is a reflection on something present; it is not self-reflection of the determination of the beginning but an external reflection. In his essay on the beginning, Rickert gains the main pairs of concepts through an analysis of the concept of the “given” (Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 18). Moreover, on the one hand, he repeatedly argues for a primacy of epistemology (logic) in the system of philosophy, but, on the other hand, in his reflections on the beginning of philosophy, he tries to argue that the initial concept of philosophy is not that of a theoretical beginning but has a universal content preceding it (Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939b, 39 f., 42 f., 46 f.). Undoubtedly, the beginning is not the beginning of cognizing the whole as the subject matter of philosophy. It is at most its origin, the universal minimum of thought.

Rickert’s last book, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy (Grundprobleme der Philosophie), confirms this result (Reference Rickert1934, § 31). At the same time, Rickert connects here the world of the beginning with his doctrine of the so-called pro-physics, the “pro-physical sphere of being” (Reference Rickert1934, § 31, cf. §§ 21 ff.). This sphere concerns the dimension of the subject or agent as the principle of objectifying (performing synthesis) that is, the subject as distinct from the object world as that which is mediated (Rickert Reference Rickert1934, § 25). As a cognizing agent, the subject thereby proves to be synthesis (Rickert Reference Rickert1934, § 26): it thinks the content and thus forms it conceptually (Rickert Reference Rickert1934, § 29). For cognition, this content is first of all a “state” (Zuständliche), that is to say, content brought to a standstill by the form of “identity” (cf. too Rickert Reference Rickert and Faust1939a, 107 f.). Subsequently, this content as a state becomes something objective by further forms of cognition. Hence, beyond heterology it also becomes visible that the philosophical reflection does not determine itself but takes the shape of ontological stages. Rickert’s monograph on the Logic of the Predicate (Logik des Prädikats: Reference Rickert1930) shows how this gradation takes place. It takes place in such a way that the original heterothetic relation enters into the relation of judgment so that the synthesis of form and content through a multiplicity of forms of cognition becomes the constitution of concrete-objective meaning. According to its foundational function, the origin is at the same time the beginning of an advance too.

This advance, however, does not result from the progress of the self-constitution of the origin. In this respect, to use Hegel’s phrasing, the advance of the determination is not at the same time a return to its ground. It is rather an advance from it to relations of objective meaning that are logically subordinated. The matter of thought (Sache des Denkens, ratio essendi, correlation of origin as immediate presupposition) and the thinking of the matter of thought (Denken der Sache, ratio cognoscendi, mediated cognition of the origin) fall apart. A self-constitution of thought as the ground of all determinacy is not present.

Rickert’s heterothesis as the principle of all principles has the right thing in itself to qualify thought and thus also that what is thought in its fundamental structure as a “relation of relata” (Rickert Reference Rickert1921, 56; Reference Rickert1924, 18). The problem, however, is that while Rickert rightly holds that the cognition of the fundamental structure of thought is mediated in multiple ways, he insufficiently considers that the concepts with which he qualifies the logical beginning must follow from the thought of the beginning itself. The agreement between Rickert and Hegel therefore ends with the fact that for both the logical beginning is the immediate. For Hegel, it is precisely the indeterminate immediacy of the beginning as a beginning that makes up its determinacy; Rickert, in contrast, begins to qualify the beginning by concepts that are not concepts of the beginning itself. Obviously, Rickert’s heterology is primarily concerned with the completeness of the concepts of the origin, which can only be achieved disjunctively (that is heterothetically). However, as has been mentioned in the section on Kant, it is not possible at all to “easily make the basic alternatives of logic in ten different ways,” to use the famous formula of Schelling (Reference Schelling and Schelling1856–1861, 143). The beginning is characterized by an entanglement that prevents its analysis, as in Rickert, from being carried out in such a way that its synthesis is included. For Hegel, against this, the advance is, as it is said, analytic and synthetic at the same time (GW 20, § 239 N; GW 12, 242). The logical beginning can be done in only one way, generating its own dynamic of determination.

Hegel’s Logic of Being as the Prehistory of Heterology

In the previous section, it was shown that Hegel, in his Logic of Essence and seen from a systematic perspective, qualified the Rickertian model of graded (layered) apriority as an “external reflection.” Transcendental philosophy as such is an external reflection.

Concepts like form, content, identity, or difference, with which Rickert characterizes the purely logical object, for Hegel basically belong to the Logic of Essence (GW 11, 291 ff. with 258 ff.). Hence, they have a prehistory in the Logic of Being. Moreover, they still have to pass through the Logic of the Concept; only here, Rickert’s heterothesis is qualified as the absolute idea. In this section, the presupposed Logic of Being is discussed, in the next the presupposed Logic of the Concept.

The Logic of Being is presupposed by heterology. In what way does Hegel conceive of this logical prehistory of the Logic of Essence so that the beginning of logic is truly able to reach its goal? How can the continuation of the determination of thought be truly a return to its ground and not merely an advance from it?

The beginning of logic as thought that thinks itself qua objective thought is nothing but pure immediacy, that is “pure being.” As such, it is the “immediacy itself, simple and indeterminate”; the beginning, as a beginning, must not be anything “mediated” and “further determined” but only thought in its indeterminacy (GW 20, § 86; TWA 8, 184 A1). As such indeterminate immediacy, being immediately turns into “nothing” (GW 20, § 87). The logical realm, which is to be opened at the very beginning of logic, turns out to be not only being but also nothing. Both prove to be conceptually unstable and merge into each other, although they obviously exclude each other. Therefore, they become moments of something overarching, which Hegel, with regard to the relatedness of the relations initially conceived of as indeterminate immediacies, denominates as “becoming” (GW 20, §§ 88 f.). Concerning not the instability of this unity but its stability, Hegel (GW 20, §§ 89 f.) labels it as “determinate being” (Dasein, bestimmtes Sein). “Determinate being” is the first case of determinacy (GW 21, 96). Determinacy results from indeterminacy. Being that is equipped with a determinacy that itself is “immediate,” that is determinacy as a “being,” Hegel calls “quality” (GW 20, § 90). While determinate being is so far not thematic in relation to anything else but determined in itself as a unity of being and nothing, it becomes necessary to continue the course of an immanent clarification of meaning, that is to further determine the determinacy of determinate being. It needs to be determined what this determinacy is. At first, determinate being is one with its determinacy. As in this determinacy reflected “into itself,” determinate being proves to be differentiated in itself (GW 20, § 90). Determinate being is so quality; it contains a certain content (reality) and thereby excludes another (negation) (GW 20, § 91). Thus, in determinate being a determination-functional self-relation appears that Hegel calls “something (Etwas).” Something is determinate being that in its determinacy (quality) distinguished from it is related to itself (GW 20, § 90). Therefore, for the first time, something determinate is achieved, as Hegel says, “being-in-itself” (Insichsein) but admittedly, at first, this being-in-itself is still indeterminate; “something” for Hegel is only the “beginning of the subject” (GW 21, 103). Through the development of the moments reality and negation of determinate being, that is, through the determination of the determinacy of determinate being, determinate being logically becomes a “something” (GW 20, § 90; GW 21, 102 ff.). If the determinacy of this something, which it has as the unity of reality and negation, is developed, then the negative is involved. The negative is that which grants determinacy. This negative is itself a determinate being, the negative of something. Hegel qualifies it as “other (Anderes)” (GW 21, 104): something is determined as what it is by other. With the differentiation of determinate being into something and otherness (GW 20, § 91) or other (GW 21, 98), the logical realm starts to dissociate itself in itself.Footnote ³² Something turns out to be the other of itself; it is limited by itself (GW 20, § 92). In this consists the contradiction of everything finite: what something is not, shows to be determinant for what it is, for its being-in-itself; the finite is independent as well as dependent.

For my purposes, it is sufficient to outline only roughly the further development of this process of self-explication of objective thought in such a way that a process of condensation of self-referentiality of the logical determinations of being becomes visible; a condensation of self-referentiality that leads to an initial relation of absolute relationality.Footnote ³³

While the ceasing-to-be of the finite leads to another something and thus to an infinite progress (GW 20, § 93 f.), so that both, finite and infinite, are externally opposed to each other and thus can no longer be distinguished from each other, in their transition they therefore go together “with themselves.” It comes to “true infinity” (GW 20, § 95). True infinity is self-mediation at one with its parts: transition as going together with itself. The finite becomes a moment of the infinite; it becomes “ideality” (GW 20, 95 N). Admittedly, the logical form of infinity within the logic of determinate being is still undeveloped, not yet a self-determined going together with itself but only the onset of the determination of true infinity. Nevertheless, a processual self-relation of something and other, of going together with itself is achieved. Determination is a relation in which the determined only refers to itself, any externality of something and other is erased; self-mediated determination prevails; as Hegel says: “being-for-itself” (GW 20, § 95 f.).

Thus the transition from quality to quantity is at hand. In being-for-itself, the externality of something and other has disappeared. Both have become moments so that a relation of self-reference of the determined is present. Since it is now a relation of distinguished moments qua aspects of the whole, no longer something independent or an indiscriminate unity, the dimension of quality is surpassed. Quality is determinacy that is immediately one with being, whereas quantity is being at which determinacy is posited as “sublated” (GW 20, § 99). Here, the logical realm is conceived of not as consisting of isolated determinacies but as a realm of discrete multiplicity and insofar as a realm of a manifold that is undetermined in itself. At this level of development, in the logical realm relations (quanta) can be expressed without the being of the thematic matter changing thereby. At qualitative determinations, therefore, a quantitative dimension can be detected. This dimension is to be determined in the logic of quantity. Being-for-itself as simple self-reference, insofar in its immediacy and thus first as in itself without distinctions, is then for Hegel the “One” (GW 21, 151, cf. GW 20, § 100). The relation of “limited quantity” (GW 20, § 101), the relation of quanta, that is the “quantitative ratio” (GW 20, § 105) thereby renders explicit that something and other as quanta standing in relation no longer have their determinacy independently of each other but only in relation to each other. The quantitative ratio is a self-relation characterized by self-mediation. With the quantitative ratio, the qualitative dimension of the parts standing in relation also reappears; the “measure” is this “qualitative quantum,” the “immediate unity” of quality and quantity (GW 20, §§ 106–108). The logical development resulting from the immediacy of measure leads to the positing of a new indeterminacy, which is pure mediation of determinacy: to essence. The determinacy of being thus proves to be mediated or posited by “essence”; being has become “mediation with itself” (GW 20, § 111), shining in itself of being (GW 20, § 112). While being in its quality simply passes over into another, the indeterminacy of the quantitative is characterized by inner differences that can ultimately be shown to be relations of pure self-mediation and thus transfer into essence as the logical realm of absolute relationality.

In short, from a methodical point of view, it is decisive that Hegel develops the determinations of his Logic from the thought of the beginning itself. It is a long way to the absolute idea as Hegel’s conception of the origin of everything. In the course of the development of thought, it comes to such concepts that characterize the relation of thought as reflective. Rickert, on the other hand, too rashly turns the beginning into the origin. Accordingly, a Logic of Being as a Logic of Being that emerges from making the meaning of thought in its beginning explicit is missing. It is missing for methodical reasons as well: transcendental philosophy’s reflection on validity does not advance from the thought of the beginning but is accomplished by considering the content in its original determinacy. As a consequence, this original determinacy is itself determined by concepts that are not justified by the process of reflection. They are rather subordinated to it, that is they are infiltrated into the reflection externally. Despite the claim of transcendental philosophy to develop a radical foundation, such concepts do not emerge from thought that constitutes itself.

Hegel’s Logic of the Concept as the Adequate Original Synthesis

In transcendental philosophy, the original determinacy of the content is itself determined by concepts, especially concepts of the Logic of Essence that are not justified by the process of philosophical reflection. As transcendental philosophy is an absolutized Logic of Essence, such concepts do not owe themselves to a true self-constitution, a radical self-determination of thought. In contrast, Hegel’s Logic of the Concept is a logic of radical self-determination.

How does the foundational deficit of transcendental philosophy manifest itself in terms of a speculative Logic of the Concept? This question is provocative insofar as the conceptual-logical dimension of philosophical foundations is strictly absent in transcendental philosophy qua absolutized Logic of Essence. Topics that belong to the Logic of the Concept such as concept, judgment, conclusion, idea, and the like are of course dealt with by transcendental philosophy. Nevertheless, they are not dealt with in their conceptual-logical determinacy. Transcendental philosophy conceives of the concept as an essence, not as a concept. As Hegel says, “reflective understanding” does not unite the differences “into the concept” (GW 20, § 114 N). From Hegel’s Logic of the Concept it also becomes clear that transcendental philosophy, whether Kant’s or a later version, cannot be a radical doctrine of foundations. It must be replaced by a speculative logic. The Logic of the Concept in particular renders the competence of thought to be radical self-determination explicit, while transcendental philosophy is and remains cognition under what Hegel calls the “theoretical idea” (GW 12, 199 ff.; GW 20, § 225). This is why it cannot get rid of its formalism. It lacks the methodical moment of the “realization of the concept.” “Forms” are not primarily conditions of the possibility for what is made possible; rather, they must first be determined in themselves in terms of their truth content.

This determination culminates in Hegel’s concept of the “idea,” that is reason (Vernunft) as the unity of concept and reality, subject-object unity (GW 12, 173 ff.; GW 20, §§ 213–215). Subject and object function as moments of comprehending thought, whereby the idea ultimately proves to be the absolute idea as the unity of subject and object that knows itself in the concept. This becoming-for-itself of the concept takes place as a “process” of the idea to overcome the mentioned “most stubborn opposition in itself” (GW 12, 177; cf. GW 20, § 215). In transcendental philosophy the opposition is retained, even if Kant’s apperception-theoretical profile of the “original unity” is replaced by a (validity-noematic) structure of thought in neo-Kantianism and in later transcendental philosophy, just as it is in Hegel.

Hegel’s Logic of the Concept thematizes the determinations of thought first as determinations of the activity of thought through which the subject matter is brought to its concept (subjectivity). Subsequently, it determines the resulting objectivity of thought. Finally, it addresses its ideal character (idea). Unlike in transcendental philosophy, even in its sublimated variants that overcome the Kantian dualism of the stems of sensibility and understanding in favor of an intrinsic relationship of thought, Hegel develops objectivity purely from the concept. As a pure relationship of self-determination, the concept has shed any onticism. The concept is that which comprehends, that which is comprehended its concept. The concept gives itself its reality.

While transcendental philosophy conceives of the principles of what is cognized in terms of a graded (layered) apriority that constitutes it, covering the entire spectrum of determination, Hegel’s logical theory of constitution is divided into being, essence, and concept. The Logic of the Concept thematizes the pure self-determination of the concept. This dimension of pure self-determination is explicated in transcendental philosophy as heterology. According to this, the original synthesis, the synthesis of the origin, is characterized by the self-application and self-generation of its moments, by, formulating it with a term of post-war transcendental philosophy, reflective constitution. Only in this way does the reflection of transcendental philosophy on validity gain the absoluteness of its meaning, at least in terms of its claim.

For Hegel, the concept is just such a reflective constitution, pure self-determination: determination as an infinite relation of the concept to itself (GW 12, 33). The Logic of the Concept is a reflective constitution that thematizes and thus determines itself. The respective determinations of thought are thematic as forms of the realization of absolute self-determination. It goes without saying that here Kant’s insight is taken into account that the concept is not only a determination of itself but at the same time a determination of the determined. Also in accordance with Kant’s philosophical exploration, which arrives at the pure concepts of understanding as principles of objective determination via the forms of judgment as principles of thought, Hegel develops the determinations of the concept via its subjectivity as forms of comprehending (GW 12, 31 ff.; GW 20, §§ 163 ff.) to the adequation of subjectivity and objectivity in the idea as absolute self-determination: as self-determination that has passed through both and is therefore self-mediated self-determination (GW 12, 173 ff.; GW 20, §§ 213 ff.). What distinguishes Hegel from transcendental philosophy in principle, however, is that the determination of pure self-determination of the concept is achieved without any recourse to external conditionality.

Although the transcendental philosophical model of a graded a priori makes the singularization of the origin visible, the origin does not singularize itself into itself but into something else. In contrast, with Hegel’s transition from the Logic of Essence to the Logic of the Concept, the substance is comprehended as the subject (GW 12, 15). A self-referential relation of “absolute negativity” is established; Hegel qualifies it not only as freedom but also as “manifested” identity (GW 12, 15). The mediation of the concept has become a “mediation of the concept with itself” (GW 12, 34 f.). Accordingly, not only is the development of the Logic of the Concept from the concept to the idea conceived of as a manifestation of the concept, but nature and spirit as the parts of the system of philosophy that follow on from logic are also manifestations of the concept in a specific way and thus of freedom as a manifesting self-relation: being-and-remaining-with-itself of the concept in the other.

In contrast, in the apriority model of transcendental philosophy, the relationship of form to content remains characterized by externality or foreignness, despite all attempts to overcome Kant’s stem dualism through a consistent structure of the validity of knowledge that is supposed not to be an abstract generality but a constituent of all objectivity. The form does not determine itself to content; the content remains non-form regardless of its form-determinacy as content. Mirabile dictu, this becomes particularly clear in the very paradigmatic doctrine that claims to articulate the intrinsic synthesis structure of thought transcendental philosophically, that is the heterology. Although here content proves to be form and the relation of thought to content to be the self-reference of thought to content, Rickert feels compelled to distinguish from the form “content” the “content of content,” which, as it is said, we can only “experience” (Erleben), “see,” or otherwise “grasp alogically” (Reference Rickert1921, 53 f., 62 f.; Reference Rickert1924, 13, 15), even if form may belong to it because of its thinkability. The content is therefore not conceived of as a manifested self-relation; rather, it contains a perennial other that eludes form. In this respect, Kant’s stem dualism remains logically intact. There is no such dualism in Hegel. Here, singularization is thought of as a manifestation of the universal through the particular to the singular, not as a form of external foundation, how sublimated it may be, of reflection on something other. In general, the constellation of content that “‘we” can only grasp alogically is not of a logical but of a spiritual-philosophical nature. From a logical point of view, the concept has emerged, at the end of the Logic of Essence, as absolute self-determination; everything else in the system of philosophy is a manifestation of the concept in the “elements” of the logical, nature, and spirit, which determines the structure of the system.

By completely mediating its moments with one another, the “objectivity of the concept” is achieved (GW 12, 127 ff.; cf. 92 and GW 20, §§ 192 f.). Here, the concept as the subject has not united (zusammenschließen) with another but with itself. It is precisely this realization of the concept that Hegel conceives of as the “object” (GW 20, § 193). The concept determines itself as objectivity (GW 12, 127, 130). Hegel’s line of argument from the subjectivity of the concept to its objectivity is in this respect quite Kantian; both for Kant and Hegel, something is an object only through the “unity of the concept” (GW 12, 14; cf. KrV, B 137).

The Renewal of Hegelianism

The development of transcendental philosophy following the Kantian idea that subjectivity constitutes objectivity cannot be understood without taking into account the motive of the “renewal of Hegelianism.” In addition to rejecting the dialectical method in favor of the critical method, Windelband saw Hegel’s positive methodical relevance for philosophy in the doctrine of the fact of culture, so important for transcendental philosophy: Hegel’s brilliant achievement is supposed to consist in the orientation of philosophy towards history. By working out the content of philosophy (that is the “universally valid values”) from the activity of rational consciousness in history, Windelband writes, Hegel conceived of history as the organon of philosophy (Reference Windelband and Windelband1907, 540; Reference Windelband and Wilhelm Windelband1915a, 280 ff.; Reference Windelband and Windelband1915b, 133). History, or as it is then also called, culture, provides the material for philosophy, more precisely for the application of the “critical method.”

From a systematic point of view, however, the methodical relevance of culture cannot be reduced to the fact that in the initial phase of its self-knowledge of reason, philosophical thought has to start with something concrete, as the doctrine of the fact of culture holds. The phenomenological moment of philosophy would be overstretched. It was not least Hegel himself who emphasized the relevance of the phenomenological moment in the method of philosophy. Nevertheless, the determination of thought in its beginnings can only be made with (pure) “being” as the immediate, regardless of whether one enters the philosophical discipline of logic via Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit or through a resolve to consider thought as such. It is therefore, in fact, “not saying much that philosophy owes its first emergence to experience (the a posteriori)” (GW 20, § 12 N). Using the methodological meaning of experience against Hegel just misses the point; rather, the phenomenological reduction, to use Husserl’s term, needs to merge into the eidetic reduction.

The problem is not the “fertile bathos of experience” (Kant), the “fact of culture” (neo-Kantianism) as the starting point of philosophy, but to comprehend the fundamental rationality of experience. That is to say that the problem is the form of reflection of philosophical cognition. A renewal of Hegelianism as a synthesis of transcendental and speculative idealism would have to face up to this in all the radicality of philosophy as science. The concepts with which philosophy accomplishes its comprehension must also be sufficiently grounded. In accordance with Kant’s requirement to identify and demonstrate them as principles of the determinacy of the determined, the beginning of conceiving of the subject matter of philosophy (idea, value, principle, etc.) cannot be made in numerous ways; it can only be made in one way: with the self-explication of the meaning of beginning.

All other ways of beginning turn out to be a relapse into external reflection, which runs completely counter to philosophy’s claim to be a rigorous, indeed the most rigorous science. Transcendental philosophy suffers from the fact that it has not yet succeeded, and possibly cannot succeed for methodical reasons, in realizing its concern for a radical “self-knowledge of reason.” The synthesis of Kant and Hegel, which neo-Kantianism was just as intent on as post-neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy, lies in a speculative idealism that has gone through Kant’s critical turn, thinks the idea as the ground of unity of everything, and makes the determinacy of thought reflected in it the principle of the movement of thinking the idea. The idea of transcendental philosophy can only be accomplished as speculative idealism: as the doctrine of the absolute idea and its realizations (Krijnen Reference Krijnen2023a).

On the Assessment of Hegel’s Critique of Early Fichte

The basic idea of Hegel’s critique of early Fichte is that Fichte’s beginning with the “I” is not a true, presuppositionless beginning of philosophy as a science, since it still stands in an oppositional relation to an objectivity that enables the development of the I. Strictly speaking, the Science of Knowledge conceived of as the philosophy of an absolute I, that is the position of early Fichte,Footnote ³⁵ is not a self-explication of reason in the mode of science. In this respect, the unity of reason as emerged from concepts remains underdetermined. Hegel saw this precisely in his early Jena works such as The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Differenzschrift: 1801) and Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen: 1802) and qualified Fichte as an exponent of a “reflective philosophy of subjectivity” (even in the title of the latter work: Faith and Knowledge, or the Reflective Philosophy of Subjectivity in the Completeness of its forms as Kantian, Jacobian and Fichtean Philosophy: TWA 2, 287 ff.).

However, Hegel’s early criticism of Fichte is repeatedly accused by both Fichte and Hegel scholars of not doing justice to Fichte. Hegel is reproached for interpreting Fichte’s philosophy as a “failed identity system,” which wants to think of reason as an identity of thought and being, whereas Fichte was concerned with finding an unconditional dimension in consciousness as the foundation of knowledge and starts from absolute principles whose conditions of conceivability are then demonstrated (cf., e.g., Siep Reference Siep2000, 40–43).

If this were the case, Fichte would be sold seriously short. After all, for the German idealists, regardless of whether Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, or Hegel, Kant’s transcendental philosophy is to be perfected. For Fichte, this is accomplished when Kant’s idea of autonomy, of self-legislation is universalized. Fichte praises his Science of Knowledge as “the first system of freedom” (GA III/2, 298), as “from beginning to end only an analysis of the concept of freedom” (GA III/4, 182).Footnote ³⁶ It is a logical condition for this that the system of philosophy as a system of self-determination remains in the identity from the beginning and does not go out of it in the first step. The beginning remains, as Hegel says, as the underlying ground of all that follows without vanishing from it (GW 21, 58). Hegel considers Fichte’s transcendental idealism to be methodically deficient: a mere philosophy of reflection of subjectivity. In view of this, it is not surprising that Hegel scholars also argue for the validity of Hegel’s fundamental objection, present already in the young Hegel (cf., e.g., Vieweg Reference Vieweg2018; Reference Vieweg2023, 175 ff.).

First, I discuss Fichte’s Transcendental Logic (Transzendentale Logik: 1812) as per the lecture transcript of Lisco (GA IV/5). Subsequently, the Science of Knowledge of 1804 (second lecture: GA II/8) takes center stage, not only because the later versions do not deviate significantly from it in the overall argumentation, but above all because it contains in a clear structure and elaboration Fichte’s doctrine of truth as a doctrine of the determinacy of the absolute (in contrast to the doctrine of appearance, which dominates the later versions and determines reality as an appearance of that very absolute).

Fichte’s Transcendental Logic as Reflective Philosophy

About Fichte’s late philosophy, it is first of all extremely important to bear in mind that – despite the central role of the concept of being, the occasional conflation of being and God, and the dominance of the doctrine of the appearance of the absolute in the late versions of the Science of Knowledge – it is transcendental philosophy through and through and not metaphysics beyond transcendental subjectivity.Footnote ³⁷ According to Fichte himself, the Science of Knowledge has not changed in its basic features. Fichte further elaborates and improves the idea of transcendental foundations. Being is therefore not conceived of as some absolute given to thought in the sense of a trans-gnoseological existence. Rather, it is a presupposition of thought and as such at the same time posited by thought; more precisely it is the presupposition of an original immediacy. The Science of Knowledge is transcendental philosophy, a doctrine of the principles of validity of “knowledge,” knowledge the “highest” of which can be known (GA IV/6, 273; cf. GA II/15, 122, 133).

In the context of this task of comprehending knowledge, a distinction is made between the Transcendental Logic and the Science of Knowledge. In general, the subject matter of the Science of Knowledge is consciousness in the determinacy that it makes claims to validity: it pretends to refer to objects. The transcendental philosophical question then aims to determine and justify the principles of object-reference, that is the conceptual conditions that “make possible” the claim to validity of consciousness. From these principles, the totality of which is reason as, to phrase it with the early Fichte, absolute I, or as the late Fichte says, absolute being or the absolute, more neutrally formulated, the structure of validity, the opposition of subject and object initially emerges. This opposition is therefore a validity-functional relationship, not an ontic one.

In his Transcendental Logic, Fichte shows that traditional, formal logic is not capable of scientifically justifying its own basic concepts such as thought, concept, etc. A transcendental logic is can do just that. Transcendental logic is not a formal logic but a content logic of thought; it thematizes thought as objective, object-related thought. If such thought is knowledge, then Transcendental Logic comprehends knowledge and thus the concept in its comprehending function: the concept as the determination of the object. As a philosophical doctrine of thought, it is part of the Science of Knowledge: the part that refrains from the content of object-related thought, that is from the content of knowledge, and determines the form of knowledge. It determines the thought of the object, not the object of thought. Moreover, by clarifying the possibility of knowledge, it also clarifies its own possibility. While Transcendental Logic addresses the form of knowledge transcendental philosophically, the late presentations of the Science of Knowledge are concerned with the content, especially with the systematic development of the appearance of the absolute.

External Reflection

Does Fichte’s implementation of transcendental philosophy fall prey to Hegel’s critique of being a mere philosophy of reflection, unable to determine and justify its own foundations? To answer this question, I first revisit Hegel’s main problem with transcendental philosophy and subsequently judge Fichte’s Transcendental Logic on this basis.

Hegel himself constantly pointed out the limits of transcendental philosophy, not only in his early texts but also right up to the latest ones. In the Encyclopaedia of 1830, transcendental philosophy belongs to the second position of thought to objectivity. Here, philosophy has not yet reached the standpoint of speculative idealism and is therefore immature (GW 20, §§ 40 ff.). Let us refer in this respect to the analysis of the Kant section. What Hegel says about Kant also applies to Fichte (and Reinhold): Fichte’s philosophy conceives of spirit as “consciousness”; it therefore does neither come to the “concept” nor to “spirit” as they are “in-and- for-themselves” (GW 20, § 415 N). The reason is that for philosophy as a philosophy of consciousness the opposition of consciousness is characteristic (GW 20, §§ 413 ff.). Thought or reason remains characterized by the reference to a residue of externality, by the “relation to an other” (GW 20, § 415 N). It thus concerns an other that is not determined by thought but proves to be given, merely found. For Hegel, the “I” or “pure self-consciousness” is not at all the pure concept but at most the pure concept that has come into a“determinate being” (Dasein), into a “free existence” (GW 12, 17). In this respect, thought is thought of an existing subject (agent), of a thinker, and the subject existing as a thinker is the “I” (GW 20, § 20). Thought is spirit. The logical, however, is the “foundation and […] the inner sustaining structure” of the forms of spirit (GW 12, 19 f.). In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel hinted at the missing logical dimension in the early Fichte: Fichte has not grasped the principle of the I as “idea” but solely “in the consciousness of the activity which we exercise in knowing” (TWA 20, 391); the Science of Knowledge regards the “struggle of the I with the object as that of the continuous process of determining the object,” not the “identity of the restfully self-developing concept” (TWA 20, 410). Just as little as Kant would Fichte’s philosophy – for Hegel the “completion” of Kant’s philosophy (TWA 20, 387) –, strictly speaking, offer no (philosophical) logic at all. Fichte would merely make use of a whole arsenal of logical concepts uncritically, only presuppose them, instead of demonstrating their determinacy and validity through the process of reflection.

As we have seen in the previous sections, this critique is justified by the reflection-logical profile of transcendental philosophy. Transcendental philosophy fails for methodical reasons and, especially when one insists so much on philosophy as a science, as Kant and Fichte did, must turn into speculative idealism. Here, the relationship between a Logic of Being, a Logic of Essence, and a Logic of the Concept is conceived of appropriately, whereas transcendental philosophy is an absolutized Logic of Essence.

Consequently, Hegel develops the determinations of logic from the thought of the beginning. It is a long way to the absolute idea as the origin of everything. In the course of the development of thought, such concepts emerge that characterize the relationship of thought as reflective. Transcendental philosophy, in contrast, hastily turns the beginning into relations of origin (I – non-I, thought – being, one – other, apodicticity – contingency, etc.) instead of thinking through the beginning as the beginning of the determination of the origin. Accordingly, for methodical reasons, there is no Logic of Being in Hegel’s sense: the transcendental philosophical reflection on validity does not develop from the thought of the beginning. Rather, it takes place through considering existing content in its original determinacy, that is through reflection-on-present. Therefore, the original determinacy of the content itself is determined by concepts that did not emerge from the process of reflection. Because of the methodical profile of transcendental philosophy, they do not owe themselves to a true self-constitution. Transcendental philosophy fails to fulfill its claim of conducting a radical self-determination of thought.

The Problem of the Beginning in Fichte’s Transcendental Logic

So back to Fichte! The outlined problem of the externality of the fundamental determinations of thought is readily recognizable in Fichte’s Transcendental Logic too. Fichte starts with knowledge as a present claim to validity and attempts to determine the principles of knowledge, that is he seeks the logical conditions of the concept of knowledge, Kantian speaking, the conditions of its possibility. Fichte conceives of thought not as a psychic phenomenon but as the principle of objectivity (GA IV/5, 14). Against the presupposition of a gap between thought and being at the level of empirical consciousness, Fichte proves their original unity in knowledge itself: what is, is founded on the principles of knowledge. By clarifying the principles of the validity of knowledge, Transcendental Logic also clarifies its own conditions of possibility, that is the validity of its concepts. According to its claim, it is radical self-enlightenment of knowledge. More precisely, it is the self-enlightenment of knowledge about the form of knowledge. Starting from “appearance,” the “a priori form” is abstracted from the “a posteriori content.”

In the course of this self-referential determination of knowledge, a multitude of correlations emerge that constitute the concept of knowledge. It concerns concepts that mutually implicate each other like form and content, image (Bild) and being, intuition and concept, knowledge and non-knowledge, understanding and appearance, and so on. For Fichte, such correlations are presuppositions of objective thought or knowledge. The logic of Transcendental Logic is a transcendental logic of presuppositions, that is an absolutized Logic of Essence. As an absolutized Logic of Essence, it presupposes unreflectively a Logic of Being. This Logic of Being determines the beginning and progress of thought or knowledge as the principle of objectivity. In Fichte’s Transcendental Logic, absolute knowledge is shown to be the ground of everything that is: appearance is always the appearance of absolute knowledge.

Already at the beginning of his Transcendental Logic, Fichte starts (in confrontation with formal logic) with the clarification of knowledge: Knowledge is composed of intuition and thought (GA IV/5, 256). It is a synthesis (GA IV/5, 259 f.). Transcendental Logic thematizes thought as original thought, thought in its origin (GA IV/5, 270). Such thought is thought as the ground of being (GA IV/5, 275). It concerns a synthesis of intuition and concept, both of which have their original unity in knowledge (GA IV/5, 276). However prima facie plausible and historically saturated these determinations or distinctions are, they are not developed from the thought of the beginning itself. Consequently, they are taken from elsewhere.

This is why Fichte can conceive of being and image as opposites. It has the effect that Fichte thinks an absolute foundation as a duality and thinks of this duality as an image since the image implies what it imagines (Abgebildetes) and is therefore not sufficient in itself. Being is conceived of by Fichte as “absolutely closed in itself”: it only posits itself absolutely and nothing outside itself. It is therefore not unity as a duality but an absolutely closed unity that is transparent through itself, “complete in itself,” and needs no other for its cognition (GW IV/5, 293): “eternal closedness” (GW IV/5, 295), absolute immanence that only posits itself and does not emerge from itself (GW IV/5, 297), precisely “the indeterminable, the absolutely non-becoming” (GW IV/5, 298). The image of being, in contrast, as an image, is something that expresses itself, emerges from itself, images itself (GW IV/5, 297 f.). Knowledge is an image; as an image, it posits being; it posits being from itself and is only image in relation to being. Image and being imply each other in knowledge (GW IV/5, 293 ff.).

Obviously, Fichte operates with the opposition of thought and being. As an intra-gnoseological opposition, it is grounded in knowledge; knowledge is supposed to be the original unity of the opposition, in knowledge as absolute knowledge. To put it differently with Fichte, in the “original representations” and thus in the “original understanding” itself, there are “directly” two elements: the “image” and what it “imagines,” “intuition” and “concept” (GW IV/5, 300 f.). For Fichte, these elements represent the cognitive functions of indeterminacy and determinacy (cf., e.g., GW IV/5, 291 f.). Fichte, however, conceives of them as a mutual correlation of thought or image or concept and being or image or intuition (or the like). That is to say that he does not conceive of them as the self-determination of the beginning, of the relationship of indeterminacy and determinacy itself, more precisely of its first moment, the moment of indeterminacy. This moment concerns being as the true moment of the intrinsic relatedness of the fundamental relation of implication of absolute knowledge qua original unity of the relation. This original unity would then show itself logically as the unity of the beginning, that is as the beginning of objective, content-saturated thought that thinks itself. From this, it would result first and foremost what Fichte expects from the Science of Knowledge: that the laws of the self-generation of appearance are generated “without our intervention” and “before our eyes” (GW IV/5, 359 f.). Anything else would be an external reflection, not self-determination of the matter at issue.

Hegel saw this very clearly from the outset. Therefore, unlike Fichte, he also avoided Schelling’s powerful misconception that in philosophy, to use Fichte’s words, there is a “certain arbitrariness in the order of construction,” that one can even, to apply Schelling’s famous words, easily make the beginning in ten different ways, if one only, as Fichte says, analyzes each member of the organic unity of the world of images for itself “in-depth,” so that one arrives at all of them from each (GW IV/5, 382). In contrast, as has been shown in the previous sections, the beginning can only be made in one way: with the beginning. As a beginning, the beginning is the immediate, indeterminate. What the beginning is, will emerge in the thought of the beginning. Pure being, taken as the mere “is,” is this pure immediacy. Hence, the thought of being is the thought that is suitable as the beginning of thought.

Despite all its immanence and closedness, being emerges from its indeterminacy by entering into it: by thinking indeterminacy itself as determinacy, as the determinacy of the beginning, while remaining with itself. The thought of pure being is the thought in its pure indeterminate immediacy. In this indeterminacy, however, being is (pure) nothing. The beginning of thought qua the beginning of the self-determination of the absolute in the element of pure thought, that is the logical, is thus ambivalent. Although being and nothing seem to exclude each other, the logical space opened with the thought of being as indeterminate immediacy is apparently identical with nothing; nothing is also indeterminate immediacy, pure indeterminacy. Being as the determination of the beginning passes from itself into nothing. The same applies to nothing. As what it is, namely indeterminate immediacy, it is not differentiated from being; of its own accord, nothing merges into being.

In any case, this is true insofar as the determinacy of both is considered in isolation. As such, being and nothing prove to be conceptually unstable. They each claim to be the whole of the beginning – indeterminate immediacy – but merge into one another of their own accord. More precisely, they cannot be conceptually held for themselves at all but have always already merged into one another. Hegel’s logical concept of “becoming” expresses precisely this immediate disappearance of being and nothing into one another as the whole and thus the truth of both determinations. In becoming, the disappearance of being and nothing into each other has disappeared. For becoming is the concept of thought as a pure, directly self-mediating relationship of thought: direct self-mediation of pure immediacy.

With this thought of the beginning as being or of being as the beginning, philosophy has shed its consciousness- and power-theoretical profile, while according to Fichte (in line with Kant but quite different from later transcendental philosophy) the “whole transcendental philosophy” is founded in and on the “synthesis of apperception” (GW IV/5, 442). From a systematic point of view, the “concept” takes its place as the pure self-determining self-relation. In a primitive form, namely that of the beginning of the Logic of Being, this has already become visible above in the discussion of being, nothing, and becoming. Fichte’s Transcendental Logic is supposed to be “thinking of thought,” not “factual finding of thought” (GW IV/5, 467). Strictly speaking, it can only fulfill this ambition as a speculative logic. Otherwise, its own logic would remain uncomprehended, a mere logic of presuppositions, a logic that always sees only the “I” in everything that is formed, the I as the “image of appearance” (GW IV/5, 510), the I as the first “absolute being” (GW IV/5, 511), polemically formulated, ego-ism as external reflection.

Transcendental philosophy is an absolutized Logic of Essence. For methodical reasons, it lacks both a Logic of Being and a Logic of the Concept. This can also be pointed out to the effect that Fichte does not overcome what is absolute knowledge in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.Footnote ³⁸ In Hegel’s conception of “absolute knowledge,” consciousness has overcome the subject-object opposition, the opposition of consciousness, at the end of its development (GW 11, 422–433). The appearing knowledge comes into being as philosophical knowledge. This knowledge is now to be developed in the system of philosophy. Overcoming the standpoint of consciousness at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit results in knowledge of the absolute as something that is to be determined and in this respect is immediate knowledge of the absolute.

Although Fichte endeavors to conceive of the unity of thought and being intra-gnoseologically as a self-differentiation of absolute knowledge, in his Transcendental Logic he nevertheless further elaborates the content-related determinacy of absolute knowledge. Instead, he should have lifted it into a new unity that is yet to be determined; a unity from which all determinacy and the method of its determination emerge in the first place. Fichte’s Transcendental Logic therefore does not meet the requirements of the beginning of philosophy as a science, that is to say, the requirements that Hegel clearly and unambiguously discussed in his Logic (GW 21, 53–65). Fichte does not think the advance from the beginning; rather, his Transcendental Logic has at its beginning the opposition of image and being, not being as the immediate unity into which the opposition has returned by overcoming itself. With Hegel, absolute or pure knowledge has returned to a unity that has sublated any relation to others and mediation. Yet, if there is only something without any difference, then it ceases to be knowledge: what is, is simple immediacy (GW 21, 55). Pure knowledge and pure being are the same, the problem of “knowledge” is not a logical problem but one of spirit. Hegel’s Logic thematizes thought as it is “in itself”; it develops itself in this “element without opposites” (GW 20, § 467 A).

Being, as conceived of by Fichte, however, is not this initial unity from which all determinacy first arises. For him, being is absolutely closed in itself, positing nothing apart from itself, indeterminable, the logical substrate of all determinacy. Fichte thus thinks of it as “empty,” namely –in accordance with transcendental philosophy – as something that can only ever enter thought as an image: as the image of an “empty and formal being,” that is as a blank space for any image (GW IV/5, 299). As a consequence, Fichte fails to recognize the nullity of his concept of being, even if he recognizes being as a presupposition of Transcendental Logic and attempts to sublate it transcendental philosophically through the concept of the image. To phrase it differently, he sticks to the opposition of a fixed, self-contained being and the becoming of the image. Being, empty as it is, has no determinacy; only as an image is it capable of determinacy.

Therefore, Fichte lacks what for Hegel is precisely the sign of immanent conceptual development, that is the realization of the concept: self-referential negativity. In this particular case it concerns the power of the negativity of being.Footnote ³⁹ The indeterminate immediacy of being is its determinacy: being is nothing; nothing is being; what is, the disappearance into each other, thus the becoming of becoming, becoming as the result of an immanent conceptual development of what is a presuppositionless thinking of the beginning of thought: pure immediacy, thought pure in the minimal determinacy of its indeterminacy, which at the same time encompasses the whole universe of the thinkable.Footnote ⁴⁰ In its beginning, thought is nothing but that which is to be determined, determinable, still undetermined. Due to the presupposition of its own conceptual framework, every other beginning turns out to be, as Hegel once expressed himself in general terms with regard to Fichte, a “running on finitude, a looking back to what went before” (TWA 20, 388 f.) – a logic of presuppositions as external reflection.