Dilek Huseyinzadegan, Atlanta

On Hegel’s Radicalization of Kantian Dualisms:

„The Debate between Kant and Hegel“

1 Introduction
In Hegel: Three Studies, Theodor W. Adorno claims that the debate between Kant and Hegel is
far from over because „the superior power of [Hegel’s] logical stringency is untrue in the face of
Kantian discontinuities  …“ and yet there is a „truth in Hegel’s untruth.“1 Taking my clue from
this claim, I argue in this paper that Kantian discontinuities, namely his hesitation to identify
subject and object, form and matter, and subjectivity and objectivity, have to be maintained as the
starting point of any critical philosophy. Resolving these discontinuities is the untruth of Hegel’s
thought, whereas its truth lies in the fact that Science of Logic performs a reproduction and reifi-
cation of the existing conditions of early capitalist society. I start by showing that Hegel’s inquiry,
by his own account, follows the Kantian dualisms to their logical conclusion by motivating and
radicalizing the notion of the unity of apperception. I then ask what is really to be gained or lost
by such „logical stringency“ and „radicalization.“ I conclude that Hegel’s post-critical position is
in fact a dogmatic one both from Kant’s perspective and from the perspective of Critical Theory,
and that the starting point of any truly critical philosophy [critique – krinein – to separate], must
be to maintain and mediate, without resolving, the crisis [krisis - separation] between subject and
object.

2 Hegel radicalizing Kant: The Unity of Apperception

What Henri Allison calls the unholy trinity of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s philosophy consists in the
charges of dualism, formalism, and subjectivism.2 Thus, if we are to take Hegel at his word, his
is a philosophy that attempts to solve these problems one by one. In this section I briefly explain
how Hegel does this.
The traditional conception of logic refers to an inquiry regarding the rules and the categories
that apply to our thinking about things. These rules or categories pertain to the „form“ of our
thought, which makes logic a wholly different kind of inquiry than metaphysics, a theory of reality
or existing things. However, carried out in the way Hegel proposes in the Science of Logic, logic
comes to coincide with metaphysics in that the thought of the essentialities of things comes to be
the same as the essentialities of things; in this way, those thoughts become „objective thoughts“,
as Hegel calls them.3 To explain this, I take up Robert Pippin’s argument that Hegel must be taken
at his word when he says that „…the basic position of his entire philosophy should be understood

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies. Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholson. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993, 86 f.
2 Henry Allison. „Is Kant’s Critique of Judgment Post-Critical?“ in Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel. Edited by Sally Sedgwick. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
3 G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, [referred as Encyclopedia 1830 edition]. § 2/ Translated by W. Wallace and
A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Henceforth designated as Encyclopedia 1830 followed by paragraph
number.
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as a direct variation on a crucial Kantian theme, the ‚transcendental unity of apperception‘.“4

Therefore, Hegel’s identitarian logic (as well as his metaphysics) owes a lot to the Kantian idea of
the unity of apperception, which Hegel will later call the Concept (der Begriff).
The question of bridging what seems like binary opposites, namely concepts and objects, is
the question of Kant’s transcendental deduction (and to a certain extent also of the schematism
and principles) in the Critique of Pure Reason.5 The issue is whether the categories, the pure con-
cepts of the understanding that seem at first glance like mere subjective dispositions, do really
apply to objects: in short, the core problem of the deduction is how one can ascribe objective
validity to subjective conditions for thinking.6 In Kant’s case, the short answer to this question
will be that we grasp the determinations of phenomena in terms of the pure concepts of the under-
standing we have, because those concepts determine the object for us in the first place.7 It is in
this sense that the concepts can be considered to be the ground of everything for Kant because
we can make sense of the manifold around us only by means of these concepts, our a priori rules
of cognition. As Kant puts it, „We cannot think any object except through categories; we cannot
cognize any object that is thought except through intuitions that correspond to those concepts.“8
The condition for the possibility of both „being able to think something through categories“ and
„being able to cognize objects“ is the synthetic unity of apperception.9 This is the highest princi-
ple of all cognition in Kant’s view.
One crucial difference between Kant and Hegel in terms of how they conceive the relationship
between this dualism is that while both start with the idea that the condition for the possibility
of thinking/knowing the object is the spontaneity of thought, Hegel takes a step further to show
that once this activity takes place it also constitutes its object, that there is no object per se inde-
pendently of and outside this activity. According to Hegel, when we reflect on something, where
our spontaneity of thought takes us to cannot be anything other than the thing itself, because
such synthesizing activity is the supreme principle of all thinking and cognition. In this sense,
Hegel, like Kant, traces thinking and knowledge back to their origin, to their condition of pos-
sibility. Kant seeks (and finds) this unity „someplace higher“ (CPR, B131), whereas Hegel claims
that since the „I think“ is an act of spontaneity, it cannot stand still where it is found, to speak
figuratively. The origin of the unity is not a static thing or a mere formal principle for Hegel; it is an
activity and this activity is totally responsible for the „constitution“ of its objects.
Although in Kant’s terms, this is an objective principle from which all thinking and knowl-
edge can be derived, one must not forget that it applies only to the manifold of intuition and its
synthesis by the understanding; therefore, it is presupposed that the intuitions are already given
through space and time. This is all to say that the knowledge of noumena or things-in-themselves

4 Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989, 6.
5 All references to the Critique of Pure Reason will be from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant.
Translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Henceforth
designated as CPR, followed by the paragraph number in parentheses.
6 CPR, A90.
7 Ibid. B138. This passage does not seem to say that the object was nothing at all before it was brought to the unity
of consciousness and became an object for me; It was a Gegenstand before it was brought to a unity, and thanks to
the unity of apperception, it became an Object (an object for me – rather than a Gegenstand). The distinction between
Gegenstand (the object before it is brought under the unity of consciousness, as it appears through space and time)
and Object (the object when it becomes an object for me by means of the unity of apperception) seems to be an unim-
portant one for Hegel; hence the claim that the object is constituted by the unity of apperception.
8 CPR, B166.
9 Ibid., B136. Also see Robert Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1982, 169. To put it rather bluntly, as Terry Pinkard points out in his commentary on Pippin’s
thesis about the so-called Kantian legacy of Hegel’s thought, if one drops the condition of intuition as requirement of
the synthesis of the consciousness, one gets something like the Hegelian logic. See Terry Pinkard, „How Kantian was
Hegel?“ The Review of Metaphysics 43 (June 1990): 834n.
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cannot be derived from this principle, simply because they can never be encountered in any expe-
rience (that is, they do not appear through pure forms of intuition, space and time). They cannot
be known because they do not conform to our way of thinking; in other words, they cannot be rep-
resented by the unity of consciousness because they do not have the sensible material combined
with the categories. For Hegel, however, one of the shortcomings of Kant’s conception of the unity
of apperception is that while it secures the objective validity of the combining activity of the cate-
gories and thus constitutes the possibility of objective experience, it does not constitute the object
as such. Since without intuitions concepts are empty in the Kantian picture, there is nothing in
the Concept that can give us the objectivity of the object itself: the intuitions must fill the Concept,
providing its content.10
In Hegel’s terms, the Concept (der Begriff) is the name of the activity that takes up the object
in its immediacy and mediates it.11 This activity truly mediates thinking vis-á-vis the object and
the object vis-á-vis thinking; this is the reason why the thoughts of things gained in this way are
called objective or concrete thoughts.12 In this way, the dualism between the form of thought (or
more simply: thought) and the content of thought (being) is overcome because the form of thought
is there only by virtue of thinking through the content. The object is there only by virtue of being
thought, by virtue of the Concept that grounds it. This is also how the science of logic coincides
with metaphysics for Hegel.13 Traditional metaphysics grasps forms of thought as the determina-
tions of being, but never thinks that the laws or forms of thinking are gained by thinking things
over. Mediation, or the idea that there is nothing in the world (or in thought) that is not mediated
is a notion peculiar to the science of logic that is rendered possible after metaphysics and critical
metaphysics have reached their final stage.14
It is true that for Kant as well, this unity is not a mere mode of feeling, an intuition, or a rep-
resentation,15 but neither is it „identical“ to the object – this is the place Kant does not want to
go, for identifying the conditions for the possibility of experience with the experience itself is a
dogmatic move in terms of his project. He wants his critical endeavor to be limited to an analysis
of the origins and the forms of experience; therefore, he seems to be content with the formality of
his theoretical philosophy.16

10 Kantian philosophy, putting the reality up against the Concept, lets thinking be „utterly separate“ from the reality,
and philosophy (logic and metaphysics alike) becomes empty talk, incapable of saying anything real or objective
about existing things, things-in-themselves.
11 SL, 585 f.
12 Encyclopedia (1830), § 24.
13 Ibid. § 24.
14 Encyclopedia (1817), § 18. The relationship between the concepts and the objects cannot be one of identity, that is,
they cannot be wholly homogeneous to one another for Kant. Otherwise, he would not need to reflect on the nature
of this relationship in the Analytic of Principles (B169/A131–B294/A235), more specifically in the Schematism and the
Principles of Pure Understanding chapters in the Critique of Pure Reason. But this question is irrelevant for Hegel;
for him, unless the object is identical to the unity of apperception that determines it, every kind of account of this
relation will remain external, contingent, and subjective. He thinks that the schemata bring together understanding
and sensuousness, or the concepts and the manifold only like a piece of wood and a leg bound together by a cord!
(Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Translated by E. S. Haldane and F. H. Simson. London: Routledge, 1896.
vol. III, 441. In Hegel’s view, Kant is the first person to come close to realizing that the Concept cannot be a mere external
property of the I; however, for this unity to take place, according to Kant, a given intuition is necessary, whereas for
Hegel, that is not the case. (SL, 584.)
15 CPR, B131–132, and SL, 584–185. „Concepts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind“
(CPR, B75/A51), as he famously put it. According to Hegel, however, the concepts are not empty without the intuitions
because concepts become the intuitions in mediation, and any attempt to break this identity will give rise to unnec-
essary dualisms in philosophy.
16 SL, 585.
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3 The Scandal of Idealism: Dualisms and

Critical Philosophy
I have shown that according to Hegel, not only experience and knowledge of objects are possible
thanks to the unity of apperception, but the object itself is only possible due to its being mediated
by the Concept; the object is the Concept. While in Kant’s Copernican revolution, the subject was
only the account of how knowledge is possible, in Hegel’s „radicalization,“ the subject seems to
be the constituting factor in how objects themselves are possible. There is no distinction between
the form of thinking and the content of it: being and thought are identical and logic coincides with
metaphysics. This, I believe is a dogmatic step back, both from Kant’s and Adorno’s perspective
of critical philosophy. Bringing back Adorno’s interpretation of Hegel here will help me illustrate
this point.
According to Adorno, the philosophical problem par excellence is „the problem of the rela-
tion of subject to its object,“17 which came to be ‚dissolved‘ by idealist philosophies in the claim
that they are simply identical. His main argument concerning The Critique of Pure Reason can
be summarized as follows: Kant, according to Adorno, is one of the first thinkers to mobilize the
subject-object relationship by grounding objectivity in subjectivity. But it never occurs to him that
this grounding might be reciprocal, that as much as objectivity depends on subjectivity, subjectiv-
ity depends on objectivity. Thus, it seems that Kant lacks any notion of a ‚dialectical relation‘. In
Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno often talks about Hegel as „Kant come into his own,“18 meaning that
certain steps that had not been taken by Kant were recognized and criticized by Hegel, and that
Hegel had answers to most of the questions Kant left in unanswered. Thus, Adorno argues that the
dualisms Kant ends up with are already the energizing force behind Hegel’s thought:

In Kant, the idea that a world divided into subject and object, the world in which, as prisoners of our own con-
stitution, we are involved only with phenomena, is not the ultimate world, already forms the secret source of
energy. Hegel adds an unkantian element to that: the idea that in grasping, conceptually, the block, the limit
that is set to subjectivity, in understanding subjectivity as „mere“ subjectivity, we have already passed beyond
that limit.19

According to Adorno, Hegel’s dialectical mediation makes explicit the point that the moment
when we place a limit on our knowledge, we are already beyond that limit. When „I think“ is taken
as the ultimate source and ground of all cognition, and when it provides a dialectical mediation,
subject becomes object for Hegel.
However, is this dialectical mediation truly reciprocal? Does this identity of the subject (or
thought) and object (or being) not amount to the primacy of the subject at the expense of the
object? In other words, is it not the case that the Hegelian subject-object is a subject?20 Does
Hegelian unity discard discontinuity and nonidentity, and does matter just become form? We can
answer these questions in light of the exegesis I have given in the previous section, by paying
attention to the way in which Hegel „radicalizes“ the unity of apperception or the Concept.
The unity of apperception, understood as the fundamental activity through which things are
what they are, ensures that thought determines its own content and in this way the activity also
eliminates thought’s dependence on any external, simply given content. Therefore, the knowl-

17 Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Stanford University Press,
California: 1995, 15.
18 A recurring theme in his Hegel: Three Studies; see especially 5f, 8, 14, and 66.
19 Ibid., 6.
20 Ibid., 13.
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  Dilek Huseyinzadegan, On Hegel’s Radicalization of Kantian Dualisms   153

edge that the Concept has is essentially the knowledge of itself; the Concept knows only itself. This
is what Adorno calls „the scandal of idealism,“ namely that „if […] in the totality, everything ulti-
mately collapses into the subject as the absolute spirit, idealism thereby cancels itself out, because
no difference remains through which the subject would be identified as something distinct, as
subject.“21 Put differently, if the subject (or the Concept) is the object, then it seems impossible
that the subject can know anything but itself. Since there will be no distinction between subject
and object, every piece of knowledge will be the self-knowledge of the subject, and nothing more.
If Hegel’s subject-object is the subject that finds its legitimization in the unity of apperception,
or in other words, if the Concept is everything,22 then the claim that logic coincides with meta-
physics comes to mean that the form of thought is all that there is and there is nothing else. One
cannot even point to something outside the determinations of thought, let alone think or know
it. As Pippin suggests, „Without the idea of the Concept’s self-determination, one cannot enter
the Hegelian system; but with that idea, one cannot remain within it.“23 Whether or not it was
inevitable to interpret the Kantian unity of apperception as a constitutive, determining activity,
and whether or not Hegel was really motivated by the idea of „completing Kant“24, I believe that
locating the terms of the ongoing debate between Kant and Hegel in the idea of the unity of apper-
ception is not far from the truth.
There is nothing in the world that is not mediated: this is the important insight that Hegel
contributes to Kantian philosophy, and a step in the direction of providing a more sophisticated
form of mediation than for example the transcendental schematism. However, from the per-
spective of critical philosophy initiated by Kant, this is also a step back in another respect: If the
object equals the subject, if matter is nothing other than form, and if being is nothing other than
thought, then we can say that the whole world can be fully and completely grasped by reason. In
this sense, Adorno’s enigmatic statement regarding Hegel’s philosophy that its truth is its untruth
means the following: Hegel’s identitarian philosophy perfectly imitates the structures of early
capitalist society and even provides a theoretical justification for the logic of exchange, equiva-
lence, and expendability. Although it is untrue that the subject is identical to the object or that
the subject constitutes its object, for example, it is true of the logic of late-enlightenment society.
From a critical perspective, however, this goes no further than ideology, a dogmatic repetition,
reproduction, and justification of the status quo. What Kant opened up when he insisted on the
fact that subject and object or form and matter are not identical, was the possibility that perhaps
„the world is not reason“ – in Hegel’s philosophy, there is no room to think that any longer. This is
what I mean when I say that Hegel’s post-critical metaphysics is in fact a relapse into dogmatism:
critique is about separating, maintaining the non-identity, leaving the possibilities of different
forms of mediation open, whereas Hegel’s philosophy unites, mediates the non-identical, and
legitimizes only one form of mediation, namely mediation by thought. What is lost in Hegel’s
resolution by „identitarian mediation“ is the possibility that reality in its totality cannot and will
not be fully and completely grasped by human reason. If we consider Adorno’s famous claim from
Negative Dialectics, namely that objects do not go into their concepts without a remainder, we
can see that Hegel’s philosophy makes it impossible to reflect on the remainder, the moment of
non-identity – the separation between subject and object, the crucial moment in Kant’s dualisms.
Because he sublates reality in thought, his philosophy becomes a mere repetition of the existing
conditions of the society, closing off the possibility of critique. At least in the aftermath of Kantian
discontinuities, we find a force-field, an element of non-identity that constantly creeps up in the
face of logic, subject, and thought.

21 Ibid., 68–69.
22 SL, 826.
23 Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 39.
24 Ibid., 7.
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In conclusion, it turns out that Hegel’s radicalization of the unity of apperception was in
fact a very conservative move, both in philosophical terms (a scandal, a giant tautology) and in
socio-political terms, for it fully identifies thought with being, providing a justification of the
status quo that attempts at such identification in various forms. Thus, Hegel solves the problems
of dualism, subjectivism and formalism, but at the expense of the origin of critical philosophy,
namely, non-identity. This is not to say that Hegel is unimportant for critical theory or Adorno;
throughout this essay, one point I have emphasized is that the unity of apperception or how we
understand it is crucial to locating the element of non-identity in thought, and it is only when
we remember this element that the critical path is re-opened. By making the synthetic unity of
apperception into an absolute Concept that is capable of grasping anything and everything, Hegel
conceals the critical path and leads us instead into the desert of totality and the Absolute spirit.

Dilek Huseyinzadegan
Emory University
Department of Philosophy
561 S. Kilgo Circle
Atlanta, GA 30322
dhuseyin1@emory.edu

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