Hegel’s Critique of the Kantian Noumenon

Sean Kelly

In Kant’s system of transcendental idealism the two main trends in eighteenth century philosophy – the rationalist and the empirical – were finally brought face to face. Hume had tried to show how the three fundamental conceptions of metaphysics – substance, causality, and the self – have no basis in sense-experience, but rather arise out of the mind’s tendency to anticipate what, due to the association of ideas, has “customarily” seemed to be the case. Kant made a significant epistemological advance when he replaced Hume’s “custom” with the notion of a priori categories through which the manifold of sense-data is apprehended as phenomenon. Many, however, questioned the validity of Kant’s characterization of the noumenon, or thing-in-itself, which, he believed, must be inferred from the very notion of phenomenon. It “follows quite naturally,” reasoned Kant,

from the concept of a phenomenon in general, that something must correspond to it, which in itself is not a phenomenon, because a phenomenon cannot be anything by itself, apart from our mode of representation. Unless, therefore, we are to move in a constant circle, we must admit that the very word phenomenon indicates a relation to something. The immediate representation of which is no doubt sensuous, but which nevertheless, even without this qualification of our sensibility (on which the form of our intuition is founded) must be something by itself, that is an object independent of our sensibility.

Hence arises the concept of a noumenon….¹

The distinction between phenomena and noumena is, of course, much older than Kant’s view of the matter. The first systematic treatment of the distinction is to be found with Plato who distinguished between two kinds of knowledge. The first, which deals only with appearances, more or less unreflectively, is actually not knowledge at all, but mere “opinion” (δόξα) and true “knowledge” (ἐπιστήμη) which arises above, or penetrates beyond, the world of appearance to the eternal essence of things, i.e., the Ideas. Ideas are not apprehended by the senses, but purely through the activity of mind (νοῦς) – hence noumena.

Kant’s conception of the nature of ideas, however, is more limited than Plato’s. Although ideas, for Kant, cannot be apprehended through the senses, they are not the noumena.^[1] Nor are they objects of knowledge. Rather, they function as mere “regulative principles” in the mind’s instinctive search for the unconditioned.

For Kant, the noumena are not Ideas (in the Platonic sense) or “essences” at all. They are the “things-in-themselves,” the postulation of which is demanded by the very notion of phenomenon. Therefore, despite the fact that he maintains the distinction between things as they seem and things as they are, Kant has really opted out of the Platonic tradition. For although the noumenon is conceived as “something by itself, … an object independent of our sensibility,” the notion of a noumenon “is not positive nor a definite knowledge of anything.”² In fact, we “cannot know these noumena” at all, “but can only think of them under the name of something unknown.”³

For Hegel, as for many of Kant’s immediate successors, the conception of the unknowable noumenon was felt to be fundamentally incompatible with the nature of reason. How could knowledge claim to be truly rational and universal in scope if the “things-in-themselves” were deemed beyond the mind’s reach? This sentiment is well expressed in Hegel’s inaugural lecture at the University of Heidelberg:

Man, being mind (Geist), may and should consider himself worthy of the Highest; he cannot esteem too greatly the stature and power of his mind; and if he retains this faith, nothing will be so hard and unyielding that it will not open up to him. The initially closed and concealed essence of the universe has no power that can resist the courage of cognition; it (the essence of the universe) must disclose itself to him, revealing its riches and its depths and giving them up to him for his enjoyment.⁴

It was not, of course, merely as a matter of sentiment that Hegel disagreed with the limits Kant sought to impose on knowledge. The notion of an unknowable thing-in-itself was clearly unacceptable on its own grounds. “The Thing-in-itself,” writes Hegel,

(and under “thing” is embraced even Mind and God) expresses the object when we leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it, all its emotional aspects, and all specific thoughts of it. It is easy to see what is left – utter abstraction, total emptiness, only described still as an “other world” – the negative of every image and definite thought.⁵

Kant, too, looked upon the noumenon as empty and abstract. For the concept of a noumenon is “merely limitative.” It is therefore “of negative use only …. a real division of objects into phenomena and noumena … in a positive sense, is quite inadmissible, although concepts may very well be divided into sensuous and intellectual.”⁶ We cannot, says Kant, admit of a noumenon in a positive sense because there can be no sensuous presentation to which the concept of a noumenon corresponds. And as “thoughts without contents are empty,” and it is only “by their union” that knowledge can be produced,⁷ it is clear that the noumenon is essentially unknowable.

Hegel, of course, cannot agree with this kind of reasoning. He finds in Kant’s argument an implicit transcending of the bounds which the argument seeks to impose. “It argues an utter want of consistency,” Hegel contends,

to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as “cognition can go no further”; “Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.” No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it. A very little consideration might show that to call a thing finite or limited proves by implication the very presence of the infinite or unlimited, and that our knowledge of a limit can only be when the unlimited is on this side in consciousness.⁸

The contradiction in Kant’s position, though not the notion of the implicit immanence of the unlimited, can easily be elicited by the following syllogism. All knowledge is limited to the phenomenal. The truth of the phenomenal is the noumenal (which is unknowable). Therefore the phenomenal is unknowable (or: Therefore the truth of the phenomenal is that it is unknowable).

Hegel, as we shall see, uses a similar argument in the Phenomenology, though he uses it to draw the opposite conclusion. But to return to the passage where Hegel describes the Kantian noumenon as “utter abstraction” and “total emptiness”; it is easy to see, he continues, “that this caput mortuum is still only a product of thought, such as accrues when thought is carried on to abstraction unalloyed: that it is the work of the empty ‘Ego’, which makes an object out of this empty self-identity of its own.” Here we have the essence of Hegel’s critique of the Kantian noumenon considered from the point of view of the knowing subject. And it is precisely because it is an act of knowing, however abstract this knowing may be, that Hegel concludes: “… one can only read with surprise the perpetual remark that we do not know the Thing-in-itself. On the contrary, there is nothing we can know so easily.”¹⁰

Hegel reaches the same conclusion in the addition to section 124 of the Logic proper in his treatment of the notion of the “in-itself.” Here he finds that Kant’s exclusive relegation of the in-itself to the category of “the thing” is both indiscriminate and unjustified. For one might just as easily “speak of quality-by-itself or quantity-by-itself, and of any other category. The expression would then serve to signify that these categories are taken in their abstract immediacy, apart from their development and inward character.”¹¹ Although Kant’s view of the noumenon as merely “limitative” and “negative” seems to accord with this understanding of the in-itself, his fundamental position is radically opposed to that of Hegel. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is meant to be, to use Hegel’s phrase, the thing as it is “in its truth,” or the thing as it “properly is.” For Hegel, however, the thing, or any other category for that matter, if it is to be grasped as it is “in its truth,” must be allowed to rise from the level of mere abstraction to the conceptual concreteness proper to the truth.

Thus the man, by or in himself, is the child. And what the child has to do is to rise out of this abstract and undeveloped “in himself,” and become “for-himself” what he is at first only “in-himself” – a free and reasonable being…. In the same sense the germ may be called the plant in-itself.¹²

Hegel’s view of the matter leads him to the conclusion that it is a mistake to suppose “that the ‘thing-in-itself’ … is something inaccessible to our cognition. All things are originally in-themselves, but that is not the end of the matter.”¹³

Moving from the addition to the corresponding paragraph in the Logic, we see that Hegel understands the in-itself of the thing in terms of a “reflection-into-self.” To appreciate what Hegel means by this we have to go back a little. All talk of things-in-themselves, in the sense of things as they truly are, implies a level of thought or reflection which seeks to penetrate beyond the surface to the essence of things. Now “reflection” is the key concept in the sphere of Essence. The three categories which Hegel sees as the “pure principles of reflection” are identity, difference, and the ground. At the heart of the dialectic between the categories of identity and difference is a twofold movement of reflection, characterized by Hegel as reflection-into-self and reflection-into-another. The essential unity of this twofold movement of reflection first becomes explicit with the notion of the ground.

The Ground is the unity of identity and difference, the truth of what difference and identity have turned out to be the reflection-into-self, which is equally a reflection-into-another, and vice versa. It is essence put explicitly as a totality.¹⁴

The notion of the ground, however, is “not yet determined by objective principles of its own.”¹⁵ Much in the same way that becoming issues into the more determinate notion of “being-there” (Dasein), so the notion of the ground issues into the notion of existence, which is “the immediate unity of reflection-into-self and reflection-into-another.”¹⁶ But existence, too, is impelled toward further determination. Just as the notion of being-there leads necessarily to the notion of the “somewhat” (etwas), it is clear that in this case something must exist.

The reflection-on-another of the existent is inseparable from the reflection-on-self: the ground is their unity, from which existence has issued. The existent therefore includes relativity, and has on its own part its multiple interconnections with other existents: it is reflected on itself as its ground. The existent is, when so described, a Thing.¹⁷

The notion of the thing is the first category in the sphere of Essence which possesses an explicitly “conceptual” (Begreifende) character. Although it represents the still immediate unity of the twofold movement of reflection at work in the preceding dialectic, the category of the thing is nevertheless more concrete than what has come before.

Given this understanding of the thing, Hegel is able to say:

The “thing-by-itself” (or thing in the abstract), so famous in the philosophy of Kant, shows itself here in its genesis. It is seen to be the abstract reflection-on-self, which is clung to, to the exclusion of reflection-in-other things and of all predications of difference. The thing-by-itself is therefore the empty substratum for these predicates of relation.¹⁸

Here we have the logical counterpart, from the perspective of the object conceived as thing, to Hegel’s epistemological reduction of the Kantian noumenon to the abstract self-identity of the ego.^[2]

Hegel’s point is that Kant’s thing-in-itself is not really a thing at all. For it is implicit in the concept of the thing that it receive its determinations through its relation to – i.e., through its similarities with or differences from – other things. The relationality implicit in the concept of the thing constitutes its specific nature – what Hegel terms its “properties.”

As the germ, being the plant in-itself, means self-development, so the thing in general passes beyond its in-itself (the abstract reflection-on-self) to manifest itself further as reflection on other things. It is in this sense that it has properties.²¹

Kant, therefore, is guilty of misapplying the category of the thing when he conceives of the noumenon (in the sense of that which truly is) as the thing-in-itself. It is only because of this misapplication, which arises from an unwarranted abstraction from the concreteness proper to the truth, that Kant is led to the opinion that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. It is unknowable only in the sense that there is nothing to know.

McTaggart objects to this understanding of the Kantian thing-in-itself.

In the first place, the phenomenal qualities are not, for Kant, the characteristics of the Thing-in-itself at all. They may be partly caused by it (inconsistent as this is with the other parts of the theory) but they are not its characteristics. It may be due to the Kantian Thing-in-itself … that I have a sensation of green. But to say that the Thing-in-itself was green, would simply be a mistake. In the second place, Kant does not exclude the possibility of the Thing-in-itself having characteristics, which not only belong to it, but express its nature, so that they would be what Hegel calls Properties, and the Thing-in-itself would not be what Hegel calls a Thing-in-itself. Such properties of the Kantian Thing-in-itself cannot, indeed, be known by the pure Reason. But the Pure Reason… expressly recognizes their possibility….²²

This criticism simply does not hold water. McTaggart has missed Hegel’s point entirely. To begin with, if “phenomenal qualities”, (which are “partly caused” ? by the Thing-in-itself) are not characteristics of the Thing-in-itself, then just what are they? McTaggart does not enlighten us on the matter. To be sure, it is a mistake to say that the thing-in-itself is green. As we have just seen, it is only because of its reflection-into-other-things that any properties, such as greenness, come into being at all. As to the possibility of the thing-in-itself possessing properties on its own – i.e. apart from any consideration of phenomenality – if these properties, as McTaggart admits, “cannot, indeed, be known by the Pure Reason”, then it becomes meaningless to talk of such a possibility.

The remainder of the doctrine of Essence is concerned with illustrating the dialectical unity of traditionally opposed categories governed by the underlying movement of reflection-into-self and reflection-onto-other. The categories dealt with are form and content, whole and parts, force and expression, and finally inward and outward. These categories, however, are merely expressions of the fundamental opposition between essence (in the sense of the true) and appearance.

“The Essence”, writes Hegel, “must appear or shine forth.”

To show or shine is the characteristic by which essence is distinguished from being – by which it is essence; and it is this show which, when it is developed, shows itself, and is appearance. Essence accordingly is not something beyond or behind appearance, but – just because it is the essence which exists – the existence is appearance (Erscheinung).²³

The reasoning behind this view of the relation between essence and appearance is stated by Hegel in the passage of the Phenomenology referred to earlier. Here, however, essence is spoken of as the “inner world” or “supersensible beyond”.

The inner world, or supersensible beyond, has, however, come into being: it comes from the world of appearance which has mediated it; in other words, appearance is its essence and, in fact, its filling. The supersensible is the sensuous and the perceived posited as it is in truth; but the truth of the sensuous and the perceived is to be appearance. The supersensible is therefore appearance qua appearance.²⁴

The fundamental identity of essence and its manifestation, an identity constituted by the relation of necessary mutual implication between both terms, is elaborated by Hegel in the second section of the doctrine of Essence, entitled Appearance (Erscheinung). Appearance here is not, however, mere “show” (Schein). It is no longer a question of the phenomenal in the Kantian sense. For, as we have seen, “it is the essence which exists” – i.e., appears. “Appearance” in the specifically Hegelian sense is, as Taylor remarks, “the exact opposite of Kant’s. Instead of pointing by contrast to the essential hiddenness of the transcendent real, it rather expresses the essential manifest-ness of all reality.”²⁵

The pairs of categories in which the “essential manifest-ness of all reality” is played out are, as I mentioned earlier, those of form and content, force and expression, and finally inner and outer. Implicit in this dialectic of “appearance” is a richer, more concrete expression of truth toward which reflection is drawn. The logical category which emerges from the dialectic must include “the characteristics aforesaid and their difference”, and must also therefore be “the development of them, in such a way that, as it has them, they are at the same time plainly understood to be a show, to be assumed or imposed.”²⁶ This category Hegel terms “Actuality” (Wirklichkeit).

Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence with existence, or of inward with outward. The utterance of the actual is the actual itself: so that in this utterance it remains just as essential, and only is essential, in so far as it is in immediate external existence.²⁷

I will not follow Hegel in his extended treatment of the notion of actuality. With regard to the principal concern of this essay, it is important to recognize, to begin with, that with the notion of actuality Hegel’s critique of the Kantian noumenon, in all essentials, is complete. But this is not the end of the matter. For what was at first merely implicit in Hegel’s critique, and which finds a preliminary articulation in the category of actuality, is a positive transformation of Kant’s conception of the noumenal. This transformation represents, with certain qualifications, a return to the fundamental position of Greek philosophy. As Findlay remarks: “in Hegel’s mature system, we may say, a dynamic Platonism has superceded all the subjectivities of Kant and Fichte, while however incorporating all that is essential in the latter.²⁸ In fact, he continues, although “Hegel is generally regarded as the crowning phase of Germanic subjective idealism, he can more appropriately be regarded as the crowning phase of the objective idealism of antiquity”.²⁹ Hegel is at one with Plato and Aristotle, as indeed with the spirit of classical Greek philosophy as a whole, first, in his conviction that the Absolute can be apprehended, and secondly, that this is possible only through thought or reason (νοῦς, λόγος). “Thought and thought alone has eyes for the essence, substance, universal power, and ultimate design of the world.³⁰ What is important for Hegel, however, is that the Absolute^[3], the “ultimate design of the world”, not be conceived as standing beyond the world itself. Unlike the Kantian noumenon – and here Hegel is also at variance with Plato – the Hegelian Absolute encompasses all phenomenality. We have seen how this is the case with the category of actuality, which is a prefiguration of the concept of the Absolute. Though the phenomenal world cannot be passed by as “inessential”, it must, however, be sublated (aufgehoben).

To think the phenomenal world rather means to recast its form, and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action of thought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of Sensation, when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its first and phenomenal shape. By the removal and negation of the shell, the kernel within the sense-precept is brought to the light.³²

The last sentence of this passage, the language of which descends from the level of the concept (Begriff) to that of presentation or “picture thinking” (Vorstellung), is in tension with what we have seen to be the proper conception of the relation between existence and essence. The metaphor of the kernel and shell, like that of the wheat and chaff, implies that phenomenality is in some sense “unessential”. Hegel, of course, does not wish to maintain this view. For “Essence must appear or shine forth” (my emphasis). What Hegel means to say finds more apt expression in the first part of the same passage where he speaks of recasting or transmuting the phenomenal world into the form of universality. Again, one must bear in mind the specifically Hegelian conception of the universal as concrete — that is, as incorporating the particular as a constitutive “moment”. The universal, like the infinite or the Absolute itself, cannot be conceived abstractly. This is where Kant went wrong. His mistake, according to Hegel,

was to stop at the purely negative point of view, and to limit the unconditionality of Reason to an abstract self-sameness without any shade of distinction. It degrades Reason to a finite and conditioned thing, to identify it with a mere stepping beyond the finite and conditioned range of understanding. The real infinite, far from being a mere transcendence of the finite, always involves the absorption of the finite into its own fuller nature.³³

The actualization of this real infinite is the truth toward which the unconditionality of reason is instinctively drawn. To actualize this truth, thought or reason must overcome the equally instinctive tendency to impose abstract limitations on the range of its activity. This is precisely what Kant failed to do. Faced with the manifest contradictions in experience and cognition – contradictions which defy resolution through the “either/or” of the understanding (Verstand) – he sacrificed (in the language of the Phenomenology) a more concrete vision of the truth to the desire for self-certainty. Consequently, Kant

never got beyond the negative result that the thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.^[4]34

Hegel agrees with Kant that all knowledge is bound to the phenomenal. But this, as Hegel puts it, is not the end of the matter. The antinomies of experience and cognition do not point to the natural limits of reason (Vernunft) in its search for the things-in-themselves. Rather, these antinomies constitute their very essence. “The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves but in the universal divine Idea.”³⁵ This “universal divine Idea” is the perfect expression of the truth which found its preliminary articulation in the category of actuality.

The Idea may be described in many ways. It may be called reason (and this is the proper philosophical signification of reason); subject-object; the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite, of soul and body; the possibility of which has its own actuality in its own self; that of which the nature can be thought only as existent, etc. All these descriptions apply, because the Idea contains all the relations of understanding, but contains them in their infinite self-return and self-identity.³⁶

Clearly the Idea is no mere “regulative principle”. Nor, on the other hand, is it equivalent to Plato’s conception of the Idea as subsisting apart from the world of appearance. Hegel’s conception of the Idea is very close to Aristotle’s understanding of the living form (ἐντελέχεια) though absolutized and identified with the divine Thought which thinks itself (νόησις νοήσεως).^[5]

Hegel’s revindication of the conception of a positive noumenon is not, therefore, a simple return to the standpoint of classical Greek philosophy. Nor does his exhaustive critique of Kant’s understanding of the noumenon represent a complete rejection of the latter’s attempt to fuse the empiricist and rationalist trends. Rather, Hegel has endeavoured, in the manner so characteristic of that philosopher, to rise above the shortsightedness of the philosophical perspectives involved to a position which commands a clearer vision of the truth. Whether in fact he has succeeded in doing so remains, of course, a matter for debate.

REFERENCES

1. Critique of Pure Reason, in the Essential Kant, ed. by Arnulf Zweig, Mentor Book, 1970, p. 191.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid, p. 195.
4. Quoted from Wiedmann, Franz, Hegel: an Illustrated Biography, New York: Pegas, 1968, p. 56.
5. Hegel’s Logic, (being part one of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 1830), translated by William Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1975, section 44. Hereafter abbreviated as E. Logic.
6. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 194.
7. Ibid, p. 81.
8. E. Logic, 60.
9. Ibid, 44.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid, 124, addition.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid, 121.
15. Ibid, 122.
16. Ibid, 123.
17. Ibid, 124.
18. Ibid.
19. Hegel, a reexamination, London, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1970, p. 202.
20. “Hegel’s Critique of Kant”, in the Review of Metaphysics, vol. 26, March 1973, p. 450.
21. E. Logic, 124, addition.

22. Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, New York, Russell & Russell Inc., 1964, p. 133.

23. E. Logic, 131.

24. Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. by Miller, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 89.

25. Hegel, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 224.

26. E. Logic, 143.

27. Ibid, 142.

28. “Hegel’s Conception of Subjectivity”, Hegel Studien, Beiheft 19, Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, Herbert Grundmann, 1979, p. 26.

29. Ibid.

30. E. Logic, 50.

31.Sience of Logic, tr. by W. H. Johnston B.A., & L. G. Struthers, London: Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966, volume II, p.160

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid, 45, addition.

34. Ibid, 48, addition.

35. Ibid, 45, addition.

36. Ibid, 214.

Sean Kelly is Professor of Philosophy, California Institute of Integral Studies.

1. Although it must be conceded that they, along with all a priori determinants, are grounded ultimately in the subjective noumenal substrate. ↑
2. John E. Smith, following upon a remark of Findlay’s,¹⁹ identifies these two strands of Hegel’s critique without clearly distinguishing between them. He states Hegel’s position as follows: “a mutual or reciprocal relation should be acknowledged in which there is due recognition of the ‘I’ of self-consciousness as a self-reflected unity which comes to light in the thinking of the object, whereas Kant placed all the emphasis on the unity bestowed on the object in virtue of its being thought by the subject.”²⁰ ↑
3. In the Science of Logic, Hegel states that actuality, as the unity of inner and outer, “is Absolute actuality. At this point this actuality is the Absolute as such – in so far as it is posited as unity in which form is transcended and has become the empty or external distinction of an Outer and an Inner. Reflection is related to this Absolute as eternal, for it rather contemplates the Absolute than is its proper movement. But since it is this essentially, it exists as the negative return of itself into the Absolute.³¹ ↑
4. Modern science is only now beginning to realize the full significance of this profound insight. The new physics revolves around the apparent paradoxes of matter/energy, space/time, and the wave/particle theory of light. The depth psychologies of Freud and Jung recognize the fundamental ambivalence and polarity which characterizes all unconscious contents. Witness also the importance of binary opposition in structuralist theory. ↑
5. See section 236 of the E. Logic where Hegel describes the Absolute Idea as “the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself.” ↑