The role of ideas in Kant and Hegel’s search for systematic unity

Jones, Henry (2025) The role of ideas in Kant and Hegel’s search for systematic unity. (MA(R) thesis), Kingston University, .

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the role of ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Science of Logic, in relation to their attempts to establish an objective philosophical basis for systematic unity. In the first Critique the principles of the understanding, based on the categories and the schematism, establish the conditions of possibility for experience and objects of experience, but they do not, in themselves, provide the level of rational cognition required to develop a systematic body of knowledge. This can only be achieved through the employment of the logic and judgments of reason, or, in another word, ideas. However, when reason moves beyond the empirical realm to develop its own transcendental ideas which involve unconditioned totalities, such as the immortal soul, the whole world or the existence of God, the result is that it crosses the boundary of its legitimate use. Kant argues that, whereas it is legitimate to use ideas regulatively as a means to orientate the understanding towards systematic unity in nature, they cannot be employed to constitute objects of experience, and, thereby, establish such unity ‘objectively’. In my view, Kant’s position is ambiguous. Furthermore, a close examination of the first Critique reveals that the schematism and the categories themselves rely on metaphysical principles, without resorting to traditional metaphysics.. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant addresses the gulf between the theoretical cognition of nature and the practical laws of freedom by attempting to ‘throw a bridge’ across the two domains, by means of the a priori principle of purposiveness in nature. However, his final works, collected and published as the Opus Postumen, suggest strongly that the task of establishing the idea of a systematic unity capable of providing a philosophical basis for applied natural science in general, and physics in particular, has still to be completed. I will argue that this task is only properly completed in the systematic philosophy of Schelling and, particularly, that of Hegel in the Logic, where he is determined to overcome the antinomies and contradictions that arise inevitably from Kant’s abstract thinking and his artificial separation of form and concept, reason and understanding. The dissertation will consider Hegel’s attempt to ground systematic unity in the speculative logic of the absolute idea, not as a subjective presupposition, but as the full actualisation of the concept. In so doing he is, to a large extent, seeking to rescue Kant from himself.

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