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Coming Down from the Trees:
Metaphysics and the History of Classification
(c) David Kolb, 2002
What is the philosopher supposed to do for the empirical researcher? To what
extent can very general ontological considerations guide the construction of
empirical concepts? This essay traces the relation of three kinds of concepts:
transcendental, empirical, and what I call "meanings of being." I begin by
showing the three kinds of concepts operating in Plato, and then study their
relation in Kant and Hegel, who introduce significant changes that suggest one
meaning for the notion of an "end of metaphysics." There are many meanings
of "metaphysics" and many "ends," but the one I trace is pervasive, and still
active. I conclude by showing how these issues remain divisive in current
philosophical trends.
Plato and Aristotle
We can start with the trajectory that Plato describes in the Republic.
Plato tells us that the master of dialectic has to travel the way up that arrives
at the unhypothetical beginning, and then the way down to completion,
descending with no reliance on sensible perception, traveling through forms to
forms, and ending with forms. At the end of the path the philosopher will
possess a set of necessary and normative characterizations of what is being
studied: the circle, the city, the virtue of justice, the kinds of pleasures, the
statesman. The result would resemble what would later be called an a priori
philosophical science. It would establish the "right" normative classification of
beings.
Plato's dialectical way down is usually interpreted as a progression from
the more general forms to the more specific through his process of collection
and division. The Porphyrian tree of concepts of decreasing generality, for
instance living being on top, animal in the middle, cows further down, illustrates
this descent through genera to ever more particularized species. Plato would
have us "cut reality at its joints" and find the ontologically necessary tree of
genera and species.
Plato illustrates this method when he defines the sophist and the
statesman. In building several definitional trees Plato discusses the method of
dialectic and its ontological presupposition that the forms participate in one
another. Dialectic traces the necessary connections of inclusion and exclusion
inherent in each form.
However, there is a second kind of "concept" involved in Plato's
enterprise. In the Sophist Plato discusses an unusual feature of some very
general forms (being, sameness, and otherness). These forms look as if they
should be at the top of any tree of forms, but they do not really sit comfortably
at any one location on the tree. They relate directly to every single form, which
they "pervade and connect" and so make possible the forms' mutual
participation and division. Plato says that one task of dialectic is to point out
which kinds are consonant, and which are incompatible with one
another--also, whether they are certain kinds that pervade them all
and connect them so that they can blend, and again, where there
are separations, whether there are certain others that traverse the
whole and are responsible for the divisions. (Sophist 253bc;
"responsible for" translates the word aitia.)
Although Plato does not make the point explicitly, Aristotle argues that
being and unity do not relate to other concepts as genera to species; being is
not a genus.
But it is not possible that either unity or being should be a single
genus of things; for . . . it is not possible for the genus . . . to be
predicated of its proper differentiae; so that if unity or being is a
genus, no differentia will either have being or be one. (Metaphysics
III.3, 998b21-28)
Being and unity do not appear on Aristotle's list of the categories that
gives the highest genera of beings. They, and Plato's highest kinds, are not
located at the top of the tree; they are the space within which the tree is
articulated; they touch each item on the tree directly.
These pervasive forms are the ancestors of the medieval transcendental
concepts (ens, unum, verum, bonum, res) and I will use that name for them.
They were called transcendental because they transcended any genus; they
were not located on any branch in a tree of genus and species.
Although neither Plato nor Aristotle make too much of it, there is a
problem about getting from the open space of the transcendentals to the
articulated tree of genera and species. How do we find the joints and
branchings, the proper differences that articulate the realm of being? This
problem is less difficult for Aristotle, who uses a combination of argument and
empirical observation to arrive at his tree of genera and species. The problem
is acute for Plato, who restricts dialectic to the realm of necessary relations
and demands that philosophical science "not make any use at all of sensible
things, but move in forms through forms to forms, and ending with
forms." (Republic 511c)
Implicit in this problem is a third kind of "concept". The examples of
collection and division that Plato offers in the Sophist and the Statesman show
him using a third kind of "concept" alongside the transcendentals and the tree
of genera and species. The third kind of concept offers guidance for making
divisions, and so helps establish genera and species. It regulates the branchings
in the tree.
In the various examples Plato constructs, certain principles of binary
division appear again and again. They create ontological divisions and levels
that can be used to analyze phenomena and set up the tree of concepts. The
most important is that which cuts between entities that possess in themselves
a source of motion (or action or self-determination) and entities that receive
motion (or action or determination) from another and then pass it on. This is
the ontological principle behind the mind/body division and the division between
the realm of the forms and our world, but it inspires other divisions as well, for
example: divine/human production, freemen/slaves, logon/alogon, voluntary/
involuntary, wild/tame animals, as well as many other distinctions Plato draws
between kinds of production and preservation, and kinds of arts, such as
producer/retailer, productive/acquisitive arts, and others. A closely related
distinction cuts between that being whose activity stays in itself and that whose
activity affects others. This leads to more divisions of art and knowledge.
These are not the only general polarities Plato uses to guide his construction of
genus-species trees, but these recur constantly, and many other important
polarities (such as reality/appearance or inside/outside or measure/
measureless) can be related to them.
Aristotle is deeply influenced by these Platonic ontological polarities.
Similar divisions show up in his discussions of actuality and potentiality,
especially when he distinguishes the two kinds of actuality, those that do or do
not have a product outside themselves. This metaphysical machinery gives him
a set of divisions that can guide his empirical study and help him construct the
genus-species trees. Like Plato he divides human skills in accord with these
polarities, and types of knowledge and types of motion, but also grades of
animality, the heavenly bodies, and so on.
In both thinkers these ontological polarities approach the genus-species
trees from the side, as it were, to help in their construction. They advise where
the branches should divide. The relation of these polarities to the
transcendental concepts is not clear. These polarities are not themselves
genera or species, for they are used repeatedly at many places in the tree, to
construct the divisions among many different genera or species. Neither are
they quite repetitions of the transcendental concepts such as being and unity,
for they contain polarities.
In a way these principles give "content" to the transcendentals, which
otherwise remain quite formal. Plato asks in the Sophist how true being can be
distinguished, and he suggests that the mark of "being" would be the "power"
to affect or be affected (247e). Becoming a principle of binary division, this
distinguishes more and less powerful, that is, more and less self-sufficient, kinds
of being. This brings the meaning of being as power to bear on divisions in the
tree. We might say that being as power, with its built-in polarity, gives an
absolute direction to the space opened by the more empty transcendental
concept of being. Similarly, the Aristotelian notion of the kinds of actuality and
potentiality gives "content" to the notion of being, and provides guidance for
the construction of conceptual trees.
The Heideggerian phrase "meaning of being" seems appropriate here,
though I don't mean to imply the whole Heideggerian story of his "history of
being." Still, it does seem possible that such a metaphysical meaning of being
might change while the more formal function of the transcendentals continued.
What would make a meaning of being "metaphysical," in some of the current
meanings of that term, would be the polarity and directionality involved.
If the transcendentals offer an open logical space for the conceptual
trees, the meaning of being gives that space definite dimensions and a metric
and orientation, just as Aristotle's physical space has a built-in directionality
and orientation. Not all directions in logical space are equal. Indeed, that there
are directions at all in logical space is due to such binary principles of division.
These pervasive influences on the articulation of genus-species trees
within the field of the transcendentals can define one meaning of
"metaphysics." It would follow that one version of the so-called "end of
metaphysics" would involve doing away with such built-in directionality in the
opening of logical space. In the remainder of this essay I will show how that
revolution happens in Kant and how it is partly followed up and partly retracted
in Hegel.
Kant
The jump from Aristotle to Kant is long, but as philosophy went on, and
especially after the revolutions and disputes wrought by the rationalists,
Newton, and Hume, some justification for ontological classifications of reality
became urgent, to answer the skeptics, to show that metaphysics was more
than physical science, and to counter the proliferation of philosophical systems.
Kant agrees with Hume that there is no metaphysical necessity to be had
by climbing up a tree of abstraction from experience. Nor can necessity be
found by descending a tree of analyzed Leibnizian concepts. But Kant works
from a new source for ontological categories. In the previous tradition,
categories were derived from the basic features of entities. In Kant ontological
discourse is to be structured by the architectonic and the table of the
categories, but these categories themselves are not derived from an analysis of
the features of beings. Kant derives them from the conditions for the possibility
of determinate thought and the subject-object relation. Furthermore, in Kant
ontological classifications no longer produce much in the way of divisions into
genera and species. Also, in Kant the first and the third kinds of concepts (the
transcendentals and the metaphysical meaning of being) become fused in a
new way.
In the first Critique Kant criticizes the idea that the ontologically basic
concepts are simply the most general items on the tree of genus and species.
Among empirical principles we can distinguish some that are more
general, and so higher in rank than others; but where . . . are we to
draw the line? . . . I ask: Does the concept of the extended belong
to metaphysics? You answer, yes. Then, that of body too? Yes. And
that of fluid body? You now become perplexed; for at this rate
everything will belong to metaphysics. It is evident, therefore, that
the mere degree of subordination (of the particular under the
general) cannot determine the limits of a science; in the case
under consideration, only complete difference of kind and of origin
will suffice. (A843f/B872f)
For Kant the prime ontological categories are not highest genera to be
divided into species. The categories he discovers through his transcendental
analysis have quite another origin and quite another structure.
In Plato and Aristotle, the overall tone is one of discovery by investigating
the nature of things. In Kant the discovery turns inward. The categories emerge
from studying the conditions that make possible assembling the unity of
experience and self across time. In that action, forms are applied, but those
forms are neither empirical nor rationalist nor freely created. The action of
synthesis is unification and presentation; Kant's categories are to give the
dimensions of any possible unification and presentation.
The categories have complex relations among themselves but are not
arranged in a tree structure. Instead the categories are found in four
architectonic groups (quantity, quality, relation, modality), within each of which
the first two categories connect to form the third.
Besides the twelve main transcendental categories, Kant affirms that
there are other ontological concepts that are developed from the main
categories. However, they are not generated by division. Kant says that "The
categories, when combined with the modes of pure sensibility, or with one
another, yield a large number of derivative a priori concepts." (A82/B108) His
emphasis on combination shows that Kant does not think that the relation
among the ontological categories is one of progressive differentiation.
The Kantian categories open a space for possible objects of knowledge.
They apply directly to all objects of thought. In this way they are like the
medieval transcendental concepts. But they have more ontological punch.
Kant's categories are not merely a list of concepts, as in the Medieval lists of
the transcendentals, nor does Kant offer a set of highest genera, as in
Aristotle's list of his categories. Kant's categories structure the possibility of
thought and judgment through a four part structure (the four kinds of
categories) and a subordinate three part structure (the relations within each of
the four kinds), followed by various combining structures. As conditions of
possibility Kant's categories give rise to synthetic a priori principles (about
causality, substance, etc.) that go far beyond the kind of general statements
derived from the medieval transcendentals.
Can we then conclude that the transcendentals of medieval times grow
up to become the Kantian categories? Yes and no. Kant has this to say about
the old transcendentals ("one, true, good"):
These supposedly transcendental predicates of things are, in fact,
nothing but logical requirements and criteria of all knowledge of
things in general, and prescribe for such knowledge the categories
of quantity, namely, unity, plurality, and totality. But these
categories . . . have . . . been used only in their formal meaning, as
being of the nature of logical requisites of all knowledge, and yet at
the same time have been incautiously converted from being
criteria of thought to be properties of things in themselves. . . . We
have not, therefore, in the concepts of unity, truth, and perfection,
made any addition to the transcendental table of the categories, as
if it were in any respect imperfect. (KRV B113-116)
For Kant the medieval transcendentals can, in one sense, all be gathered
under the categories of quantity (unity, plurality, totality). His own categories
go beyond them in detail and generative power. In another sense, Kant says
that the medieval transcendentals express the "general logical rules, for the
agreement of knowledge with itself," but in so doing they do not apply as
ontological characteristics of objects.
So what becomes of the trichotomy I discerned in Plato and Aristotle?
Earlier I have suggested a threefold division among transcendental concepts
that open a space for other concepts, trees of genera and species, and
meanings of being that guide the articulation of the trees. In Plato these roles
are played by the highest kinds discussed in the Sophist, the forms for genera
and species, and being as power. In Aristotle the roles are played by the notions
of being and unity, the ten categories plus empirical genera and species, and
being as kinds of actuality and potentiality. The medieval transcendentals play
no important role in Kant, and his table of categories is not, like Aristotle's, a
list of highest genera, and he offers no polarized meaning of being like Plato's.
What we find instead is that (a) the table of the categories as a whole takes
over the space-opening role of the medieval transcendental concepts, (b) the
tree of genera and species includes some foundational concepts of the sciences
plus empirical genera and species, and (c) what guides the branchings on the
tree is the table of categories.
Notice that Kant's categories appear in the third place as well as in the
first. We have seen that they fill and expand the role of the old transcendentals:
every being that appears must fall directly under the categories; the categories
are "transcendental" in the old sense as well as in Kant's new sense. They open
the conceptual space for appearance. Now I want to show that they also fill the
role of the old metaphysical meanings of being, because the structure of the
table of categories offers some directions about how to approach the analysis
of any realm of being and how to construct a tree of genera and species.
As an example I will turn briefly to Kant's treatment of the notion of
matter.
Kant is not building trees. Because Kant structures his system overall
according to the division of form and content, and what is a priori affects only
the form of experience, you might think that there would be no problem in the
relation of the categories to any tree of species and genera. We would let
empirical observation fill in the genera while remaining within the formal limits
demanded by the table of categories and the overall architectonic. Why have
any a priori at all guide to tree construction?
But Kant wants to do special metaphysics as well as general ontology. He
wants to "construct the concept" that specifies necessary properties and some
laws for at least two kinds of being: matter and thinking substance, which are
the objects of outer and inner sense. We can see this in operation at the
beginning of his discussion of matter, which is the kind of being that is formally
required by our mode of outer intuition.
Kant discusses matter in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science, which was written after the Prolegomena but before the B edition of
the Critique. There, and also in the notes gathered as his Opus Postumum, Kant
tries to find a priori necessity for at least some wide genera of material beings
and forces. In these arguments, the categories play a role quite similar to the
role played by Plato's conception of being as power, guiding the divisions.
Kant insists that the four divisions of the table of the categories are the
key to developing any system of ideas that will be relevant to science:
The schema for the completeness of a metaphysical system,
whether of nature in general or of corporeal nature in particular, is
the table of the categories. For there are no more pure concepts of
the understanding, which can concern the nature of things. Under
the four classes of quantity, quality, relation, and finally modality,
all determinations of the universal concept of matter in general,
and therefore, everything that can be thought a priori respecting it,
that can be presented in mathematical construction, or that can be
given in experience as a determinate object of experience, must be
capable of being brought. (Metaphysical Foundations
473-477/11-16)
The first chapter of the Metaphysical Foundations presents basic
concepts of matter considered as pure quantity, the second presents concepts
of matter considered under its quality (as moving force), the third and fourth
present concepts concerning matter in relation and with reference to its
modality of appearance. The result is not a set of genera and species, but it is
a list of what Kant considers the necessary basic categories for this kind of
object.
This program in the Metaphysical Foundations was not Kant's last
word on the subject. In the notes that make up his Opus Postumum, Kant
worked and reworked a proposed "Transition from the Metaphysical
Foundations of Natural Science to Physics." There was need for a further
bridge discipline that would connect the Metaphysical Foundations with
empirical physics. He sought to bring the empirical manifold of physical
moving forces into contact with an a priori order, without producing
either a new empirical science or an extension of the table of categories.
In this work too he claimed that "the moving forces of matter will be best
divided according to the order of the categories, in terms of their
quantity, quality, relation, and modality." (OP 21.291)
In both the Metaphysical Foundations and the Opus Postumum the table
of the categories tells us not only the general requirements of thought but also
suggests how to analyze and group physical moving forces. The table fills both
the role of the old transcendentals (opening the space for classification) and
the role of the meaning of being (guiding the construction of classifications).
What is important for our purposes is that the meaning of being role
played by the table of categories is flat and formal. That is, although the table
provides a conceptual order for the species of force where some divisions come
before others, it does not establish an ontological hierarchy in the classic
manner. Plato's meaning of being as power supplied a repeatable principle of
binary division that inherently privileged one side of the divisions. This is not the
case with Kant's categories as guides for classification. Some forces may be
logically or categorically prior to others, but this does not mean that they are
more "being" than the others, in the way that for Plato or Aristotle a full
actuality is a more perfect example of being than a dependent actuality.
In the Metaphysical Foundations the definitions of matter and the various
propositions about matter and force that are proved in each chapter build on
the previous chapters, without supplanting one another or being absorbed into
one final definition. They are not related as genus to species. The propositions
proved in the different chapters all describe the same phenomena. The various
forces have their concepts are constructed in a certain order, but they are
ontologically all on the same level.
Although Kant emphasizes the overriding division of the a priori versus
the empirical, the division of a priori and empirical is not a duality that guides
the construction of genus and species trees. Nor does the table of categories
provide highest genera to be divided into species. They are more like the old
transcendentals, and yet they also give guidance in the construction of
classifications: the two functions which were separated in the Greeks are fused
in Kant.
In that fusion, to return to my spatial metaphor, the table of the
categories sets the dimensionality of logical space, but eliminates its built-in
orientation or directionality. We have moved from Aristotelian to Newtonian
logical space. In such a space the construction of trees of genera and species
becomes more empirical, and correspondingly of less interest to the
philosopher.
Hegel
Though his work in progress was never completed, Kant was trying to
make transcendental philosophy into what he said it should be, an architectonic
and encyclopedic formal a priori science. With this goal we have moved some
distance towards Hegel, or perhaps the distance was not so great all along.
Kant's deduction of the categories was considered incomplete by his
successors. They objected to the "clue" he had found in the Aristotelian table
of judgments, which seemed too empirical. There were also all the dualities that
Kant seemed to presuppose, subject/object, in/out, appearance/reality, which
had not received a proper transcendental deduction.
Hegel sought new ways to "deduce" categories. He kept Kant's basic
strategy of deriving categories from the conditions for determinate thought,
but added the claim that the self-investigation of pure thought thinking itself
overarches any duality that might be used to "locate" its results as "only
subjective" or only concerned with "appearances." For Hegel the basic
ontological categories arise from pure thought thinking itself, thinking its own
motions as its own content, seeking the conditions of possibility of ontological
definiteness, togetherness, and self-coincidence, of which self-consciousness is
a mode.
Hegel, like Kant, insists that ordinary empirical concepts do not turn into
ontological categories by getting more and more universal.
This [empirical] universal is itself already determinate and
consequently only a member of a division. Hence there is for it a
higher universal, and for this again a higher, and so on . . . to
infinity. For the cognition here considered there is no immanent
limit. (WL 12.217/803)
Full-blooded ontological categories are to be generated in another way
than by abstraction from given empirical data. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
could be seen as a version of the Platonic way up to the unhypothetical
beginning, which for Hegel is the activity of pure thought. The Science of Logic
articulates that beginning. The rest of the system gives a version of the
Platonic way down to the concrete, as the logical categories are further
determined to yield derivative concepts and to help organize genera and
species.
Hegel is responding not just to Kant but to Reinhold's demand for greater
systematicity than Kant had provided. Though he uses Kant's clues from the
triplex structure of the category sets, and Kant's idea that the categories can
be combined with one another, Hegel gets much more ontological detail than
Kant. But in the Logic Kant's direction of progression is reversed: the dialectical
combination of categories with one another yields fuller and richer concepts
rather than derivative and lower ones.
In Hegel my three kinds of concepts look like this: (1) in the role of the
transcendental concepts he has the Absolute Idea, the final category of the
Logic, (2) for the tree of genera and species he has his philosophical treatment
of various areas such as nature and history, (3) as a "meaning of being" that
guides the constructions of more detailed concepts he has once again the
Absolute Idea. As in Kant, the same item occurs in slots one and three. The
action and content that open the space for empirical concepts also provides
guidance for their construction.
The Absolute Idea with its internal movements fills the role of the old
transcendentals by providing the space within which empirical concepts can be
constructed. And it also fills the role of the old metaphysical meaning of being
that guides the construction of subsidiary categories. It does both these roles,
however, in a new way.
The old transcendentals that grew into Kant's table of the categories
have now in Hegel become the entire Logic. The Logic moves through a
sequence of kernels for ontologies that were in earlier ages developed into
guides for classification and for constructing genus and species trees. The
pattern of the motion of that sequence is self-described at the end of the
Logic. The last items in the process both enact and describe the movement of
the process. The makes space for determinations of thought, but not for a
single concept or a static set.
For Kant the medieval transcendentals could be gathered under the
categories of quantity. In Hegel the medieval transcendentals show up within
the logical sequence, but are refracted into multiple categories on different
levels. He has no single location for a single concept of unity or reality, and the
absolute idea is neither a static tree nor a blank formal space.
The absolute idea might at first look like a super-category providing an
ultimate metaphysical meaning of being. The Idea is unique in its union of form
and content, but that content is just the preceding logical sequence taken as a
motion with its own pattern. If there is a final meaning of being, it is this
movement that poses itself from immediacy to determinateness and then takes
that back into full self-possession. Its content is the previous sequence now
seen in terms of the method of its progress. The absolute idea gathers within,
not over, the logical sequence, and it describes a set of transitions that are at
once methodological form and ontological content. Its content is a description
of its form, which is the process of the generation of its content through the
sequence of the other categories.
As in Kant, what takes the place of the medieval transcendentals offers
more content and structure than the old concepts could do. But Hegel's logic is
also the self-referential movement of transition among various metaphysical
meanings of being that offer temporary dimensioning to the space of being.
These are gathered within a motion that could be considered a single formal
meaning of being, except that the detailing of that form refuses to stand aloof
and complete in itself, but throws us back into the varied transitions and
contents.
While Kant opens a formal space in which the categories apply equally to
all objects, Hegel produces a system of categories that apply in different ways
to different spheres and instances, yet they are not empirical concepts and are
not related in genus-species trees. So the first and third roles can no longer be
separated even to the extent that was possible with Kant.
We can ask Hegel: do all beings we can think about exemplify at least
some of the categories of the Logic? Yes. We can also ask: do all beings
exemplify the full overall motion of the Logic? Here the answer is more complex
than it would be for Kant. For Kant the table of categories is like the
Aristotelian scheme of actuality and potentiality; it can be applied in any area
of being. For Hegel the logical categories and movements do apply to
everything, but not everything can contain the full movement. All the stages of
the Logic apply to all real beings. But in Platonic fashion Hegel allows that there
can be beings that are not fully real. That is, there can be things (in nature or
in social relationships and institutions) that remain abstract, in Hegel's sense of
the word. They cannot in their structure manifest the full movement of the
logical Idea. This means that they are not in his sense fully concrete, self-
appropriating being, so that they cannot and do not exist on their own but only
as moments within a richer totality. The study of just which totalities will
contain just which moments is Hegel's equivalent of the old project of
constructing classifications based on a tree of genera and species. It moves him
some distance back from Kant's formal meaning of being toward the normative
ontological judgments of Plato and Aristotle, though not in terms of genus-
species divisions. This moves Hegel back towards Plato and "metaphysics" in
the sense I have used, without returning to "metaphysics" as a study of beings
independent of Kantian critical considerations.
The way Hegel uses logical categories to make ontological judgments is
most clear in the Philosophy of Right, but I will parallel my earlier discussion of
Kant on matter by a quick look at the early sections of Hegel's Philosophy of
Nature, which treats of matter and force.
At the end of the Introduction to the philosophy of nature Hegel uses his
logical patterns to structure the divisions of his treatment:
The Idea as Nature is (I) in the determination of asunderness or
mutual outsideness, of infinite separatedness, the unity of form
being outside it . . . Mechanics; (II) in the determination of
particularity, so that reality is posited with an immanent
determinateness of form and with an existent difference in it. . . .
Physics; (III) in the determination of subjectivity, in which the real
differences of form are also brought back to the ideal unity which
has found itself and is for itself--Organics. The division is made
from the standpoint of the concept grasped in its totality." (E 252)
Kant used the structure of the table of categories to divide his treatment
of matter and force, assigning different forces to different points in the
structure. Hegel uses the dialectical patterns found in the Logic to structure his
own treatment of matter and force. Hegel's logical structures are more
elaborated than Kant's, and the application to Nature more complexly layered.
There is no point for point transference from the logical progression to the
philosophy of nature; multiple logical patterns are used at the same time, and
not always in the order in which those patterns appear in the Logic.
The diagram below lines up the earliest sections of Hegel's Science of
Logic against the early sections of his Philosophy of Nature. The arrows
indicate the application of logical patterns in the discussion of nature. What is
significant is how the arrows do not lie parallel but cross and recross as Hegel
applies the dialectical patterns as needed.
Hegel and Kant
Hegel knew Kant's Metaphysical Foundations, and although Hegel's
Philosophy of Nature contains no lengthy discussion of Kant's views, the order
of treatment of the early topics is fairly similar. Hegel mentions Kant four times
in the early parts of the philosophy of nature, but none of these mentions deal
with the details of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations. Hegel does discuss Kant's
doctrine of matter at some length in the larger Logic. There he censures Kant
for treating the basic forces of matter (attraction, repulsion, and their species)
as if they were externally related properties that just happen to show up in the
same substance. (We might read some of Kant's efforts in his Opus Postumum
as stemming from a similar worry about his earlier work.) What Hegel says
about Kant's treatment of forces indicates the degree to which Hegel refuses
to take the act of division and classification as final, and replaces it with
movements within a totality.
Their respective discussion of physical forces also shows us something
important about the way Kant and Hegel alter the ancient search for normative
classification. Neither of the Germans seeks to construct Plato's necessary tree
of genera and species. But neither would be satisfied with a philosophy that just
stated a few formal necessities and left to empirical observation the task of
drawing up classifications of whatever entities and trees of genera and species
just happened to exist--though this picture of philosophy has become common
enough nowadays. While both Germans concede that at some level we do
eventually just assemble lists and group empirical causes, both think that a
good deal of necessary structure is needed to enable that activity.
So Kant and Hegel do not offer a philosophical science that produces an
overall tree of genera and species classifications, but neither do they end up
with a list of externally related entities, properties, and groups. When they get
down to the business of dividing genera into species (and this is late in the
game for both of them) they look for more than mere subordination and
adjacency. In his treatment of matter and force, Kant organizes the species of
force according to the table of the categories, and so into something akin to an
order of prior and posterior. Hegel tries to find through the differentiated
species of force a movement of self-division and self-affirmation. His dialectical
patterns are to show how the division into species is necessary to the self-
affirmation of the genus, and how the species have some echo of this and other
dialectical patterns in their particularities.
For both Kant and Hegel the applications of their ontological schemes are
not simple transfers from one field to another; both thinkers are supple and
ingenious in what more empirical concepts they choose to link to their
ontological machinery. But that very suppleness should increase our worry that
in both cases, but especially in Hegel, they are working with a repertory of
structures from which they choose to draw this or that pattern. That choice
seems more flexible and more empirical than their methodological
pronouncements allow, and more under the influence of historical factors that
are not supposed to be operative at that level of necessary knowledge.
Both Kant and Hegel are influenced by current science and its disputes
(dynamism over mechanism, the nature of chemical compounds, Goethe's
theory of colors, puzzles about the ether, and so on). Both share a special
antagonism to the mechanical picture of nature as made up of externally
related self-complete atoms--Kant and especially Hegel are deeply anti-atomist
in their physics, in their ontology, and in their theories of meaning.
Hegel says explicitly that it is the business of philosophy to take up
current science and to find the necessity behind the categories and laws that
science has developed (E 9). Kant does not put the point that way, but he is
willing to have his a priori science take sides, as in the dispute between
mechanism and dynamism. Both thinkers, however, view their comments on
current scientific disputes not as the validation of one of a pair of equally
plausible hypotheses but as showing that one side of the dispute is badly
conceived or ultimately un-thinkable.
Although both thinkers want philosophy to keep an eye on current
science, they differ concerning the stance of the philosopher. Hegel does not,
like Kant, approach the science of his time seeking to draw lines between a
priori laws and empirical statements. Rather he seeks to find in current science
the traces of the concept and notion that he knows from the logic must already
be there. The Kantian philosopher stands firmly on the established ground of
the a priori. The Hegelian philosopher moves in the circle of the self-
differentiation of the Idea, which encompasses both the pure thought of the
categories and the self-particularizations that are found in the otherness of
nature. Those particularizations are examined in the confidence that they
already embody the categorial structures of the Idea. "Believe in reason, no
matter how contingent things seem to be--that the world moves according to
reason."
There are many more comparisons that could be drawn between their
treatments. For instance, we could talk about the way Kant's entire analysis
works within an overarching subject-object relation that Hegel does without.
Here I want to follow out another comparison that concerns my theme.
Consider what we get from the two thinkers. Kant is out to set up certain
distinctions and orders of priority, and so is Hegel. Both thinkers deal in
authoritative classifications. But Kant seeks synthetic a priori statements. Each
of Kant's chapters in his treatment of matter tries to prove some necessary
propositions and dismiss other alternative propositions. You can sum up Kant's
results in a series of statements that look like a prelude to or a part of
Newtonian physics. Classifications occur through and within those statements.
On the other hand, looking for a set of statements that sums up Hegel's
philosophy of nature would be a frustrating task. There are no conclusions that
you can walk away with. Hegel is qualifying various ranges of predicates and
discourses. Insofar as there are results they have to do with judgments about
the order of dependence and the adequacy of different kinds of discourse. For
example, Hegel tries to show that Kepler's discourse about motion is superior in
certain ways to Newton's. He does not deny Newton's, but he refuses to take it
as the first or last word. But then Kepler does not have the last word either.
There are no final propositions and what there are of final classifications occur
within a motion that is not that of classifying.
Implied here is an important difference in what takes the place of the old
transcendental concepts. For Kant the conditions for language and experience
can be isolated and reported in a series of straightforward formal principles.
These principles level the ontological playing field. In the space opened by the
categories, there is one non-polarized meaning of being for the phenomenal
world. The transcendental categories are articulated not in a tree of genera and
species, but in a series of synthetic a priori statements that apply to all
entities. Philosophy then examines the warrants for claims within the space set
up by those formal conditions. A large part, but not all, of current analytic
philosophy espouses a modified version of this program.
Hegel's logic offers a fusion of the transcendentals with a variety of
metaphysical meanings of being, each given its place in an overall motion. That
motion with its self-description in the Absolute Idea is not a set of propositions
on some meta-level. There is no static higher level; there is no independent
platform from which it can all be reported. We have to be consciously within
the motion. Its "summary" is its own self-description, but that description is not
a report on a static form, but a re-enactment of the motion of thought,
describing itself by doing itself. The Hegelian movement occurs as a series of
purported wholes and their self-articulations. These are neither trees of genera
and species nor sets of necessary propositions, but they do provide
classifications. Any formal conditions are caught up within the movement,
which is not describable in a purely formal way. A large part, but not all, of
current Continental philosophy espouses a modified version of this program.
This End of Metaphysics Today
In classical and medieval philosophy there was much earnest construction
of large genus-species trees that were supposed to cut reality at its necessary
empirical joints. Kant stopped that kind of metaphysical adventure. If we take
this "end of metaphysics" as the loss of a single meaning of being that provides
an absolute orientation or built-in polarity for logical space, then almost all
contemporary philosophy has embraced that end. Genus-species trees are no
longer of deep philosophical significance. When they are fought over
philosophically, it is usually not the details of one tree versus another, but the
overall status of such classifications, as in realist-conventionalist disputes.
While there is some plausibility to the general characterization at the end
of the previous section, describing analytic philosophy as Kantian and
continental philosophy as Hegelian, closer examination suggests that on both
sides of that divide we can find both Kantian and Hegelian ways of dealing with
the end of ontological or transcendental guidance.
The focal issue is the possibility of a single meaning of being. The Kantian
style of thought fuses the transcendentals into a structure of presuppositions
that can be thought of as providing a formal meaning of being, without the
polarities and primacies in most of the traditional meanings of being. This
approach tends towards reportorial and argumentative prose.
The Hegelian style disperses the transcendentals into a movement that
we are constituted within. This can be described as one oddly broken meaning
of being or as a movement out of which many such meanings emerge. This
style can tend more towards performative than reportorial textual gestures.
In those species of analytic philosophy that aim for the primacy of logical
analysis and avoid a fully naturalized epistemology, but also in many versions of
Continental critical theory, we find something Kantian stripped of Kant's
detailed table of the categories and his architectonic of the sciences. The
categories have become slimmer formal conditions for discourse, and there is
nothing like Kant's attempt to extend necessity into the foundations of physical
science. The formal conditions open a level field on which one builds such
empirical concepts as one can. All genus-species trees have become empirical.
Such a formal analysis of conditions of possibility is often supplemented by a
general pragmatism, which could be seen as a mutated version of of Kant's
overarching subject-object relation and his distinction between the realm of
appearance and things in themselves. There are no polarized metaphysical
meanings of being to guide the construction of empirical concepts -- this is the
"end of metaphysics" described above -- but there is one non-polarized
"factual" meaning of being as presence that is enforced for all entities -- this is
a continuation of "metaphysics" in another sense of the term. The status of
formal analysis itself is not taken as problematic. Formal analysis is securely
located within unchallenged dualities such as form/content, epistemological/
ontological, and logical/psychological.
In more Wittgensteinian and Rortian-pragmatic species of analytic
philosophy, and in phenomenological and hermeneutic species of Continental
philosophy, we find something Hegelian, where the transcendentals remain
fused with a motion within which forms or structures come to be. This
resembles Hegel's process, but his circle is broken. Pure thought is
compromised and its motions spill over in all directions--Plato's form of
otherness returns with a vengeance. So we get deconstructive and hermeneutic
and other attempts to find movements and differences within the most fixed
systems and polarities. The motion of being is neither Platonic harmony and
differentiation nor Hegelian self-division and re-appropriation. What goes around
doesn't come all the way around. The motion is incomplete and broken and self-
transgressive. In this case the status of formal analysis is very problematic
indeed, since something like the older Hegelian transcendental strictures
against purely formal unities still apply, and, as in Hegel, they apply to
themselves as well. Standard dualities are challenged, without locating them
within larger fixed conceptual structures. As in Hegel, this leads not to nihilistic
paralysis but into a self-reflexive motion of thought or interpretation.
Each style tries to recreate the other in its own image. The modern
Kantian tries to force the modern Hegelian to admit a meta-level, a formal
description of the motion; the Hegelian tries to force the Kantian to see that
such descriptions are within a motion that they do not capture. The modern
Kantian has rejected some of Kant's basic dichotomies, and the modern
Hegelian has denied the purity of the logical categories, so we are really dealing
with new species here.
These Kantian and Hegelian trends do not exhaust contemporary options.
In keeping with our beginning with Greek philosophy, we could describe another
main trend as atomist and Epicurean. The opening of space for concepts is
seen as arising from the combinatory play of multiple forces or elements,
rather than as any kind of unified or unifying action of subjectivity or thought.
This trend embraces thinkers on both sides of the analytic-continental divide,
from Nietzsche and Deleuze to the evolutionary and naturalized
epistemologists. For them, the field where conceptual trees can be planted is a
product of multiple local forces and non-intentional operations. There is no
unified space of meaning, no overall action of unity or self-presentation or self-
return. These thinkers offer only formal and pragmatic constraints on empirical
concept creation, without desiring any more than evolutionary accounts of the
origin or legitimacy of these constraints. Because of its anti-transcendentalism
this trend can be seen as an even more final end of metaphysics, but in many
cases it reintroduces a polarized meaning of being as power, and uses that
meaning to guide classifications and evaluations in ways reminiscent of Plato's
meaning of being.