Hegel’s Critique of Kant: From Dichotomy to Identity by Sally Sedgwick (review)

Hegel’s polemics against his predecessors frequently seem more like straw-man arguments than carefully devised criticisms, and so lead many scholars to conclude that he did not engage in diligent study of his opponents. Sally Sedgwick’s book attempts to correct this impression in the important case of Kant. She allows that, on their surface, many of Hegel’s criticisms of Kantian doctrines are misleading. But she defends Hegel by reconstructing his arguments within a more compelling general strategy. Her aim is to show, on the one hand, that Hegel’s arguments derived from a careful study of Kantian texts. On the other hand, she attempts the more ambitious position that Hegel’s accounts of subjectivity and cognition are superior to Kant’s. The volume is clearly written, impressively argued, and transparently structured.

The broad framework for Hegel’s attack on Kant rests on three interrelated themes. The first is the concept of intuitive understanding, which Sedgwick shows (chs. 1 and 2) Hegel to have plausibly adopted and developed from his early reading of Kant. Sedgwick skillfully demonstrates how Hegel’s more abbreviated polemics were coherently developed from earlier studies such as “Faith and Knowledge.” She thereby executes her negative aims: Hegel’s criticism of Kant is in this case sympathetic, and his later doctrine stems largely from Kant himself. The notion of “organic unity” thus appears as a plausible correction to Kant’s dualism of concept and intuition. What is lacking, however, is a sense of how this notion should resolve the epistemological puzzles presented in the second half of the book.

The second theme (chs. 3 and 4) is the purportedly skeptical conclusion of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. Sedgwick allows (123) that Kant’s argument does not to lead to skepticism by his own criterion, but she insists that Hegel isolates an important sense in which Kant fails to account for our knowledge of reality. Kantians will be less convinced by this portion of the text, since it offers too little elaboration of the supposedly skeptical implications of Kant’s position.

This shortcoming is compensated for somewhat by the third theme. Sedgwick argues persuasively (ch. 5) that Kant’s account of subjectivity is insufficiently modest. While Kant alleged to uncover the pretensions of rationality, he was inattentive to the sense in which his very enterprise rested on “a certain vanity” concerning our critical powers. Hegel, by contrast, accepts the fact that our abstract reasoning is fundamentally limited, and so is more hesitant concerning the finality of our epistemic categories: “[N] of just our scientific investigations but also our meta-level efforts to perform critique are invariably accompanied by a certain blindness” (157). This leads Sedgwick into a spirited defense of Hegel’s historicism, in the course of which she accuses Kant of possessing unjustified confidence in the ability of inquiry to transcend historical circumstance.

From here Sedgwick proceeds (chs. 5 and 6) to sketch a notion of Hegelian criticism that would replace the Kantian version. Critical reason, for Hegel, operates from within historically given conceptual frameworks or “shapes of consciousness.” The conclusion, however, is not sufficiently pursued. Sedgwick succeeds in demonstrating how Kant’s less modest method leads him to a “question-begging” solution to the third antinomy, and this is proposed as an example of how a properly understood Hegelian critique applies to Kant’s arguments. But one wonders what is left to do, for Hegel, once the weaknesses of Kant’s approach are accepted. In other words, what specific tasks does a Hegelian philosophy accomplish that the Kantian one did not?

This mild complaint hinges on the rather unambitious rhetorical context of the work. Sedgwick confesses in a number of passages that her arguments were motivated by Kant scholars who claim that Hegel did not understand Kant. While this aim seems reasonable enough, it is strange that she presents Kant scholars such as Allison, Ameriks, and Guyer as offering “the standard interpretation” of Hegel...