understanding and the speculative metaphysics of reason Kant’s philosophy marks one of the significant edges of the “meta- physical period” in Western philosophy. that being said, we must nonetheless take care to note how the sense of “former metaphysics” potentially differs from that of “pre-Kantian metaphysics.” For one, Hegel is not averse, in some instances, to counting locke among the metaphysicians, and this fact indicates that “metaphysics” is not, for Hegel, co-extensive with rationalist metaphysics. Furthermore, he sees important continuities between older, “dogmatic” metaphysics and Kant’s transcendental philosophy: like the dogmatic metaphysicians, in his theoretical philosophy Kant is exclusively concerned with the finite determinations of the understanding; to the extent that he con- siders the possibility of an alternative mode of cognition (as he does in respect to the intuitive intellect), it is only to set it up as a hypothetical point of contrast to our finite, discursive understanding. Finally, the period of the former metaphysics is demarcated not by Kant alone, but by Kant and Jacobi, whom Hegel almost invariably mentions together in this connection.47 this fact is significant. Jacobi is by no stretch of the imagination a transcendental philosopher. His critique of metaphys- ics rests on the argument that metaphysical pretensions to scientific cognition of the unconditioned necessarily end in atheism, fatalism, nihilism; differently from Kant, his emphasis lies not on proving the logical incoherence of special metaphysics, but on revealing the mor- ally and existentially repugnant consequences of a strictly coherent metaphysical system.
From this perspective, Kant’s transcendental explanation of the scope and limits of theoretical philosophy, that is, the function of the categories in constituting unified empirical consciousness of appear- ances and their dependence on sensible intuition for content, is not at the heart of the story. indeed, it is impossible not to notice that Kant’s
46 cf. Hegel’s common characterization of Kant and Jacobi at tW 20:384, who are criti- cized as leaving us with an “unknown god,” merely “god as such, god with the deter- mination of what is unlimited, universal, undetermined.”
47 cf. the discussion in the introduction.
transcendental subjectivism is the subject of at least as much Hegelian polemic as Jacobi’s insistence on the sufficiency of immediate certainty as a guarantor of the reality of god, freedom, and personality. rather, the dual significance of Kant and Jacobi is that, on the one hand, both insist on the necessary relation of the finite mind to the infinite (the unconditioned), that is, on the necessity of metaphysics; this distin- guishes them from the superficial Popularphilosophie and Unphilosophie of late enlightenment psychology, anthropology, and common sense with their misguided anti-metaphysical, anti-systematic affect.
on the other hand, both insist that scientific cognition of the infin- ite (the unconditioned) is impossible on the basis of the cognitive forms the understanding has to rely on. Kant argues that attempts at scien- tific metaphysics lead the understanding into antinomies and other devastating logical embarrassments; Jacobi argues that the forms of scientific cognition necessarily construe their objects as conditioned, dependent, externally determined and thus not only falsify the objects of metaphysics (the unconditioned) in advance, but ultimately instill a perverse belief in their unreality. therefore all that remains of the former metaphysics is its fundamental directedness toward what exists in and for itself, substantial being (“rational faith”), minus any cogni- tive means for moving determinately in its direction – a compass with- out a map to go with it.48
the negative effects of attempting to formulate the unconditioned in terms of our conceptual scheme motivate Kant and Jacobi, in their separate ways, to place relatively narrow limits on the scope of the categories, and this is the germ for the idea of a critique of the under- standing, a critique of categories, a critique of our conceptual scheme in the Hegelian sense of critique.
By metaphysics, in its strictest sense, Hegel therefore understands the philosophical standpoint (1) for which the conceptual scheme represented by the categories (by the understanding) is ultimate and (2) which explicitly undertakes to determine the nature of the uncon- ditioned by means of the categories. it makes no difference in this context whether the categories are understood realistically as onto- logically ultimate or idealistically as (merely) epistemologically ultim- ate. to the extent that Kant and Jacobi deny the possibility of (2), that
48 cf. andreas arndt, “Figuren der endlichkeit: Zur Dialetik nach Kant,” in annett Jubara and David Bensler (eds.), Dialektik und Differenz: Festschrift für Milan Prucha (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag 2001), 91–104.
is, the possibility of determining the unconditioned in terms of the categories, they initiate the project of a critique of metaphysics. to the extent, however, that their attitude towards (1), the irreducible and ultimate nature of the categories, is ambiguous, both can be seen still to have one foot in the metaphysical mode of thought.
in spite of themselves, Kant and Jacobi remain unwilling and unwit- ting metaphysicians. they belong to the epoch of thinking whose end they have brought about. they are basis and the starting point of a new age in philosophy, yet an age to which on Hegel’s view they do not wholly belong.
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