Given the centrality of the transcendental unity of apperception as I have depicted it here, it remains a curious fact that in the literature on Hegel’s critique of Kant that issue is not often made the explicit subject of extended treatment. One exception is Karl Ameriks, who, in his paper “Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” does make the issue one of Hegel’s primary charges against Kant. There, after showing how Hegel sees the transcendental unity 224
of apperception as a missed chance, Ameriks argues that Hegel’s argument on this point actually begs the question against Kant. For Ameriks, Hegel’s claim amounts essentially to claiming 225
that Kant did not do what Hegel would have with the idea of the transcendental unity of apperception. But the fact that Kant did not employ the concept in an argument for absolute idealism, and did not use it to eliminate the idea of things in themselves, is not a flaw in Kant’s philosophy, at least not according to Kant himself. For Ameriks, it is only because of Hegel’s own philosophical agenda that he sees Kant’s representational conception of the transcendental unity of apperception as a mistake. 226
The primary goal of this chapter is to present and motivate a study of the transcendental unity of apperception as a key player in the connection between Kant and Hegel. On the fact that it is does play a key role, Ameriks and I are agreed. And to a certain degree, in establishing that point it is immaterial whether Hegel’s claims on this count constitute legitimate objections to the Kantian system. It is enough that Hegel makes these criticisms and can be understood as building his own philosophy out of the weaknesses he finds in Kant on this point. Nonetheless, if Hegel’s arguments were merely question-begging, that would weaken the importance of the
224 He describes it as “one of three major weaknesses that Hegel finds in Kant’s deduction.” Ameriks,
“Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” 5.
225 “As far as I can see, it is only with a question-begging assumption of absolute idealism that Hegel can
force on Kant the kind of all encompassing "productive" representation of the I that he does.” Ameriks, “Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy,” 8.
connection here and make it harder to justify a reading focused on that connection. So I want to take a moment to address these charges against Hegel’s reading of Kant.
Whether a criticism of another philosopher is question-begging depends on the
philosophical goals of the criticized philosopher. So to understand whether Hegel is in error on this count, we need to understand Kant’s goals. Kant’s primary stated goal in the first Critique is to explain how synthetic a priori judgments are possible - he describes this issue as the “the real problem of pure reason.” But this question about synthetic a priori judgments is a more 227
precise and philosophically determined way of a framing a more basic question: how can we know substantive necessary truths about the world? This same question has plagued many philosophers prior to Kant, including thinkers like Plato and Hume, virtually none of whom thought of it as a question that was primarily concerned with appearances alone. Although 228
they did not always make a strong distinction between appearances and things in themselves, if pressed, it seems unlikely that Plato, Hume, or even any everyday person, would think of the question as primarily focused on how we experience the world. If anything, they would be more likely to instinctively conceive of the question as an issue concerning things in themselves, and not mere appearances. 229
Bearing this in mind, note that Kant’s representational conception of the transcendental unity of apperception can serve as an answer this question only insofar as the synthetic a priori
227 A few sentences later, he goes on to say that “On the solution of this problem, or on a satisfactory proof
that the possibility that it demands to have explained does not in fact exist at all, metaphysics now stands or falls.” Kant, Critique of Pure Reason , B19.
228 The Platonic theory of forms could be read as an answer to this question, and Hume’s skepticism about
causality is based on his claim that we cannot have any such knowledge of necessary truths.
229 Hume, for example, was not a self-avowed skeptic about causality because he thought we did not
experience causality. He would agree that we experience certain connections as causally necessary. He would deny, however, that there is any such necessity even in our experience, since what we describe as causal necessitation is simply the product of repeated habituation. Moreover, even the (illusory)
experience of such necessary causal connections is not, for him, a necessary one but merely a contingently existing habit of the human mind.
Plato, too, would be deeply dissatisfied if the only way of establishing the existence of the forms was to make them necessary features of human cognition.
judgments in question are construed as being judgements about objects understood as appearances . Indeed, that is Kant’s key innovation; the theory of transcendental idealism, by taking the objects of experiences to be appearances and not things in themselves, is able to demonstrate the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements. This shift from things in
themselves to appearances, and the corresponding shift from a study of the nature of the object to the nature of the subject, is key to the answer Kant wants to give to his question. In other 230
words, Kant is able to resolve the matter, but only by re-defining the objects about which we form judgments, taking them not to be things in themselves, but appearances only.
This is a major advance on prior thinkers, who merely dogmatically assumed that such judgements were possible. But it also marks a subtle shifting of the goalposts. The original question was, if not directly about things in themselves, at least neutral as to whether it was them or appearances that we were concerned with. Kant answers it, but by restricting our
knowledge to appearances only; in doing so he is answering a slightly different question than the one originally posed.
So in charging Kant with misunderstanding the transcendental unity of apperception, Hegel is not begging the question. Instead, in effect, he is saying that a better answer to the question can be given, one that does not rely on narrowing its scope and thus restricting our knowledge to appearances. To put it more forcefully, Hegel is arguing that Kant does not in fact succeed in addressing the problem he raises for himself, insofar as he redefines central elements of that problem to make it more tractable. If Hegel can answer this question in the way it is originally framed, without restricting it to appearances, then his solution would be preferable to Kant’s. Understood in this way, the charge that Kant mishandles the transcendental unity of
230 That Kant describes this shift as a “Copernican Revolution ” indicates that even for him it represents a
major shift, a revolution, in how we would normally understand the question. See Kant, Critique of Pure reason , Bxvi-xvii.
apperception is not a question-begging objection based on Hegel’s own philosophical agenda, but a demand that Kant take his own question seriously and on its own terms - it should be understood as a question about how we can have synthetic a priori knowledge not simply of appearances, but of things as they are outside of the subject as well. If we take the
transcendental unity of apperception as a subjective condition on representations, it is useless in answering this latter question. Hegel’s insight, however, is to see that if we liberate the 231
transcendental unity of apperception from its subjective, representational role, it could hold the key to a more satisfying solution to our problem. In that, he aims to develop Kant’s basic insight, pushing it past the restrictions Kant places on it so that it can give a more complete answer to the question Kant himself posed.