David asked:

How was Immanuel Kant exactly outlived? NOT by whom, but rather why and how...Thanks.

1. Kant saw the categories (cause and effect, space and time, quality and quantity etc.) as either
   objective or subjective. He said the categories belonged to the spontaneity of our thought. They were
   not objective. Therefore they were subjective. But Kant called them objective because they were
   universal and necessary. The subjective is the merely felt, he thought. "Thoughts, according to Kant,
   although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts, separated by an impassable gulf
   from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge" (Hegel, Logic41). The problem with Kant was
   that he reduced ontology (the question of being) to epistemology. "The world of sense is a scene of
   mutual exclusion: its being is outside of itself" (Hegel, Logic42).

2. "Fichte called attention to the need for exhibiting the necessity of these categories and giving a
   genuine deductionof them" (Hegel, Logic42). If the categories are specialized 'forms' of the 'I', how
   do we get at them?

3. Given this reductio,for Kant, the egobecomes an absolute. "The 'I' is as it were the crucible and
   fire which consumes the loose plurality of sense and reduces it to unity" (Hegel, Logic42). This is
   what Kant calls "pure apperception", the process by which disparate things become 'mine'. This 'unity'
   is a category too. But the absolute ego is at odds with the natural mind and our everyday sense of
   "out there". "Though the categories, such as unity, or cause and effect, are strictly the property of
   thought, it by no means follows that they must be our merely and not also characteristics of the
   objects." The absolute ego needs to be deconstructed by ontology. Hegel performs this
   deconstruction in the Logic on the Kantian 'soul', on the antinomies' and on the existence of the
   divine.

(a) In each case Hegel agrees with Kant to a certain extent. Kant is right that the old fashioned idea of
the soul-substance confused experiential fact with intellectual formulation of them (paralogism). But
that does not put pay to the soul idea, Hegel goes on, it merely shows that "this style of abstract
terms is not good enough for the soul, which is very much more...".

(b) Hegel says yes to the antinomies. But goes on to say that it is ridiculous to limit their number to
the special cases enumerated by Kant. Antinomies abound "in all objects of every kind, in all
conceptions, notions and ideas".

(c)The divine or God. The point here is that while Hegel says yes to Kant' s idea of the
transcendental, he argues that this does not make the transcendent merely transcendental. The
'rising' if thought is its transcendent quality — or in ancient terms, its capacity for ecstasy, to 'stand
outside itself.' This is what Hegel argues, except not in terms of ancient metaphysics. "The rise of
thought beyond the world of sense, its passage from the finite to the infinite, the leap into the
super-sensible which it takes when it snaps asunder the chain of sense, all this transition is thought
and nothing but thought." This talent for "exaltation" is what makes us more than just animals. The
ontology of Daseinstarts here.

4. In this way, Hegel tries to redress the balance and antinomy which must exist between ontology
   and epistemology, but without reverting to traditional metaphysical thinking, which takes its
   oppositions very literalistically as 'real'. "Phenomena [are so] not for us only, but in their own nature"
   (Hegel Logic45).

Matthew Del Nevo

www.sicetnon.com