Going Beyond the Kantian Philosophy: On McDowell's Hegelian Critique of Kant

Abstract

IThe Kant-Hegel relation has a continuing fascination for commentators on Hegel, and understandably so: for, taking this route into the Hegelian jungle can promise many advantages. First, it can set Hegel's thought against a background with which we are fairly familiar, and in a way that makes its relevance clearly apparent; second, it can help us locate Hegel in the broader philosophical tradition, making us see that the traditional 'analytic' jump from Kant to Frege leaves out a crucial period in post-Kantian thought; third, it can show Hegel in a progressive light, as attempting to take that tradition further forward; fourth, it can help us locate familiar philosophical issues in Hegelian thought that otherwise can appear wholly sui generis; and finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, focusing on this relation can help raise and crystalise some of the fascinating ambiguities concerning Hegel's outlook, regarding whether Hegel's response to Kant shows him to have been a reactionary, Romantic, pre-critical thinker, who sought to turn the philosophical clock back to a time before Kant had written, or a modernist, Enlightened and essentially critical one, who remained true to the spirit if not the letter of Kant's philosophy.This strategy of assessing Hegel via his relation to Kant has long been used in connection with his ethics and social thought; and it has more recently been used to good effect in connection with his epistemology and idealist metaphysics. The current consensus in both cases seems to be that it is misguided to set Hegel too rigidly against Kant in these areas, and that instead Hegel should be seen as a figure who seeks to overcome what is problematic in the Kantian project, but nonetheless who aims to take it further forward, to 'go beyond it', as Hegel himself put it. 1 Thus, in ethics and social philosophy, Hegel is no longer seen as the reactionary and conservative defender of Sittlichkeit in opposition to Kant's liberal ideal of Moralität, but as simply trying to complement the abstract universalism of the latter with a more socially situated and historically realistic conception of the subject; whilst in epistemology and metaphysics Hegel is no longer seen as impervious to Kant's modernising project, but rather as trying to save that project from certain debilitating aporiai, in a way that will make it safe against sceptical objections. Thus, on this approach, Hegel's importance, and to some degree that of his contemporaries, lies in the fact that they attempted to overcome a certain one-sidedness in Kant's thought which they believed meant that he

Hegel, Analytic Philosophy’s Pharmakon

“…See Stern (2008) for a response. 34 See Sedgwick (1997) and Stern (1999) for helpful detailed discussions of Hegel and McDowell. 35 R. Brandom, 2002: 216. normative purchase by virtue of being assented to and acknowledged by a community of rational agents.…”