Hegel's Sublation of Kant's Transcendental Philosophy: Absolute Idealism as a Non-Metaphysical or Rational Metaphysics

Abstract

The aim of my paper is to give an interpretation of Hegel’s critique of Kant in the vein of the recently so-called “revised metaphysical reading” of Hegel. I will try to show indeed that Hegel neither remains within the Kantian limits, nor, by contrast, surpasses Kant’s restrictions on thought, but rather attempts to deny those very restrictions on the basis that they are only remains of that very old metaphysics that Kant himself pretended to overcome. Since Kant’s concept-intuition schism – ground of his notion of thing-in-itself, and consequently of his entire critique of metaphysics – is based on what Hegel calls understanding, and insofar as the understanding is the very ground of the old dogmatic metaphysics, the emergence of reason, by means of a complete critique of the understanding (and therefore of the Kantian concept-intuition schism), may be well thought of as a critique of Kant’s metaphysical remains, and hence as a radicalization of Kant’s own critique of metaphysics. This emergence of reason gives rise with Hegel to a renewed and rational notion of the thing-in-itself, and thereby to what might be called the non-metaphysical or rational metaphysics of absolute idealism.