Hegel: How, and How Far, is Philosophy Possible?

Abstract

David Hume, the gifted amateur, woke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, and Kant, being a professional physicist as well as a professional philosopher, proceeded to ask himself how pure physics and pure mathematics are possible. With his a priori categories and forms of sensuous intuition (Anschauung) he provided an answer. Whether he provided any positive answer to the question how the critical philosophy is itself possible is more doubtful. He confined human knowledge to the deliverance of the understanding (Verstand) in cooperation with sense; to phenomenal objects, that is, which we know to be the appearances only of things forever unknown to us as they are in themselves. We know that these objects are only phenomenal, because they present themselves everywhere and always as conditioned ab extra and not as self-subsistent, as terms in, e.g., an endless causal series in which every term is an effect and, in its turn, a cause. It is true that human reason (Vernunft) has Ideas (Ideen) of the unconditioned, but these are mere thoughts which do not yield us knowledge of any object. Their function is at once to stimulate Verstand and to restrict it to its proper cognitive function in cooperation with sensuous intuition. They merely regulate: they cannot, since we have no facuity of intellectual intuition, constitute any object of knowledge. This is the human condition.