Absolute Form: Modality, Individuality and the Principle of Philosophy in Kant and Hegel

357 Pages·2020·4.718 MB·English

by  Thomas Sören Hoffmann

Absolute Form
Critical Studies in German

Idealism
Series Editor
Paul G. Cobben
Advisory Board
Simon Critchley – Paul Cruysberghs – Rózsa Erzsébet – Garth Green
Vittorio Hösle – Francesca Menegoni – Martin Moors – Michael Quante
Ludwig Siep – Timo Slootweg – Klaus Vieweg
volume 27
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ csgi
Absolute Form

Modality, Individuality and the Principle
of Philosophy in Kant and Hegel
By
Thomas Sören Hoffmann
Translated by
David Healan
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hoffmann, Thomas Sören, author.
Title: Absolute form : modality, individuality and the principle of
philosophy in Kant and Hegel / by Thomas Sören Hoffmann ;
translated by David Healan.
Other titles: Absolute Form. English
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2021. | Series: Critical studies in
German idealism, 1878-9986 ; volume 27 | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Summary: “Knowing precisely what philosophy
actually is, is itself a matter of philosophical science. It is knowledge of
the idea of philosophy that is explicit to itself; knowledge’s cognition
of itself in the separation of its beginning and its end, from which
difference its precise determination follows, is not itself a knowledge
“about something””– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045218 | ISBN 9789004441057 (hardback : acid-free
paper) | ISBN 9789004441071 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich, 1770-1831. | Modality (Logic)–History. | Individuality–History. |
Methodology–History. | Absolute, The–History.
Classification: LCC B2798 .H63413 2021 | DDC 193–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045218
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/b rill- typeface.
issn 1878-9 986
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-4 4105-7 (hardback)
isbn 978-9 0-0 4-4 4107-1 (e- book)
Copyright 2021 by Thomas Sören Hoffmann. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi,
Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for
re- use and/ or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com.
This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.
Contents

Preface vii
Preface to the English Edition viii
1 Introduction 1
1 Philosophy and Its Topic 1
2 Form as Relation– Preliminaries 7
3 On the Form of the Syllogism 12
4 External Reflection 20
5 Consciousness and Appearance 26
2 Kant and Hegel 40
1 Critique and System 40
2 From Kant to Hegel? 51
3 Consciousness, Self- Consciousness, Language 74
3 Absolute Individuality 100
1 Individualisation of Cognition 100
a) Absolute Inversion 100
b) Infinite Proposition 108
c) Cognition as Process and Definition 123
2 On the Way to the Predicate 136
a) Reality of Perception 136
b) Categories and the Context of Experience 145
c) Transcendental Ideal 154
3 Hegel’s Category of the Absolute 161
a) The Absolute in the Logic 161
b) Interpreting the Absolute 172
c) Absolute Attribute 186
d) Modus of the Absolute 189
4 Kant’s Modal Concepts 198
1 Logical versus Ontological Modality 198
a) Kant’s Concept of Logic 198
b) Kant and the History of Modal Logic 201
2 Differentiating Logical Modality 213
a) Logical Possibility 213
b) Logical Actuality (Truth) 217
vi Contents
c) Logical Necessity 220
d) Logical Modality and Unity of Thought 222
3 Postulates of Empirical Thinking 227
a) Status of Modal Principles 227
b) Possibility Postulate 233
c) Actuality Postulate 242
d) Necessity Postulate 247
4 Absolute Modality 256
5 Hegel’s Logos of Actuality 261
1 Actuality and Language that Speaks 261
2 Contingency and Its Formal Interpretation 268
3 Relative Necessity or Actuality of Content 277
4 Absolute Necessity 287
5 Absolute Relation 300
a) Substantiality 300
b) Causality 305
c) Reciprocity 311
6 Science of Absolute Form 314
Bibliography 317
Name Index 328
Subject Index 331
Preface

This study treats of the form of philosophy. Proceeding primarily from the top-
ics modality and individuality in Kant and Hegel, criteria will be established
for the precise determination of the idea of philosophy and of philosophical
method. This excludes from the outset any attempt at a merely historical com-
parison. Neither is the intention that the two thinkers be considered in terms
of questions external to their concerns. Instead the attempt is made to let each
of them say what they have to say as concisely and distinctively as possible on
specific topics, such that from these topics then it becomes possible to recog-
nise their distinctive proposals for determination of the form of the practice of
doing philosophy. The question as to a relation between the two thinkers in the
specific matter, but then also the question as to the matter itself, can only really
be answered in reference to that determination.
The connection between the problem complexes modality and individual-
ity may not seem immediately plausible, especially not in terms of methodol-
ogy. Of course the concept of method informing this study can only redeem
itself in the execution but its most important feature can be given a prelim-
inary statement as follows. Instead of a proposal for regulating the language
with a view to the widest possible general validity, the method must on the
contrary be understood as a movement from external generalities into indi-
viduality, i.e. into the real location of cognition; it must demonstrate itself to
be the pathway to an individualising kind of speech capable in all its func-
tions of the self- consciousness of truth. The ‘modal’ aspect then relates to the
determination of the active modes of formation of objectivity mediating what
appears to be determined as general and objective to take it back into self-
individualising speech; a return which is equally the individualising utterance
of what is objective.
The study was accepted in the summer of 1990 by the Philosophical Faculty
of the Rheinisch Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn as a Ph.D. dissertation
supervised by Prof. Josef Simon, to whom my gratitude is owed not only for
his support including many and varied suggestions but also for the freedom
he granted me in the completion of the study. Thanks are also due to Prof.
Gerhart Schmidt, who as second referee encouraged me in the research from
the beginning. I also benefited greatly from doctoral scholarships of the federal
state North Rhein Westfalia and then from the German Academic Scholarship
Foundation.
Thomas Sören Hoffmann Bonn- Geislar spring 1991
Preface to the English Edition

The focus of this study, now appearing in English thirty years after the orig-
inal, is the always provocative claim of philosophy to autopoiesis of philo-
sophical thought, to a knowledge that encompasses its own mediation com-
pletely within itself, to the self- contained and self- fulfilling concept. From this
standpoint philosophy is never merely a manner of “thinking of something”,
never merely an external form of something thought like common or garden
thoughts, which includes the kinds of thinking usual in the natural and social
sciences. Philosophical thinking is always thinking of itself– and that precisely
then when it is a matter of thinking with well- defined, determinate content.
Philosophical thinking is radically autonomous. It is the implementation, the
performance, the embodiment of absolute form.
Awareness of the claim of absolute form was achieved early on in the his-
tory of philosophy. It finds expression–a s one could say, in archaic simplicity–
in Parmenides’ principle of the unity of thinking and being. It is also found–
including initial steps to systematic development–i n Plato’s dialectic of ideas,
and it is there in the vanishing point of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Absolute form
constitutes one of the fundamental motifs of Descartes’ re- establishment of
philosophy in the medium of self- sustaining certainty, just as it was essential
to Leibniz’s initiative proceeding from infinity.
This study defends the thesis that the claim to self- determination based
on pure thinking attained its maximal development in Hegel’s philosophy.
A comparative study of the fundamental forms of philosophy in Kant and He-
gel establishes a foundation for the study fully acknowledging the contribution
of transcendental logic to the emancipation of thinking from heteronomous
thought forms. These opening moves include a demonstration of the imma-
nent limitations of Kant’s own form of thinking, which Hegel’s speculative log-
ic undertook to overcome. As is well known Hegel always saw in Kant a new
beginning in philosophy, and he regarded him as a genuine pioneer in specula-
tive thinking too. For Hegel it was Kant’s speculation that made it possible pre-
cisely to identify and name the logical form moments from which a repulsion
to genuine absolute form had to happen.
For this new preface it may suffice initially to explain the intention behind
the leading terms in the title of modality and individuality in relation to the
principle of philosophy in Kant and Hegel. This will be followed by a state-
ment of the systematic premisses and implications of the theses developed
here, especially in their relation to the problem of universals, as a way of briefly
outlining the new “conceptual realism” tied to the claim to a self- determined
Preface to the English edition ix
thinking, to an autonomous language of philosophy. These preliminary re-
marks are intended as an introductory plea for a form of doing philosophy
which today is no longer necessarily the usual procedure, but which neverthe-
less remains consistently committed to the heritage of the tradition of the sci-
ence of reason. There is no future for philosophy without the science of reason.
i
In common understanding, thinking and knowing refer to “something”, think-
ing is “intending” thinking and knowing finds its truth in dependence on a “ref-
erence”, an external object. Thinking, knowing is “true” when it is “adequate” to
the external object– it matters little here whether “adequacy” is meant as for-
mal (in the sense of contradiction- free modelling), pragmatic (in the sense of
attainability of subjective goals), or in its genuine meaning of material (in the
sense of a real determination of thinking by the matter through its “duplica-
tion” in thought). Philosophical thinking and knowing is in its kernel a think-
ing and knowing that fulfils and confirms itself by itself–a s such in terms of
form it is reflexive knowing, in terms of content “self- verifying”, such1 that it has
its own function for its content, it has itself for its own content. What appears
at first quite alien, if it does not already sound suspiciously like a solipsistic
circulus vitiosus, is in fact nothing other than the reference to Plato’s ἀνάμνησις,
to Aristotle’s νόησις νοήσεως and even (a very famous example indeed) to the
ontological proof of God’s existence, whose main (or at least speculative) point
lies precisely in demonstrating the knowledge of God as self- realising and in
this sense absolute knowing.
All three of these examples belong to the metaphysical tradition, which
ultimately does not mean that they refer to mediating instances assumed to
be objective– the soul, the ideas, God– themselves requiring liberation from
the form of external objectivity in order to open them up to the pure self-
determination of thinking and knowing, to the true λόγος. Plato conceived
of this “liberation” of the λόγος to self- determination in the supraobjectivity
(ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας) of the good as ultimate ground of the λόγος. The Neo-
platonist dialectical tradition similarly found this supraobjective ground in
the concept of the unattainable transcendence of the vanishing point of all
mediation– the one in Plotinus and infinity for Nicholas of Cusa. The ground
1 Cf. the author’s “ ‘Die Philosophie ist wie das Universum rund in sich’. Enzyklopädisches Wis-
sen und Selbstbegründung der Philosophie bei Hegel” in T.S. Hoffmann and Hardy Neumann
eds. Hegel und das Programm einer philosophischen Enzyklopädie, Berlin 2019, esp. 18– 23.