Ever since Plato coined the metaphor, it has been tempting to treat the history of philosophy as a series of battles between Gods and Giants, as a ‘clash of argument’ between idealists and materialists, rationalists and naturalists, and idealists and realists. Many commentators, provoked by Hegel's combative remarks, have been led to see the Kant-Hegel relation in this way; and yet it has not always been easy to determine either what the issue between these two antagonists really is, or indeed which of them is the Giant and which the God. Robert Pippin, in his new book, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp. xii + 327, hb £30.00, pb £10.95) casts new light on the nature of the struggle, and makes clear what was at stake: a non-rationalist, non-metaphysical answer to the sceptic, and with it absolute knowledge.

Pippin's densely written but engrossing book provides the focus of discussion for this issue of the Bulletin. The contributions by H.S. Harris and Terry Pinkard offer critical comments on Pippin's approach to Hegel, and they are followed with a response by Pippin himself. These pieces were originally presented as a meeting of the Western APA, and assume an acquaintance with Pippin's argument, which I will try to outline in what follows.

Like many recent commentators, Pippin begins by insisting that we take seriously Hegel's claim to have ‘completed’ Kant, and so rejects any metaphysical, rationalist readng of Hegel. On the other hand, Pippin wants to understand Hegel's claim to have found a form of idealism that answers Kant's transcendental scepticism regarding the ‘thing-in-itself’, without collapsing back into rationalism.

Robert Pippin's book, Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, is a deep, probing reconstruction of Hegel's project and the specific ways in which he tried to work out that project. It is rich in both analytical detail and in setting Hegel's thought in the historical complex of ideas that run from Kant to Fichte. It offers us a different view of Hegel than we have been accustomed to getting.

I shall not concentrate too much on the details of Pippin's book, which excels in the depth and fine grained quality of its analyses. Instead, I shall deal with his overall interpretation and how good a case can be made for it. Pippin's goal of locating Hegel in terms of the Kantian project is well founded, and I think that he almost succeeds admirably. But only almost.

The design of this commentary is threefold. First, I will give an overview of the general thrust of Pippin's interpretation. Second, I shall raise some questions about it and propose an alternative to it. Finally, I shall look at part of one particular section of Pippin's work, namely, his interpretation of Hegel's conception of “Essence” in the Science of Logic.

Pippin's main thesis about Hegel's program seems relatively straightforward: Hegel's work should be understood as carrying on and transforming the Kantian idea of deriving all the conditions of knowledge from the transcendental unity of apperception, a special kind of self-conscious awareness of objects. Let us call this the Apperception Thesis.

For years I have repeated to the students in my seminars the programmatic assertion that “Hegel was the greatest disciple Kant ever had.” My object in saying this has always been to remind them as forcibly as possible that for Hegel and everyone in his generation, Kant was the master of them that know, the German philosopher, the thinker who had raised German thought to a new level, and had given it a decisive primacy over the earlier achievements of modern (or ‘scientific’) Reason from Bacon and Descartes to Hume and Rousseau. For this reason alone, I wished to affirm, it was in the highest degree unlikely that Hegel's ‘speculative’ philosophy, his theory of the ‘Idea’, was a reinstatement of the ‘dogmatic’ tradition that Kant so decisively overthrew. On the contrary, the theory of the ‘Idea’ must be seen as that ‘completion’ of the Kantian philosophy of which Hegel spoke prophetically in a letter to Schelling when he was approaching his twenty-fifth birthday.

It took Hegel several years to discover that Kant could not be ‘completed’ simply by the process of turning his revolutionary ‘insight’ into universal ‘Enlightenment’. At the time when he first appeared before the learned public as a philosopher in his own right Hegel was convinced (mainly as a result of his ten-year intimacy with Hölderlin) that “Truth is the whole”; and that a direct experience of that divine wholeness had actually been achieved by the poets of Greece (especially by those of Athens between the Great War with Persia and the Great Civil War). He was vividly aware that those same Greek poets were articulating the life of a world which had perished irretrievably.

First of all, I am very grateful to both commentators for the attention they have devoted to Hegel's Idealism; I am heartened by the kind words and humbled by the magnitude of the problems introduced by their criticisms. These criticisms both rightly refer to what is the heart of my interpretation, the Kant-Hegel relation, and, interestingly enough, raise objections from roughly opposite directions. Professor Pinkard, in effect, charges that I have made too much of that relation and thereby confused transcendental and speculative concerns. He argues here, as he does at greater length in his recent book (Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility), that the philosophically valuable core of Hegel is a ‘category theory’ limited to an ‘explanation’ of the conceptual ‘possibility’ of various judgments, practices, institutions, etc. Professor Harris charges, on the other hand (and with some irony), that I have made too little of the Kant-Hegel relation, or have construed it too narrowly, that the interpretation of Hegel's idealism which I provide thus either unfairly neglects, or does not have the resources to deal with, Hegel's full theory of the ‘whole’, or of Absolute Spirit, his account of the modern community's reconciliation with itself in time. I am thus alleged to have provided an interpretation that is at once too ambitious, and not ambitious enough, and I hope that such responses, at least for the Aristotelians in the audience, count as prima facie evidence that I must have said just the right thing.

My claim in Hegel's Idealism is that the well-known Hegel Renaissance, in post-war Western Europe especially, has still failed to produce a contemporary reconstruction of Hegel's fundamental position, his ‘identity theory’, his identifying the ‘self-actualization’ of the Notion with ‘actuality’, or his theory of the reality of the Absolute Idea.