Three Ontologies

Let us venture to identify the necessary, albeit nowadays unacknowledged, realism in the philosophies of Kant and Hegel. It is a realism which is at all times functional, but remains somewhat “underplayed” under the banner of Kant’s “transcendental” and Hegel’s “absolute idealism.” We will show how realism in these philosophies works, how it is always at play, and why Kant and Hegel are nevertheless considered (and misunderstood) as champions of antirealism.

Before accusing modern philosophy of anthropomorphism, of losing contact with science, of locking us up in the prison of consciousness and language, one must keep in mind the other side of its inherently “idealist” aspiration. It is a mistake to assume that with the progress of philosophy the world became in any way more human or humanized. If anything, with Kant philosophy began to discover, sometimes almost exaggerate and well-nigh feast on the inhuman qualities of the universe and the cosmic contingency of man. A certain “poetry of planetary meaninglessness” of the world in which we live was not alien to Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, or Heidegger.

Thus, instead of straightforwardly equating post-Kantian thought with antirealism, a different type of question must be asked: what is needed for the modern subject to become aware of his own “creatureliness?” A surprisingly precise answer was given by none other than Kant. When, at the famous ending of the Critique of Practical Reason, the moral subject raises his eyes to the night sky, his gaze opens to the regions of being as yet unknown. Suddenly, the starry heavens do not seem to belong to him. From the point of view of the immensity of “worlds upon worlds,” the alleged Kantian monster of anthropomorphism starts appearing to himself as an “animal creature”:

Here, a disengagement of two “regimes” takes place. On the one side, the human finally realizes his material negligibility, and on the other, his intellectual capability enables him to gain immunity from his material conditions. After constituting the world in the synthesis of understanding, Kant’s subject discovers within him the moral law which bestows upon him the function of a free agent. At this point, the human being could just as well succumb to delusions of grandeur when looking at the stars, which, after all, he himself had (theoretically, epistemologically) constituted, but he opts for insignificance instead. If, in the pre-Kantian philosophy of Hobbes, Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume, he bore the names “man,” “soul,” and “rational creature,” now, after this final inauguration on the throne of transcendental subjectivity, he adopts the name of “animal.” The rationalist and empiricist subject was a necessary central point of the world, the point at which the logical activity of cognition and the anthropoid empiricity of its bearer could still overlap; in Kant, however, the two entities go separate ways, and only after the subject experiences a moment of pure self-determination can he surrender his body to radical contingency. In short, the subject must have accomplished a kind of self-posited independence from the world in order to be able to fully admit and comprehend his own utter worldliness. As we will see, even Kant’s theoretical subject will have to acknowledge that his incarnation is not (cosmically) necessary, but it is not until the new, practical subject is overwhelmed by the sudden inclination of moral feelings that he can finally afford to wholeheartedly experience his fleshly pettiness. For while the theoretical subject still deduced the world from his cognitive activity, it is only the practical subject who recognizes that the world could do well without him.

There is a certain slight and still vague coincidence to be detected here. With Kant, the rationalist subject of innate ideas and the empiricist subject of passive perceptions are replaced with the subject of the primary synthesis of understanding, spontaneity, and, finally, even freedom. This tendency is of course only strengthened in post-Kantian philosophy: the former epistemological subject is succeeded by the subject of self-positing (Fichte), self-reflexivity (Hegel), labor (Marx), power (Nietzsche), care (Heidegger), life-form (Wittgenstein), and so forth. An originary practical energy of the subject inhabits his former stable, immobile theoretical nature. But this “autopoietic” autarchy of the modern subject triggers an exhaustive rearrangement of the status of reality; effectively, it sets in motion the slow process of its devaluation. It seems that in his “practical invention” the subject gains sovereignty over his own truth procedure, which, simultaneously, releases the constraints with which, in his theoretical approach, he still held facticity hostage. Historically, there is a development to be observed: as soon as the “truth value” shifts from the mode of representation, correspondence, and adequation to the mode of synthesis, activity, and creation, the “outside world” starts displaying entirely nonhuman qualities.

Contrary to the common opinion, it was German Idealism that, in a way, invented and developed this interrelation. Perhaps, traces of such unforeseen equilibrium go back as far as Kant. On the one hand, the Kantian subject is endowed with spontaneity and freedom, on the other, the concepts of totalization begin to lose their constitutive grip and become regulative. But it was Fichte who made the reciprocity between the two poles definite. In Fichte, the object-correlate even receives a negative prefix, the “not” of the not-I, and the world is being reduced to a place of a lesser truth:

The self-generated self-sufficiency of the subject is being balanced with the untruth of the world. Here, an interesting controversy ensues between overt idealism and covert realism. Within the idealist, “normative” perspective, everything is posited by the “I” and therefore consists only within the mind of the rational being. But this Verichlichung of the world has been given the status of an aspiration, an infinite task, thereby implying that the world “as it is presently” (since, technically speaking, there is no world “in itself”) subsists in a state of rawness lacking any signs of human rationality. Fichte’s not-I is an ontologically negative entity insofar as it possesses neither rationalist substances nor empiricist qualities. In other words, the normative, idealist, active, practical design of being releases by necessity the factual world from the human grasp. Because the not-I is something which must be formed normatively, because it is yet to be conquered and belabored, it is momentarily something precisely not yet formed by the “I.” Within the normative “loop-hole” of Fichte’s I, a certain logically modest landscape of realism can unfold. Fichte assigns to reality an ambivalent status swaying between idealist positedness and realist formlessness: “It is therefore an infinitely modifiable originally given stuff external to ourselves (‘originally given,’ i.e., posited by thinking itself, through its very form).”^[3] It is worth stressing that the realist side of this flagrant idealism is not a matter of sophistry, but actually functions as such: it is only because of Fichte’s idealist design of the rational being that the existence of its material bearer could be recognized as completely contingent. The “necessity” of a rational being is entirely self-produced and consists only in the act of its self-positing:

Since no one can prove the existence of rationality, since the rational being can never be deduced from any state of affairs, there is no cosmic Providence according to which the human must enter the stage. Because the subject is all about the “become,” his “is” is allowed to lack any metaphysical necessity—something even Hume’s subject as “theater of the mind” is incapable of conceding.^[5] The Fichtean self-sufficiency of the “I,” who posits himself in order to set himself a task of conquering the not-I, finally allows us to think the sheer inhumanity of the world, to the point that the human being itself is merely a contingent emergence within this otherwise malleable, wholly humanizable universe.

Thus, if there is any realism in German Idealism, it can only be vouched for as an equilibrium correlate to its idealist claims. And while the idealist project deepens progressively, becoming Schelling’s or Hegel’s absolute idealism, certain possibilities of realism seem to increase as well. Fichte’s formlessness of the not-I becomes Schelling’s chaos as the abyss of freedom or Hegel’s nature as the otherness of the idea. We cannot go into the detail of Schelling’s too complex philosophy, but, to touch on one example alone, his famous Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom is nothing but an extensive account on idealism being incessantly counterbalanced by the remainders of realism, and it is precisely the surplus of free will which compels the system to acknowledge the chaotic reality as its necessary other. Finally, Hegel’s fundamental distinction between Spirit and nature brings this disruptive tendency to a climax. Hegel is one of the rare philosophers to have founded the strict and axiomatic de-anthropomorphization of nature upon a tenable logical ground. Spirit assumes the form of “the other of itself” and “the return from the otherness,” thus achieving a certain self-reflexive autonomy, which enables it to release nature out of itself as its absolute exteriority. Nature is no longer a cosmos, a world of order and beauty, and it never represents a structure of concepts and judgments. Already in his early work Faith and Knowledge, Hegel quotes Pascal’s “‘la nature est telle qu’elle marque partout un Dieu perdu et dans l’homme et hors de l’homme.’ [Nature is such that it signifies everywhere a lost God both within and outside man.],”^[6] while in his Encyclopedia, nature is defined as “the Idea in the form of otherness,”^[7] (i.e., something that does not directly incarnate an ideal image). Hegel is a crucial advocate of the meaninglessness of immediacy; in this sense, Marx and Nietzsche could be regarded as his heirs.

As we can observe, German Idealism provided a matrix of two regimes emancipating themselves from each other. There is always a “creative” surplus required on the part of the subject, so that the object-correlate can be released into nonhuman otherness. This pattern has unconsciously been adopted time and again in the history of philosophy. For instance, it was only Nietzsche’s Übermensch who was capable of living in a thoroughly contingent world, a world that is itself a mistake, and only the centered, almost demiurgical Heidegger’s Dasein could be thrown into the facticity that never awaited its arrival.

Certainly, these swiftly presented examples scrape only the surface of the possibilities of realism; they are circumstantial evidence at best. However, one could insist that a theory is needed that would somehow elucidate the fact that suddenly in Western philosophy purposelessness, formlessness, chaos, otherness, meaninglessness, and facticity have become the new predicates of the immediate world. It is here, perhaps, that realism may find its greatest impulses.

To account for this development, to find a logic behind these enigmatic equilibria, three possible ontologies will be discussed in this chapter: the ontology of immediacy, stretching from the rationalists to the last empiricists, the ontology of totalization, beginning with Kant, and the “ontology of release” or “de-totalization,” the first rudiments of which may have been provided by Hegel. We will try to outline the process in which the issue of immediate reality ceases to represent the issue of truth—to this purpose, those conditions will be examined under which the two emblematic methods of modern philosophy, Cartesian doubt and Kant’s “absolute totality in the synthesis of phenomena,” slowly resign the function of the criterion of truth.

Truth as Adequation

To be able to estimate the reach of Kant’s realism, we must know how to place it in the logical environment in which Kant made his moves. We will hardly claim that Kant was an accomplished and straightforward realist. Realism is a stance that could only be achieved progressively and should therefore be evaluated relatively, that is, historically. Like atheism, which never stands on its own feet, but consists of an intersubjective contest of who dares to articulate more godlessness than the others, realism is a comparative liberation of reality from the forms of human consciousness and language. Kant made one, indeed important step toward this goal. He relieved reality from the constancy of the ideal and perceptual constraints of the rationalists and the empiricists. It is against this background that Kant must first be interpreted.

In early-modern, pre-Kantian philosophy, there seem to be two principal foundations of truth. According to the rationalists, empirical knowledge is uncertain due to sense deceptions, which is why clear and distinct ideas cannot be achieved externally, but only by way of rational argument. This a priori reduction of the senses comes at a price: in order to secure the content to cognition, the existence of innate ideas must be postulated. The repudiation of this rationalist hypothesis later constitutes the basis of empiricist philosophy (Locke opens An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by stating that there are no innate principles in the mind) and consequently all knowledge now derives from definite, immediate perceptions. This, however, raises the issue of structures in the mind that enable the formation of compound, abstract, universal, intelligible ideas. The famous third step of this development is of course the Kantian turn, which, according to the well-tried and now trivial definition, represents a synthesis of rationalism and empiricism. Kant’s philosophy posits the existence of general operations of the mind that implement a synthetic supplement to the content of knowledge, thus representing a common characteristic of all experience.

But why do we retell this well-known tale? Even though the proceedings of the rationalists and the empiricists are exactly the opposite, they are still bound by a common belief, a tacit assumption that truth exists in the form of immediacy. Therein lies the reason why Descartes, in his celebrated opening act of modern thought, posits doubt as his primary method: a simple, immediate thing in the outside world must be doubted precisely because it could potentially sustain a truth deep enough to lay the foundation of the system of certainty. If the Cartesian subject, possibly by an act of epistemological mercy from a benevolent God, were absolutely certain of one of his sense perceptions, then the “grand truth” could by all means be founded on this concrete sense perception, without the additional need to prove the incontestability of his own self-consciousness. Following merely the literal surface of Descartes’s argument, one can see that at the beginning there is, in principle, no more truth to the ego than to the famous this piece of paper that Descartes holds in his hand in the room of his winter refuge in Neuburg an der Donau. Potentially, in line with the truth form itself, even a piece of paper could figure as the Archimedean point. The difference between the piece of paper and the ego is not ontological, but only epistemological: as a subject of knowledge I am only capable of being certain of myself, while due to the nature of my senses I cannot recognize the existence of a piece of paper clearly and distinctly. I cannot be sure of this piece of paper, but a piece of paper could at any rate be a place of truth. Even though Descartes was a dualist and his philosophy marks the beginning of a tradition that subsequently gave rise to modern phenomena such as subjectivism, existentialism, individualism, solipsism, the perspectivity of truth, and so on, the argument itself does not, in its reasoning and proving, explicitly write out any a priori ontological priority of the concept of the ego to the concept of any other thing.^[8] And it is precisely because everything is potentially equally “true” that the method of doubt (i.e., a procedure of sorting and picking immediacies one by one) is needed to distinguish the ego from all other facts and entities in the world.^[9]

Therefore, within Descartes’s system there can be no criterion of differentiation of facts that would sustain more or less truth. All things (i.e., hands, feet, the fireplace, and this piece of paper) that have fallen victim to doubt, remain a guilty conscience in the memory of the subject of doubt and demand the very same truth value as the ego possesses at the moment of self-certainty. To put it crudely, because every single thing aims at the same amount of certainty as the ego has it, a transcendent dimension must finally be introduced in order to guarantee the truth of the outside world. For this reason, Cartesian nature bears the immediate stamp of God and is, accordingly, no less true than the subject himself.^[10]

The fact that the ego, the bearer of all certainty and truth, and this piece of paper, the object of the ego’s methodical doubt, are of the same ontological order, so to speak, is possibly the reason why, subsequently, the great tradition of modern rationalism resorted to argumentative structures that are as odd and unusual as Malebranche’s occasionalism, Spinoza’s parallelism of attributes of extension and thought, or Leibniz’s monadology.

In Malebranche, for instance, the prosthesis of God as an occasional cause is inserted into the pure immediate contact between mind and body, between spirit and matter, into each representation that the mind perceives and each movement that the body performs. In order to sustain truth in the form of immediacy, every natural thing is now redoubled, both having a physical existence outside the human mind and being an idea incepted to the mind by God. The Malebranchean ontology would rather endure a redundancy of this magnitude than deprive things of their ideal correlates, warrants of their immediate evidence. Or, from the point of view of God, it is the ideas that cannot afford to be deprived of their real correlates.^[11] Hence, because every single entity, be it an idea or a material thing, must be “directly verified,” as it were, everything in this world comes in redundant pairs.

The same could be said about Spinoza’s parallelism, where the “order and connection of ideas is the same [. . .] as the order and connection of things, and, vice versa, the order and connection of things is the same [. . .] as the order and connection of ideas.” (E V., P1)^[12] Because of these invariant parallel authentications and substantiations between ideas and things, being is constructed exclusively within the framework of pure self-affirmation of its smallest parts. Typically, the finite modes (i.e., the rudimentary unities of being, the conati) are designed as strivings “to persevere in its being,” that is to say, entities not beset with any inner negativity. It was Leibniz who took this notion of indivisible intensive magnitudes to the extreme.

Leibniz’s system is probably the most trenchant attempt to demonstrate how this piece of paper already stands in for an undiminished certainty and truth. Monads seem to be a symptom of Descartes’s self-evidence, an extrapolation and generalization of the Cartesian form of truth: the absolutely immediate and punctual self-awareness of the ego set the criteria of truth so high that now only the entities stand the trial of it, whose self-certainty is experienced within the absolute punctual immanence of their being. Because truth bears the form of utmost immediacy, the world disintegrates and unitizes in a vast multiplicity of pure self-evidences, the simple substances or, later, the monads. The fact of certainty is thus not restricted to the subject alone (in the sense of the Kantian condition of possibility of all reality), but dissolves in innumerable cells and populates the entire universe—something that after the Kantian turn becomes obsolete, since now the ego, the “I think,” is structurally detached from any possible phenomena.

Both rationalism and empiricism advocated truth in the form of common sense, of immediate evidence and adequation, or, to put it in German, in the form of Verstand, understanding, as opposed to Vernunft, reason. In the rationalist doctrine, only the immediacy that is a carrier of truth is recognized. As a consequence, God now stands at the beginning of every movement and every idea (Malebranche), the world is an order of things immediately being the order of ideas (or even an assembly of positive conati as “modes of God”) (Spinoza), and, in a more pointed manner, is parceled out and secluded into monads (Leibniz). In a surprisingly similar way as Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz escalated the basic ontological frame of Descartes, so Berkeley and Hume could be regarded as, rightfully and justifiably, bringing Locke’s empiricist setting to its extremes. Thus, in its outcome, the empiricist doctrine, recognized only the truth that is a bearer of immediacy. Any entity that cannot become an object of immediate perception is now subtracted from the world: first primary qualities fade away (Berkeley), then substances, and finally even laws of causality (Hume). In rationalism, things must be idealized instantaneously; in empiricism, ideas must be realized on the spot. Empiricists are finally prohibited from assuming an ideal structure which would enable reality to exist beyond perception and allow time lags in our presence of mind.

For this reason, empiricism, not unlike rationalism, develops ontological constructions unusual to common sense, such as the Berkeleyean world extinguishing behind our backs and the Humean world without cause and effect. Just like in Descartes, there is no possibility of differentiating or even hierarchizing the “truth value” of phenomena. If primary, and not only secondary, qualities could be perceived immediately, things would possess a substance and would continue to exist behind our backs. If cause and effect could be perceived immediately in the movement of bodies, the world would follow the laws of causality. Hume is incapable of transferring cause and effect to the transcendental level and rather plays with the idea of detecting them in situ. What separates Hume’s agnosticism from Kant’s transcendentalism is the fact that “Hume’s experiment,” if there is one, strives to perceive the causal relation directly, thus presupposing that cause and effect either exist on the same ontological level as sensations, or that we remain, if we do not perceive them, eternally ignorant of their existence.^[13]

Now, the question arises: why is it that a period of slightly more than one hundred years witnessed an emergence of systems of philosophy that, in the spirit of defending common sense, resort to such profoundly noncommonsensical constructions as, for instance, an erection authored by God himself (Malebranche), Julius Cesar in whom his death by the hand of Brutus is already inscribed (Leibniz), a table that disappears when we avert our eyes from it (Berkeley), and billiard balls that only accidentally always move in expected directions (Hume)? Common sense, so it seems, tolerates even the most extreme noncommonsensical conceptions of the world, rather than renouncing its truth form whose place value is bound to the pure, immediate evidence.

Truth as Totalization

Early-modern, pre-Kantian philosophy apparently suffers from the condition of absolutization of the common-sense form of truth, the truth as an immediate adequation of idea and thing. As a result of this rigid equation, “unintelligible” redundancies and reductions occur on both sides, on the side of the idea as well as on the side of the thing.

In this sense, rationalism subjects the idea to something we might call acute realization. Since an idea can only be apprehended as immediate self-evidence, on the other side of its correspondence some kind of crystallization of the world of things takes place, condemning things to exist as sequestered incarnations of ideas. In a way, the form of truth being strict adequation, the order of ideas and the order of things become morcellated, parceled out, and finally placed one on top of the other, so that, in Malebranche, each contact of a mental event as a cause with the physical event as an effect (or vice-versa) is an immediate explication of the idea within the time frame of a bare occasion, whereas in Leibniz, for instance, every substance possesses its complete individual concept from where its body can be derived, and, as such, it represents a distinct, indivisible, complete world, a mirror of God and the whole universe.^[14] A rationalist idea is, in a manner of speaking, redoubled and thus acutely verified within the thing, most famously in the monad. The logical reduction is here performed on the side of reality, which thereby relinquishes its own autonomous, continuous, indiscreet causality, its nonideal fluidity.

In contrast, the basic, most authentic operation of empiricism is an acute idealization of every sensible entity. The thing is perceived in its absolute immediacy and is translated into its ideal correlate so straightforwardly that a perception can no longer be apprehended outside the form of a pure sensual instantaneousness. Not unlike Muybridge’s chronophotographs, reality is now “instantiated” or, to coin a new word, “momentized,” and is incapable of egressing the form of its smallest un-intermediateness. In Berkeley, one cannot detect primary qualities behind the secondary ones, which is why there is no perseverance in being beyond the immediate intensiveness of perception, whereas in Hume, behind the momentary images of sense objects the principles that mediate between them can no longer be realized. It is now reality that is acutely verified, being thoroughly and radically transformed into its most instant ideal correlate: a mere perception. Hence, the logical reduction is performed on the side of abstract, ideal entities. A world without substance, cause, or effect appears before our eyes.

Leibniz’s monad has neither windows nor doors, and in Malebranche no hand is moved without God being inserted between the mental and the physical event; in rationalism, reality is parceled out. In Hume, no causal connection can be ascertained and no boundaries drawn between things; what remains are only windows and doors through which an uninterrupted current of phenomena is flowing, while this peripheral continuity refuses to be halted and allocated in a discreet entity; arguably, reality is infinitesimalized. On the side of rationalism, the idea is progressively incapable of discharging and allowing the fluid of being, and on the side of empiricism, the fluid of being is increasingly unfit to fixate an (abstract) idea. There, things are broken down into monads ad infinitum, here, ideas are narrowed down to evermore fleeting perceptions. Because truth is condemned to immediate adequation, the “truth quanta” are fading toward infinite smallness and fugacity. These hysterically verified worlds are so punctualized that often a God’s perspective must be introduced in order for the world to remain consistent and enjoy its usual breadth. The universe, so it seems, must become a spectacle for the eyes of God instead of the human being. In Malebranche, the ideas are so self-sufficient that the human mind has no need for reality; the corporeal world is created on account of God’s truthfulness alone. In Leibniz, the concept of a monad contains all its determinations including the entire universe, so one monad is sufficient unto itself; it is to God’s purpose that all the others are created. In Berkeley, the perceptions are so auto-verifiable that things behind our back need not persevere; so it is only God that gazes upon them, when the humans choose to look away. Because every single entity is consistently and invariably “true,” we are suddenly doomed to live in a thoroughly incomprehensible world. Common sense, thought through to the end, becomes something utterly nonsensical. It is here, precisely, that Kant makes his entrance.

The philosophy of Kant may in this respect be regarded as an attempt to return to the normality of common sense. However, this return is possible not by conferring more truth on reality, but, in a way, by alleviating the truth-constraint from the immediacy of things. On the basis of the (not fully overlapping) differences between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the Apriori and the Aposteriori, the transcendental and the empirical, Kant succeeds in relieving the rationalist substances of the form of “acute” self-evidence and transfers them into the transcendental realm of conditions, thereby releasing the phenomena from being the forthright derivations of ideas. As opposed to Leibniz’s “object” knowing itself only a priori, since all its a posteriori perceptions are deduced from its own concept, here, a priori knowledge of a single, individual object is no longer possible:

No concept alone can vouch for the necessary existence of a thing. The concepts are no longer “programs of necessity,” so to say, but only “conditions of possibility”; they are not embodied in reality directly, piecing it up in occasions or monads, but rather subsist as “pure concepts” in the latency of general forms of thought, by means of which the immediacy of experience is synthesized in the first place. This transition from the rationalist immediate verification of things (as in Spinoza’s parallelism or Leibniz’s monadology) to Kantian a priori conditions fundamentally alters the constitution and conceptualization of reality. In Kant’s argument, we lose the thing as substance and gain the thing as a state:

By “fluidifying” reality, on the other hand, cause and effect, space and time, the object-form and the logical unity of the subject, all being general conditions of possibility of knowledge, regain the certainty and the necessity that they forfeited in the time of empiricism. Reality is no longer verified within the temporality of a momentary sense impression, but seeks to establish a connection of phenomena and the mediation between them. In short, the truth value is transferred to the form of the whole.

In Kant, “understanding” undoubtedly reclaims its former everyday sense of life. And this shift of truth value from immediacy to conditions of possibility at the same time ascribes the conditional to the unconditional (i.e., the absolute, thus unfolding the sphere of “reason”). On account of this, the form of truth is no longer committed to “morcellate” the order of ideas and the order of things and to parcel, crystallize, and infinitesimalize the contacts between the two orders, but rather it besets the form of adequation with some sort of deferral toward totalization. The old forms of reality and truth, such as self-evidence, occasional cause, monad, secondary quality, and perception, are now substituted by a new form, the “absolute totality in the synthesis of phenomena.”

Within the Kantian universe, every phenomenon already asserts a claim to be constituted within the totality of phenomena of which itself is only a part.^[15] There are no Leibnizean “individual substances” and no “complete individual concepts” in Kant. Now, concepts are universal representations common to many objects. Instead of the old relation of a concept conforming to an object, which usually poses as the basic formula of realism, Kant offers the new correlation of all objects, that is, of experience, conforming to the synthetic activity of the entire system of concepts. This turn seems antirealist at first sight, since the objects conform to the concepts rather than vice versa. But there is a realist edge to this manifest antirealist move: while experience in its entirety is synthesized by way of concepts, each object individually is relieved from the compulsion of representing or embodying a definite, individual idea. Things are embedded in the context of other things, and the ideas no longer assume the form of self-evidence. The highly restrictive parallelisms of rationalism and empiricism are thus alleviated.

Of course, Kant did not invent such “coherence arguments.” Interestingly, Descartes even concludes his Meditations claiming that it is the connection of a perception to the whole of life that distinguishes being awake from a dream: “But when I distinctly see where things come from and where and when they come to me, and when I can connect my perceptions of them with the whole of the rest of my life without a break, then I am quite certain that when I encounter these things I am not asleep but awake.”^[16] However, this argument is only possible after the certainty of the ego and the existence of God has already been proved. In ordo cognoscendi, the system of certainty is still founded upon an immediate evidence of one of the facts (as mentioned earlier, this fact could potentially even be a piece of paper). Leibniz carried this self-evidence of a single entity to extremes: from ordo cognoscendi to ordo essendi. Early in his life, he also made use of a “coherence argument” when differentiating dreams from being awake,^[17] but then he managed to seclude entire biographies, entire “coherent waking states,” within substances and monads to which it makes no difference whether they are alone in the world or not. In Kant, these thought experiments, these parcellations of the world, no longer make sense, since a thing in its singularity can never be “verified” by its individual concept, but only by the context in which it coexists with other things. On the other side, the “I” can never become a res cogitans and experience the punctual Cartesian self-certainty; he is rather the “sum of all representations,” a “synthetic unity of apperception” accompanying perceptions, thus a “condition of possibility” of all experience. There is no “parallel verification” between concepts and things piece by piece; the concepts are now transcendental, the subject lacks any concept and is a mere “accompanist,” and the things must join hands outside the constant control of subjective perceptions and ideal determinations.

In one move, Kant overcomes the impasses, or rather, the extravagances of both rationalism and empiricism. On the one hand, no self-evident and self-sufficient entities populate the space. The “thing” is no longer a Leibnizean monad, which suffices to deduce from it the world. Instead, the whole world is needed, from which a single thing is to be deduced. On the other hand, no perception separated from other perceptions is directly translated into its idea. Primary qualities, causes, and effects are no longer chased after and then missed behind each perception separately; they are rather forms which structure the whole experience and connect one perception to the other; they are essentially forms of the whole, in order for its parts to be perceptible at all. A “synthetic unity of appearances” replaces the “rhapsody of perceptions” (KrV A 156/B195).^[18] Not one monad, but all of them are needed for the one to be real. Not one collision of two billiard balls, but the whole context of experience is needed for cause and effect to cease to be mere illusions or habits of the mind. The whole, so to speak, over-determines the part.

In this sense, Kant reestablished both the connectedness and the soundness of the world. Facticity, once corroded by doubt, occasion, sequestration, immateriality, and lack of necessity, now seems to be able to exist solidly and at ease. Figuratively speaking, Kant restored the “taken-for-grantedness” of Descartes’s winter dressing gown and fireplace beyond the necessity to doubt their existence, Malebranche’s movement of the hand without the need to insert in it the occasional cause, Leibniz’s monads whose windows finally open, Berkeley’s table that vanishes no more when we avert our eyes from it, and the causal interaction of Hume’s substances in space and time that are no longer subject to radical contingency. The traditional truth coordinates, such as Descartes’s dualism, Malebranche’s occasionalism, Leibniz’s preestablished harmony, Berkeley’s idealism or even immaterialism, and Hume’s agnosticism, are all a result of a certain too agitated truth-compulsion: it is not enough to move a hand, God himself must be present at it; it is not sufficient for Brutus to kill Caesar, Caesar must also be killed by Brutus; one should not content oneself with relying on the existence of a table, God must also look upon it all the time; it does not suffice to assume causality, cause and effect demand to be perceived as well, and so forth. However, with Kant, these unusual landscapes of truth values become antiquated, and, what is more, start losing their grip on reality. Only through Kant are we finally capable of beholding particular things without expecting too much truth from them.

For this reason, the methodologies of rationalism and empiricism are suddenly obsolete. The sorting out, selecting, parceling, and infinitesimalizing of immediacies is replaced by the mediations of syntheses, conditions, and totalizations. It can be said, heuristically, that Descartes, sitting in his winter quarters, took in hand one phenomenon after the other, piece by piece, and discarded each individually before he got hold of the next. In Kant, however, along with every phenomenon one always already takes into account the whole world. Cartesian doubt, as a method of the successive reduction of uncertain facts, forfeits its relevance, and it is not because with Kant the phenomena would attain some additional certainty, but because the noumena shift to another domain, no longer verified through immediate evidence. This is the crux of the matter: the issue is not that within the Kantian world this piece of paper, this winter dressing gown, this fire, could never become an object of deception, but rather that the truth form is now “invested” in a different sphere, so the system no longer needs to assume and presume that immediate outer things invariably hover over the abyss of nonexistence. It is not the case that things got more certain; the point is rather that the fact of them being incessantly doubted adds nothing to the truth form itself. Kant did not invent a procedure to guarantee more truth in things; rather, he allowed the immediate objects of experience to be less true, and with carrying this “lesser truth” things also got rid of being unceasingly suspected. The concepts of falsehood, doubt, and prejudice no longer represent an entrance test for admission to the system of certainty. In the Kantian world, optical illusions do not cease to exist, they only forfeit the function of a truth criterion. Because truth is now in a way upgraded, the sense perceptions of the lower level need not be scrutinized as assiduously as before. Therefore, the senses stop lying as notoriously as they did in the times of Descartes, and, subsequently, optical illusions, hallucinations, and severed limbs do not represent the touchstones of philosophical arguments any longer.

The Functional Interpretation
of Kant’s Realism

What was said about Kant until now is hardly contestable. And it is on these grounds alone that a realist reading of Kant’s philosophy is perhaps made possible. If we are prepared to read Kant not only “according to the letter,” but also “according to the spirit,” if we dare to indulge in some slight over-interpretation, Kant’s alleged antirealism may soon prove to be only a means of unleashing new possibilities for realism. Kant’s position did not arise in a vacuum and cannot simply be downplayed as antirealist. Rather, it sought for solutions to very definite problems of its time, and one of the great goals Kant set out to achieve was precisely to identify the principles which would increase our knowledge of the physical (not metaphysical!) world and to provide philosophical foundations for scientific realism. And, one might add, if this approach is about to expose the human race as cosmically insignificant and even contingent, then Kant’s program of the growth of knowledge must be recognized as an act of realism.

Moreover, revolutions should perhaps be evaluated historically, not sub specie aeternitatis. Their value lies not in their literal form but in the shift that they perform relative to their predecessors. The Copernican system itself was empirically highly flawed; its predictions of the movement of celestial bodies were defective even under the standards of their own time and at first fell behind the accuracy of the Ptolemaic system. Therefore, the significance of Copernicus lies not in the performed calculations themselves, but in breaking the horizon of traditional cosmologies and setting up a new frame of possible future calculations. Kant himself could only think within the limitations of his time, and not all the implications of his revolution were as clear to him as they can be today. Thus, the real worth of the Kantian move lies in its relative realism by contrast with the stances of pre-Kantian philosophy. And the issue is not whether Kant is realist or antirealist per se, but rather whether his philosophy opened new dimensions of realism as compared to the philosophies of rationalism and empiricism.

First of all, the strongest case for Kant’s assumed realism could be made on the grounds of the relation that he allotted to philosophy with regard to science. Today, we are frequently made to believe that Kant somehow estranged, perhaps forever, the reach of philosophy from the domain of science. Meillassoux claims that “at the precise moment when modern science was trying to give us diachronic knowledge about ‘the nature of a world without us’ in which ‘the truth or falsity of physical law is not established with regard to our own existence,’ Kant returned humans to the centre of epistemology.”^[19] And Harman, recapitulating Meillassoux, mentions that “At the precise historical moment when science was leaping forward and seizing the absolute, Kant enslaved philosophy to a model of finitude that still dominates philosophy today.”^[20] All too easily we succumb to the illusion that there was more realism in the time before Kant. It appears to some as if in the period between Descartes and Hume the relation to science was somehow more honest, complementary, and productive. However, it would presumably be more accurate to celebrate Kant as one of the most important figures in the history of this dramatic affair: with him, the liaison between philosophy and science begins to be defined anew.

Pre-Kantian philosophers may have sounded more “scientific” at times, although rarely, but this was because they still formulated their own narratives and constructed their own “world pictures” directly competing with scientific theses of the time. Descartes, for example, criticized Galileo’s concept of cause, the occasionalists developed their own theories of causality and replaced physical with occasional causes, the empiricists, especially Berkeley, relegated Newton’s efficient causes to “secondary causation,” while Leibniz subordinated them to the final causes and derived them from these. All these controversies were played on the same field, as if their object were exactly the same: namely, the immediate reality. For instance, Leibniz never understood his monadology as a discursive product, an exaggeration of the intellectual constraints of rationalism, an argumentative extravagance of idealism being thought to the end, but rather as a theory of physical reality claiming enough confidence to risk a head-on, frontal dispute with Newtonian mechanics. Before Kant, philosophy still had the audacity to provide an alternative and, what is more, universal physics. But suddenly the rivalry between philosophy and physics came to an end. Ray Brassier’s assessment of the Kantian turn is negative: “Ultimately, it is the Kantian dispensation of empirical and transcendental regimes of sense, and the concomitant division of labor between the ontic purview of the sciences and the ontological remit of philosophy, which needs to be called into question.”^[21] But these lines seem to misconstrue the very extent and purpose of the Kantian move: the only aim of transposing the truth value from immediate adequation to the total horizons of categorical conceptuality was to secure that philosophy will no longer tread on the toes of science. With Kant, a trivial but peculiarly overlooked development occurs: from a certain point onward, philosophy stops intervening in the area of jurisdiction of science and no longer opposes it with competitive positive ontologies of reality. Kant is possibly the first prominent philosopher who was aware of the fact that outside of his field of competence there already stands a figure of science which philosophy can no longer challenge with its own ontology. Kant had his Newton, and he had him in a different way than Descartes had his Copernicus or Galileo. He could no longer oppose Newtonian physics with his own “theory of immediate reality,” in the same way the rationalistic dualists, monists, occasionalists, and monadologists, or the empiristic immaterialists and agnostics had done. Right from the outset of his philosophical endeavor, Kant knew all too well that philosophy is no longer due to constitute its own structures of reality in the style of pre-established harmony, occasional causes, secondary properties, and so forth. All that is left for philosophy to do is to retreat to the transcendental level and, speaking from this conceptual verge, provide an a priori foundation of natural science, leaving the arena of tangible reality to Newton’s physics. Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science can thus be read as a sort of capitulation of philosophy before the essentially ontological reach of science.

However, it is not our objective to investigate the relation of Kant’s philosophy to science, but rather to determine the philosophical conditions of his realist incentives. After all, this new relation to science can only be a consequence of Kant’s “realism” as defined and redeemed within philosophy. As we have shown, Kant’s crucial merit, placed within the historical perspective, was to construct a philosophy that would, bluntly said, secure the normal existence of the world behind our backs. He drafted a reality that exists beyond the need to be doubted, permeated with God’s interventions, sequestered in ideal entities, a reality that can continue to be while not perceived and follow the laws of physical causality. This Kantian “normalization” of the world was not performed by means of providing a direct answer to the dilemmas of the rationalists and the empiricists; instead, Kant made their questions and queries obsolete. Cartesian doubt whether this piece of paper, my winter dressing-gown, the fireplace, or even my arms and legs really do exist, Descartes’s and Malebranche’s concerns about how minds and bodies act on each other, Berkeley’s inquiry into what happens to the table when I avert my eyes, Hume’s speculation on how to detect cause and effect in the clash of two billiard balls—all these questions do not receive a straight answer in Kantian philosophy, but rather lose their point. Kant did not supply Descartes’s dressing gown and fireplace with any additional clarity or distinctness; he did not locate the seat of the soul in the extensional body of man, put eyes on the back of the subject to constantly gaze at Berkeley’s table, or find a new way to immediately perceive Hume’s cause and effect. He merely transferred the truth value onto the level of the conditions of possibilities of all experience, where the methods of partial antinomies of the rationalists and the empiricists no longer apply. The true grip, the pivot of his revolution therefore lies in the significant displacement of the mind frame in which certain philosophical questions can be asked at all. And it is solely within this new frame that we must look for the origins of his being more realist than the previous philosophies. In what way?

Kant considered himself to be a transcendental idealist and empirical realist (see KrV A 370), and to this day interpretations usually point out two residues of realism in his otherwise predominant antirealist stance: first, the assumption of the thought-independent thing-in-itself, second, the insistence on constructing “objective reality” (i.e., the necessity and regularity of phenomena for all knowing subjects as opposed to the possibly illusory representations of one subject alone). On the side of reality, Kant still posited a “thing” that eludes our grasp. And on the side of subjectivity, he posited a necessary conceptual structure that is resistant to particular subjective inclinations. According to most interpretations and even, to some extent, according to Kant himself, all the rest is antirealist. However, we claim that it is possible to offer an even more realist reinterpretation of Kant’s minimal realism, perhaps to show that he was a realist without being fully aware of it.

First, a different, functional reading of the infamous thing-in-itself may be proposed. Usually, the thing-in-itself is understood as the inaccessible outside of our grasp of reality, the deepest ground of being, the ultimate, albeit unknowable reason of our knowledge. However, when properly placed within the historical perspective, this thing-in-itself may show to have performed a downright contrary logical operation. Before Kant, the thing in its singularity has always been suspected of being the “carrier” and, hence, the “maker” of truth. Every entity of the material world has always already been a priori idealized: a rationalist substance was an embodiment of its eternal concept, an empiricist perception of the object was a mere idea of the mind, and so forth. In contrast, Kant defines the thing-in-itself as an entity to which no forms of knowledge, be it space, time, or categories, can be attributed. Against the background of Leibniz’s substance being entirely deducible from its complete individual concept, of Berkeley’s object being a mere idea and nothing beyond it, Kant’s thing-in-itself appears to be, contrariwise, a thing with no Damocles’ sword of parallel idealization hanging over its head. Viewed from this, intrinsically historical, angle, the thing-in-itself receives a different function: it may be regarded as a thing which represents nothing but its own nonidealizability. It stands for reality inasmuch as it resists piecemeal ideal verification; hence, it is an anti-thing.

As we have seen, the “absurdities” of rationalism and empiricism ensued from the fact that the smallest quanta of reality suffered under the constraint of being most immediately true; every infinitesimal entity needed an individual idea to be verified by it. For this reason, the things were occasionalized, monadized, immaterialized, decausalized. Kant, on the other hand, strived to relieve the field of reality from these direct, parallel, lateral idealizations. And it is precisely because the “thing-in-itself” can exist without a concept immediately verifying it that all the other “things” of reality, the perceptible and knowable things, such as tables and chairs, trees and roses around us, can displace the frame of their verification from individual to universal concepts, from perceptions to relations, from necessary incarnations to conditions of possibility of all experience. While the thing-in-itself assumes the role of the symbol of nonidealizability, the empirical things of the phenomenal world can afford to transfer their truth value from a sequestered singularity to the context with all other things. Paradoxically, in traditional readings, the thing-in-itself is the beacon of Kant’s realism, the guarantee of “deep reality.” In our reading, on the other hand, this thing is a realist assumption not because it was “in itself” something profoundly real, but because it assumes the function of an instrument of liberating thingness from idealization. In short, the thing-in-itself is a logical, not a real entity.

There is another way to make this same point. In the doctrine of the thing-in-itself, one could recognize a radical break with the most successful theory of truth, the correspondence theory. As Lee Braver beautifully states, this theory

In Braver’s view, of course, this turn from “picturing” the prepackaged world to constituting it actively is a straightforward case of antirealism. However, the same operation, viewed from a different angle, could turn out to be a realist one. True, Kant did invert the usual sequence of concepts conforming to objects to objects conforming to concepts. But, by doing that, he also introduced an overlooked, but logically most consequential operation: instead of a concept corresponding to an object, all objects must now correspond to the synthetic activity of concepts. In short, what Kant did was to relieve the world from the form of being prepackaged. The thing loses its ground both in the eternal concept of Spinoza and Leibniz as well as in the perceptive immediacy of Berkeley or Hume; neither eternity nor instantaneousness can constitute its time frame. Rather, the thing must spatially, chronologically, and causally cohere and blend with other things, precisely because the thing as it is in itself cannot be reached and can, by extension, no longer serve as the ultimate place of truth. By means of this logical retraction of the thing-in-itself, the world can finally become less dinglich (i.e., less complying with the forms of substances, conati, monads)—which might be considered to be a realist move.

Let us give another illustration. The thing-in-itself has no positive quality and thus represents nothing except its own lacking within the phenomenal realm. And by this pronounced absence, it starts symbolizing the shift of truth value from particular things to their all-encompassing context. This truth-displacement may remind us of Heidegger’s famous tool-analysis in Being and Time, where Dasein suddenly faces unusable, damaged equipment. The key characteristic of Heidegger’s totalized world is its unobtrusiveness, its inconspicuousness, its normality, so to speak. However, when Dasein seizes a piece of equipment in a state of disrepair or reaches for the hammer but fails to grasp it, that is when the thing “becomes conspicuous.” And the sole function of this sudden presence-at-hand of the broken, or even absent, tool is to make visible the thing’s a priori connectedness to the totality of readiness-to-hand:

Here, Heidegger’s presence-at-hand corresponds to Kant’s in-itselfness, and his readiness-to-hand to Kant’s context of experience. The sudden presence-at-hand does precisely not represent a thing in its truth but in its untruth: “it is still not just a Thing,” as Heidegger says. So if in this “ontology of totalization” there appears a “thing as thing,” it is only to prove the impossibility of its pure thingness more properly. The tiniest, unexpected void unfolds only to suggest that the real “object of truth” is not a separate thing, but the totalizability of the world. In this view, Kant’s thing-in-itself may not signify the ultimate, yet inaccessible fountain of truth, but only the irrelevance of the in-itselfness of a thing as a singular entity. It is not the thing that was unreachable, it is its in-itselfness that is untrue! The logical form of a thing-in-itself being a priori excluded from the realm of knowledge indicates that we will never encounter a rose “in itself,” a table “in itself,” but always only a rose in a vase on the table at which we are sitting: this, precisely, is the nowadays unacknowledged side of this controversial concept.

In short, the logical gist of the “thing-in-itself” does not necessarily lie in the fact that there is something about reality that is eternally unattainable for us. Instead, this thing functions as a conductor to a reality that consists sooner in the contextuality of the whole than in the ideality of its parts. Kant’s presumed realism consists not in conceding to some thing-in-itself outside our perceptive and conceptual reach, but rather in establishing a picture of reality relieved from the constraints of permanent conceptual verification, a reality no longer morcellated into a mere aggregate of embodiments of ideas. The true formula of Kantian realism may go as follows: Contextualization is de-idealization.

And from this new status of a no longer segmented, but totalized reality a new function of the subject could be deduced. The same method of “reading against the background of traditional stances” in order to discern the true scope of an operation can now be applied to the reinterpretation of Kant’s notorious subject. The transcendental subjectivity is frequently considered as the great, historically perhaps even the most momentous proponent and guardian of anthropomorphism. With Kant, it is claimed, everything became the correlate of the finite human thought. But with this simple reduction of Kant’s subject to human finitude, the complex structure of the transcendental subjectivity is overlooked. The “critical” subject consists of two “Is,” the empirical “I,” who is the object of the inner sense and as such appears in the world of phenomena, and the pure “I,” who itself does not appear but only represents the logical unity of consciousness. The pure consciousness is neither an intuition nor a concept; its identity is purely logical.

This type of duality in the heart of the ego was (more or less) unknown to the consciousness of rationalism and empiricism. There was no structural division between the empirical and the logical subject within the self-evidence of Cartesian res cogitans, the monadic “soul” of Leibniz, within the mind theater of Hume, or, to a limited extent, the tabula rasa of Locke.^[24] In these pre-Kantian subjects, either their logical concept was already a program of their empirical perceptions, or the empirical constancy of perception was itself a logical category. Descartes states it clearly: “It could even happen that, if I were to cease thinking for a moment, I would also completely cease to exist.”^[25] In Locke, similarly, one must be awake all the time in order to re-identify one’s soul; but, since we fall asleep occasionally, our original soul may be lost, and our consciousness can be transferred to another soul. And Hume claims that “[w]hen my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.”^[26] Thus, Hume’s mind theater may have no center, but, for this reason precisely, its doors must always be open and its stage is always giving performances. As seen within this “historical juxtaposition,” Kant certainly made reality dependent on the forms of thought which are accommodated by the subject, but with this move he also replaced the traditional “psychological” subject of conceptual intensity and perceptive continuity with the logical subject of making judgments. With it, he made the world independent of the ideas of the mind and the constancy of the perceptive gaze, and further made self-consciousness independent of the constraint of being awake. The transcendental subjectivity no longer proves to be a form that encloses the outside world within the “psyche” of a finite human being; it is rather the form that opens the logical possibility of liberating the subject from believing that the reality of things is somehow deducible from his individual concept or dependent on his empirical presence of mind. If the subject can provide the logical forms to conceptualize reality, its constant, frantic “attendance” to this world and to itself may become unnecessary. Sleeping certainly was a problem for an early modern consciousness, and, as such, it played a part in the arguments of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume. Kant’s subject, however, retrieves the right to fall asleep from time to time.

But the pure “I” does not only relieve the empirical “I” from his rationalist and empiricist constraints, he also shifts the frame of verification of empirical objects. The only point of this “logical displacement” of the subject is to open and warrant a different landscape of truth, in which a new kind of objectivity can take place. Kant’s subject is not a being in whom the world just lies enclosed, in the same way as the whole universe already subsists within the concept of a single monad. It is, likewise, not a passive receptacle of impressions, a gradually filling tabula rasa or the eternally open, never closed mind theater. For a passive subject focuses his attention on one object at a time, and because he is bound to the form of perceptive immediacy, sooner or later he attempts to perceive primary qualities, causes and effects in the here and now. It is in this predicament exactly that the Kantian move exerts its firmest grip. Against the perpetually concentrated and aware traditional subject, the basic disposition of Kant’s subject is his synthetic activity, his primordial spontaneity. To put it heuristically and in too simplified terms, Kant only strived to solve the problem of the perceptibility of primary qualities. Instead of looking for them behind every object separately, he realized that they can only be assumed as predicates of the whole rather than its singular parts. And as the predicates of the perceptive totality, they could no longer be ascribed to this or that object, but only to the guarantor of the whole—that is, to the active, spontaneous subject. Thus, the “aggrandizement” of the subject is only there to play a crucial and necessary logical role: because Kant refused to idealize singular objects, to verify them by way of a concept, he invented a sphere of some sort of “collective verification.” This sphere, in turn, had to assume a different form, a form of the “spontaneity of understanding,” for only an immanently subjective activity could prevent truth values from being extracted passively from each object separately. The irreducible activity of the subject is therefore anything but an agent of anthropomorphism. Being a mere “vehicle of all concepts whatever” (KrV A 341/B 399), its logical function is exactly the contrary: it performs the “decoupling” of concepts from being immediately embodied, replicated, and transcribed into discrete entities.

Kant’s subject is not a self-evidence, a self-certain concept, a self-sufficient soul, a complete individual concept, a passive opening toward the world, an idealist of a single perception, an agnostic of the clash of billiard balls, a private dreamer, an intimate fantasist, hence, the “Grand Human” in the midst of things, but the only logically conceivable agent of assurance that the new object of truth is not a single thing, but rather their totality. To grasp the logical scope of the Kantian move, it is important to remember that he did not transpose the “things” of empiricism into the mind of a subject, but only the form of their relationality. What lies in his “mind” is not the heavy reality of things, but their essential contextuality, their spatial, chronological, causal relations (i.e., all the logical inventory which distances this very thing here from being “by itself” true).

In other words, the great “unity” of the subject here functions as a safeguard against the subject being parceled in singular acts of attention and the objects being parceled in singular expressions of truth. Therefore, within the manifest subjectivization of the world (i.e., within Kant’s universally known antirealism) a logically preceding operation has always already been carried out: the totalization of the object of knowledge that, as seen from the historical perspective, should be recognized as intrinsically realist. With Kant, the conditions of possibility of reality have become subjective, because it is only within an active, spontaneous, synthetic subject that the predicates of the context of experience may finally over-determine the qualities of its parts.

In summary, the true value of Kant’s move consists in the fact that the thing in its thingness is no longer the carrier and maker of truth, and the subject in his subjectivity is no longer the agent of a certain existential and perceptive perseverance. In our reading, the thing-in-itself does not symbolize the unattainability and inherent finitude of knowledge, but functions as a “logical instrument,” which keeps things from being invariably idealized. And the subject is not designed as the “mind” in which the world is enfolded, but rather represents the possibility of a “logical distance” to the obligatory innate intensity and empirical attentiveness of the traditional consciousness. Or, to put it differently, Kant’s objectivity is a precaution against things being immediately true, and his subjectivity is a precaution against consciousness being immediately there. “In itself,” Kant may give the appearance of someone who “humanized” the world by way of the transcendental subjectivity, but, from the historical point of view, his “paradigm shift” is presumably more about de-psychologizing myself, the individual, self-evident ego, and, simultaneously, in de-idealizing this or that thing. The ontology of adequation always aimed at an immediate correspondence between the singularity of the thing and a certain intensity of the mind: in Leibniz, there is the perfect correspondence between the soul of the substance and its body, in Berkeley, the idea of the mind is the object. In Kant, however, the idealized thing is replaced by the contextualized thing, and the psychological subject is replaced by the logical subject. The res corporea, the body, the perception now become reality. The res cogitans, the soul, the presence of mind convert into a synthetic unity. And this is precisely the function of Kant’s transcendental turn: the concepts that were once “laterally” redoubled in real entities, are now retracted into the logical subject of knowledge, while on the other side of this epistemological retraction, reality can start living its nonoccasional, nonmonadic, nonperceived physical life.

Finally, there is another issue that must be addressed. In order to ensure the “contextual conceptuality” of reality, the Kantian subject lost a great deal: his self-evidence, the “human empiricity” of his experience, and, as we shall see, even his creatural necessity. Kant invented a new mind frame and cannot be interpreted as being an idealist, subjectivist, or correlationist within the old one. Why is this important? Perhaps it could be shown that the recent reproaches to Kant’s philosophy are actually made within the mind frame of pre-Kantian philosophy and somehow neglect the true point of the Kantian revolution. For instance, the typical Meillassouxean (pseudo-Berkeleyean) argument for the epistemological (not ontological) necessity of correlationism goes like this: “If I try to think something beyond thought, this is a contradiction, for I have thereby turned it into a thought.”^[27] But this reasoning is based on the equation: “something equals thought,” which is essentially pre-Kantian; it is a scene depicting Descartes beholding a piece of paper or Berkeley directing his haze toward a table. In Kant, there is no “something” as a primary object of truth and no “thought” as a primary empirical experience. There are only things in their experiential context and only thoughts in their synthetic activity.

Meillassoux’s concept of “arche fossil” was designed in order to expose a limit of the Kantian world, but this singular thing, which must be gazed upon at least idealiter, by an “ancestral witness,” that is, in the potential presence of one’s mind, or else the whole system collapses, is actually an early-modern, Cartesian notion that does not necessarily touch upon the Kantian design of reality. The whole idea of testing the system of truth with a deliberately atypical entity is pre-Kantian. Cartesian optical illusions, his fantasies of attending his own funeral or of occupying the amygdala of another person (an idea later seized upon by Berkeley), Locke’s notion of waking up in another soul, the blind and the deaf in the philosophies of the eighteenth century, or even the Lebnizean leave, which should not resemble another leave—all these thought experiments could not pose as a Kantian touchstone of truth. The critique of reason made these kinds of attempts to comprise the precarious experience of truth into a single impression redundant. Since Kant, we no longer have to “be there” to perceive a thing, not even in potentia. It suffices that we send our concepts back to the past. And these concepts are designed precisely as “logical distances” to our empirically given nature. Kant did not believe in Berkeley’s esse est percipi, but in the possibility of the world being conceptualized. Today, this may still seem to be an antirealist position, but in its time, the transcendental turn only used the conceptual structure of the subject in order to liberate him from regarding his empirical existence as pertinent to the issues of truth.

In other words, the thought experiments of traveling to the distant past before the advent of humanity do not seem to undermine Kant’s position. Meillassoux writes,

However, Kant’s method presumably claims something else: everything in this Newtonian universe could be conceptualized, and it is for this very reason that it does not need to be humanized as well. The necessity for the scientist to be human would only apply if the empirical and the logical subjects were the same. But by means of the dissociation of the empirical and the pure I, the logical forms within the human subject were detected that open the possibility of de-humanizing his cognitive faculty.^[29] It is precisely this difference that allows Kant to rationally conceptualize the world without making any particular rational being necessary:

Here, an argument is being conducted which may at first seem counterintuitive: It is the very logical necessity of concepts that makes their bearers and conferrers empirically contingent. No natural qualities can ever be deduced from the pure “I”:

This indicates that the contingency of the emergence of humanity is not unthinkable within Kant’s philosophy. In the first Critique, Kant speaks freely of the pre-human past, of other worlds, of stars so distant that likely “no human being has ever perceived them or ever will perceive them” (KrV A 496/B 524). And, what is more, when discussing their experience by the knowing subject, he repeatedly uses the word possibility and never actuality. He points to the “possibility of prolonging the chain of experience” (KrV A 495/B 523), the “reference to possible experience” (KrV A 496/B 524), and the “possible progress of experience” (KrV A 493/B 521).^[31] Consequently, this tarnishes the necessity of the empirical existence of humanity. Kant always assigned merely a relatively superior role to the human race in comparison to other known living beings. For instance, he called the human being “the only rational creature on earth”^[32] and allowed for the possibility of “the inhabitants of other planets.”^[33]

It could be said that Kant’s transcendentalism is the logical apparatus of his antihumanism. The conceptual emancipation of the subject from his biological conditions is the very lever that allows the disclosure of his empirical insignificance. From the higher ground of the “person,” the homo noumenon, which is in no sense a biological or anthropic determination, the cosmic position of the homo phaenomenon, the appearing human being, can be pitilessly devalued: “In the system of nature, man (homo phaenomenon, animal rationale) is a being of slight importance and shares with the rest of the animals, as offspring of the earth, an ordinary value (pretium vulgare).”^[34] Therefore, it would probably not contradict Kant’s system to assume another, nonhuman being of conceptual faculties; as long as this being’s mind would exhibit a transcendental logical structure, its empirical provenance would be beside the point.

In his arguments of “ancestrality,” Meillassoux seems to, perhaps not mistakenly confound, but nevertheless unmistakably identify the empirical conditions of manifestation of the transcendental with the transcendental conditions of manifestation of the empirical. He claims that the correlation cannot “exist by itself, independently of its incarnation in individuals,”^[35] and that “the transcendental subject is localized among the finite objects of its world in this way, this means that it remains indissociable from its incarnation in a body.”^[36] In his view, a thing prior to the advent of humanity, for instance a fossil, thus shatters the very foundations of man’s relation to the world, because it exposes the correlation itself as a mere (contingent) product of time, an emergence within its cosmic history. However, by deducing correlation from its historical incorporation, the original duality of Kant’s subjectivity is reduced to a plump unity. For the great innovation of Kant was to implement a schism in the correlation itself, a rift between the transcendental and the empirical regime. And only because the human being is capable of becoming aware of the transcendental structure of his reason, can he now begin to consider his empirical, bodily incarnation as accidental. Of course, the question remains, what would Kant’s world be without the occurrence of any of the rational beings—this might, from the vantage point of the present, in fact present an impasse, or at least a problem, of Kant’s thought. According to the Slovene Kant scholar Zdravko Kobe, the transcendental subjectivity possesses its “intelligible body,” which must be incarnated at one point, without there being a necessary point at which it must be incarnated. Even though this body of the transcendental subject “is spatial and temporal, it is not bound to a specific space and time.”^[37] This means that a rational being must emerge sometime and somewhere within the universe, but not necessary in a human being.

However, perhaps Kant gave a slight hint on how to surpass this dilemma, thus allowing us to bring his thoughts a step further. The transcendental structure that the subject finds in himself as nonappearing, even as detachable from the permanent vigilance of the consciousness, is also a means to realize the contingency of the (biological) embodiment of this consciousness—a means that pre-Kantian philosophies did not yet have at their disposal. And since transcendentality poses as the very lever of the insight into the contingency of its own empirical embodiment, it itself perhaps becomes something that may or may not be personified somewhere in the history of time. Doubtlessly, the system of concepts possesses its inner necessity, but if this “pure I” simultaneously discredits the necessity of his own “empirical I,” then the incarnability of the pure I itself becomes fortuitous. From this it may follow, not to Kant himself, but to us, his readers, that there is no inherent urgency within the otherwise rational universe to give birth to a rational being in order to be known by him.

To evaluate both Kant’s realism and his antirealism, a certain distinction must be introduced. Today, the paradigms of consciousness and language are usually lumped together. But in Kant, the empirical and the logical side of subjectivity must be held apart. One of the great merits of Kant was to offer possibilities of trespassing the horizon of rationalist and empiricist consciousness. But he did still believe in the thoroughly rational, conceptual world. So he might be called a cosmic realist and a conceptual antirealist. His antirealism does not lie in the mandatory humanity of the mind but in the conceptual structure of the transcendental subject. Within the Kantian frame, it is at least possible to think the human race as contingent, but the concepts are always necessary. Or, to put in other words, Kant’s philosophy already provided some rudiments of the de-anthropomorphization of the world, but not of its de-symbolization. For this, another step is needed.

Truth as Release: Gleichgültigkeit,
Hegel’s Overlooked Revolution

So far, we have differentiated two different ontologies—with all their “ontological” consequences. On the one hand, there was the ontology of immediacy, first embodied in the form of Cartesian doubt, on the other, the ontology of totalization, following the form of Kantian conditions of possibility. And now the possibility of a third ontology may be considered (i.e., the ontology of release and de-totalization). Traces of this new truth procedure go back at least as far as Hegel. It could be said, somewhat catechistically, that after the truth of understanding, based upon the correspondence form, and the truth of reason, based upon the coherence form, a third kind of truth form was invented, the truth of Spirit, Hegel’s Geist, which consists in creating a new, “institutional” sphere of truth, thereby releasing its other, the immediacy of nature, from the realm of its jurisdiction. This conception opens an entirely new landscape of truth values.

Today, we live under the impression, or even under a Zeitdiagnose concerning all aspects of our condition, that the modern subject has lost its way in the prison-house of language, in manifold language games, discourses, communications, metaphorical and metonymical transfers, or even wordplays. On the other hand, however, the human being has supposedly never felt as foreign and as homeless in this cold universe as he does today. The world seems all-too-human and inhuman at the same time. Thus, against these too simple pronouncements, another tendency can be observed. For illustrative purposes only, a certain shift can be seen in entirely heterogeneous areas of modern science, in psychoanalysis, sociology, biology, and even in philosophy. For it was precisely the science of the previous century that witnessed the emergence of a form of thought relating to an ontology of two orders of being: the first being caught within its own self-referential circuit, and the second representing the pure, relatively indifferent facticity.

Stephen Jay Gould’s biology can be considered as one of these “new ontologies,” since he never became weary of stressing that many, or even most, of the traits of living beings had never been the object of selective, evolutionary pressures. Against what we might call “Darwinian pan-adaptationism,” Gould points out how large quantities of life are reproduced, or even dragged along, without holding any specific, transparent, biological function.^[38] The other “scientific ontology” of this type is Niklas Luhmann’s sociology, his systems theory, the first axiom of which is not based on substance, but on difference, a difference between the system and the environment. Hence, this theory does not ensue from some presupposed uniformity and totality of being, but rather thinks the emergence of systems that, once established and reproducing themselves, surrender their claim about the rest of reality. The systems, so to speak, release their environment into a state of de-totalization. The idea of systems lies expressly in the fact that they essentially do not presuppose the existence of a super-structure that could totalize the environment. So, systems theory is not an “immediate theory of everything,” but a theory of difference, according to which the systems in their reproduction (which can be autopoietic and self-referential) gain the right to overlook and ignore, but also to admit and, with a certain amount of ease and casualness, allow the existence of outer reality. Luhmann’s sociology, as an ontology of difference, is therefore in the true sense of the word an ontology of the right to indifference. And, finally, the greatest example of such a “new ontology” may be Freudian sexuality, his celebrated and infamously misinterpreted pan-sexualism. Freud has always been an adversary of something we might call “total interpretationism” in psychoanalysis, where everything is bestowed with meaning, every character trait reveals a collective history, every object is sexualized, and so forth. The difference between Freud and Jung lies precisely in Freud’s ability to limit sexuality to a specifically human experience, whereas Jung perceived the flowing of sexual energy everywhere, even in animals and plants. For it was Freud who discovered a closed causality within sexuality that somehow underpins the whole human existence, and, by encasing this drive within a self-reflexive circuit, he could discharge the outside natural world from the realm of sexual desire.

So, in the end, the point in common to all these scientific ontologies is the discovery of a sort of pivot that finally allowed the world to lose its meaning, as opposed to Lévi-Strauss’s famous remark that “either everything, or nothing, makes sense.”^[39] Gould, for instance, could afford not to recognize a bearer of biological meaning in every trait of a living being; Luhmann felt no need to presuppose systemic order in the environment of the system; and Freud was no longer bound by the necessity of perceiving immediate sexual energy in the objects of the external world.

Based on this simple premise, one is tempted to set off on a quest for the origins of these ontologies of de-totalization. Their birthplace will be located in one of the earliest documents of genuine Hegelianism, in the famous “Sense certainty,” the first chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel first developed his concept of indifference, Gleichgültigkeit. At first, it is a small and seemingly negligible operation, but, as we will see below, it permeates all domains of Hegel’s philosophy and perhaps even represents a “method” of a new ontology. Hegel could well prove to be the founding father of a momentous and consequential shift.

The only reason why “sense certainty” is placed at the beginning of the Phenomenology of Spirit, a work representing the first part of the System of Science, lies in an attempt to expose the truth to the test of immediacy. For “this is the essential point for sense-knowledge, and this pure being, or this simple immediacy, constitutes its truth” (PdG 58–59).^[40] Language can pin down immediacy with a demonstrative pronoun (just as Descartes asked himself whether this piece of paper existed), and so the world now divides into “one ‘This’ as ‘I,’ and the other ‘This’ as object” (PdG 59). To the question, “What is the This?,” Was ist das Diese?, Hegel responds: “the Now and the Here,” das Jetzt and das Hier. And he continues:

In Descartes, this piece of paper is an object of doubt, its victim; in Hegel, however, the paper becomes a means of his method: as a place of preservation of the written, it assumes the role of the Archimedean point investing the world with a new value. Here, it is the I that is uncertain of himself, while the piece of paper is able, as it were, to say: “It is written, therefore it is,” thus becoming a bearer of some sort of self-evidence, of certainty that, irrespective of the changes in the immediacy, one and the same statement can always be read from it. Hence, the simple contraposition of the I and the world is now transferred into a new arena, which no longer perpetuates the naive opposition of outside and inside, but rather opens a new front between the written sentence and the referred fact already beginning to elude adequacy.

In a way, Hegel here implements Berkeley’s method of “turning one’s back.” However, the subject now actively turning away is the world of day and night, while the truth of the I, pinned down to the temporal adverb “now,” has, as Hegel points out, already become stale. It is the “I” that, so to speak, starts extinguishing behind the back of the world. Nevertheless, the Hegelian subject is, at this point, no longer confined to being a mere “I” of sense-knowledge, a tabula rasa of a sort, but rather he already embodies a certain schism between the I and the piece of paper, that is, he disposes of a leverage point from which the truth becomes increasingly less dependent on its outside:

At this point, the subject of knowledge assumes a new function, the importance of which should not be underestimated: he is given the right to become indifferent, gleichgültig, to night and day. Generally, one imagines the empiricist subject to incarnate intensity and constancy of his presence of mind, a continuity of perceptions. Berkeley’s subject may avert the eyes, but he is not allowed to hide behind indifference, since his perception immediately produces the being of things. Hume’s subject is merely a bundle of perceptions, and if he were indifferent to his impressions, he would presumably dissolve himself. Kant liberated the subject from this fixation to immediate perceptions, but within the horizon of totality, the experience still needs the subject of Ich denke as a logically continuous accompaniment of his representations. Of all these subjects it could be said that they are the being of night and day, and without them there is neither night nor day. Hegel, on the other hand, invents a new realm, in which the subject is finally permitted to become fundamentally indifferent to the content of his cognition. However, in order to open the “logical space” for this indifference to emerge, he must first endow the subject with a certain surplus, with which his indifference is kept in balance. The “now” of the sentence is neither this nor that, and, as a “not-this,” becomes a universal, a unity not of reality, but of language. And, as Hegel famously concludes, “But language, as we see, is the more truthful” (PdG 60).

The indifference does not come free of charge; it is counterbalanced by the fact that at the place of the subject a truth-surplus is produced, the “greater truthfulness” of language. Of course, Hegel’s early masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit, is at times somewhat unclear and as such perhaps allows freer interpretations. Hence, there is most probably no mistake in reading this “now” as something which preserves itself as the negative focal point of the change of night and day (i.e., a universal concept of language which becomes truer than its mere correspondence to either day or night). Night and day are not its being, Hegel says. In the face of the universal of language, an immediate certainty, an empirical adequacy, does not guarantee truth.

But Hegel does not stop here; he also adds, just as much also is it Day and Night. And the second half of this sentence is of even greater importance, representing the necessary correlate to the Hegelian turn. The “now” is a point of coincidence of two subjects, the subject of judgment (that is, the grammatical subject) and the deictic function through which the subject of perception is inscribed into language. And since the subject of perception, signified by the “now,” produces a linguistic surplus value whose truth no longer derives from the (empirical) immediacy of the world, on the reverse side of this shift the world likewise gains independence from the attention of the subject of knowledge. Night and day acquire an ontological license to change in their own right, according to a mechanics that does not adhere to the logic of cognition, certainty, and truth, and, consequently, the alternation of day and night makes no further claims on the subject in whose eyes it would come to exist. In a sense, the world now not only relinquishes the need to be gazed upon, either actually or at least potentially, but it also shows itself as eluding the conceptual structures of the subject.

This at first glance inconspicuous shift is of most far-reaching consequence. Since Hegel is never weary of repeating the term, the Gleich-
gültigkeit, indifference, seems to play an essential role in this cognitive situation. The subject is relieved of the task to either constantly perceive or conceptually constitute the objects, but, symmetrically, the outer world, the cycle of day and night, gains independence from the cognitive activity of the subject. The reverse side of this new attitude toward the world is an unimpeded, continued existence of the external world. And in view of our naive notions about the nature of truth and philosophy that we have grown accustomed to under Cartesian influence, this may represent a certain revolution. If the subject is entitled to become indifferent to his outside, then the world is free to lose its meaning; it is allowed to exist behind our backs, and it need not be totalized into a transcendental idea. Indeed, immediacy no longer plays the role of the truth-maker, neither in the form of adequation nor in the form of totalization. Even if this thing in front of us is exceedingly certain, we haven’t thereby achieved truth as yet. And even if we sum up and resume all the things and facts of the world, we are still not capable of conceiving of the concept of the “world.” Or, seen from the other perspective: the moment the outer world slips out of the focus of truth, it no longer needs to disappear and become null. There is no necessity for the things of the world to become objects of Cartesian doubt, Berkeley’s turning of the back, Hume’s agnosticism, or, in the perspective of totality, of Kant’s logic of illusion. Here, Hegel almost argues for some sort of unconscious anti-Berkeleyianism: in Berkeley, when one averts his eyes from the thing, the thing vanishes, while in Hegel, one quasi must face away to release the thing in the facticity, to enable its emergence as a purely factual existence outside the framework of the subject of knowledge. The tables fade behind our backs as symbols and meanings, so to speak, and only behind our backs do they resurface as facts.

Now, the following thesis can be proposed. Hegel’s Gleichgültigkeit is not an accidental disposition of the subject of knowledge, but rather a method, la méthode, which is as strict, relevant, and far-reaching as Cartesian doubt. Gleichgültigkeit is a foundation of a new ontology that may contain and implicate some of the most important precursors of modern thought.^[41]

Correctness and Truth

Above, we have indicated the instruments with which Kant made Cartesian doubt trivial: the singular object of one’s attention is no longer a place of presumed full truth, but, at the utmost, a place of a lesser truth. Even though doubts may still turn up here and there, they lose the paramount position in the truth processes which always favor contexts to particulars, relations to relata, the whole to its parts. Hegel, however, invented a new junction between subject and object, between inside and outside, between the “I” and the world. He showed that all the precarious issues with the external world can be suspended by assuming a new level of truth which surpasses any correspondence to a given immediate reality. The things outside us, such as day and night, begin to exist beyond any doubt or synthesis by the sole virtue of being untrue.

In Berkeley, the night is “true” as long as it is gazed upon. In Kant, it is “true” inasmuch as it forms a regular, causal interval with the day. And in Hegel, the night becomes simply “untrue,” not because it did not exist, but because by now the subject of its perception already holds in his hands something truer: the creative surplus of the emergent truth. In rationalism and empiricism, the object of the senses must be immediately verified; in Kant, it must be integrated in the context of experience; and, finally, in Hegel, it is released from the jurisdiction of truth. It starts representing the “other of the idea” (i.e., something that will later be referred to as the untruth of nature in the face of the self-reflexivity of Spirit). Perhaps, Kant’s subject was no longer haunted by doubt and could look away from things at any instant, but everything that he perceived was still a product of his synthetic activity. Yet similar to Kant rendering Cartesian doubt obsolete, Hegel makes the assumption of reality coming to existence within the spontaneous synthesis of the subject of cognition unnecessary and even impertinent. Instead, he opens the possibility of a reality falling out of the process of truth and thus withdrawing from the conceptual grasp (of the human being). The sensible immediacy of things is not totalized in the experience, but released from it. It is not assimilated into the program of the growth of knowledge, but left behind on the path of its progression. Thereby, the objects of the senses cease to represent the conceptual structure of the mind. In this subchapter, we will demonstrate how the mechanics of this somewhat delicate operation of release work.

One way to describe this entirely new design of truth value is by Hegel’s terminological difference between correctness and truth, Richtigkeit and Wahrheit.^[42] Hegel’s correctness is constituted on the line between representations and outer things and is the truth about the empirical facts of the world. Truth, however, is the truth of the explicated concept.^[43] The concept is no longer a form of representation, of empirical adequacy, of Kantian synthesis of experience, but rather a form of discourse.

Let us briefly return to sense certainty. We wrote down the sentence “Now it is Night” on a piece of paper, meanwhile it has become bright, and we find that it is now day. But the sentence on the piece of paper persists. At the empirical level it became untrue, that is, incorrect, but at the same time it produced its own irrevocable “truth,” a permanence of a sentence, in the face of which the immediate outside world, a former warrant of truth, proves untrue. There is therefore the sentence “Now it is Night,” and there is a reality that, by refuting the sentence, is itself refuted. “Night” and “day” are in the moment of “now” sometimes correct and at other times incorrect, but the truth has already passed over from the sphere of facts to the realm of universality of language.

And the question might be raised, what does this new “truth” consist of, what is its surplus over mere correctness? Taking into account the subsequent development of Hegel’s theory, let us imagine that besides the sentence “Now it is night” we write down on the piece of paper the sentence “Now it is day.” From both statements a law of discourse can be deduced, by which the (grammatical) subject is constituted within the symmetrical opposition between its two predicates (namely, the “now” within the opposition between “day” and “night”). Hegel himself defines the “now” as a not-this which can be both this or that (see PdG 60). Hence, an ideality of the “now” is produced within the discourse as determined by the interplay between the concepts “day” and “night.” As a not-this, the “now” does henceforth not have to consider the present state of the world to verify its content. It is a typical reversion of the subject and the predicate that later became one of the hallmarks of Hegel’s philosophy. In the processes of truth rather than correctness, there is no substantial subject to which accidental predicates are being attributed; there are only predicates that, by way of binary oppositions, create the subject in the first place. The soul, for instance, is not a “thing” but a product of two consecutive judgments “The soul is simple” and “The soul is complex.” Likewise, the world is “both infinite and finite,” and thus a result of the dialectical process between the concepts of “infinity” and “finitude” (see Enz I., § 28, § 32). Here, the concepts of “night” and “day” enter into a speculative opposition and produce an ideal subject, the “now,” which is no longer bound to the immediacy of experience.

But the crucial point of this idealist trickery, which may seem superfluous and self-indulgent to some, is a realist one. As soon as the meaning of the concepts is determined within discourse, Cartesian doubt and the Kantian unity of experience are no longer required: the birds are singing, the grass is growing, night and day are changing, and there is no longer any need to apply to them the operation of reduction or totalization. Once we begin laying claims to something truer than the mere immediate experience, the criteria for assessing this very experience retroactively unwind and get released. It is a seemingly paradoxical situation. Modern science operated within the paradigm of truth as an induction of empirical data from the outside world, and yet it is precisely the Cartesian method that according to Heidegger “has the tendency to bury the ‘external world’ in nullity ‘epistemologically’” (SuZ 250). With Hegel, however, the truth value is transferred from the realm of representations to the realm of ideas, and, yet, it is this new truth that now becomes indifferent to (or even “at ease” with) the entire area of correctness, therewith allowing things to exist in their own right—as long as they come to terms with being untrue.

Within this Hegelian disposition, immediacy is always something untrue, or, to use a slightly more convenient term, something naïve. If Hegel’s Gleichgültigkeit is capable of claiming straightforwardly, “just as much also is it Day and Night,” this does not mean that some sort of naïve realism once more assumed the function of a truth criterion. On the contrary, in this perspective it is not the belief in the existence of independent outside reality (hence, naïve realism) that is naïve, but rather it is the stance that has now become naïve whereupon the front between the object and the subject, the question of correspondence between reality and representation, is by itself already a focal point of truth. Or, to put it in another way, when the truth form was still determined by correspondence (i.e., when it assumed the form of naïve realism, one was in incessant need of doubting the content of one’s representations). However, the moment this naïve realism no longer defines the coordinates of truth values, the world regains its former reality, albeit at a price: reality as such may now be real, but is itself something utterly naïve.

It is in this “untrue-ization” of immediate reality that we will recognize the most prolific incentives to a new realism. The standpoint of truth is no longer constituted by a suspension of the realist stance, but by reaching a point of indifference to it. In the methodological sense, Hegel’s system offers the possibility of a two-fold evaluation of “truth,” now being either richtig or wahr. And since for Hegel the external, empirical reality of the natural consciousness is unwahr , untrue, there is no need to deprive it of its correctness as well, its immediate reality, its facticity^[44] (in opposition to actuality, Hegel’s Wirklichkeit, which is structured by reason and therefore always already wahr). This thought complex of instituting a self-referential “truth” in a localized area that now becomes indifferent to the very reality it referred to in the first place is, after all, a long-exploited and well-wrought form. For a clearer image, let us resort to a few examples.

Lacan famously declared that, even if a jealous man was correct about his wife cheating on him, his jealousy was still pathological. This argument may rest on the following intuition: the moment jealousy becomes pathological, the psychological system itself becomes indifferent to the fact whether the wife’s lover existed or not. If the real reason for the patient’s ailments were false perceptions, then the analysis could in fact endeavor either to confirm or refute the existence of people that the patient hallucinates about. But if the analyst, as in the case of our poor cuckold, finds that the patient revolves around his own jealousy, then the wife’s lover automatically loses the status of a figment of imagination. A pathological emotion exhibits a sufficiently proper, self-referential investment of energy, so now, in a way, Cartesian doubt, whether the lover really exists, or Kant’s context, in which the lover is only one of the several causes of the patient’s ailments, yields to the Hegelian indifference to this reality. The wife’s lover may be correct, he may exist as a fact, but, as for the therapeutic “actuality,” the lover is simply untrue, for the truth of the patient’s state is not “saturated” around the wife’s affair but around his jealousy. Or rather, since the existence of the lover is untrue with regard to the patient’s pathology, it is a matter of no consequence whether it is correct or not; thus, he may very well exist. Similarly, in Descartes, the fireplace and the winter dressing gown are potentially true, so the question incessantly arises whether they are also correct, whether they exist as facts; however, with Hegel, the day and the night become untrue, which entitles them to exist “at ease” in all the correctness of their facticity.

To take another example, one of vulgar psychology, let us imagine a case of someone making every effort to escape the social environment in which he was born, marked with poverty, backwardness, and so forth. As long as a person of this sort is still caught within the dynamics of his social advancement, he does everything in his power to downplay his humble origins. However, when he finally obtains a position of rank, reputation, and stability, when his assets start reproducing on their own, this summit ascent often goes hand in hand with a certain “release” of his biography, which was thus far held under quarantine. Suddenly, he overcomes the reluctance to publicly indulge in reminiscences of his destitute childhood, and so forth. Here, we witness an analogy to the Cartesian paradox in which the subject, under the constraint of the form of immediate adequation, doubts the existence of the immediate world itself: until someone believes that his modest origins serve as an incentive for his striving for higher social rank, he is compelled to disguise these origins at any cost; yet, as soon as his position is secured and maintains itself, he becomes indifferent to the unveiling of the path of his becoming. The reason why someone socially well-established exhibits his inglorious roots so easily appears to be quite simple: he managed to make his own past untrue, is no longer determined by it, and because of it, he can finally let it be seen in all its unobscured “correctness.” To make this case even more pointed, people often feel the desire to “tell the truth in the end”; and if this truth is traumatic, it can only be conceded when first being made untrue. What one can undo retroactively are not the facts of the past but only their truth. And this new untruth of those facts can only be asserted by declaring their factual correctness. All the attempts to doubt or conceal something only preserve it within the regime of truth. Thus, at some point, the only way to make something untrue is just to confess to it.

Let us turn to our last example. Psychologizing great personalities was without doubt one of the maladies of the twentieth century. The fictitious philosopher Botul wrote about the sexual life of Immanuel Kant, about his vast asexuality, Gustave Flaubert was, according to the famous analysis by Sartre in his monumental work L’idiot de la famillie, possibly even a submissive lesbian, and we keep hearing about the sexual preferences of Adolf Hitler. The first and most common reaction to such conjectures is usually mistrust, suspicion, disagreement, or perhaps even a remark that Kant had nevertheless had an appointment with a lady in some garden or other. For it seems to us that the reality of an effect, such as critical philosophy, Madame Bovary, or the holocaust, is of such magnitude that it cannot be explained simply from the “codomain” of the reality of the cause. But according to our thesis, the best way to make something untrue is to admit that it is correct and to acknowledge its factual existence. Indeed, when something is exactly what it seems, it is inhibited in its truth. What we have here is an antiskepticism of a sort: while a skeptic negates every possible stance, we affirm it in order to take the wind out of its sails. And, consequently, it is probably the reason why, in the end, we nevertheless come to terms and reconcile with these seemingly shortsighted psychological explanations. If we were to doubt and suspect them, we would tacitly continue to assume that a famous oeuvre could in fact be psychologized, save that for the time being we did not possess a sufficiently complex knowledge of all the diverse causes to draw an outline of the real causality. By doubting the existence of a thing, as we have seen with Descartes, one simultaneously imposes on it the truth form of adequation; and by doubting the psychological reconstructions, one may in fact belie the specific analyses by Botul or Sartre, yet still remain within the realm of assuming that Kant’s and Flaubert’s work is reducible to a meanwhile unknown, but potentially reconstructible biography. The only way to release the emergence and irreducibility of their work from their private biographical psychism is to approve and condone the latter as entirely appropriate—hence correct and irrelevant. The moment these attempts of “psychologizing” are fully recognized, they are neutralized and in this way put in their place, in their indifferent field of competence. It is perfectly possible that there is a real psychological continuity between Kant’s asexuality and the concepts of the thing-in-itself, transcendentality, the categorical imperative, the beautiful, and the sublime; likewise it is at least probable that in order for critical philosophy to be invented, an author was needed who slept in tightly wrapped linen; and finally, we can even imagine that the three Critiques would have never seen the light of day, had a man in the midst of a drab and flat Königsberg not preserved his chastity into old age. But in Kant’s philosophy something else has arisen, something that transcends and is entitled to dissociate itself from its factual history. It is the truth of the Kantian philosophy that emerged along the way and can only be emancipated from the “reality” of its emergence when this reality is acknowledged as essentially correct.

The Functional Interpretation
of Hegel’s Realism of Release

Gleichgültigkeit is a small, almost inconspicuous operation placed at the very outset of Hegel’s “epistemology.” Hegel himself never recognized it as a method, but he did use it on practically all levels of his thought. Or, to be more precise, in his system there was a method of which the “indifference” in Sense certainty is only its first manifestation. And it is precisely this somewhat neglected method, and the broader implications of its ostensibly innocent move, that must now be discerned and examined. The final task of this chapter is thus to observe how the mechanics of release function not only logically, but in actu, and thereby to pinpoint where the scope of Hegel’s realism can best be measured and felt.

Perhaps the best way to assess the somewhat concealed possibilities of Hegel’s realism is to read it against the backdrop of Kant. Thus far, we have demonstrated how Kant surpassed the form of immediate adequation by transferring the truth value to the horizon of postulated totalization. Now, we will investigate Hegel’s break with these Kantian dialectical postulates of totality. If Kant’s philosophy was interpreted as a gain in “relative realism” with respect to the philosophies of rationalism and empiricism, our next effort will be to get hold of the increase in realism that Hegel’s philosophy facilitated. We have placed Kant within a perspective in which his moves seem to have been at their most operative. And now we will try to situate Hegel within the prospect in which his shifts and maneuvers make the greatest sense. In our reading, Kant detected the aporias and paradoxes of the previous philosophies, such as doubt, mind-body interaction, the perceptibility of primary qualities or causality, and established a frame in which they start losing their grip. But Kant’s avowedly remarkable overcoming of rationalist and empiricist chimeras just relocated them to a different level (i.e., to the realm of reason, which, in turn, can only be conceived as the transcendental dialectic, the “logic of illusion”). Hence, our aim is to demonstrate that the most fertile ground of Hegel’s moves, the true vantage point of his operations, consists in the detection and transgression of these “transcendental illusions.”

In order to set the stage for the appearance of Hegel, a slightly more lengthy presentation of certain deadlocks and dilemmas unfolding at the farthermost horizon of Kantian thought is needed. In Kant, understanding is placed in the horizon of reason, and the truth value is shifted from the realm of immediate evidence to the realm of the totality of conditions. However, this semantics of reason, which is compelled to use quantifiers such as “the whole,” “entire,” “universality,” “allness,” and “totality,”^[45] has a price to pay. Now, the solidity of the representations of understanding is secure, because it is no longer grounded in the immediate evidence of ideas or perceptions, but rather in their embedding under the reason’s scope of totality. However, this solidification of representations opens an abyss at the other end of the size scale: the concepts of reason, such as “world,” “soul,” and “God,” no longer correspond to the objects of experience, thereby forfeiting the function of expanding our knowledge. In a nutshell, the metaphysical concepts, and the judgments that are being made on them, are essentially illusory; they form paralogisms, antinomies, and an ideal.

In this way, the Kantian scheme represents a crucial and decisive rearrangement of “ontological values” as opposed to traditional stances. Within the historical perspective, it could be said that, between Descartes and Kant, as it were, certainties and uncertainties change places. To put it pointedly, Descartes rounded out the potential deceptiveness and inconstancy of sense objects within the realm of the certainty of the ego and then within the proof of the existence of God, while with Kant, in contrast, the soundness of the syntheses of understanding finally dissolves into the illusions of the judgments of reason. In Descartes, the doubt about this or that thing is comforted in the secure lap of God; in Kant, however, the firm ground of the things of understanding liquidates in the hazy mist of the idea, in uncertainty whether God exists or not. The self-evidence of the “I” in the inner sense is no longer possible, the empirical knowledge of the world as a whole cannot be synthesized, and one is no longer capable of proving the existence of God. In short, the partial issues of Cartesian doubt are converted to the total impasses of Kantian dialectics.^[46]

The threat of illusion, of nonbeing, always appears at the level where the truth value is, so to speak, “invested” or “saturated.” With Descartes, truth aimed at the immediate thing in the form of adequation, and thus the truth’s method could only be doubt (i.e., the dilemma about whether this thing exists or not). With Kant, on the other hand, truth is conceived in the form of totality, of conditions of possibility, the unconditional, the absolute. Therefore, it is the realm of reason, the transcendental dialectic, that is affected by nothingness. The entities whose existence becomes precarious are now the “I,” the world, and God.^[47] The repression of negation in the domain of understanding witnesses a “return of the repressed” in the domain of reason. The undecidability of being and nonbeing, which was cultivated by pre-Kantian philosophers in the scope of minor and limited phenomena, such as my hands and feet, mental and physical events, determination and negation, Brutus and Caesar, the table behind one’s back, or the collision of billiard balls, overleaps with Kant to the level of “everything.” Rationalist and empiricist alternatives of being and nothing start eroding the totality itself. Kant’s “totalizing compulsion” thus manifests a negative edge; by displacing the truth value from imminent adequacies to mediated contexts, the Kantian universe becomes dialectical, illusory, and, in its final horizon, the Humean predicate of “agnostic” is occasionally still ascribed to it.

Kant thus offers a world that is partim more “real” and more “commonsensical” than the rationalist or empiricist universe, yet in toto this same world becomes undecidable as to the alternative of truth and falsehood. We can be certain of our hands and feet, a rose can stab us in the back, and all pragmatic assumptions in the game of billiards are ontologically justified, but we are not in a position to be sure whether the world as a whole really exists On the level of totality, the question why is there being instead of nothing seems to be slightly out of place, and it only remains for us to ask, are we really confident that there is being instead of nothing? Kant himself wrote in the Critique of Judgement, “Perhaps nothing more sublime has ever been said, or any thought more sublimely expressed, than in the inscription over the temple of Isis (Mother Nature). ‘I am all that is, that was, and that will be, and my veil no mortal has removed’” (KU 194).^[48] Isis is “all that is, that was, and that will be,” and the reason why no one ever took a glance behind her shroud may well lie in the fact that being itself, at the very moment it is bestowed with a universal quantifier, turns into a mere veil.

Now, the stage is set, and Hegel can enter the scene. First, a remark is due concerning the Kantian and the Hegelian operation of totalization. Admittedly, the ill repute of totality has haunted Hegel much more than Kant. After all, it was Hegel who declaratively stated, “The True is the whole” (PdG 11) in the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In Hegel, Kant’s thing-in-itself is abolished, the sensitivity is “sublated” within the sphere of understanding and reason, nature shows itself to be a mere by-product of the self-movement of Spirit, and so forth. It seems that nothing was left outside this idealist frenzy. But Hegel’s “totality,” as we shall see, is always a complex operation introducing highly sensitive equilibria between the realm of the achieved whole and the realm of the respective release. One of Hegel’s “basic operations” is to institute an emergent causality of higher standing in order to release from it the facticity that was once under its jurisdiction. To give a few examples as a foretaste, in Hegel’s political philosophy, the state is a viable structure of reason only if it maintains a civil society in its midst that is indifferent to the particular interests of its members; the state, in a way, releases the sphere of finance, profession, or economy, surrendering it to the “invisible hand” of the market and other civil relations. The system of right and justice is only functioning if it is capable of disregarding the psychological motives of the offenders; it releases the constraint of considering circumstances, personal histories, family backgrounds, and so forth. Finally, in Hegel’s theory of aesthetics, the artistic beautiful, das Kunstschöne, should not depict or imitate the beautiful of nature, das Naturschöne, but rise above it; the beauty of Spirit releases all natural forms from its field of interests. And the examples are many more.

Perhaps, this relation between Kant and Hegel could best be explained in terms of the difference between their respective idealisms. Again, Kant’s “frame of verification” is no longer direct perception but the entirety of experience, and the conceptual form of this totality is an “idea.” In Kant, an idea is not an empiricist immediate representation, but a “pure concept,” which extends beyond the limits of possible experience and to which no sensible object can conform. As such, it is a “focus imaginarius” (KrV A 644 / B 672), “only a projected unity” (KrV A 647 / B 675) (i.e., a regulative, and not a constitutive principle). The final horizon of truth within which things can be real at all is thus something both necessarily whole and eternally elusive. And it is this “presumptuous” openness of the totality, this “bad infinity,” in which Hegel intervenes with his specific idealism. Kant shifted the meaning of “idea” from the immediacy of representation to the totality of conditions. Now, Hegel shifts it from the never achievable allness in the synthesis of phenomena to the establishment of an emergent sphere, which both actualizes within reality and releases this reality from its domain. In rationalism and empiricism, an idea was the correlate of a thing (in Berkeley, it directly was the object). In Kant, its correlate is the totality (i.e., the world, the soul, God, or the ideals of the highest purpose or the highest good). And, finally, Hegel conceives the idea as a complex balance between its self-reflexive emergence and the release of its otherness. The idea must always step out of itself, alienate itself in its other, and only then return to itself, leaving its other behind as something untrue. Most notably, Spirit releases itself into nature in order to constitute itself in its “second nature,” as a self-reflexive movement free of any “naturalist” restrictions. An idea is thus neither bound to any particular immediacy nor does it remain open and incomplete in its infinite process of totalization. It is an emergent entity, which achieves its ultimate definitiveness precisely in the movement of rendering its original, immediate object untrue. God, to put it pointedly, is no longer an intangible Kantian ideal, but someone who reveals himself once and for all; but he does it by being crucified and dying on the cross.

Thus, Hegel reshuffles and displaces the landscape of truth values once again, for it has already been repositioned and displaced by Kant. Against pre-Kantian immediate adequation, Kant conceives his ultimate concept, the idea, as a form of accumulation and regulation. Kant’s Weltanschauung is always governed by something that might be called a program of addition. The concepts of “world,” “soul,” “morality,” and “history” are all matrices of summation of the entirety of empirical phenomena in their respective areas of discretion. Because of this inherent claim to totalization, Kant’s philosophy is all about infinite tasks and asymptotic approaches. Inversely, Hegel offers a philosophy of definite actions and concrete actualizations, of stepping behind the veil of the phenomena, jumping into the water,^[49] committing the act, and even of ending history. However, these ideally activated “definite breakthroughs” always represent complicated balances between creating an emergent truth on the one side and unveiling the area of untruth on the other. Instead of the Kantian timeless, all-encompassing frame of infinite growth and approximation, Hegel provides a matrix of ideas being embodied here and now, within the nonideal sphere of immediacy. And yet, there is always a “realist remainder” to this process: the given world suddenly reveals itself in its untruth. The subject can express his morality only in a pathological act (he must even, as it is said in the Phenomenology of Spirit, acknowledge his evil); the state can only actualize itself in the exteriority of the finite human will, its particular, mundane interests; and, most famously and picturesquely, God comes to earth to die in the worldly body of his human son.

Ideas have always been devised as instruments of control over reality, of holding it in the reins of truth. Before Kant, ideas immediately seized reality and cut it up into truth-quanta. In Kant, first, the concepts were detached from being directly incarnated, and then, they were submitted to the jurisdiction of ideas as their final regulation. Only ideas can guarantee a unity of experience, in which every piece of reality stands for the part of the truth of the whole. In contrast, Hegel’s idea is designed as an instrument of alleviation of either immediate or totalizing ideal constraints imposed upon reality. First, the Hegelian incarnations of ideas in the midst of reality do not represent a return to the pre-Kantian mind frame and have nothing to do with the rationalist and empiricist equations of ideas and objects. The object in which the idea incorporates (for instance, “the being of Spirit is a bone” (PdG 208), from the Phenomenology of Spirit) is not its verificator, but the representative of its own untruth in the face of which an idea can only verify itself by its own self-detachment from its material bearer.^[50] The object enjoys the status of the “necessary other” and as such performs a very precise function: by its blatant inadequacy, it represents the fact that the idea is not given, but must first make itself to be in the process of burning its fingers on its own incarnation. Or, as Hegel puts it, “The Idea is thinking, not as formal thinking, but as the self-developing totality of its own peculiar determinations and laws, which thinking does not already have and find given within itself, but which it gives to itself.” (Enz I., § 15) Hegel thus displaces both ends of the equation: on the one end, the bond of adequation between the thing and the idea is dissolved, and, on the other, the idea becomes itself only by means of this break and did not exist before. In brief, the idea becomes a processual entity, while the thing is released from the compulsion to represent an idea. As opposed to Kant’s perennial horizon of totalization, Hegel’s idea is only as good as its historical actualization. An idea must thus stumble upon its other, experience the latter’s inaptness, and then establish its truth as a virtual movement of surpassing any immediate reality.

Here, the ill-famed “totality” of Hegel enters a subtle relation with its other, the de-totalized rest of its self-reflexive process. The truth’s “whole” is not a static, Spinozist substance, an inventory of the present state, a claim about the givenness of the world, but signifies solely the accomplishment of the journey traveled: a journey which does not allow us to take a step further until we are capable of gaining indifference to things originally intended and leaving them behind. The realm of truth is totalized merely in the sense of a path being walked through, so that the realm of pretended adequations may reveal itself as fundamentally de-totalized. Hegel’s method of the whole is thus only a means to finally be able to behold the given world as essentially unwhole. If, before Kant, the idea verified its immediate real correlate, and if, with Kant, it verified the summation of all its correlates, now, in a way, it falsifies its immediate correlate, which, in turn, releases the need to sum up all the phenomena of its domain. To put it illustratively, because the transcendent God reveals himself here on Earth and then dies in the mortal body of Christ, human beings may cease to represent the “image of God” individually and henceforth constitute God only by way of the daily actions of their spiritual community. Man’s body is thus freed from its ideal over-determination, and God becomes merely a process of his earthly actualization.^[51] Or, to use another example, Spirit may embody itself in the bone, but only to realize that the bone cannot express and carry its truth, so, in the end, it no longer needs to totalize nature under its discretion; in fact, it can release it and make it its untrue other. Ideas are emergent entities which produce themselves only concomitantly with producing, so to speak, the untruth of the world.

While Kant’s ideas were ethereal horizons of holding the world together, the veils of Isis that secured and thereby cloistered the solid existence of particular things, Hegel sends the ideas to earth, he confronts them with the brute reality of things, folds them back onto themselves in the movements of self-reflexivity, and thereupon surrenders all immediate reality to the state of untruth. Just as Kant, having established the reason’s dimension of totality, no longer needed the old, rationalist and empiricist methods of truth, which parceled out and infinitesimalized immediacy, Hegel, positing the productive autonomy of the concept, simultaneously relieved it of the obligation to cumulatively summate all its intuitive content. And just as Kant did not provide Cartesian objects with more truth, but simply rendered the method of doubt in them less truthful, Hegel does not accomplish the endless progress of experience, but rather institutes a truth form that surpasses the framework of Kant’s postulates of totality. Instead of fulfilling Kant’s infinite tasks, he establishes a structure of the actual applicability of ideas. Thus, Kant’s and Hegel’s totality are not the same thing: Kant’s is a regulative, summative, and, finally, necessarily transcendent horizon, and Hegel’s is a normative, virtual, and, as such, active and actual force. More figuratively speaking, Kant’s “whole” is always surrounded by an aura of holiness, of zealous and devout daily struggles to achieve the unachievable immaculateness, while Hegel’s Ganzes is rather a novelesque endeavor of taking the next step and bidding goodbye to the old one.

And it is precisely in this fundamentally deferred method of self-posing truth and released reality that we will recognize the greatest possibilities of realism. If there is such a thing as Hegel’s realist stance, it consists in the fact that he recognized in the thing’s inadequate representation of the idea a lever to surpass the Kantian confines of imposed totality. Kant’s idea endorses the (albeit infinite) accumulative and additive design of the world, while Hegel’s, on the other hand, performs the operation of its release from the jurisdiction of truth. In Kant, the idea posits a world laying claims to total value, a world in which (potentially) nothing will escape the endless progressions of knowledge. In contrast, Hegel’s move performs an ontological release of the value of the world. Since the idea requires neither immediate verification nor totality in the synthesis of phenomena, immediate being is freed from the compulsion of meaning, rationality, or truth. An idea that exists solely in the movement of its actualization and never in any parallel mapping or postulated enclosing of the given world opens the view to a landscape of its otherness, of the world lying outside the ideal constraints of possible synthetization and conceptualization. Consequently, not every single piece of being is suspected of signifying something, nature is allowed to discard the seal of reason, and the world no longer bears testimony to its higher calling. Although traditionally Hegel has always been read as an old metaphysician still able to totalize the world into a single teleology, it is the merit of his philosophy that it lays the groundwork for thinking the nonsense of immediacy. The order of nature, be it the arrangement of the planets,^[52] the biological diversity of the earth, the shape of our bodies, or the impulses of our particular interests, are always a place of untruth.^[53]

In short, from Kant to Hegel, the whole range of what is true and what is real, of what must be taken into account and what can be disregarded, undergoes a fundamental modification. Perhaps this altered status of the ideal in its relation to the real can best be seen in the divergence of the “dramaturgical curve” of the two great works of German idealism, the Critique of Pure Reason and The Phenomenology of Spirit. Kant aimed at laying the foundations of the scientific appropriation of the world and Hegel at elaborating a “philosophical novel,” an education of a philosophical subject who will appropriate the world by means of labor, cultural forms, and history. While Kant’s propaedeutic approach is all about including all reality into one idea, Hegel’s Bildungsroman, as The Phenomenology of Spirit is sometimes called, follows the path of developing, overcoming, and leaving behind those portions of reality that have become untrue. In short, Kant’s Critique implements the program of a comprehensive noumenal definition of the phenomenal, while Hegel’s Phenomenology provides a narrative of the “noumenal” structures of reality being constituted on a path along which they gradually separate from their own immediate phenomenal content. What is at stake here is thus no longer the Kantian case of how to infuse the idea with all its possible content, but the issue of what the idea can afford to release on this passage toward its constitution.^[54]

As a consequence, upon the contrasting status of the idea, two unconditionally disparate worldviews are built. The initial logical divergence, which, at first sight, might seem negligible, does not remain limited to the sphere of its theoretical competence, but starts permeating all levels of concreteness of Kant’s and Hegel’s thought, from morality, to society, to history. Let us then examine a few of these practical implications of the altered status of truth.

For instance, Hegel’s concept of morality is established upon entirely different grounds than that of Kant. On the one hand, there is the morality of totalization and, on the other, the ethics of actualization. Kant advocates a slow and steady one-way program of the strictest purgation of the soul, while Hegel allows a constant re-invention of the subject amidst the taint of things. Since, in Kant, an idea always computes and adds together, when assessing the “morality” of man, the entire, comprehensive picture of his incentives for action needs to be taken into account, the sum of his motives performed. Morality is thus an essentially gradual and necessarily infinite task of the purification of pathological impulses. The concept of “the highest good” has to totalize man’s biography under the ideal of “holiness,” and any good action, no matter how small, can only be accomplished within the dimension of time’s infinity: “This endless progress is, however, possible only on the presupposition of the existence and personality of the same rational being continuing endlessly (which is called the immortality of the soul)” (KpV 238). The moral law condemns the subject to a continuous, eternally unfulfilled, and therefore totalizing aspiration. In his ultimate scope, Kant’s subject is designed as an infinite effort to rectify his own interior; it is a beautiful soul in becoming. In Hegel, this “bad infinity” of time is no longer needed. The value of the act’s “morality” is not defined by the perpetually deferred purity of the subject’s intentions, but by the effect of his doings here and now. In the Philosophy of Right, to give perhaps the most obvious example, the concept of “morality” is superseded by the concept of Sittlichkeit, or “ethical life,” which shifts the Kantian moral dilemmas of pure will to the externalized and particular area of legal and social relations. Hegel’s “ethical life” does not actually perform and complete the Kantian process of moral maturation; Sittlichkeit is exactly not a totalization of Moralität. Instead, it endows the subject with a surplus that allows him to distance himself from his own internal impulses—the surplus of concrete action. Against Kant, Hegel notably stated, “What the subject is, is the series of its actions.”^[55] And only retroactively, with respect to the act committed within the impurity of the present moment, does an individual becomes a subject (i.e., an actualized ideal being). Accordingly, while Kant pursues the totalization of one’s existence, the immortality of one’s soul, the ideal of holiness, Hegel, if anything, propagates the interruption of one’s biographical continuity. In Kant, everything counts; and in Hegel, it is always possible to leave one’s nature behind. While Kant’s subject still “nurtured” his biography and carried it along eternally, while he entrapped the soul in the process of the infinite approach, Hegel releases the space of possible practicability and allows the subject to constitute himself alongside his actions against the untruth of his primary instincts.^[56] However, below the threshold of the ideal becoming of the subject, his original nature is released, which might be recognized as a realist move. The base instincts, the lowly drives and urges are always preserved with Hegel and remain operative as minimal conditions of every actual activity, as long as they abjure any truth.

The very same relation between the Kantian and the Hegelian design of reality can be expanded to the field of the philosophy of history as well. Kant conceives of the concept of “history” as a totalizing explication of the concept of “nature.” The following passage is a good example of Kant’s inherent “pathos of totality”:

When natural capacities achieve the degree of allness, the human race as a whole realizes its historical mission. Thus, the institutional, even cultural, concepts of “purpose,” “development,” “progress,” and “history” can only emerge at the point at which the subject of “nature” assumes the universal quantificator: as the “hidden plan of nature,” the development of “all natural capacities,” and finally, and primarily, as “mankind.” Of course, this “totality” is bound to remain an infinite task, seeing as “morality,” “the good,” “history,” and “the objective teleology of nature” are only postulates and ideas. Conversely, it was Hegel’s great achievement of liberating the concept of “history” from its naturalistic constraints. History, as Hegel contrives it, is precisely not a Kantian pretended teleological totalization of nature. Instead, it is an actual sequence of events, encompassing, for instance, in one of these nowadays hopelessly outdated reconstructions, the Greek polis, the Roman law, the Christian state, and the Germanic realm. It is not a development of the natural capacities of mankind, but an emergent process of man’s facility to escape and transcend his organic constitution. This actualization is intensified to the point of presupposing that history has actually already come to its fulfillment, its end. Even though the concept of the “end of history” has gained some notoriety throughout the years, especially in comparison with Kant’s seemingly more modern open-endedness and infinite improvability, it should rather be interpreted as an antithesis to the fallacies of Kant’s infinite tasks—the same infinite tasks that forever tie mankind to its natural conditions. Hence, the “end of history” must also be read as a notion that shifted the concept of “history” from being a derivation of natural predispositions to unfolding only within an emergent sphere of the Spirit’s definite emancipation from nature. Thus, world history has already ended because, in Hegel, the totalization of a self-reflexive movement is always a precondition of de-totalization of its other (i.e., of releasing man’s biology into the state of untruth).

To draw a line, we have only adopted this course of investigation in order to examine the possibilities of broadening the dimensions of realism. And Hegel’s operations and shifts, if understood correctly, prove to be manifestly realist. Kant’s idea (i.e., his ultimate truth form) cumulates, expands in an upward direction, but in the end, because of its ingrained infinity, remains incomplete, and as such holds the whole world hostage in the anticipation of future fulfillment. In reverse, Hegel’s idea, his maximum truth, emancipates itself from its content, achieves self-reflexivity, but in its actualization also allows itself to be indifferent to what remains below its nominal threshold, what it can, in a way, outplay and leave behind. With Kant’s phrase “beyond the limits of possible experience” in mind, it seems that Kant delimits the area of possible experience upward, toward the final limit, while Hegel delimits it downward, toward the irrelevance of immediacy. While Kant’s concept basically trembles and suffers in the dialectic of an open ending, Hegel’s concept actualizes and enjoys the indifference to its origin—for instance, the indifference to the sense content of the concept “now,” to the form of the skull, to the pathological incentives of the practical subject, or to the natural capacities of mankind. In Hegel, the problem of immediacy is not that it might not exist or that we might not complete its synthesis, but in the fact that it is the least interesting, the least meaningful (i.e., that it represents the state of the least truth).^[58]

In other words, Kant’s agnosticism always unfolds on the grandest possible scale. It is the final, the ultimate, the unconditional which is unknowable on principle. In his great systemic books, the unintelligible, the indefinable, the antinomic always comes last and belongs in the chapter titled “Dialectic.” In Hegel, on the contrary, the ineffable is now no longer the ultimate horizon of totality that awaits us in the end, but rather the small and negligible periphery of the beginning (i.e., that which the concepts left behind en route to their constitution). One could call Cartesian doubt, which scrutinizes pieces of paper, dressing gowns, hands, and feet, an agnosticism of the medium-sized. Comparatively, Kant’s infinite totalization, which reveals the concepts of God, world, soul, good, or purpose, as illusions, comes down to an agnosticism of the grand. In this respect, we could perhaps refer to Hegel’s misgivings with respect to reality as an agnosticism of the small (i.e., a stance that claims an ontological right of indifference toward immediacy, a prerogative to gloss over small, nondiscreet continuities of the fluidity of being). And it is precisely this postulate of indifference which renders Cartesian and Kantian methods obsolete and finally avoids the “immediate illusions” of Descartes and the “transcendental illusions” of Kant. The indifferent world might be small, naïve, and poor, but it exists factually, not because someone secured it with truth beforehand, but because it is allowed to be untrue. Surprisingly, it is only Hegel’s “virtual idealism” of Spirit and its actualizations in the world of society and history which makes the truly realist move. It was not until Hegel that idealism could finally afford to elaborate a concept of nature which no longer needs to be brought under the banner of any preestablished, teleological reason, pregnant with its future order. Hegel thus took us one significant step further in the direction of the “growing realism” of Western thought. He granted an insight into the other of the idea (i.e., into the untruth of reality where no man has threaded before and no concept squared away the order of things).

The purpose of this short walk through the modes of the three ontologies, based on the three irreducible forms of truth value, was to play out the variations of a possible realism. Kant’s transcendental subjectivism procured us with the common-sense normality of the world, but only Hegel’s absolute subjectivism could give us the first glimpses into the radical meaninglessness of facticity. Kant provided the solidity of things behind our backs, while it was not until Hegel’s logic of indifference that an egress of the circle of Kant’s totalization was made possible. This releasing the facticity, however, is not to be obtained straightforwardly, but only by way of ever-more-complex equilibria. Hegel had to “intensify” his idealism and start producing ideal entities in self-reflexive circuits in order to be able to reveal reality outside any human purpose, rational order, or conceptual grasp. To define these sensitive balances between emerging idealities and released facticities deprived of any meaning and sense will be the topic of the following two chapters.

NOTES

Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason,” in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), (hereafter cited in text as KpV).

Johann Gottlob Fichte, The System of Ethics: According to the Principles of Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17.

Fichte, The System of Ethics, 82.

Fichte, The System of Ethics, 52–53.

This theater of successive perceptions may be devoid of simplicity and identity, its whereabouts may be unknown, nonetheless, it must at any cost be, or else the world itself would cease to exist.

G. W. F. Hegel, Faith & Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H. S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 190.

Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline I., Science of Logic, trans. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 205, (§ 247).

The argument can go even further: Descartes’s dualism is precisely the consequence of this strict truth-invariance: not only do the things demand the same type of truth, but it is also the ego that must now interact with them on the same ontological level. The typical rationalist problems of contact between idea and thing, mind and body, the difficulties of real interaction, are a direct consequence of the simple fact that the mind is entitled to occupy reality in the form of immediacy, in the same way that the body does. As was already pointed out by Heidegger, Cartesian dualism conceived the relation between res cogitans and res extensa upon the model of the relation between two res extensae.

With Kant, the “I” is not the end point of the path of doubt, a product of a step-by-step reduction of all uncertain facts, but a result of the apperceptive synthesis, a theoretical deduction of the subject as a condition of possibility of empirical knowledge. Hence, the “I” instantly assumes a different ontological function than the rest of the phenomena and never claims the status of immediate truth. In Kant’s view, doubting the external world would by no means consolidate the self-certainty of the “I,” but rather the contrary. Or, to put it in another way, within the realm of the transcendental subjectivity, doubt no longer plays the role of a “truth-process.”

10.

Even Cartesian dualism, the doctrine of two substances, is to be understood in this way. It could be viewed as an “ontic” separation of spirit and matter as a consequence of their “ontological” equivalence. The problems Descartes faced of how the mind interacts with the body ensue from the simple fact that the spirit is argumentatively preconceived as a thing among things, as a substance that, albeit nonspatially, nevertheless exists in the same logical order of evidence as material things do. In Kant, dualism is no longer needed, since mind and body, spirit and matter, are distinguished “logically,” “transcendentally.”

11.

According to Miran Božovič, Malebranche’s God is self-sufficient and is as such under no obligation to create the material world and the bodies of human beings in its midst. Since humans think and perceive only through God, nothing would change for us if the world never existed. The reason for its existence, for this unnecessary expense in material and creative powers, is somewhat more sophisticated: “If these corporeal things did not exist and if their ideas were produced in us by God, he would be a deceiver, as it was he who gave us our propensity to believe that these ideas are produced in us by corporeal things.” Miran Božovič, An Utterly Dark Spot (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 72. In order to be true, the thing needs to be redoubled in its idea, and the idea, in order not to be deceptive, requires a redoubling in the thing.

12.

Baruch Spinoza, “Ethics,” in Complete Works, trans. Samuel Shirley (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), (hereafter cited in text as E, followed by book number in large Roman numerals, P for proposition number, D for definition, A for axiom).

13.

There are many ways to express this difference. Robert B. Brandom, a pragmatist, considers Kant’s “radical break” with both the rationalist and empiricist traditions to consist of the fact that Kant transferred concepts, having content only insofar as they contribute to judgments, in the “normative space.” A concept is now a norm, not an abstract idea. See Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 32ff. To make judgments using the concepts of “cause” and “effect” no longer means to have perceived them then and there, but rather to take commitments in a language game of giving and asking for reasons.

14.

See G. W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis; Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 1989), 41–43 (§ 8–9).

15.

For instance, “Thus the possibility of a thing is thoroughly determined only by the overall possibility of everything, and he who wants to know something in its entirety, must know everything.” Immanuel Kant, Refl. 4244 (1789–1779?), in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, Akademieausgabe XVII. (Berlin, Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1926) 477–78 (translation mine).

16.

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 62.

17.

See G. W. Leibniz, “A Fragment on Dreams,” in Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Leroy E. Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989).

18.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), (hereafter cited in text as KrV, by A and B, representing the original pagination of the first and second editions, respectively).

19.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2007) 114.

20.

Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 10.

21.

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 63.

22.

Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 42.

23.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), (hereafter cited in text as SuZ).

24.

Locke’s theory of personal identity is highly complex. On the one hand, the tabula rasa itself is already equipped with certain innate faculties, on the other, within the matter of life an almost Cartesian self-consciousness, an identity of the thinking person can develop. See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) (see especially Book II, Chapter 1, section 9–20, 90–99). But the principal difference to Kant remains: the “soul” is by no means the site of conditions of possibility of all experience, but an emergent phenomenon whose identity is precarious and must at all times be maintained by the acts of attention, or else, as, for instance, by means of forgetfulness, it can be lost again.

25.

René Descartes, “The Search for Truth by Means of the Natural Light,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 415.

26.

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 252.

27.

Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 3.

28.

Meillassoux, After Finitude, 13.

29.

On that account, accusing Kant of reinstituting a Ptolemaic gesture in philosophy presumably misses the point. Copernicus placed the calculability of the Solar system before the original firmness of any of its bodies, and thus displaced the Earth from its center. Kant placed the “conditionability” of all reality before the reality of any of its parts, and thus he shifted the once self-evident subject to a mere accompaniment of representations. He is at his most Copernican in the necessary totalization of the object of knowledge.

30.

Immanuel Kant, “Welches sind die wirklichen Fortschritte, die die Metaphysik seit Leibniz’s und Wolff’s Zeiten in Deutschland gemacht hat?” (1804), in Werke, Bd. 3, (Leipzig: Modes und Baumann, 1838) 426–27 (translation mine).

31.

When he refers to the inhabitants of the moon, he, admittedly, says that “they are real when they stand in an empirical connection with my real consciousness” (KrV A 493/B 521). But this is because the logical subject can only be incarnated within the empirical subject, and the human being is the only empirical bearer of transcendental subjectivity that we know of so far.

32.

Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political Writings, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109.

33.

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 113.

34.

Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 230.

35.

Meillassoux, After Finitude, 11.

36.

Meillassoux, After Finitude, 25.

37.

Zdravko Kobe, Automaton transcendentale III. Kantova teorija subjekta (Automaton Transcendentale III. Kant’s Theory of the Subject), (Ljubljana: DTP-Analecta, 2014), 193 (translation mine).

38.

The process of evolution is by no means refuted by the nonadaptivity of this considerable (perhaps even larger) part of the biological mass. The proof of its “truth,” as it were, lies exactly in the fact that evolution is not an all-encompassing structure of the empirical world, but rather that it arises locally, as an emergent quality so to speak, in order to constitute its own restricted areas of action, thus displaying a certain stability and resistance against the nonbiological world. The “truth” of evolution lies in the stability of its reproductions, not in the totality of its jurisdiction.

39.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966), 172–73.

40.

G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), (hereafter cited in text as PdG).

41.

Perhaps, this “subjective” Gleichgültigkeit experiences its recurrence in its more “objective” manifestation, the absolute Indifferenz, the transition from being to essence, in the Science of Logic. This “logical” Indifferenz represents the final image of being, its pure indeterminate in-itselfness subsisting somewhere behind the indifferent “back” of essence and reflection. “Indifference, now posited as what it in fact is, is simple and infinitely negative self-reference, the incompatibility of itself with itself, the repelling of itself from itself. Determining and being determined are not a transition, nor an external alteration, nor again an emergence of determinations in it, but its own referring to itself, which is the negativity of itself, of its in-itselfness.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 334. We could hazard a guess that Hegel’s logical concept of “indifference” is only there to reveal being at its least true, that is, in its utter untruth.

42.

This distinction has its philosophical predecessors; at least three can be named. Plato opposed “opinion” to “knowledge,” but not necessarily on the grounds of the incorrectness of opinions (see for instance Plato, “Meno,” 98b). Opinion, insofar as it passes judgment on the world of change, can be correct, but it is still not a knowledge of ideas. Similarly, the scholastic contemplative truth is achieved only by turning away from the world, so that the real truth is only to be experienced in the denial of empirical adequacy. Lastly, Leibniz differentiates between vérités de raison (vérités éternelles) and vérités de fait. And yet the structure that Hegel proposes is in no way reducible to any of the three distinctions. Contrary to the knowledge of ideas, contemplative truth, and vérités éternelles, the Hegelian “truth” endeavors only to grasp and utter the immediacy, but in doing so an unexpected creation occurs that, in its excess, can ultimately afford indifference to its primary content. It is a truth that rises from the ashes of the failed correctness.

43.

The difference between Wahrheit and Richtigkeit is to be found in the famous passage of the Small Logic: “The idea is the truth; for the truth is this, that objectivity corresponds to the concept, not that external things correspond to my representations; these are only correct representations that I, this person [lch Dieser], have. In the idea it is not a matter of an indexical this [Diesen], it is a matter neither of representations nor of external things. But everything actual, insofar as it is something true, is also the idea and possesses its truth only through and in virtue of the idea” (Enz I., § 213). G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline I., Science of Logic, trans. and ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) (hereafter cited in text as Enz I. by paragraph number).

44.

This is of course a stance that we impose on Hegel, as he didn’t write it out in so many words. However, he was quite clear on one point, namely, that there are facts both correct and untrue at the same time: “In this sense, a bad state is an untrue state, and what is bad and untrue generally consists in the contradiction that obtains between the determination or the concept and the concrete existence of the object. We can form a correct representation of such a bad object, but the content of this representation is something intrinsically untrue. We may have in our heads many instances of correctness of this sort that are simultaneously untruths” (Enz I, § 24).

45.

See for instance KrV A 322/B 378–79.

46.

Incidentally, in a more or less the same way, one could compare Kant with Spinoza. Typically, in Spinoza, in the sphere of the finite, affirmation and negation are equivalent, relative, and equiprimordial, while in the sphere of the infinite, affirmation altogether prevails. In this vein, “finite existence involves a partial negation, and infinite existence is the absolute affirmation of the given nature” (E I., P8, note I.), so that “it may, in the order of nature, come to pass that this or that man does or does not exist” (E II., A1), while the substance, on the other hand, is conceived as an exclusion of possible negation, “that is, its essence necessarily involves existence, or existence belongs to its nature” (E I., P7). Kant reverses this distribution. While within the domain of understanding, of synthesizing concrete experience, the form of affirmation prevails and negation remains only its marginal, “ridiculous,” didactic supplement (see KrV A 709/B 737), the differentia specifica of the judgments of reason, that is, of paralogisms, antinomies, and the ideal, is exactly the circumstance that they are constructed according to the rule of the co-sovereignty of affirmation and negation. The most splendid example of the coexistence of affirmation and negation are certainly the antinomies, and even the book layout conforms to this equivalence: the affirmative judgment (for instance, that the world has a beginning in time) is printed on the left-hand side of the book and the negative (that the world has no beginning) on the right-hand side. In his critique of the ontological proof of the existence of God, Kant even says, “Now if I think of a being as the highest reality (without defect), the question still remains as to whether it exists or not” (KrV A 600/B 628), claiming practically the same thing that Spinoza did about the finite human creature. In Spinoza, the finite entity may or may not exist. In Kant, however, it is the infinite entity whose existence becomes more insecure than that of a finite being. Hence, the phrases that Descartes and Spinoza applied to the objects of doubt, the finite modes, and the mortal human being are to be found in Kant, in a nearly identical form, on the other side of the order of magnitude: with God. This argument may not be entirely waterproof, but it indicates well certain far-reaching discursive shifts in the Kantian design of reality.

47.

The same argument of a Cartesian dream being transmitted to the realm of Kantian totality was beautifully phrased by Schopenhauer: “Thus, although individual dreams are marked off from real life by the fact that they do not fit into the continuity of experience that runs constantly through life, and waking up indicates this difference, yet that very continuity of experience belongs to real life as its form, and the dream can likewise point to a continuity in itself. Now if we assume a standpoint of judgment external to both, we find no distinct difference in their nature, and are forced to concede to the poets that life is a long dream.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 18. The clear and distinct dividing line between a short dream and real life is secured from the perspective of the “life as a whole,” but, as if by way of compensation, this “whole of life” must finally become but a long dream. And, in Kant, the distinction between a minor trick of the senses and reality can only be guaranteed in a world that is itself possibly an illusion.

48.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Mattheews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), (hereinafter cited in text as KU).

49.

Hegel famously criticized Kant’s theoretical philosophy by stating, “But to want to know before one knows is as incoherent as the Scholastic’s wise resolution to learn to swim, before he ventured into the water” (Enz. I, § 10). Or he quotes Aesop’s Hic Rhodus, hic salta, and paraphrases it: “Here is the rose, dance here.” G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 22.

50.

Another example could be Hegel’s anecdote about the Achilles’ heel, as depicted in his Fragments of historic and political studies from Berne and Frankfurt period: “Achilles died because of the arrow that inflicted a wound on his heel. He could just as easily be injured in any other part of the body. The wound in that part was an absolute coincidence. It was completely determined by the direction of the arrow.” G. W. F. Hegel, “Fragmente historischer und politischer Studien aus der Berner und Frankfurter Zeit” (ca. 1795–1798), in Frühe Schriften, 431–32 (translation mine). Hegel’s Begriff possesses a self-conscious structure that loses itself in its otherness and regains itself only on the grounds of this loss. Unlike Leibniz’s “complete individual concept,” Hegel’s concept must face what is not deducible from it and remain open to the possible irruption of contingency from the outside. Between Achilles and the arrow there is no ontological reciprocity in the fashion of Brutus and Caesar. Achilles is thus exposed to an utter coincidence of the direction of the arrow, and yet, it is constituted precisely on the grounds of this dis-harmony. The concept of Achilles henceforth bears, as his differentia specifica, the mark of the contingency of his heel, as in the phrase “Achilles’ heel.”

51.

See G. W. F. Hegel, “The Absolute Religion,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 2, trans. E. B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1895), 327–58.

52.

Hegel was often criticized for the supposed world-enraptured quality of his philosophy, especially around his Dissertatio de Orbitis Planetarum [Dissertation on the Orbits of the Planets], published in 1801. Over the years (and centuries) it has become a genuine myth that, in this dissertation, Hegel merely followed Plato’s exponential series from Timaeus in order to prove that no other planets existed between Jupiter and Mars. And since just six months before the text’s publication the asteroid Ceres had been discovered at that very location, Hegel is famously said to have responded, “Too bad for the facts!” Of course, Hegel’s opponents promptly recognized in this (presumably never given) reply a complete detachment of his philosophy from the empiricity of nature. However, it is now clear that Hegel was trying to make a different point. He was criticizing the Titius-Bode Law, according to which the number of planets in the solar system, as well as their succession, could be predicted on the basis of arithmetic progression. Kant himself already noticed the lack of harmony in the heavens, but it was Hegel who elevated nature not conforming to mathematical proportions to a principle. Therefore, even if a new planet is discovered between Mars and Jupiter and the distances between planets exhibit no regular sequence, this fact alone could never contest the logical necessity of Hegel’s system, the claim of which has never been representational or inductive, but rather discursive, normative, or, in our view, emergent and creative.

53.

The constitution of Hegel’s Begriff is logically dependent on its radical otherness. His “concept” can always, in fact must always be thought in relation to facts lying outside the gaze of man. The inherent power of Hegel’s “concept” achieves its greatest potency when confronted with inert matter that bears no immediate traces of conceptuality, as in the case of Achilles’ heel. In this vein, one could extrapolate Hegel’s logic and claim that a concept, for instance that of “Spirit,” will achieve its ultimate affirmation when brought face to face with a time prior to the existence of man, when realizing that the natural world could never await and predict the ascent of mankind. For the truth of Spirit lies in the fact that it is self-produced and not a teleological product of immediate reality.

54.

It is a “spontaneous ideology” of knowledge to constantly strive to know more and, ultimately, to know everything. However, Hegel’s progression of knowledge takes the opposite direction and relies on the realization that there are areas of knowledge that can be, in a way, “surpassed” due to their irrelevance. The increase of knowledge simultaneously performs the operation of an increase in ignorance, a continuous expansion of the domain that no longer needs to be taken into account. It is a reasoning perhaps similar to the one found in Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, according to which it is necessary to know increasingly less and be able to disregard history, so as not to be detrimental to the expansion of life.

55.

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 151 (§ 124).

56.

The analogy can be pursued further. Kant’s theoretical “self-consciousness” is an accompaniment of all representations, whereas Hegel’s self-consciousness is constituted only when consciousness discontinues its devouring of inorganic nature, its cumulation of otherness, and, famously, “achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness” (PdG 110). In the “struggle for recognition,” only the self-consciousness which puts its own life at risk and becomes indifferent to its natural dispositions achieves full recognition and becomes the master. Hence, subjectivity in Hegel is always constituted as a break with the totalizing endeavors of its original nature.

57.

Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 50.

58.

In Solomon’s judgment on the existence of the unspeakable, on the richness of the senses that the abstract forms of language fail to grasp, Hegel proclaims: “But if language expresses only what is universal, then I cannot say what I only mean. And what cannot be said—feeling, sensation—is not what is most important, most true, but what is most insignificant, most untrue” (Enz. I., § 20).

Three Ontologies

Truth as Adequation

Truth as Totalization

The Functional Interpretation of Kant’s Realism

Truth as Release: Gleichgültigkeit, Hegel’s Overlooked Revolution

Correctness and Truth

The Functional Interpretation of Hegel’s Realism of Release

NOTES

The Functional Interpretation
of Kant’s Realism

Truth as Release: Gleichgültigkeit,
Hegel’s Overlooked Revolution

The Functional Interpretation
of Hegel’s Realism of Release