Kant and Hegel on Practical Reason

Abstract

For Kant it was the fate of human reason to fall into contradiction when it attempted to transcend the limits of empirico-scientific knowledge as formulated in the first Critique. These limits are the epistemic consequences following from the application of the model of mechanistic materialism to the objects of human experience. Under this paradigmatically but ahistorically restricted conception of experience, nature appears as a uniform causal chain of externally related events. Freedom of thought and decision transcend this mechanistic system generating therein a dialectic of reason in the form of an antinomy of freedom and necessity. For Kant this contradiction is a permanent feature of human reason conceived as a set of formal categories imposed on an “originally foreign” given content. Professor Smith has described how this notion of an “originally foreign” given is central to Hegel’s theoretical objections to Kant and lies therefore at the core of the controversy between them on the actuality of reason. In this paper I shall try to add to the discussion of the controversy from the practical side where the question is the actuality of reason in moral and social practice. Before discussing Hegel’s dialectical “resolution” of the problem, I shall sketch just enough of the Kantian background to be able to demonstrate the way in which Hegel is responding to the antinomies of bourgeois thought which the Kantian critique develops in systematic form.