t r a n s c e n d e n ta l l o g i c a n d d i a l e c t i c a l l o g i c
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As Bernard Bourgeois shows, “becoming a form of reflection” means for Hegel assimilating the heritage of Kantian philosophy, and more specifically of the first Critique. It is through this assimilation that Hegel’s project becomes specifically and explicitly philosophical (rather than being a more directly practical project of religious, social or political reform).11 All the categories in which “the ideal of his youth” was expressed (very roughly: the thought of a totality that might integrate in itself all differences, especially in the realm of human interactions) are reformulated in this light. This is the case, first of all, of the category of the Absolute, which plays a prominent role in Hegel’s philosophy as well as in the philosophy of all other German Idealists. I intend to show that the intent Hegel proclaims in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that of “grasping and expressing the True, not as substance, but just as much as subject,” provides its meaning to the Hegelian category of the Absolute, in virtue of the equation: the True = the Absolute = the transformation of Kant’s notion of truth.12 We must keep this equation in mind in order to understand any polemic pitting Hegel against Kant, and in particular that through which Hegel takes his place in the long cohort of dissatisfied heirs: the challenge against Kant’s notion of the thing in itself. The problem of the thing in itself is considered by all post-Kantians to be the cross of Kant’s “Copernicanism.” For, against the fundamental inspiration of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which places the source of the objectivity of cognitions in the subject of cognition, the thing in itself seems to reintroduce a pole irreducible to transcendental subjectivity. The entire history of post-Kantianism can be read as an attempt to resolve this contradiction.13 Hegel is no exception. He too attacks the notion of an unknowable thing in itself. This is what allowed the Marxist tradition to make a “good” objectivist of Hegel (meaning a defender of the objective validity of cognition), contrary to the “bad” agnostic, Kant.14 Now here as elsewhere, Hegel does not return to a pre-Kantian view. He does not affirm that we can know something that is in itself external to thought. Quite the contrary, his position is developed on the terrain staked out by Kant: that of a thought that finds the conditions of its objectivity within itself. But Hegel occupies this terrain in order to oppose Kant’s view by demonstrating the inanity of the very notion of an unknowable thing in itself. This problem of the thing in itself offers a good example of the twist Hegel gives to the transcendental enterprise, a twist that leads him to his own dialectical logic. So we will start with this problem, in