THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

view, Kant fails to recognize the full meaning of the resources provided by his doctrine of
apperception. He fails to generalize the insights that he discovered.
Without Hegelian jargon, we might state the point as follows: in the doctrine of
the synthetic unity of apperception, Hegel sees a model of subjectivity as a kind of
activity. Rather than construing the “I” as a substance or thing, Kant conceives the “I” –
or at least the phenomenal “I” – as an activity and as essentially relational. Hegel sees
this non-substantial conception of the “I” as the basis for conceiving all genuine
objects. 271 He sees it as the basis for an ontology that construes the substance as subject,
or, more accurately stated, as the basis for an ontology that construes genuine objects in
terms drawn form the structures of subjectivity rather than in terms drawn from more
traditional ontological accounts of substance.
271 Hegel’s comments on the Paralogisms help to clarify the fundamentally new direction in which Hegel
seeks to take Kant’s doctrine of the synthetic unity of apperception. In the Paralogisms section of the
Transcendental Dialectic, Kant emphasizes the epistemic limits on our ability to grasp the “I” as a thing-initself.
While holding open the possibility that the “I” is an immaterial, simple substance, Kant argues that
we cannot cognize the “I” as such. He goes on to show how various misconceptions of the merely formal
“I think” might lead us to the false conclusion that we can cognize the “I” as simple substance. Hegel
transforms this epistemological discussion into one that has ontological import. He sees the Kantian
doctrine of apperception as the liberation of the “I” from the false categories of the understanding – i.e.
from the categories that make the “I” into a mere thing. Thus he says: “Unquestionably one good result of
the Kantian criticism was that it emancipated mental philosophy from the ‘soul-thing’, from the categories,
and consequently, from the questions about the simplicity, complexity, materiality, etc., of the soul”
(Encyclopedia Logic, paragraph 47). Sometimes this remark has been taken as Hegel’s rejection of
ultimate metaphysics in favor of a pragmatic or merely existential conception of the self or the “I.” By
contrast, I would argue that, in this passage, Hegel presents what he sees as the correct ontological picture
of the “I,” not a non-ontological conception of the “I.” Elsewhere, Hegel makes a similar point in a way
that supports my ontological interpretation. He says: “In the first place, he [Kant] is perfectly correct when
he maintains that the ego is not a soul-thing, a dead permanency which as a sensuous present existence;
indeed, were it an ordinary thing, it would be necessary that it should be capable of being experienced”
(Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3. P. 447). Shortly thereafter, Hegel continues: “The form
which Kant accordingly bestows on Being, thing, substance, would seem to indicate that these categories of
the understanding where too high for the subject, too high to be capable of being predicated of it. But
really such determinations are too poor and too mean, for what possesses life is not a thing, nor can the
soul, the spirit, the ego, be called a thing” (Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 3. Pp. 447-8). So
Hegel sees Kant’s conception of the “I” in terms of the synthetic unity of apperception as the true
conception of the “I.” It is true both in the sense that (a) it presents the “I” as the “I” truly is, and in the
sense that (b) it fully captures the nobility of the “I,” a nobility that the traditional conception of substance
obscures. Hegel ultimately argues that the model presented by the “I” applies to all other genuine things as
well.
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