Hegel Vs Kant

Lanz Romulo N. Deiparine ENGLCOM A56 24-02-12

Compare and Contrast Essay on Spirit as the Philosophical State of Mind

(Hegel's Spirit/Mind and Philosophies VS. Kant's Reason/Soul and Philosophies)

I. Introduction

II. Argument 1: Divisions and Facilities A.) Divisions of Spirit B.) Faculties of Soul

III. Argument 2: Idealism A.) Hegelian Absolute Idealism B.) Kantian Transcendental Idealism

IV. Argument three: The Dialectic A.) Hegelian Theory of Dialectics B.) Kantian Transcendental Dialectics

V. Conclusion

Spirit in Philosophy is regarded as another word for the Mind or the Mental Consciousness of human beings. The most renowned philosophies regarding Spirit is by Georg Hegel and his works; his
studies revolved around the Geist, the German word for spirit and how it became his revolutionary concept in creating his most famous work the “Phenomenology of Spirit”. A philosopher before him by the name of Immanuel Kant had a rougher version of the Mind in which he talked more on about the Mind’s use of Reason and the concept of the Soul, which many of his works became the works that Hegel himself used to conceptualize his Geist and Mind philosophies. The purpose of this essay is to compare and or contrast Hegelian philosophies of Spirit/Mind and Kantian philosophies of Reason/Soul. The three main factors that would be discussed are on the forms or facilities of their main concept, their Trichotomy or three-way classificatory division, the Idealisms where they base their philosophies from and the Dialectics of Hegel and Kant.

Trichotomy, for starters, is a concept used to divide and facilitate categories, parts and the like into three (Collins English Dictionary, 2009). In Philosophy, the main notion of Trichotomy is that it is divided into three parts: Body, Soul and Spirit (Nollie, 2010), and from there it can be said that it further subdivides into newer Trichotomies, depending on the Philosopher who uses it. In Hegel’s Philosophy and renowned work “The Phenomenology of Spirit”, he discussed his own Trichotomy on Spirit or in his words “Geist”; he divided it into Subjective Spirit/Mind, Objective Spirit/Mind and Absolute Spirit/Mind. According to Hegel.net, Subjective Geist is the one that deals in for-itself or the subjectivity of one’s own, which is why it deals with Behavioral Sciences like Anthropology and Psychology. Objective Geist, on the other hand, deals with the spirit expressing itself unto the world and its surroundings since without the world, everything is subjective and abstract; it focuses more on the concepts of Law, History and Politics. Finally, Absolute Geist is the one that reflects and realizes what it does as it seeks the reasons of reasons, the goals of goals and the things beyond the sphere of Subjectivity and Objectivity; it is therefore explored more into the Arts, Religion and Philosophy itself in general. Being a philosopher before Hegel’s Philosophies and having his work used by said person, Kant’s works on Reason and Soul, along with his most famous work “Critique of Pure Reason”, suggested his own Trichotomy- the three Faculties of Soul: Knowledge, Feeling of Pleasure/Displeasure and Desire. According to Howard Caygill’s book “A Kant Dictionary”, the Faculty of Knowledge states that one only learns something from either receiving information, or as he termed it “representations”, or knowing such an object through these representations. Feeling of Pleasure and Displeasure merely states that they are just the counterparts of the same subject feeling, like the pleasure of life yet the displeasure of going through its obstacles. Finally, the Faculty of Desire states that by consciousness, as it is to bring out the object of one’s actions, then one commits a choice, with that comes a reason, and so forth comes the Will, which is more related to determining the choice yet at the same time is more in itself one’s practical use of reason. Idealism is the metaphysical and epistemological doctrine that ideas or thoughts make up fundamental reality.
Essentially, it is any philosophy which argues that the only thing actually knowable is consciousness (or the contents of consciousness), whereas we never can be sure that matter or anything in the outside world really exists. Thus, the only real things are mental entities, not physical things (which exist only in the sense that they are perceived). Hegel formulated an Idealism he called Absolute Idealism which was to state that only by which there is an identity of though and being can human reason know something. He also “continued” Kant’s concept of “thing in itself” in a way that he managed to conceptualized Geist or the Human mind or Spirit and the Zeitgeist (spirit of the ages) which was when the human mind progresses throughout time and changes like trends; he also stated that only by an interaction of opposites can we desire to progress and achieve understanding, for both the Geist and Zeitgeist, and the view of the being as being more dynamic to give more diversity on the concepts we use to understand the world we live in. Kant, on the other hand, formulated an Idealism that would contain concepts that helped remake a new concept for Hegel to use, he formulated the Transcendental Idealism. He focuses on how things would appear to us and how that becomes our experience; a focus in which he constructed to see not just an objective world of representations and experiences made but a reality that is beyond what human reason can comprehend: the noumenon or “the thing in itself”, a concept he uses to ironically be our ground for human representation even though it cannot independently exist (Philosophy Basics,
n.d.).