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13 - Kant, Hegel, and the Fate of “the” Intuitive Intellect

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2009

Sally Sedgwick
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
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Summary

Kant's remarks on intellectual intuition captivated Schelling, Fichte, and Hegel, and the theme of intellectual intuition has entranced many Hegel scholars. Hegel's early Jena writings on Kant are complex, compressed, and cryptic. Nevertheless, I have become convinced that much of Hegel's interpretation of Kant at that time is in fact quite sophisticated and subtle, although often obscure and still developing. Understanding and learning from Hegel's early writings, however, requires overcoming widespread unclarity about the nature of “the” intuitive intellect. It is widely assumed that, because it is nondiscursive, an intuitive intellect is aconceptual. That is how Schelling understood it, and that is often the view of the early Hegel, too. Most commentators – whether sympathetic or critical – have followed them in this assumption. This is not, however, how Kant understood an intuitive intellect. As Moltke Gram has shown, Schelling and Fichte each have different accounts of “intellectual intuition,” their accounts differ from Kant's, and indeed Kant discusses three distinct views under the heading “intellectual intuition.” Kant's three accounts of an intuitive intellect are these: (i) an intellect that knows things in themselves independent of any conditions of sensibility, (ii) an intellect that creates its own objects, and (iii) an intellect that intuits the sum total of the whole of nature. Gram points out that these accounts are logically independent of each other. The first account only requires knowledge sans sensibility; it does not require that objects are created in the act of knowing them, which is the hallmark of the second account.

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The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
, pp. 283 - 305
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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