ON THE IDENTITY OF THE RATIONAL AND THE ACTUAL IN THE PHILOSOPHIES OF KANT AND HEGEL (GERMANY)

This thesis explores Hegel's reading of Kant's critical philosophy and demonstrates the way in which the philosophies of Kant and Hegel have been traditionally misread. The thesis focuses in particular on Kant's political thought and aims to show how any political philosophy founded on essentially Kantian presuppositions, presents a dangerous dead end unless and until it is speculatively re-read in the way that Hegel re-reads Kant's politics in the Philosophy of Right.

In the first two chapters, the nature of Hegel's re-thinking of Kant's critiques of theoretical and practical reason in the Science of Logic is expounded, and the nature of the logic of critique and the logic of speculation is established. In Chapters Three and Four, the self-defeating pattern of Kant's political philosophy, unrecognised by contemporary commentator on Kant, is shown to be speculatively read and re-presented in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, something that goes unappreciated in Marx's critique of Hegel. In the final chapter, the impossibility of a successful political philosophy written in terms of critique, and the related impossibility of a Hegelian political philosophy read in terms of critique, is made clear through an examination of the work of Weber, Rawls, Arendt, Habermas and Benhabib. In the conclusion, the need for a new, speculative political philosophy is argued for. A political philosophy premised on a thinking through of the self-defeat of critical thought, and a recognition of the identity of the rational and the actual in ethical life.