Kant — Value & Knowledge

I present below a synopsis of the essential argument of the Critique of Pure Reason using Kant’s own words, and side-by-side with this I propose an application of the same essential propositions to political economy:

This reading indicates several “transliterations": value=knowledge, labour=experience, a priori =natural (human), a priori principles= human needs, science=industry, human reason=production, question=need, and from this transliteration, follows the equation of the Kant’s metaphysical thing-in-itself with that for which there is no human need.

[Left-hand column From Critique of Pure Reason, 1787 by Immanuel Kant]

As is known, Kant’s Critique arrives at certain contradictions, the resolution of which is the motive force of classical German philosophy and leads to Hegel. In my view, foremost among these contradictions is Kant’s re-assertion (with Descartes) that human beings have innate capacities, albeit awakened by experience, but absolutely independent of experience; it is this assertion that is necessary to overcome the absolute scepticism of the final product of British Empiricism, (Berkeley &) Hume. However, these “ a priori principles” are fictions. Man does not stand apart from Nature, and nor is humanity just a product of Nature, gifted with Reason. It is necessary to comprehend the origin of this intelligence, and only by understanding its origin can the dualism which Kant wished to overcome be transcended.

Correspondingly, human needs are not natural needs, but needs themselves products of human social practice. Until human needs are understood equally as human products, epistemology is trapped in dualism.

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Hegel

Hegel overcomes the problems of Kant’s system by revolutionising Logic. According to Hegel, Kant considers the question of knowledge solely from the point of view of the subject-object relation, and in so doing places the entire content of cognition on the side of the subject, leaving nothing to the object. Instead of seeing appearance as a barrier between subject and object, Hegel conceives of the subject and object as a single entity. Kant, he says, like all those who have gone before, first define the object and subject as separate, push them together, and then prove that their only genuine existence is as separate. For Hegel Appearance is a stage in the process of self-distinction of object into subject. Thus Hegel deals once for all with both the dualist-monist and the rationalist-empiricist problems. The abstractions of sense-perception are just as much abstractions as those of conceptual thought; but in either form, the abstractions have a content.

Rather than holding that contradiction is a defect of thought, which cannot pertain to the world outside of thought, Hegel declares that contradiction is a property of the world and thought only grasps and reflects thought through being itself contradictory. This requires a radical revision of the concept of Logic, which instead of avoiding contradiction, has contradiction as its motive force.

Whereas for Kant, human needs, and thus human senses and experience, are givens, and the drive of Reason to go beyond the objects of possible experience the ask questions which cannot be answered by Reason, is a malady which must be cured, Hegel recognises that these human needs are themselves a human product. The production of such needs is explicable only by the fact of consciousness of limitation and that consciousness itself creates the contradiction which drives to overcome it, creating in its wake new human needs.

However, for Hegel, like Kant a professional philosopher, this drive is situated in the labour process, but in an extra-terrestrial spiritual force, not arising from the world, but governing it from above.

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