Comparing Kant And Twim By Georg Hegel

In Addition 1 to section 41 of the Encyclopedia Logic Georg Hegel accuses Kant of “the error of refusing to enter the water until you have learnt to swim” (Hegel). This accusation is resting on a fundamental difference between Kant and Hegel’s conceptions of knowledge, namely, that Hegel believes we can know objects in themselves. In the following paper, I will discuss this accusation at length and offer my own thoughts on its legitimacy.
Kant’s presentation of the categories is that they are objective in so far as they are universal to human understanding. This means that were one to observe the striking of a match and the match subsequently lighting that the cause and effect observed is not a part of that action or the match, but a part

The world itself is categorical rather than our own minds. This categorical structure is however dynamic and changing alongside the engines of history. We as people are understanding the world through the spirit, or our collective thought as humans. So, while we can say a consequence to Napoleon was the rejection of the monarch in France, it was not Napoleon himself who needed to fill this role. The spirit of the world would have found someone to fill not in so far as filling it in the same way directly, but in furthering the evolution of thought by getting the people of France to reject the monarchy. We are the sense of the world trying to understand itself. The flaw that Hegel saw in Kant’s categories as universal, but not externally so, is a lack of knowing the limit of a thought. “So that what we want is to combine in our process of inquiry the action of the forms of thought with a criticism of them… Hence they examine themselves: in their own action they must determine their limits, and point out their defects. This is that action of thought, which will hereafter be specially considered under the name of Dialectic, and regarding which we need only at the outset observe that, instead of being brought to bear upon the categories from without, it is Immanent in their own action.” (Hegel 41). The dialectic to Hegel is a means of coming to understand the essence of a thought. It is to know a thought by what it is and what it is in the web of the universe. Kant lacks a means of piecing the world back together once it is deconstructed by thought. Effectively, Kant can not confirm his knowledge or that he can swim in the only way in which you could clearly tell one could swim, by being in the water or thinking about