Returning to Kant: Clearing the Residue of Hegelian Thought and Its Marxian Consequences

To understand modern philosophy again, we may first need to return to Kant. This does not mean treating Kant as a philosopher who merely belongs to the past, or placing him in a museum of philosophical history. It means returning to the basic framework he established. That framework has not really been surpassed. On the contrary, many philosophies that claimed to move beyond Kant, especially Hegel’s philosophy, remained inside the space of problems that Kant opened. They enlarged Kant’s questions, historicised them, dramatised them, and finally turned them into a totalising narrative that appears grand but lacks stable constraints.

There is a common misunderstanding of Kant. Many people think he artificially divided the world into two parts, one called appearance and the other called the thing-in-itself, and then declared that human beings could only know the former and not the latter. This makes Kant much narrower than he actually is. Kant did not begin by defining some mysterious thing-in-itself and then prohibiting us from knowing it. What Kant really did was analyse the human faculty of cognition. His question was how experience is possible, how knowledge is possible, and how sensory material can be organised into a stable world of objects.

So Kant’s central concern was not to divide the world into two domains. It was to define how human cognition can operate validly. Space, time, categories and forms of judgement are not subjective fantasies. They are the conditions under which the empirical world can be given to us as a world of objects. The human being is not a passive machine receiving external stimuli. The structure of human cognition participates in the formation of the world as an object of experience. In this sense, Kant did not diminish human capacity. He greatly elevated the position of the human subject. The world, insofar as it is knowable by us, must pass through the conditions of human cognition.

The thing-in-itself is not another world positively defined by Kant. It is a boundary concept. It reminds us that an object is not identical with the way it appears under our conditions of experience, and that being is not exhausted by its presentation within the structure of human cognition. Kant was not saying that he knew what the thing-in-itself was and then forbade others from knowing it. He was saying that, as long as we are speaking of theoretical knowledge, we cannot step beyond the conditions of possible experience and claim to have grasped the absolute object itself.

This is where Kant’s philosophy is most rigorous. Kantian reason is not powerless reason. It is reason that has undergone self-critique. Reason must know where it is valid and where it produces illusion. Kant did not restrict the rightful power of human cognition. He restricted uncriticised reason when it crosses its proper limits. The old metaphysics that spoke directly of the soul, God, the totality of the universe and absolute substance was not simply meaningless for Kant, but it could not be treated as theoretical knowledge. Reason may raise these questions, but it cannot disguise its own desire as knowledge.

Hegel appears to be the philosopher who most forcefully surpassed Kant. Kant left boundaries between appearance and the thing-in-itself, subject and object, finite reason and absolute truth. Hegel refused to accept these boundaries. He wanted to absorb these divisions into reason’s own self-development. Contradiction became movement, negation became generation, and history became the process by which spirit comes to understand itself. Hegel’s philosophy therefore appears enormously grand, as if it had swallowed all the problems Kant left behind into a larger system.

But this is precisely the problem. Cancelling a boundary is not the same as truly surpassing it. Hegel did not really prove how reason could legitimately move beyond Kant’s limits. He rewrote those limits as moments within reason’s own development. He did not establish a philosophical closure more rigorous than Kant’s. He turned Kant’s critical structure into an epic of history and concepts. This epic has force, attraction and extraordinary synthetic power, but it lacks the clear conditions of legitimacy that Kant maintained.

Kant’s system is limited but coherent. It accepts that human cognition has conditions, that theoretical reason has boundaries, that moral freedom cannot be derived from empirical facts, and that the human person must never be treated merely as a means. The problems Kant leaves behind are problems he recognises as problems, so they do not destroy his system. Hegel’s case is different. Hegel tries to abolish the problems Kant leaves behind, but he does not do so rigorously. The gaps between subject and object, logic and reality, freedom and the state, the individual and history are not truly resolved in Hegel. They are placed inside a larger dialectical narrative.

What is especially dangerous is Hegel’s claim that contradiction can be absorbed into a higher level. This does not necessarily mean that contradiction has been genuinely resolved. In many cases, it merely changes the standard by which contradiction is judged. A structure that has failed at one level should force a theory to revise itself, but Hegel redescribes that failure as a necessary moment in a higher stage. This may look profound, but it can easily become sophistry. It renames an unresolved problem as an unfolding process, theoretical failure as a mediation of historical development, and an internal rupture of concept as preparation for a higher unity. This is not a strict philosophical breakthrough. It is a way of protecting the system by moving the criterion of judgement.

A reliable philosophy cannot absorb every counterexample as proof of its own correctness. If a theory has no condition of failure, if every contradiction, failure and disaster can be reinterpreted as a necessary moment in its own unfolding, then it may look all-embracing, but it has lost the ability to be judged. Hegel’s problem is not that he recognises contradiction. His problem is that he deprives contradiction of its testing function. Contradiction no longer forces the theory to revise itself. It becomes material for the theory’s self-expansion. This is one of the most dangerous elements in Hegelian dialectics.

This danger is not merely internal to philosophy. Hegel’s most concrete influence was not primarily in epistemology, philosophy of science or the foundations of ethics, but in political philosophy, philosophy of history and philosophy of the state. He gave modern politics a way of placing the individual inside the totality of history, the totality of the state and the collective mission. Hegel certainly speaks of freedom, but his freedom is no longer Kantian freedom centred on personal dignity and rational autonomy. It is placed inside the development of history, ethical life, the state and absolute spirit. The individual does not disappear completely, but the meaning of the individual becomes increasingly dependent on a larger total structure.

This leads to a serious consequence. Once the individual is placed inside grand structures such as historical necessity, reason of state, national mission, class liberation and total progress, the individual can easily turn from an end into material. The centre of Kant’s philosophy remains the human being. The human being as an end must never be treated merely as a means. This proposition looks simple, but it is one of the most important baselines of modern civilisation. Hegel’s philosophy makes it easier for this baseline to be absorbed by history and the state. Kant uses reason to limit power. Hegel’s system can easily be used to sanctify power.

Here Marx must be mentioned. Many of the political disasters of the twentieth century did not arise directly from Hegel’s philosophy. They came more directly from Marx’s theory and its later political practice. Marx appears to invert Hegel. He turns Hegel’s self-unfolding of spirit into the development of material production, class struggle and social history. He turns the movement of ideas into the movement of real social structures. He turns absolute spirit into class emancipation within history. But this inversion does not really escape Hegel. It preserves the same method of thought. Marx reverses the content of Hegel, but he inherits the structure of Hegelian dialectics.

This is the key point. Hegel treats contradiction as the driving force of the development of spirit. Marx treats contradiction as the driving force of social and historical development. Hegel treats negation as a moment leading towards higher unity. Marx treats negation as the historical mechanism by which the old system is replaced by the new one. Hegel makes the individual subordinate to historical spirit and the ethical state. Marx makes the individual subordinate to class, revolution and the total aim of a future society. Their contents differ. One is oriented towards spirit and the state, the other towards matter and class. But their deeper structure is similar. Concrete human beings can be placed inside a larger historical process and interpreted as material for the realisation of a totality.

So the disasters of the twentieth century came more directly from the politicisation and institutionalisation of Marxism. But Marxism was able to become such a powerful theory of historical mobilisation precisely because it inherited the most dangerous part of Hegelian dialectics. It believes that contradiction can be absorbed by history, that sacrifice can be justified by the future, that violence can be explained by progress, and that disaster in the present can be described as a necessary price on the way to liberation. Once such a theory enters the machinery of the state and revolutionary organisation, it is no longer merely a philosophical discussion. It becomes a compulsory historical project.

Therefore, clearing the residue of Hegelian thought cannot stop with Hegel himself. It must also recognise Marx’s inheritance and politicisation of Hegel’s method. Marx did not simply abandon Hegel. He translated Hegel from a philosophy of spirit into a theory of social history. For this reason, Marx had a more direct influence on the political disasters of the twentieth century, while Hegel provided, at a deeper methodological level, the philosophical form through which such disasters could acquire an intellectual covering.

The alienation of modern civilisation receives a philosophical language here. Modern civilisation appears increasingly organised, institutionalised, technological and mobilised. Yet the concrete life, natural being, inner freedom and personal dignity of human beings can be hollowed out by grand historical narratives. Human beings are managed by systems, defined by ideologies, used by state objectives, and sacrificed in the name of historical progress. The danger of Hegel’s philosophy is not that it has no insight. Its danger is that it gives this sacrifice a beautiful conceptual covering. The danger of Marxism is that it turns this conceptual covering into revolutionary practice and state organisation.

This is why returning to Kant today is not merely a choice within the history of philosophy. It is a choice about the direction of civilisation. To return to Kant is to return to the boundary of reason, to human dignity, to the autonomy of the subject, to the conditions of legitimate knowledge, and to the basic line that power must not cross. Kant is not conservative, nor is he weak. His real strength is that he knows reason must first limit itself before it can become a foundation of civilisation. Without this restraint, reason turns into grand narrative. Once grand narrative joins power, it becomes disaster.

Many modern political ideas after Hegel carry the temptation of totality. They believe history has a direction, that the state can represent higher reason, that individual sacrifice can be justified by the future, and that present suffering can be redeemed by progress. This way of thinking looks profound, but it is deeply dangerous. Once the future is absolutised, people living in the present can be sacrificed. Once the totality is sanctified, the concrete human being loses an inviolable position. Once history is described as the path of reason, real violence can be packaged as a necessary moment.

Clearing the residue of Hegelian thought does not mean denying Hegel’s place in the history of philosophy. It does not mean simply removing him from intellectual history. What must be cleared is the philosophical impulse to place history, the state, totality and spirit above the human being. What must be cleared is the habit of treating the movement of concepts as the movement of reality itself. What must be cleared is the political imagination that allows grand narratives to swallow concrete life. What must be cleared is the mistake of treating an incoherent totalising system as a philosophical completion higher than Kant.

The most attractive part of Hegel’s philosophy is also its most dangerous part. It makes people believe that every division can be absorbed into a higher unity, every contradiction can be sublated by history, and every pain can receive meaning inside the totality. But what human civilisation truly needs may not be this excessive unity. It may need Kantian boundary-consciousness. We must know what can be known and what can only be thought; what can be organised and what must not be violated; what can be explained historically and what must first be confronted as human dignity.

Returning to Kant is not regression. It is the rediscovery of the constraint structure of modern civilisation. Hegel pushes philosophy towards historical totality, while Kant pulls philosophy back to the conditions of the human being. Hegel can allow power to acquire a philosophical covering, while Kant forces power to face the judgement of reason and morality. Hegel’s world looks more spectacular. Kant’s world looks more restrained. But what sustains civilisation is often not spectacle, but restraint.

Here, returning to Kant does not mean treating Kant as the final destination of philosophy. Kant still places the knowing subject at the centre, while modern knowledge, technology, institutions and artificial intelligence have increasingly externalised knowledge beyond any single subject. What we need to recover from Kant is his sense of boundary, his critical spirit and his principle of human dignity. What we need to continue developing is a broader analysis of sustenetic conditions, extending Kant’s analysis of the conditions of the subject into a more general account of how things become formed, sustained, tested and revised. In this sense, returning to Kant does not mean stopping with Kant. It means using Kant to re-establish the necessary constraints, and then moving from those constraints towards Sustenesis Theory.

If Kant established the constitution of modern philosophy, Hegel established a philosophical form of modern political myth. A constitution limits power. Myth mobilises power. A constitution protects the human being. Myth absorbs the human being. In reassessing Kant and Hegel today, we should not merely ask whose system is grander, whose language is more magnificent, or whose historical influence is more dramatic. We should ask who better protects the place of the human being, and who better prevents civilisation from crossing the boundary of the human.

In this sense, Kant remains one of the most important foundations of modern philosophy. Hegel did not truly surpass Kant. He refused to accept Kant’s boundaries and wrote that refusal into dialectics. Marx then inverted this dialectic from a philosophy of spirit into a theory of social history, allowing it to enter the political practice of the twentieth century more directly. A philosophical breakthrough that has not formed a coherent closure can become a seedbed of civilisational disaster once it becomes a source of political thought. Clearing Hegel and his Marxian consequences is not about returning to an old philosophy. It is about allowing modern civilisation to return to a rational framework centred on the human being, conditioned by boundaries and grounded in dignity, and from there to move further towards Sustenesis Theory.

A Sustenesis Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic

Philosophy & Ideas