Idealism and the Problem of Finitude: Heidegger and Hegel

Idealism in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel has nothing to do with the minddependence of the world or a mind-imposed structure in experience, or a socalled objective idealism (a claim about the nonmaterial nature of the real, in favor of its ideal nature). Instead, it is a claim about the capacity of pure (empirically unaided) reason to determine of all that is knowable that it is knowable, and how it is knowable. Human reason can thus be understood to be self-authorizing, a tribunal unto itself. In the Hegelian version, this determination of the knowable is a determination of all that there is in its knowability, and so a metaphysics. For Hegel, the determination of the knowable is not the determination of a limitation, as in a limitation just to the knowable-for-us. Or, in Hegel’s famous and controversial phrase, this determination is “absolute”. Since Hegel, this claim has been subjected to a wide range of criticisms, the most important of which insist on the finitude of human reason. The most important critics are Schelling and Heidegger, and in this paper I begin to assess those criticisms.