Modality in Kant and Hegel

Abstract This chapter explores Kant’s and Hegel’s views on what unifies the modalities, i.e., why possibility, actuality, and necessity are modalities and other notions, like truth, are not. According to Kant, modal concepts do not describe properties of objects, but instead express the relation of concepts of objects to our capacity for cognition. Since our capacity for cognition has two “stems,” sensibility and understanding, this generates a distinction between two kinds of modality: logical modality, which expresses the relation of a concept to the form and matter of the understanding alone, and real modality, which expresses the relation of a concept to the form and matter of understanding and sensibility. Hegel rejects this Kantian account of the unity of the modalities, holding that modal categories are determinations of objects just as much as any other category of Hegelian Logic. Hegelian modalities do not express the relation of a concept to a cognitive power rather than a determination of an object; they describe both determinations of an object and the relation of thought to its object, for, in Hegel’s Logic, these are ultimately the same. What unifies Hegelian modalities instead is that they describe structural moments of the self-development of the ‘modes’ of what Hegel calls ‘the Absolute.’