| My comparatively weak claim is that modal logic is changed in certain fundamental ways once Kant and Hegel attempt to incorporate it into their philosophical systems. My strong claim, however, is that these changes are responses to weaknesses inherent to Western metaphysics. Both philosophers include a certain modal "node" that serves simultaneously as a necessary condition for the possibility of each system and the very thing that renders that system impossible. I address the transformation of modal philosophy in Kant and the reaction generated by his idealist successors, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Kant's problems begin when he claims that necessity is an a priori category because this precludes demonstrating that the category is itself necessary. Fichte sought to remedy this problem by organizing critical philosophy into a deductive science. However, Fichte found himself forced to ground the systematic necessity of what we can know upon the freedom of action. In the end he is unable to reconcile freedom and necessity. For Hegel, modality has a bivalent character. On the one hand, he claims that logic is a systematic science of reason as thought passes through stages that are progressive and necessary. On the other hand, modality is itself a conceptual stage within the logic. I locate the intersection of the inner and outer components of modality within the overall teleological thrust of his dialectic. Finally, I compare the notion of teleology in Hegel to Kant's treatment of teleological judgment. I argue that in precise locations of their respective systems we get a glimpse of the kind of "modal nodes" that occur whereby (1) notions of necessity implicitly rely upon some notion of a teleological end; (2) the closer that one approaches that end, the more modality begins to exhibit strange phenomena that make reaching that end in principle impossible. |
