Iñigo Baca Bordons

Wechselwirkung does not mean the same thing for Kant, Fichte and Hegel, but plays a different role for each of their systematic arguments at distinct structural joints. Firstly, Kant’s ‘Third Analogy’ presents a problematic conflation of pseudo-causal influence and the logical requirement for the totalization of experience. Then, Fichte takes Wechselbestimmung to characterize determination in general and is a key operative concept for the construction and justification of both logic and empirical content undertaken in his Wissenschaftslehre. And finally, Hegel’s presuppositionless argument requires that the emergence of the concept involve the overcoming the opposition of activity and passivity.

In both the Critique of Pure Reason [KrV] and Science of Logic [WdL], Wechselwirkung caps off significantly lengthier discussions of causality with a suspiciously brief section. The superficial difference is clear enough: Kant considers the “interaction” between substances, whereas Hegel emphasizes the reciprocity of cause and effect. But the aim here will not just be that Hegel’s Wechselwirkung works differently from Kant’s simply because his systematic idealism rejects the transcendental split between concept and sensibility. Rather, the aim is to find a continuity of concern over a shared problem behind their different accounts and uses of the concept Wechselwirkung, and thus the kind of role it can play for their respective systematic argumentation. This will involve making explicit the problem which Kant’s account tries to address by taking up this concept, both with regards to its analogous schema, “simultaneity”, and its (much later) corresponding idea. It is here that Kant’s insistence that determination take place “thoroughgoingly” [durchgängig] will appear as a core problem. I will thus argue that Kant and Hegel take Wechselwirkung to be central to their projects because they both want to find a way of making determination “thoroughgoing”, and thereby give coherence to “effectivity”, but without falling into dogmatic rationalism.

This paper argues that Hegel’s account of modernity is already an account of postmodernity, according to Fredric Jameson’s definition of the cultural logic of globalized capitalism. First, Hegel’s account of the problematic of modernity will be sought in the Phenomenology of Spirit by considering the constellation of Athens, Rome and Christianity along with Hegel’s contrast between tragedy and comedy in the “Religion” chapter, in order to present a philosophical account of a concrete problem connecting social, political and economic structures with their own self-representations. The core problematic will become instantiated in the legal figure of the “person” and the social world-structure of “empire”, associated with both Roman legality and comedy. It will be argued that Hegel’s socio-historical relevance today hinges on drawing a connection between Jameson’s periodization of Realism-Modernism-Postmodernism and Hegel’s aesthetic cultural categories of Epic-Tragedy-Comedy, and not Greece-Rome- Christianity. On this basis, the Phenomenology of Spirit stands as Hegel’s own “cognitive map”, for which comedy designates a problematic extreme of a social regime of representation commensurate with the contemporary cultural logic of late and imperial capitalism.