This study treats of the form of philosophy. Proceeding primarily from the topics modality and individuality in Kant and Hegel, criteria will be established for the precise determination of the idea of philosophy and of philosophical method. This excludes from the outset any attempt at a merely historical comparison. Neither is the intention that the two thinkers be considered in terms of questions external to their concerns. Instead the attempt is made to let each of them say what they have to say as concisely and distinctively as possible on specific topics, such that from these topics then it becomes possible to recognise their distinctive proposals for determination of the form of the practice of doing philosophy. The question as to a relation between the two thinkers in the specific matter, but then also the question as to the matter itself, can only really be answered in reference to that determination.
The connection between the problem complexes modality and individuality may not seem immediately plausible, especially not in terms of methodology. Of course the concept of method informing this study can only redeem itself in the execution but its most important feature can be given a preliminary statement as follows. Instead of a proposal for regulating the language with a view to the widest possible general validity, the method must on the contrary be understood as a movement from external generalities into individuality, i.e. into the real location of cognition; it must demonstrate itself to be the pathway to an individualising kind of speech capable in all its functions of the self-consciousness of truth. The ‘modal’ aspect then relates to the determination of the active modes of formation of objectivity mediating what appears to be determined as general and objective to take it back into self-individualising speech; a return which is equally the individualising utterance of what is objective.
The study was accepted in the summer of 1990 by the Philosophical Faculty of the Rheinisch Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn as a Ph.D. dissertation supervised by Prof. Josef Simon, to whom my gratitude is owed not only for his support including many and varied suggestions but also for the freedom he granted me in the completion of the study. Thanks are also due to Prof. Gerhart Schmidt, who as second referee encouraged me in the research from the beginning. I also benefited greatly from doctoral scholarships of the federal state North Rhein Westfalia and then from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.
Thomas Sören Hoffmann Bonn-Geislar spring 1991