Nevertheless, for both Kant and Hegel there is a close bond between thought and Being to the extent that both take the world of beings to be available in principle for our intelligibility. Hegel goes so far as to think that Being itself is intelligible. As Martin Heidegger aptly puts it in a comment on Hegel’s Logic in Pathmarks, for Hegel the 'movement of principles circling within themselves' is 'itself the absoluteness of Being.' While he does argue that this idea of the system of principles as Being originates in Kant, Heidegger shows that for Kant, contrary to Hegel, Being can be addressed or determined only to the extent that a necessary distinction between possibility and actuality is made: our understanding can only 'think an object in its possibility” (emphasis added). To be able to know the object “in its actuality' we need to be affected through the senses. Being is determinable only 'from positing [vom Setzen her] as [an] act of human subjectivity.' In Hegel, this limitation is lifted. Being’s intelligibility is no longer relativized to merely human subjects. Hegel in fact radicalizes Kant’s insight into the necessary reciprocal relation between thought and object by identifying the absolute identity that lies at the heart of this reciprocal relation, Kant’s productive imagination, as Being itself—not in any pre-critical, substantivist sense, but in the sense of Being as reason, as pure intelligibility.












