Karen Ng has produced an original and ambitious book that aims to defend a novel understanding of Hegel’s “idealism.” Such idealism, in Ng’s view, does not deny that things exist outside the mind, but it maintains that life is what “opens up the possibility of rendering things intelligible” (64). This “naturalized” idealism is indebted to what Ng takes to be Kant’s idea, set out in the Critique of Judgment, that “internal purposiveness”—exemplified by organisms—is an “enabling, empowering condition for judgment” and cognition (61).
Ng examines what Hegel called Kant’s “great service to philosophy” in part 1 of her book. She focuses first on the Critique of Pure Reason and provides a brief but lucid account of the role assigned by Kant to categories as the conditions of possible experience. She then turns her attention to what (following Henry Allison) she calls the problem of “empirical chaos” (32). This problem...
