Kant and Hegel accused the Aristotelian table of categories of being '
rhapsodic', derived arbitrarily and in bulk from experience, without any systematic
necessity. The early modern dualism, which has been described above, of Mind and Matter or Subject and Relation, as reflected in the writings of Descartes underwent a substantial revision in the late 18th century. The first objections to this stance were formulated in the eighteenth century by
Immanuel Kant who realised that we can say nothing about
Substance except through the relation of the subject to other things. For example: in the sentence "this is a house", the substantive subject "house" only gains meaning in relation to human use patterns or to other similar houses. The category of Substance disappears from
Kant's tables, and under the heading of Relation, Kant lists
inter alia the three relationship types of Disjunction, Causality and Inherence. The three older concepts of Quantity, Motion and Quality, as
Peirce discovered, could be subsumed under these three broader headings in that
Quantity relates to the subject through the relation of
Disjunction; Motion relates to the subject through the relation of
Causality; and
Quality relates to the subject through the relation of
Inherence. Sets of three continued to play an important part in the nineteenth century development of the categories, most notably in
G.W.F. Hegel's extensive tabulation of categories, and in
C.S. Peirce's categories set out in his work on the logic of relations. One of Peirce's contributions was to call the three primary categories Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness which both emphasizes their general nature, and avoids the confusion of having the same name for both the category itself and for a concept within that category. In a separate development, and building on the notion of primary and secondary categories introduced by the Scholastics,
Kant introduced the idea that secondary or "derivative" categories could be derived from the primary categories through the combination of one primary category with another. This would result in the formation of three secondary categories: the first, "Community" was an example that Kant gave of such a derivative category; the second, "
Modality", introduced by Kant, was a term which Hegel, in developing Kant's dialectical method, showed could also be seen as a derivative category; and the third, "Spirit" or "Will" were terms that
Hegel and
Schopenhauer were developing separately for use in their own systems.
Karl Jaspers in the twentieth century, in his development of existential categories, brought the three together, allowing for differences in terminology, as Substantiality, Communication and Will. This pattern of three primary and three secondary categories was used most notably in the nineteenth century by
Peter Mark Roget to form the six headings of his
Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. The headings used were the three objective categories of Abstract Relation, Space (including Motion) and Matter and the three subjective categories of Intellect, Feeling and Volition, and he found that under these six headings all the words of the English language, and hence any possible predicate, could be assembled.
Kant In the
Critique of Pure Reason (1781),
Immanuel Kant argued that the
categories are part of our own mental structure and consist of a set of
a priori concepts through which we interpret the world around us. These concepts correspond to twelve logical functions of the understanding which we use to make judgements and there are therefore two tables given in the
Critique, one of the Judgements and a corresponding one for the
Categories. To give an example, the logical function behind our reasoning from ground to consequence (based on the
Hypothetical relation) underlies our understanding of the world in terms of cause and effect (the
Causal relation). In each table the number twelve arises from, firstly, an initial division into two: the Mathematical and the Dynamical; a second division of each of these headings into a further two: Quantity and Quality, and Relation and Modality respectively; and, thirdly, each of these then divides into a further three subheadings as follows. Table of Judgements Mathematical • Quantity • Universal • Particular • Singular • Quality • Affirmative • Negative • Infinite Dynamical • Relation • Categorical • Hypothetical • Disjunctive • Modality • Problematic • Assertoric • Apodictic Table of Categories Mathematical •
Quantity • Unity • Plurality •
Totality •
Quality •
Reality •
Negation • Limitation Dynamical •
Relation •
Inherence and
Subsistence (
substance and
accident) •
Causality and Dependence (
cause and
effect) • Community (reciprocity) •
Modality •
Possibility •
Existence •
Necessity Criticism of Kant's system followed, firstly, by
Arthur Schopenhauer, who amongst other things was unhappy with the term "Community", and declared that the tables "do open violence to truth, treating it as nature was treated by old-fashioned gardeners", and secondly, by
W.T.Stace who in his book
The Philosophy of Hegel suggested that in order to make Kant's structure completely symmetrical a third category would need to be added to the Mathematical and the Dynamical. This, he said, Hegel was to do with his category of concept.
Hegel G.W.F. Hegel in his
Science of Logic (1812) attempted to provide a more comprehensive system of categories than Kant and developed a structure that was almost entirely triadic. So important were the categories to Hegel that he claimed the first principle of the world, which he called the "
absolute", is "a system of categories the categories must be the reason of which the world is a consequent". Using his own logical method of
sublation, later called the
Hegelian dialectic, reasoning from the abstract through the negative to the concrete, he arrived at a hierarchy of some 270 categories, as explained by
W. T. Stace. The three very highest categories were "logic", "nature" and "spirit". The three highest categories of "logic", however, he called "being", "essence", and "notion" which he explained as follows: • Being was differentiated from Nothing by containing with it the concept of the "
other", an initial internal division that can be compared with Kant's category of disjunction. Stace called the category of Being the sphere of common sense containing concepts such as consciousness, sensation, quantity, quality and measure. •
Essence. The "other" separates itself from the "one" by a kind of motion, reflected in Hegel's first synthesis of "
becoming". For Stace this category represented the sphere of science containing within it firstly, the thing, its form and properties; secondly, cause, effect and reciprocity, and thirdly, the principles of classification, identity and difference. •
Notion. Having passed over into the "Other" there is an almost
Neoplatonic return into a higher unity that in embracing the "one" and the "other" enables them to be considered together through their inherent qualities. This according to Stace is the sphere of philosophy proper where we find not only the three types of logical proposition: disjunctive, hypothetical, and categorical but also the three
transcendental concepts of beauty, goodness and truth.
Schopenhauer's category that corresponded with "notion" was that of "idea", which in his
Four-Fold Root of Sufficient Reason he complemented with the category of the "will". The title of his major work was
The World as Will and Idea. The two other complementary categories, reflecting one of Hegel's initial divisions, were those of Being and Becoming. At around the same time,
Goethe was developing his colour theories in the of 1810, and introduced similar principles of combination and complementation, symbolizing, for Goethe, "the primordial relations which belong both to nature and vision".
Hegel in his
Science of Logic accordingly asks us to see his system not as a tree but as a circle. ==Twentieth-century development==