Abstract

Why are Kant and Hegel so notoriously hard to understand? It has hitherto gone unnoticed that Kant and Hegel account for philosophy's necessary obscurity by recasting what they think is an ancient tradition of philosophical esotericism. Reconstructing these accounts generates new interpretations of Kant's deduction of freedom and Hegel's deduction of the concept of science . Both deductions aim to make philosophy universally accessible. Each raises, but fails to settle, the question of philosophy's exclusions. ;Following a procedure of Cavell's, I offer a thematics of esotericism, permitting a wide variety of esotericisms. Recent discussion knows only one: elitist obfuscation. I trace several eighteenth century controversies, showing that elitist obfuscation was rejected by Kant and others, but that other esotericisms remained available. I argue against the interpretation of Kant as a secret obfuscatory elitist. ;I then characterize the shift in Kant's thinking leading to his deduction of freedom and his account of esotericism. Building upon work by Allison and Henrich, I interpret the fact of reason as a practical deduction, consisting in an actualization of the capacity for freedom. The first-personal character of the deduction underlies Kant's explicit recasting of esotericism in his response to Schlosser's Seventh Letter esotericism . Kant's metaphysics of morals is esoteric because it is accessible only through the fact of reason: the first-personal actualization of the capacity for freedom shared by all human beings. Kant locates philosophy's "true secret", which Plato grasped only obscurely, in this esoteric, yet universally accessible, practical metaphysics. ;Finally, I interpret Hegel's Phenomenology as a practical deduction whose first-personal character is expressed by the Hegelian "we". This avoids the circularity problem facing interpretations based upon Kant's theoretical deduction of the categories, and enables the reconstruction of Hegel's account of the esotericism of determinate negation. I argue that Fichte's and Schelling's accounts of esotericism endanger Kant's commitment to universal accessibility and that Hegel seeks to preserve Kant's commitment without abandoning their insights. However, neither Kant nor Hegel accounts sufficiently for the resistance their work encounters