The metaphysics question: speculative metaphysics or non-metaphysical category theory?

G.W.F. Hegel, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The system rests on substantive speculative claims. The Logic is logic and ontology together — the categories of thought are the determinations of being.¹ The Idea is the unity of Concept and reality, what truly is. Geist is substance becoming subject. But the metaphysics is post-Kantian, not pre-critical romantic theology. There is no cosmic-mind hovering above finite minds, no return to substance-stuff, no abandonment of Kant's discovery that the categories are thought's own self-legislation.

Against Kant, the speculative claim is that thought's self-legislation is not formal but content-generating — the Concept is the activity by which determination produces itself.²³

Sources

1. On the contrary the unity belongs equally to the Object [Obje k t] and, with its determinations, constitutes the proper nature thereof. Thoughts are of three kinds: (1) The Categories; (2) Determinations of Reflection; (3) Concepts. The Doctrine of the first two constitutes Objective Logic or Metaphysics; the Doctrine of Concepts constitutes Subjective Logic or Logic proper.

   The Philosophical Propaedeutic, pp. 110–111

2. In the latter I deal with the succession of stages from feeling through intuition, representation, imagination, and so on.

   The Letters, pp. 289–290

3. Their distinguishing is not a subsisting of the one and the non-being of the other, but rather they are for their part immediately sublated, posited as sublated and ideal 2 • [It is] not a non-posited, a vanishing into simplicity, but [it is] rather what the determinacies are inherently, something posited in the same manner, though as sublated, in their one self-equivalent simple unity, a unity that is their…

   The Jena System 1804-5 Logic and Metaphysics, pp. 77–78

Where the argument is made

• Science of Logic (1812-16, esp. the Doctrine of the Concept)
• Encyclopedia Logic §§79-83 on the speculative
• Phenomenology of Spirit Preface (substance becoming subject)
• Faith and Knowledge (1802)

How the argument was received

The central interpretive battleground in Anglophone Hegel scholarship since Pippin (1989). Non-metaphysical readers (Pippin, Pinkard, Brandom) treat the speculative claims as a sophisticated post-Kantian category theory; chastened- metaphysical readers (Houlgate, Beiser, Stern, Williams) take the claims as substantive ontology distinct from the romantic caricature.