There is something quite paradoxical in Hegel's presentation of Kant's Critical system in the first part of his 1802 article “Faith and Knowledge.” On the one hand, Hegel praises Kant for having expressed the “true idea of reason” in his Critique of Pure Reason and his Critique of Judgment. On the other hand, he describes the so-called pure practical reason expounded in the second Critique as resulting from a “complete trampling down of reason.” More surprising still, it seems that in effect, Hegel sees an anticipation of his own notion of reason in those explanations of judgment, in Kant's first and third Critiques, where our discursive abilities are presented as inseparable from sensibility (synthetic a priori judgments in the first Critique, aesthetic and teleological judgments in the third Critique). By contrast, he considers as a destruction of reason what Kant took to be its purest and highest use: its practical use in the autonomous determination of the will, as described in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals and in the second Critique.

What is the motivation for this peculiar appropriation of Kant's Critical system? The beginning of an answer to this question can be found already in Hegel's early theological writings, most notably, “The Spirit of Christianity and its Destiny.” There Hegel proclaimed the superiority of the moral teaching of Jesus (whose principle was love as the expression of life) over Kantian morality that teaches the bondage of inclinations and sensibility by reason and the moral law.