Does it make sense to compare philosophies?
​
I am studying philosophy in highschool, so I am not - by any means - appropriately educated to claim that I have any deep understanding of any philosophy or philosopher.
I often ask find myself very annoyed when books or teachers compare philosophers and say that one "surpasses", "defeats" or "proves" wrong another one. I think there is just no such thing as a more correct philosophy. We've recently studied Hegel, so I will use the comparison between Kant and Hegel as an example.
Kant claims that there some things that are unknowable due to limits of reason; he supports this claim with the existence of antinomies, that supposedly prove that reason can fail. Hegel argues that the contraddictions that Kant found are not final, but are just a part of the dialectical process, which makes everything, including conscience possible. So contraddictions aren't just possible, they're necessary.
I hold Kant and Hegel in the highest respect for their intellectual productions and endeavors, but to me it seems really wrong comparing their philosophies. They are indubitably very smart individuals, but they have founded their philosophies and constructed their lines of reasoning on completely different premises, observations and intuitions. So it doesn't really make sense to state something like:
Hegel surpassed the limits that Kant had postulated.
Or even worse:
Hegel proves that the noumena are impossible.
It's not fair to dismiss Kant's conclusions and reasoning using a completely different system which is just as arbitrary as the one he used. Hegel and Kant believed very different things and used very different arguments to explain their thought processes. I think that comparing Kant's and Hegel philosophy is like comparing apples to oranges, meaning that it's a comparison that doesn't make sense and whatever result you may gather from that comparison is worthless (because the comparison itself is nonsensical).
Am I wrong to believe that philosophical discussion between two very different philosophies is kind of pointless because they affirm truths that are equally as valid and as undeniable in their own realm? The discussion produces nothing in the absolute, because there is no philosophically inferable absolute truth, so is it just a way for the philosophical standpoints themselves to be explained even more deeply?
I think that philosophy (like art) is intrinsically beautiful and that it is infinitely valuable even though it doesn't always have practical applications (especially in the case of metaphysics) just like pure mathematics. But what I am really asking is does it make sense from a purely speculative perspective to compare different philosophies and to claim that one has some weaknesses compared to another one (or, even more bluntly, that one is "better")?