XII - The Concept

Summary

Having reached the subject, Hegel is now in a position to spell out what has only been implicit in the earlier books. We saw that the categories of Essence as against those of Being make implicit reference to a subject of knowledge. This reference is now made explicit. And this consciousness that the real is for a subject will no longer be lost sight of in the Logic.

This is the first justification for calling this section the book of the Concept. That the world is for a subject means that the world-as-object-of-knowledge is structured by concepts. This was intrinsic to our starting point in the Logic, which is a dialectic of categories, but it is now to be examined explicitly. And it shows Hegel's debt to Kant. But while Hegel's notion of the Concept owes a lot to Kant, it involves a profound transformation of Kant's basic ideas.

Hegel takes the basic Kantian idea of the original unity of apperception which he says ‘belongs to the deepest and most accurate insights that can be found in the critique of reason’ (WL, 11, 221) and gives it a twist which Kant would have received with horror. This original unity is what unites the different representations, and it is this unity which gives them objectivity, i.e., relates them to an object. As just intuitions, the contents of our experience have no objectivity, but as brought together by the ‘I’, and brought together under concepts, they achieve objectivity.