Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic
Georg Hegel · en
By 'subjective' the world is in the way of understanding what is due
to personal prepossession, void of general acceptability, a product of
individual feeling, peculiar and inexplicable tastes. By subjective
Kant means what belongs to _the_ subject or knowing mind as such and
in its generality: what is constitutive of intelligence in general,
what sense and intellect are _semper et ubique_. Into the question
how the human being came to have such an intellectual endowment--the
question which Nativist psychology is supposed to settle in one way;
and Evolutionism in another--Kant does not enter; he merely says
where there is knowledge, there is a knower,--a knowing subject _so_
constituted. It comes after all to the tautology that the reality we
know is a known reality: that knowledge is a growth in the knower,
and not an accidental product due to things otherwise unknown. The
predicate (or category) _'is'_ is contained, implicit, in the predicate
'_is known,_' or what '_is_' puts implicitly, '_is known_' puts
explicitly and truly.
By 'appearance' the world understands a sham, or at least somewhat
short of reality. By appearance Kant understands a reality which has
appeared: or, as that is going too far, a something which is real
so far as it goes (a _prima facie_ fact), but only a candidate for
admission into the circle of reals. And such reality depends on nothing
more than its thorough-going coherence with other appearances, its
explaining the rest, and being in turn explained by them,--its absolute
adaptation to its environment. And this environment all lies in the
common field of consciousness, and in the one correlating and unifying
apperceptivity of the ego,--that Ego which is the inseparable comrade,
vehicle, and judge, of all our perceptions. It is the appearance--but
as yet not the appearance _of_ something,--but rather an appearance
_to_ or _for_ something.
By an 'idea' the world in general understands what it is sometimes
ready to call a _mere_ idea. And by a mere idea is meant something
which is _not_ reality, but a peculiarity of an individual mind, or
group of minds-a fancy, without objective truth:--something, we may
even add, which for many people is located in their own head or brain,
cut off by blank bone-walls from the open air of real being. By idea
(representation, _Vorstellung_) Kant meant that an object is always
and essentially the object of a mind: always relative to a subject
consciousness, and implying it, just as a subject consciousness always
implies an object.