Summary
The notion of the Notion
In his SL remarks on the “Notion in general,” Hegel introduces the central topic of Book III, the “notion of the Notion.” His remarks on what such a topic involve all indicate that this book will contain a decisive discussion and defense of the core of his claim about the necessary “Notionality” of all “actuality.” And, as quickly as he introduces the topic, he insists on that version of the issue stressed throughout this study:
The Notion, when it has developed into a concrete existence that is itself free, is none other than the I or pure self-consciousness.
(SL, 583; WL, II, 220)This is, of course, the passage where Hegel so strongly identifies his own account of the Notion with Kant's doctrine of apperception, a passage I have stressed and used as a point of orientation since Chapter 2, and it is also the section where he produces one of the simplest formulations of his own idealism:
The object therefore has its objectivity in the Notion and this is the unity of selfconsciousness into which it has been received; consequently its objectivity, or the Notion, is itself none other than the nature of self-consciousness, has no other moments or determinations than the I itself.
(SL, 585; WL, II, 222)We should thus discover in this book, in terms of these claims, the speculative idealist solution to the problems inherent in rationalist and empiricist accounts of such notionality (Book I) and in the various finite idealist insufficiencies detailed in Book IPs account of external and positing reflection.
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- Hegel's IdealismThe Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, pp. 232 - 260Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989