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:

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:

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.