Science of Logic

When people speak in the usual way of the understanding that I have, they mean by it a faculty or property which stands in the same relationship to the "I" as the property of a thing stands to the thing itself—as an indeterminate substrate Hegel is critiquing the idea that the mind is just a "container" or a blank "thing" that happens to have the power of thought, rather than being defined by thought itself. which is not the true ground and determining factor of its property. According to this representation representation (Vorstellung): an ordinary, often mental-image-based way of thinking, which Hegel contrasts with the rigorous "Concept.", I have concepts and "the Concept" just as I have a coat, a color, and other external properties.

— But Kant has gone beyond this external relationship of the understanding (as a faculty of concepts) and of the concepts themselves to the "I." It is among the deepest and most correct insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason original German: "Kritik der Vernunft." Hegel is referencing Immanuel Kant’s 1781/1787 masterpiece. that the unity which constitutes the essence of the Concept is recognized as the original, synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of "I think," or of self-consciousness. — This proposition constitutes the so-called transcendental deduction of the categories; however, it has always been regarded as one of the most difficult parts of Kantian philosophy — likely for no other reason than that it requires us to move beyond the mere representation of the relationship in which the "I" and the understanding (or concepts) stand to a thing and its properties or accidents accidents (Accidenzen): non-essential qualities of a thing that can change without the thing itself changing., and toward actual thought.

— An object, says Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 137, 2nd ed.) is that in whose concept the manifold manifold (das Mannichfaltige): the raw, disorganized data of the senses before the mind organizes it into a coherent experience. of a given intuition intuition (Anschauung): the direct sensory perception of an object. is united. All unification of representations requires, however, unity of consciousness in the synthesis In this context, synthesis refers to the mind's active process of gathering separate sensory inputs into a single, unified thought. of them. Consequently, this unity of consciousness is that which alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity, and upon which even the...