THE UNITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE AS THE ...

discussion of apperception, in the “Transcendental Deduction,” presents the first accurate
account of the structure of the notion. 50 Hegel praises Kant for this discovery. He says:
It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure
Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognized as
the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the I think, or of selfconsciousness.
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In this passage Hegel claims that unity constitutes the notion. He identifies this unity
with “the original synthetic unity of apperception,” with the “I think,” and with “self-
consciousness.” Moreover, he claims that Kant was the first philosopher to conceive
apperception or self-consciousness in its true form, thus opening up the way for the
proper conception of the unity of the notion.
In paragraphs five through seven of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes the
structure of the will, which presents the most developed form of the notion, in terms of
(a) the unity of the universal and the particular, (b) the unity of the infinite and the finite,
and (c) the unity of the indeterminate and the determinate. In all three cases, the
structure of the will or the notion consists in the unity of apparently oppositional terms.
In this passage, Hegel claims that this unity, the unity of the notion, must be conceived in
terms of the “original synthetic unity of apperception.” The unity of apperception thus
50 Kant makes a crucial distinction between transcendental and empirical apperception. Hegel
accepts this distinction, though he believes that the two can only be understood in relation to one another.
For the moment I will use the term “apperception” in a general sense that includes both transcendental and
empirical apperception.
51 Science of Logic, p. 584. For two different interpretations of this passage, see Horstmann’s
Wahrheit aus dem Begriff: Eine Einführung in Hegel (pp. 62 – 73), and Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The
Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness (pp. 16 – 41). Both authors focus on the centrality of Kantian
apperception for the development of Hegel’s thought. On Horstmann’s view, Hegel transforms Kant’s
epistemic or logical conception of apperception into a specifically ontological thesis about the basic
structure of reality. By contrast, Pippin construes Kantian apperception as a doctrine about the selfreflexivity
that constitutes rule following, and he argues that Hegel develops this doctrine even further
within an explicitly epistemological and pragmatist framework.
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