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The aim of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to provide its reader with a "ladder" to the standpoint of science, showing him "this standpoint within himself" (p. 26).¹ By the standpoint of science, the standpoint of absolute knowing, I understand a perspective in which human cognition has no absolute limits or barriers, in which no items and types of items, most notably Kant's things in themselves, are intrinsically or a priori external to human cognition. Hegel is only attempting to provide a ladder to this standpoint because he believes that no demonstration or deduction of it is possible. Hegel's denial of the possibility of demonstration is premised on a simple logical insight: if what is presupposed as external to reason and cognition — material objects, other persons, language, social practices, history — are in fact constitutive conditions of them, then a position whose premises are weaker than what it seeks to demonstrate, as for example one might attempt to explicate the possibility of linguistic meaning only through reference to elaborate structures of intention, must necessarily fail. Hence, Hegel's initially puzzling formula that states that the "aether" of knowing is "pure self-recognition in absolute otherness' (p. 26), is designedly anti-Kantian: we only come to apperceptive self-awareness, what for Kant is pure or transcendental self-consciousness, through cognition of things in themselves, the very things access to which Kant denies as a condition of apperception.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8917-8_8

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