Abstract

THE IDEA OF A "PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCE," something of a Fata Morgana in the West for several centuries, underwent a well-known revolutionary change when Kant argued that in all philosophical speculation about the nature of things, reason is really "occupied only with itself." Indeed, Kant argued convincingly that the possibility of any cognitive relation to objects presupposed an original and constitutive "relation to self." Thereafter, instead of an a priori science of substance, a science of "how the world must be", a putative philosophical science was directed to the topic of how any subject must "for itself" take or construe or judge the world to be. The nature and forms of such a self-conscious or even self-determining activity assumed center stage in later German philosophy, and, as many commentators have noted, was the decisive presupposition for Hegel's central, deeply obscure position on "the Absolute" as some sort of complete "self-consciousness."