Kant’s transcendental logic results from a subjective turn away from sideways-on reflections on the conditions of possibility to think about present objects. Hegel transforms it into an explication of steps that allow us to talk about possible and, as such, abstract objects and their real instantiations or ‘presentations’. Full language encodes the conceptual knowledge necessary for any access to modalities about physical things and their movements (1), chemical matter and processes (2) and, finally, life on earth (3). In the emergence of the ‘personal’ form of human life there are developments that lead (4) from the social behaviour of animals to the human forms of practice, (5) from signal-languages to full language with its two syntacto-semantic parts of sentences, noun-phrases and verb-phrases, and (6) from enactive perception to conceptually formed apperception and intuition. Our mind thus depends on the shared intellectual and ethical history of whole humankind. We express the genericity of these developments by relating trans-subjective ‘spirit’ to ‘the concept’ in the sense of the indefinite system of definite, hence limited, conceptual domains to talk about and refer to – such that there is no further need for a divine creator nor for attributing to cosmic matter a disposition for evolving life and consciousness.
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (Wed,) studied this question.