ABSTRACT
Hegel himself regularly disowns what he calls 'subjective idealism' and it seems not to have occurred to him that he might be vulnerable to such an interpretation. In fact when he says that Kant is a subjective idealist, he seems to have in mind at some different doctrines. Kant held that the objects with which we are acquainted are appearances. Kant distinguishes carefully between the words 'appearance' and 'illusion'. All phenomenal objects are appearances, in the sense that they are merely the way in which reality as it is in itself appears to us. Hegel's notion of contradiction is, of course, a flexible one. Objective contradictions are, on Hegel's view, no more and no less objectionable than subjective ones, and, as we have seen, he criticizes Kant for supposing that contradictions are more tolerable if they are located in our minds rather than in things.
