ABSTRACT
Michael Inwood in his A Hegel Dictionary, under the entry ‘Appearance, Illusion and Shining’, usefully explains that German has two words for appearance: Schein, with the verb scheinen, and Erscheinung, with the verb erscheinen. The radical character of Kantian philosophical revolution is brought to our attention by Slavoj Zizek precisely in regard ‘to the difference between Schein and Erscheinung. Immanuel Kant drew a contrast between illusion and the ‘transcendental illusion’. Kojin Karatani explains this difference succinctly as follows: ‘Enlightenment is the liberation from illusions. If the illusions are errors caused by the senses, as philosophers of the Enlightenment assumed, it is easy to rectify them by reason. Zizek informs us that ‘Although an insurmountable abyss separates Kant’s critical philosophy from his great idealist successors, the basic coordinates which render possible Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit are already there in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’.
