Comments on §87, Experience and Reflection
What can be present to consciousness are only those objects proper to its given shape. Thus Hegel supposes he may have been misunderstood (c.f. §85-86) to be saying that consciousness finds its object inadequate through the manner of an empirical disproof. In this capacity, consciousness is the passive apprehension of its proper objects, and indeed one may call into question the inferences from another in this manner. But Hegel means to have described a quite different phenomenon which he distinguishes here and which I call call instead 'reflection.' We--I suppose he means something like we philosophers, or at least we followers of the method of the Phenomenology... We attend not to the content passively apprehended by consciousness but to the form of this apprehension. In the changing shapes of consciousness we see a kind of activity, something brought to consciousness by reflection or at least by its implicit activity, yet something which is brought to bear precisely on the contents that have been apprehended. Is this the Hegelian face of the Kantian restriction against the pure use of understanding?