The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Hartmann - Zum Begriff der unbewussten Vorstellung
Representation [Vorstellung is translated thus throughout] includes, qualitatively, sensation, intuition, and concept, and as to the source of the activity, perception, recollection, and phantasy. The question is which of these kinds of the genus representation is possible in the sense of an unconscious representation. Unconscious sensation is impossible, for where sensation exists it implies a consciousness. Unconscious sense intuition is also impossible, as it is built up out of sensations. An unconscious concept is perfectly impossible; it is the conscious understanding which abstracts. Unconscious perception or apperception, and unconscious recollection, and unconscious phantasy are also impossible. We can't introduce the character of unconsciousness into representation through feeling; feeling is either conscious or it is nothing. But is there no other kind of representation than the kinds enumerated? Unconscious representation of course, if it exist, must be incapable of being experienced, but we can't conclude from this that it does not exist; that it can't be experienced is a negative support of (the hypothesis of) unconscious representation. Positively, then, unconscious representation is determined as 'intellectual intuition' [intellectuelle Anschauung]. Intellectual intuition and unconscious representation are different expressions for the same concept. One can recognize in man intellectual intuition without recognizing in him beyond his sensuous abstract understanding also a supersensuous intuitive intellect. If any one wishes a simple term for the compound expression unconscious representation or unconscious intellectual function, we may use the word idea (specific and not generic in its signification in Greek and German v. English and French). Idea is equally incapable of being experienced along with intellectual intuition and unconscious representation, and like these words it excludes all difference or opposition, e.g. between that which is presented and that which presents, and like them is in opposition to sensation and intuition on the one side and concept on the other. H. rejects the eternal and immutable idea; the concreteness and the singularity of the one absolute idea attains to validity in the temporal changing content of the world-process. This idea is one with unconscious representation, i.e. if this idea exists, unconscious representation exists. On the latter H. builds his system.