Abstract
Both Maimon and Fichte undertook a transformation of Kantian idealism. This transformation concerned, first, the concept of 'subject" in relation to which the world is a phenomenon. The subject cannot mean the individual subject. It is the view of both Maimon and Fichte that the individual psychic subject is in itself a phenomenon; like all phenomena of experience, it is a creation of an objectifying act of our object-forming thinking. The forms of the world, that is, the forms in which we conceive phenomena, cannot be thought of as dependent upon the subjective human mind with its casual, incidental frailties. Critical idealism is objective idealism; it is not compatible with subjectivism and psychologism. Hence the conception of the human subject as the ground of any cognition of the objects of reality is to be eliminated as incompatible with transcendental, critical idealism. Kant himself has clearly shown in his refutation of idealism that the individual subject is to be replaced with the idea of a super-individual subject as the ground of our conception of phenomena. The creative function of thought, producing objective laws governing the phenomena of experience, is to be attributed to a "general consciousness' (Bewusstsein überhaupt) and not to the individual subjective consciousness. The "general consciousness' is to be understood as objective, scientific thought manifesting itself in the various stages of scientific development.