Herbart adduces this fact of consciousness in repudiation of Fichte’s idea that the I posits itself. Herbart’s statement is a relative of Rand’s “Before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something” (1957)
The quotation of Herbart is in Michael Heidelberger’s book on Fechner.
In his commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, Abelard writes:
“By their very nature things are prior to understandings.”
This quotation affirming the primacy of existence is given in Klaus Jacobi’s essay on Abelard’s philosophy of language, which is Chapter 4 of The Cambridge Companion to Abelard (2004).
Without objects self-consciousness would be nonsense.
