The article proposes the analysis of a short story “I” by the Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler. This short story exemplifies the main contradictions of the transcendental theory of subjectivity — first of all the consequences of an attempt to explain the self-consciousness as the object-knowledge. In order to prove this assertion Hegel’s theory of subjectivity was scrutinized which he had concentrated expounded in the “Introduction to the Phenomenology of mind”.