Abstract
This chapter addresses the issue of the relationship between the domain of what there is (being) and the domain of what can be known (thought) in the Wissenschaftslehre of 1804. It argues that Fichte’s project should be read as a contribution to transcendental ontology, i.e., to an account of being and existence that shows that there are no objects or facts in principle inaccessible to human knowledge acquisition. In this context, the chapter offers an interpretation of Fichte’s concept of “absolute knowing”: absolute knowing consists in our capacity to grasp the concept of empirical knowledge on a level of reflection that differs in category from fallible thought about objects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), ix.
- 2.
Sebastian Gardner, “The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism,” in German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Espen Hammer (London: Routledge, 2007), 19–49; Sebastian Gardner, “The Status of the Wissenschaftslehre: Transcendental and Ontological Grounds in Fichte,” International Yearbook of German Idealism − Metaphysics in German Idealism 5 (2007): 90–125; Steven Hoeltzel, “Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief,” in Transcendental Inquiry. Its History, Methods and Critiques, ed. Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 55–82.
- 3.
For a defense of this opening move of Fichte’s transcendental ontology, see the argument from facticity in Markus Gabriel, “Neutral Realism,” The Monist 98, no. 2 (2015): 181–96.
- 4.
Hoeltzel, “Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief,” 77.
- 5.
Fichte frequently uses this term. In the Seventeenth Lecture he links it to his theory of representation (of the image of the light):
because it is clear that a representative without the representation of what is represented or an image without the imaging of what it images, is nothing. In short, an image as such, according to its nature, has no intrinsic self-sufficiency, but rather points toward some external, primordial source. (WL1804 63 [GA II/8:101])
I believe that Fichte here deals with the notion of the content of a thought. The light is the concept of a content that puts a thinker in touch with a reality that cannot be identified with the fact that it is represented.
- 6.
The principle of idealism here states that “consequently being depends on its being constructed” (WL1804 121 [GA II/8:244]).
- 7.
This is Ian Hacking’s term for “a group of words that arise by what Quine calls semantic ascent: truth, facts, reality.” Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21.
- 8.
Daniel Breazeale, Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 192.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Wolfram Hogrebe, Prädikation und Genesis. Metaphysik als Fundamentalheuristik im Ausgang von Schellings “Die Weltalter” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 52.
- 11.
For a clear-cut case of this effect, see Thomas Nagel’s naturalistic brand of objective idealism in his Mind and Cosmos, where he identifies Schelling and Hegel as predecessors of his proposed framework. See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 17.
- 12.
The following is a version of a train of thought spelled out in different ways by Andrea Kern, Sources of Knowledge: On the Concept of a Rational Capacity for Knowledge (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) and Sebastian Rödl, Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
- 13.
On this concept, see Markus Gabriel, The Limits of Epistemology, trans. Alex Englander (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
- 14.
Gardner, “The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism.”
- 15.
On this see, of course, Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in In the Space of Reasons. Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 369–408.
- 16.
Gardner, “The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism,” 36–37.
- 17.
On the notion of a theory agent (Theorieagent) in a critical metaphysics, see Markus Gabriel, Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn: Bonn University Press, 2006).
- 18.
Gardner, “The Status of the Wissenschaftslehre,” 93.
- 19.
On the concept of an idealistic principle of intelligibility see Markus Gabriel, “What Kind of an Idealist (if any) is Hegel?” Hegel-Bulletin 27, no. 2 (2016): 181–208.
- 20.
Hoeltzel, “Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief,” 74.
- 21.
Gardner, “The Limits of Naturalism and the Metaphysics of German Idealism,” 37.
- 22.
Ibid., 34.
- 23.
To be sure, Hoeltzel’s ontotheological reading of Fichte’s position is explicitly restricted to the 1798–1800 period and, thus, explicitly leaves it open to read the later project as a critical reaction to the earlier ontotheological approach.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gabriel, M. (2019). Transcendental Ontology in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre of 1804. In: Hoeltzel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Fichte Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26508-3_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26508-3_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-26507-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-26508-3
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)