Abstract
Reflection is the unified pattern and fundamental structure of every presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre. This chapter develops this hypothesis by showing, first, how Fichte’s conception of reflection marks a difference with the traditional views on the subject by identifying reflection with the status of the philosopher’s discourse. This issue leads Fichte to conceive of philosophy as metaphilosophy. And in the end, this metaphilosophy rests on a single principle found in every version of the Wissenschaftslehre, which induces an unprecedented method of argumentation that Fichte is the first to develop. Neither introspection nor description, reflection is a new form of the transcendental method.
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Notes
- 1.
Luigi Payerson, Fichte. Il sistema dellà Libertà (Milan: Mursia, 1976), 14.
- 2.
See one example, among others, in the beginning of Wissenschaftslehre of 1801: “the science of knowledge qua science of science” (GA II/6:140).
- 3.
This point is made by numerous commentators on Kant’s philosophy. See e.g., André de Muralt, La Conscience transcendantale dans le criticisme kantien (Paris: Aubier, 1958), 15. The fact of representation, de Muralt, writes, “allows to retrieve the totality of Kant’s theory of knowledge.” See also the work of Alexis Philonenko, who has constantly defined Kantian philosophy as a “theory of representation,” i.e., as an elucidation of the subject-object relation.
- 4.
This text was written in 1793–1794, only a few months before the first Science of Knowledge.
- 5.
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 18. On the conception of the first enunciation of the Cogito as a performative, see Jaakko Hintikka’s seminal paper “Cogito ergo sum, Inference or Performance,” Philosophical Review 71, no. 1 (1962): 3–32.
- 6.
Fichte never ceased to criticize the philosophies that started with a simple “fact” (Tatsache), the facticity of consciousness included. It is therefore not simply a matter of acknowledging through reflection something that was already there prior to reflection itself.
- 7.
The expression appears no less than six times in ten lines.
- 8.
The conjunction of epistemeandlogos, which could be literally translated by the expression “science of science,” is reminiscent of Fichte’s own Wissenschaftslehre, which could also be translated as “science of science.” Fichte’s expression, formed form Germanic roots, could thus be seen as a literal counterpart to the word “epistemology,” formed with Greek roots.
- 9.
It is worth noticing that Fichte insists on the absence of a significant change between the different versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. The condition is said to be “permanent,” meaning unchanged, as if it had always been the foundation of every Wissenschaftslehre.
- 10.
A certain interpretation of Gamma, 4 could lead one to acknowledge that Aristotle already used this kind of argumentation to refute the sophist’s argument against the law of non-contradiction as a formal principle. The argument as such is far from new and has been well-known throughout history as a means to counter skepticism. Fichte’s originality is to transform this mere means into the principle of principles, the foundation of any possible philosophical discourse. Accordingly, Fichte enables new propositions to be produced on the basis of classical problems.
- 11.
This first proposition, which, as knowledge of knowledge, is specified as the congruence between the enunciated (the actualized) and the enunciation (the actualizing), is an end to achieve, a task to fulfill, and not a first proposition in the Wolffian sense of the word, that is, a proposition whose content would allow us to deduce other propositions in compliance with a hypothetico-deductive model.
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Thomas-Fogiel, I. (2019). Reflection, Metaphilosophy, and Logic of Action in the Science of Knowledge. 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_6
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