Abstract
This chapter argues for a unifying and clarifying analysis of Fichte’s diverse and unusual characterizations of the nature of reason and rational normativity. Fichte equates or closely associates reason with “I-hood,” “positing” (especially self-positing), “acting” (as opposed to being), “self-reverting activity,” and “subject-objectivity.” He also claims that reason, qua reason, harbors “an absolute tendency toward the absolute”—and even that, in the final analysis, “only reason is.” I argue that we can readily grasp the meaning, interconnection, and putative justification of such claims, if we suppose that, for Fichte, reason is the self-initiated instatement of self-wrought ordering forms, the first and foremost of which is the idea of precisely this type of activity in a pure and uncompromised (independent, “self-sufficient”) form.
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Notes
- 1.
This reading applies only to the work of Fichte’s Jena period. I take it that beginning around 1801, and certainly by 1804, Fichte’s earlier account of I-hood, finite rational being, and so on, is radically qualified (and in certain respects revoked) by his shift to a position no longer based upon the free self-positing of the I, but now grounded, instead, in the necessary self-revelation of the absolute.
- 2.
Assuredly, there will be readers well-versed Kant in who take exception to this account of his treatment of causation. But the point here is not to establish the precise content of Kant’s actual views. It is simply to identify some characteristic ideas and approaches that one might glean from Kant’s writings and that are also at work (or so I argue), even more radically and pervasively, in Fichte’s philosophy. The same qualifications apply to all other characterizations of Kant in this chapter.
- 3.
For further discussion of the differences between (1) the understanding and its categories and (2) reason and its ends, see Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 2.
- 4.
Because these themes resonate in Fichte’s thinking, it is also worth briefly noting Kant’s related equation of “the greatest systematic unity” with “purposive unity”; his claim that the idea of such unity is “inseparably bound up with the essence of our reason” and therefore “is legislative for us”; and his affiliation of this ideal of systematic and purposive unity with the idea of an “intellectus archetypus” (A694–95/B722–23).
- 5.
This account of the pure-rational pedigree of the idea of God is patterned after what Kant says in the Appendix to theTranscendental Dialectic, especially its closing section: “On the final aim of the natural dialectic of human reason” (A669/B697). The same topic is approached from different angles prior to the Appendix, especially in “The transcendental ideal (Prototypon transcendentale)” (A571/B579). I sidestep that section here, however, because its particulars have no pronounced echoes in Fichte’s philosophy—whereas the reverse is true with regard to the more general picture, sketched by Kant in the Appendix (and later solidified, from an ethical angle, in CPrR) of reason as a self-regulating power of abstract ordering.
- 6.
See Paul Guyer, “The Possibility of the Categorical Imperative,” in Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172–206.
- 7.
One important component of this deployment is the practical postulation of the existence of God, of the freedom of the will, and of the immortality of the soul. I briefly touch upon this topic in the chapter’s final section, which examines Fichte’s interestingly similar account of “faith” or “belief” (Glaube).
- 8.
To be sure, the overview upon which this claim is based has been highly schematic and selective. For a more detailed analysis, see Steven Hoeltzel, “Fichte and Kant on Reason’s Final Ends and Highest Ideas,” Revista de Estud(i)os sobre Fichte 16 (2018): https://journals.openedition.org/ref/827.
- 9.
Thedistinction is sometimes put forward using different terms: “doing” (Tun), “activity” (Tätigkeit), “subsisting” (Bestehens), etc. And Fichte often deviates (as will I) from the indicated technical sense of “being,” speaking more casually of the (still purely active) “being of the I.” All things considered, however, clearly there is a single, stable distinction at work here, despite the various shifts in terminology.
- 10.
See Steven Hoeltzel, “Fichte and Existentialism: Freedom and Finitude, Self-Positing and Striving,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
- 11.
In case this is not already clear: The type of activity with which Fichte is principally concerned does not occur as any datable episode within the individual’s empirically accessible inner life. Instead, this activity—the I—is the constantly operative, pre-personal, transcendental enabler of (among other things) any reference to discrete, empirically qualified objects, including the individual’s empirically apprehended inner states. See Günter Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 3.
- 12.
All quotations in this chapter that reference WL are my own translations; I provide the references for the benefit of Anglophone readers who wish to examine the indicated claims in context.
- 13.
“In consciousness, the representation is distinguished by the subject from the subject and the object and related to both.” Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Beyträge zur Berichtigung bisheriger Mißverständnisse der Philosophie (Jena: Mauke, 1790), 1:167; my translation.
- 14.
This Reinholdian notion of “consciousness” (Bewußtsein) is therefore consonant with the Kantian conception of “experience” (Erfahrung), as truth-apt representation of putatively mind-independent states of affairs.
- 15.
Fichte was brought to see this by G. E. Schulze’s criticisms of Reinhold. For a classic study of the Reinhold–Schulze–Fichte constellation, see Daniel Breazeale, “The Aenesidemus Review and the Transformation of German Idealism,” in Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 23–41.
- 16.
Here I am adverting to Fichte’s doctrine of the Anstoß, which is proffered in order to explain, in an anti-dogmatic fashion, why it is that in certain cases “we do not consider ourselves to be free with respect to the content of our cognitions.” Fichte refers to such “representations accompanied by the feeling of necessity” as “experience” (Erfahrung), and he places this conception of experience in close proximity to Kant’s (see note 14, above), stating that “we refer representations of this … type to a truth that is supposed to be firmly established independently of us and is supposed to serve as the model for these representations” (IWL 7–8 [GA I/4:186]). I cannot discuss the Anstoß doctrine in detail here; see Steven Hoeltzel, “Anstoß and Aufforderung (‘Check’ and ‘Summons’),” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Fichte, ed. Marina Bykova (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). For a wider-ranging discussion, see Daniel Breazeale, “Anstoβ, Abstract Realism, and the Finitude of the I,” in Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre, 156–96.
- 17.
See above, Notes 14 and 16.
- 18.
Fichte indicates later in the Foundation (and makes more explicit in later writings) that there must be “an original limitation” that “conditions my positing of myself” (IWL 74 [GA I/4:242]), insofar as the determinate singling-out of the I requires the presence of something in contrast with which self-initiated non-sensory activity can be singled-out as such. Consciousness must therefore contain something “not immediately posited through the I’s own positing of itself” (WL 130 [GA I/2:293])—“a difference originally in the I as such … something heterogeneous, alien, and to be distinguished from itself” (WL 240 [GA I/2:405]), ergo, adventitious empirical data.
- 19.
“The senses merely provide us with something subjective,” but “this determination of yourself, you straightaway transfer to something outside you” (WL 275 [GA I/2:440]).
- 20.
My account of positing is indebted to (but in some ways diverges from) Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Position: Anti-Subjectivism, Self-Awareness, and Self-Location in the Space of Reasons,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fichte ed. David James and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 376–83.
- 21.
As indicated above (see Note 15), Fichte’s principles were worked out partly in response to Schulze’s critique of Reinhold’s claim that the Principle of Consciousness could be the first principle for all philosophy. One of Schulze’s criticisms was that Reinhold’s principle would be subordinate to the laws of logic. Fichte’s strategy in the first part of theFoundation seems designed to meet this criticism—not, however, in order to rescue Reinhold’s theory specifically, but in order to ground transcendental idealism more radically. Fichte’s main contention here seems to be (underscore “seems”: the section is obscure, and Fichte never reiterated its argument) that the incontrovertibility of logic’s laws derives from the elementary acts of the I, which abstractly order all consciousness in such a way that consciousness’s variable concrete contents invariably conform to certain formal principles.
- 22.
Granted, Fichte’s later pivot to a proto-phenomenological method, guided by “intellectual intuition,” yields a better-integrated presentation of his account of I-hood. But I suspect that this methodological shift also raises serious questions about the objective justifiability of the ensuing account. This is why I prefer to focus on the foundational texts of 1794/1795, whose overall argument does not hinge upon claims to direct acquaintance with the law-governed self-complexification of a self-constituting subject-objectivity—claims which, in their specifically Fichtean form, I believe to be phenomenologically unsustainable.
- 23.
At a later step in his larger argument, Fichte rules out the conjecture that this act might be the effect of some cause that is extrinsic to it and that goes undetected by it. His reasoning: Given the Wissenschaftslehre’s second basic principle, which entails that “opposition in general is absolutely posited by the I” (WL 103 [GA I/2:266]), the concept of “a not-I that is not opposed to any I” is philosophically inadmissible (EPW 74 [GA I/2:62]). Consequently, so is the aforementioned conjecture.
- 24.
This point receives particular stress in the 1797/1798 Attempt at a New Presentation, but the 1794/1795 Foundation also clearly reflects this commitment.
- 25.
I believe that this commitment of Fichte’s—especially in conjunction with certain transcendental corollaries (e.g., “because there is no passivity in the I, as indeed there cannot be, … the entire system of objects for the I must be produced by the I itself”: FNR 27 [GA I/3:337]) and methodological qualifiers (e.g., “the question here is not how the issue might be in itself from the transcendental point of view, but only how it must appear to the subject”: FNR 32 [GA I/3:337], emphasis added)—poses serious problems for any interpretation that would locate the source of the aforementioned rational requirement in a “summons [Aufforderung]” that must originate in a rational being numerically distinct from the I. Of course, I do not deny that the concept of the summons plays a crucial role within Fichte’s transcendental derivation of “right [Recht].” But I believe that the texts speak strongly against interpretations according to which the source of rational normativity, for Fichte, is an ontologically plural intersubjectivity, as opposed to a transcendentally pre-personal rationality. For a defense of this claim, see Hoeltzel, “Anstoß and Aufforderung.”
- 26.
The discussion thus far leaves open the possibility that the adventitious empirical contents of consciousness comprise some non-sensory content that has the significance of a requirement—perhaps, for example, a summons from another rational being, who calls upon the I to … do what, exactly? Presumably not tooriginally posit a not-I, which is the transcendental accomplishment of the I that we are now seeking to explain. See also Note 25, above.
- 27.
On rational self-sufficiency as the ultimate goal of ethical endeavor for Fichte, see especially Michelle Kosch, Fichte’s Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Below I suggest that, on Fichte’s account, reason’s highest self-legislated end is an ultimately hyper-ethical (but not contra-ethical) ideal.
- 28.
Here I am referring specifically to the account of rational normativity comprised by the transcendental foundations of the Wissenschaftslehre, as opposed to the latter’s further extensions and applications in Foundations of NaturalRight and The Systemof Ethics (both of which are, as their subtitles state, worked out “according to the principles of the Wissenschaftslehre”).
- 29.
This sketch of constructivism is indebted to (but adapts) Carla Bagnoli, “Introduction,” in Constructivism in Ethics, ed. Carla Bagnoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–2. There is of course an extensive literature discussing possible constructivist readings of Kant; to begin with, see Christine Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); cf. Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Concerning Fichte, see Kosch, Fichte’s Ethics; and cf. Tom Rockmore, German Idealism as Constructivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), which discusses another, principally epistemological kind of constructivism.
- 30.
To be sure, their inseparability is a central theme for Fichte. For the classic treatment, see Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy.
- 31.
For a defense of this interpretation, including replies to objections, see Steven Hoeltzel, “The Unity of Reason in Kant and Fichte,” in Kant, Fichte, and the Legacy of Transcendental Idealism, ed. Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015), 129–52.
- 32.
This interpretation of that passage is further supported, and defended against objections, in Hoeltzel, “Fichte and Kant on Reason’s Final Ends.”
- 33.
F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1988), 16.
- 34.
I believe that this plank of Fichte’s later Jena position is eventually discarded, and this entire outlook largely superseded, by the shift to a less subject-centered, more speculative frame of reference after 1800 (certainly by 1804).
- 35.
Compare Kant on the mode of assent that “can be calledbelief [Glaube] and, indeed, a pure rational belief since pure reason alone … is the source from which it springs” (CPrR 5:126).
- 36.
See, most recently, 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.
- 37.
I wish to dedicate this chapter to my mentor and friend Günter Zöller, for whom I will always be grateful, and from whom I am still learning.
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Hoeltzel, S. (2019). Fichte’s Account of Reason and Rational Normativity. 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_9
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