Abstract
This chapter exhibits and explains a range of claims, each of which is central to Fichte’s “theory of science” (Wissenschaftslehre) and all of which importantly anticipate existentialism. The claims in question are the following: (1) The nature of selfhood or subjectivity is an issue of fundamental philosophical importance. (2) The self is not a thinking substance or knowing subject; it is a self-conscious project of self-actualization. (3) Qua self-conscious project, the being of the self is an ongoing interrelating of freedom and finitude. (4) Qua project of self-actualization, the self is not a causally conditioned object but a self-transparently self-realizing activity. (5) This activity involves a striving for the self’s actuality. (6) Knowing is an activity founded upon and steered by that striving. (7) Qua striving for the self’s actuality, the self’s activity harbors an orientation toward authenticity. (8) Qua striving for the self’s actuality, this activity aims for a humanly unreachable goal.
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Notes
- 1.
All quotations that reference Fichte 1982 are my own translations; I provide the references for the benefit of Anglophone readers who wish to examine the indicated claims in context.
- 2.
In later writings, Fichte supplements this idea of a merely sensory “check” or “affront” (Anstoß) with which the I finds itself confronted, with the more complex notion of a conceptually structured “summons” (Aufforderung) or “demand” (Anforderung), by which the I finds itself addressed. This is a noteworthy innovation, but it introduces complications that need not detain us here (see Hoeltzel 2020a).
- 3.
Incidentally, it appears that Fichte himself first coined the term “Facticität,” around 1800 or 1801, and that Heidegger picked up the term from Emil Lask’s 1902 dissertation, Fichte’s Idealism and History (Kisiel 2000, p. 243). However, facticity is stressed even in the first (1794–1795) presentation of Fichte’s system, long before the coinage of the term.
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Hoeltzel, S. (2020). Fichte and Existentialism: Freedom and Finitude, Self-Positing and Striving. In: Stewart, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Existentialism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44571-3_4
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