Abstract
This chapter is essentially about Hegel.1 If I bring Fichte conspicuously into the picture, this is for the sake of contrast. There is another reason as well. Common wisdom has it that Fichte was the one who remained the closest to the master in the reception of the Critique of Reason.2 No doubt, Kant’s legacy is broad enough, and in places even ambiguous, that a case can be made to that effect, especially if one concentrates on the legacy’s moral side. But I want to say that, in what counted most, it is Hegel who was Kant’s true inheritor. I shall presently say what I consider as “counting most.” I must first make clear that the Fichte I have in mind is post-Jena — notably the Fichte of 1804 onward, the time when Fichte dropped from his Science the idiom of the “I”; when Hegel, for his part, finally made it to the philosophical stage, and a conversation between the two, albeit always at a distance and perhaps not even ever deliberately intended, was in fact taking shape. The Fichte whom Hegel had in mind in his explicit criticisms was always the author of the early versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. As for Fichte, his primary confrontation was with Schelling3 — not Hegel, to whom he occasionally only alluded. A conversation was nonetheless taking shape between the two, for, whoever their immediate philosophical interlocutor (and Schelling was as much on Hegel’s mind as on Fichte’s), it was with respect to Spinoza’s metaphysics that both, in their contrasting ways, were taking position, and, in so doing, were also staking their respective claims to the Kantian legacy.
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Notes
...which I have documented elsewhere. Cf. George di Giovanni, “The Unfinished Philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,” introduction to The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill” by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), sect. 2; and George di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion in Kant and His Immediate Successors: The Vocation of Humankind, 1774–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 1.
...as I have documented elsewhere. Maimon’s critique is the philosophically more interesting one. Cf. di Giovanni, Freedom and Religion, 97–104; and George di Giovanni, “The Facts of Consciousness,” introduction to Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, rev. ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 20–27, 32–36.
Thus Karl Rosenkranz, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben: Supplement zu Hegels Werke (Berlin: Dunder und Humblot, 1844), 132–44.
Wilfrid Seilars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 298–99.
I am borrowing Gilbert Ryle’s analogy of philosophy as a cartography of mental space. See Gilbert Ryle, “Abstractions,” Dialogue 1, no. 1 (June 1962): 5–16.
In Heinrich Heine’s words, “In the year 1804, the God of Schelling appeared at last in His completed form in a work entitled ‘Philosophy and Religion.’“ And Heine added, “Here philosophy ceases with Schelling, and poetry — I may say folly -commences” (Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany: A Fragment, trans. John Snodgrass [Boston: Beacon Press, 1959], 151, 152).
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di Giovanni, G. (2014). Kant’s Critical Legacy: Fichte’s Constructionism and Hegel’s Discursive Logic. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_33
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