Fichte once described the first principle of his philosophical system as a globe or attractor point which rests on nothing else but its own power, and which – as by the inception of a gravitational field – thereby simultaneously sets the conditions for the groundedness of all the components of the edifice of knowledge which follow. This description suggests his philosophical enterprise is articulated in accordance to the linear structure of foundationalism. At the same time, however, Fichte’s enterprise is unequivocally transparent regarding its many circularities, the most interesting of which is described by the relation between the I under philosophical observation and the I of the transcendental philosopher who undertakes the observation. Indeed, such a relation – which Fichte called not only a circle but a circuit – is what explains his assertion that the task of the transcendental philosopher is to be a pragmatic historiographer rather than a legislator of the mind. The philosopher’s task is historical insofar as the I who undertakes the examination is at every move trying to repeat its genesis in a conscious manner. It is circular, in turn, insofar as the activity of the examined I is supposed to culminate in precisely the point where the examining I stands, but not forgetting that it has to account for the possibility of the latter’s very examination. To map the horizon and grounding capacity of such circumvolutions of the mind is what this paper aims to do.

The article is about the meaning of the word ‘transcendental’ in Kant and Fichte. Its aim is not merely exegetical. It is a common hermeneutical insight (now revitalised by research on conceptual engineering and conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy) that analysing the use and definitions of concepts in history, and their shifts in the development of the history of philosophy, is a crucial tool we have to understand those concepts and to assess their viability for philosophy today. In this paper, I focus on Kant’s use and definitions of the word ‘transcendental’ and suggest that they are symptomatic of a fundamental question that is not completely answered in Kant’s philosophy. If transcendental philosophy deals not with objects but rather the conditions of possibility of objective knowledge, then important questions emerge: What are these possibility conditions? Do they exist? Are they special objects? What is their nature? I show that the shift in Fichte’s use and understanding of the concept of ‘transcendental’ leads to a possible solution of the problem Kant was struggling with.

This paper addresses Fichte’s puzzle of self-consciousness. I propose a new reading of “Fichte’s original insight”, inspired by Pareyson’s general reading, which I call here the “Fichtean metaphysical turn in transcendental philosophy”. Against the mainstream view in Fichte’s scholarship, I argue that Fichte’s and Kant’s views do not concur regarding the primary reference of the “I”, namely spontaneous agency in thinking, which Fichte calls “Tathandlung”. Yet, their views do in fact concur when Fichte claims that this spontaneous agency in thinking is the “essence” or the underlying nature of the self, which Kant denies. Regarding this I take the side of Fichte. But how is Fichte’s original insight supposed to solve the puzzle of self-consciousness? At that transcendental level, the puzzle does not arise because there is no need for self-identification in the first place. Transcendental self-knowledge results from the sui generis intellectual Selbstanschauung that everyone has of oneself as sheer spontaneous agency in thinking. But at the empirical level, the puzzle does not arise either and for the same reason. Reference to the embodied self dispenses with any self-identification because it is based on the fundamental metaphysical relation everybody has to their own body, namely identity.

In his recent All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2005), Paul Franks defends Maimonian skepticism and explicitly criticizes Fichte’s response to the same. I argue that Franks’ interpretation of Fichte’s response to skepticism is fundamentally flawed in that it ignores or misinterprets the critically important practical/moral dimension of Fichte’s response. I also challenge Franks’ interpretation of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre as a »derivation holistic monism« and argue for a more modest interpretation of the same and one more in keeping with Fichte’s appreciation of the force of philosophical skepticism and the limits of transcendental philosophizing.

In a letter to Jacobi dated August 30, 1795, Fichte writes: »What is the purpose of the speculative standpoint, and indeed of philosophy as a whole, if it does not serve life?« But the question is also: in what sense is the meaning of life founded on the meaning of freedom? What I would like to suggest here is that the Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) Nova methodo (1796–99), probably the pinnacle of Fichte’s thought during the Jena period, should be read together with the Bestimmung, which brought this period (1800) to a close. The two works tackle head-on the question of the meaning of freedom, which directly links up with the question of the meaning of human existence, with both questions being entirely immanent to the reflection of finite consciousness on its synthetic activity.

In a transcendental argument, a judgement ≫S is P≪ is unpacked into the two reflective claims: ≫I say that S is P≪, and ≫What I say is indeed the case≪; and the truth of the second is made to rest on the authority of the ≫I say≪ of the first. The argument has all the features of a testimony, where the reliability of the testimony (as in juridical cases) depends on the extent to which, in being rendered, it conforms to stipulated canons of objectivity. As presented in 1804, Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre can be interpreted as a protracted argument of this kind, inasmuch as, since its avowed subject-matter, the One, is ex hypothesi ineffable, its validity as a narrative about it depends solely on its internal logic as narrative. Such a narrative can only be one which, in constructing any schema about its transcendent subject-matter, at the same time de-constructs it: in the course of this process it methodically and exhaustively uncovers the genesis of otherwise merely accepted facts of experience, manifesting them for what they truly are (a disappearing appearing), and also allowing the necessarily unspoken evidence of the One to shine through (at least, for those willing to freely give themselves over to the discipline of Fichte’s Science). The Wissenschaftslehre 1804 is a type of apophantic theology. It is a Spinozism, but one developed from the standpoint of a finite subject who knows that he exists in a universe where, in truth, there is no explainable room for finitude.

One recently discovered aspect of Reinhold’s early Elementarphilosophie is that it constitutes the last historical step of a teleological activity of reason that ends the history of philosophy. The historical emergence of Reinhold’s system first enables the recognition of the ever-existing laws of the human spirit, and hence, the definitive grounding of philosophy on an unquestionable Grundsatz. According to Reinhold, this also meant that all pre-critical or non-enlightened, partisan assertions, including those of skepticism, lose their raison-d’être. One failure of Reinhold’s approach is its inability to provide a justification of reason’s historical ability to make teleological progress. A Schulzean skeptic might argue that this reveals the inexhaustive character of Reinhold’s Grundsatz, its inability to determine a constitutive aspect of his concept of historical reason. A critical re-articulation of the early Elementarphilosophie after Schulze’s objections required that this issue be reworked. This was one of the tasks that August L. Hülsen, one of Reinhold’s former students who embraced Fichte’s system in 1795 addressed in Preisschrift, his virtually neglected book of 1796. This paper outlines Reinhold’s approach, and shows how Hülsen’s normative reading of the Wissenschaftslehre allowed Fichte’s concept of self-positing activity to become a historical mechanism of teleological striving capable of providing an enlightened or skeptically ›immune‹ alternative to Reinhold’s concept.

An examination of the intellectual context in which Fichte develops his ethical program in the Jena period and its immediate aftermath (1794–1800) reveals the determining presence of Leibniz, and the complex heritage of Leibnizian perfectionist thought from which Kantian, and post-Kantian, ethics seek to extricate themselves. While Kant blocks any reversion to the older, Leibnizian perfectionism, his criticisms leave open a space for a new kind of perfectionist ethic, one whose object is the promotion not of any determinate notion of eudaimonia or thriving, but of the possibility of free agency itself. The aim of post-Kantian perfectionism is to sustain the conditions of free, spontaneous action. Fichte’s ethical system is one example of post-Kantian perfectionism.

First in the Phenomenology and then in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel rejects Fichte’s notion of conscience on the grounds that it leads to despair (since the agent can never be sufficiently well-informed to know that he is doing the “right” thing). He also criticizes Fichtean conscience as purely “formal” and “abstract” and compatible with any content, which it can obtain only arbitrarily from the manifold of one’s natural drives and inclinations. For Hegel, there is an unresolvable tension between the claimed “universality” of a conscientious deed and the natural particularity of every moral agent, which ultimately leads to ethical egoism and hypocrisy. The aim of this paper is to show, first, that Hegel misrepresents key aspects of Fichte’s position and, second, that Fichte possesses the resources to respond successfully to most of Hegel’s criticisms. In order to grasp this one must closely examine Fichte’s subtle and often misunderstand account of moral deliberation and conscientious decision-making and the relation of the same to his larger account of I-hood.

This article defends the paradoxical thesis that neo-Kantianism is better described as neo-Fichteanism rather than neo-Kantianism. It maintains that neo-Kantianism is closer to Fichte than Kant in four fundamental respects: in its nationalism, socialism, activism, and in its dynamic and quantitative conception of the dualism between understanding and sensibility. By contrast, Kant’s philosophy was cosmopolitan, liberal, non-activist quietist and held a static and qualitative view of the dualism between understanding and sensibility. I attempt to explain why it took the neo-Kantians so long to recognize these profound affinities with Fichte: they were influenced by Fries conception of Fichte as a speculative metaphysician. I argue that the hold of Friesian interpretation of Fichte was first broken by Emil Lask in his Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte.

Independently of the discussions on the development of Fichte’s philosophy, there is something that does not seem to change throughout the more than a dozen presentations of his doctrine, namely, his constant concern with the meaning of philosophy. This concern is such a structuring one for Fichte that he even decides to replace the very name of “philosophy” by another one, less heavy in meaning and better suited to elucidate the nature of this particular activity that constitutes his own project. He calls it the Wissenschaftslehre. In this term created by Fichte three verbs can be found: wissen (to know), schaffen (to create) and lehren (to teach) – we would like to propose that Fichte’s conception of philosophy can be brought out as the orchestrated action of those three activities: knowing, creating and teaching. The point here being not to say that Fichte had the idea in mind of composing these three verbs (wissen, schaffen, lehren) when he created the term Wissenschaftslehre, but only that those terms offer useful landmarks for the exploration of Fichte’s philosophical landscape.Unabhängig von den Diskussionen über die Entwicklung der Philosophie Fichtes gibt es etwas, das sich in den zahlreichen Darstellungen seiner Lehre nicht zu ändern scheint, nämlich seine ständige Auseinandersetzung mit der Bedeutung der Philosophie selbst. Diese Sorge ist für Fichte so entscheidend, dass er sogar beschließt, den Namen Philosophie durch einen anderen zu ersetzen, weniger schwer in der Bedeutung und nach ihm besser geeignet, das Wesen dieser besonderen Tätigkeit, die sein eigenes Projekt zum Ausdruck bringt, aufzuklären. Er nennt es die „Wissenschaftslehre“. In diesem von Fichte geschaffenen Begriff lassen sich drei Verben auffinden: Wissen, Schaffen und Lehren. Im vorliegenden Aufsatz möchte ich vorschlagen, dass Fichtes Auffassung von Philosophie als die orchestrierte Handlung dieser drei Tätigkeiten angesehen werden kann: Wissen, Schaffen und Lehren. Ich will damit nicht behaupten, dass Fichte die explizierte Absicht hatte, diese drei Verben zu komponieren als er den Begriff „Wissenschaftslehre“ schuf, sondern nur, dass diese Begriffe nützliche Anhaltspunkte für die Erforschung von Fichtes philosophischer Landschaft anbieten.