https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6480-6423
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ABSTRACT
While Kant’s claim that the moral law discloses our freedom to us has been extensively discussed in recent decades, the reactions to this claim among Kant’s immediate successors have gone largely overlooked by scholars. Reinhold, Creuzer, and Maimon were among three prominent thinkers of the era unwilling to follow Kant in making the moral law the condition for knowing our freedom. Maimon went so far as to reject Kant’s method of appealing to our everyday awareness of duty on the grounds that common human understanding is susceptible to error and illusion. In this paper I shall examine how these skeptical reactions to Kant’s position shaped the background for Fichte’s method of moral justification, leading up to his own deduction of the moral law in the System of Ethics (1798). By way of conclusion, I shall propose a new interpretation of how consciousness of the moral law serves as an entry-point to Fichte’s form of idealism.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
For constructive feedback and discussion, I would like to thank Anthony Bruno, the three reviewers of BJHP, as well as Allen Wood and the participants in our co-taught Fichte seminar at Stanford University (June 2018). I am also grateful to have written this paper while living on the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River.
ORCID
Owen Ware http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6480-6423
Notes
1 See Wood (Fichte’s Ethical Thought) and Ware (‘Fichte’s Deduction of the Moral Law’) for more detailed treatments of this deduction. I have also benefitted from Breazeale’s (Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre) and Bruno’s (‘Genealogy and Jurisprudence’) reflections on Fichte’s methodology during the Jena period.
2 See the Abbreviations list at the end of the paper. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
3 Allison coined this phrase in his classic ‘Morality and Freedom’ essay.
4 As Kant puts this thesis elsewhere:
Were this law not given to us from within, no amount of subtle reasoning on our part would produce it or win our power of choice over to it. Yet this law is the only law that makes us conscious of the independence of our power of choice from determination by all other incentives (of our freedom) and thereby also of the accountability of all our actions.
5 In the second edition of his Letters on Kantian Philosophy from 1792, Reinhold links the disclosure of freedom directly to self-consciousness:
But reason has a very real ground for thinking of freedom as an absolute cause, namely self-consciousness, through which the action of this capacity [dieses Vermögens] announces itself as a fact [Thatsache], and common and healthy understanding is entitled to infer its actuality from its possibility.
6 We find a similar claim in Fichte’s 1793 review of Creuzer’s free-will book: ‘Self-activity gives this faculty its determinate form, which is determinable in only one way and which appears as the moral law’ (CR 8:413).
7 The review Fichte wrote during the autumn of 1793 on Frederich Heinrich Gebhard’s book On Ethical Goodness as Disinterested Benevolence appears to be an anomaly within this development. At a crucial point in his discussion, Fichte raises the question of how reason can be practical, remarking that this must be proven and not assumed. ‘Such a proof’, he then states, ‘must proceed somewhat as follows’:
The human being is given to consciousness as a unity (as an I). This fact can be explained only by presupposing something in human beings that is simply unconditioned; we must therefore assume that there is within human beings something simply unconditioned. What is simply unconditioned, however, is practical reason.
8 Thanks to a BJHP reviewer for pressing me to draw this distinction more sharply.
9 In §1 Fichte also states, quite clearly, that affirming the feeling of moral compulsion in an attitude of Glaube is ‘sufficient for engendering both a dutiful disposition and dutiful conduct’ (SL 4:14).
10 This is why, as Allen Wood (Fichte’s Ethical Thought) has observed, the philosopher in Fichte’s system is always below or subordinate to the common person, even though transcendental reflection requires the philosopher to go beyond or above the mere facts that present themselves to ordinary life.
11 For an attempt to unpack these intricacies in Kant’s doctrine of the fact of reason, see Ware, ‘Rethinking Kant’s Fact of Reason’.
12 I am drawing this unilinear/multi-lateral distinction from Breazeale’s (Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre) excellent discussion of how Fichte’s methodology underwent a change from the 1794 incarnation of the Wissenschaftslehre to the ‘new method’ lectures he delivered in the late 1790s.
13 In a similar vein, Neuhouser writes:
Fichte’s rejection of Kant’s appeal to the notion of a “fact of reason” is most plausibly understood as based upon the belief that, in taking this position, Kant fails to carry out a thoroughgoing, consistent application of his own Critical principles to the field of moral philosophy.
Kant’s moral philosophy places the moral law as a “fact of reason” first and examines what the moral law must be, if it exists. In contrast, Fichte puts the existence of self-consciousness ahead of a system of ethics and demonstrates that an acceptance of a principle of morality is a prerequisite for such self-consciousness.
[In contrast to Kant] Fichte precisely wants to deduce this moral law […] Therefore, he does not start from the moral law as a “fact of reason,” but rather seeks to explain it through its transcendental conditions of possibility.
14 As Guyer explains:
The key to understanding the nature of self-consciousness in general thus becomes the understanding of human action, and the key to understanding this is understanding freedom. The key to understanding freedom, in turn, is to understand that activity must have its own law distinct from the laws that govern that which is represented merely as object, and the key to Fichte’s transcendental derivation of the moral law is then the insight that the moral law is the only candidate for such a law of the distinctive activity of the self.
15 See Ware, ‘Fichte’s Deduction of the Moral Law’ for a fuller discussion.
16 We find an equally clear statement to this effect in Fichte’s essay, ‘On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World’, published in 1798:
Therefore, conviction in our moral vocation already flows from a moral voice and is belief or faith [Glaube]; and in this respect one speaks quite correctly in saying that belief or faith is the element of all certainty [das Element aller Gewissheit ist Glaube]. – And so it must be, since morality, insofar as it is morality, can be constituted absolutely only through itself and in no way through some logically coercive thought.
That I should and what I should is the first and most immediate. This permits no further explanation, justification, or authorization; it is known for itself, and it is true for itself. It is grounded and determined by no other truth; instead, all other truth is rather grounded in it. – Whoever says, “I must first know whether I can [do something] before I judge whether I should,” either abrogates the primacy of the moral law [den Primat des Sittengesetzes], and thereby the moral law itself, when he judges this way practically, or he completely misrecognizes the original course of reason when he judges this way speculatively.
17 As a BJHP reviewer has helped me to see, the difference between Maimon and Fichte is not just a matter of where they locate the basis of their deduction, with Maimon privileging a theoretical ground and Fichte privileging a practical ground. The difference is that Maimon’s deduction of the moral law goes beyond the standpoint of common reason altogether: it seeks a purely theoretical ‘fact’. Fichte’s deduction, by contrast, seeks to give a philosophical investigation (and ultimately, a justification) of our common standpoint. While Fichte arrives at conclusions only accessible to the transcendental philosopher – concerning, above all, the concept of the moral law – his entire approach remains ‘inside’, as it were, the framework of common reason.
18 Sebastian Gardner defends a similar claim in an illuminating essay devoted to comparing Fichte and Schelling. As he explains, Fichte ‘identifies the supremacy of practical reason with the categoricality of moral demands – an alignment which in Schelling’s eyes disqualifies it, by subordinating the unconditioned to the inherent conditionedness of morality’ (‘Fichte and Schelling’, 334).
19 At the level of transcendental reflection – to which Fichte guides the reader in §3 of the System of Ethics – the moral law is the ‘the conceptual consciousness that the I has of its freedom’, as a BJHP reviewer puts it. On my view, this is another instance in which Fichte is radicalizing Kant’s disclosure thesis, since he views freedom and morality as two aspects of the I as such, rather than as two co-entailing concepts (pace Kant’s reciprocity thesis). See Wood (Fichte’s Ethical Thought, 123) and Ware (‘Fichte’s Deduction of the Moral Law’) for further discussion.
20 For Fichte, the ordinary person need only follow the dictates of ‘conscience’ (das Gewissen), which he characterizes in terms of our higher faculty of feeling. See Ware, ‘Fichte on Conscience’ for further discussion.
21 Cited in Henrich, The Unity of Reason, 69.