Fichte's Fictions Revisited

Abstract

Fichte's most influential presentation of his Wissenschaftslehre, which coincides with his tenure at Jena, has, ironically, been subjected to incredulity, misunderstanding, and outright hostility. In a recent essay, noted scholar Daniel Breazeale has undertaken to challenge this history of neglect and misunderstanding by pointing to the significance of striking passages from Fichte's writings in which he asserts that his philosophical system is fictional. At the same time, Breazeale also notes some of the tensions between this fictionalist reading of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre and Fichte's equally forceful insistence on the reality of his system. In this essay, I argue that these two sides of Fichte's conception of his philosophy can, in fact, be reconciled by looking more carefully at distinctions that Fichte himself draws between realities, philosophical fictions, and mere fabrications. What results is a clearer picture of Fichte's conception of transcendental philosophy that builds upon Breazeale's valuable insights.

Notes

1. This phrase comes from the subtitle of the famous Sonnenklare Bericht, composed during the aftermath of the “Atheism Controversy” of 1798–1799 and published in 1801 after Fichte's departure from Jena. References to Fichte's works are given parenthetically in the body of the text, beginning with the critical edition, (1964) J.‐G. Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, R. Lauth, H. Jacobs, H. Gliwitzky, & E. Fuchs (Eds.) (Stuttgart‐Bad Canstatt: Frommann‐Holzboog). When applicable reference is also made to the relevant English translations according to the following abbreviations:

 EPW  (1988) Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans. D. Breazeale, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

 GNR  (2000) Foundations of Natural Right According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, F. Neuhouser (Ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

 IW  (1994) Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, trans. D. Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett).

 SE  (2005) The System of Ethics, D. Breazeale & G. Zöller (Eds.) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press).

 WLnm  (1992) Foundations of TranscendentalPhilosophy: (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99), D. Breazeale (Ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press).

2. I have in mind particularly the following studies: Neuhouser, F. (1990) Fichte's Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Martin, W.M. (1997) Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte's Jena Project (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press); Zöller, G. (1998) Fichte's Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); and Franks, P.W. (2005) All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments, and Scepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). In addition, in his valuable studies of the seminal period of German idealism, Frederick C. Beiser has provided careful, erudite treatments of some central ideas in Fichte's thought. See especially (1987) The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) and (2002) German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). In his superb introduction to the period, Terry Pinkard also presents a clear account of Fichte's place in the post‐Kantian development of philosophy. See (2002) German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 105–131.

3. Breazeale, D. (2002) “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, in: D. Breazeale & T. Rockmore (Eds.), New Essays on Fichte's Later Jena Wissenschaftslehre, pp.175–208 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP). This assertion is found on p. 188.

4. Breazeale, “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, pp. 183–188.

5. See Crowe, B.D. “Revisionism and Religion in Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre”, forthcoming in the British Journal of the History of Philosophy.

6. Somewhat oddly, Breazeale attacks Reinhard Lauth's attempt to understand Fichte's fictionalism in his (1975) Die Enstehung von Schellings Identitätsphilosophie in der Auseinandersetzung mit Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre (Freiburg and München: Karl Alber). See Breazeale, “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, pp. 186–87. Breazeale dismisses Lauth's challenge to the fictionalist reading a bit too quickly, for, in appealing to “intellectual intuition,” Lauth seems to be pointing to the very problem with the fictionalist reading that Breazeale later details. See Breazeale, “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, pp. 191–193.

7. Breazeale, “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, p. 188.

8. Breazeale, “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, p. 193.

9. Breazeale, “Fichte's Philosophical Fictions”, pp. 182–183.

10. Notably, unlike Kant, Fichte wants to include the belief in other minds, in God, and in moral obligation among those “representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity” in which “reality” has its home. This is a significant modification of the Kantian view expressed, most famously, in Book II, Chapter 3 of the “Transcendental Dialectic.”

11. Basing his account on Sonnenklare Bericht, read as Fichte's definitive statement of the nature of his Jena system, Günter Zöller defends what he calls the “model‐theoretical” reading of the Wissenschaftslehre. See Fichte's Transcendental Philosophy, pp. 22–24. Zöller's account here is compatible with Breazeale's “fictionalist” reading. Indeed, Zöller highlights Fichte's talk of the “fictional” character of “the philosophical account of ordinary consciousness” (p. 23). In an earlier essay, Zöller calls attention to the tension between Fichte's fictionalism and what he describes as Fichte's attempt to “capture the I in its true nature.” This is, with some modification, precisely the same difficulty that Breazeale so clearly articulates with regard to his own reading of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre. However, as with his criticism of Lauth, Breazeale seems to overlook Zöller's sensitivity to this issue. See Zöller, (1997) “An eye for an I: Fichte's transcendental experiment”, in: D.E. Klemm & G. Zöller (Eds.), Figuring the Self: Subject, Absolute, and Others in Classical German Philosophy, pp. 73–95 (Albany: SUNY Press).

12. In this respect, Fichte can be understood as an ancestor of later German Neo‐Kantianism, of both the “Marburg” (Cohen, Cassirer, Natorp) and “Heidelberg” (Windelband, Rickert, Lask, Cohn) schools. These later Neo‐Kantians reacted to the widespread tendency amongst nineteenth‐century philosophers to read the Critique of Pure Reason as a sort of quasi‐psychology. Not coincidentally, the Neo‐Kantians (particularly in the “Heidelberg” school) appealed to Fichte and were noted scholars of Fichte's thought. For a good overview of this important chapter in the reception of Fichte's thought, see Marion Heinz, “Die Fichte‐Rezeption in der südwestdeutschen Schule des Neukantianismus”, Fichte‐Studien, 13 (1997), pp. 109–129. For a discussion of psychologistic Kantianism, see Köhnke, K.C. (1991) The Rise of Neo‐Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

13. The published version of this review essay is found at I/2, 21–29.

14. I have here followed Daniel Breazeale's translation of this text in The Philosophical Forum, 32 (4) (2001), pp. 297–310. This passage is found on p. 303 of the translation.

15. Paul Franks has carefully articulated this aspect of Fichte's system and of the idealist program more generally. He calls the principle at work here the “Heterogeneity Requirement,” i.e., that the unconditioned ground of a series of conditions must be heterogeneous with the series, in that it is not subject to the law that applies to each member of the series such that it must have an antecedent condition. See Franks, All or Nothing, pp. 102–103.

16. The flavor of Schmid's worries is captured by a passage quoted by Fichte in the essay: “Recently, a bold attempt has been made to unite the starting point of philosophy with its end point. This has been done by substituting an idealistic absolute for the concept, which does occur in consciousness, of a knowing subject, and then, on every occasion, deriving from the wealth of this fictitious [erdichteten] infinity just what and just so much as one thinks one needs for the derivation of all that occurs within consciousness” (I/3, 251–52; EPW, 321).

17. For a discussion of thought experiments in general, from which the Galileo example is drawn, see Brown, J.R. (2004) “Why Thought Experiments Transcend Empiricism”, in: C.Hitchcock (Ed.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Science, pp. 23–43 (Oxford: Blackwell).

18. This idea reappears in the “Second Introduction” to the 1797 Attempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre (I/4, 260; IW, 92–93).

19. Manfred Frank makes this the centerpiece of his well‐known treatment of the immediate reception of Fichte in the late 1790's by the early Romantics. See especially (1997) Unendliche Annäherung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp).