The Current of Living in the Existential-I-Subject According to the Philosophy of J. G. Fichte

Abstract

In this Symposium on the Phenomenology of Life, in which “man’s self-interpretation-in-existence” is emphasized in a unique way, we have judged it opportune to expound on revolutionary- teaching that represented a milestone in the history of human thought. I refer to the teaching given by the German philosopher J. G. Fichte, first in Jena (from 1794 to 1799) and later in Berlin (from 1800 to 1814). This great philosopher’s thought, by breaking with the consideration of man as an “object” in the mode of any determinist, mechanist, materialist, or fatalist philosophy, elevates the human being to the category of subject. It simultaneously emancipates him from any objectivism of the thing-in- itself, placing him above any causal, casual, and chance constellation of factic content. That mere “vehicle of all concepts in general” — as Kant conceived of the Cartesian I think — becomes the “center from whence all must derive and from whence we elevate ourselves”¹ in Fichte’s philosophy. His philosophy is something more than a gnoseological or ethical theory. It is the life of a self-consciousness that attempts in a speculative compromise to connect the reality of the lived world to the “independent activity” of the I-subject.

In the present study we have utilized two editions of the Works of Fichte: (a) the edition prepared by his son in Berlin, 1845–1846, and in Bonn, 1834. At the same time we have taken advantage of Walter de Gruyter’s photomechanical reimpression (Berlin, 1971), which has as its title Fichte’s Sammtliche Werke, abbreviated S. W., followed by the volume (in Roman numerals) and the page number. We have also used the edition prepared by R. Lauth and Collaborators: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstat: 1964 and cont.), abbreviated by Akad-Ausg, followed by the series volume (in Roman numerals), and corresponding chapter, in Arabic numbers.