Abstract
This chapter argues that the challenge of skepticism and the ensuing charge of nihilism are the main problems that Fichte tries to solve in his system of Wissenschaftslehre, and that his solution is offered via his recourse to a distinction between two standpoints: the standpoint of philosophy and the standpoint of ordinary life. In particular, I argue that Fichte regards it a virtue of his system to have resolved the seeming incompatibility of freedom and determinism by invoking that distinction. As a consequence, philosophy for Fichte turns out to be a radical discipline by which a unity of speculation and life—that of thought and action, together with the unity of the two standpoints—is prominently exemplified.
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Notes
- 1.
See Halla Kim, “Fichte on Fact-act (Tathandlung)” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Fichte, ed. Marina Bykova (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
- 2.
The first principle: “The I originally and absolutely posits its own being [Das Ich setze ursprünglich schlechthin sein eigenes Sein]” (WL 98–99 [GA I/2:181], translation modified). The second: “Against the I the non-I posits itself [so gewiss wird dem Ich schlechthin entgegengesetzt ein Nicht-Ich]” (WL 104 [GA I/2:185], translation modified). And the third: “In the I, the I opposes a divisible not-I to the divisible I [Ich setze im Ich dem teilbaren Ich ein teilbares Nicht-Ich entgegen]” (WL 110 [GA I/2:189], translation modified).
- 3.
See Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 240f.
- 4.
Cf. Daniel Breazeale, “J. G. Fichte,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/johann-fichte/ accessed May 1, 2018.
- 5.
See, e.g., Bertrand Russell’s bleak appraisal of Fichte’s idealism in The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1963), 718.
- 6.
Erich Fuchs, ed., J. G. Fichte im Gespräch (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), 2:217.
- 7.
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 118.
- 8.
For Kant, the word “transcendental” is referred to cognition‚ which is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of objects in general. The system of such concepts would be called “transcendental philosophy” (A11–12/B25). By “transcendental” Kant also means the conditions of the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition (B40–41).
- 9.
Fichte sometimes calls this history “pragmatic,” because it describes the activities in which the mind constructs itself and the world. As he puts it, “We are not the legislators of the human mind, but rather its historians. We are not, of course, journalists, but rather writers of pragmatic history” (EPW 131 [GA I/2:147]).
- 10.
For this view, see Daniel Breazeale, “The Standpoint of Life and the Standpoint of Philosophy,” in Thinking Through the Wissensschaftslehre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 360–403.
- 11.
Ibid., 372.
- 12.
Ibid., 361.
- 13.
Ibid.
- 14.
Ibid., 366.
- 15.
For more on this, see Halla Kim, “Abstraction in Fichte,” in Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 143–62.
- 16.
For Fichte, all philosophy is either dogmatism or criticism but never skepticism. See Daniel Breazeale, “Editor’s Introduction,” in IWL, xxiv.
- 17.
Pace Breazeale, Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre, 373.
- 18.
Daniel Breazeale, “The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796–99 (nova methodo),” in The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, ed. David James and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 99–101.
- 19.
Steven Hoeltzel, “Fichte, Transcendental Ontology, and the Ethics of Belief,” in Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods and Critiques, ed. Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 64.
- 20.
For such a deduction, see Christian Klotz, “Fichte’s Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794–95 Wissenschaftslehre,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, ed. David James and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 65–93.
- 21.
For more on this claim, see Steven Hoeltzel, “Nonepistemic Justification and Practical Postulation in Fichte” in Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 296.
- 22.
Steven Hoeltzel, “Fichte on Faith,” Lecture given at University of Nebraska at Omaha, March 31, 2016.
- 23.
Breazeale, Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre, 376.
- 24.
For more on this, see Frederick Beiser’s discussion of this doctrine in German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 232–35.
- 25.
Not all of our subjective opinions count as “belief” as Fichte uses the term here. For him, belief signifies a fundamental attitude of ours that lies at the foundation of our sweeping outlook on the world. In this respect, it resembles the notion of a ‘hinge proposition’ found in later Wittgenstein. Belief is also far from expressing discursive knowledge, for it is not “about knowing but about acting” (VM 67 [GA I/6:253]). Nor is it a privately felt sensation.
- 26.
Yolanda Estes, “J. G. Fichte’s Vocation of Man: An Effort to Communicate,” in Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 79–102.
- 27.
See Hoeltzel, “Transcendental Ontology,” 60; Hoeltzel, “Nonepistemic Justification,” 295.
- 28.
Fichtean belief, however, is not a loose cannon which generates commitment to any entities whatsoever at will. Instead it is clearly subject to critical control by the transcendental explanation of experience. The rule: posit nothing of a kind not proven to exist by the aforementioned explanation—so that, as Fichte puts it, “free spirits alone are real … an independent, sensible world through which they might act upon each other is quite unthinkable” (VM 108 [GA I/6:293]). For this point, I am indebted to Steven Hoeltzel.
- 29.
Breazeale, Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre, 367.
- 30.
Ibid., 366.
- 31.
Hoeltzel, “Nonepistemic Justification,” 300.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
For Fichte’s criticism of dogmatic idealism as well as the indirect idealism of J. S. Beck, see Halla Kim, “Imagism and Fichte’s Criticisms of J.S. Beck’s Phenomenalism,” a paper presented at the Xth International Fichte Congress in Madrid (2017).
- 34.
Daniel Breazeale, “Jumping the Transcendental Shark,” in Fichte’s Vocation of Man: New Interpretive and Critical Essays, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 200–201.
- 35.
Lior Nitzan, Jacob Sigismund Beck’s Standpunctlehre and the Kantian Thing-in-itself (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 208.
- 36.
Cf. ibid., 207.
- 37.
Nitzan also criticizes Fichte for his unstable system, arguing that the thing in itself as a mere noumenon, if it is understood as the product of the I, leads to a dogmatic idealism, which Fichte tried to shun. See ibid., 204.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
For a detailed study of Fichte’s conception of philosophy, see Daniel Breazeale, “The Divided Self and the Tasks of Philosophy,” in Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre, 124–55.
- 40.
Günter Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 117.
- 41.
I thank Steven Hoeltzel and Kienhow Goh for extensive comments on an earlier draft.
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Kim, H. (2019). Fichte on the Standpoint of Philosophy and the Standpoint of Ordinary Life. In: Hoeltzel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Fichte Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26508-3_5
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