Abstract
In this chapter I provide an account of self-positing and the nature of I-hood that challenges the traditional view popularized and defended by Henrich and his followers. I argue that self-positing and I-hood are the foundation for Fichte’s comprehensive theory of rational agency construed to embrace epistemic and practical agency. Accordingly, the chapter includes a sustained critique of Henrich’s (Wildt’s, Tugenhat’s, etc.) contention that Fichte’s theory of subjectivity is grounded in a view of self-positing as strictly and essentially an epistemic self-relation. I argue that self-positing should be read as free, absolute, rational self-determination underlying and underwriting all acts of the I, and that Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre is a theory of free, rational agency. Self-positing, thus, must be interpreted in light of the Fichte’s striving doctrine.
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Notes
- 1.
Hegel adopts the same strategy in thePhenomenology of Spirit. A form of consciousness must provide a stable and coherent way of providing justification for knowledge-claims and reasons for action. Of course, Hegel’s theory differs significantly from the view Fichte defends.
- 2.
The discontinuity Fichte stresses between mechanistic causation and drive suggests that purposive, organic functions do not supervene on mechanistic, causal processes.
- 3.
Even the representation of objects accompanied by a feeling of necessity—when one feels constrained to represent an object precisely in the way in which one is affected by feelings, that is, when one’s representation is a constructive copying of the content of feelings—involves an act of free, self-determination whereby one freely accedes to the limitation of one’s activity.
- 4.
For an excellent discussion that takes the tension in the Grundlage to be more substantive than I have suggested, see Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 52–57.
- 5.
See Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
- 6.
See Dieter Henrich, “Fichte’s Original Insight,” in Contemporary German Philosophy 1 (State College, PA: Penn State University Press, 1982), 15–53; Andreas Wildt, Autonomie und Anerkennung: Hegels Moralitätskritik in Lichte seiner Fichte Rezeption (Stuttgart: Klett-Cota, 1982).
- 7.
Daniel Breazeale, Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes From Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 211. [ii3] is Breazeale’s term for the form of intellectual intuition, which is the philosophical retrieval—‘think of yourself and observe what you are doing when you do so’—of the original intellectual intuition (Breazeale’s ii2) which, Fichte claims, underlies all consciousness.
- 8.
Fichte presents his regress argument in AnAttempt at a New Presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre (IWL 111–12 [GA I/4:274–76]) and in somewhat more compressed form in theWissenschaftslehre nova methodo (NM 113 [GA IV/3:346–47]). The argument is a standard Agrippan argument, which draws the skeptical conclusion that an explanation of the necessary requirements for consciousness is impossible. Fichte imbeds the argument within a modus tollens argument designed to establish a non-intentional, immediate self-consciousness as a necessary hypothesis. Highly compressed, the argument goes as follows: One is conscious of some object only if she is conscious of herself as conscious of that object (Fichte takes this claim to be indisputable). Since consciousness of any object consists of a distinction between the conscious subject and the object of which the subject is conscious, the subject’s consciousness of itself must involve consciousness of herself as conscious of herself in being conscious of the object. This leads to an infinite regress, and thus the conclusion that consciousness is impossible. But, Fichte observes, consciousness is real. The initial premise—that all consciousness has a distinctly intentional structure—conscious subject conscious of an object of consciousness—is false, and one must infer the existence of a non-intentional, immediate form of self-consciousness as a necessary explanatory hypothesis explaining the possibility of consciousness. For a detailed analysis, see C. Jeffery Kinlaw, “Self-Determination and Immediate Self-Consciousness in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy, ed. Tom Rockmore and Daniel Breazeale (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 176–89.
- 9.
Henrich, “Fichte’s Original Insight,” 37.
- 10.
Ibid., 35.
- 11.
Ibid.
- 12.
The regress would be something like this: the I posits itself as self-knowing. Since it is the posited I that is self-knowing, a further act of positing is required to establish the positing I as self-knowing, but then we have a further positing I that has yet to be established as self-knowing. QED.
- 13.
Wildt, Autonomie und Anerkennung, 220.
- 14.
Ibid., 231.
- 15.
I have argued elsewhere that Fichte rejects an introspective or spectator model of self-knowledge, and defends a view that has significant affinities with rationalist accounts of self-knowledge defended by Stuart Hampshire and especially Richard Moran. Just as Moran argues that one knows that she believes that p by avowing p, Fichte maintains that one knows, for instance, that she is free by freely acting. Awareness of oneself as acting is a commonplace, non-observational component of acting. For a more detailed discussion, see C. Jeffery Kinlaw, “Fichte and Philosophy of Mind,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Fichte, ed. Marina Bykova (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). For an informed discussion of commonplace non-observational self-knowledge, see Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially §8.
- 16.
One might also ask how Wildt’s interpretation of Fichte’s I as the certainty of oneself as a persisting subject of mental states avoids the objection that he has imported the concept of substance into his interpretation of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity, a view that Fichte explicitly rejects.
- 17.
Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, 45. In the passage cited, Tugendhat actually is describing Henrich, along with Henrich’s Fichte and Henrich’s then Heidelburg colleague Pothast’s, conception of selfhood. But clearly he has Fichte in mind as well.
- 18.
Ibid., 29.
- 19.
Ibid., 45.
- 20.
Ibid., 36. And, Tugendhat adds, our immediate self-knowledge cannot be intersubjective either.
- 21.
A prominent difficulty in Fichte’s account of I-hood is the claim that at least tacit awareness is intrinsic to all acts of the I. Call this the consciousness condition: for all instances of a subject S’s representation of X, S has at least a tacit awareness of her self-determination to represent S precisely in the way in which she represents X. Does the consciousness condition apply only to complex acts—that is, acts of representation (recalling that willing involves representation, since one must project as a goal what one is to do in acting)—or to the components of an act? A complex act of representation might involve the following: the free self-determination to reflect upon feelings, perhaps consideration of alternative ways of representing something when practical goals demand that one do so, and then the final act whereby the productive imagination constructs the representation of the object. The consciousness condition, at least prima facie, is assuredly false, since the components of the act—and perhaps the act itself in some cases—occur below the radar of consciousness. Limiting awareness only to the complex act itself seems more plausible, but Fichte indeed affirms that all acts consist in part of (tacit) self-awareness. A full-blooded analysis of the ubiquity problem is beyond the scope of this chapter.
- 22.
Allen W. Wood, The Free Development of Each: Studies on Freedom, Right, and Ethics in Classical German Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); and especially Allen W. Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
- 23.
Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought, 58–59.
- 24.
Wood, Free Development of Each, 168.
- 25.
Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought, 69.
- 26.
Wood, Free Development of Each, 168.
- 27.
See Note 21.
- 28.
Any action, for Fichte, requires the concept of a goal, since the productive imagination must project, from a synthesis of actual and possible feelings, a general outline of what one is going to do. The goal might simply track the feelings registered from one’s encounter with the object, or it might include possible ways to manipulate or deploy the object or its properties for one’s own ends.
- 29.
By “prior to the subject-object distinction,” Fichte must mean prior to the structure of representing subject and represented object. Much of what impinges upon our senses goes unnoticed, and the resulting affections are not felt. To feel, to be aware of the way in which one is being affected, requires that she be reflectively distant from the affections she feels. This occurs prior to the common subject-object distinction, because one doesn’t feel, and thus doesn’t represent, an object. One simply feels. Nothing peculiar here, except, of course, that Fichte insists that reflective distance must be established by the I’s free, self-determining activity. To the extent that feeling is reflected, one might say that feeling is a proto-representational activity.
- 30.
Heidegger’s indebtedness to Fichte on this point seems unmistakable and significant.
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Kinlaw, C.J. (2019). Knowledge and Action: Self-Positing, I-Hood, and the Centrality of the Striving Doctrine. 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_8
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