Abstract
Despite giving his main work on what would today be described as legal and political philosophy the title Foundations of Natural Right (Grundlage des Naturrechts), Fichte at one point in the same work announces that “there is no natural right [Naturrecht] at all in the sense often given to that term, i.e. there can be no rightful [rechtliches] relation between human beings except within a commonwealth and under positive laws” (FNR 132 [GA I/3:432]). This claim signals that natural right “in the sense often given to that term” is in some way misleading or even mistaken, because relations of a certain type between human beings are only possible given the existence of two artificial, and thus non-natural, entities: the type of legal and political community designated by the term “commonwealth” and the laws that govern such a community. In this respect, Fichte provides a negative answer to a question that he himself poses in the Foundations of Natural Right : the question as to “whether a genuine doctrine of natural right is possible, by which we mean a science of the relation of right [Rechtsverhältnis] between persons outside the state and without positive law” (FNR 92 [GA I/3:395]).
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Notes
Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen according to Natural Law, trans. Michael Silverthorne, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7. There are other ways in which Fichte’s theory of right may be said to be related to the modern natural law tradition. For example, it is claimed that Fichte’s attempt to ground the concept of right on the indubitable foundation provided by self-consciousness finds its precursor in Locke’s attempt to do something similar, while Fichte’s incorporation of the “collision” of individuals’ external actions into his deduction of right recalls Hobbes’s theory of the state of nature.
See Ludwig Siep, “Naturrecht und Wissenschaftslehre,” in Praktische Philosophie im Deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 19–41.
For more detailed accounts of Fichte’s separation of right from morality, see David James, Fichte’s Social and Political Philosophy: Property and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 112–61
Wolfgang Kersting, “Die Unabhängigkeit des Rechts von der Moral,” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Grundlage des Naturrechts, ed. Jean-Christophe Merle (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 21–37
Frederick Neuhouser, “Fichte and the Relationship between Right and Morality,” in Fichte: Historical Context/Contemporary Controversies, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1994), 158–80.
John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 285–302.
Cf. Ives Radrizzani, “Recht und Natur. Das Naturrecht bei Fichte,” Fichte-Studien 27 (2006): 135–55. Given the primacy of freedom, the claim made in the same article that right is “through and through the instrument and plaything of nature” (154) seems to me to be an overstatement.
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© 2014 David James
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James, D. (2014). How “Natural” Is Fichte’s Theory of Natural Right?. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-33475-6_18
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