Abstract
This chapter examines Fichte’s conception of the Anstoβ in his theory of subjectivity. I argue that Fichte has a relational conception of the I that should be distinguished from Descartes’s and Kant’s views of the I. After providing an overview of Anstoβ’s role in Fichte’s Jena writings, I examine two interpretations of the Anstoβ: the standard interpretation views the concept of the Anstoβ as an Aufforderung (or summons) is not found in Fichte’s 1794/1795 Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre; the intersubjective interpretation holds that the concept of the Anstoβ as an Aufforderung is present in this work. I sketch an alternative interpretation, the normative interpretation, that suggests the Anstoβ possesses a normative content that is evident in the 1794/1795 text.
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Notes
- 1.
For a reconstruction of his theory of subjectivity see, Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
- 2.
Allen W. Wood writes, in an essay on Fichte’s anti-Cartesian conception of the I, “As philosophers of mind, we are all recovering Cartesians—in the same sense that some people are said to be recovering alcoholics. Like recovering alcoholics, we have our good days and our bad days.” Allen W. Wood, “Fichte’s Intersubjective I,” Inquiry 49, no. 1 (2006): 62.
- 3.
John McDowell, “Singular thought and the extent of ‘inner space,’” in Meaning, Knowledge, Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 246, 243.
- 4.
René Descartes, “Fourth Set of Replies” (Reply to Arnauld), in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 171–72.
- 5.
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. Allen Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 36.
- 6.
The “theorem” Kant proves in the “Refutation of Idealism” states: “The mere, but empirically determined, consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me” (B276).
- 7.
I develop this point about external-world skepticism in “Fichte’s Deduction of the External World,” International Philosophical Quarterly 55, no. 2 (2015): 217–34.
- 8.
Fichte’s terminology in this text is more clearly oriented around the concept of limitation.
- 9.
Throughout I’ve modified the Heath and Lachs translation by substituting “the I” for “the self,” as this is a more accurate translation of “das Ich.”
- 10.
Pierre-Philippe Druet, “L’«Anstoss» fichtéen: essai d’élucidation d’une métaphore,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 70, no. 7 (1972): 384–92.
- 11.
Ibid., 389.
- 12.
Druet is citing Pascal’s remark from his Pensées: “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.” Pascal, Pensées (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910), 34.
- 13.
See also Slavoj Žižek’s endorsement of the mechanical view of the Anstoβ: “The Anstoβ, the primordial impulse that sets in motion the gradual self-limitation and self-determination of the initially void subject, is not a merely mechanical external impulse: it also points toward another subject who, in the abyss of its freedom, functions as the challenge (Aufforderung) compelling me to limit/specify my freedom.” Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 150.
- 14.
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117.
- 15.
Daniel Breazeale, “Check or Checkmate? On the Finitude of the Fichtean Self,” in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, ed. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 96.
- 16.
Fichte attempts to capture our normative beholdenness to objectivity with the phrase “feeling of necessity.” He raises the general question of objectivity when he writes “How do we come to attribute objective validity to what in fact is only subjective?” (IWL 39 [GA I/4:211]). Part of his answer is that our objective perception occurs when we are responsive to our “feeling of necessity,” when we take that feeling as a reason to limit our activity with respect to the object.
- 17.
For an interpretation of realism in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, see Daniel Breazeale, “Anstoβ, Abstract Realism, and the Finitude of the I,” in Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156–96.
- 18.
See Breazeale’s discussion of the Anstoβ as a feeling of the moral “ought” (ibid., 176–86).
- 19.
For a reconstruction of his argument, see Allen W. Wood, “Deduction of the Summons and the Existence of Other Rational Beings” in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide, ed. Gabriel Gottlieb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2016), 72–91.
- 20.
Breazeale “Anstoβ,” 172.
- 21.
Ibid., 171.
- 22.
In his essay “Anstoβ, Abstract Realism, and the Finitude of the I,” he titles one section “Anstoβ as Feeling.”
- 23.
Not surprisingly, these two interpretations are not the only options. See Breazeale “Anstoβ,” 156–59, for additional, if problematic, interpretations.
- 24.
Ibid., 165.
- 25.
Ibid., 164.
- 26.
Reinhard Lauth, “Das Problem der Interpersonalität bei J. G. Fichte” in Transzendentale Entwicklungslinien (Hamburg: Meiner, 1989), 184. Lauth argues that “the conception of interpersonality is as old as the conception of the standpoint of the Wissenschaftslehre as such” (184).
- 27.
F. H. Jacobi, Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn (1785), in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 231.
- 28.
F. H. Jacobi, David Hume on Faith, or Idealism and Realism, A Dialogue (1787), in Main Philosophical Writings, 277.
- 29.
Alexis Philonenko, La liberté humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte (Paris: Vrin, 1966).
- 30.
Ibid., 329.
- 31.
Philonenko writes: “Le rapport de la conscience aux phénomènes se double d’un rapport au noumène, de telle sorte qu’au rapport conscience-objet se trouve lié comme fondement le rapport Moi-Toi, c’est-à-dire Nous. Au principe de l’objectivité il y a l’intersubjectivité.” Ibid., 329.
- 32.
Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: A Systematic Reconstruction, trans. Brady Bowman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
- 33.
Ibid., 210.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid., 211 (translation in Förster).
- 36.
Breazeale, “Anstoβ,” 174n58.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Breazeale, “Check or Checkmate?” 97.
- 39.
Paul Franks, “Fichte’s Kabbalistic Realism: Summons as ẓimẓum” in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right: A Critical Guide, ed. Gabriel Gottlieb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 101.
- 40.
Stepehn Darwall, “Fichte and the Second-Person Standpoint,” ed. Karl Ameriks and Jürgen Stolzenberg Internationales Jarbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/Internation Yearbook of German Idealism 3 (Berlin: de Gruyter: 2005); Owen Ware, “Fichte’s Voluntarism,” European Journal of Philosophy, 18, no. 2 (2009): 262–82; and Michael Nance, “Recognition, Freedom, and the Self in Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right,” European Journal of Philosophy, 23, no. 3 (2012): 608–32.
- 41.
Needless to say, developing such a view is not my task here.
- 42.
A draft of this paper was presented at the University of Kentucky, where I received helpful feedback. Special thanks to Steven Hoeltzel, Dan Breazeale, and James Clarke for their comments and objections, many of which I’ve heeded and attempted to meet in the essay.
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Gottlieb, G. (2019). Fichte’s Relational I: Anstoβ and Aufforderung. 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_10
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