Abstract
In this chapter, I defend Fichte’s characterization of the Wissenschaftslehre as an extension of Kantian idealism. On Fichte’s view, Kant had not carried his own insights into the subjective conditions for the possibility of experience far enough. Kant showed that the extent of our knowledge is limited to the objects of consciousness and that we cannot make speculative claims beyond those epistemic limits. Fichte argues that Kant goes beyond these limits when he explains appearances by referring to the thing in itself as their cause. For Fichte, the reality of the world, apart from human perception, can, like the reality of God, freedom, and immortality, be established only on practical grounds, as a necessary condition of moral agency. Rather than deny the existence of a mind-independent world, Fichte justifies the belief in its reality in a way that, although it contradicts the letter of Kant’s philosophy, is more consistent with its spirit, specifically Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics.
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Notes
- 1.
Chapter 2 of Wolff’s Deutscher Metaphysik is titled “Von den ersten Gründen unserer Erkenntnis und allen Dingen überhaupt” (Christian Wolff, Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt [Marburg: Renger, 1752], 6). See also Johann Christoph Adelung, Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches der Hochdeutschen Mundart, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1777), 3:488 (“Metaphysik”).
- 2.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Jacobi to Fichte, in The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel “Allwill,” ed. George di Giovanni (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 497–536; and G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977). Hegel says that, in Fichte’s system, “pure consciousness, the identity of subject and object, established as absolute in the system, is a subjective identity of subject and object” (Difference, 117).
- 3.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 718.
- 4.
Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985), 187–88. Heidegger is quoting from: Friedrich Schiller to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jena, 28 October 1794, in Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, 1794–1805, trans. Liselotte Dieckmann (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), 19.
- 5.
Alejandro Naranjo Sandoval and Andrew Chignell, “Noumenal Ignorance: Why, for Kant, Can’t We Know Things in Themselves?” in The Palgrave Kant Handbook, ed. Matthew C. Altman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 104–11.
- 6.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, David Hume on Faith; or Idealism and Realism: A Dialogue, in Main Philosophical Writings, 336.
- 7.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. ed. P. H. Nidditch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 209–10.
- 8.
Fichte focuses mostly on Kant’s apparent claim that the thing in itself causes appearances. This criticism is also expressed by Jacobi,Schulze, and Schopenhauer. See Jacobi, David Hume on Faith, 331–38; G. E. Schulze, Aenesidemus oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie, ed. Manfred Frank (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996), 184; and Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. and ed. Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 463, 475, 532–33, 535–36. Schopenhauer also criticizes Kant’s application of the concept of plurality (things in themselves) to what is undifferentiated (World as Will and Representation, 152–53).
- 9.
Hegel makes a similar claim in the Science of Logic, where he says that any substantive claim about the thing in itself must be nonsense:
Things are called ‘in themselves’ in so far as abstraction is made from all being-for-other, which really means, in so far as they are thought without all determination, as nothing. In this sense, of course, it is impossible to know what the thing-in-itself is. For the question ‘what?’ calls for determinations to be produced; but since the things of which the determinations are called for are at the same time presumed to be things-in-themselves, which means precisely without determination, the impossibility of an answer is thoughtlessly implanted in the question, or else a senseless answer is given. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010], 93–94)
- 10.
Salomon Maimon, Essay on Transcendental Philosophy, trans. Nick Midgley et al. (London: Continuum, 2010), 108.
- 11.
Hegel claims that the distinction between appearances and the thing in itself is a distinction of the understanding, so the so-called thing in itself is also a reflection of consciousness. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §§145–48. See also Hegel, Science of Logic, 41, 93–94, 423–30.
- 12.
Salomon Maimon, Kritische Untersuchungen über den menschlichen Geist oder das höhere Erkenntniss und Willensvermögen (Leipzig: Fleischer, 1797), 158–91.
- 13.
I develop this claim in more detail in Matthew C. Altman, “Fichte’s Meditations: The Practical Reality of the ‘Real World’ in The Vocation of Man,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Fichte, ed. Marina Bykova (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
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Altman, M.C. (2019). The Letter and the Spirit: Kant’s Metaphysics and Fichte’s Epistemology. 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_19
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