Abstract
This chapter, which focuses on the nature and function of the popular method in Fichte’s transcendental philosophy, is framed by preliminary reflections on the political status of philosophical knowledge in classical antiquity and early modern Europe. On this extended socio-epistemological basis and in light of Kant’s precedence in conjoining the scientific and the popular in Enlightenment philosophy, I present Fichte’s works in the popular method as the other half of his overall philosophical project, designed to assure the wider influence of the Wissenschaftslehre. In particular, I argue that Fichte’s exoteric and esoteric philosophies are quite akin in their efforts to find ideas and images for conveying a complex of thoughts that essentially eludes teaching as well as learning.1
We few, we happy few,
we band of brothers…
— Shakespeare, Henry V
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Notes
See KrV, Axi, note, and AA V, 294f; see also Günter Zöller, “Autocracy. The Psycho-Politics of Self-Rule in Plato and Kant,” in Relations of the Self, ed. Edmondo Balsamão Pires, Burkhard Nonnenmacher, and Stefan Büttner-von Stülpnagel (Coimbra: Coimbra University Press, 2010), 385–404.
See Günter Zöller, “Aufklärung über Aufklärung. Kants Konzeption des selbständigen, öffentlichen und gemeinschaftlichen Gebrauchs der Vernunft,” in Kant und die Zukunft der europäischen Aufklärung, ed. Heiner F. Klemme (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 82–99.
On the extension to Fichte, see Günter Zöller, “The Unpopularity of Transcendental Philosophy. Fichte’s Controversy with Reinhold (1799–1801),” PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 10 (2000): 50–76.
and Günter Zöller, “Mensch und Erde. Die geo-anthropologische Parallelaktion von Herder und Kant,” in Herders “Metakritik.” Analysen und Interpretationen, ed. Marion Heinz (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2013), 253–271.
On Fichte’s widened conception of transcendental philosophy, see Günter Zöller, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and
Günter Zöller, Fichte lesen (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 2013).
On the popular philosophy of the middle Fichte in its entirety, see Hartmut Traub, Fichtes Populärphilosophie 1804–1806 (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1992).
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© 2014 Günter Zöller
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Zöller, G. (2014). Popular Method: On Truth and Falsehood in Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy. In: Rockmore, T., Breazeale, D. (eds) Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412232_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137412232_11
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