The 1790s - Fichte

  The s: Fichte In the hothouse atmosphere of Jena in the last part of the eighteenth cen- tury (which Reinhold himself helped to create), Reinhold’s star rapidly set about as fast as it rose. Although by  he had become, after Kant, the guiding light of German philosophy, by around  he seems to have been by and large forgotten. It should also be remembered that de- spite Reinhold’s initial and meteoric success, not everybody among the German intellectual public was completely happy with the post-Kantian direction in which he was taking German philosophy. To many, the whole apparatus of “transcendental idealism” itself seemed far-fetched, and, despite Kant’s newly won prestige, there were rumblings to be heard against it on all sides of the German intellectual spectrum. These reached a new crescendo with the publication in  of an anonymous piece chiefly known by the abridgment of its title, “Aenesidemus.”  At first the author was anonymous, although his identity was quickly revealed to be that of G. E. L. Schulze, a professor of philos- ophy at Helmst¨adt. The literary conceit of the piece involved Schulze’s adopting the pseudonym, Aenesidemus (a first-century  Greek skeptic), who enters into a dialogue with Hermias, a so-called Kantian, so that Aenesidemus–Schulze could demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Kantian position. Offering a self-styled “Humean” attack on Kantianism in general and on Reinhold in particular, “Aenesidemus” proved to be devastating for Reinhold’s career. Although the piece covered quite a bit of ground, its criticisms boiled down to roughly three: () both Reinhold and Kant introduced the notion of a thing-in-itself as the cause of representations or sensations in the thinking subject, a claim  The full title is “Aenesidemus, or, On the Foundations of the Elemental Philosophy offered by Professor Reinhold in Jena. Including a Defense of Skepticismagainst the Presumptuousness of the Critique of Reason.” See Gottlob Ernst Schulze, Aenesidemus, oder, ¨ Uber die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Professor Reinhold in Jena gelieferten Elementar-Philosophie: nebst einer Verteidigung des Skeptizismus gegen die Anmaßungen der Vernunftkritik (ed. Manfred Frank) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, ).   Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians which violated the strictures of both Kant’s and Reinhold’s theory; () Reinhold’s alleged “fact of consciousness” was anything but such a “fact”; some mental states, such as sensations of pain, did not fit the model of “subject/representation/object” at all; () there was a massive inconsistency in Reinhold’s account of self-consciousness, since Reinhold required all consciousness to involve representations, and a self-conscious subject therefore had to have a representation of itself, which, in turn, re- quired a subject to relate the representation of the subject to itself, which, in turn, implied an infinite regress. In effect, “Aenesidemus” kept alive and underscored the interpretation of Kantian idealismas primarily an attempt to refute skepticism; and, in response, it argued that Kant had in fact not only not refuted the skeptic but also that Kant himself was only a sort of “phenomenalist,” somebody who believed that we construct our ideas about physical objects as hypotheses to explain our own sensations. It concluded with the assertion that Hume (again, interpreted as a skeptic) was right, that we have no real knowledge of things, only knowledge of our subjective states. Although “Aenesidemus” in some ways dealt a lethal blow to Reinhold’s “Elemental Philosophy,” it also became the launching point for his successor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (–). The son of a ribbon-weaver in Saxony, Fichte had been given the unexpected chance for education when a local noble, fascinated by the eight-year-old Fichte’s ability to recount afterward that day’s sermon in church, decided that it would be better if the young boy were given a proper education. Fichte was removed from his familial home (which by his own later accounts was an emotionally cold environment) and eventually sent to a Gymnasium (university preparatory school), where he was always made to feel acutely aware of his social inferiority to the other students. Although Fichte was able to attend university for a brief period, financial exigencies forced himto withdraw. Toying with the idea of entering several dif- ferent careers (including being a pastor), Fichte ended up journeying to K¨onigsberg to meet Kant, where in order to impress the master he wrote a short piece, “An Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation” (); this led to an astonishing piece of good luck, since when the piece was published (with Kant’s assistance), the publisher – inadvertently or purposefully, it is not clear – omitted Fichte’s name and Fichte’s preface, and, since the piece was written with such a thorough command of the whole Kantian apparatus, everyone assumed the author could only be Kant himself. When it was revealed that the author was in fact Fichte, Fichte’s fame was sealed. Another new star had joined the intellectual firmament. The s: Fichte  His newly found literary fame gave him the opening he needed, and when Reinhold resigned fromJena in  to accept a much better pay- ing position in Kiel, Fichte was designated to be his successor, with Fichte arriving in Jena only shortly after Reinhold had departed. (The two men never personally met, although they corresponded.) The Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung commissioned the newly famous Fichte to do a review of “Aenesidemus,” which finally appeared early in ; that review served only to raise his own status even further, and, quite inadvertently, helped to lower Reinhold’s, since in the review he conceded many of the points raised by Schulze against Reinhold’s views. However, he turned the tables on both Schulze and Reinhold; to be sure, so Fichte conceded to “Aenesidemus,” Reinhold’s “proposition of consciousness” only ex- presses a “fact,” and, to be sure, it cannot make good on the basic claims in Kantian thought. However, why should we assume, so Fichte argued, that we have to begin with a “fact” of any sort at all? Since the basic, first principle of the kind of philosophical “science” for which Reinhold was striving had to be itself normative and not “factual” in character, that first principle could not be a “fact” (a “Tatsache” in the German) but a kind of “normguided action” (a “Tathandlung,” literally a “deed-act”), a funda- mental mode of doing something that serves as the basis of other norms. The kind of “distinguishing” and “relating” that the subject is supposed to do in Reinhold’s philosophy should be conceived along more truly Kantian lines in terms of basic acts of synthesis according to normative rules, not in terms of being derived from some fundamental “fact” of any sort. Building on that point, Fichte argued that Schulze’s major criticism of Reinhold and Kant – that they were internally inconsistent in posit- ing things-in-themselves as the ground of our sensations of them – was itself misguided. Schulze concluded that we cannot know with certainty anything of things-in-themselves; we can know with certainty only the contents of our own mental states. Fichte argued, though, that it would make more sense to admit that the whole notion of a thing-in-itself (which Schulze shared with Reinhold) is only, as Fichte put it, a “piece of whimsy, a pipe-dream, a non-thought.”  That rejection of things-in-themselves and what it entailed was elabo- rated by Fichte in the first version of his own systemof philosophy, given as his initial lectures in Jena and published in  as simply, “The Foundations  J. G. Fichte, “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Daniel Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), p. .  Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians of the Whole Doctrine of Science.”  As is everything with Fichte’s highly orig- inal writings, even the title is difficult to translate. Fichte decided to call his systemthe Wissenschaftslehre, literally “Doctrine of Science,” but the overtones of the termhave to do with its being a doctrine of all forms of knowledge. (It is sometimes translated as “Science of Knowledge,” and it could also be rendered as the “theory of knowledge” or the “theory of scientific knowledge,” but it is usually just left in the scholarly literature in English as the sui generis termit is, “Wissenschaftslehre.”) Fichte also considered his systemto be a continual work in progress and was forever revising it, adopting new terminology, new modes of presenting its fundamental ideas, and in general feeling no particular need to explain to readers where and why he had changed his mode of presentation. This has made interpreting Fichte especially laborious; there are sixteen different versions of the Wissenschaftslehre in his collected writings, each differing fromthe other in crucial ways, and almost any- thing one says in general about the Wissenschaftslehre as a whole can be countered with some contrary passage in one of the versions. Moreover, since, as Fichte explained it, the  version was itself printed merely to relieve the students fromthe burden of taking lecture notes (and thereby making it easier for them to concentrate on Fichte’s oral presentation of the material), it was never intended to survive the kinds of close readings that scholars (and Fichte’s contemporaries) have given it ever since. Nonetheless, although Fichte insisted over and over again that his sys- temwas never finished and that each new elaboration of it was only a new attempt to give adequate expression to what the ideal, completed system would, if actually finished, look like – and although Fichte emphasized that all readers should therefore take its continual work-in-progress status seriously – it is still possible to summarize its key points and arguments if one keeps in mind that almost everything one says about it has to be qualified. For Fichte, the key problemto be solved in completing the systemthat Kant had begun was the problemof self-authorization, that is, of what we have called the “Kantian paradox” (the paradox seemingly lying at the core of what it means to say that we are subject only to those norms for which we can regard ourselves as the author). The core insight at the root of Fichte’s attempt to complete the Kantian system and “solve” the problemof self-authorization had to do with what he saw as the  For an insightful overview of Fichte’s development in Jena, see Daniel Breazeale, “Fichte in Jena,” in Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings. The s: Fichte  basic dichotomy at the root of the Kantian system. As Kant had shown, in the world as we experience it, we encounter ourselves as subjects (unities of experience, “points of view”) making judgments about objects (as substances interacting causally with each other in space and time), which, if true, answer to those objects that make them true. However, so Fichte concluded, that dichotomy itself – that core distinction between subjects and objects – was itself subjectively established; it was a normative distinction that “subjects” themselves institute.  As Fichte saw it, Kant had shown that everything we encountered was either an object or a subject; but the dynamic of Kant’s own thoughts should have shown himthat this distinction itself was subjectively established. To elaborate this notion, Fichte drew on two other key ideas that he wove into one overall conception: first, there was his reworking of a tra- ditional rationalist insight. Second, there was his innovative adaptation of the Kantian notion of autonomy to explain this rationalist insight. The initial rationalist insight, in Fichte’s own reminiscences, came to himall at once and concerned the notion of the relation of things- in-themselves to thought about them, namely, that “truth consists in the unity of thought and object.”  That is, Fichte believed that the only pos- sible account of justification had to see the mind as capable of grasping certain necessary, a priori features of reality through an act of what he called “intellectual intuition” (the termwas Kant’s, although he could just as easily have called it “rational insight”).  In such intellectual intu- ition we grasp or apprehend a necessary truth that can serve to justify some other claim.  Fichte’s own examples of such intellectual intuition  On this notion of one of the terms in a distinction being used to define the distinction itself, see the similar notion in Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming ).  These are not Fichte’s own words but as recounted by one of his students. Cited in Breazeale (ed. and trans.), Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, “Fichte in Jena,” p. .  Fichte did not actually deploy the term, “intellectual intuition,” at first in his exposition of the Wissenschaftslehre, but the basic idea is already contained in the very earliest formulations, and in the “Review of Aenesidemus,” it is mentioned explicitly. On the use and development of Fichte’s use of the term, “intellectual intuition,” see J ¨urgen Stolzenberg, Fichtes Begriff der intellektuellen Anschauung: die Entwicklung in den Wissenschaftslehren von / bis / (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, ); Stolzenberg very helpfully brings out the constructionist elements inherent in Fichte’s conception.  In the Critique of Judgment, Kant had entertained the thought of such intellectual intuition as that which would be directly aware of the “supersensible basis” of nature and freedom, even though he made it clear that in his system such intellectual intuition would be, strictly speaking, impossible for human knowers. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, § : “But in fact it is at least possible to consider the material world as mere appearance, and to think something as [its] substrate, as thing-in- itself (which is not appearance), and to regard this thing-in-itself as based on a corresponding intellectual intuition (even though not ours). In that way there would be for nature, which includes  Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians are geometrical (and resemble a Platonic conception of “noesis”): if we have two sides of a triangle and are told to supply the missing side, we immediately “see” that, necessarily, there is only one side that can com- plete the triangle; this is a necessary truth about triangles themselves; it is not a statement about our mode of apprehending them, nor is it a statement about how we use words; it is rather an insight into the neces- sary structure of things themselves. Another (non-Fichtean example) of such intellectual intuition would be the apprehension of the truth that no object can be both red and green all over; this too, along the lines of Fichte’s account, would not be a statement about how we use the words, “red” and “green,” nor would it be something true by definition; rather, it would be a truth about reality itself, having to do with the nature of extensible surfaces in space. In intellectual intuition we are not, that is, grasping our mode of apprehending reality or the way we use words;weare apprehending the necessary structure of reality itself. Thus, our thought about reality and the necessary structure of reality itself are in the case of intellectual intuition one and the same, not because we subjectively “make up” or “produce” the real world, but because intellectual intu- ition gives us insight into the way that world necessarily is (that extended bodies in space cannot, for example, be red and green all over). In almost all of his writings, Fichte drove the point home that the basic first principle of all true “science” (which Reinhold had vainly sought in his “proposition of consciousness”) can only be given in such an intel- lectual intuition and that therefore no further justification can be given nor should be sought for it. In his attempt at a popular presentation of his systemin  – carrying the ponderous and somewhat comical title, A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand – Fichte emphasized this point: our knowledge of a first principle can only occur, he said, “in a fortunate flash of insight, which, however, when found, us as well, a supersensible basis of its reality, though we could not cognize this basis” (p. ). Fichte distinguished his view fromKant in that he took intellectual intuition to be directed at a mode of acting – the “Tathandlung” – and took claims to something’s “being” (what we might just call “existence”) to be justified only by sensible intuition. Intellectual intuition only justifies asserting the existence of the “pure I” as self-positing activity: “Since the Wissenschaftslehre derives the entire concept of being only fromthe formof sensibility, it follows that, for it, all being is necessarily sensible being .The intellectual intuition of which the Wissenschaftslehre speaks is not directed toward any sort of being whatsoever; instead it is directed at an acting – and this is something Kant does not even mention (except, perhaps, under the name ‘pure apperception’),” J. G. Fichte, “Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, ), p. . The s: Fichte  neither requires nor is capable of further proof, but makes itself im- mediately clear,” and “is incapable of being proven. It is immediately evident” – it is the “absolute intuition of reason through itself.”  In intel- lectual intuition, our thought of things-in-themselves gets them exactly right without any residue left over on their part.  However, although the results of such an intellectual intuition would be necessary and absolutely certain, we ourselves as knowers must recognize ourselves as fallible when it comes to mistaking a genuine intellectual intuition for something that only seems to be one; we can, that is, think that we are having an intellectual intuition, we can even be absolutely certain about it, and we can still be wrong.  Likewise, that the result of an intellectual intuition gives us insight into the necessary structure of reality does not imply that the proposition expressing it cannot itself be a conclusion drawn fromanother set of premises; rather, the necessary truth apprehended in an intellectual intuition does not require that it be derived fromany other premises for us to grasp its necessity. To all those critics (there were many and there still are) who thought that such an intellectual intuition was hopelessly obscure or simply so mysterious as to be incredible, Fichte would reply that nothing could seemmore clear and less mysterious than that only one side could complete a triangle for which we were already given the two other sides (or that something could not be red and green all over), that we could apprehend that “fact”  J. G. Fichte, A Crystal Clear Report to the General Public Concerning the Actual Essence of the Newest Philosophy: An Attempt to Force the Reader to Understand (trans. John Botterman and William Rasch), in Ernst Behler (ed.), Philosophy of German Idealism (New York: Continuum, ), pp. , , .  The idea that we grasp things-in-themselves through an act of “intellectual intuition” is not without controversy in Fichte scholarship. The more traditional reading sees Fichte as denying that there are things-in-themselves at all. A sophisticated version of that readingis found in Wayne M. Martin, Idealism and Objectivity: Understanding Fichte’s Jena Project (Stanford University Press, ). Martin argues (p. ) that “the Wissenschaftslehre is best construed as renouncing existential claims (whether positive or negative) about things-in-themselves. Such claims lie beyond the self-imposed limits of its theoretical concerns.” The reading I am offering obviously argues that opposite view. Martin’s view seems to impute a more Husserlian notion of the suspension of the “natural attitude” to Fichte, which, I think, severely underplays the Platonist aspects of Fichte’s attempts.  By at least , Fichte was already making this point quite clearly: “But one may never claiminfallibility. That systemof the human mind which is supposed to be portrayed by the Wissenschaftslehre is absolutely certain and infallible. Everything that is based upon this system is absolutely true .If men have erred, the mistake did not lie in something necessary; instead, the mistake was made by free reflective judgment when it substituted one law for another,” J. G. Fichte, “Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre,” p.  in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings. Fichte was not always clear on this point; over and over, he would also claimthat truths apprehended in intellectual intuition were also certain; by that he seemed to mean that if they were apprehended rightly, then they could not be reasonably doubted, since their very necessity would exclude doubt. The tension between that and his fallibilismregarding themis obvious but not fatal for his views.  Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians and simply see that it was necessary. Look within yourself, Fichte kept saying, and ask yourself if nothing could be more lucid than those types of intuitions, and you will see that they are really no more “mysterious” than ordinary perceptual judgments. However, the necessity of such intellectual intuitions, coupled with Fichte’s willingness to admit fallibility with regard to them, only raised a more fundamental issue: was there something that was so basic, so necessary, that the intellectual intuition of itself would serve to justify other propositions that otherwise, although certainly seeming to be nec- essary, might nonetheless rest on mistakes in our apprehension? Fichte’s answer – in his own rather daring reformulation of Kant’s notion of the “fact of reason” – turned out to be his real innovation. The traditional rationalist solution to that problemhad been to search for some object that was appropriate for such rational insight (such as Plato’s forms, math- ematical structures, God in his eternal nature, and so forth). However, the Kantian revolution had shown that no such object could be found; in essence, that had been Reinhold’s mistake – to look for some fact (of consciousness, or of anything else) that would serve as the a-priori, necessary basis for justifying our normative commitments. Instead, noth- ing other than our own spontaneity, our autonomy itself, could serve as such a basis; and that very basic autonomy had to be itself construed non-metaphysically, not as expressing any ground-level metaphysical fact about some supersensible object, but as expressing some absolutely basic norm, which itself could only be grasped in its necessity through an act of rational insight, of intellectual intuition.  That is, we simply had to grasp through an act of “intellectual intuition” that our thought could be sub- ject only to those norms of which it could regard itself the author. In many ways, the rest of Fichte’s philosophy revolved around testing out the ways to best express that normwhile avoiding its most paradoxical aspects. Fichte at first obscurely formulated this basic norm as “I = I.” In the first version of the Wissenschaftslehre, he tried to show how such a normwas even more basic than the statement of identity, “A = A.” To understand Fichte’s argument, it is important to note that he construed “A = A” a s equivalent to a conditional – in his own words, “if A is posited, then A is posited.” That is, a statement of identity is something more like what we might nowadays call an inference license, something that (normatively) entitles an agent to a particular type of performance (in this case, making  “This is not the domain of ‘facts of consciousness’; it is not part of the realm of experience,” “[First] Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre,” in Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale), p. . The s: Fichte  an inference).  Such inference licenses involve normative statuses, that is, statuses that entitle one to do something (in this case, to infer from “A” that “A”). Such normative statuses are not, however, to be found in nature; indeed, to seek themin the physical world would be an instance of what Fichte labeled “dogmatism.” From the physical standpoint, saying “A = A” is just causing sound waves to be sent through the air; it is only fromthe normative standpoint that it can be taken to mean anything. (Signing a check, hitting a home run, making an assertion, shopping at a sale are all other examples of normative activities that cannot be captured in a purely physical or “naturalistic” description of them.) Such statuses must therefore be instituted and not, as it were, discovered in the world. As such they cannot be “facts” in any ordinary sense.  Identity statements, whose necessity seems to be at first self-evident when grasped in an act of intellectual intuition, in fact derive their neces- sity froma prior inference license (“if A, then A”); if so, then even more ba- sic than the identity statement itself must be the notion, so Fichte argued, of issuing the license. The license involves authorizing an inference – necessarily, if A, then A – whose necessity seems to be derived from the authorization itself; but, as Fichte clearly saw, that only raises the further issue of what (and how) anything could acquire the authority to institute such a license. (The intuited necessity of A = A turns out, Fichte was claiming, to be derivative from the intuited necessity of something else that is more basic.) Since inference licenses (again, not Fichte’s own term) could only be instituted by something that would be, to return to Fichte’s own ter- minology, not itself a “fact” (a Tatsache) but an “act” (Tathandlung), and, since natural things cannot be said to act (in any normative sense), the subject that institutes the license must itself be such an “act,” indeed, an act that somehow institutes the license and also simultaneously authorizes  “Positing” (Setzen) was a termFichte took over fromeighteenth-century logic books; it can be roughly rendered as attaching a “that” to a proposition. Thus, there is “P” and “That-P” or “P-as-asserted.” The termalso carries other senses to be found in the English, “posit”: such as “to postulate,” or “to put forward for discussion.”  Although I developed part of this manner of understanding normativity in terms of entitlements and commitments in Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, ), Robert Brandom’s important and influential book, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ) is not only the most well known, but also the best treatment of the topic. In this chapter, I have adapted Brandom’s powerful use of the language here of commitment, entitlement, and institution to make sense of Fichte’s idealist claims. Brandom himself has used these terms to explicate idealist theses in Robert Brandom, “Negotiation and Administration: Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Administration of Norms,” European Journal of Philosophy, () (August ), –.  Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians itself to institute such licenses.  This would be the apperceptive self,ex- pressed in the necessary proposition, “I = I,” and the necessity for this act of instituting licenses and authorizing itself to institute such licenses is available only in an act of intellectual intuition, a necessity which can itself “neither be proved nor determined.”  The self, that is, is not a nat- ural “thing” but is itself a normative status, and “it” can obtain this status, so it seems, only by an act of attributing it to itself. (Fichte, as we will see, qualified this in his writings on political philosophy and in later presen- tations of the Wissenschaftslehre.) Outside of its own activities of licensing, attributing statuses, and undertaking commitments, the thinking self is quite literally nothing. There simply can be no deeper ground of the self than this act of self-positing. One cannot give a causal, or, for that matter, any other non-normative explanation of the subject’s basic normative act of attributing entitlement to itself and to other propositions. (This is why Fichte also continually identified the “I” with “reason” itself, since it was as “reason” that it was authorizing itself to institute such normative statuses; the basic normative fact, as it were, at the root of the “Kantian paradox” was, so Fichte was arguing, not a “fact” at all, but a status, something instituted by an act, that is, a Tathandlung.) What struck Fichte’s readers as odd and what Fichte himself proudly asserted was that this subject came into existence as it acted; prior to the act of instituting norms, there simply is no “self,” no subject of en- titlement, nothing that can be said to be responsible for its utterances, nothing that can be “discovered” or encountered in empirical investiga- tion. There may indeed be bodies equipped with brains, but there are no normative statuses until the “I” attributes such statuses. This of course, as Fichte clearly saw, raised the further issue: are there any criteria for  Fichte’s notion of a Tathandlung might also be explicated in terms of the way in which normative judgments have a semantics that is, as it were, midway between the semantics of imperatives and declaratives, an idea worked up and developed in Mark Lance and John O’Leary-Hawthorne, The Grammar of Meaning: Normativity and Semantic Discourse (Cambridge University Press, ). On Lance’s and O’Leary-Hawthorne’s view, like declarative judgments, normative judgments issue justificatory responsibilities for the content of what is asserted; and, like imperatives, they issue an entitlement to act. Traditional prescriptivists erred in treating norms as imperatives and thus made them immune from rational criticism; traditional objectivists (Lance and O’Leary- Hawthorne misleadingly call them “transcendentalists”) took them to be declaratives (and there- fore descriptive) that had the special property of licensing acts (which led theminto the impasses that finally motivated the “error” theories of normatives to see them as based on non-existent, metaphysically “queer” entities). Fichte’s colorful metaphor of the “deed-act” expresses this “midway semantics” perfectly.  J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge (ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs) (Cambridge University Press, ), p. ; S¨amtliche Werke (ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, ), ,p. (hereafter SW ). [...]... case Therefore, besides executive and legislative powers, there must be a third, impartial evaluative power, which Fichte called the Ephorat. The Ephorat of the state is to observe the various activities of the branches of the state and government to see if they comply with the basic principles of “right” and the laws of the land; they are not, however, judges in the ordinary judicial sense, and they... and equal rights? Fichte claimed that, despite all the counter-arguments, there were indeed powerful reasons not to do so His reasoning (so he thought) was both simple and decisive: women were either daughters (virgins, as Fichte put it) and therefore under the authority of their fathers; or they were wives and therefore under the authority of their husbands (indeed, they could have their “own dignity,”... out of the various subjective viewpoints of the citizenry as they each keep score on each other The problem, so Fichte thought, has to do with whom in the state would ever be in a position to make such judgments, since allowing the state-as -the- common-will to be the judge in those cases where it is opposed to the will of some individual citizen would violate the most elemental principle of justice, namely,... rights, further rights to sanction performances from others (when they violate your rights), and so on It follows, so Fichte thought, that the state should be construed as the institution that embodies the common will and is thereby in the appropriate position to “judge” all of the citizens and sanction them accordingly The state functions as the “objective” viewpoint that precipitates out of the various... only the highest moral and intellectual standing in the community Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre (), p   Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians judicial sanctions, they have only the power of making public the abuses of “right” they have discovered, and in the most extreme cases they can issue a “state-interdiction” (on the model, Fichte. .. problem of the  Wissenschaftslehre) was thus reformulated into a doctrine of mutual recognition and sanctioning, of each agent constraining the content of the other’s commitments Fichte thought of this in a pair-wise way, of two agents mutually recognizing each other such that each agent becomes for the other the normative “Not-I” that serves to limit and constrain the normative commitments the other... each side of the paradox was only an appearance of some deeper underlying unity? Moreover, there was the related and underlying issue about whether there could be a non-normative basis of the normative, which Fichte himself had first introduced into the debate Was there, as Reinhold thought, a “factual,” positive foundation for the various norms that Kant had asserted? The early versions of the Wissenschaftslehre,... obsessed with elaborating the “Kantian paradox,” had taken a radical, normative-allthe-way-down stance toward that problem, arguing in effect that the difference between the normative and the factual (the non-normative) was itself a normative issue about how we ought to treat things Although Fichte never fully abandoned that idea, he began to rethink it Fichte s later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre... comparison with the large amount of work concerned with his Jena Wissenschaftslehre They also form some of the most dense writing he did For example, from the  lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre: “In this absolute identity of concept and intuition – the absolute concept is the concept of the picture and the absolute intuition is the being of the picture – consists the innermost essence of the absolute... collected in Z¨ ller, Fichte s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will Both o Rockmore and Z¨ ller stress the element of “finitude” in Fichte s account of subjectivity and take o Fichte s arguments for the intersubjective basis of the “I” to be arguments for this kind of pre- or proto-existentialism in Fichte s thought Nonetheless, it does seem true that Fichte s insistence . were either daughters (virgins, as Fichte put it) and therefore under the authority of their fa- thers; or they were wives and therefore under the authority. agent becomes for the other the normative “Not-I” that serves to limit and constrain the normative commitments the other undertakes.  Fichte, Grundlage