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ZUR DISKUSSION Freedom, Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre

by Paul Franks (Bloomington)


When Fichte was at the summit of his philosophical fame, during his Jena period (179499), he produced two presentations of the foundations of philosophy. The first version has been available in English for some time. But a rise in classroom interest is marked by George Seidel's bilingual edition with commentary of the most famous section of the first presentation of Fichte's system, Part One of the 1794-95 Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre.l Meanwhile Daniel Breazeale has made an enormous contribution to the Anglo-American study of Fichte, of German Idealism and of the philosophical implications of Kant's revolution, by translating Fichte's lectures on the second presentation of his system, the 179699 Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo.2 Fichte's second Jena presentation is thus accessible in English for the first time. These publications testify eloquently to the revival of interest in Fichte that has now spread from Europe to the Anglo-American philosophical community. And they make it possbile for English-speaking scholars and students to make an informed judgment, for the first time, about Fichte's massively influential but littleunderstood achievement at Jena. It is well-known (although little understood) that Fichte presented the I as the absolute ground of all reality in the Grundlage. But it is hardly known at all (at least among Anglo-American philosophers) that in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo Fichte argued that there could be no I without some relation to another who recognizes the I as an I, and that Fichte was the first to make intersubjectivity and the concept of reciprocal recognition so important to Hegel and to the continental tradition into a fundamental issue for philosophy. The second Jena presentation of Fichte's system is a rich and important work in its
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Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre of 1794. A Commentary on Part 1 (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993). Seidel uses the translation of Peter Heath and John Lachs from Fichte: The Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Fichte: Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy. (Wissenschaftslehre) Nova Methodo (179619) (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie 79. Bd., S. 310-323 Walter de Gruyter 1997 ISSN 0003-9101 Brought to you by | Yale University Library New Haven
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own right, but it also suggests that the prevailing impression of Fichte's system as a species of metaphysical egoism requires revision. Together, Fichte's two Jena presentations represent a significant attempt to account for the necessary features of experience while laying the ground for the revolutionary practical philosophy outlined in Fichte's other major Jena works: the Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796) and the System der Sittenlehre (1798), whose accurate English translations we still await.3 When Fichte lectured on both versions of his system at Jena in the 1790's, he was a leading member of an intellectual community that included Goethe, Schiller and Herder, as well as Schelling, Hlderlin, Novalis and the brothers Schlegel At that time, Fichte was generally regarded as the leader of the radical Kantians, occupying the center of the philosophical stage with his ambitious projects and provocative pronouncements. However, Fichte has been regarded as a peripheral figure since 1799, when he migrated to Berlin amidst accusations of atheism that exploded into a full-blown national controversy: the atheism controversy. At this moment, just as the nineteenth century was beginning so the all-too-familiar story goes - the philosophical baton passed from Fichte to Schelling and then to Hegel, and Fichte's work at Jena should be regarded, at best, as a necessary but preliminary step on the road to Hegel, while his work at Berlin may be disregarded altogether. This version of the history of philosophy is in part the result of Hegel's powerful interpretation of world-history as a prelude to his own system. But it is also in part the result of Fichte's decision not to publish the mature versions of his philosophy which he continued to develop and to teach until his death in 1814. Fichte's reputation has been allowed to rest mainly on the first version of his system, the Grundlage, which was written at great speed, lecture by lecture, during Fichte's first semester of university teaching, and with which he quickly became dissatisfied. In recent decades, however, there has been a dramatic reassessment of Fichte's philosophical significance, first in Germany, France, Italy and Japan, and lately in America. Since the 1790's, the quantity and quality of the discussion of Fichte's ideas have never been so high as they are at present. This reassessment would hardly have been possible if not for the posthumous publication of Fichte's later works. Fichte's son published most of these works a few decades after his father's death. But at least one of Fichte's major works the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo on the basis of which he lectured from 1796-99, during the bulk of his Jena years - was apparently lost. This work reappeared in the form of a student transcript in the early years of this century and was published in 1937. A second transcript was discovered in 1980 and published in 1982. Now Daniel Breazeale has prepared an excellent English translation of this highly important work, together with an extremely useful historical introduction, in which he gives an account of Fichte's fateful decision to forego the publication of his main philosophical works. As Breazeale explains, Fichte published two introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo and its first chapter
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G. E. Moore pointed out the inadequacy of Kroeger's translation in "Review of J. G. Fichte, The Science of Ethics, as based on the Science of Knowledge (translated by A. E. Kroeger, edited by the Honourable Dr. W. T Harris, London, 1897)", International Journal of Ethics, Oct. 1898, IX; 92-97.

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in 1797-98,4 but he was interrupted by the atheism controversy, which drained most of his energy for two years and cost him his chair at Jena. Although Fichte continued to revise the manuscript until 1800, he never resumed publication for two reasons: (1) By 1801, Fichte's views had developed in such a way that revising the 179699 lectures was not enough; he had transcended the "new method" of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo and an entirely new manuscript was needed. Fichte's major innovation in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo (to which I shall return later) had been the thematization of intersubjectivity of reciprocal recognition in the intelligible or spiritual world of finite rational beings within the foundations of philosophy. But by the spring of 1798 before the accusation of atheism was first made in an anonymous pamphlet published in the autumn of that year Fichte had already come to think that he had not yet accounted adequately for the unity or worldhood of the spiritual world, and he had realized that his account of that unity would have to take the form of a philosophy of religion or an account of God. The atheism controversy only strengthened Fichte's pre-existing commitment to lay theistic foundations for philosophy and it was this project that ultimately led Fichte beyond the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo in 1801. The unpublished Jena manuscript thus provides the key that makes it possible to understand the (otherwise quite puzzling) transition from the Jena philosophy of the self to the theocentric works of the Berlin period. (2) Meanwhile, Fichte's attitude towards publication was shifting. He had always distinguished sharply between the spirit and the letter, and he had long maintained that philosophy, which is all spirit and is inadequately expressed by written texts, demands a spiritual activity that cannot be conveyed by the text and must be supplied by the reader. His reluctance to expose philosophy to misunderstanding and ridicule by publishing it in written texts was exacerbated by the gross incomprehension which he encountered during the atheism controversy. By 1804, Fichte decided to confine himself to oral communication of his still developing thought about the foundations of philosophy. Breazeale deserves credit for bringing our attention to this little-known aspect of Fichte's conception of philosophy, which connects Fichte to a tradition of philosophical esotericism whose classical representative is Plato's Seventh Letter. Fichte's conception of philosophical education and his understanding of the difference between written and oral communication deserve full investigation elsewhere. ' The disappearance of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo for over a century led to enormous confusion and some injustice. Even Martial Gueroult, whose Evolution et Structure de la Doctrine de la Science chez Fichte (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1930) is a landmark in the study of Fichte, failed to realize the significance of the shift in Fichte's thinking in 179596 and failed to recognize the distinction between the two Jena presentations. Consequently, Gueroult misinterpreted the Grundlage, into which he imported the specific doctrine of intellectual intuition outlined in the
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Breazeale has translated these texts in Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).

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1797-98 introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo. Following Eduard von Hartmann, he also accused Fichte of a contradiction between the theoretical philosophy of 1794-95 - which, he said, demonstrates the unreality of everything except the absolute I - and the practical philosophy articulated in the Naturrecht of 1796 and the Sittenlehre of 1798 - which, he said, depended on the reality of a community of finite consciousnesses.5 In fact, the latter works pertain to Fichte's second presentation and it is no criticism of Fichte to say that they cannot be effortlessly reconciled with his first - although, in my opinion, it is an open question whether some effort might ultimately succeed in reconciling them.6 Gueroult may perhaps be excused on the grounds that the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo had not yet been published when he wrote (although extracts had already been printed in Germany).7 But echoes of these misinterpretations can still be heard. And it is more difficult to excuse Peter Heath and John Lachs for including both the two 179798 introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo and the Grundlage in their English translation without once explaining that the First and Second Introductions are introductions to a different version of the Wissenschaftslehre. This is bound to confuse the unwary reader and is likely to perpetuate Gueroult's misinterpretations. Seidel is also not free from this confusion, for he suggests repeatedly8 that the Naturrecht and the Sittenlehre are to be understood in terms of the Grundlage because they are, according to their subtitles, nach Principien der Wissenschaftslehre as if Fichte used the term Wissenschaftslehre to signify a book. In fact, by Wissenschaftslehre Fichte meant philosophy itself the foundation of all knowledge which he strove until his death to articulate and which he thought no text could adequately express. To appreciate the significance of Fichte's work at Jena, one must understand not only the differences between the 1794-95 and the 1796-99 presentations, but also the sense in which both are responses to the same set of philosophical problems. Seidel is correct, I think, to portray Fichte as both inheriting and transcending the Kantian problem of the actuality of freedom and the relationship between the intelligible and the empirical worlds. In the Third Antinomy, Kant argued that freedom was not impossible from the theoretical point of view, provided that it was located within the intelligible world and not within the empirical world governed by the law of causality. In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant sought to deduce the actuality of freedom from impractical point of view, by showing that we humans are capable, despite the temptations of desire, of determining ourselves in accordance with the moral law that governs the intelligible world. For Fichte, Kant was the one who had made the greatest discovery in the history of humanity without, like all discoverers, See Gueroult, Evolutional: 41 f. and E. von Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphysik (Leipzig: H. Haacke, 1900), II: 75 f. 6 This criticism of Gueroult originates with Luigi Pareyson, one of the first scholars to recognize the importance of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, in his Fichte (Turin: Edizioni di "Filosofia", 1950), I: 315-317. 7 See Breazeale, Foundations, 34. s Seidel, 2, 68, 88.
5

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quite knowing what he was doing and without knowing how to transpose his ideas from the piecemeal order of discovery to the systematic order of justification; and the problem of freedom was, for Fichte, the key to systematization. For one of Kant's greatest insights was that the natural laws governing the empirical world, including the law of causality, were expressions albeit necessary expressions of human freedom or spontaneity, and in Fichte's view the systematic grounding of Kant's philosophy demanded the deduction of the actuality of the freedom underlying theoretical knowledge, and the establishment of the unity of that freedom with the freedom underlying practice, without obliterating their distinctness. Thus Fichte believed that one could not solve the theoretical problem of the representation of the external world at the heart of which lies the problem of synthetic a priori judgment, both with respect to space and time and with respect to the categories without also, and in a single system, solving the practical problem of the freedom of the will. And both Fichte's 1794-95 and 1796-99 works may be described as attempts to carry out the massively ambitious project of a thoroughgoing deduction of freedom. Seidel is correct, then, to relate Fichte's project to the Kantian problem of the actuality of freedom. However, Seidel misconceives the nature of the Kantian doctrine of two worlds and therefore the significance of Fichte's response. For Seidel thinks that the distinction between the intelligible world and the empirical world is a distinction between actions and their consequences: "For example, in virtue of the 'intelligible order of things,' I possess free and autonomous causality to jump from an airplane or not; however, once I jump, the determining and conditioning causality, the necessity, of the law of gravity takes over."9 The problem to which Fichte responds is, in Seidel's view, the problem of achieving the proper alignment between agents, actions and consequences: [... I]f I am to act in an ethically responsible fashion in the sensible world, some level of knowledge on the part of the moral agent, the practical ego, regarding just how my freely posited actions may work out in the sensible world would be more than helpful. Also, if there were not some genuine knowledge of the two selves, then there would really be no way of knowing whether the actions posited in the world of sense are, or were, actually mine and not someone else's. Fichte does not spell out the problems associated with Kant's two critiques in precisely these terms. Nevertheless, this is, I think, the problematic that he is wrestling with and the reason for his later insistence that there has to be an intellectual intuition [...] in performing a moral action, the self must be aware, must know, that it is the self that is the one performing it.10 But (1) Kant's view is not, as Seidel thinks, that I am free to act as I choose but that I cannot (alas!) control the consequences of my action. It is rather that I am free to determine myself to act by adopting a maxim or general policy indeed, I am free to determine myself to act autonomously by adopting maxims in accordance
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Seidel, 9. Seidel, 10.

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with the procedural constraints of the moral law - but this freedom does not entail that I will be able to act in accordance with my maxim on any given occasion, for deliberate action depends not only on rational deliberation but also on my ability to harness my empirical desires and inclinations, an ability that can only be developed through long and arduous habituation. What is at stake in Kant's division of the two worlds is not, therefore, merely the efficacy of my actions, but whether I am capable of genuine action - as opposed to mere behaviour - at all. Relatedly, (2) Fichte's problem with Kant's resolution of the problem of freedom is not that Kant has shown that there are noumenal selves and that there are genuine actions, but that he has left these selves and actions without establishing the proper correspondence between them, so that I cannot be certain whether a given action is to be imputed to my noumenal self or to yours or to some other's. Fichte's problem is, rather, that he does not think Kant has shown that there is - that 7 am - a self at all and therefore whether there are any genuine actions in the world, so that I do not know whether I have the right to say "I", whether any actions are mine to claim. Hence the moral fervour of Fichte's philosophizing: until the reality of freedom is established, both our philosophy in the classroom and our actions in our everyday lives remain ungrounded. Their very existence - our very existence - remains in question. Orthodox Kantians have always accused Fichte of chasing a chimaera and of pursuing a line of questioning that can only lead to the dissolution of Kant's most important ideas. But it can be surprisingly difficult, when one penetrates into the depths of Fichte's thinking, to determine where he departs from Kant, who repudiated Fichte without, it seems, having read him - in August 1799, at the height of the atheism controversy. The difficulty arises in part from the fact that Fichte uses key terms differently from Kant, and in part from the complex relationship between Kant's thought and Fichte's ambition to deduce space, time, the categories and the moral law within a single account of human freedom. Here Seidel is of little help. His commentary succeeds in obscuring a passage in which Fichte indicates his terminological departure from Kant,11 he makes no attempt to characterize the aims of Fichte's reasoning, and he neglects entirely to analyze Fichte's strategies for attaining those aims. Yet it is exactly with respect to such matters that students Seidel's intended audience are most in need of help, if they are to appreciate the philosophical seriousness of Fichte's endeavour. It is instructive, however, to juxtapose the 1794-95 and 1796-99 versions of the Wissenschaftslehre. One might do worse than to think of the 1794-95 thesisantithesis-synthesis method as an attempt to recast all philosophy in the form of
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Fichte's account of his use of the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" in Grundlage, section 3, 4 (Seidel, 74 f.) makes it clear that his usage differs from Kant: since Fichte takes analytic judgments to specify differences, and synthetic judgments to mark comparisons, there are no purely analytic judgments, for there are no judgments of difference without the possibility of judgments of similarity. But Seidel's gloss (76) assimilates Fichte's usage to Kant's distinction between explicative and ampliative judgments and refers the reader to the Critique of Pure Reason.

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Kant's Third Antinomy, and to think of the 1796-99 "new method", which locates the ground of consciousness in the autonomous pure will that is capable of overcoming our transgressive desires, as an attempt to recast all philosophy in the form of the Analytic of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason. Fichte's own remarks in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo about the continuities and discontinuities between his two presentations are extremely helpful.12 The overarching antinomy which Fichte seeks to resolve in the Grundlage is between the I posited by itself as absolute (which expresses itself in theory as the transcendental unity of apperception and in practice as the autonomous moral law) and the not-I posited as absolute by the I (which expresses itself in theory as the external cause of representation and in practice as the heteronomy that morality ought to overcome). Both these principles must be accomodated if theory and practice are to be possible, but they appear to be unavoidably opposed, as the terms of an antinomy which threatens to dissolve our conviction in our freedom, in our reason, in our very lives. Attempted reconciliations of the antithetical principles what Fichte calls syntheses turn out to conceal hidden oppositions, further forms of the original antinomy which, like a bump in an ill-fitted carpet, only reappears elsewhere whenever it is suppressed. Thus the first synthesis the reciprocal limitation of the I and the not-I - develops in turn into the antinomy between the principle governing theoretical philosophy (the I posits the not-I as determining the I, developed in Part Two of the Grundlage) and the principle governing practical philosophy (the I posits the I as determining the not-I, developed in Part Three of the Grundlage). Seidel has commented only upon Part One of the Grundlage, in which the fundamental antinomy and initial synthesis are given, and his reflections upon Parts Two and Three are of little help to anyone interested in understanding Fichte's goals and method, but Fichte gives us a preliminary indication of his final destination when he writes in Part One of the Grundlage that the Idea of the human being as free as an absolute subject "is itself unthinkable, since for us it contains a contradiction. But it is nevertheless imposed upon us as our highest practical goal. Man must approximate, ad infmitum, to a freedom that he can never, in principle, attain"13. This has suggested to readers since Hegel that Fichte's 179495 system succumbs to a "bad infinity" "an endless sequence of finitudes"14 in which the antinomy of theory and practice, and therefore the fundamental antinomy of I and not-I, is never overcome. For Fichte's solution would appear to be that the I is not and indeed, given the demands of theoretical reason, cannot be absolutely free, but that we ought, in practice, to aim our actions at the goal of an absolute freedom which we know is impossible. And if Fichte's conclusion is that we ought to deceive ourselves into believing in freedom, then this seems to be no solution at all. Indeed, Fichte seems to be taking, not a step beyond Kant, but rather a step back. For, by
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See Breazeale, Foundations, 85f., 118f., 134-138, 181-186, 248f., 381 f. Seidel, 85 f. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner, 1968), IV: 44; The Difference Between Fichte's and Schellings System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 131.

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insulating practice from theory, Kant at least preserved the non-contradictoriness and therefore the logical possibility of freedom, even if he also had to refuse freedom any theoretical actuality. Whether such a reading of the Grundlage is justified is a larger question than I can examine here, not least because it would require an investigation of Parts Two and Three (not included by Seidel). There Fichte seeks to show that the transcendental imagination is a faculty through which human spontaneity unconsciously constitutes the very content of the sensible given. This view of the imagination (so important to the Romantics) enables Fichte to argue that the autonomy which ought to be consciously pursued in the practical sphere, is (in some sense) unconsciously achieved in the theoretical, so that autonomy is the actual but hidden principle of the empirical world. Whatever the merits of his 1794-95 presentation, Fichte did at any rate recognize shortcomings in the method of his presentation, and he sought to remedy these shortcomings in 1796-99. Instead of formulating the system of freedom as a series of successive syntheses intended to overcome an original antinomy - which Fichte now described as "the most difficult method of all"15 - he instead invited his audience to think any thought whatsoever, then to think the I thinking that thought, and then to accompany Fichte himself in the investigation of the ingredients and transcendental conditions of that freely performed act of thinking oneself. Thus Fichte sought to ensure the active participation of his audience in the production of the "I think" which, as Kant had argued, must be capable of accompanying any representation whatsoever. He hoped in this manner to secure the spiritual participation of his audience that he considered necessary for the proper comprehension of the letter of the Wissenschaftslehre. And he entirely bypassed the confusing attempt, in Part One of the Grundlage, to arrive at the spontaneous subject ("I = I") by inviting his audience to reflect upon the logical principle of identity ("A = A"). Even if Fichte is correct in thinking that formal logic is an abstraction from the acts of the absolute subject articulated in transcendental logic, Fichte's own views commit him to think that one cannot derive transcendental logic from formal logic, but that the derivation proceeds in the opposite direction only, so he should not have expected anyone who did not already understand his system to see its relation to formal principles, and so he should not have expected anyone to gain access to his system by means of such principles, which in fact made incomprehension all but inevitable. The Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo begins, then, not with an antinomy but rather with a free act of conscious self-positing as a subject - with the explicit addition of the "I think" to some thought. Fichte thinks of this act as the making explicit for consciousness of the spontaneous activity of the I that implicitly constitutes consciousness - an intelligible activity that Fichte calls the Tathandlung. And the philosophical awareness of our spontaneity to which Fichte hopes thereby to bring us, is what he calls intellectual intuition - although we who, unlike Fichte, are making this journey for the first time, will not in fact understand the sense
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Breazeale, Foundations, 248,

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in which we have attained intellectual intuition of the Tathandlung that constitutes consciousness until we have reached the mid-point of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, the discussion of the pure will and our resistance to it in section 13.16 In two respects I find myself in disagreement with Breazeale about the method and starting point of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo. (1) He writes: [... I]n his new presentation, [Fichte] chose to follow what he himself described as a "much more natural path," one that reversed the direction of the previous presentation and proceeded from empirical experience to intelligible conditions from Tatsache to Tathandlung rather than vice versa.17 I can see no way to reconcile this statement with Fichte's own description of the difference between the two starting-points: "Here [i. e. in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo} we began with the Tathandlung and arrived at the Tatsache; but the method of the book [i.e. the Grundlage] is just the reverse."18 Furthermore, (2) Breazeale adds in a footnote an error which he has repeated in each of his otherwise excellent Fichte translations and which has unfortunately made its way into the Englishlanguage literature on his authority: "Tatsache is the ordinary German word for "fact"; Tathandlung is a word Fichte invented to designate the (self-)productive deed of the I [...]"19 "Tatsache" was not an ordinary German word in the late eighteenth century, although it has become one since. Instead, "Tatsache" was a philosophical term introduced in 1756 by J. J. Spalding to translate one of the central terms of Bishop Butler's Analogy: "matter of fact". This term carried with it a legal background and entered German in the context of Enlightenment theology. A Tatsache was a deed or occurrence whose actuality was not inductively or deductively demonstrable but was nevertheless well-established on the basis of reliable testimony. The appeal to Tatsachen in this case, the miraculous events of Christian history played a major role in the controversy about Lessing's publication of the Reimarus fragments in the 1770's. Indeed, as Lessing remarked at that time, the neologism was so unusually successful that one could scarcely turn a page of certain books without stumbling across a Tatsache, although he could easily remember a time when it was in nobody's mouth.20 In contrast, "Tathandlung" is an old German word whose usage can be traced back several centuries before Fichte and which, although already somewhat archaic, was still being used in the eighteenth century by as exemplary a stylist as Lessing.21 A Tathandlung, as we are informed by Christian Gottlob Haltaus in his Glossarium Germanicum Medii Aevi (Leipzig, 1758), is a violent action
16 17 18 19

20 21

See especially Breazeale, Foundations, 291 299. Breazeale, Foundations, 13. Breazeale, Foundations, 118. Breazeale, Foundations 13 n.; see also Breazeale, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), xiv and Introductions to the Wissenschaft slehre, 48 f. See "ber das Wrtlein Tatsache" in Lessing's Werke (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), XVII: 451. Lessing, Werke, XIX: 135 and XXI: 54.

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or an illegal use of force: "via et culpa facti: actio violenta, vis iniusta, nempe contra leges iudiciariamque autoritatem admissa".22 Why does this matter? And why did Fichte insist first in his 1794 review of Aenesidemus,23 generally considered to be the first public document of his systematic period; again in the 1796 culmination of an ugly controversy with his Kantian colleague at Jena, Schmid;24 and finally in the 1797 Second Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo25 - that philosophy must begin with a Tathandlung and not with a Tatsache! And why insist now on preserving Fichte's reference to an originary violence of reason? My view - which I can only mention here and will develop more fully elsewhere - is that Fichte was attempting to correct a philosophical tendency that arose from a misinterpretation of Kant's Faktum of reason. When Kant sought in the second Critique to deduce the actuality of freedom by means of this Faktum which he called a Tatsache in the third Critique21 he was understood to be appealing to what Reinhold called a fact of consciousness (Tatsache des Bewusstseins) a state of affairs whose actuality, although undemonstrable, could be established through the "testimony" of the immediate awareness of morally impeccable people. If the actuality of our obligation to obey the moral law could be established in this way, then it followed - since "ought" implies "can" - that we must be free to obey the law and therefore that we must be free to act without the influence of any empirically causal, sensuous motivation. If the freedom of the will could be proven in this way, then why not solve a whole host of hoary metaphysical problems by appealing to one's immediate consciousness and one's reliability as a witness? Thus the facts of consciousness were multiplied in the philosophy of Schmid, Fichte's colleague - and enemy at Jena. Fichte did not deny that there were facts of consciousness, but he denied vociferously that these facts could do any philosophical work; instead the facts of consciousness were precisely what philosophy was supposed to explain. And the starting point of philosophy had therefore to be the ultimate ground of consciousness itself, which, as Fichte took Kant to have shown, had to be the spontaneous activity of the subject: not a Tatsache or reified act, but a Tathandlung or pure activity that recognized no law but its own. Hence the suggestion of violence and the rejection of external authority. Without the Tathandlung of the subject, there could be no necessary laws of consciousness - no normativity - and therefore no objective consciousness whatsoever. What is at stake in Fichte's attempted deduction of freedom, therefore, is nothing less than the justifiCompare Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wrterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854-1971), s.v. Thathandlung. 23 J< G. Fichtes smmtliche Werke (Berlin: Veit, 1845-46), I: 8; Breazeale, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, 64. 24 / G. Fichtes smmtliche Werke, : 448; Breazeale, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, 328. 25 / G. Fichtes smmtliche Werke, 1.465; Breazeale, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, 48. 2 * Kants Werke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902), V: 31. 2 ? Kants Werke, V: 468,
22

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cation of normativity as such. Since Fichte's project can assume no pre-established norms whatsoever, it cannot help but resemble the revolutionary establishment of a legal system in the absence of any pre-existing authority, and it cannot help but carry those suggestions of violence and illegality that inevitably accompany what is sometimes called revolutionary justice. It is worth noting that Kant's Faktum of reason, by which reason proclaims itself as originating law, is also associated with willfulness and violence. For Kant characterizes the originary power of reason with the help of a quotation from Juvenal's Satire VI 223, a remarkable speech made by a tyrannical woman who is asked by her husband to explain why, in his absence, she has sentenced a slave to death: "hoc volo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas".28 Thus, by insisting that philosophy begin not with a Tatsache but with a Tathandlung, Fichte took himself as I believe but cannot prove here to be restoring the true meaning of Kant's appeal to a Faktum or act of reason in order to deduce the actuality of freedom. Breazeale's note on the history of "Tatsache'9 and "Tathandlung" is therefore not only incorrect; it is also likely to obscure the significance of Fichte's philosophical manoeuvre and his relation to Kant's Faktum of reason. There may seem to be an inconsistency between Fichte's rejection of philosophizing on the basis of Tatsachen and his statement, which I quoted earlier, that in the Grundlage, as opposed to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, he began with a Tatsache. But the inconsistency is only apparent. Fichte intends, I think, to refer to the expository difficulty to which I referred earlier: Part One of the Grundlage tries to get one to see that the Tathandlung of the absolute I is the ground of all consciousness through reflection on the formal principle of identity, a principle which is indeed a Tatsache des Bewusstseins. But this is likely to confuse the reader, who is used to the procedure of Fichte's contemporaries and who may therefore think that the Tathandlung is based on the Tatsache, when the contrary is supposed to be the case. In the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo Fichte begins quite differently, by encouraging his audience to become conscious of the Tathandlung in the only way possible: by actively making explicit the thinking I. Only in the course of his investigation of this act does it become clear that, even when one does this, the I must be understood as an intuition which is never present to consciousness as an isolable state or Tatsache, since consciousness is always discursive and must involve concepts as well as intuitions. Besides the fact that the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo begins differently from the Grundlage, the most important difference between the two presentations to which Fichte draws our attention concerns precisely that relationship between theory and practice which, as I said earlier, many readers find to be the most unsatisfactory aspect of the earlier presentation. In the 179495 version, there were distinct treatments of theoretical and practical philosophy, and Fichte proceeded from theoretical philosophy to the practical philosophy in which he sought its ground. But,
28

See Critique of Practical Reason in Kants Werke, V. 31 and Opus Postumum in Kants Werke, XXI: 23.

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In the present [1796-99] lectures, however, the hitherto familiar division between theoretical and practical philosophy is not to be found. Instead, these lectures present philosophy as a whole, in the exposition of which theoretical and practical philosophy are united. This presentation follows a much more natural path, beginning with the practical sphere, or, whenever it would contribute to the clarity of the exposition to do so, inserting the practical into the theoretical, in order to explain the latter in terms of the former: a liberty for which the author was not yet sufficiently self-confident at the time that he published his [1794-95] Wissenschaftslehre.29 Breazeale rightly emphasizes this passage30 which, I believe, provides the key to Fichte's "new method" and hints at his solution to the antinomy between theory and practice that seems to have been left unresolved by the Grundlage, at the end of which it seems that absolute freedom determines practice but not theory. In the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, however, absolute freedom the spontaneous Tathandlung made explicit in each reader's "I think" - is clearly the principle determining the necessary structure of the empirical world, as well as the moral law, within a single development. We should be careful, it seems to me, about how to read Fichte's claim that this change is a result of his growing "self-confidence". For Fichte is one of those philosophers who is apt to exaggerate the continuity of his thinking. I do not doubt that Fichte already wanted to show that absolute freedom was the determining principle of experience in the Grundlage, nor do I doubt that he attempted to show just that by means of his account of the imagination. But he surely made a significant advance which enabled him to achieve a new synthesis of theory and practice in 1796-99. That advance, I believe, was the concept of the summons [Aufforderung], whose first published discussion appeared in his Naturrecht in 1796. The idea seems first to have occurred to Fichte in the summer of 1795 while he was living in self-imposed exile at Osmannstdt - as a way of solving two problems at once: (1) the need for an a priori derivation of the idea of right or justice that was independent of the moral law, unlike the derivation in his 1793 book on the French revolution; and (2) the need for a justification of the assumption of finite rational beings other than oneself, a justification which he had criticized Kant for not providing. I believe that the concept of the summons allowed Fichte not only to solve these two problems but also to achieve a more thoroughgoing synthesis of theory and practice than he had achieved in the Grundlage. The concept of the summons is the central concept of the 1796-99 works (the 1796 Grundlage des Naturrechts, the 1797 First and Second Introductions, the 1798 System der Sittenlehre and the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo) and may be characterized as follows. Fichte argues that I could not have become conscious of myself - that I could not have become capable of explicitly adding the "I think" to my thoughts - unless I had, on some occasion, discovered myself to be summoned to free activity by another self who recognizes me as a self and whom I recognize as
29 30

Breazeale, Foundations, 85 f, See Breazeale, Foundations, 12.

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recognizing me, whom I therefore in turn recognize as a self. The existence of at least one other self is therefore a necessary condition of my self-consciousness. Three aspects of this original genesis of self-consciousness merit noting here. (1) No matter how I respond to the summons of the other, I am absolutely determined to respond in some way, provided only that I recognize the summons as a summons. Even to ignore the summons is a response and is quite different from failing to discover that one is summoned. Thus my will is absolutely determined to respond to the summons in some way or other, an absolute determination which Fichte calls the pure will in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methode and which, he says, expresses itself as the moral law at a much later stage in the development of consciousness. In the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo the pure will is discussed only in its primordial manifestation, as a necessary expression of spontaneity that is a genetic condition of the possibility of self-consciousness. Nevertheless, the principle of moral philosophy is already latent in the ground of self-consciousness in general and therefore in the ground of theoretical consciousness or experience, since the possibility of self-consciousness is conceived (following Kant) as a necessary condition of the possibility of consciousness. (2) Although I am absolutely determined to respond to the summons somehow, I am free to determine myself to respond as I choose. So not only is the pure will (which should be compared with what Kant calls Wille) to be found within the situation of the summons, but freedom of choice (which should be compared with what Kant calls Willkr) is to be found there as well. And like the moral law the principle of the doctrine of right the principle of reciprocal recognition is already latent in the very ground of consciousness in general, theoretical as well as practical. (3) Fichte argues that the reciprocal recognition required by the summons in turn requires that I think of myself as an individual will, sharing the concept of rational being with the other but distinguished by having a particular region of efficacy individuated, in other words, by my body. And to think of oneself as embodied is, Fichte argues, to think of oneself as interacting with a world of external objects that resist one's will in various ways. Thus Fichte seeks to show that, given the summons as genetic condition of self-consciousness, there must be an external world which has certain necessary features, which turn out to be space, time and the Kantian categories. This is, of course, no more than a sketch of Fichte's highly complex strategy and it is obvious that there are many extremely challenging steps that would need to be taken before that strategy could be completed. Indeed, Fichte employs the central concept of the summons in a different way in each of his 179699 texts and further discussion would have to both distinguish and relate these different employments. It should be clear, however, that if Fichte were to succeed in carrying out the program of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, then he would have succeeded in deducing the actuality of absolute freedom as a determining principle, not only of moral practice, but also of the necessary structure of experience; that he would have simultaneously laid the foundations for a moral philosophy and for an independent philosophy of right; and that he would have done all this precisely by introducing the intersubjective concepts of the summons and of reciprocal recognition into the very heart of post-Kantian philosophy.

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This account of Fichte's program raises an important historical question and an important philosophical question. The historical question is: should we think of intersubjectivity as entirely new to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo (and to the Grundlage des Naturrechts and System der Sittenlehre that are latent within it) or should we think of intersubjectivity as somehow implicit within the Grundlage! Alexis Philonenko has argued forcefully for the latter claim31 and, at the very least, appreciation of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo ought to encourage a revision of some traditional readings of the Grundlage, such as those of Hegel and Gueroult. It would be fruitful to ask, for example, whether Fichte, instead of developing a "new method", might simply have added a further synthesis to the Grundlage: the synthesis of theory and practice by means of the concept of the summons, as outlined in the various texts of 1796-99. The philosophical question is: did Fichte succeed? And if he did not, could his strategy be reconstructed, or is there something deeply misguided about the Fichtean project of a deduction of freedom as such? To pursue such questions is to explore issues that are currently being discussed in Anglo-American philosophy - such as the relationship between spontaneity and receptivity, and the privacy of consciousness as well as issues that are currently discussed in continental philosophy such as intersubjectivity and embodiment. One reason for the current revival of interest in Fichte is surely that his thought provides a terrain on which Anglo-American and continental philosophy may encounter one other.

31

See his La Liberia dans la philosophic de Fichte (Paris: Vrin, 1966).

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