The 1790s - Fichte

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

 

In the hothouse atmosphere of Jena in the last part of the eighteenth tury (which Reinhold himself helped to create), Reinhold’s star rapidlyset about as fast as it rose Although by he had become, after Kant,

have been by and large forgotten It should also be remembered that spite Reinhold’s initial and meteoric success, not everybody among theGerman intellectual public was completely happy with the post-Kantiandirection in which he was taking German philosophy To many, the wholeapparatus of “transcendental idealism” itself seemed far-fetched, and,despite Kant’s newly won prestige, there were rumblings to be heardagainst it on all sides of the German intellectual spectrum

an anonymous piece chiefly known by the abridgment of its title,

“Aenesidemus.”At first the author was anonymous, although his identitywas 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’sadopting the pseudonym, Aenesidemus (a first-century Greek skeptic),who enters into a dialogue with Hermias, a so-called Kantian, sothat Aenesidemus–Schulze could demonstrate the bankruptcy of theKantian 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: () bothReinhold and Kant introduced the notion of a thing-in-itself as thecause 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 themodel of “subject/representation/object” at all; () there was a massiveinconsistency in Reinhold’s account of self-consciousness, since Reinholdrequired all consciousness to involve representations, and a self-conscioussubject 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 aliveand underscored the interpretation of Kantian idealismas primarily anattempt to refute skepticism; and, in response, it argued that Kant had infact not only not refuted the skeptic but also that Kant himself was only asort of “phenomenalist,” somebody who believed that we construct ourideas 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 ofour subjective states

Although “Aenesidemus” in some ways dealt a lethal blow toReinhold’s “Elemental Philosophy,” it also became the launching pointfor his successor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (–) The son of aribbon-weaver in Saxony, Fichte had been given the unexpected chancefor education when a local noble, fascinated by the eight-year-old Fichte’sability to recount afterward that day’s sermon in church, decided that itwould be better if the young boy were given a proper education Fichtewas 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 acutelyaware of his social inferiority to the other students Although Fichtewas able to attend university for a brief period, financial exigenciesforced himto withdraw Toying with the idea of entering several dif-ferent careers (including being a pastor), Fichte ended up journeying toK¨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 thepiece was written with such a thorough command of the whole Kantianapparatus, everyone assumed the author could only be Kant himself.When it was revealed that the author was in fact Fichte, Fichte’s famewas sealed Another new star had joined the intellectual firmament

The s: Fichte His newly found literary fame gave him the opening he needed, andwhen Reinhold resigned fromJena in to accept a much better pay-ing position in Kiel, Fichte was designated to be his successor, with Fichtearriving 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 servedonly to raise his own status even further, and, quite inadvertently, helped

to lower Reinhold’s, since in the review he conceded many of the pointsraised by Schulze against Reinhold’s views However, he turned thetables on both Schulze and Reinhold; to be sure, so Fichte conceded

to “Aenesidemus,” Reinhold’s “proposition of consciousness” only presses a “fact,” and, to be sure, it cannot make good on the basic claims

ex-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 wasstriving 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 mental mode of doing something that serves as the basis of other norms.

funda-The kind of “distinguishing” and “relating” that the subject is supposed

to do in Reinhold’s philosophy should be conceived along more trulyKantian lines in terms of basic acts of synthesis according to normativerules, not in terms of being derived from some fundamental “fact” ofany sort

Building on that point, Fichte argued that Schulze’s major criticism

of Reinhold and Kant – that they were internally inconsistent in ing things-in-themselves as the ground of our sensations of them – wasitself misguided Schulze concluded that we cannot know with certaintyanything of things-in-themselves; we can know with certainty only thecontents of our own mental states Fichte argued, though, that it wouldmake 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

posit-of whimsy, a pipe-dream, a non-thought.”

That rejection of things-in-themselves and what it entailed was rated by Fichte in the first version of his own systemof philosophy, given ashis initial lectures in Jena and published in as simply, “The Foundations

elabo- 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 inal writings, even the title is difficult to translate Fichte decided to call

orig-his systemthe Wissenschaftslehre, literally “Doctrine of Science,” but the

overtones of the termhave to do with its being a doctrine of all forms ofknowledge (It is sometimes translated as “Science of Knowledge,” and

it could also be rendered as the “theory of knowledge” or the “theory ofscientific 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 progressand was forever revising it, adopting new terminology, new modes ofpresenting its fundamental ideas, and in general feeling no particularneed 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 torelieve the students fromthe burden of taking lecture notes (and therebymaking it easier for them to concentrate on Fichte’s oral presentation ofthe material), it was never intended to survive the kinds of close readingsthat 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 newattempt to give adequate expression to what the ideal, completed systemwould, if actually finished, look like – and although Fichte emphasizedthat all readers should therefore take its continual work-in-progress statusseriously – 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 bequalified

For Fichte, the key problemto be solved in completing the systemthatKant had begun was the problemof self-authorization, that is, of what

we have called the “Kantian paradox” (the paradox seemingly lying atthe core of what it means to say that we are subject only to those normsfor which we can regard ourselves as the author) The core insight atthe 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, soFichte 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, Kanthad shown that everything we encountered was either an object or asubject; but the dynamic of Kant’s own thoughts should have shownhimthat this distinction itself was subjectively established

To elaborate this notion, Fichte drew on two other key ideas that hewove 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 in-themselves to thought about them, namely, that “truth consists in theunity of thought and object.”That is, Fichte believed that the only pos-sible account of justification had to see the mind as capable of graspingcertain necessary, a priori features of reality through an act of what hecalled “intellectual intuition” (the termwas Kant’s, although he couldjust as easily have called it “rational insight”).In such intellectual intu-ition we grasp or apprehend a necessary truth that can serve to justifysome other claim. Fichte’s own examples of such intellectual intuition

things- 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 wehave 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 astatement about how we use words; it is rather an insight into the neces-sary structure of things themselves Another (non-Fichtean example) ofsuch 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 ofFichte’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 ofextensible surfaces in space In intellectual intuition we are not, that is,

grasping our mode of apprehending reality or the way we use words; we are

apprehending the necessary structure of reality itself Thus, our thoughtabout 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 ition gives us insight into the way that world necessarily is (that extendedbodies in space cannot, for example, be red and green all over)

intu-In almost all of his writings, Fichte drove the point home that the basicfirst 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 givennor should be sought for it In his attempt at a popular presentation

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 immediatelyevident” – it is the “absolute intuition of reason through itself.”In intel-lectual intuition, our thought of things-in-themselves gets them exactlyright without any residue left over on their part.

However, although the results of such an intellectual intuition would benecessary and absolutely certain, we ourselves as knowers must recognizeourselves 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 ofreality 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 thosecritics (there were many and there still are) who thought that such anintellectual intuition was hopelessly obscure or simply so mysterious as

to be incredible, Fichte would reply that nothing could seemmore clearand less mysterious than that only one side could complete a trianglefor which we were already given the two other sides (or that somethingcould 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 reading is 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 withFichte’s willingness to admit fallibility with regard to them, only raised

a more fundamental issue: was there something that was so basic, sonecessary, 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’sanswer – 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, ematical structures, God in his eternal nature, and so forth) However,the Kantian revolution had shown that no such object could be found;

math-in essence, that had been Remath-inhold’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 assuch a basis; and that very basic autonomy had to be itself construednon-metaphysically, not as expressing any ground-level metaphysical factabout 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 graspthrough 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 manyways, 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 understandFichte’s argument, it is important to note that he construed “A= A” asequivalent to a conditional – in his own words, “if A is posited, then A isposited.” That is, a statement of identity is something more like what wemight 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 innature; indeed, to seek themin the physical world would be an instance ofwhat 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 becaptured 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-evidentwhen 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 theauthorization itself; but, as Fichte clearly saw, that only raises the furtherissue of what (and how) anything could acquire the authority to institutesuch a license (The intuited necessity of A= A turns out, Fichte wasclaiming, to be derivative from the intuited necessity of something elsethat is more basic.)

Since inference licenses (again, not Fichte’s own term) could only beinstituted 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 canitself “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 normativeact of attributing entitlement to itself and to other propositions (This iswhy Fichte also continually identified the “I” with “reason” itself, since itwas as “reason” that it was authorizing itself to institute such normativestatuses; the basic normative fact, as it were, at the root of the “Kantianparadox” 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 proudlyasserted was that this subject came into existence as it acted; prior tothe 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 nonormative 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 ).

The s: Fichte attributing such statuses outside of what the “I” itself “posits” or couldthe “I” posit anything? Fichte’s answer: there can be no ultimate criteriafor positing except that which is entailed by the necessity of such positing

in the first place, by whatever is necessary to maintaining a normativeconception of ourselves

In a rather dense and compressed series of arguments, Fichte cluded something like the following To adopt any kind of normativestance at all is to commit oneself necessarily to the possibility of negation,

con-of asserting not-A Since normativity involves doing something correctly

or incorrectly, there must exist the possibility of denying or affirming

an assertion’s correctness (This involves, as Fichte put it, the notion of

“inherent correctness” which at the opening level of abstraction of talkingabout the I’s positing itself necessarily “remains problematic.”) Thus,for a subject, an “I,” to be said to be issuing inference licenses in thefirst place, it must be able to entertain both “A” and “not-A.” Otherwise,

it will never be able to commit itself to any particular inference license

at all Negation, like normativity in general, is not a part of the ral world but is the result of subjects instituting certain normative sta-tuses, and this act of negation is, like the first principle of “I= I,” “anabsolutely possible and unconditional act based on no higher ground.”Since the “I” at first attributes (“posits”) a normative status to itself –

natu-indeed, attributes to itself that it is nothing more than a normative status –

it must be able to entertain the notion of there being a “not-I,” thing whose normative status does not consist in its being attributed bythe “I.” So Fichte thought, that means that the “I’s” self-authorizing actsmust be conceived as constrained by something that is not the result of itsown self-authorization (otherwise, it could authorize anything, including,

some-“I authorize X and do not authorize X”) Thus, the most basic inference

to which we are entitled would be the conjunction that “I amby virtue

of positing myself, and there is something whose normative status is not

posited by me.”

This clearly involves a contradiction Fichte took it to imply thing like: “All normative status is instituted by the ‘I,’ and the ‘I’ must(at least possibly) institute some things as not having their normative sta-tus instituted by the ‘I’.” How is this apparent contradiction to be recon-ciled? Fichte’s so-called third principle involves postulating an “infinitetask” of coming to grips with the necessity to understand why certain

some- Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, p. ; SW, p .

 Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, p. ; SW, p .

 Part II The revolution continued: post-Kantians

“posits” – that is, the whole complex of entitlements to assert this orthat, commitments to certain norms, attributing authority or responsi-bility or entitlements to others – are indeed necessary and why someare not necessary More prosaically put, it would be the “infinite task”

of sorting out which propositions really are necessary – which may begrasped as the proper objects of an intellectual intuition – and which only

seem to be necessary The only way to do that, so Fichte thought, was

by the foundationalist project he called the Wissenschaftslehre: ultimately,

everything that involves necessary truths – even mathematics and logicthemselves – should be shown to follow from the more basic principlesinvolved in assertion and negation, and those areas should be sharplydelimited from non-necessary, empirical truths. The activities of as-sertion and negation themselves, moreover, must be derived from thenecessity of a self-conscious subject’s coming to think of itself as having

an absolute normative status that it confers on itself – “absolute” in thesense that nothing else except it itself could confer that status on itself

In the rest of his Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte went on to argue how this

activity of self-consciousness (as an act of normatively positioning oneselfand authorizing oneself to attribute such positions to oneself ) is the man-ner through which the “I” constitutes itself as a cognitive, thinking self –

as constituting itself through the acts of assuming a set of justificatory

 The overall characterization of Fichte’s project as “foundationalist” has been notably challenged

and rejected by TomRockmore, who argues that, at least in spirit, if not in letter, Fichte should

be seen as an anti-foundationalist Rockmore’s position has been elaborated in a number of his works, but he gives a nice summary of his views and his defense of them in Tom Rockmore,

“Fichte’s Anti-Foundationalism, Intellectual Intuition, and Who One Is,” in Tom Rockmore and

Daniel Breazeale (eds.), NewPerspectives on Fichte (New Jersey: Humanities Press,), pp – Rockmore bases this claim on several notions One of them – “I see no way around Fichte’s own

argument, at the beginning of the Wissenschaftslehre, that if a principle is to be first, then it cannot

be derived fromany other principle and also cannot be shown to be true” (p ) – seems to me

to beg the issue, since Fichte did not include the claim“and also cannot be shown to be true”

in the passage Rockmore cites fromhimto support that claim (Fichte’s passage goes: “Our task

is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle,” Fichte,

The Science of Knowledge, p ; SW, p  Obviously the issue at stake is whether something can

be shown to be true without our having to derive it fromanything else.) Second, he takes it that

Fichte’s emphasis on the “finitude” of the thinking subject (its being limited by other factors than its own positing) makes Fichte’s theory anti-foundationalist; but that may point more toward

a tension in Fichte’s own thought, rather than to a strong anti-foundationalist commitment Finally, he argues that the term“intellectual intuition” first appears in Fichte’s “second period,” which he admits points in a “foundationalist” direction, and he then tries to show how this is compatible with Fichte’s own earlier anti-foundationalismwhere, he says, this termdid not occur Yet already in the “Aenesidemus review,” Fichte was clear about such “intellectual intuition”:

“If, in intellectual intuition, the I is because it is and is what it is, then it is, to that extent, self-positing, absolutely independent and autonomous,” Fichte, “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Daniel Breazeale (ed and trans.), Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, p..

The s: Fichte responsibilities with respect to the various assertions one makes.In par-ticular, he argued that our ordinary experience of a “given” world doesnothing to undermine this transcendental idealist picture of things Totake a non-Fichtean example to make his point: in ordinary perception,

we see, for example, a tree, and no act of will can change the fact thatthe tree just presents itself to us and causes a belief (“there is a tree”)

to arise in us; there is no activity, so it seems, on our part The world,

in fact, seems to offer up a series of such “checks” or “stimuli” (Anst¨oße)

to us in the forms of experiential data whose status is not posited by us.

Fichte agreed, pointing out that something can function as a piece of

“given” data only to the extent that we take it up as data, as having some

kind of cognitive potential: as he quite succinctly put it, “no activity ofthe self, no check.” Fichte’s point was that everything that has beensaid to exist – the Greek gods, natural objects, sensations, monarchies –

is to be regarded as a “posit” and what we ultimately take to exist has to

do with which set of inferences are necessary in order to make the mostsense of those “checks” found in our consciousness.

 One of the most influential readings of Fichte’s work on self-consciousness has been Dieter

Henrich’s “Fichtes Urspr¨ungliche Einsicht,” in Dieter Henrich and Hans Wagner (eds.), Subjektivit¨at

und Metaphysik: Festschrift f¨ur Wolfgang Cramer (Frankfurt amMain: Klostermann,) Henrich gued that Fichte saw that all “doubling” accounts of self-consciousness are doomed to failure – ac- counts that see the self as aware of itself as an object of awareness – since they will beg the question

ar-or lead to an infinite regress Henrich famously concluded that Fichte nonetheless failed to draw the correct conclusion from this, namely, that we must have an immediate, non-propositional

“Vertrautheit ” (familiarity) with ourselves that defies any “subject/object” scheme The notion of

self-awareness as “normative positioning” sidesteps these difficulties In any event, even if it is true that we have a certain “familiarity” with ourselves, it need not be “immediate” in any robust sense We can be directly aware of things (for example, in perceptual cases), and that kind of direct awareness can be immediate (non-inferential) in the sense that we do not make any infer- ences while engaged in them (I can see a tree as a tree without making any inferences about it.) However, I could not have those kinds of direct awareness without already being in possession

of a whole host of other abilities to make inferences Thus, an “immediate” awareness can, in fact, presuppose a set of (mediated) abilities This is at least what I take to be rudiments of the

arguments made by Wilfrid Sellars in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul,); and Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, ) Something like this view of “normative positioning” is attributed to Fichte by Robert Pippin in his Hegel’s

Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press,), chapter .

 Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, p. ; SW, p .

 G ¨unther Z¨oller displays a certain ambivalence in his attempt to explicate and defend Fichte on

this point: He speaks of the “I” “finding” that it is checked, and that its positing of the “Not-I” is

a “reflection” of its finitude There is certainly something to that, but it severely underplays the unconditioned, absolute nature of authorization and licensing, the way in which the “checking”

has to be something not merely “found” but spontaneously posited by the “I.” This tension in

Fichte between “positing” the “Not-I” as that to which it is also responsive, and the demands that the “I” be subject only to laws of which it can regard itself as the author is essential to understanding of Fichte’s attempt at dealing with the “Kantian paradox.” See G ¨unther Z¨oller,

Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (Cambridge University

Press, ).