“Was heißt es, heute ein Idealist zu sein? Fichte über Freiheit und Geschichte” Douglas Moggach University of Ottawa/University of Sydney

The period 1780 to 1830 is one of the most fruitful times in the history of European philosophy and political thought, rivalling the achievements of classical Athens. German idealism, the philosophical current originating in the critical works of Immanuel Kant, is an extended reflection on the idea of freedom and on the prospects for its realisation in the modern world. It is both ‘German’ and ‘idealist’ in special senses. The German territories at the beginning of this period were a welter of kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, bishoprics, and city states, under the titular leadership of the Holy Roman Empire (founded by Charlemagne in

800 AD) until Napoleon abolished it in 1806, leaving various political institutions and movements to struggle for hegemony in its wake. Scattered throughout these lands, from the extreme north-east to the south-west, were intellectual centres such as Kant’s own Königsberg

(geographically remote, but a commercial hub in close communication with Britain); Goethe’s

Weimar; Jena, where Schiller and Fichte both lectured, and the site of a budding Romanticism; and the Tübingen of Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling.1 Later in the period, with its newly- founded university (of which Fichte was elected as the first Rector), Berlin was to play a leading cultural role. In these centres, the effects of the European Enlightenment, and receptions and critiques of the indigenous theoretical traditions stemming from Leibniz, were distilled into a philosophical revolution. The essence of this revolution was an engagement with modern society, and an account of its emergence and potentialities, undertaken in works by Fichte, Schiller, and

Hegel, with Kant in the vanguard.2 It is this resolute yet critical modernism which imbues

German idealism with its particular characteristics: for all its inner divergences,3 it is a practical idealistic approach, a brilliant vindication of freedom.

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With its focus on freedom, German idealism from Kant to Hegel differs from previous types of idealist thinking.4 As Hegel will maintain, the unity of thought and being is the core of all true philosophy;5 but throughout its history, this central idea has been conceived in many different ways. Even philosophical materialism asserts this unity, but inverts it, making thought the pale reflex of being. For Fichte, materialism is not only a theoretical doctrine, but a practical attitude toward the world whose proponents take themselves to be acting deterministically, without critical consciousness or responsibility.6 Conversely, German idealism is the stance of self-conscious, critical freedom. It does not imply that being dissipates into thinking, or that only consciousness exists, but affirms the causal power of thought in objectivity, the ability of reason to realise itself, to engage with and change the objective world. For the German idealists, the unity of thought and being refers to a historical process by which the structures of objectivity can gradually be made consonant with the evolving claims of reason, itself not timeless and static, but dynamic. Such an idealism is distinct from that of Plato, because the German formulation rejects the metaphysical distinction between an unchanging transcendent order of Ideas, and the fluctuating material world as its inexact replica. In its striving to bring the domains of thought and being into closer accord, German idealism has greater affinity with Aristotle’s concept of energeia, the shaping presence of the ideal or form in matter, but it is more insistent than

Aristotle on the activity of subjects as the sources of form. (The root of energeia, -erg preceded by a digamma, is lexically cognate with Hegel’s technical term Wirklichkeit, the effective force of reason in objectivity). Nor is German idealism to be confused with the phenomenalism and subjectivism of Bishop Berkeley, where all being is mere perception, for which we are not entitled to assert an objective correlate. Against such ‘dogmatic’ or ‘empirical’ idealism, as

Fichte calls it, the Kantian tradition mounts a decisive assault.7 The world as it appears to the

2 senses is not unreal, but derivative; German idealism directs our attention to the formative activity which underlies the objects of experience and the processes of self-shaping. It develops ideas of practical reason as the capacity to be self-legislating and autonomous, and it stresses the self-causing, spontaneous quality of human action. The fundamental issue of German idealism is not to impugn the external world, but to ask how we can rationally and freely relate to it, act in it, and transform it. This practical idealism is fundamentally critical of objective historical and social conditions which hinder free self-determination.

In his text, “What is Enlightenment,” Kant describes the Enlightenment as an epochal turning point for humanity: the shaking off of self-imposed tutelage, marking the historical maturation of the species.8 Traditional and transcendent sources of authority in Church and state are deprived of their unreflective, unexamined influence, and must yield to critical adjudication and self-legislation by rational subjects. Kant had formulated this idea earlier, in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason:

“Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit. Religion through its holiness and legislation through its majesty commonly seek to exempt themselves from it. But in this way they excite a just suspicion against themselves, and cannot lay claim to that unfeigned respect that reason grants only to that which has been able to withstand its free and public examination.”9

Enlightenment subjects no longer derive their ethical and political standards from the traditional idea of a fixed natural order, with its hierarchies and hereditary statuses, nor are these standards to be accepted unquestioningly as the command of an external authority. The criteria of action and value must be interrogated and freely endorsed: they derive from an idea of the self and its purposes.

Building on Enlightenment conceptions, the Kantian tradition also undertakes a critique and reformulation of these ideas. Empiricist and materialist theorists in the Enlightenment

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(Helvetius, Holbach, and later Bentham, with Hobbes as an early progenitor) had indeed understood and endorsed the centrality of the modern subject, but had done so through categories like utility and its cognates; the world existed as material for the satisfaction of need, and the maximisation of happiness. This modern revival of ancient materialism, notably Epicureanism, entails a fundamental revision of the older position. Epicureans had shared the views of classical

(idealist) philosophies that nature set intractable limits on our efforts; from this the Epicureans concluded that our aim should be to minimise pain, not to maximise pleasure. Otherwise we committed hubris, overstepping the appropriate bounds of the natural order, and we invited nemesis or retribution, not from divine agency, but as a direct consequence of excess. But modern materialisms typically take a more expansive view of human capabilities, and of the responsiveness of nature. Thus for Hobbes the objective is to maximise pleasure; felicity consists in the constant satisfaction of desire, the attainment of pleasure after pleasure, ending only in death.10 In this quest, Hobbes reduces individuals to the status of obstacles or means to each other’s purposes, and defines freedom as the ability to secure the objects of one’s (naturally determined) desire. The state thus appears to Hobbes as the result of a social contract, providing the instrumental context for a more secure pursuit of private ends.

On the Kantian account, these materialist currents had failed to grasp the genuine nature of subjectivity. The materialists had promoted an overly naturalised and overly deterministic picture of the human subject, undermining its specific capacity for freedom by subsuming it again under natural imperatives of a new kind. The natural order had been deprived of its older normative force, as a source of values, of boundaries, and of circumscribed places within which subjects ought to confine their efforts. Nature was now viewed as a field of scientific investigation, manipulation, and usefulness, at the disposal of subjects, and yet natural necessity

4 was simultaneously deemed to control these subjects themselves through the mechanisms of their needs and desires. This simultaneous emancipation and subsumption process constitutes the dialectic of modernity. For Enlightenment materialism, subjects’ ends were determined by the pushes and pulls that objects exerted on them. The ends of activity were largely fixed by the effects of sensibility or of nature upon subjects.11 On this account, reason was reduced to an ancillary restraining role in the guise of prudential or instrumental reason: it did not operate to set ends, but only charted the most efficient and least dangerous means to obtain them, or warned if subjects were pursing ends that were inconsistent or contradictory. For all their centrality, such subjects (as Marx, too, later observed)12 are essentially passive, and fully integrated within the causal nexus of the natural order (as modernity conceives it).13 For Kant and the German idealists who further developed his thought, the error of the materialists is to minimise the capacity of subjects to abstract from motives of sensibility and immediate desire and interest, and to submit these, too, to rational examination and critique, just as all prevailing values and relations are to be critically assessed. The error is to deny to subjects their intrinsic spontaneity.

Spontaneity for idealism does not mean thoughtless, groundless, arbitrary action, but self- determined activity on inner grounds. To develop and systematize this insight is the task which

Fichte assigns to himself, and which he executes in his writings.

Kant and his successors thus redefine the model of rational action which underlies the

Enlightenment project. The key to this redefinition is the notion of spontaneity, one of the central and distinctive concepts of German philosophy since Leibniz,14 and while the Leibnizian and

Kantian versions differ significantly, the core idea is the ability not to be ruled from without, but to be self-determining. This idea underlies the imperative to bring the external and internal world

5 under rational direction, which is the hallmark of German idealism in its development of the

Enlightenment project.

As the precursor to German idealism, Leibniz (1646-1716) rejected the external determination of the materialist thought of his time, but instead, he conceives of subjects as inwardly self-determining centres of force and change; these centres he called monads. In their essential rational and juridical personalities (but not in their material, bodily, thus phenomenal composition), human subjects can be considered to be monads of this type, acting on internal reasons rather than simply reacting to external causes. For Leibniz, the spontaneity with which monads are invested means constant change in response to an inner imperative that belongs to the subject alone. Each monad is unique in its perspective on the world. Each is active and self- directing, revealing in its actions an inner content. The activity of these monads can be explained from their own intrinsic properties, not from external mechanistic causality (though Leibniz does not deny mechanist causal laws; they have their legitimate sphere of operation in the derivative, phenomenal world that the monads structure in their purposive, self-directed movements). He thus admits two levels of causality, one teleological and formative, the other mechanical and derivative, though the complexities and possible changes in the architectonic of Leibniz’s system cannot retain us here. As befits the founder of the calculus, Leibniz’s philosophy means thinking change and the forms that change engenders. Action is revelation or projection of a spontaneous force, resulting in a form as the expression of this force. Form is thus visible force, manifesting itself in time and space.

Kant develops this Leibnizian idea critically, reconceiving spontaneity not as a kind of internal necessity which governs subjects’ actions, but as the ability to abstract from the motives of sensibility, or as what he calls negative freedom. (Ernst Cassirer, one of the important

6 twentieth-century historians of philosophy, describes Kant as Leibniz’s most intelligent reader and his genuine philosophical heir).15 Theoretically, Kant characterises spontaneity as the mind’s power of producing representations out of itself.16 Practically,17 it refers to the will’s capacity to exempt itself from external causal determination, and to direct its course according to self- imposed rules or maxims which are themselves not causally derived. On Kant’s account, subjects are sensibly affected, but not, as Enlightenment materialists maintain, sensibly determined. 18

Practical reason endows subjects with the ability to abstract from the workings of natural causes or desires, as these arise in the medium of sensibility; and to initiate in the phenomenal world new causal series, whose origin lies in our practical orientation toward the world, the ways that we take up or relate to externality, rather than in being directly caused by anything foreign to the will.19 For Kant, desires do not directly necessitate action, but operate through the medium of practical judgements, after being sifted and assessed in light of their fitness for subjects’ teleological projects. Negative freedom in Kant’s sense is precisely this independence of the will from desires, and the capacity to adjudicate among them; the will is not immediately determined by external causes, but only by causes which it itself admits, or allows to operate.20 Freedom is not the fulfilment of indiscriminate desires, as in Hobbes, but precisely entails the ability to discriminate and to judge on the basis of practical reason. From spontaneity flow the other concepts which Kant adduces in his account of agency: autonomy and heteronomy.

Autonomy is self-legislation in accord with the moral law, and out of the motive of duty: it is freedom in a positive sense, whereby practical reason manifests its primacy over desire. The contrary of autonomy, heteronomy, or taking the law from elsewhere, is nonetheless a manifestation of spontaneity. In acting heteronomously, subjects determine themselves in conformity with a desire,21 and in opposition to duty; it is not the case that the desire simply

7 determines the subjective will, as on the materialist model, but rather that the will actively colludes in this determination, in pursuit of illegitimate ends, or in opposition to what ought to be. From this perspective Hobbesian liberty is no true freedom, but enslavement to externally- determined desires. But this enslavement is self-imposed: even heteronomous acts display spontaneity and subjective activity, but do so in a perverse form.

The centrality of activity and spontaneity is the characteristic trait of Fichte’s philosophy.

Fichte experienced his original encounter with Kant’s Critiques as a liberating release from the grip of dogmatism, materialism, and determinism. His stellar ascension from very modest beginnings to the Chair of Philosophy in Jena was initially due to a mistaken attribution to Kant of his first anonymous publication, Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (1792), and the immediate renown which this work won its author. He followed up this publication with two other audacious texts, in defence of the French Revolution (both 1793).22 Thus his career began in critical engagements with religion and legislation, recalling Kant’s remarks on the tasks of

Enlightenment. Dieter Henrich has observed that Fichte’s influence, as mediated by Romantics and Idealists like Schlegel, Novalis, and Hölderlin, is arguably greater than any philosopher since

Plato, 23 and that it has been decisive for modern Western understandings of formative subjectivity. Yet Fichte also exists in caricature. Heinrich Heine in a famous passage ironically describes early reactions to Fichte’s 1794 Wissenschaftslehre as if it were a doctrine of

Berkeleyan subjective idealism and of solipsism:

“The great multitude believed, in fact, that the I of Fichte was the I of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and that this individual I denied all other existences. ‘What shamelessness!’ cried the good people, ‘this person does not believe that we exist, we who are far more corpulent than he is, and who, as mayors and professional bookkeepers, are even his betters!’ The ladies asked, ‘Doesn’t he at least believe in the existence of his wife? No! And Mrs. Fichte puts up with this?’” 24

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But the repudiation of the external world in no way corresponds to Fichte’s project. The point is not merely to interpret the world, or to interpret it away, but to change it. The key to

Fichte’s idealist activism lies in the notion of positing. The English translators of Fichte’s first

Wissenschaftslehre of 1794-95 observe wryly that it often appears that Fichte knows only one verb, to posit (Setzen);25 but in this seemingly ordinary and innocuous verb is concealed the essence of his idealism, and of his revisions of Kant.26

In the first, Jena version of the Wissenschaftslehre 27 (a text to which he constantly recurred, and with whose exposition he was never satisfied), Fichte poses the question of the relation of freedom and spontaneity to objective necessity, as these are manifest in both theoretical representation or experience, and in practical striving or transformation. The problem which Fichte confronts is reminiscent of Leibniz, “the immortal Leibniz” as Fichte calls him:28 how can the active, spontaneous subject be affected by a cause outside itself? How is its continuous motion interrupted by an encounter with an alien object, and how does the subject interact with that object in ways consistent its own freedom? The philosophical task is to show how the subject enters into interrelationship with external objects, both theoretically and practically. The ubiquity of the verb Setzen is explained by its foundational role in these two domains. In its theoretical capacity, reason encounters the objective order as given, independently of the subject; but in this encounter the fundamental question is not how the world impinges on subjects or determines them as if they were merely passive receptors of outside influences, but how subjects actively relate to objects, posit them or take them up, incorporating them into their experiences; and how, decisively, reason is wirklich: how it transforms (as well as cognizes) the world. This bringing the world of objectivity under the command of practical reason is the process of emancipation in Fichte, and is the meaning of history.

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To determine the relations of subject and object, Fichte undertakes the exhaustive analysis of activity that comprises the core of his first system. In demonstrating what is involved in acts of positing, Fichte wishes to rethink the dualism which Kant establishes between receptivity and spontaneity in conscious action.29 He stresses that subjects are active throughout, even in the ways they appropriate outside influences. The deficiency of Kant’s presentation of experience is that he simply invokes intuition as the medium through which an alien content comes to be present in consciousness (I, 186), although Kant recognises that reception also involves activity in that cognizing subjects filter this material through the pure forms of intuition, space and time, thus provisionally processing it and making it available for the application of concepts. Only subsequently are concepts deployed, as forms of the activity of understanding, to structure this given content; so, at least, runs the dominant Kantian account.30

In a move which recalls Leibniz, Fichte deliberately blurs the distinction of intuition and concept. The issues which Fichte raises are at the centre of his activist idealism. He emphasizes, in a first step, that the intuitive moment of experience already contains a spontaneous dimension of activity and freedom.31 Not inconsistently with Kant, but more explicitly, Fichte insists that intuition is not mere passive reception, but already an initial productive appropriation by subjects of the material world. Fichte now proceeds to his second step: he subordinates intuition to conceptuality because he takes the conceptual framework to supply the conditions of possibility for any particular intuition. Although the encounter with the object, or the clash with the not-I, remains a necessary component of experience, Fichte underlines that intuition is already a taking up or (provisional) positing of the object, and that it occurs as an instance of the application of the concept of reciprocal causality. Thus Fichte stresses the active, subjective, constitutive act of experience. Even in the cognitive act we are not merely outwardly determined, but

10 spontaneously self-determining in relation to the external world. We posit the world by situating it within our cognitive experience, and ourselves in it. Unlike dogmatic idealism, Fichte’s critical or formal idealism does not deny the empirical reality of the object (I, 172, 279-81).32 Against materialism, however, the object itself is not the sufficient cause of experience, as though the subject were a mere passive spectator. (I, 280) The formative, shaping power of subjectivity in experience is the expression of its spontaneity.

Fichte seeks to show, next, how the concepts and categories of the understanding evolve as modes of subjective activity, and how these concepts stand in determinate relations to each other. Fichte links concepts together, like a weaver, showing for example that if we think the category of relation through that of quality or through that of quantity, different aspects of our productive activity come to light, and different ways of situating ourselves in the world become possible. Fichte wants to demonstrate that the Kantian cognitive categories are forms of the practical subjective appropriation of the world; and to show that subjects exert active causality in nature. The derivation of the concepts is the explication of the forms of this activity.

Further, this cognitive process is fundamentally related to practical reason as the call to realise reason, to transform the objective order. This process involves fundamentally relations to other subjects, and self-consciousness itself as a structure of intersubjective relations.33 The

Grundlage des Naturrechts of 1796 (the year before Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals) offers an account of juridical relations in which the freedom of one can co-exist with the freedom of others, based on reciprocally educative interactions among subjects. The juridical sphere originates as a structure of practical reason based on the two moments of Aufforderung and

Anerkennung: respectively the elicitation of freedom through the demonstration of what it means to act freely in pursuit of an end, and, in response, the mutual limitations which are the necessary

11 conditions of compatible external freedoms.34 Such a system is not idealist in a pejorative sense, relying on the good will alone, but requires the possibility of legitimate constraint through political and juridical institutions.

In Fichte’s System of Ethics of 1798, freedom is understood as the causality of the concept, that is, the power of subjective thought and will to refashion objectivity in light of ends; he defines it elsewhere as the sensuous representation of spontaneous activity. Spontaneity, in other words, is labour. Both Foundation of Natural Right and the Closed Commercial State focus on freedom and action in their juridical aspects as the right of spontaneity, the right to initiate changes in the world of the senses in accord with our concepts and purposes, and to bring these processes to fruition. Labour is the manifestation of spontaneity and freedom, as well as a means to material need-satisfaction. The right to labour is the fundamental juridical principle: to be a cause of change in the material world, and to be recognized as this cause. The conditions of effective action, to be stipulated in theory and provided in practice, are three-fold: first, material, the attribution by persons to themselves of an objective sphere for their activity, and access to the requisite tools and materials through which their activity can be transmitted to objects; secondly, intersubjective: subjects reciprocally consent to restrict their own efficacy so as to allot a sphere to each, and refrain from interference in the activities of others; and thirdly, epistemic: the maximum possible consistency and predictability of objective processes in which individuals plan their labour, hence the imperative to reduce contingent disturbances occasioned by the unpredictable workings of the world market. Thus Fichte advocates the economic self- sufficiency of political communities, their monadic character.

The sphere of right can be illegitimately constricted by economic institutions whose ends are individual welfare: that is, a conflict can arise between the claims of empirical and pure

12 practical reason. This constriction occurs when, as a result of inequality in civil society, some individuals are deprived of access to the means of activity in the objective world, and thus are denied freedom. Despite its problematic controls and regulations, Fichte conceives an interventionist state to preserve the possibility of free causality and spontaneity for all subjects, consistent with the basic principles of Kantian juridical thought. The types of intervention which he sanctions differ fundamentally from the enlightened absolutist state of which Christian Wolff, in a distinct development of Leibnizian principles, had been an advocate in the mid-eighteenth century. For Fichte, the end of intervention is not to promote happiness or thriving (a variant of

Aristotelian eudaimonia based on an idea of natural ends), as in Wolff, but freedom, as in Kant, who had castigated the Wolffian form of state as despotic, because it paternalistically prescribed happiness to its subjects. An ought governs the moral and juridical spheres, enjoining us to processes of social creation,35 extending the scope of rightful action, and perfecting intersubjective relations as expressions of spontaneity. This represents a “post-Kantian perfectionism,” of which more can be said in another place.

What impedes the functioning of this system of freedom, however, is the 'characteristic trait of the present age', the problem of egoism. In his Addresses to the German Nation, Fichte

36 sees his times as the era of absolute sinfulness, of unchecked egoism. The generalised egoism which Fichte decries is the incapacity of particulars to elevate themselves to the status of the universal, or the failure to adopt the point of view of morality and autonomy, that is, their failure to exercise their negative freedom. Egoism is thus the brittle and one-sided affirmation of freedom as private interest, the freedom of Hobbes run rampant. Modern alienation is the reign of heteronomy, a clinging to particularity and finitude, which Fichte characterises as inertia or idleness.37 Against torpor and indifference to moral betterment, against satiety and external

13 determination, Fichte issues a ringing call to spontaneous transformative action. To be spontaneous, and consciously so, is itself an injunction, a command of practical reason, and not only a theoretical description of our agency. Despite its devastating effects, egoism is only provisional, and can be overcome in a potential new age of autonomy whose dawning Fichte hopefully anticipates.

The historical process in which alienation and its possible overcoming are set is not strictly deterministic, as Fichte presupposes neither a self-correcting dynamic, nor an inexorable necessity which would reduce human activity to the heteronomous implementation of alien ends.

The possibility of a better world has the status of a directive idea. Reflecting on the conditions of its effectiveness, reason prescribes ends which correspond to its own essence. It cannot, however, guarantee their realisation. No natural necessity pushes individuals to elevate themselves to universality out of the fragmentation of the present; and causes work on our spirit

38 only to the extent that we admit them.

The imperative to bring the forms of objectivity under the command of reason is the hallmark of idealism, from Kant and Fichte to Hegel and his school. To the extent that the forms of objective social life and the claims of critical reason do not correspond, they ought to; and subjects ought to act to bring about this accord. History for German idealism is the expression of practical reason. For Fichte the progressive character of history as the realisation of reason is a moral postulate or regulative principle: by acting on the assumption that the objective world can be refashioned under the command of reason, we help to bring about this result. And never has that imperative been more pressing than today.

The mechanistic materialism against which emergent German idealism defines itself has become increasingly implausible in the light of recent scientific developments. Revolutions in

14 physics have shaken the old mechanistic conceptions to their foundation, and have established indeterminacy as a central feature of the movements of elementary particles and waves.

Neuroscience too has undermined determinism because no unique outcomes of system states can be predicted; the complexity of systems opens space for alternate possibilities.

If the older materialism of the Enlightenment, construing itself as scientifically grounded and validated, is vanquished on the terrain of contemporary science, idealism cannot be vindicated by the methods of science, either. As Kant contended, freedom demonstrates its reality in practical reason, and not as a matter of theory or scientific proof; Fichte endorses this position. Yet practical reason must engage with science, placing it securely within its appropriate place in a system of rational ends, and directing it to socially beneficial ends. The looming environmental crisis highlights the need to limit the arrogations of science, instrumental reason, and their particularistic economic applications. The age of absolute sinfulness is now even more absolute than in Fichte’s day, the distribution of wealth even more skewed, the instabilities of the world market more dire, the threats more extreme, not only to free agency, but to the very conditions of life. Idealism offers no facile consolation in these circumstances: not refuge in a theoretical view of inevitable historical advance (or decay); nor any metaphysical guarantees of progress. Instead, it issues an injunction, a stern imperative to strive unrelentingly to bring the forms of objectivity under the command of reason. It mandates a careful stewardship of the environment, and social creation to consolidate and extend the sphere of right: to set limits to our own actions so that all may be free. It is not necessary to revert to an ancient vision of natural limits. In Kantian idiom, we must learn to legislate limits to ourselves. The unity of thought and being does not mean that being is eradicated, but enhanced.

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German idealism proposes new ways of understanding the modern world and the capacities of modern subjects, while remaining attentive to the conflicts and contradictions that beset this world. Hegel claims that philosophy cannot predict or prescribe the path of the future; this is the meaning of his famous image of the owl of Minerva, taking wing at dusk. Philosophy can, however, examine the historical process, offering subjects developmental perspectives on their world and the critical issues that beset it; and it can articulate the structures, requisites, and aims of rational agency. It can also act as an elicitation, inviting an ongoing interrogation into the validity of modern institutions, their emancipatory claims, and their successes and failures; and demonstrating nodal points for possible transformative action. In assessing these issues, German idealism is better regarded not as a closed and forbidding edifice, but as a beacon, illuminating both the historical becoming of freedom, and the obstacles that stand in its way.

* The author acknowledges the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Social Sciences.

1 (see Boyle 2000)

2 (see Pinkard 2002, 1-15)

3 The scope of this paper precludes discussing these divergences in any detail, though they can be quite sharp. On continuity and shifts in the post-Kantian tradition, see Pippin 1989.

4 (for a survey, Vesey 1982)

5 Hegel

6 Fichte…

16

7 (Beiser 2002)

8 Kant, Immanuel. [1784] 1970. “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in

Kant’s Political Writings, Reiss, Hans ed. Cambridge: CUP, 54-60.

9 Kant, Immanuel. [1781, 1787] 1998. Critique of Pure Reason, Guyer P. and Wood A. eds.

Cambridge: CUP, A vii-viii.

10 Hobbes 11 Even less deterministic accounts do not entirely escape this problem insofar as they take subjective preferences as essentially arbitrary, with reason relegated to an instrumental function.

Such apparent arbitrariness conceals the ‘hidden mechanism of nature’, the effects of unexamined and unresisted natural causality upon the will. For a discussion of one such voluntarist theory, see Moggach, Douglas. 2009-10. “The Subject as Substance: Bruno Bauer’s

Critique of Max Stirner,” Owl of Minerva, Vol. 41, no. 1-2, 63-86.

12 Marx, Karl. 1976. “Theses on Feuerbach,” Collected Works, vol. 5. New York: International

Publishers, 3-5.

13 Thin, non-Kantian versions of autonomy often define the term to mean consistent rank ordering of preferences, and efficiency of means. For recent reflections on this subject, see

Cristman, John and Anderson, Joel eds., 2005. Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism. New

Essays Cambridge: CUP.

14 Spontaneity has a technical sense here of self-causing action. This meaning is to be distinguished from popular usage, which implies that an action is undertaken without reflection.

Leibniz, G.W. [1720] 1991. Monadology, Rescher, Nicholas ed. Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press, esp. Section 11-13; Rutherford, Donald. 2005. “Leibniz on Spontaneity,” in

Rutherford, D. and Cover, J.A. eds., Leibniz. Nature and Freedom. Oxford: OUP, 156-80. For a stimulating and lucid discussion of Leibniz and German idealism, see Cassirer, Ernst. 2001. 17

Freiheit und Form. Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte, ed. R. Schmücker. Hamburg:

Meiner.

15 Cassirer, Freiheit und Form…

16 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B75/A51.

17 Henrich- must not conflate these two though

18 The standard reference is Hobbes’s Leviathan, Part One, which polemically redefines Stoic horme/aphorme (involving practical decisions by subjects to adopt or reject a maxim of action in relation to objects) as a mechanical pull or push exerted by the object on a subject. For a discussion of related models of agency, see Allison, Henry E. 1990. Kant’s Theory of Freedom

Cambridge: CUP, 5-6, 39-40, 60-61, 191-98. The sensibly affected/determined distinction appears on p. 60.

19 Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom, 85. Kant, Immanuel [1788] 1956. Critique of Practical

Reason, trans. L.W. Beck. London: Macmillan. See Henrich, Dieter. 2003. Between Kant and

Hegel. Lectures on German Idealism, ed. D. S. Pacini, D.S. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP,

46-61.

20 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, § 8 (5: 33).

21 See above, note 13.

22 Fichte 2 texts Fr. Rev. 23 D. Henrich (184) (223-227) 24 Heinrich Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, ed. Wolfgang Harich (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-Verlag, 1966), 168-69. (my translation DM)

25 Lachs…. 26 Primacy of the practical (but Ameriks, Breazeale, equiprimordiality..…)

27 J. G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre, Gesamtausgabe, Bd. I/2,

(Stuttgart: Fromann, 1965); hereafter, following traditional usage, WL. (The concluding portion

18

of the text was first published in 1795.) All bracketed references in the form (I,...) are to this edition. This text must be distinguished from later versions, unpublished during Fichte's lifetime.

On the relation of the versions of 1794, 1801, and 1804, see Martial Gueroult, L'évolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1930; reprint

Hildesheim: Olms, 1982); and Michael Vetö, "Les trois images de l'Absolu. Contribution à l'étude de la dernière philosophie de Fichte," Revue philosophique de France et de l'étranger,

182, 1 (1992), pp. 31-64.

28 Anaesidemus

29 Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 51; Edith

Düsing, "Sittliche Aufforderung. Fichtes Theorie der Interpersonalität in der WL nova methodo und in der Bestimmung des Menschen," in Mues, ed., Transzendentalphilosophie als System, pp.

174-97.

30 H. J. de Vleeschauwer, "Immanuel Kant," in La révolution kantienne, edited by Yvon Belaval,

2e. édition (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 61-63. This apparent change of position becomes yet more pronounced in Kant's Opus posthumum, where, in the idea of self-positing, the conceptual constitution of the object assumes a still greater priority. Immanuel Kant, Opus posthumum, translated by Eckhart Förster and Michael Rosen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1993), pp. 170-99. See Burkhard Tuschling, "Apperception and Ether: On the Idea of a

Transcendental Deduction of Matter in Kant's Opus posthumum," in Kant's Transcendental

Deductions, edited by Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 193-216; but also Eckart Förster, "Kant's Selbstsetzungslehre," ibid., pp. 217-238.

31 Reinhard Lauth, "Der systematische Ort von Fichtes Geschichtskonzeption in seinem System",

Hegel-Annalen (1983), pp. 100-05.

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32 Note that at I, 426-28 (First Introduction), Fichte equates dogmatism with realism. He defines dogmatic idealism at I, 172.

33 That Fichte's theory is intrinsically incapable of grasping the problem of intersubjectivity, has, however, been maintained by a long line of interpreters. See also Vittorio Hösle,

"Intersubjektivität und Willensfreiheit in Fichtes 'Sittenlehre'," in Fichtes Lehre vom

Rechtsverhältnis, edited by Michael Kahlo et al. (Frankfurt/M: Klostermann, 1992), pp. 29-52.

Other readings stress the foundational importance of intersubjectivity for Fichte. See Reinhard

Lauth, "Le problème de l'interpersonnalité chez J.G. Fichte", Archives de philosophie, 25, 3-4

(1962), pp. 325-44; Alexis Philonenko, La liberté humaine dans la philosophie de Fichte (Paris:

Vrin, 1966 and 1980); and Robert R. Williams, Recognition. Fichte and Hegel on the Other

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 27-70.

34 GNR 35 Maesschalk 36 J.G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, Werke, Bd. VII, pp. 263-74.

37 Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, p. 257ff.

38 Kant considers the adoption of a heteronomous maxim to be a free act. Kant, Metaphysics of

Morals, pp. 189-90.

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