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The Idea of Liberty in the Fichtean Natural Right

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The Idea of Liberty in the Fichtean Natural Right ESTUDIOS Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía ISSN-e 1988-2564 http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/ASHF.57896 The Idea of Liberty in the Fichtean Natural Right Hector Óscar Arrese Igor1 Recibido: 5 de noviembre de 2017 / Aceptado: 14 de marzo de 2019 Abstract. This paper discusses Isaiah Berlin’s interpretation of Fichtean political philosophy in terms of organicism. It shows that individual liberties play a fundamental role in the education of future citizens as a task performed by parents, not the state. However, Fichte did not defend an idea of individual liberty or non-interference, even if similarities between his theory and Humboldt’s suggest the contrary. At the same time, Fichte also did not espouse the idea of freedom as non- domination, as a comparison with Philip Pettit’s theory reveals. By contrast, Fichte posited that the education of future citizens makes sense only if individual liberties are considered inextricably linked to property. Keywords: Fichte, freedom, right, education, property. [es] La idea de la libertad en el derecho natural fichteano Resumen. En este trabajo se discute la interpretación de Isaiah Berlin de la filosofía política fichteana en términos de un organicismo. Esta interpretación muestra que las libertades individuales juegan un rol fundamental en la educación de los ciudadanos futuros en tanto que ésta es una tarea realizada por los padres y no por el Estado. Sin embargo, Fichte no defiende una idea de la libertad individual como no-interferencia, aun cuando las similitudes entre su teoría y la de Humboldt sugieran lo contrario. Del mismo modo, Fichte no defendió tampoco la idea de la libertad como no-dominación, como revela la comparación con la teoría de Philip Pettit. Por el contrario, Fichte sostuvo que la educación de los futuros ciudadanos tiene sentido únicamente cuando las libertades individuales son consideradas como inextricablemente unidas con la propiedad. Palabras clave: Fichte, libertad, derecho, educación, propiedad. Sumario. 1. The Problem of Education in the Natural Right. 2. Fichte and Humboldt on Freedom and Education. 3. Is Fichte a Republican? 4. Conclusion. Cómo citar: Arrese Igor, H. O. (2019): The idea of Liberty in the Fichtean Natural Right, en Revista Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía 36 (2), 407-419. 1 Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. [email protected] https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8773-5357 An. Sem. His. Filos. 36 (2), 2019: 407-419 407 408 Arrese Igor, H. O. An. Sem. His. Filos. 36 (2), 2019: 407-419 The problem of liberty has returned with force in the past decades, particularly due to the division between positive and negative liberty established by Isaiah Berlin. That division led to watersheds in the debate, as with the discussion by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas about the predominance of individual or political liberties, and in Amartya Sen’s thesis that said freedom consists in the development of capabilities to achieve reasonable ends that we might pursue.2 At the same time, however, it is important to highlight Charles Taylor’s radical criticism of the idea of negative liberty, which is understood as the mere realization of our factual desires in order to defend positive liberty as the realization of an authentic life.3 Also in circulation is the idea that liberty constitutes non-domination–that is, the resilient absence of arbitrary interferences upon the agent–which in turn constitutes the core of Philip Pettit’s republicanism.4 In a sense, that debate can be traced back to Benjamin Constant’s critique of Rousseau and is generally understood as a theory of the liberty of the ancients versus the necessary validity of the liberty of the moderns, or negative liberty.5 In that context, this paper explores the concept of liberty that Fichte defends in his Foundations of Natural Right, which tests Berlin’s critique of the Fichtean natural right in terms of organicism. Although Berlin draws upon Fichtean philosophy in different moments of his writings,6 in Freedom and Its Betrayal he developed a more extensive interpretation of the theory.7 According to his interpretation of the Fichtean theory of the state, freedom entails the integration in a supra-personal totality in which the individual loses him or herself as an individual.8 According to this reading, Fichte gave no quarter to the idea of negative liberty understood as non-interference. Although Berlin drew on Fichtean texts from different periods– including writings before his time at Jena–in the natural right of that period and in Addresses to the German Nation, an argument appears that bears importance for this paper. Berlin supported his interpretation with a passage from Foundations of Natural Right, wherein Fichte distinguished the ideas of totalitas and compositum to argue that the common will of the state can be identified with the former.9 From that argument, Berlin concluded that Fichte’s idea of will as totalitas excludes the currency of individual liberties. 2 Jürgen Habermas, “Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Lib- eralism,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 92, No. 3 (1995), 109-131; John Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 92, No. 3 (1995), 132-180; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000), 54-86. 3 Charles Taylor, “What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” in Robert Goodin and Philip Pettit, eds., Contemporary Political Philosophy. An Anthology, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 421-425. 4 Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17-79. 5 Benjamin Constant, Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 1110-1021; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), Vol. III, 351-393. 6 See Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 220-221, 424 ff., 569-575; The Roots of Romanticism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999), 88-99. 7 Isaiah Berlin, Freedom and its Betrayal (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002). 8 Ibid., Freedom and its Betrayal, 67-73 9 Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts nach Prinzipien der Wissenschaftslehre. 2. Teil, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. Reinhard Lauth and Hans Jacob (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann Verlag, Günther Holzboog, 1966, Volume I, 4), 14-19; Berlin, Free- dom and Its Betrayal, 70-71. Arrese Igor, H. O. An. Sem. His. Filos. 36 (2), 2019: 407-419 409 To test Berlin’s criticism, it is necessary to show that Fichtean educational policy, developed in the family, implies the neutrality of the state in moral problems and the defense of freedom of conscience without state interference. Nevertheless, such an idea does not mean that Fichte is an advocate for negative freedom. 1. The Problem of Education in the Natural Right Fichte based his concept of state on the principle of right (Rechtssatz) that makes it possible to guarantee equal spheres of action for all individuals. That idea does not apply to matrimony, however, which stipulates a moral and natural community that precedes the juridical order.10 For that reason, the right must regulate the family once its structure is established.11 The moral and natural character of matrimony derives from the nature of spouses’ sexual drives, which form the starting point of Fichte’s argument. On one hand, there is the masculine sexual drive that has an active character and is therefore compatible with reason. On the other hand, the feminine drive fulfills a passive role in procreation that must be sublimated to take the active form of love for men.12 However, the moral character of these natural drives remains unclear. The moral dimension surfaces only when human liberty comes into play in order to satisfy those drives, or not, which is possible by virtue of the conscience we have of them.13 Women have the drive to sacrifice their preferences for others’, which morally takes the form of love.14 This drive is the proper origin of matrimony and the family because men do not have that drive and develop it in a different way than women. This Fichtean thesis becomes clearer when addressing the problem of children’s education. Fichte stated that though the father has a moral drive to take care of vulnerable beings, he does not have the drive to take charge of a particular subject, his child. To anchor that drive, Fichte argued that the father possesses it in only a derivative way–that is, by way of the emotional bond that unifies him with his wife, which leads him to make her preferences and interests his own. Thus, a husband develops an attachment to his child and the drive to take care of his or her needs from the impetus of his wife’s love.15 At the same time, men develop magnanimity according to their natural drive mediated by freedom. Magnanimity consists of being worthy of a wife’s respect. Ultimately, marital tenderness unifies spouses and makes it possible for them to complement each 10 On this point, Fichte opposes the romantic thesis of the conventional character of matrimony; see Juan Cruz Cruz, Fichte: La subjetividad como manifestación del absoluto (Navarra: Ediciones de la Universidad de Navar- ra, 2003), 220. 11 Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, 95. 12 Ibid., 97. The idea that each gender looks for the satisfaction of his or her sexual drive, which results in procre- ation, is opposed to the Christian idea that the sex act has an exclusively reproductive function; David Archard, “Family Law (First Annex),” in Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Grundlage des Naturrechts, ed. Jean-Christoph Merle (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 188-189.
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