The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts A CRITICAL EXPLICATION OF THE FIRST TWO SECTIONS OF FICHTE’S GRUNDLAGE DER GESAMTEN WISSENSCHAFTSLEHRE A Dissertation in Philosophy by Paul Rudolf Bilger © 2011 Paul Rudolf Bilger Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2011 ii The dissertation of Paul R. Bilger was reviewed and approved* by the following: Dennis J. Schmidt Professor of Philosophy Chair of Committee Dissertation Adviser Christopher P. Long Associate Professor of Philosophy Brady Bowman Assistant Professor of Philosophy Jeffrey Nealon Professor of English Nancy Tuana Professor of Philosophy Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Philosophy *Signatures are on file at the Graduate School iii Abstract In this dissertation, I offer a critical explication of the theoretical section of Johann Gottlieb Fichte‘s Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, abbreviated as Grundlage); in doing so, I explore the highly idiosyncratic mode of philosophical reasoning used in that text. In doing this, it is of decisive importance to understand how a set of philosophical figures function to drive the development of the conceptuality required for Fichte‘s project. As such, the explication of this work partly involves tracing the way in which figurative language and geometrical schema develop and drive the determination of that conceptuality. In closely following the Grundlage‘s series of concepts and schemata, we are better able to understand the decisive importance such figures play in Fichte‘s thought, and, more generally, develop a deeper appreciation of the role of the imagination in philosophical thinking. iv Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 1: Fichtean Schemata and Figurative Language…..…… 10 Chapter 2: Architectures of System……………………………. 25 Chapter 3: I and not-I …………………………………………. 51 Chapter 4: Division and Determination.……...……………..…. 71 Chapter 5: the Principle of Ground …...…………….……...…. 89 Chapter 6: Efficacy and Substantiality…………………………. 108 Chapter 7: Inter-active and Independent Activities….…………. 139 Chapter 8: Consciousness as Crossing…...…………….………. 164 Chapter 9: Ideal and Real Ground…………..…………………. 176 Chapter 10: the Determination of Totality……………………... 199 Chapter 11: Imagination and Anstoß…………………….….….... 211 Chapter 12: the Deduction of Representation……….…………. 235 Conclusion: The Role of Liminal Figurativity in the Grundlage…. 253 Bibliography…………………………………………………….. 257 1 Introduction How at all does the empirical I stand to the pure I-I? Anyone who wants to be a philosopher will more than appreciate a little information on this, and above all want not to become a ludicrous creature by being transformed, eins zwei drei kokolorum, into speculation. — Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding unscientific postscript Fichte‘s thought is difficult to understand but easy to caricature. As Günter Zöller notes, the difficulty of his work arises from the fact that he ―eschewed established philosophical terminology, continued to revise the presentation of his philosophical position throughout his lifetime and made unprecedented demands for sustained concentration on the listeners of his lectures and the readers of his works‖ (Fichte‘s Transcendental Philosophy 25). As opposed to this, the central position which he gives to the I, especially in his Jena period, makes it easy to reduce his philosophy to a slogan: ―The I is to be the central principle of philosophy,‖ which, when read superficially, appears to be nothing more than philosophical narcissism1. The seeming opacity of his thinking, when combined its traditional reception as a mere subjective idealist— a paving stone on the way from Kant to Hegel— had left the careful study of his work in a state of near total neglect until the relatively recent resurgence2 of interest in his work in the second half of the twentieth century. Given the difficulty of engaging Fichte, and the ease of dismissing him as the ―Philosopher of the I,‖ one might wonder if understanding Fichte is worth the effort. 1 This is a comparatively benign way of interpreting the Fichtean centrality of the I. In Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer writes, ―in [Fichte‘s] early doctrine, according to which the sole raison d‘être of the world lies in affording a field of activity for the imperious transcendental self, the relation between the ego [das Ich] and nature is one of tyranny.‖ Horkheimer understands modern rationality to be much closer to this portrayal of Fichte than that rationality itself recognizes. 2 Foreshadowed by Heidegger‘s lectures on German Idealism, but truly coming into its own, in German speaking countries, with Dieter Henrich‘s work on Fichte (Henrich, Einsicht). In the English speaking world, Daniel Breazeale has been instrumental in both making his work accessible in translation and in editing multiple anthologies which comment on some phase of his thinking. See the bibliography, below, for an indication of its scope. 2 I initially encountered Fichte‘s work in a graduate course on German Idealism; at this time, I became acquainted with the work of his Jena period (1794 — 1800). This period of his thinking is marked by both an insistence on establishing scientific (i.e. Wissenschaftlich) rigor within philosophy and the project of securing, through philosophical thought, the foundations of the other sciences. In itself, this is not unusual, as many thinkers of the same era (e.g. Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Jacob Sigismund Beck, etc.) understood themselves as having a similar, if not identical, project. Nor is it unique to Fichte that he finds his point of departure in the study of Kant‘s critical philosophy (the same is true of Reinhold and Beck) or even that he aspires to ―complete‖ the Kantian project. What struck me about Fichte was the way in which he thematizes representation itself: representation— the experience of a certain set of mental determinations as free or constrained— isn‘t simply presupposed but set forth as something which must be explained, but must itself be accounted for. Given the critical parameters of Fichte‘s philosophy, this cannot mean explaining representation on the basis of something which exists wholly independently of it. Representation must be accounted for on the basis of something not wholly other to it, yet also more fundamental than it (i.e. unlike representation, not requiring a higher ground to explain). This means that the principles which account for the emergence of representation can neither be ―things in themselves‖ nor themselves mere representations. If these principles were things in themselves, he would be left with the skeptical impasse of how knowledge of such things is possible; if they were mere representations, he would be presupposing the very thing he sets out to account for. Fichte‘s turn to the I (das Ich) must be understood in terms of this exigency. On the one hand, the I is the being for whom there are representations; on the other, it is, itself, the representing being (the Kantian legacy)— the I is active in representation. But merely appealing to the I is not sufficient; the representations which must be accounted for are not mere fancy but are bound up with feelings of necessity and constraint. How and why should the I limit itself in this way? Yet, 3 once again, appealing to a thing-in-itself as the limiting principle of the I is not acceptable, as that outstrips the limits of critical philosophy. The I, ―itself,‖ becomes something which must be understood— not, at this point, by appealing to a ground outside the I, but through a more nuanced examination of the I‘s self-constitution. Like representation, the I cannot be simply presupposed, but the peculiar logic of its ―self-positing‖ must be investigated. At this point, the problem of representation becomes the problem of self-consciousness; this is because the I‘s existence is unthinkable apart from its self-positing. For Fichte, self-consciousness is not a matter of coming to be conscious of something which pre-existed that act, but is itself the activity through which both the being which is conscious and the being which that being is conscious of exist. For the I to be an I, it must be conscious of itself as an I. Indeed, this is why Dieter Henrich understood Fichte‘s thought to be of contemporary relevance. Henrich writes, ―[a]nyone seeking a suitable concept of ‗self-consciousness‘ must go back to Fichte and the knowledge he achieved‖— it is not new that the I is taken as an explanatory ground (consider Descartes); what is new is the way in which self-consciousness itself becomes a problem. Thus, in Fichte‘s Jena period, we find two questions which are not without contemporary relevance— the question of the emergence of representation, and the question of essential nature of subjectivity. Because of this relevance, it is the aim of this dissertation to provide readers with some access to Fichte‘s thought in its earliest, distinctively Fichtean phase— his work from 1794, by way of the lecture handbook he published that year. The text under consideration here is Fichte‘s 1794 lecture handbook, Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, hereafter abbreviated as Grundlage). This was the first (and only public) detailed presentation of the foundation of his philosophy, and, as the date suggests, we also have in this text a representative presentation of the earliest phase of the Jena period. Though many essays have been written, there has been little in the way of a sustained 4 explication of this text3. Because the chief interest for this work is the emergence of representation and the self-constitution of the I, I will limit the investigation of the Grundlage to the first two parts. To make sense of this work, we will also be making extensive use of two other texts from this period— the prospectus for the same lecture course (Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre) and an essay he wrote on the origin of language the following year (―On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language‖).