THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO INFINITE MIND: MORALITY, SELF-EXPRESSION, AND IMAGINATION IN GERMAN IDEALIST THOUGHT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF GERMANIC STUDIES BY MARCUS ALAN LAMPERT CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2015 Table of Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................................................... iii List of Abbreviations ........................................................................................................................................ iv Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................................ v Preface ............................................................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1: Fichte’s Science of Knowledge as a Theory of Concept Realization .............................................. 1 Chapter 2: Universal and Local Mindedness in the Development of the Jena Science of Knowledge ....... 29 Chapter 3: Fichte’s Philosophical Framework in the Work of Wilhelm von Humboldt ...................... 75 Chapter 4: Novalis’s Theory and Practice of the Imagination ............................................................... 116 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................... 150 ii List of Figures Figure 1: Fichte’s distinctions in the Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge ..................................................... 20 Figure 2: The structure of the philosophical system in the Foundation ..................................................... 44 Figure 3: Fichte’s distinctions in the New Method ........................................................................................ 57 Figure 4: The structure of the philosophical system in the New Method .................................................. 59 iii List of Abbreviations Frequently cited works have been identified by the following abbreviations: Fichte, Johann Gottlieb GA J.G. Fichte-Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften , edited by Eric Fuchs, Reinhard Lauth, Hans Jacobs and Hans Gliwitzky. Stuttgard-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann- Holzboog, 1964-2012. Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis) NS Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs , edited by Paul Kluckhohn, Hans-Joachim Mähl, Heinz Ritter, Richard Samuel, Gerhard Schulz. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960-2006. Humboldt, Wilhelm von WB Werke in fünf Bänden , edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010. iv Acknowledgements True intellectual discovery always requires community, and I have been extremely lucky these past several years to have had an outstanding network of mentors, teachers, colleagues, friends, and family who have enabled me to grow as a researcher and as a communicator. My deep gratitude goes first and foremost to David Wellbery, who has advised this project from beginning to end and whose dedication both to a broad intellectual perspective and to the highest scholarly standards of precision and clarity never ceases to amaze and to inspire me. I would also like to thank the other three members of my dissertation committee, who have all been invaluable to the development of the project: Eric Santner, for always pushing me to communicate my interests in terms more contemporary than the idiom of 18 th -century German philosophy, Robert Pippin for initially drawing my interest to Fichte and modeling for me the crystalline language of the modern, Anglophone-inspired approach to German Idealism, and finally Florian Klinger for encouraging me to find my own voice. Additional thanks is also due to Dina Emundts at the University of Konstanz for her feedback on my Fichte chapters and for generously sharing with me her own very instructive perspectives on German Idealist philosophy. The Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago has been my institutional home the past six years, and I am grateful for the rigor and the support that various members of the Department have provided, including Catherine Baumann, Christopher Wild, Susanne Lüdemann, and David Levin. A very special thanks is also due to Michelle Zimet for always helping me to move forward and for countless occasions of much-needed advice and support. Another crucial source of support has been the Department’s dissertation writing group and its members past and present: Robert Abbott, Martin Baeumel, Mirjam Berg, Peter Erickson, Jake Fraser, Greg Hedin, Maeve v Hooper, Tamara Kamatovíc, Jamie McCormick, Amy Stebbins, Philip Sugg, Bastian Reinert, Stephen Haswell Todd, Andrea Wald, and Joela Zeller. Thanks also to Daniel Carranza for his feedback on my chapter drafts and his patience in helping me talk through my ideas. The graduate students at the University of Chicago have made studying here a very rewarding experience. They have given me the gift of a community in which friendships both personal and intellectual have been able to thrive. I am also grateful to the Mellon Foundation for funding my final year of dissertation writing. Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank my family for their loving support and encouragement: my mother, my father, and my grandfather, my sister for paving the way, my brother for always listening, my aunts and uncles in Chicago and beyond. Completing a large research project is about making progress day by day, and no one has provided more help in getting me through the day and making each day a gift than my partner in life, Susanna Beerheide. vi Preface This dissertation offers a reappraisal of the work and influence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Starting with the publication of Dieter Henrich’s groundbreaking essay Fichte’s Original Insight , interest in Fichte’s philosophy has experienced an international renaissance, resulting in a growing number of articles, book chapters, and full-length monographs devoted entirely to investigating the significance of Fichte’s writings and the influence he had on his contemporaries. 1 However, I argue that Fichte’s most significant contribution has thus far eluded the grasp of his interpreters, a contribution that consists in having identified the basic form according to which mind structures experience. Only when we see the contours of Fichte’s entire project are we in a position to assess his influence on the work of his contemporaries. This is demonstrated in studies of the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis). The major limitation in the inherited view of Fichte’s work is that it has been interpreted as a theory of human consciousness and self-consciousness, rather than as a theory of human experience as it is shaped by consciousness. Fichte himself is partly to blame for this misconstrual, for he advertised his philosophy as a theory whose central message was the so-called self-positing ability of the human mind, something he first formulated in the 1794 Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge (hereafter: Foundation ) as the principle that “the self posits originally and absolutely its own being.”2 In his article Fichte’s Original Insight , Dieter Henrich took this to mean that Fichte is first and foremost a theorist of self-consciousness, the first, and perhaps the last philosopher of his generation to fully 1See: Dieter Henrich, “Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht,” in: Subjektivität und Metaphysik. Festschrift für Wolfgang Cramer , ed Dieter Henrich and Hans Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1966), 188-232. Other notable studies include: Robert Pippin, “Fichte’s Contribution,” Philosophical Form , 19 (1988), 74-96. Frederick Neuhouser, Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1990. Violetta Waibel, Hölderlin und Fichte: 1794-1800 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000). Eckart Förster, Die 25 Jahre der Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2011). 2 “Das Ich sezt ursprünglich schlechthin sein eignes Seyn.” In: Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (GA I/2, 261). vii recognize that standard views of self-consciousness as a reflective act of taking oneself as the object of one’s thought cannot do justice to the immediacy and certitude with which conscious beings refer to themselves.3 Subsequent studies, one by Dieter Henrich himself, have helped to expand this view, drawing out other dimensions of Fichte’s theory of consciousness such as the role that imagination and longing play in conscious life, the particular way in which consciousness construes objectivity, and finally the essentially inter-subjective structure of consciousness.4 However, the current state of research leaves open the extent to which Fichte does in fact have a unifying, developed view of the way in which consciousness structures experience and makes experience of the world present to mind. My central claim is that Fichte’s most significant philosophical insight concerns the division of experience into six basic elements, which in turn form a unity as interrelated aspects of how mind structures experience. According to Fichte, the essential structural features of human experience are sensuous form and matter , mental activity and rest , and the unifying principles of efficient causality and rational