Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20
New Essays on Fichte's Later Jena
Wissenschaftslehre, eds Daniel Breazeale and Tom
Rockmore
Iain Hamilton Grant
To cite this article: Iain Hamilton Grant (2004) New Essays on Fichte's Later Jena
Wissenschaftslehre, eds Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology, 35:3, 324-326, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2004.11007454
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2004.11007454
Published online: 21 Oct 2014.
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of philosophy (v.supra). V. "Clara asked with great animation, what was physical in
that other world?" "Above" and "below" are conceptions based in gravity, and there
are many gravities, not just one; earth and heaven belong together; there is harmony
where the internal predominates over the external; the presence of protective spirits;
why it is hard to part with earth after death (the complementarity of spirit and nature,
the successful intercession of Saint Walerich, and the relation between language and
the (Divine) Word: v.supra)). The editor adds a "Spring fragment" from the first
single edition: v.supra.
Edward Booth O.P.
Stykkish6lmur, Iceland
NEW ESSAYS ON FICHTE'S LATER JENA WISSENSCHAFTSLEHRE, eds
Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 2002, pp.xviii+360, hb $89.95, pb $29.94.
It is fascinating how much material is currently being generated around German
Idealism in general, and around Fichte in particular. Since Neuhouser's Fichte's
Theory of Subjectivity (1990), for example, there have been two further monographs
on Fichte, Wayne Martin's Idealism and Objectivity ( 1997) and Giinter Zoller's
Fichte's Transcendental Philosophy (1998), along with translations of Fichte's
Foundations of Natural Right (2002) and of Novalis' Fichte Studies (2003). All this
work suggests an attempted recovery of post-Kantian philosophical problems, a
recollection of their significance, perhaps, beyond the generally poisonous histories
of that philosophy. The present collection of nineteen new essays (including one by
Zoller) on the "later Jena Wissenschaftslehre" (comprising the Wissenschaftslehre
novo methodo (1796-9), the Foundations of Natural Right (1796-7) and the System of
Ethical Theory (1798)), is therefore to be welcomed as a contribution to this
recollection. At issue, the editors argue, is whether Fichte's philosophical "relevance"
is best assessed from the perspective of the Foundations of the Entire
Wissenschaftslehre (1794, tr. Heath & Lachs as The Science of Knowledge in 1982,
and to which the same editors devoted their 1992 collection Essays on Fichte 's
Science of Knowledge, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), or from the later revisions,
which ran, between 1800 and 1814, to thirteen.
Whether the 1794 work, the later Jena works, or the thirteen further revisions of
the Wissenschaftslehre between 1800 and 1814 are selected as the primary source of
Fichte's system, this collection bases Fichte's relevance on his contributions to the
philosophy of consciousness and subjectivity. Yet there is a second agenda against
which the collection seeks to rescue Fichte's strictly post-Kantian transcendental
philosophy. That is, contrary to Schelling's assertions in his letters to Fichte around
1800 (the relation between the two philosophers is the subject of Steven Hoeltzel's
insightful contribution to this volume), Fichte's transcendentalism was not only
capable of, but was actually turning towards, a philosophy of nature. It is against this
backdrop, which formed the basis of Schelling's and then Hegel's eclipsing of
Fichte's "philosophy of subjective reflection", that the collection seeks to defend
their author's philosophical relevance. Despite therefore the collection's stated
purpose of introducing the later Jena Wissenschaftslehre into English-language
discussions of Fichte's philosophy (which is certainly welcome), Fichte's general
relevance lies far more in a problem as close to issues at the core of contemporary
metaphysics as to his immediate successors' judgment: the relation of metaphysics to
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non-empirical nature. Fichte, whatever period the scholar selects, stands for the
practical determination of consciousness as circumscribing the totality of the domain
of metaphysics, ie., against any form of realism. What is unusual and instructive
about Fichte is not his accommodation of nature in philosophy, but rather the
extraordinary philosophical lengths to which he goes in order to demonstrate how the
development of philosophical and practical consciousness towards active and free
self-determination, is premised on its elimination. Fichte's philosophical relevance
lies, in other words, in its echoes, in Wittgenstein's solipsism in the Tractatus; in
Marx's denunciation of crude materialism in favour of the praxical determination of
historical consciousness; in the formalistic nominalism (The Science of Knowledge
effectively seeks to prove the infinite continuity of non-empirical consciousness with
infinitessimal calculus) that led Quinean metaphysics away from nature and towards
semantics, or led Heidegger from ontology to poetry; and in the only recently
diminishing prestige enjoyed by discursive constructionism in the humanities and
social sciences.
The outlines of this problem are effectively addressed by F. Scott Scribner's
account of the "explanatory crisis in transcendental philosophy" generated by
physicalistic rivals in explaining social interaction: briefly, if the theory of "subtle
matter" can provide a coherent account of the social, then a transcendental account of
conditions is either reducible to it, or eliminable by it. It is this problem that Fichte
confronts in Foundations of Natural Right. Although therefore the problem of the
traffic between physics and metaphysics gets a philosophically significant airing in
the late Kant and his immediate philosophical successors, it is not reducible to that
historical context, but rather faces all metaphysics.
While five of the nineteen essays in this collection are explicitly devoted to the
role of the Foundations in the "later Jena Wissenschaftslehre" (with a further seven
essays covering the Wissenschaftslehre novo methodo, just two the System of Ethical
Theory, and a further five on "various topics"), few direct the reader beyond the
intricacies of comparative studies of Fichte's own, changing system, towards the
question of that system's ongoing philosophical relevance, as does Scribner. This is,
of course, an issue that might frequently arise regarding such collections, and one
which would not warrant mention here were it not for the editors' explicit claim that
this collection treats of a subject matter with broader philosophical relevance than
Fichte-studies. Where relevance needs to be stressed, however (as does not generally
occur, for example, in a book of essays on Kant), it is clear that it is not immediately
evident. In part, the editors do provide a schema for assessing that relevance, insofar
as they emphasize changes in the Wissenschaftslehre that respond to Schelling's
particular criticism that Fichte's system cannot acknowledge an active nature. The
question remains, therefore, whether the essays demonstrate the relevance of
Fichteanism the editors seek.
Again, therefore, Scribner's essay, which takes the "scientific and social meanings
of subtle matter" Fichte investigates in the Foundations of Natural Right alongside
Fichte's late notebooks on animal magnetism (1813), contributes to precisely this
demonstration by posing the problem of the impact of scientific accounts of matter on
Fichte's articulation of intersubjectivity on the basis of affect (again, much like
Kant's sensus communis). Just as "affect" has one side turned to bodies and the
impersonal events they undergo (physiological affect), so another is turned towards
the effort of consciousness to appropriate it retrospectively from the former realm
(psychoanalytic affect), which thereafter becomes "the unconscious". This last is the
trajectory Scribner's fascinating essay takes, illustrating the many ways in which
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Fichte's philosophical enterprise acquires its hidden contemporary presence precisely
insofar as it once again opts for an essentially subjectivist solution to the problem of
matter and impersonal events.
In short, the continuing subjectivism of so much - especially continental philosophy assures the continuing relevance of Fichteanism, even if as a
philosophical archaeology of the conceptual bullwarks of autonomous mind,
discourse or image. However, the problem to which Fichteanism is a response - the
relation of transcendental to physical conditions - is that problem that gives this
attempted solution, and the essays herein addressed to it, a general philosophical
significance that is crucial for the future of metaphysics.
lain Hamilton Grant
University of the West of England
THE AGE OF GERMAN IDEALISM, Edited by Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen
M. Higgins, Routledge History of Philosophy Volume VI, Routledge, London, 1993.
Paperback 2003, pp.xxv+408. £18.99.
This collection is a survey from Leibniz to Kierkegaard. Lewis White Beck
contributes on German philosophy from Leibniz to Kant, though the real starting
point is Wolff. Wolff is followed by a half-page section on Baumgarten, which is
mostly on Wolff and therefore is somewhat inadequate. An only slightly more
substantial discussion of Moses Mendelssohn is followed by more satisfactory
discussions of Crusius, Tetens, Lambert and a return to Mendelssohn via his
controversy with Jacobi. Too many figures appear too briefly.
Kant receives three chapters. Bonevac summarises the 1st Critique, with a
particular emphasis on Kant as a rationalist and on the Platonist roots of his
argument. This obscures the questions of the influence of British empiricism on
Kant, his equal rejection of pure empiricism and rationalism as it appears in Leibniz,
the role of Aristotle and the tendency for Platonist ideas to become something other
than they are in Plato. The most 'rationalist' and 'Platonist' moments refer to
morality.
Becker covers ethics and politics in a reliable descriptive kind of way, in the
opposite approach to Bonevac. One has uncontroversial description and the other a
more tendentious interpretation, contributing to an inconsistent approach in the
volume as a whole. Gardiner's account of the Third Critique presents the role of
reflective judgement, beauty, the sublime and the teleological in Kant competently,
without reference to the implications for the other Critiques and Kant's philosophy as
a whole.
Daniel Breazeale writes on Fichte and Schelling. The chapter deals with the work
of two major philosophers who both had a complex philosophical development; and
it deals with the immediate reaction to Kant in Jacobi, Herder, Hamann, Goethe and
in particular Reinhold. This is too much and the consequence is that only Fichte's
early philosophy is given an adequate presentation.
There are three chapters on Hegel. Robert Solomon's chapter on The
Phenomenology of Spirit provides a comprehensible summary of the work. There is,
however, too much of a tendency to gesture towards positions Hegel supposedly
anticipated or answered in advance. The Preface is a more substantial piece of
philosophical work than Solomon suggests, because Hegel investigates the
limitations of philosophical prefaces very deeply. The mapping of The
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