Franks_Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre

7/29/2019 Franks_Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre

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ZUR DISKUSSIONFreedom,Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Developmentof Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre

b y Paul Franks (Bloomington)When Fichte was at the summit of his philosophical fame, during his Jena period(179499) , he produced two presentations of the foundations of philosophy. The

first version has been available in English for some time. But a rise in classroominterest is marked by George Seidel's bilingual edition with commentary of the mostfamous section of the first presentation of Fichte's system, Part One of the 1794-95Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre.l Meanwhile Daniel Breazeale has madean enormous contribution to the Anglo-American study of Fichte, of German Ideal-ism and of the philosophical implications of Kant's revolution, by translatingFichte's lectures on the second presentation of his system, the 179699 Wissen-schaftslehre Nova Methodo.2 Fichte's second Jena presentation is thus accessible inEnglish for the first time.

These publications testify eloquently to the revival of interest in Fichte that hasnow spread from Europe to the Anglo-American philosophical community. Andthey make it possbile for English-speaking scholars and students to make an in-formed judgment, for the first time, about Fichte's massively influential but little-understood achievement at Jena. It is well-known (although little understood) thatFichte presented the I as the absolute ground of all reality in the Grundlage. But itis hardly known at all (at least among Anglo-American philosophers) that in theWissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo Fichte argued that there could be no I withoutsome relation to another who recognizes the I as an I, and that Fichte was the firstto make intersubjectivity and the concept of reciprocal recognition so importantto Hegel and to the continental tradition into a fundamental issue fo r philosophy.The second Jena presentation of Fichte's system is a rich and important work in its

1 Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre of 1794. A Commentary on Part 1 (West Lafayette,Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1993). Seidel uses the translation of PeterHeath and John Lachs from Fichte: The Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1982).2 Fichte: Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy. (Wissenschaftslehre) NovaMethodo (179619) (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992).Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie 79. Bd., S. 310-323 Walter de Gruyter 1997ISSN 0003-9101 Brought to you by | Yale University Library New HavenAuthenticated | 128.36.3.164


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Zur Diskussion 311own right, but it also suggests that the prevailing impression of Fichte's system as aspecies of metaphysical egoism requires revision. Together, Fichte's tw o Jena pre-sentations represent a significant attempt to account for the necessary features ofexperience while laying the ground for the revolutionary practical philosophy out-lined in Fichte's other major Jena works: the Grundlage d es Naturrechts (1796) andthe System d er Sit tenlehre (1798), who se accurate English tran slations we still await.3When Fichte lectured on both versions of his system at Jena in the 1790's, he wasa leading member of an intellectual community that included Goethe, Schiller andHerder, as well as Schelling, Hlderlin, Novalis and the brothers Schlegel At thattime, Fichte was generally regarded as the leader of the radical Kantians, occupyingthe center of the philosophical stage with his ambitious projects and provocativepronouncements. However, Fichte has been regarded as a peripheral figure since1799, when he migrated to Berlin amidst accusations of atheism that exploded intoa full-blown national controversy: the atheism controversy. At this m om ent, just asth e nineteenth century was beginning so the all-too-familiar story goes - thephilosophical baton passed from Fichte to Schelling and then to Hegel, and Fichte'swork at Jena should be regarded, at best, as a necessary but preliminary step on theroad to Hegel, while his work at Berlin may be disregarded altogether. This versionof the history of philosophy is in part the result of Hegel's powerful interpretationof world-history as a prelude to his own system. But it is also in part the result ofFichte's decision not to publish the mature versions of his philosophy which hecontinued to develop and to teach until his death in 1814. Fichte's reputation hasbeen allowed to rest mainly on the first version of his system, the Grundlage , whichwas w ritten at great speed, lecture by lecture, during Fichte's first semester of univ er-sity teaching, an d with w hich he quickly became dissatisfied.In recent decades, however, there has been a dramatic reassessment of Fichte'sphilosophical significance, first in Germany, France, Italy and Japan, and lately inAmerica. Since the 1790's, the quantity and quality of the discussion of Fichte's ideashave never been so high as they are at present. This reassessment would hardly havebeen possible if not for the posthum ous publication of Fichte's later works. Fichte'sso n published m ost of these wo rks a few decades after his father's death. But at leastone of Fichte's major works the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo on the basis ofwhich he lectured from 1796-99, during the bulk of hisJena years - was apparentlylost. This work reappeared in the form of a student transcript in the early years ofthis century and was published in 1937. A second transcript was discovered in 1980and published in 1982. Now Daniel Breazeale has prepared an excellent Englishtranslation of this highly important work, together with an extremely useful histori-cal introduction, in which he gives an account of Fichte's fateful decision to foregothe publication of his m ain philosophical wo rks. As Breazeale explains, Fichte pub -lished two introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo and its first chapter

3 G. E. Moore pointed out the inadequacy of K roeger's translation in "Review ofJ. G. Fichte, The Science of Ethics, as based on the Science of Knowledge(translated by A . E. Kroeger, edited by the Honourable Dr. W . T Harris, Lon-don, 1897)", International Journal of Ethics, Oct. 1898, IX; 92-97.

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312 Zur D iskussionin 1797-98,4 but he was interrupted by the atheism controversy, wh ich drained mo stof his energy for tw o years and cost him his chair at Jena. Altho ug h Fichte continuedto revise the manuscript until 1800, he never resumed publication for two reasons:

(1 ) By 1801, Fichte's views had developed in such a way that revising th e1 7 9 6 9 9 lectures was not enough; he had transcended the "new method" of theWissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo and an entirely new manuscript w as needed.Fichte's m ajor innovation in the Wissenschaftslehre Nova M e t h o d o (to which I shallreturn later) had been the thematization of intersubjectivity of reciprocal recogni-tion in the intelligible or spiritual w orld of finite rational beings within th e founda-tions of philosophy. But by the spring of 1798 before the accusation of atheismwas first made in an anonym ous pamph let published in the autumn of that yearFichte had already come to think that he had not yet accounted adequately for theunity or worldhood of the spiritual world, and he had realized that his account ofth at un ity w ould have to take the form of a philosophy of religion or an account ofGod. The atheism controversy only strengthened Fichte's pre-existing commitmentto lay theistic foundations for philosophy and it was this project that ultimately le dFichte beyond th e Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo in 1801. The unpublished Jenama nuscript thus provides the key that makes it possible to understand th e (otherwisequite puzzling) transition from the Jena philosophy of the self to the theocentricworks of the Berlin period.(2 ) Meanwhile, Fichte's attitude towards publication w as shifting. He had alwaysdistinguished sharply between th e spirit and the letter, and he had long maintainedthat philosophy, which is all spirit and is inadequately expressed by written texts,demands a spiritual activity that cannot be conveyed by the text and must be sup-plied by the reader. His reluctance to expose philosophy to misunderstanding andridicule by publishing it in written texts was exacerbated by the gross incomprehen-sion which he encountered during the atheism controversy. By 1804, Fichte decidedto confine himself to oral communication of his still developing thought about th efoundations of philosophy. Breazeale deserves credit for bringing our attention tothis little-known aspect of Fichte's conception of philosophy, w hich connects Fichteto a tradition of philosophical esotericism whose classical representative is Plato'sSeven th Letter . Fichte's conception of philosophical education and his understandingof the difference between w ritten and oral communication deserve full investigationelsewhere.' The disappearance of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova M e t h o d o for over a century ledto enormous confusion and some injustice. Even Martial Gueroult, whose Evolutione t Structure de la Doctr ine de la Sc ience chez Fichte (Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1930)is a landmark in the study of Fichte, failed to realize the significance of the shift inFichte's thinking in 1 795 96 and failed to recognize the distinction between the twoJena presentations. Consequently, Gueroult misinterpreted the Grundlage, intowhich he imported the specific doctrine of intellectual intuition outlined in the

4 Breazeale has translated these texts in In troduct ions to the Wissenschaftslehre a n dOther Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).

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Zur Diskussion 3131797-98 introductions to the Wissenschaf ts lehre Nova Meth od o . Following Eduardvon Hartmann, he also accused Fichte of a contradiction between the theoreticalphilosophy of 1794-95 - which, he said, demonstrates the unreality ofeverythingexcept the absolute I - and the practical philoso phy articulated in the Naturrech t of1796 and the Si t t en lehre of 1798 - which, he said, depended on the reality of acommunity of finite consciousnesses.5 In fact, the latter works pertain to Fichte'ssecond presentation and it is no criticism of Fichte to say that they cannot be effort-lessly reconciled with his first - although, in my opinion, it is an open questionwhether some effort might ultimately succeed in reconciling them.6 Gueroult mayperhaps be excused on the grounds that th e Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo hadnot yet been published when he wrote (although extracts had already been printedin Germany).7 But echoes of these misinterpretations can still be heard. And it ismore difficult to excuse Peter Heath and John Lachs for including both the two179798 introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo and the Grundlagein their English translation w ithout once explaining that the First and Second Intro-ductions are introductions to a d i f f e r e n t version of the Wissenschaftslehre. This isbound to confuse th e unwary reader and is likely to perpetuate Gueroult's misinter-pretations. Seidel is also not free from this confusion, for he suggests repeatedly8that the N a t u r r e c h t and the Si t t en lehre are to be understood in terms of theGrundlage because they are, according to their subtitles, n a ch Principien der Wis-senschafts lehre as if Fichte used the term Wissenschaftslehre to signify a book. Infact, by Wissenschaf ts lehre Fichte meant philosophy itself the foundation of allknowledge which he strove until his death to articulate and which he thought notext could adequately express.To appreciate the significance of Fichte's wo rk at Jena, one must understand notonly the differences between the 1794-95 and the 1796-99 presentations, but alsothe sense in which both are responses to the same set of philosophical problems.Seidel is correct, I think, to portray Fichte as both inheriting and transcending theKantian problem of the actuality of freedom and the relationship between the intelli-gible and the empirical worlds. In the Third Antinomy, Kant argued that freedomwas n ot impossible from the theoret ical point of view, provided that it was locatedwithin the intelligible world and not within th e empirical w orld governed by the lawof causality. In the Crit ique of Prac t i ca l R e a s o n , Kant sought to deduce the actuali tyof freedom from impractical point of view, by showing that we human s are capable,despite the temptations of desire, of determining ourselves in accordance with themo ral law tha t governs the intelligible world. For F ichte, Ka nt w as the one who hadmade the greatest discovery in the history of hum anity without, like all discoverers,

5 See Gueroult, Evolut ional: 41 f. and E. von Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphy-s ik (Leipzig: H. Haacke, 1900), II: 75 f.6 This criticism of Gueroult originates with Luigi Pareyson, one of the first schol-ars to recognize the importance of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, in hisFichte (Turin: Edizioni di "Filosofia", 1950), I: 315-317.7 See Breazeale, Foundat ions, 34 .s Seidel, 2, 68, 88.



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314 Zur Diskussionquite knowing w h a t he was doing and w i thout knowing how to transpose h is ideasfrom the piecem eal order of discovery to the system atic order of justification; andth e problem of freedom was, for Fichte, the key to systematization. For one ofKant's greatest insights w as tha t the natural laws governing the empirical world,including the law of causality, we re e xpressions albeit necessary expressions ofh u m a n freedom or spontaneity, and in Fichte's view the systematic grounding ofKant's philosophy demanded th e deduction of the actuality of the freedom underly-ing theoretical knowledge, and the establishment of the unity of that freedom w iththe freedom und erly ing practice, w ith ou t oblitera ting their distinctness. Thus Fichtebelieved tha t one could not solve the theoretical problem of the representation ofth e external w orld at the heart of which lies th e problem of synthetic a priorijudgment , both w ith respect to space and t ime and w ith respect to the categories without also, and in a single system, solving th e practical problem of the freedomof th e will. And both Fichte's 1794-95 and 1796-99 works may be described asa t tempts to carry out the m assively am bitious project of a thorough going deductionof f reedom.Seidel is correct, then, to relate Fichte's project to the Kantian problem of theactuality of free dom . How ever, Seidel m isconceives the nature of the Kantiandoctrine of tw o worlds and theref ore the significance of Fichte's response. For Seidelthinks that the distinction between the intelligible world and the empirical world isa distinction between act ions and their consequences: "For example, in virtue of the'intelligible order of things,' I possess free and autonom ous causality to jum p froman airplane or not; however, once I j ump, the determining and conditioning caus-ality, the necessity, of the law of gravity takes over."9 The problem to which Fichteresponds is, in Seidel's view , th e problem of achieving th e proper al ignment betweenagents, actions and consequences:

[... I]f I am to a ct in an ethically responsible fash ion in the sensible world, somelevel of knowledge on the part of the moral agent, the practical ego, regardingjust how m y freely posited actions m ay w ork out in the sensible w orld w ould bemore than helpful. Also, if there were not some genuine knowledge of the twoselves, then there would really be no w ay of knowing whe ther th e actions positedin the w orld of sense are, or were, actually mine and not someone else's.Fichte does not spell out the problem s associated w ith Kant's two critiques inprecisely these terms. Nevertheless, this is, I think, the problematic that he iswrestling with and the reason for his later insistence that there has to be anintellectual intuition [...] in performing a m oral action, th e self must be aware,must k n o w , that it is the self that is the one perform ing it.10

But (1) Kant's view is not, as Seidel thinks, that I am free to act as I choose butthat I cannot (alas!) control the consequences of my action. It is rather that I amfree to determine myself to act by adopting a maxim or general policy indeed, Iam free to determ ine m yself to act autonomously by adopting maxims in accordance9 Seidel, 9.10 Seidel, 10.



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Zur Diskussion 315with the procedural constraints of themoral law - but this freedom does not entailthat I will be able to act in accordance with my maxim on any given occasion, fordeliberate action depends not only on rational deliberation but also on my abilityto harness my empirical desires and inclinations, an ability that can only be devel-oped through long and arduous habituation. What is at stake in Kant's division ofthe two worlds is not, therefore, merely the efficacy of my actions, but whether Iam capable of genuine action - as opposed to mere behaviour - at all. Relatedly,(2) Fichte's problem with Kant's resolution of the problem of freedom is not thatKant has shown that there are noumenal selves and that there are genuine actions,but that he has left these selves and actions without establishing the proper corre-spondence between them, so that I cannot be certain whether a given action is to beimputed to my noumenal self or to yours or to some other's. Fichte's problem is,rather, that he does not think Kant has shown that there is - that 7am - a self atall and therefore whether there are any genuine actions in the world, so that I donot know whether I have the right to say "I",whether any actions aremine to claim.Hence the moral fervour of Fichte's philosophizing: until the reality of freedom isestablished, both our philosophy in the classroom and our actions in our everydaylives remain ungrounded. Their very existence - ourvery existence - remains inquestion.

Orthodox Kantians have always accused Fichte of chasing a chimaera and ofpursuing a line of questioning that can only lead to the dissolution of Kant's mostimportant ideas. But it can be surprisingly difficult, when one penetrates into thedepths of Fichte's thinking, to determine where he departs from Kant, who repudi-ated Fichte without, it seems, having read him - in August 1799, at the heightof the atheism controversy. The difficulty arises in part from the fact that Fichteuses key terms differently from Kant, and in part from the complex relationshipbetween Kant's thought and Fichte's ambition to deduce space, time, the categoriesand the moral law within a single account of human freedom. Here Seidel is of littlehelp. His commentary succeeds in obscuring a passage in which Fichte indicates histerminological departure from Kant,11 he makes no attempt to characterize the aimsof Fichte's reasoning, and he neglects entirely to analyze Fichte's strategies for at-taining those aims. Yet it is exactly with respect to such matters that students Seidel's intended audience are most in need of help, if they are to appreciate th ephilosophical seriousness of Fichte's endeavour.

It is instructive, however, to juxtapose the 1794-95 and 1796-99 versions ofthe Wissenschaftslehre. One might do worse than to think of the 1794-95 thesis-antithesis-synthesis method as an attempt to recast all philosophy in the form of

11 Fichte's account of his use of the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" in Grundlage,section 3, 4 (Seidel, 74 f.) makes it clear that his usage differs from Kant: sinceFichte takes analytic judgments to specify differences, and synthetic judgmentsto mark comparisons, there are no purely analytic judgments, for there are nojudgments of difference without the possibility of judgments of similarity. ButSeidel's gloss (76) assimilates Fichte's usage to Kant's distinction between expli-cative and ampliative judgments and refers the reader to the Critique of PureReason.



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Zur Diskussion 317insulating practice from theory, Kant at least preserved the non-contradictorinessand therefore the logical possibility of freedom, even if he also had to refuse freedomany theoretical actuality.

Whether such a reading of the Grundlage is justified is a larger question tha n Ican examine here, not least because it would require an investigation of Parts Twoand Three (not included by Seidel). There Fichte seeks to show that the transcenden-tal ima gination is a faculty through which hum an spon taneity unconsciously consti-tutes the very conten t of the sensible given. This view of the im agination (so impor-tant to the Romantics) enables Fichte to argue that th e autonomy which ought tobe consciously pursued in the practical sphere, is (in some sense) unconsciouslyachieved in the theoretical, so that autonomy is the actual but hidden principle ofthe empirical world. Whatever the merits of his 1794-95 presentation, Fichte did atany rate recognize shortcomings in the method of his presentation, and he soughtto remedy these shortcomings in 1796-99. Instead of formulating the system offreedom as a series of successive syntheses intended to overcome an original antin-omy -which Fichte nowdescribed as "the most difficult method of all"15 - heinstead invited his audience to think any thought whatsoever, then to think the Ithinking that thought, and then to accompany Fichte himself in the investigation ofthe ingredients and transcendental conditions of that freely performed act of think-ing oneself. Thus Fichte sought to ensure the active participation of his audience inthe production of the "I think" which, as Kant had argued, must be capable ofaccompanying any representation whatsoever. He hoped in this manner to securethe spiritual participation of his audience that he considered necessary for the propercomprehension of the let ter of the Wissenschaftslehre. And he entirely bypassed theconfusing attempt, in Part One of the Grundlage, to arrive at the spontaneous subject("I = I") by inviting his audience to reflect upon the logical principle of identity("A = A"). Even if Fichte is correct in thinking that formal logic is an abstractionfrom the acts of the absolute subject articulated in transcendental logic, Fichte's ownviews commit him to think that one cannot derive transcendental logic from formallogic, but that the derivation proceeds in the opposite direction only, so he shouldnot have expected anyone who did not already understand his system to see itsrelation to formal principles, and so he should not have expected anyone to gainaccess to his system by means of such principles, which in fact m ade incomprehen-sion all but inevitable.The Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo begins, then, not with an ant inomy butrather with a free act of conscious self-positing as a subject - with the explicitaddition of the "I think" to some th oug ht. Fichte thin ks of this act as the m akingexplicit for consciousness of the spontaneous activity of the I that implicitly consti-tutes consciousness - an intelligible activity that Fichte calls the Tathandlung. Andth e philosophical awareness of our spontaneity to which Fichte hopes thereby tobring us, is what he calls intellectual intuition - although wewho, unlike Fichte,are making this journey for the first time, will not in fact understand the sense

15 Breazeale, Foundations, 248,



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318 Zur Diskussionin which w e have attained intellectual intui t ion of the Tathandlung that constitutesconsciousness unti l w e have reached th e mid-point of the Wissenschaftslehre NovaMethodo, th e discussion of the pure will and our resistance to it in section 13.16

In tw o respects I find myself in disagreement with Breazeale about the methodand starting point of the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo. (1) He writes:[... I]n his new presentation, [Fichte] chose to follow what he himself describedas a "much more natural path," one that reversed the direction of the previouspresentation and proceeded from empirical experience to intelligible conditions from Tatsache to Tathandlung rather than vice versa.17

I can see no way to reconcile this statement with Fichte's own description of thedifference between the two starting-points: "Here [i. e. in the Wissenschaftslehre NovaMethodo} w e began with the Tathandlung and arrived at the Tatsache; but the methodof the book [i.e. the Grundlage] is just the reverse."18 Furthermore, (2) Breazealeadds in a footnote an error which he has repeated in each of his otherwise excellent Fichte translations and which has unfortunately made its way into th e English-language literature on his authority: "Tatsache is the ordinary German word for"fact"; Tathandlung is a word Fichte invented to designate the (self-)productive deedof the I [...]"19 "Tatsache" was not an ordinary German word in the late eighteenthcentury, although it has become one since. Instead, "Tatsache" was a philosophicalterm introduced in 1756 by J. J. Spalding to translate one of the central terms ofBishop Butler's Analogy: "matter of fact". This term carried with it a legal back-ground and entered German in the context of Enlightenment theology. A Tatsachewas a deed or occurrence whose actuality was not inductively or deductively demon-strable but was nevertheless well-established on the basis of reliable testimony. Theappeal to Tatsachen in this case, th e miraculous events of Christian history played a major role in the controversy about Lessing's publication of the Reimarusfragments in the 1770's. Indeed, as Lessing remarked at that time, the neologismwas so unusually successful that one could scarcely turn a page of certain bookswithout stumbling across a Tatsache, although he could easily remember a time whenit was in nobody's mouth.20 In contrast, "Tathandlung" is an old German wordwhose usage can be traced back several centuries before Fichte and which, althoughalready somewhat archaic, was still being used in the eighteenth century by as exem-plary a stylist as Lessing.21 A Tathandlung, as we are informed by Christian GottlobHaltaus in his Glossarium Germanicum Medii Aevi (Leipzig, 1758), is a violent action

16 See especially Breazeale, Foundations, 291 299.17 Breazeale, Foundations, 13.18 Breazeale, Foundations, 118.19 Breazeale, Foundations 13 n.; see also Breazeale, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writ-ings (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), xiv and Introductions to the Wis-senschaft slehre, 48 f.20 See "ber das Wrtlein Tatsache" in Lessing's Werke (Hildesheim and NewYork: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), XVII: 451.21 Lessing, Werke , XIX: 135 and XXI: 54.



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Zur Diskussion 319or an illegal use of force: "via et culpa facti: actio v iolenta, vis iniusta, nem pe contraleges iudiciariamque autoritatem admissa".22

W hy does this matter? And why did Fichte insist first in his 1794 review ofAenesidemus,23 generally considered to be the first public document of his systematicperiod; again in the 1796 culmination of an ugly controversy with his Kantian col-league at Jena, Schmid;24 and finally in the 1797 Second Introduction to the Wis-senschaftslehre No v a Methodo 25 - that philosophy must begin with a Tathandlungand not with a Tatsache! And why insist now on preserving Fichte's reference to anoriginary violence of reason? My view - which I can only mention here and willdevelop m ore fully elsewhere - is that Fichte wasattempting to correct a philosophi-cal tendency that arose from a misinterpretation of Kant's Faktum of reason. W henKant sought in the second Critique to deduce the actuality of freedom by means ofthis Faktum which he called a Tatsache in the third Critique21 he was under-stood to be appealing to what Reinhold called a fact of consciousness (Tatsache desBewusstseins) a state of affairs whose actuality, although undemonstrable, couldbe established through the "testimony" of the immediate awareness of morally im-peccable people. If the actuality of our obligation to obey the moral law could beestablished in this way, then it followed - since "ought" implies "can" - thatwemust be free to obey the law and therefore that we must be free to act without theinfluence of any empirically causal, sensuous motivation. If the freedom of the willcould be proven in this way, then why not solve a whole host of hoary metaphysicalproblems by appealing to one's immediate consciousness and one's reliability as awitness? Thus the facts of consciousness were multiplied in the philosophy ofSchmid, Fichte's colleague - and enemy at Jena. Fichte did not deny th at therewere facts of consciousness, but he denied vociferously that these facts could do anyphilosophical work; instead the facts of consciousness were precisely wh at philoso-phy was supposed to explain. And the starting point of philosophy had therefore tobe the ultimate ground of consciousness itself, which, as Fichte took Kant to haveshown, had to be the spontaneous activity of the subject: not a Tatsache or reifiedact, but a Tathandlung or pure activity that recognized no law but its own. Hencethe suggestion of violence and the rejection of external authority. W ithout the T a t -handlung of the subject, there could be no necessary laws of consciousness - nonormativi ty - and therefore no objective consciousness w hatsoever. Wh at is at stakein Fichte's attempted deduction of freedom, therefore, is nothin g less than the justifi-

22 Compare Jacob and W ilhelm Grimm , Deutsches Wrterbuch (Leipzig: S. H irzel,1854-1971), s.v. Thathandlung.23J < G . Fichtes smmtlich e Werke (Berlin: Veit, 1845-46), I: 8; Breazeale, Fichte:Early Philosophical Writings, 64 .24 /G. Fichtes smmtliche Werke, :448; Breazeale, Fichte: Early PhilosophicalWritings, 328.25 /G . Fichtes smmtliche Werke, 1.465; Breazeale, Introductions to the Wis-senschaftslehre, 48.2* Kants Werke (Berlin: W alter de Gruyter, 1902), V : 31.2? Kants Werke, V : 468,



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320 Zur Diskussioncation of normat iv i ty as such. Since Fichte's project can assume no pre-establishednorms whatsoever, it cannot help but resemble the revolutionary establishment of alegal system in the absence of any pre-existing authority , and it cannot help butcarry those sug gestions of violence and illegality that inevitably accom pany wha t issometimes called rev olutiona ry justice.It is wo rth noting tha t Kant's Faktum of reason, by which reason proclaims itselfas o rig ina ting law, is also associated w ith willfulness and violence. For Kant charac-terizes the originary power of reason with the help of a quotation from Juvenal'sSatire VI 223, a rem arkable speech m ade by a tyrannical wom an who is asked byher husband to explain why, in his absence, she has sentenced a slave to death: "hocvolo, sic iubeo, sit pro ration e voluntas".28 Thus, by insisting that philosophy beginnot with a Tatsache but with a Tathandlung, Fichte took himself as I believe butcannot prove here to be restoring the true meaning of Kant's appeal to a Faktumor act of reason in order to deduce the actuality of freedom. Breazeale's note on thehistory of "Tatsache'9 and "Tathandlung" is therefore not only incorrect; it is alsolikely to obscure the significance of Fichte's philosophical manoeuvre and his rela-tion to Kant's Faktum of reason.There may seem to be an inconsistency between Fichte's rejection of philosophiz-ing on the basis of Tatsachen and his statement, which I quoted earlier, that in theGrundlage, as opposed to the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, he began with aTatsache. But the inconsistency is only apparent. Fichte intends, I think, to refer tothe expository difficulty to which I referred earlier: Part One of the Grundlage triesto get one to see that the Tathandlung of the absolute I is the ground of all conscious-ness thr oug h reflection on the formal principle of identity, a principle which is indeeda Tatsache des Bewusstseins. But this is likely to confuse the reader, who is used tothe procedure of Fichte's contemporaries and who may therefore think that theTathandlung is based on the Tatsache, when the contrary is supposed to be the case.In the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo Fichte begins quite differently, by encourag-ing his audience to become conscious of the Tathandlung in the only way possible:by actively making explicit the thinking I. Only in the course of his investigation ofthis act does it become clear that, even when one does this, the I must be understoodas an intuition which is never present to consciousness as an isolable state or Tat-sache, since consciousness is always discursive and must involve concepts as well asintuitions.Besides the fact that the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo begins differently fromthe Grundlage, the m ost imp ortant difference between the two presentations to whichFichte draws our attention concerns precisely that relationship between theory andpractice which, as I said earlier, many readers find to be the most unsatisfactoryaspect of the earlier presentation. In the 179495 version, there were distinct treat-ments of theoretical and practical philosophy, and Fichte proceeded from theoreticalphilosophy to the practical philosophy in which he sought its ground. But,28 See Critique of Practical Reaso n in Kants Werke, V. 31 and Opus Postumum inKants Werke, XXI: 23.



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Zur Diskussion 321In the present [1796-99] lectures, however, the hitherto familiar division betweentheoretical and practical philosophy is not to be found. Instead, these lecturespresent philosophy as a whole, in the exposition of which theoretical and practicalphilosophy are united. This presentation follows a much more natural path, be-ginning with the practical sphere, or, whenever it would c ontribute to the clarityof the exposition to do so, inserting the practical into the theoretical, in order toexplain the latter in terms of the former: a liberty fo r which the author wasnot yet sufficiently self-confident at the time that he published his [1794-95]Wissenschaftslehre. 29Breazeale rightly emphasizes this passage30 which, I believe, provides the key to

Fichte's "new method" and hints at his solution to the antinomy between theoryand practice that seems to have been left unresolved by the Grundlage, at the end ofwhich it seems that absolute freedom determines practice but not theory. In theWissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo, however, absolute freedom the spontaneousTathandlung made explicit in each reader's "I think" - is clearly the principle deter-mining the necessary structure of the empirical world, as well as the moral law,within a single development. W e should be careful, it seems to me, about how toread Fichte's claim that this change is a result of his growing "self-confidence". ForFichte is one of those philosophers who is apt to exaggerate the continuity of histhinking. I do not doubt that Fichte already wanted to show that absolute freedomwas the determining principle of experience in the Grundlage, nor do I doubt thathe attempted to show just that by means of his account of the imagination. But hesurely made a significant advance which enabled him to achieve a new synthesis oftheory and practice in 1796-99. That advance, I believe, was the concept of thesummons [Aufforderung], whose first published discussion appeared in his Naturrechtin 1796. The idea seems first to have occurred to Fichte in the summer of 1795 -while he was living in self-imposed exile at Osmannstdt - as a way of solving twoproblems at once: (1) the need for an a priori derivation of the idea of right or justicethat was independent of the mo ral law, unlike the derivation in his 1793 book onthe French revolution; and (2) the need for a justification of the assumption of finiterational beings other than oneself, a justification which he had criticized Kant fornot providing. I believe that the concept of the summons allowed Fichte not onlyto solve these two problems but also to achieve a m ore thoroughgo ing syn thesis oftheory and practice than he had achieved in the Grundlage.The concept of the summons is the central concept of the 1796-99 works (the1796 Grundlage des Naturrechts, the 1797 First and Second Introductions, the 1798System der Sit tenlehre and the Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methodo) and may be charac-terized as follows. Fichte argues that I could not have become conscious of myself- that I could not have become capable of explicitly add ing the "I think" to mythoughts -unless I had, on some occasion, discovered myself to be summoned tofree activity by another self who recognizes me as a self and whom I recognize as29 Breazeale, Foundations, 85 f,30 See Breazeale, Foundations, 12 .



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322 Zur Diskussionrecogniz ing me, w h o m I therefore in tu rn recognize as a self. The existence of atleast one other self is therefore a necessary condition of my self-consciousness. Threeaspects o f this original genesis o f self-consciousness merit noting here. (1) No matterhow I respond to the summons of the other, I am absolutely determined to respondin some way, provided only that I recognize the summons as a summons. Even toignore th e summons is a response and is quite different from failing to discover thatone is summoned. Thus my will is absolutely determined to respond to the summonsin some way or other, an absolute determination which Fichte calls the pure will inth e Wissenschaftslehre Nova Methode and which, he says, expresses itself as the morallaw at a much later stage in the development of consciousness. In the Wissenschafts-lehre Nova Methodo th e pure will is discussed only in its primordial manifestation,as a necessary expression of spontaneity that is a genetic condition of the possibilityof self-con sciousness. Nevertheless, the principle of moral philosophy is already lat-ent in the ground of self-consciousness in general and therefore in the ground oftheoretical consciousness or experience, since the possibility of self-consciousness isconceived (following Kant) as a necessary condition of the possibility of conscious-ness. (2) Although I am absolutely determined to respond to the summons somehow,I am free to determine myself to respond as I choose. So not only is the pure will(which should be compared with what Kant calls Wille) to be found within thesituation of the summons, but freedom of choice (which should be compared withwhat Kant calls Willkr) is to be found there as well. And like the moral law theprinciple of the doctrine of right the principle of reciprocal recognition is al-ready latent in the very ground of consciousness in general, theoretical as well aspractical. (3) Fichte argues that the reciprocal recognition required by the summonsin turn requires that I think of myself as an individual will, sharing the concept ofrational being with the other but distinguished by having a particular region ofefficacy individuated, in other words, by my body. And to think of oneself asembodied is, Fichte argues, to think of oneself as interacting with a world of externalobjects that resist one's will in various ways. Thus Fichte seeks to show that, giventhe summons as genetic condition of self-consciousness, there must be an externalworld which has certain necessary features, which turn out to be space, time and theKantian categories.

This is, of course, no more than a sketch of Fichte's highly complex strategy andit is obvious that there are many extremely challenging steps that would need to betaken before that strategy could be completed. Indeed, Fichte employs the centralconcept of the summons in a different way in each of his 179699 texts and furtherdiscussion would have to both distinguish and relate these different employments.It should be clear, however, that if Fichte were to succeed in carrying out the pro-gram of the Wissenschafts lehre Nova Methodo, then he would have succeeded indeducing the actuality of absolute freedom as a determining principle, not only ofmoral practice, but also of the necessary structure of experience; that he would havesimultaneously laid the foundations fo r a moral philosophy and for an independentphilosophy of right; and that he would have done all this precisely by introducingth e intersubjective concepts of the summons and of reciprocal recognition into thevery heart of post-Kantian philosophy.



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Zur Diskussion 323This account of Fichte's program raises an important historical question and animportant philosophical question. The historical question is: should we think ofintersubjectivity as entirely new to the Wissenschaf ts lehre Nova Met hodo (and to theGrundlage de s Naturrech t s a n d System de r Si t tenlehre that are latent within it) orshould we think of intersubjectivity as somehow implicit within the Grundlage!Alexis Philonenko has argued forcefully for the latter claim 31 and, at the very least,appreciation of the Wissenschafts lehre Nova Met hodo ought to encourage a revisionof some traditional readings of the Gr u n d la g e , such as those of Hegel and Gueroult.It would be fruitful to ask, for example, whether Fichte, instead of developing a"new method", might simply have added a fu r ther synthesis to the Grundlage: thesynthesis of theory and practice by means of the concept of the summons, as outlinedin the various texts of 1796-99.The philosophical question is: did Fichte succeed? And if he did not, could hisstrategy be reconstructed, or is there something deeply misguided abo ut the Fichteanproject of a deduction of freedom as such? To pursue such questions is to exploreissues that are currently being discussed in Anglo-American philosophy - such asthe relationship between spontaneity and receptivity, and the privacy of conscious-ness as well as issues that are currently discussed in continental philosophy -such as intersubjectivity and embodiment. One reason for the current revival ofinterest in Fichte is surely that his thought provides a terrain on which A nglo-Am eri-can and continental philosophy may encounter one other.

31 See his La Liber ia d a n s la phi losophic de Fich te (Paris: Vrin, 1966).

Documents

Franks_Tatsache and Tathandlung in the Development of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre