Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy

T. Rockmore, D. Breazeale, T. Rockmore, D. Breazeale

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137412225
• eBook ISBN: 9781137412232
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Épistémologie en philosophie

With renewed attention to German idealism in general and to Fichtein particular, this timelycollection of new papers will be of interest to anyone concerned with transcendental philosophy, German idealism, modern German philosophy and transcendental arguments.

Part I

Fichte on Method and Transcendental Philosophy

1

On the Very Idea of a Method of Transcendental Philosophy

Jere O’Neill Surber

In an often cited passage in the “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge” (1797), Fichte asserted that “my system is nothing other than the Kantian; this means that it contains the same view of things, but is in method quite independent of the Kantian presentation.”¹ This statement (and others in the same vein) would naturally lead one to infer that transcendental philosophy as presented in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre did, in fact, have a distinctive “method” that could be contrasted with that deployed by Kant (and perhaps those of other “transcendental” or idealist thinkers as well). In this chapter, I suggest that, although this statement is doubtless valid with respect to the differences between Kant’s and Fichte’s manners of “presentation,” it should not be read as licensing the further assumption that Fichte regarded himself as deploying some unique or distinctive method that could be taken as valid or normative for his own or any other “transcendental inquiry.”

I develop this argument along two different lines, one textual and historical, the other more conceptual. In the first part, I begin by considering, in a sort of “stereoscopic” manner, both Kant’s discussion of method in the “Transzendentale Methodenlehre” (the concluding section of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [KrV]) and some of Hegel’s views on similar topics. I then turn to Fichte’s programmatic essay of 1794, “Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre,” which remained for the rest of his career his most explicit and sustained discussion of questions touching upon method. My main thesis in this section is that, as a matter of fact, one looks in vain in the texts of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel for any discussion, presentation of, or even reference to some distinctive method that would be valid or normative for “transcendental philosophy.” In the second part, I consider some general conceptual or philosophical reasons why the very idea of a distinctive method for transcendental philosophy, at least as Kant and the German idealists understood this project, might at least be suspect if not incoherent. I conclude with some brief conjectures about why, nonetheless, such an idea seems to persist (as evidenced, among other things, by the theme of the present conference).

Before I begin, however, one clarification is necessary. Viewed broadly, the term “method” can be used in two quite different senses that (borrowing terms from Kant without retaining his own distinctive meanings of these terms) I call the “a posteriori” and the “a priori.” On the one hand, given any specific artifact, such as a work of philosophy, we can always shift our focus from the concrete existence and details of the work as it lies before us and consider its overall structure or form. Proceeding from the concrete work to its form or structure “a posteriori,” as it were, and then adding the idea that somehow this form or structure played some important role in the genesis of the work, we might maintain that this form or structure governed its production and hence constituted the “method” by which it was constructed. This a posteriori sense of “method” is, of course, conceptually a very weak one, since it involves no claim that such a “method” possesses any validity or normativity beyond the artifact or work being considered. At most, it amounts merely to a sort of redescription of the artifact or work itself in more formal or procedural terms. On the other hand, we might, prior to or independently of producing any concrete artifact or work, attempt to formulate some general “method” or procedure for producing works of a specific sort, especially some general pattern or ordered set of operations that would then serve as definitive and generative of and normative for producing a specific type of artifact or work. (Probably the most famous instance of “method” in this “a priori” sense is that outlined by Descartes in his Discourse on Method, although many other later examples readily come to mind). My point, then, is that this “a priori” sense of “method” is the only one at stake when considering both whether one in fact can discover in the works of Kant, Fichte, or others some “method” of transcendental philosophy and whether such a concept of method is philosophically cogent or logically coherent in the context of transcendental philosophy as understood by Kant and his philosophical progeny. Certainly, one can extract some description of method in the “a posteriori” sense from any major work of these thinkers (or all of them taken together, for that matter), but the salient question will always concern method in the “a priori” sense as generative of and normative for any enterprise that would count as “transcendental philosophy.”

Method, science, and system: Fichte between Kant and Hegel

Method and system in Kant’s “Transzendentale Methodenlehre”

Kant’s “Transcendental Doctrine of Method” is without doubt the most extended and detailed consideration of method to be found in the entirety of his works. In it, he begins by describing what he calls the “architectonic of pure reason.” The central concept of his entire discussion in the “Methodenlehre” and the defining notion of his architectonic is that of system. He tells us that “systematic unity is what first raises ordinary knowledge to the rank of science, that is, makes a system out of a mere aggregate of knowledge.”² Invoking the metaphor of an “organism” or “organic whole,” he then proceeds to characterize the various features of any system that will, albeit under various interpretations, serve to define the holy grail of philosophical activity for the entire tradition of German idealism. Briefly put, he claims that a system is “the unity of the manifold modes of knowledge under one idea,” that it must be complete in including all (relevant) modes of knowledge, and that it must present and articulate the relations that each has to the system’s “single idea” and to the other modes. He then declares, “Philosophy is the system of all philosophical knowledge.”³ After a discussion of such topics as metaphysics, the types of human knowledge, and the “ends of Reason,” he finally comes to “transcendental philosophy,”⁴ which he contrasts with a “physiology of pure reason” as two divisions of “metaphysics, in the narrower meaning of the term,” which is itself, in turn, a higher-order division of the overall “architectonic” that he is outlining.

The details of Kant’s discussion of method need not detain us further, since my only concern here is to emphasize a single feature of Kant’s discussion of method, one that involves not the details of what Kant says but what he doesn’t say. One might fairly assume that if Kant had maintained that there is some distinctive method of transcendental philosophy, it would be included in this section promisingly entitled “The Transcendental Doctrine of Method,” but such a discussion is entirely lacking, even when he explicitly addresses the place of transcendental philosophy in the broader system of philosophy that he is describing. Alternatively, Kant might have decided to take up this more limited issue of the method of transcendental philosophy within the works constituting his “critical philosophy,” but I am aware of no such discussion apart from some of his more general remarks, scattered throughout these works, concerning the presentations he had already made. We must conclude, I think, that while Kant provides us with a sort of a priori discussion of method in terms of his overall conception of “system,” it is far too broad to constitute anything like a more specific treatment of method that would be distinctive of or normative for transcendental philosophy, which he treats merely as one among other elements of the broader architectonic.

Hegel’s view of method

Hegel’s discussions of method, while equally broad as that of Kant, may be suggestive of the reason for Kant’s silence about a method of transcendental philosophy in any philosophically significant, a priori sense. In almost every one of the prefaces to his major works, Hegel somewhat ironically reminds us that prefaces to works of philosophy are always intrinsically misleading oversimplifications of the actual “labor of thought” contained within the work to which they are appended. He typically relates this to a more fundamental issue, the distinction, so prevalent in virtually all prior philosophy (including and especially that of Kant), between form and content.⁵ Hegel’s critique of this distinction is based upon his view that while the primary task of philosophy is to describe the conceptual development of, variously, experience, “the Concept,” and the various areas of human knowledge and engagement with the world, the “concepts” involved in these processes are themselves already, so to speak, “formed contents” with their own histories, relations to other concepts, and distinctive places within the whole of the system. To attempt to separate the form of a concept from its content will therefore always destroy the philosophical significance of the concept itself and render it, viewed as merely formal, empty and lifeless and, regarded as mere content, fragmentary and ultimately unintelligible.

Hegel regards the idea of there being a method for philosophy (transcendental philosophy included)⁶ as one among other symptoms of this (to him) deep-seated error involving the philosophical distinction between form and content. Just as prefaces to a philosophical work cannot be part of the actual philosophical labor of the work itself, so the idea that one could describe or present a method for philosophy prior to or independently of the actual presentation of that philosophy is a mistake that will necessarily vitiate any attempt to formulate it systematically; that is, in accordance with the criteria that Kant himself laid down. Hegel, on more than one occasion, suggests that the attempt to formulate some “a priori” method for philosophy amounts to a “philosophizing before philosophy,” which he regards as impossible and incoherent.⁷ If Kant did not see this problem in the broader context of his “Methodenlehre” (which, after all, was more an enumeration of the fundamental criteria for system and their application to philosophy in general than anything we might otherwise recognize as a method), he may well have at least felt that there was something troubling here in his apparent refusal to articulate some distinctive method of transcendental philosophy.

Fichte on method: “Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre”

In his programmatic essay for the lecture series he offered at Jena in 1794/1795, Fichte presented what amounted to a preface or introduction to the task to which he would devote the rest of his philosophical career, the presentation of what he called the Wissenschaftslehre. This essay (hereafter BWL) represents a pivotal document in the development of post-Kantian philosophy because it clearly and forcefully states a philosophical agenda, at best implicit in Kant, that served as the beginning point for the work of the later idealist philosophers. To summarize, he claims, like Kant, the philosophy must become “wissenschaftlich,” (scientific). In order to do so, philosophy must be presented in the form of a system, the general criteria for which he seems to borrow from Kant’s “Methodenlehre.” However, it is important to note that he challenges Kant on one crucial point: Fichte says, “Systematic form is, consequently, not the aim of science, but is an incidental means toward the achievement of this aim,”⁸ even as he continues to insist that this “science” must necessarily assume the form of a system. Finally, arguably also diverging somewhat from Kant (as well as from later directions taken by the idealist philosophers), he claims that the development of such a project (which he calls the Wissenschaftslehre) must commence from and be guided by the reflective procedures of transcendental philosophy.⁹

In BWL, then, Fichte in effect argues that Kant was mistaken in taking the explication of a concept of system as equivalent to a general Methodenlehre for philosophy. Rather, he asserts that the central aim is that philosophy become wissenschaftlich (hence the Wissenschaftslehre) and that this is possible only if philosophy is developed from a single first principle according to the “rules of reflection and abstraction” that are “familiar and valid.”¹⁰ As a by-product, such a project will necessarily conform to Kant’s idea of a system, since it is developed from a single principle or idea, but it will not be scientific merely by virtue of being systematic. (For instance, Spinoza’s philosophy arguably meets Kant’s criteria for being systematic, but Fichte would not have recognized it as being genuinely wissenschaftlich, since it does not proceed transcendentally.) We might say, then, that Fichte elevated the critical project, that is, transcendental philosophy, whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction to Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy
• Part I  Fichte on Method and Transcendental Philosophy
• Part II  Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy: Special Problems
• Part III  Fichte, Other Thinkers, and Other Debates
• Index