Abstract

In a well-known passage from the Analytic of the second Critique, Kant makes reference to what he calls “an unavoidable need of human reason”—the need to find “the unity of the entire pure faculty of reason.” The remark is made in passing, and Kant himself deals only obliquely with the question as to how this need might be met. Indeed, two centuries later we may be inclined to say that Kant’s legacy was less to unite theoretical and practical reason than to sunder them—relegating them to the distinct philosophical subdisciplines that have become an institutional fact of life. For Kant’s most controversial disciple, however, satisfying this “unavoidable need” was to become something of a philosophical obsession. From his earliest forays in systematic philosophy we see J. G. Fichte determined to uncover the deep unity of rational human subjectivity and thereby to exhibit the unity of theoretical and practical reason.