The Foundations of German Idealism: Fichte's "Wissenschaftslehre" and the Referentiality of Consciousness

Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (1993)
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Abstract

Since Kant, theorists of human consciousness have often made the claim that man's cognitive or theoretical forms of consciousness are rooted in practical forms of consciousness or in one or another form of practice . Although the ancestry of this view can be traced to Rousseau and Kant, it is among the post-Kantian idealists that it first comes to full expression. I examine the emergence of this theme in the first formulations of post-Kantian idealism: the Jena texts of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. ;The first task in understanding Fichte's "primacy of practice" thesis is to understand the general character of his philosophical project. Traditionally, Fichte's philosophy has been thought of as marking the repudiation of Kant's "critical" project in favor of a program of "speculative metaphysics." On this reading, the core of Fichte's thought is a quasi-theological view of the universe as the product of a self-constituting absolute ego. One of my central claims is that this metaphysical reading of Fichte is fundamentally mistaken. Examining Fichte's philosophical aims in their original context , I show that Fichte's central philosophical concern is not a metaphysical but a transcendental issue: the "referentiality" or "objectivity" of consciousness. How, Fichte wants to know, do we come to think of our conscious states as referring to something that we take to exist independently of them? ;At the heart of Fichte's account of referentiality, I argue, is his rejection of naturalistic accounts of subjectivity. If we treat the subject as a natural object in a network of causal relations, he claims, then referentiality remains inexplicable. The first Wissenschaftslehre is then intended to provide an alternative to such naturalism: an account of referentiality that centers on the notion of a self-relating, self-determining subject. It is in this context that the primacy of practice thesis emerges: Any account of theoretical consciousness requires an appeal to an account of human beings as agents

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