Abstract

Hanewald questions three main interpretations of Fichte’s relation to Kant, namely, that the Wissenschafstlehre illegally trespasses the limits by the critique of reason, that Fichte is the one who brought Kant’s transcendental philosophy to its completion by finding out and by remediating Kant’s systematic loophole, and finally that Fichte’s correction to Kant does not go far enough and has to wait for its completion through Hegel. There is something true in these mainstream interpretations, and something that needs to be corrected, says Hanewald. In order to reconstruct in the most exact way where Fichte stands with regard to Kant, the first thing to do is to put into brackets what Fichte himself says about the primacy of practical philosophy, for instance in the detailed stances on Kant from the Erste und Zweite Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, which do not represent anymore the stand of the first Wissenschaftslehre and rather mirror that of the Wissenschafstlehre nova methodo, as one can see, for example, as regards the role played by the pure ego as the principle of philosophy. This means that one should rather proceed by directly comparing Kant’s and Fichte’s argument and look for agreements and disagreements, which is what Hanewald effectively does. For example, while for Kant the unity of manifold representation must precede the identical self-reference of identity, for Fichte the contrary is the case, namely, that identical self-reference is the presupposition of all synthesis. Besides, Fichte explores other forms of self-referential ego, from which he deduces among others the relation of subjects and accidents. In this case Kant cannot obviously be counted among Fichte’s sources, because for Kant the category of substance is tied up with what is permanent in the flux of the accidents, which is something that finds expression in the schema of the permanence of time. Among the merits of Hanewald’s book is that it shows that the role played by the intellectual intuition in the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo marks a significant development from the first Wissenschaftslehre and at the same time a significant distance from Kant’s theoretical philosophy.