Tom Rockmore

These original essays, never published before, suggest the breadth and richness of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophy and are signs of the contemporary effort to explore the relationship between his system of thought and current philosophical debates. Some of the issues discussed included the relationship between "theoretical" and "practical" reason; the philosophy of language; antifoundationalism; the juridical status of women; duties toward natural beings; and the political implications of the Wissenschaftslehre. In addition, the volume includes an introduciton that surveys the history of Fichte interpretation in the English-speaking world and assesses the current state of Fichte studies.

Given the apparent differences in the two positions, it is not surprising that the relation between the philosophies of Fichte and Marx seems never to have been studied in depth. Books on Fichte rarely mention Marx. Conversely, works about Marx usually avoid the name of Fichte, except occasionally to mention the attraction Fichte’s thought held for the young Hegelians. Further, historians of philosophy, even those interested in the conceptual development of problems such as Windelband, do not seem to have noticed any relation worth considering in the two positions.

For Martin Heidegger the "fall" of philosophy into metaphysics begins with Plato. Thus, the relationship between the two philosophers is crucial to an understanding of Heidegger--and, perhaps, even to the whole plausibility of postmodern critiques of metaphysics. It is also, as the essays in this volume attest, highly complex, and possibly founded on a questionable understanding of Plato. As editors Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore remark, a simple way to describe Heidegger's reading of Plato might be to say that what began as an attempt to appropriate Plato (and through him a large portion of Western philosophy) finally ended in an estrangement from both Plato and Western philosophy. The authors of this volume consider Heidegger's thought in relation to Plato before and after the " Kehre " or turn. In doing so, they take up various central issues in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and thereafter, and the questions of hermeneutics, truth, and language. The result is a subtle and multifaceted reinterpretation of Heidegger's position in the tradition of philosophy, and of Plato's role in determining that position.

A great deal of attention has been devoted to Marxian man in recent years as a result of the increased interest in the early Marx. A complete list of all those who have considered this problem cannot be given here, but Lukács, Fromm, Popitz, Petrovic, and Schaff, and among more recent contributors Avineri, Mészáros, Sève and Hartmann should be mentioned. The result of all this attention has been, as could be expected, somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, progress has been made in several areas. For one thing, it has become increasingly apparent that there are at least strong indications of a view of the human individual in Marx’s thought, especially in the early writings, although the intrinsic significance of that view, for Marx’s position and in general, is a matter of debate. On the other hand, a controversy has arisen in the literature. This controversy is basically three-cornered. It roughly divides those who consider Marx’s early so-called humanism as a phase that was definitely superseded in his mature work. The principal representatives of this view are Althusser and his school. Against this, Sartre has argued that Marx in fact has no theory of the individual and his position is hence in danger of collapse because of this lack. Schaff has countered that there is a view of man implicit in Marx’s position, a view which needs to be reconstructed and further developed.

A systematic and historical study of the rela­tion of the positions of Fichte and Marx within the context of nineteenth-century German philosophy as well as the wider his­tory of philosophy. Rockmore’s thesis is that there is a little noticed, less often studied, but nevertheless profound structural parallel between the two positions that can be shown to be mediated through the development of the nineteenth-century German philosophical tradition. Both positions understand man in anti-Car­tesian fashion, not as a spectator, but as an active being. Rockmore demonstrates that there is similarity of the two views of activity in terms of the Aristotelian concept __,_ _then indicates the further parallel be­tween the respective concepts of man that fol­low from Fichte’s and Marx’s views of activity. Turning to the history of philosophy, Rockmore directs the reader to solid textual evidence supporting the influence of Fichte, not only on Marx’s Young Hegelian contem­poraries but on Marx as well. He argues that the Hegelian impact on the interpretation of the nineteenth-century philosophical tradi­tion has served to obscure the parallel be­tween the positions of Fichte and Marx, but that the concept of man as an active being can be used to reinterpret this segment of the history of philosophy and to modify the fre­quently held view of the classical German tradition as a collection of rather disparate thinkers. Finally, he provides a discussion of the intrinsic value of the anti-Cartesian ap­proach to man as such