Tom Rockmore

For some time now I have been arguing that Fichte's theory can be read as circular, antifoundationalist, and systematic, and further arguing that it is the source of an epistemological revolution in philosophy. Fichte and most of his interpreters mainly see him as carrying forward the critical philosophy. But I see him as breaking with it in crucial ways in a profoundly innovative theory. The aim of this paper is to pull together aspects of this argument in a single place in order to describe Fichte's theory as I see it, using a wider range of texts than I have so far employed, drawing consequences that follow from my interpretation and responding to recent criticism of it. In so doing, I intend to reaffirm my conviction that the interest of Fichte's theory is not merely archival, something historians of philosophy are interested in because they cannot do philosophy, or something that philosophers might concern themselves with when they are not concerned with philosophy, but directly relevant to the contemporary discussion. But as I see it, the contemporary relevance of the Fichtean view largely depends on an unorthodox, anti-foundationalist reading of it. For if it is read in an orthodox, Cartesian, foundationalist manner, favored by most writers on Fichte, it has nothing or almost nothing to contribute to our increasingly anti-foundationalist debate on knowledge.

It is hardly surprising, since for Hegel philosophers are children of their times, that French Hegelianism differs from Hegelianism in other languages and literatures. At least the following aspects typify the French approach to Hegel's theory. To begin with, Hegel, like a few others, is a master thinker in the French discussion, one of the few intellectual figures around whom the discussion tends to take shape. Second, in the wake of the major impetus provided to French Hegel studies by Kojève's work, there has long been a tendency to conflate the views of Hegel, the great philosopher, and Kojève, one of his most brilliant expositors. Third, since the 1940s when Hyppolite emerged as a major Hegel interpreter, French Hegelianism has been the theater of an ongoing struggle between the two, Hegelian unorthodoxy, represented by Kojève, and Hegelian orthodoxy, represented by Hyppolite, that now seems to have been resolved in favor of the latter. The French Hegel discussion, which was once highly unorthodox by virtue of Kojève's influence, seems now to have become more orthodox but perhaps less interesting. Fourth, as a result of Kojève's influence, there is a link, peculiar to the French discussion, between Hegel and Heidegger that has further led to the tendency, also peculiar to the French debate, to see Husserl and Hegel as sharing the same method.

Recent discussion has seen an increase in the interest in hermeneutics. The increased interest in hermeneutics goes back at least until the appearance of Being and Time in 1927, more than sixty years ago. Thisbookis characterized by the unresolved tension between two clearly incompatible theses: the Husserlian form of absolute truth, and a post-Husserlian view of truth arising from the hermeneutical circle. More recently, the interest in hermeneutics has been strengthened by the appearance of Truth and Method in 1960, in which Gadamer, Heidegger’s most important student, developed the hermeneutical thesis of the latter’s Fundamentalontologie in a way which has influenced numerous other thinkers, notably Ricoeur and Habermas, in a wide-ranging and often confused discussion. The latter’s theory of communicative action can be seen as carrying further the Gadamerian view that knowledge results from interpretation. In Habermas’s version of the linguistic turn, which is further influenced by Kant’s view of Vernunftinteresse and Habermas’s own, peculiar reading of Peirce, speech is intrinsically aimed at potential agreement through the development of consensus.

With few exceptions, philosophers typically have contended that knowledge worthy of the name is beyond time and place. This venerable idea was turned on its head in the emergence of a rival view of knowledge as historical in the wake of the French Revolution. A claim that knowledge is not ahistorical but historical resolves some of these difficulties while creating others. This paper will briefly consider several of these difficulties, including how to argue for this position, the differences between contextualism, or a view of knowledge as cultural, and historicism, as well as issues concerning relativism and cognitive objectivity. It will argue that after the decline of foundationalism, a conception of knowledge as historical is our most promising approach.

Fichte is one of the small handful of philosophers on the highest level. But he is still relatively unknown, even in Germany, for a variety of reasons. These include the difficulty of his thought and its expression, which impedes even native Germans; the relatively greater attention paid to Kant and Hegel, and perhaps even to Schelling; and the lack of a critical edition of his writings. In English-language philosophical circles, beyond these handicaps, knowledge of Fichte is further impeded by the persistent paucity of good, or even any, translations of important items in his bibliography.

In this book—the first large-scale survey of the complex relationship between Hegel’s idealism and Anglo-American analytic philosophy—Tom Rockmore argues that analytic philosophy has consistently misread and misappropriated Hegel. According to Rockmore, the first generation of British analytic philosophers to engage Hegel possessed a limited understanding of his philosophy and of idealism. Succeeding generations continued to misinterpret him, and recent analytic thinkers have turned Hegel into a pragmatist by ignoring his idealism. Rockmore explains why this has happened, defends Hegel’s idealism, and points out the ways that Hegel is a key figure for analytic concerns, focusing in particular on the fact that he and analytic philosophers both share an interest in the problem of knowledge