Kienhow Goh

This article investigates how the Kantian moral law is employed by Fichte in the System of Ethics of 1798 as a cosmic principle in order to deliver a deduction of its applicability in the world of sense. It considers how Kant’s conception of a moral teleology in the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment inspires Fichte to harness the concept of the original, determinate end of a natural thing in the deduction as a means of mediating the Kantian “supersensible idea of the morally good” by sensible intuitions. He goes beyond Kant by taking the law to be “actually operative” in ordinary consciousness and consequently “a theoretical principle for the determination of the world.”

This chapter elucidates the important Fichtean concept of drive by examining how it is put to use in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre to account for the I’s positing of an object in general, its comprehension of nature as purposive, and its consciousness of its own pure nature. In the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, the nature of drive is first clarified as the form the I necessarily takes in and for itself inasmuch as it strives. Further configurations of the determination are used to explain the operation of the laws by which the I determines external objects, their changes, and the harmony or disharmony of their changes with the moral law. In the System of Ethics, the concept is further employed to provide a transcendental account of nature’s purposiveness. By the account, the I is compelled by the need to comprehend its own nature as a drive that constitutes an organized whole to posit to a drive to form parts of itself into such wholes in the rest of nature. Also, when the I refers natural objects to the original drive, it posits final purposes for the objects. In the popular lectures, the concept is employed as an anthropological and psychological concept to explain features that accrue to human beings on account of their rationality, such as their social, aesthetic, intellectual and moral nature.