Daniel Breazeale

Fichte's System of Ethics, published in 1798, is at once the most accessible presentation of its author's comprehensive philosophical project, The Science of Knowledge or Wissenschaftslehre, and the most important work in moral philosophy written between Kant and Hegel. Fichte's ethics integrates the discussion of our moral duties into the systematic framework of a transcendental theory of the human subject. Its major philosophical themes include the practical nature of self-consciousness, the relation between reason and volition, the essential role of the drives in human willing, the possibility of changing the natural world, the reality of one's own body, the reality of other human beings, and the practical necessity of social relations between human beings. This volume offers a translation of the work together with an introduction that sets it in its philosophical and historical contexts.

Rammenau is a tiny village situated in the lovely Oberlausitz countryside east of Dresden. It is a village with two claims to fame: it possesses a large and well-preserved early eighteenth century Baroque palace, which now contains an elegant restaurant, hotel, and museum; and it is also the birthplace of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The modest house where Fichte was born in 1762 no longer survives, but the village still includes several structures from the time of Fichte, including the church where he was baptized and the school where the future philosopher was enrolled before his serendipitous “discovery,” at the age of nine, by Baron von Miltitz, who was so astonished by the extraordinary intellectual talents of the young Fichte that he offered to sponsor his study at Schulpforta and elsewhere. The village also contains several other reminders of its most famous son, including various monuments and, in the palace itself, a three-room “Fichte museum.”

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche and the Political by Daniel W. ConwayDaniel BreazealeDaniel W. Conway. Nietzsche and the Political. London: Routledge, 1997. Pp. xii + 163. Cloth, $65. Paper, $16.95.This brief but stimulating work is a vigorous effort to defend the importance of Nietzsche as a “political” thinker. In order to make this case, Conway has to fight on two fronts: simultaneously rebutting the views of the many contemporary interpreters who argue that Nietzsche is either an anti-political philosopher or else a distinctively inferior political thinker, while also reclaiming Nietzsche’s political thought from the race-theorists and Nazis who so successfully appropriated it earlier in this century. Conway is victorious on both fronts, and makes a compelling case for the contemporary relevance of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the broad topics of “culture” and “education.” This, of course, by no means exhausts the realm of the “political,” and Conway has little or nothing to say about Nietzsche’s views on such topics as the state, justice, legality, etc. Instead, he is concerned with what Nietzsche himself called “great politics.” For this reason, the book is concerned almost exclusively with Nietzsche’s later writings, focusing primarily upon the writings of 1886–88, while generally ignoring the Nachlass altogether.Chapter 1 (“Political Perfectionism”) deals with Nietzsche’s conception of the fundamental task of politics: namely, to facilitate humankind’s endless quest for “perfection,” a quest that alone justifies human existence. Since Nietzsche associated the perfection of the species with the appearance of the rarest and most exotic individual specimens, it follows that the specific task of political activity is “to legislate the conditions under which such exemplars will most likely emerge.” It is within the context of this “political” ideal that Conway offers his own, ingenious and controversial interpretation of Zarathustra’s teaching concerning the Übermensch.The relationship between Nietzsche’s perfectionism and his moral pluralism is the subject of Chapter 2 (“On the Uses and Disadvantages of Morality for Life”). Here Conway offers a thoughtful comparison between Nietzsche himself and some of his “models,” such as Caesar, Napoleon, and the Laws of Manu, and takes advantage of this comparison in order to introduce Nietzsche’s crucial—albeit extremely problematic—notions of the “order of rank” and “pathos of distance.” Chapter 3 (“Perfectionism in the [End Page 177] Twilight of the Idols”) is devoted to Nietzsche’s “critique of modernity.” Here Conway offers his own “political” interpretation of Nietzsche’s withdrawal from the “political macrosphere” of his own age and retreat into the “political microsphere” of his personal life and literary/cultural projects, including his various “educational” schemes. A certain ambiguity in the overall conception of this book becomes apparent at this point, however, inasmuch as Conway finds himself simultaneously distinguishing between Nietzsche’s “moral” and “political” perfectionism, while continuing to insist upon the larger “political” significance of the former—even while conceding that, for Nietzsche himself, political perfection was a mere means for moral perfection. Chapter 4 (“Regimens of Self-Overcoming”) contains a detailed account of the necessary antagonism between the (“untimely”) Nietzschean philosopher and his own age and an insightful discussion of what Conway calls “the aversive mechanism of self-overcoming” (69). Conway’s discussion of the link between Nietzschean perfectionism and the adoption of multiple perspectives (“experimentalism”) is one the clearest and best in the literature. Nietzsche’s own self-experiments and his understanding of the same as “signs” for others are discussed in Chapter 5 (“The Philosopher’s Versucherkunst”). Like other recent interpreters, Conway calls attention to the essential role of erotic love in Nietzsche’s conception of the process of experimental self-education and to the way in which eros links purely individual goals to larger cultural and educational ones. The chapter concludes with an admirable account of how Nietzsche was able to harness and to employ his own resentment as an instrument of self-overcoming. This theme is continued in Chapter 6 (“Comedians of the Ascetic Ideal”), which tries to show how Nietzsche sought to safeguard the crippled will in an unpropitious era, not by rejecting the ascetic ideal, but by employing it in a new way. This is perhaps Conway’s most original...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Between Kant and Hegel. Lectures on German IdealismDaniel BreazealeDieter Henrich. Between Kant and Hegel. Lectures on German Idealism. David S. Pacini, editor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xliii + 341. Cloth, $62.00.As the author explains, the title of this work is intended to distinguish it from ordinary, Whiggish accounts of the development of German philosophy “from Kant to Hegel.” Instead, Heinrich treats the positions of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel as potentially viable alternatives, none of which must be viewed as aufgehoben by those that followed, and all of which deserve reconsideration by contemporary philosophers.Dieter Henrich is known for two things: first, for championing a minutely-detailed, revisionist approach to the history of post-Kantian philosophy; and second, for his insistence that the central problem of German idealism is that of self-consciousness. Both elements are well represented in this book, which is a revised version of a series of lectures delivered (in English) at Harvard in 1973. The text thus antedates many of the more recent discoveries and claims of Henrich and his student collaborators in the “Jena project,” though some of the results are alluded to in the useful footnotes and apparatus provided by David S. Pacini, who attended the original lectures and has expert knowledge of Henrich’s more recent work.Part 1 commences with a masterful overview of some of the distinctive features of German philosophy in the decades following the publication of Kant’s Critiques, with one lecture devoted primarily to Fichte, another to Kant’s concept of self-consciousness, and a third to the systematic role of freedom in Kant’s system.Part 2 focuses on the earliest reception of Kant’s philosophy and its social, religious, and philosophical context. A lecture on how Kant was criticized by and responded to defenders of direct intuition is followed by two lectures on Jacobi’s criticisms of Kantianism, which contain a wealth of information concerning the influence upon the idealists of Platonism, Stoicism, Neo-Platonism, Spinozism, Lessing, and the contemporary “theology of the spirit.” These lectures clearly show why the next generation of idealists saw themselves challenged to construct a “Spinozism of freedom.” Part 2 concludes with two perfunctory lectures on Reinhold’s “Elementary Philosophy,” followed by another on the skepticism of G. E. Schulze (“Anesidemus”), whose critique of Kant and Reinhold was instrumental in making questions of method of central philosophical concern.Part 3 is devoted to Fichte, whose importance for the development of philosophy after Kant can hardly, in Henrich’s view, be overemphasized and whose influence “derived from his uncanny ability to penetrate the intellectual life of an entire epoch, an accomplishment [End Page 330] that even Hegel did not rival” (184). The first of the eight lectures on Fichte provides a detailed analysis of Fichte’s Anesidemus review (1794), in which Henrich discerns evidence of the fateful transformation of transcendental philosophy into an explicit theory of mental activity based upon a method of internal self-awareness and description (“intellectual intuition”). The next two lectures are devoted to a close reading of Fichte’s unpublished manuscript from the same period, “Personal Mediations on Elementary Philosophy,” which, according to Henrich, is where the “dialectical method” first appears in post-Kantian philosophy. Henrich has little to say about the actual content and systematic structure of Fichte’s only full-scale published presentation of his system, in the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, offering instead a rather free “reconstruction” of some of its more important doctrines, on time consciousness and the hovering of the imagination. But he does provide an insightful analysis of Fichte’s theory of consciousness as a self-referring and self-explaining activity and a spirited defense of Fichte’s employment of the term ‘setzen’ (“positing”) to describe this activity. The final lecture on Fichte discusses some of the difficulties implicit in Fichte’s “dynamic monism” and how he tried—unsuccessfully, in Henrich’s view—to resolve them in subsequent, unpublished versions of his system, where he moved from his early, more “descriptive” theory of the mind toward a more “explanatory” account, according to which the ground of self-consciousness lies outside the mind itself (in...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 229-231 [Access article in PDF] James A. Good, editor. The Early American Reception of German Idealism. 5 vols. Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002. Pp. 2826. Cloth, $635.00. The five volumes of this set reprint an impressive collection of long unavailable texts by five largely forgotten nineteenth-century American authors, each of whom was familiar with at least some aspects of the philosophical revolution that began in Germany with the appearance of Kant's Critiques and whose own writings were deeply influenced by German Idealism. Largely due to the efforts of these five authors, idealism began to rival empiricism and common-sense realism as a major philosophical movement in the United States by the end of the nineteenth century and was an important part of that intellectual context from which later movements, notably pragmatism, grew. But despite the obvious importance of these authors and texts for understanding both the American "reception" of German Idealism and the history of American philosophy, they are today virtually unknown and most of the volumes reprinted in this set are exceedingly rare. Every student of the history of American thought must therefore be grateful to Thoemmes Press and to James A. Good for making these important works once again available. Each volume is prefaced by an excellent introduction summarizing the essential biographical and historical facts, the relevant intellectual context, and the immediate and lasting influence of the work or author in question. Good's introductions also include insightful, albeit brief, comments on the philosophical contents and distinctive character of each volume. Indeed, one of the pleasures of perusing these volumes is the opportunity this affords to appreciate the originality and philosophical talent of some of these long neglected authors, particularly Marsh, Hickok, and Everett.Volume One reprints what would appear to be the first book on Hegelian "psychology" to be published in America: Psychology; or a View of the Human Soul, by Frederick Augustus Rauch (1841). Rauch (1806-41) was a German emigrant classicist who became enamored with Hegelian philosophy during his student years and was particularly influenced by the Heidelberg theologian Charles Daub. In America, Rauch became head of the Classics Department at Marshall College, where he also taught theology and philosophy. Described as "the first enthusiastic Hegelian in the United States," Rauch's Hegelianism was of the "Old" or "Right" variety. Despite its title, "psychology" is the topic of only the second half of this volume, the first part of which is devoted to "anthropology." These divisions correspond almost exactly to the similarly titled sections of Hegel's "philosophy of subjective spirit," which is the obvious model for Rauch's Psychology. The latter, however, displays none of the dialectical power of Hegel's work and is larded with empirical observations and sundry opinions on a variety of topics. It is perhaps illuminating to discover that American "Hegelianism" can trace its roots to such an eccentric and unrigorous work, which was widely read and even adopted as a textbook by several colleges in the mid-nineteenth century and thus can be described as the book that begin the process of "introducing Hegelianism to America."Volume Two contains The Remains of the Rev. James Marsh, D.D.: Late President and Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in the University of Vermont; with a Memoir of His Life, edited by Joseph Torrey (1843). Marsh (1794-42), who was reputedly "the first American to study Kant," was a polymath who trained at Dartmouth College and at Andover and Union Seminaries as a classicist, theologian, and philosopher and then served for many years as the President of the University of Vermont. In addition to translating Herder and others, Marsh published the first American edition of Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, with an [End Page 229] introductory essay of his own. This work, the first edition of which appeared in 1829, proved to be extremely popular and was instrumental in introducing Kantian and post-Kantian speculation to the New World. Though one of the founders of the Transcendentalist movement in America, Marsh's...

The philosophical thought of J. G. Fichte, particularly his later work, is at the very center of the paradigm shift under way in the field of German idealism. Crucial to this reassessment is Fichte's _Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo_ of 1796 to 1799, the manuscript at the heart of this essay colleciton and an articulation of the philosopher's _Wissenschaftslehre,_ or overall system of philosophy, which he discussed in lectures at the University of Jena. Coherent, comprehensive, and edited by two of the foremost Fichte scholars in the world, the essays provide a much needed introduction to the major themes of the most important period of Fichte's philosophical thought--and thus to German idealism itself--and make a persuasive case for the originality and continuing significance of the later Jena _Wissenschaftslehre._.

The first international Fichte conference was held a decade ago in Zwettl, Austria. The second convened this summer, once again in Austria, but this time in the village of Deutschlandsberg, pleasantly situated in the vine covered hill country south of Graz. The setting itself was remarkable, for the conference was held in an isolated twelfth-century castle perched high above the village. For six consecutive days in August some forty scholars from around the world took part in this extraordinary event, delivering formal papers from breakfast until bedtime and filling every unscheduled moment with informal philosophical discussion. Moreover, this was a genuinely international event, with participants from over a dozen countries—including Japan, China, Canada, the United States, Finland, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Austria, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany—and there was a great deal of very welcome interaction between scholars from different lands and with quite different intellectual backgrounds.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2001) 305-306 [Access article in PDF] Fichte, J. G. Foundations of Natural Right according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre. Edited by Frederick Neuhouser. Translated by Michael Baur. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xxxv + 338. Cloth, $64.95; Paper, $22.95. Though best known for his immensely influential effort to "systematize" Kant's Critical philosophy and to ground the same upon a transcendental analysis of the structure of self-consciousness, Fichte also made seminal contributions to social and political philosophy. Of these contributions, the most original is surely his effort to demonstrate that mutual recognition of free subjects is a condition for the possibility of individual self-consciousness. This transcendental deduction of the essentially social or intersubjective character of human beings provides the theoretical underpinnings for a pure theory of Naturrecht ("natural law" or "natural right"), in which the principles of political philosophy are established without any reference to the purely practical principles of morality. Unlike moral laws, the principles of right are only hypothetically or conditionally valid, inasmuch as they are dependent upon one's free decision to live in a community of free beings and to limit one's own freedom accordingly.Justice and law are thereby grounded upon a new, distinctly political conception of [End Page 305] human freedom, which is itself grounded in a new account of the intersubjective dimension of self-consciousness. Following his deduction of the pure concept of right, Fichte proceeds to deduce the conditions for applyingthe same, among the most significant of which is embodiment. Here again, Fichte was a pioneer in arguing for the necessary connection between self-consciousness and the human body. The next step is to demonstrate in detail how social relations between embodied free agents must be organized if such agents are to co-exist in a community. This hypothetical application of the pure concept of right establishes both the "right of coercion" and the basic outlines of the "right of the state," and hence the general form of any legitimate state constitution.Though it appears that Fichte is working with the social contract tradition, his deductive strategy requires a fundamental revision of the same and allows him to construct a theory of the just state that is both recognizably "liberal" and extraordinarily open to considerations of economic justice and social welfare. It is for this reason that some European philosophers (notably, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut) have in recent decades employed Fichte's political thought as a major resource in their effort to defend a rights-based political theory against attacks from both the right and the left.The primary source of Fichte's political philosophy is his 1796/97 Grundlage des Naturrecht, a work that exercised a decisive influence upon Hegel (whose Phenomenology of Spirit is often and incorrectly described as the first effort, within the context of post-Kantian Idealism, to demonstrate that intersubjectivity is a condition for the possibility of self-consciousness). Directly and indirectly (that is, through Hegel) Fichte's social and political philosophy exercised a strong influence upon Marx and other nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialists.For all of the above reasons, the appearance of a new and reliable English translation of Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts is a cause for celebration. Let it be said at once that Michael Baur's translation is simply marvelous. It is accurate and readable, as well as faithful to the style of this, one of Fichte's best-written works. Frederick Neuhouser's Introduction to this translation is equally fine. In it, Neuhouser not only outlines Fichte's main arguments and conclusions, but also offers a brief but trenchant critical appraisal of the historical significance of Fichte's achievement and of the potential relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates and discussions. The Introduction also includes a provocative and well-balanced discussion of some of the unresolved problems implicit in Fichte's arguments. Readers will also appreciate the useful "Guide to Further Reading," and index...