Jamie Reid

Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre is among the most significant products of that immensely fertile period spanning the publication of Kant’s first Critique and Hegel’s Phenomenology. Like many of Kant’s earliest disciples and critics, Fichte was preoccupied with puzzles that arose in connection with certain distinctions presupposed or drawn by Kant throughout the writings of the Critical period. Among the many distinctions developed with great care in the three Critiques, the most important for Fichte were those drawn between the various powers or faculties of the human mind. Fichte came to recognize that a well-grounded philosophical science would have to account for the complex structure of human subjectivity without dividing the mind into a mere aggregate of lifeless mental faculties. As Fichte famously put it in the Grundlage, the aim of the Wissenschaftslehre is to introduce into “the whole human being that unity and connection that so many systems lack.” Despite obvious Romantic overtones, this quest for a single, unified account of the human mind amounted to the demand for a strictly scientific reconstruction of the Critical philosophy. On Fichte’s view, philosophy would be able to come forward as a rigorous science of living subjectivity, with the force and evidence of geometry, only as a closed system of propositions derived from a self-evident first principle.