Lydia Kondova

In this text, we examine some of Fichte’s foundational appeals to the reader from the period of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre (1794-1799) and seek to clarify the distinctive features and underlying rationale of his way of engaging with his audience. Our goal is to show that the meta-level discourse and writing involved in presenting the Wissenschaftslehre are best understood not in the usual sense of transcendency, but as an immanent disclosure – an opening of the system’s meaning toward its reader, that is, as its inherent and indispensable function as an organic whole. In this context, the relations of trust between lecturer and student, between author and reader, acquire methodological significance, since he future of the system – and, according to Fichte, of humanity itself – depends on the success of this connection.

The paper provides a detailed reconstruction of Kant’s deduction of the concept noumenon at the end of CPR’s Transcendental analytic with the final aim to undermine the view of its unknowability. According to our initial premise, the contradictions, faced by Kant’s transcendental idealism, have their origin on the systematic level. The noumenon should, therefore, be understood as a purely methodological entity with reality solely within the system of transcendental idealism or as a “conceptual gate,” that functions as system’s entrance and exit and preserves its connection with its philosophical “other” – the realism.