Michelle Kosch

This paper surveys the major themes of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation with a view to situating them within Fichte’s earlier practical philosophy. In these lectures Fichte defines ‘nation’; defends a principle for determining a nation’s true (“inner”) borders; argues for a view of the relation of culture to language; argues for the superiority of the German to the French language as a vehicle for culture; offers an account of why an individual should be concerned with the survival of his nation and with the progress of its culture; argues that political independence is a necessary condition of the survival of a nation; argues that education is the only path to political independence (for Germans in their historical situation); and outlines a system of education aimed in part at advancing that end. Little of this is prefigured in the practical philosophy of the Jena period, though much is consistent with it, and some is prefigured by certain of Fichte’s writings post-1800.

J. G. Fichte held that a form of intersubjectivity—what he called a ‘summons’—is a condition of possibility of self-consciousness. This thesis is widely taken to be one of Fichte’s most influential contributions to the European philosophy of the last two centuries. But what the thesis actually states is far from obvious; and existing interpretations either are poorly supported by the texts or else render the thesis trivial or implausible. I propose a new interpretation, on which Fichte’s claim is that reflective self-consciousness arises in the context of ad hoc efforts to coordinate action.

One of Fichte's most important ideas - that nature can place limits on our ability to govern ourselves, and that anyone who values autonomy is thereby committed to the value of basic research and of the development of autonomy-enhancing technologies - has received little attention in the interpretative literature on Fichte, and has little currency in contemporary ethics. This volume aims to address both deficits. Beginning from a reconstruction of Fichte's theory of rational agency, this volume examines his arguments for the thesis that rational agency must have two constitutive ends: substantive and formal independence. It argues for a novel interpretation of Fichte's conception of substantive independence, and shows how Fichte's account of moral duties is derived from the end of substantive independence on that conception. It also argues for a new interpretation of Fichte's conception of formal independence, and explains why the usual understanding of this end as providing direct guidance for action must be mistaken. It encompasses a systematic reconstruction of Fichte's first-order claims in normative ethics and the philosophy of right.

I propose solutions to two longstanding interpretive questions about J.G. Fichte’s 1796–97 Foundations of Natural Right: 1. What does Fichte mean when he describes the theory of right as ‘independent’ of moral theory, and what motivates that independence thesis? 2. What does Fichte mean when he describes requirements of right and the principle of right as ‘hypothetical’ imperatives, and how is that characterization consistent with his claim to have derived the concept of right as a condition of possibility of self-consciousness? Answers to both questions are motivated by an approach to the text that looks at it through the lens of Fichte’s 1798 System of Ethics, into which its results must fit if, as Fichte believes, the possibility of morally sanctioned interactions with others requires standing in some law-governed political relationship with them.

The 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters marked a turning point in Schelling’s thinking about freedom. In various early works he had endorsed a compatibilist account of free will, arguing that acts could be free in the sense required for morally responsible agency, while still being necessary from a causal and even a metaphysical point of view. In later work he would endorse an incompatiblist conception of freedom as involving radical choice between good and evil and entailing contingency in nature. The Freiheitsschrift is a point of transition, in which Schelling has introduced the idea that freedom must involve a radical choice between good and evil, but has not yet concluded that such a requirement is inconsistent with the compatibilism of his early system

I argue that Fichte (rather than Kant or Hegel or some amalgam of the two) was the primary historical model for the ethical standpoint described in Kierkegaard's Either/Or II. I then explain how looking at Kierkegaard's texts with Fichte in mind helps in interpreting the criticism of the ethical standpoint in works like The Sickness unto Death and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, as well as the significance of the discussion of secular ethics in Fear and Trembling. I conclude with a brief look at the relevance for contemporary Kantian ethics of Kierkegaard's characterization and his criticism.

: The category of despair plays a central role in Kierkegaard's pseudonymous corpus, but its meaning is controversial. This paper offers an interpretation of its use in Either/Or (in particular, in the claim the aesthetic life is despair and the ethical life freedom from despair). After examining and rejecting two recent alternatives, I argue that despair is the conscious or unconscious assumption of a passive or fatalistic attitude toward one's existence, which attitude is informed by a misconstrual of the nature of human agency.