Abstract This article analyzes the proto-anarchist implications of Fichte’s thought, drawing on his work Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urtheile des Publicums über die französische Revolution (1793–1794) and the first metaphysical configuration of his system, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794–1795). The study focuses on the concepts of individualism and morality, aiming to highlight Fichte’s critique of any politically constituted society under the aegis of the state institution. Furthermore, the article brings Fichte’s ideas into dialogue with those of Stirner and Thoreau to deepen the anarcho-individualist sense of these philosophers’ ideas, emphasizing both their coincident and divergent resonances. This analysis seeks to demonstrate the cohesiveness of the philosophical foundations underpinning these authors’ critiques of politically understood social formations, while also underscoring certain limitations of their conceptual frameworks regarding the organization of intersubjective existence.
Abstract The paper analyzes the structural unity between Wissenschaftslehre and Staatslehre in Fichte’s late works, emphasizing their convergence in a philosophical project that integrates speculative insight and political transformation. The multiplicity of expositions of the Wissenschaftslehre is interpreted as an essential feature of its identity, grounded in the dynamic self-manifestation of the Absolute through consciousness. Philosophical insight ( Einsicht ) becomes the medium through which theory is transfigured into life and action. The Staatslehre introduces Christ as the absolute historical fact that enables a shift from a pre-modern political theology based on miracles and coercion to a post-Christian order grounded in freedom and rational self-determination. Sovereignty, traditionally legitimized by revelation or contract, is reconfigured as the unfolding of transcendental intelligence within a community. The dissolution of theological–political authority culminates in a constitutional model in which reason itself governs. In this framework, the Wissenschaftslehre emerges as both speculative doctrine and political constitution, replacing faith with self-conscious insight as the foundation of political legitimacy.
Abstract The article aims to examine the relationship between transcendental philosophy and politics considering the concept of “applied philosophy” ( angewandte Philosophie ) developed by Fichte in his 1813 lectures known as the Doctrine of the State ( Staatslehre ). The goal is to draw from Fichte’s text the resources to speak of an authentic “politics of the transcendental,” that is, a political-transformative (both critical and constructive) valorization of the knowledge of the doctrine of science. I will highlight how the political application of the transcendental raises the problem of defining alternative models of subjectivity, no longer compromised by the dogmatism underlying the utilitarian and proprietary vision of modern sovereignty (the so-called “State of owners”). Education ( Bildung ) will prove to be a crucial practice, which will make it possible to measure the limits and potential of Fichtean political thought.
Abstract The aim of this article is to reconstruct the critique of absolute monarchy that Fichte develops in his Beitrag , in connection with the discussion about the relation between Enlightenment and despotism held by some of the most prominent German thinkers of that period. I argue that, on the basis of the fundamental principles of his WL and his conception of Enlightenment as culture for the sake of freedom, Fichte rejects the idea that despotism or any external factor can contribute positively to its progress. Moreover, I show that Fichte demonstrates that unlimited monarchies block such progress and concludes that such political constitutions, which only pursue the benefit of the rulers, rest on the usurpation of the citizens’ freedom. Therefore, they should not exist. Finally, I develop Fichte’s proposal for the achievement of this plan. Fichte summons the people to transform their own reality, to become the protagonists of historical progress by making themselves worthy of freedom by means of communication between free spirits, that is, education. With this analysis I hope to evidence to what extent Fichte’s WL , the first system of freedom , is a powerful tool not only to critique the existing state of affairs, but also to provide inspiration to transform it.
Abstract A long section of The Doctrine of the State is devoted to determining what Fichte here defines as the two original human races, reformulating his earlier thesis of the original inequality between the Normalvolk and savages. This essay aims to clarify the scope and reasons for this reformulation. Against the backdrop of Fichte’s early involvement in the dispute between Herder and Kant regarding the origin of the human race and history (§1), it will be demonstrated that the dualism between Normalvolk and savages reflects Fichte’s speculative and ambivalent approach to reconciling the unity of the human race with physical and cultural differences: this approach rejects any fixed division while simultaneously justifying colonialism. In 1813, in the context of the uprising of French-occupied Prussia against Napoleon, Fichte reconsidered the relationship between the two original human races, polemically responding to Schlegel’s anti-Napoleonic attempt to justify the cultural superiority of German tribes by claiming their descent from ancient India. In contrast to this conservative nationalist view, Fichte advocates the primacy of the second and ‘savage’ human race, in order to lay the groundwork for his assertion of the primacy of the Germans, as destined to initiate a ‘new history’ by dissolving all hereditary social and political orders. However, this does not alter Fichte’s view of non-European savages as a ‘margin’ and ‘exception’ in the course of history.
Abstract This article examines Karl Friedrich Köppen’s Fichte und die Revolution (1843), published in Ruge’s Anekdota , as a pivotal moment in the Young Hegelian reception of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Köppen reactivates Fichte’s Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution (1793) fifty years later, not as a historical curiosity but as a conceptual arsenal for the political struggles of the Vormärz . By highlighting themes such as the autonomy of the will, the legitimacy of revolution, the duty of insurrection, and even the extinction of the state, Köppen constructs an image of a “Jacobin” or “sans-culotte” Fichte whose radicalism exceeded Hegel’s. The article shows how Köppen strategically weaponized Fichte’s reflections on the French Revolution against contemporary reactionary theorists like Haller and Leo, and how this retrieval provided the Young Hegelians with alternative conceptual resources to overcome the crisis of the 1840s. In doing so, Köppen positioned Fichte as a philosophical ally in the struggle for freedom, critique, and transformation.
Abstract Contemporary critics of capitalism often argue that prolonged exposure to the current economic order makes this order increasingly seem inevitable. Habituated to its structures, we come to perceive economic circumstances as ever more necessary and resistance as ever more futile. In this paper, I argue that Fichte’s 1800 Closed Commercial State , even though this has largely gone unnoticed, already anticipates an early version of this problem and even proposes a potential response. Writing that there is a »disease to regard the contingent as necessary« ( GA I /7: 92) that can affect our perception of the economic world, Fichte proposes that immersion in history, esp. in economic history, can cure this disease and reignite our sense of economic possibility. By confronting how the politico-economic world has changed in the past and how human agency has shaped those changes, we can, Fichte thinks, regain the sense that economic change is possible even now.
Abstract The aim of this article is to correctly situate the irruptive and abrupt political change within Fichte’s political philosophy. Fichte supports the political and cultural continuity of a community, but he must synthesize it with the irruptive character of some changes that entail a new worldview, integrating it into his philosophy despite the apparent incompatibility. I will show how the notion of applied philosophy allows Fichte to maintain this disruptive character in some of his works, along with the revolutionary pathos that underlies his philosophy of religion and the importance of certain concepts characterized by novelty, irruption and immediacy in his theoretical philosophy.
Abstract The contribution presents Fichte’s little-studied Doctrine of the State (1813) in four sections on the work’s ambitious synthesis of philosophy, history, politics and religion. The first section places the Doctrine of the State in the context of Fichte’s late philosophy and surveys the work’s reception through today. The second section presents the work’s extended introduction as a popular summary presentation of Fichte’s post-Kantian brand of first philosophy ( Wissenschaftslehre ). The third section features Fichte’s theologico-political distinction between the coercive “state” and the coercion-free “realm”. The fourth section addresses the affinities between Fichte’s Doctrine of the State and Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820).
Abstract In the lectures on the Doctrine of the State, delivered in Berlin during the retreat of the defeated Napoleonic army, Fichte combats romantic political irrationalism, attacking the core of the Philosophy of Nature, where access to the absolute is achieved directly without the mediation of the Logos or the image. Thus, he proposes to take advantage of the situation, not to rearm against the invading troops, but to reorganize society from the standpoint of science. To this end, he delineates the evolution of the State from faith to reason, dividing it into two stages, according to the scheme of the polemic between ancients and moderns, which Schelling had used in his Philosophy of Art , but in a different sense, because now it obeys a moral conception of history, which has to do with freedom and the exercise of power. Here, the postulation of a third stage yet to come is not a return to antiquity and the monarchical system, but a deepening of the principles of Christianity, which are those that must guide the new education to achieve the universality of citizenship and civil equality. Fichte proposes as its goal anarchy, communism and cosmopolitanism, resulting in a union of Christian peoples, following the ideas of Gioacchino da Fiore, whose historicization of the Trinity had been reintroduced by Lessing in The Education of the Human Gender . From this perspective, the Staatslehre constitutes a defense of the ideals of the Enlightenment.
Der Beitrag ist eine vergleichende Studie der Ich-Philosophie Fichtes und Maine de Birans. Er untersucht Fichtes „ursprüngliche Tathandlung“ in Bezug auf Maine de Birans „fait primitif de conscience“ in metaphilosophischer, methodologischer und struktureller Hinsicht. Als erste systematische Untersuchung zu den Strukturparallelen zwischen Fichtes „Real-Idealismus“ und Birans „transzendentalem Empirismus“ bietet der Beitrag eine rekonstruktive Lektüre der Argumente beider Autoren und einen systematischen Zugriff auf ihre verwandten, wenn auch nie übereinstimmenden Positionen. Gezeigt wird, dass (und wie) beide Ich-Philosophien systematisch auf einer Konzeption der „Tatsachen des Bewusstseins“ beruhen. Zu diesem Zweck berücksichtigt unser vergleichender Ansatz die unterschiedlichen Traditionen der französischen und deutschen Philosophie an ihrer äußersten Grenze zur nachidealistischen Moderne. Die Studie schließt mit einem kurzen Ausblick auf den anderen Anfang der späteren Philosophien Victor Cousins und Artur Schopenhauers, die den Begriff eines lichtvollen, selbstreflektierten und transparenten Selbstbewusstseins aufgeben und stattdessen das Bewusstsein entweder als den „dunklen Punkt“ des Willens (Schopenhauer) oder als abstrakte Vernunft bestimmen, die die „complexité obscure du moi“ des modernen Egos erhellen muss (Cousin).
Dieser Artikel stellt Grundzüge von Herders und Fichtes kosmopolitischem Nationalismus heraus, insbesondere die prägende Rolle der Sprache bei der Bestimmung einer Nation und der Entwicklung eines Nationalcharakters. Zudem wird dargelegt, wie sowohl Fichte als auch Herder die Nation als eine natürliche Einheit verstehen, die dazu fähig ist, der dem monarchischen Staat innewohnenden Tendenz zur Erweiterung seiner Hoheits- und Herrschaftsgebiete zu widerstehen. Bei Fichte ist diese Tendenz stark mit dem Begriff „Universalmonarchie“ verbunden. Auf diese Weise stellt die Idee einer Völkergemeinschaft einen Zustand des Weltfriedens in Aussicht. Doch Fichtes Begründung der Möglichkeit einer Verwirklichung dieses kosmopolitischen Zieles, die sich auf seine Theorie einer Ursprache und deren Wirkung auf den Nationalcharakter stützt, unterminiert zugleich dieses Ziel, indem sie die Ausgrenzung von mindestens einer Nation impliziert. Somit kann man von einem Paradoxon des kosmopolitischen Nationalismus sprechen.
This contribution develops and defends an account of Fichte’s metaphilosophical distinction between the first-order, pre-philosophical standpoint of ordinary life and the higher-order (reflective, transcendental) standpoint of idealistic speculation, with particular attention to the question what we ought finally and fundamentally to believe about ourselves and our world, insofar as we are rationally self-determining subjects who have access to both standpoints and whose beliefs are formed in an ideally rational way. For Fichte, I argue: (1) Our ordinary standpoint comprises various pre-philosophical assumptions about human agency (some broadly moral, some broadly material) that philosophy calls into question and arguably could invalidate. However, (2) dogmatism, which threatens to invalidate the moral assumptions of agency, is a self-undermining attempt at philosophy, and thus is not qualified to do so. Nevertheless, (3) while idealism transcendentally deduces and (to just that extent) rationally legitimates all the basic assumptions of agency (moral and material alike), it is also methodologically empowered and rationally entitled to reflectively invalidate the material assumptions of agency specifically (in addition, of course, to radically vindicating our most basic moral convictions). Hence, (4) philosophy in its only fully authentic and finally viable form establishes the transcendental ideality of the sensible (but not the moral) world as such and as a whole.
In diesem Beitrag schlage ich eine Rekonstruktion der ersten “Aufgabe” der Fichtschen Sittenlehre vor, um über Fichtes Gebrauch naturphilosophischer und naturwissenschaftlicher Begriffe Rechenschaft abzulegen. Laut meiner These führt der darin enthaltene Verweis auf das Phänomen der Elastizität zur Entdeckung einer Analogie zwischen der Wirkungsweise eines elastischen Körpers und den Eigenschaften eines Willensakts, ohne welche Fichtes Überlegung in einen Widerspruch geraten würde. Die in der Sekundärliteratur gängige Unterschätzung des Fichtschen Bezugs auf die Elastizität wird sich dementsprechend als ungerechtfertigt erweisen.
