Fichte-Studien

This paper addresses Fichte’s puzzle of self-consciousness. I propose a new reading of “Fichte’s original insight”, inspired by Pareyson’s general reading, which I call here the “Fichtean metaphysical turn in transcendental philosophy”. Against the mainstream view in Fichte’s scholarship, I argue that Fichte’s and Kant’s views do not concur regarding the primary reference of the “I”, namely spontaneous agency in thinking, which Fichte calls “Tathandlung”. Yet, their views do in fact concur when Fichte claims that this spontaneous agency in thinking is the “essence” or the underlying nature of the self, which Kant denies. Regarding this I take the side of Fichte. But how is Fichte’s original insight supposed to solve the puzzle of self-consciousness? At that transcendental level, the puzzle does not arise because there is no need for self-identification in the first place. Transcendental self-knowledge results from the sui generis intellectual Selbstanschauung that everyone has of oneself as sheer spontaneous agency in thinking. But at the empirical level, the puzzle does not arise either and for the same reason. Reference to the embodied self dispenses with any self-identification because it is based on the fundamental metaphysical relation everybody has to their own body, namely identity.

Although the meaning of «phenomenology» significantly differs from Fichte to Henry, it is nonetheless a similar problem that both thinkers encounter since they both can be read as conceiving of the absolute as life, i.e. as that which essentially and necessarily escapes the power of the concept as well as that of sight. If life is according to its very essence invisible, then it must remain outside the realms of intuition and discourse. On the other hand, life is precisely what a phenomenology of life as a philosophical discourse is aiming at. By placing the recognition of the absolute in the center of their approach, both Henry’s material phenomenology and Fichte’s phenomenology – presented in his 1804 Wissenschaftslehre Zweiter Vortrag – raise the question of the conditions of possibility enabling such knowing and recognition. From an ethical point of view, however, the decisive question, that of the existential form that this recognition could take in the realm of action, remains open.