The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought

Chapter 11: The Reception and Legacy of J.G. Fichte’s Religionslehre

• Chapter 11 • The Reception and Legacy of J.G. Fichte’s Religionslehre   Fichte, Philosophy, and Religion The philosophy of religion [is that part of the philosophy of the postulates that deals with] the postulate that practical philosophy addresses to the theoretical realm, to nature, which, by means of a supersensible law, is supposed to accommodate itself to the goal of morality. . . . The Wissenschaftslehre has to derive and explain this postulate {as such}. But it is not the task of the Wissenschaftslehre to apply this postulate within life, {to generate religious sentiments within ourselves and, through us, within other rational beings outside of us}. —Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) was an autumn child of the German Enlightenment, or Aufklärung. Educated to be a moderate theo logian , persuaded to be a material determinist, and inclined to be a firebrand moralist, he became a transcendental idealist after deciding that Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy reconciled the naturalism of his “head” with the moralism of his “heart.”1 Fichte’s philoso300 phy, Wissenschaftslehre —and the religious theory, or Religionslehre, it contained—would reflect an abiding commitment to rational faith, scientific rigor, and ethical responsibility. Fichte’s first book, Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (1792), defended his claim that moral consciousness was the sole religious miracle and helped him to gain a position at the University of Jena, where he showed himself to be a beloved educator and luminous mind, but also a divisive personality.2 Various foes hounded Fichte with allegations , which ranged from violating the Sabbath to corrupting youth, based on misinterpretations of his idea that genuine religiosity involved steadfast pursuit of moral perfection rather than concern for worldly or otherworldly consequences. Eventually, Fichte lost his position because of accusations of atheism leveled at his essay “On the Basis of Our Belief in a Divine Governance of the World” (1798).3 After fleeing to Berlin, he published Vocation of Man (1800) and The Way toward a Blessed Life, or the Religionslehre (1812), where he developed his nascent religious theory.4 Although he anticipated that his later Wissenschaftslehre — and specifically his later Religionslehre —would be construed as a rapprochement with orthodox theology, he explicitly denied such an interpretation.5 Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre provides a transcendental account of the world—experience in general—by showing how it must be theoretically known by rational beings and by showing how it ought to be practically constructed by rational beings.6 In addition to its theoretical and practical parts, the Wissenschaftslehre contains a philosophy of the postulates, a mixed theoretical-practical branch of philosophy that includes the Religionslehre, which provides a transcendental account of the spiritual world—religious experience in particular—by showing how the theoretical realm, or nature, must conform itself to the practical goal of morality.7 The Wissenschaftslehre requires that the transcendental philosopher abstract from the object (the thing) and reflect on the subject (the I) of consciousness. The philosopher postulates the concept of the I, or the philosophical intellectual intuition, as the ground of experience, but this concept must be thought according to the law of reflective opposition, which requires that every object of thought be conceived as something determinate in opposition to something determinable.8 The Reception and Legacy of J.G. Fichte’s Religionslehre • 301 This law drives the central argument of the Wissenschaftslehre to produce increasingly refined concepts of the I until the philosopher discovers that intellectual intuition depends on the hypothesis of a single act of consciousness wherein a rational individual, a rational world, a material object, and a material world are synthetically connected by a principle of unity.9 The Wissenschaftslehre would be purely speculative except that this fivefold synthesis occurs in experience as a real intellectual intuition of the moral law and a concomitant intuition of the conditions necessary to fulfill its command: an individual will, an object (the body) affected by the will, a sensible world order where willing becomes deed, and an intelligible world order where willing accomplishes its supersensible goal.10 According to Fichte, the real intellectual intuition provides an extraphilosophical sanction of the theoretical portion of the Wissenschaftslehre that explains objective experience, an extraphilosophical sanction of the practical portion of the Wissenschaftslehre that explains ethical experience, and an extraphilosophical sanction of the Religionslehre that explains religious experience.11 Hence, the entire project of the Wissenschaftslehre presupposes that philosophical knowledge— the standpoint of philosophy...