Matters of Spirit: J. G. Fichte and the Technological Imagination

1. An Introduction to the Crisis of Spirit: Technology and the Fichtean Imagination

1 An Introduction to the Crisis of Spirit Technology and the Fichtean Imagination Reproductive Media and the Crisis of Intersubjective Recognition J. G. Fichte is widely regarded as the first to articulate intersubjective recognition (Anerkennung) as a theory of right, and thus offer the notion of intersubjectivity as a significant social principle.1 While Fichte’s version of a theory of right is complex, the core principles of the notion are that one’s rights end where someone else’s nose begins. While such a gross simplification does little justice to Fichte’s thought, in schematic form this account of individual right nevertheless sketches the essential intent of any reciprocal theory of right: it demands intersubjective recognition. It demands one individual recognize another individual as a free autonomous being. Here we have the 1. While the notion of intersubjectivity is implicit in Kantian ethics, particularly in the notion of a kingdom of ends, Fichte’s transcendental deduction of the other was the first explicit expression of the idea of reciprocal recognition in the constitution of right. 6 Matters of Spirit essence of Fichte’s conception of intersubjective right: ‘‘Each limits his freedom through the possibility of the freedom of the other’’ (FW 3:120–21). Fichte’s intent in outlining a theory of right was to deduce the conditions of the possibility of freedom or free action. In the social sphere, he reasoned, the freedom to act depends upon a reciprocal recognition of rights. One rational being must recognize and take into consideration the rights of another rational being as an autonomous subject.2 Making space for the rights of another through the free limitation of one’s own action makes freedom possible. But what does it mean to recognize the rights of another (another rational being)? What are the limits of recognition? And—perhaps most important—how is recognition achieved? Such questions of recognition , which probe the very limits of Fichte’s transcendental method, are further complicated by the technologies of reproductive media. Consequently, with the gradual acceleration of the growth of technology since the turn of the twentieth century, the very parameters of subjectivity and its sphere of right, understood as a sphere of free action, have come to be questioned. For instance, given the power of video, photography, and television, whether one owns his or her own image has become an urgent ethical question.3 Thus, with such reproductive media it is not clear whether a subject’s sphere of right (conceived analogically as an extension of the idea of physical bodily integrity), and the description of that sphere, can be limited in terms of an immediate sphere of free bodily action. Technology has had an immense impact on Fichte’s account of both selfconsciousness and intersubjective recognition. After all, what is unique about Fichte’s account of right is that its deduction of the possibility of freedom is also a deduction of the possibility of self-consciousness. In other words, this making space in the recognition of right gives space to the self-active ego, and in the act of recognition makes self-consciousness possible. Thus, intersubjective right describes both the preservation of the self-active transcendental subject and its constitution in self-reflection. Consequently, one might say that it is the form of social interaction, in this instance, the reciprocal recognition of a community of free beings, which determines the form of consciousness. 2. In my view Fichte’s central concern with and understanding of right was determined by his larger interest in the sociopolitical question of freedom. ‘‘Right,’’ then, for Fichte, is primarily a right to free action and freedom. 3. There has been increasing interest in the ethics of the image. See, for instance, Gross, Katz, and Ruby, Image Ethics. The Crisis of Spirit 7 Although Fichte would initially describe the ego in terms of act, with the media image subjectivity can no longer be bound exclusively to a sphere of action and a system of rights that would secure it.4 In an era increasingly dominated by technologically reproduced images, a theory and definition of right anchored in the free, self-limiting, and self-reflecting action of the transcendental subject seems in danger of being overwhelmed by the needs and demands of the actual forms of social interaction. Fichte himself, as attested to in the ‘‘Tagebuch über den animalischen Magnetismus’’ (1813), encountered just such...