Fichte's Transcendental Philosophy: The Original Duplicity of Intelligence and Will (review)

The subtitle says it all: “Original Duplicity,” which is to say, interdependent duality, or perhaps “equiprimordiality.” The thesis defended by Günter Zöller in this meticulously documented and elegantly written new book is that the traditional emphasis upon the “primacy of the practical” in Fichte’s thought is seriously misleading and obscures one of the most striking aspects of his highly original transcendental analysis of consciousness and experience.

Limiting his exegesis to the period of the “early” or “Jena” Wissenschaftslehre, Zöller carefully explains how “practical” and “theoretical” elements are inextricably linked at every stage of Fichte’s analysis. While it is certainly true that Fichte made a brilliant effort to demonstrate the dependence of “thinking” upon “willing,” of “knowing” upon “doing,” and hence of “theory” upon “practice,” it is no less true that, in doing so, he also established that there can be no “willing” without some prior awareness, and hence some “knowledge,” both of one’s present condition (“what is”) and of some particular goal to be accomplished by free activity (“what ought to be”). The Kantian distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” reason is, therefore, on Fichte’s analysis, simply a reflection of a more fundamental distinction between the “theoretical” and “practical” activities or powers of the I, neither of which can function in the absence of the other.

What Fichte proposes is, in Zöller’s phrase, a truly “integrated theory of reason,” one that begins by positing a pure and original unity of intellect and will in the mere concept of selfhood, that proceeds to a discursive, transcendental analysis of the dynamic and dialectical interplay between “theoretical” and “practical” moments in the constitution of experience (or of empirical self-consciousness), and that concludes by positing, albeit only as a regulative ideal, or as a necessary but unobtainable goal of infinite striving, the final, empirically achieved unity of theory and practice: an ideal of a self that is no longer divided against itself or others and of a world that has been wholly transformed by intellectually guided human activity. As Fichte’s account proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear not only that we must distinguish the will from the intellect—even as we continue to insist upon their systematic interdependence—but that we must also modify our original understanding of both. This conclusion is most unambiguously presented in those works of 1796–99 that collectively constitute the “second” or “revised” version of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, including the lectures on Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo and the System of Ethics, and it is upon an analysis of these texts that Zöller’s interpretation is chiefly based. According to the latter, an adequate theory of willing must not merely contrast and relate “the will” to “the intellect,” but must recognize that even pure volition contains a certain cognitive core and presupposes some guiding law that is simply integral to the will itself. Similarly, “mere cognition” will always be found to contain within itself, in the form of “feeling,” a certain “practical” dimension of its own.

Zöller’s careful account of Fichte’s genetic deduction of the necessary interplay between theoretical and practical elements in the constitution of selfhood and experience is by far the most detailed and accurate one available in English, and forms the core of his book. It is by no means, however, the only topic he discusses. The first two chapters, for example, constitute an excellent general introduction to Fichte’s entire Jena project and include a fine discussion of the relationship between Kantian and Fichtean idealism. Chapter 3, which explicates the key notions of “positing” and “determining,” will be of immense help to anyone trying to understand German idealism in general and Fichte’s philosophy in particular. Like Kant’s ethical theory, Fichte’s is often treated in isolation from his larger system, but Zöller’s Chapter 4 clearly explicates the...