Other Relations: The Pre-History of le moi and (das) Ich in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte

ANTHONY KRUPP Other Relations: The Pre-History of le moi and (das) Ich in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Philipp Moritz, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte Aufgefordert durch den delphinischen Apollo und durch Sokrates, sich selbst zu erkennen, hat man nie recht gewußt, welche Frage damit denn gestellt sei. Was bin ich? Man weiß inzwischen, wie man sich zu helfen hat: eine Konfession, eine Nation, eine Profession, eine Faktion oder deren Fraktion—alles Ausfluchten, um die sokratische Unbestimmtheit zu umgehen. Demgegenüber ist die Frage Seit wann bin ich? eine eher selten gestellte. . . . Der Frage Seit wann bin ich? schien ein Vorspann von Prähistorie zugewachsen zu sein.. . . Hans Blumenberg, Matthäuspassion AN old joke tells of a warning answer to a dangerous question: What was God doing before He created the universe? Preparing Hell for people who ask such questions. Presumably, the trouble with such a question is that it generates paradox. It asks in effect what God was doing before He was doing anything. Around 1800, when the place of God was being usurped by the autonomous individual, by the self-organizing self, secular versions of this question arose: What preceded the self? What was I before I came to self-consciousness?' Whereas Rousseau sanguinely affirmed that paradoxes would follow from his inquiries, and Fichte echoed the pious answer of warning, Moritz took great pains in considering how the self might precede itself, and then attempted to formulate different questions. Goethe Yearbook XI (2002) 112 Anthony Krupp As recent scholarship documents, substantive forms of the first-person personal pronoun came into currency in the eighteenth century.2 Discourses that made use of terms such as das Ich or le moi were faced with the task of articulating both the identity of and the difference between a person and his or her Ich or moi.i My study focuses on narratives that trace the emergence of such an entity in individual human lives, with special attention given to how (or whether) these narratives account for what preceded this emergence. I observe an increasing sense of mystery regarding pre-Ich or pre-me» states in texts from 1750-1800. My thesis is that this sense of mystery represents the discovery within European thought that Enlightenment narratives could not convincingly represent the time of infancy and therefore could not convincingly explain human development. It is important to note that the role of "time" and the understanding of "infancy" were undergoing thorough changes. Michel Foucault observes an epistemic shift in European thought around 1800, which marks the end of "the Classical age" and the beginning of "the modern age."4 The modern age is marked by "a profound historicity" that "penetrates into the heart of things" such that all things seek "the principle of their intelligibility only in their own development" (xxiii). Such historicity is foreign to the Classical age, which viewed things in terms of order. It is not that development was ignored; rather, the historicity of things was regarded as trivial rather than as profound. Development was understood in the Classical age as an "ideal genesis" (62). That is, time did not matter, did not affect things; time was a simple medium for the ideal unfolding of order. (See also 72-76.) Foucault examines this epistemic shift with reference to the Classical sciences of general grammar, the analysis of wealth, and natural history, which were supplanted by the modem sciences of linguistics, economics, and biology. Several of his observations strike me as pertinent for an analysis of the older science of psychologia, the modern science of Psychologie, and the intermediate appearance of Erfahrungsseelenkunde in the 1780s.5 In condensed form, one could regard the course of eighteenth-century German thought about the soul or psyche as being structured by a shift in the understanding of temporal development. In Christian Wolffs work of the 1720s, time is regarded as a neutral medium for the unfolding of order; this statement holds for his understanding of mental development as well as for his general ontology. By the 1780s, though, in the work of Moritz and others, development no longer follows the pattern of an ideal genesis. Time had begun to matter, to be regarded...