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Introduction to the Texts of J. G. Fichte The Announcement The small text entitled Ankündigung (Announcement) bears the date November 4, 1800 and was originally published in the Allgemeine Zeitung in January 1801. It was only reprinted for the first time in 1988 in the J. G. Fichte Gesamtausgabe.1 As the name suggests, its purpose was to announce Fichte’s new and reworked presentation of his system of philosophy. Although brief in length, the Announcement is significant for both personal and philosophical reasons. On the personal level, the Announcement is notorious in the dispute between Fichte and Schelling on account of Fichte’s casual remark at the beginning of the text that he could not say whether his “talented collaborator, Professor Schelling, has been more successful at paving the way for the transcendental standpoint” than he himself had been able to secure. Schelling’s later displeasure at this passage was perhaps a result of Caroline Schlegel’s initial influence, as she was not entirely convinced of the innocence of Fichte’s remark and even pressed Schelling to seek Goethe’s opinion.2 In time, Schelling too appears to have interpreted the remark as a sly aside signifying his lack of independence in philosophical matters.3 Fichte rejected any ill intention and attributed Schelling’s overreaction to his “hyper-sensitive” personality.4 Thus, this seemingly innocuous remark proved to be one of the catalysts for the eventual rupture between the two philosophers. On the philosophical level, Fichte’s Announcement is significant for at least two reasons. First, it provides an analysis of the relationship between the Wissenschaftslehre and mathematics that is unique in Fichte’s oeuvre. Second, it contains significant statements concerning the revolutionary nature of the Wissenschaftslehre vis-à-vis Kant’s critical philosophy, especially after the latter (as well as Jacobi) had publicly rejected Fichte’s system in August 1799 as being “mere logic.”5 Fichte’s comparisons between mathematics and the Wissenschaftslehre turn on his conviction that they share three principal distinctions in common. First, 77 78 J. G. Fichte/F. W. J. Schelling in his view, they possess the same immediate self-evidence (unmittelbare Evidenz); that is to say, like the axioms of geometry, the Fichtean starting proposition exhibits a transparency and necessity whose truth is immediately apparent to the mind. Second, they jointly share a determinacy (Bestimmtheit) or quality of universality that allows every rational being to intuit the same invariable intuition. In this respect the external signs (or language) of the system are of an inferior status compared with the necessity and transparency of the immediate inner intuition. Third, both the Wissenschaftslehre and mathematics harbor the same irrefutability (Unwiderlegbarkeit). Here Fichte is not arguing for infallibility, but simply pointing out a logical consequence of his intuition and postulatebased model of philosophy. That is to say, as with any self-evident axiomatic proposition, Fichte’s own first principle is by definition not capable of proof and is therefore indemonstrable. Finally, in the Announcement, Fichte places himself squarely in the Platonic tradition by suggesting mathematics to be a propedeutic for his system. For Fichte, mathematics is an excellent intellectual training to equip the prospective student of philosophy with the requisite comprehension of the “immediate self-evidence and universality” of all postulates. The 1799 public rejections of the Wissenschaftslehre by both Kant and Jacobi, as well as his dismissal from Jena during the same period, were obviously a huge blow to Fichte. Undaunted, he took stock and partly laid the blame on his own imperfect presentations, believing in 1800 that he had at last acquired the skill to clearly communicate his scientific philosophy to others. And although Fichte continued to stress the full continuity between his system and Kantian transcendental idealism until the end of his life, in the Announcement Fichte appears to gain a new understanding of the innovativeness of the Wissenschaftslehre within the history of philosophy.6 If in 1793–1794 he had believed his accomplishment to consist in the discovery of a new Grundsatz or first principle for a philosophical system that was still essentially Kantian in spirit, in late 1800 Fichte proclaimed its newness to consist in its scientific nature, in the discovery of a “brand new science” whose “very idea did not previously exist.” Fichte maintains that the innovativeness of this science should above all be considered an epistemological one. In the “Doctrine of Method” of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had underscored the differences between the methods of mathematics and...

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