Refuting Fichte with "Common Sense": Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer's Reception of the Wissenschaftslehre 1794/5

Even a cursory comparison of Fichte's first published version of the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/5 with Kant's critical works reveals a striking methodological difference.¹ For, whereas Kant begins with the conditioned and ascends to the subjective foundations of its conditioning, Fichte immediately begins—in Hegel's words, "like a shot from a pistol"² —from an unconditioned subjective foundation. It may thus be said that Kant's method is "analytic," whereas Fichte's is "synthetic." For, in the Wolffian terminology of the time, the analytic method names a movement "from . . . consequences to their grounds," whereas the synthetic method names a movement "from grounds to their consequences."³ Kant himself employs these terms to describe the same distinction. However, he clearly believes that the analytic method is the correct procedure of all philosophy, whereas the synthetic method describes the correct procedure of mathematics.⁴ Therefore, it appears that Fichte's method is not only different from Kant's, but is also one that Kant would not sanction. It therefore seems fruitful to consider both why Fichte has made this methodological "shift," as well as whether it is justifiable. Whereas there are no shortages of responses to this first consideration, responses to the second consideration are—at least within English-language scholarship—almost entirely lacking.⁵

The aim of this study is to address this second consideration. In this context, the writings of an almost entirely overlooked contemporary of Fichte, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, will be discussed. Niethammer was professor of theology and philosophy at the University of Jena at the same time as Fichte and whilst he was initially highly supportive of Fichte and his Kritik aller Offenbarung,⁶ he did not share the same enthusiasm for the Wissenschaftslehre 1794/5. As early as October 1794, Niethammer thus writes that Fichte's "system of the I and not-I . . . appears to me to be invalid [nichtig] in every respect."⁷ The following year, he established the Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrten, the initial aim of which has been interpreted as being to promote an alternative program of transcendental philosophy to that of Fichte.⁸ As his own writings within the first issue of the journal make clear, what is at issue for Niethammer is precisely the Wissenschaftslehre's procedure of beginning with the unconditioned.⁹ Niethammer instead argues that philosophy should begin with what he calls "common sense" (gemeinen Verstand). His appeal to common sense should however not be understood as identical to the kind of uncritical "appeal to common sense" (gemeinen Menschenverstand) of the British philosophers, Reid and Priestly, which Kant castigates in the Prolegomena.¹⁰ For "common sense," for Niethammer, can in no way act as the sole criterion for philosophical truth. Rather, "common sense" denotes a body of synthetic propositions that we pre-reflectively "feel" to be necessarily and universally valid, but which require "scientific" philosophy to prove their objective validity. Niethammer thus interprets Kant's critical philosophy as an endeavour to prove the objective validity of these "demands of common sense." Niethammer's point is that in constructing such a proof, philosophy must begin with these common sense convictions, in order then—like Kant—to ascend analytically to conditions providing proof of their objective validity. For, as far as Niethammer is concerned, a philosophical system that utilises a synthetic method, and thus effectively "suspends" these convictions until their validity can be rigorously deduced from an unconditioned foundation, produces results that can never be acceptable to common sense and can thus never be valid. The case for rehabilitating this somewhat forgotten figure rests, however, not only upon the fact that his writings provide a fertile source of reflections concerning the legitimacy of the shift towards a synthetic method, but also upon the fact that it has been plausibly suggested that his writings influenced the thought of the Early-Romantics, Hölderlin and Novalis.¹¹

However, a further question arises in the course of reflecting upon the history of Niethammer's Philosophisches Journal. For although it ran for several...