Daniel Breazeale, <\/b>Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte\u2019s Early Philosophy. <\/i><\/b>Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; xxii + 460 pages. ISBN: 978-0199233632.<\/b><\/p>\n
Reviewed by Jane Dryden, Mount Allison University.<\/i><\/p>\n
J.G. Fichte is a frustrating but exciting philosopher to spend time with. His early work, during his period at Jena and immediately thereafter (1794\u20131801), speaks to many contemporary concerns. But in each text, Fichte treads his own distinct path, unassimilable to other positions, resisting obvious philosophical destinations in favour of whatever will further develop his conception of human freedom and refine his system of philosophy. He is wonderful to teach and share with students, and a rewarding interlocutor for research. For this, however, help is needed, and this is why we owe Dan Breazeale a great debt. In addition to his many translations of Fichte\u2019s writings, Breazeale writes with clarity and care about puzzles in Fichte\u2019s thought.<\/p>\n
This book started as a collection of Breazeale\u2019s essays on Fichte, but\u2014characteristic of Breazeale\u2019s scholarly conscientiousness\u2014each chapter has been further developed and updated, with some positions or points of emphasis reconsidered. For example, chapter 5, \u201cThe Spirit of the Early Wissenschaftslehre<\/i>,\u201d is substantially reworked from its early article form, drawing out the methodological comments about how one does philosophy to further emphasize their cautionary tone. Noting that \u201cthe responsibilities as well as the pleasures of interpretation are unavoidable\u201d (96; compare to Breazeale 2000, 172), Breazeale instructs us that \u201cOne of those responsibilities is that one must begin by reading widely and carefully. Only then can one begin to read critically, that is, begin to evaluate and even to challenge specific claims made by an author in the light of one\u2019s emerging grasp of the spirit that animates his overall project.\u201d (96\u201397) This serves to guide us toward Breazeale\u2019s scholarly ethos.<\/p>\n
As Breazeale notes, \u201cfew philosophers have been as insistent as Fichte upon the importance of distinguishing \u2018the letter\u2019 from \u2018the spirit\u2019 of their own <\/i>philosophy.\u201d (97) This does not mean that we can read anything into that spirit, thereby betraying \u201can attitude of cavalier indifference to what a particular thinker may actually have written<\/i>.\u201d (96) The virtue of Breazeale\u2019s work is to provide us a well-researched account not just of Fichte\u2019s published texts, but of his texts in the context of his letters and lectures, thus giving us the strongest possible tools for discerning the spirit of Fichte\u2019s philosophy. Given Fichte\u2019s frequently-changing presentations of his ideas (with the injunction to the reader to \u201cthink it for oneself\u201d), Breazeale\u2019s work is highly valuable.<\/p>\n
The book is thus an excellent resource for what one might need for seriously struggling with Fichte. Breazeale and his editor are to be heartily thanked for the decision to provide extensive footnotes, rather than burying the scholarly apparatus in endnotes. In these notes, Breazeale provides sources, full contexts for quotations, historical details about Fichte and his critics and allies, and updated accounts of scholarly debates. Each of these is provided with efficient clarity. Chapters also include extensive cross-references to help the reader pursue a particular theme.<\/p>\n
Fichte famously rejects the Kantian thing-in-itself in favour of building his system upon the activity of a radically free I. He describes his system as idealist, in contrast with a position beginning outside of human freedom, labelled \u201cdogmatist.\u201d Breazeale articulates the relationship between idealism and dogmatism in Chapter 11, noting and attempting to resolve the tension between Fichte\u2019s famous line, \u201cThe kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon the kind of person one is\u201d (300) and his belief that idealism is \u201cthe only \u2018true\u2019 or tenable system of philosophy.\u201d (320) Fichte observes that opponents of idealism fail to be motivated by the importance of freedom, due to what he calls a \u201csubjective incapacity,\u201d a failure to have raised the question for themselves. (325) As Breazeale notes, Fichte recognizes both \u201cpractical <\/i>as well as theoretical <\/i>requirements for the successful pursuit of philosophy.\u201d (324) These include not just the ability to think but the ability to will and the apprehension of the importance of freedom, which no one can have imposed upon them.<\/p>\n
This can make Fichte sound like a proto-existentialist, for whom the question of our freedom is based on a kind of leap, or groundless choice to adopt freedom as philosophical orientation. (313\u20134) Breazeale explicitly rejects this interpretation and its potential linkage to William James or Friedrich Nietzsche, and his carefully-articulated Chapter 11 helps to disentangle this by examining Fichte\u2019s account of how a person can come to learn and be educated into the Wissenschaftslehre<\/i>. This opens up potential for exploring how we can convince others without attempting to force them how to think, while yet recognizing the ways in which others may be unconvinced by our arguments. (327\u2013333)<\/p>\n
While dialing down the existentialist reading of the choice between idealism and dogmatism, Breazeale describes the existential import of Fichte\u2019s philosophy in helping us overcome our alienation with ourselves in Chapter 6, \u201cThe Divided Self and the Tasks of Philosophy.\u201d We are both thinking and willing creatures, creatures of \u201chead\u201d and \u201cheart,\u201d who experience the limitations of the world and yet strive to make it otherwise. (133) While Fichte believes that we must strive to overcome this division through our activity (\u201cpractical action\u201d)\u2014to make the world over in accordance with reason\u2014he nonetheless recognizes this striving to be endless, the task uncompleted. As Breazeale writes, \u201conly insofar as one is not <\/i>in fact self-determined can one be aware <\/i>that one ought <\/i>to be self-determined, and only a person conscious of his own dual nature can strive for a unified one.\u201d (136)<\/p>\n
This existential conflict is at the core of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, <\/i>as Breazeale describes it. Describing a distinction between the \u201cexistential\u201d and the \u201cscientific\u201d tasks of Fichte\u2019s system, Breazeale concludes that<\/p>\n the central practical or existential task of the Wissenschaftslehre <\/i>is to address and to help satisfy the longing for unity that grows out of each person\u2019s sense of his own profoundly divided condition and that a scientific system of philosophy \u2018addresses\u2019 this condition (and hence satisfies its primary existential task), not by eliminating <\/i>the division in question, but rather, by demonstrating its transcendental necessity<\/i>, thereby reconciling one to the practical realities implied by the ideal of \u2018endless striving.\u2019 (125)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In other words, philosophy helps us to make sense of our divided condition, by showing it to be both necessary and the root of our vocation in the world. The feeling of a \u201cpainful lack of unity <\/i>within one\u2019s everyday experience\u201d or the sense of \u201cguilt\u201d both help drive us toward transcendental philosophy, playing into the kind of subjectivity required to be an idealist. (145)<\/p>\n Fichte\u2019s philosophy might then seem deeply personal, geared toward addressing a subjective need; further, he enjoined his students to \u201cAct! Act! That is what we are here for.\u201d (quoted on 129) He writes to Jacobi, \u201cWhat is the purpose of the speculative standpoint, and indeed of philosophy as a whole, if it does not serve life?\u201d (quoted on 128)<\/p>\n But, Breazeale reminds us, this speculative standpoint must not be confused with everyday life. As Breazeale quotes a letter from Fichte to Reinhold,<\/p>\n I, in contrast, believe that one of the distinctive advantages of scientific idealism is that it knows itself very well and humbly renounces the exalted goal of improving and instructing mankind. Life can be improved only by those things that themselves proceed from life. Idealism, however, is the true opposite of life. The proper goal of idealism is knowledge for its own sake. It is of practical benefit only indirectly\u2014that is, its utility is pedagogic, in the broadest sense of the term. (quoted on 148)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This letter was written in the wake of the Atheism Controversy, in which Fichte was accused of atheism, due in part to his 1798 essay, \u201cOn the Foundation of Our Belief in a Divine Government of the Universe,\u201d in which God seems to be identified with the moral world-order itself. During the course of this controversy, it is hardly a surprise that Fichte would want to make a strong distinction between the philosopher\u2019s privilege of freely following an idea wherever it might lead and the concrete individual\u2019s concern for their own situation. By situating the one as pure and the other as impure, he can cast his accusers as hostile to philosophy itself.<\/p>\n For Breazeale, this is not simply a reaction to a particular chain of events, but essential to understanding Fichte\u2019s philosophy. In chapter 14, \u201cThe Problematic Primacy of the Practical,\u201d he discusses the ways in which Fichte has been taken to be a philosopher pursuing the Kantian principle of \u201cthe primacy of practical reason\u201d and described primarily as an \u201cethical idealist.\u201d (404) Those interpreting Fichte in this way have over-emphasized Fichte\u2019s emphasis on practical activity, argues Breazeale, and thus suggest that Fichte was not trying to provide a better account of consciousness and the possibility of experience but \u201cto forward his own political and moral aims.\u201d (406) Regarding the slogan of the \u201cprimacy of the practical,\u201d Breazeale writes \u201cI am convinced that the unthinking application of this familiar Kantian formula to the Wissenschaftslehre \u00fcberhaupt <\/i>has done more to hinder than to facilitate an accurate understanding of Fichte\u2019s early system.\u201d (407) In the conclusion to the chapter, he deems the slogan \u201cas misleading as it is revealing.\u201d (437)<\/p>\n After discussing a range of meanings of \u201cthe practical\u201d in Fichte\u2019s philosophy, Breazeale explains that<\/p>\n The practical function of philosophy <\/i>is therefore to serve the fundamental practical interests <\/i>of humanity, both at the individual and the societal level. Somewhat paradoxically, however, transcendental idealism, according to Fichte, can serve such a practical function only if it rigorously preserves its own independence from the practical standpoint and proceeds entirely in accordance with the laws and methods of pure theoretical speculation. (429)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The philosopher should first abstract from the standpoint of everyday experience, then pursue the investigation, and only afterward return; further, \u201conce one has committed oneself to any philosophical project it is utterly inappropriate to appeal to extra-philosophical criteria for advancing or correcting one\u2019s deductions.\u201d (420) Now, the freedom of the philosophizing subject is a starting point that cannot itself be grounded within the system, and Breazeale acknowledges that this is \u201cone of Fichte\u2019s bolder and more original thoughts.\u201d (423) But he then goes on to warn that recognizing this \u201cdoes not provide the theoretical philosopher with carte blanche<\/i> to invoke purely practical\/moral considerations.\u201d (423)<\/p>\n The distinction between the standpoint of philosophy and that of everyday life allows Fichte\u2019s idealism to be unchallenged by seemingly common-sense objections based in experience. For instance, it is quite helpful in defending Fichte\u2019s denial of the thing-in-itself\u2014something that seems to make no sense in our everyday encounters with the world, but which may make a great deal of sense when built into a transcendental account of the conditions of those encounters, particularly when compared with Kant\u2019s invocation of the noumenal thing-in-itself.<\/p>\n But the effect of this distinction can seem limiting, as though we were promised a wholesale revolution and only got a new system of logic, which we then had to promise not to use on anything real. This raises questions about what we are doing when we do history of philosophy that go beyond this particular collection. How can Fichte\u2019s idealism serve life, as he told Jacobi it should, if it cannot serve our life? Even aside from contemporary discussions of historicism and non-ideal theory, it is worth recalling Fichte\u2019s contemporary Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote, \u201cThe French Revolution, Fichte\u2019s philosophy, and Goethe\u2019s Meister <\/i>are the greatest tendencies of the age.\u201d (quoted in Mill\u00e1n 2007, 86) As Elizabeth Mill\u00e1n notes, Schlegel believed that \u201cFichte\u2019s Wissenschaftslehre <\/i>had revolutionized the field of philosophy, setting it on a path that celebrated human freedom, a path which every subsequent philosopher would have to traverse.\u201d (Mill\u00e1n 2007, 86) Schlegel is not satisfied, however, with Fichte; as Mill\u00e1n summarizes, Fichte \u201cmust take account of history and science so that his view of knowledge is not isolated from human reality. Idealism is empty if it is not connected to the concrete realities of the world.\u201d (Mill\u00e1n 2007, 89)<\/p>\n This may be the case, but, recalling Breazeale\u2019s comments regarding responsibility in reading, if I am going to develop my own ideas in conversation with Fichte, it is important not to attribute to him things he does not say. This, in turn, gives me the best opportunity for having him challenge my own contemporary philosophical assumptions, since I am not reading my own preoccupations back into his text. Breazeale makes clear that \u201chowever attractive the Wissenschaftslehre <\/i>might seem as a means for overcoming certain contradictions in the minds and hearts of its readers, this has little if any relevance to assessing the philosophical<\/i>\u2014which is to say, strictly theoretical\u2014value of his system.\u201d (438)<\/p>\n Breazeale is concerned primarily, in this chapter and in the book as a whole, to provide an honest and accurate scholarly account of the details of Fichte\u2019s philosophy, and where there is ambiguity, to clarify it with reference to Fichte\u2019s own publications, lectures, and letters. This collection is thus an essential companion for navigating Fichte\u2019s thought and for understanding and interpreting the seeming tensions between Fichte\u2019s revolutionary language and his deflationary separation of philosophy from life. Whatever we choose to do with Fichte\u2019s thought, at least may we do it with the conscientiousness and care modelled for us by Dan Breazeale.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Additional Works Cited<\/b><\/p>\n Breazeale, Daniel (2000), \u201cThe Spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre<\/i>,\u201d in The Reception of Kant\u2019s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel<\/i>, (ed.) S. Sedgwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 171\u2013198.<\/p>\n Mill\u00e1n, Elizabeth (2007), Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy<\/i> (Albany: State University of New York Press).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Daniel Breazeale, Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte\u2019s Early Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; xxii + 460 pages. ISBN: 978-0199233632. Reviewed by Jane Dryden, Mount Allison University. J.G. Fichte is a frustrating but exciting philosopher to spend time with. His early work, during his period at Jena and immediately thereafter (1794\u20131801), speaks to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[138,31],"class_list":["post-5333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-fichte","tag-german-idealism","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 06:49:33","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5333"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6937,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5333\/revisions\/6937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}