Transcendental Philosophy and Atheism
Wayne M. Martin
University of Essex
Correspondence Address:
Wayne Martin; Department of Philosophy; University of Essex; Wivenhoe Park, Essex, CO4 3SQ.
[email protected]
Word Count:
Including Notes:
10,612
Excluding Notes:
9,153
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Transcendental Philosophy and Atheism
ABSTRACT: Engineers test materials by subjecting them to stress: once a beam has been broken one
can specify exactly how strong it was. The same method can be used in philosophy. In the Autumn of
1798 and the Winter of 1799, Fichte’s philosophical position was submitted to extraordinary stress in
the extended episode known as the Atheism Controversy, culminating in his forced dismissal from his
university post at Jena. The disputed issues explicitly concerned matters of religious faith and
philosophical theology, but the stress of the controversy exposed fundamental tensions in Fichte’s
broader philosophical position and provoked him to formulate a novel, proto-phenomenological
account of the scope and structure of transcendental investigation.
Recent years have seen an explosion of new interest in the writings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.1
This recent spate of scholarship has focused attention on Fichte’s distinctive contributions in an array
of interrelated areas: the theory of self-consciousness, the theory of subjectivity, idealism,
intersubjectivity, private property and political right, freedom, etc.2 In all these areas a common pattern
has emerged: Fichte appropriates and radicalizes – sometimes beyond recognition – themes he found
in Kant, often mediated by figures such as Karl Leonhard Reinhold, Friedrich Jacobi, or Salomon
Maimon. What has been less systematically interrogated is Fichte’s contribution to the very idea of
transcendental philosophy, transcendental inquiry or transcendental proof. There are a few notable
exceptions, the most important of which is Günter Zöller’s study, Fichte’s Transcendental Philosophy.
But this is one of those cases where the exception proves the rule. For while Zöller emphasizes
Fichte’s departures from Kant on many key points, when it comes to the theme of his title he generally
emphasizes continuity. Zöller: ‘Historically speaking, Fichte’s project of a Wissenschaftslehre
continues Kant’s development of a transcendental philosophy; it aims at a comprehensive account of
the principles governing human knowledge and its world of objects.’ 3 And elsewhere: ‘Fichte retains
the Kantian understanding of transcendental philosophy as a theory of experience.’ 4 One might
accordingly conclude that Fichte simply did not have much to contribute on this score. Although he
was a radical innovator in many areas, he essentially took over an unmodified Kantian construal of the
parameters of transcendental investigation: transcendental philosophy is opposed on the one hand to
1
In referring to Fichte’s writings I have made use of the two standard editions. Where possible, I refer to the
volume and page of I.H. Fichte, (ed.) Johann Gottlieb Fichtes sämmtliche Werke (Berlin: Veit & Comp, 1845-6;
reprint: Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), using the abbreviation SW. The pagination of SW is provided in most
modern editions of Fichte’s works. For works not included in SW, I refer to R. Lauth et al. (eds.) J.G. Fichte:
Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1964 - );
page references to this edition are given with the abbreviation GA. English translations of many of the works cited
here can be found in Breazeale 1988 and 1994. Citations to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason make use of the usual
A and B numbering.
2
On Fichte’s contributions in these areas see inter alia: Henrich 1966 (on self-consciousness); Neuhouser 1990
(on subjectivity); Pippin 1989 (on idealism); Wood 2006 (on intersubjectivity); Merle, et al. 2001 (on political
right).
3
Zöller 1998: 2.
4
Zöller 1998: 74.
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traditional transcendent metaphysics and on the other hand to ordinary empirical inquiry; it carves out
its distinctive domain by asking about the conditions on the possibility of experience. Nothing
particularly new in that.
In the remarks that follow I set out to assess this implicit consensus among the recent
commentators. In doing so I propose to focus on one very narrow slice of Fichte’s corpus: the writings
pertaining to the allegations of atheism that were formally lodged against Fichte in the Autumn of
1798, and which by early the following Spring led to his effective dismissal from his university post.
The documents pertaining to Fichte’s so-called Atheism-Controversy are enormously diverse,
comprising official documents in the 18th century version of Legalese, formal petitions from student
organizations, denunciations from anonymous pamphleteers, poignant private reflections, and a series
of ill-timed and ill-considered public statements from Fichte himself.5 Among the German-speaking
intelligentsia the controversy had for a time a very high profile, and leading figures of the day felt the
need (or felt the pressure) to declare themselves in the controversy. As it happened, very few came to
Fichte’s defense. Kant was pressured into issuing a public denunciation, repudiating Fichte’s claim of
allegiance to the teachings of his Critical Philosophy.6 Jacobi’s Brief an Fichte chastised the author of
the Wissenschaftslehre for what he called ‘subjective idealism,’ and used the controversy to press his
diagnosis of a trend toward nihilism in the purportedly enlightened philosophies of the day.7 Fichte
himself issued a number of statements -- at first indignant and then increasingly bitter and resigned -in which he tried to clarify his own position in the face of the charges.8
Among Fichte’s various public and private statements concerning the controversy, one in
particular stands out. Karl Leonhard Reinhold had been Fichte’s predecessor at Jena, and in several
fundamental respects had served as the mediator in his attempt to appropriate and extend a Kantian
agenda in philosophy. Moreover, Reinhold had only recently published a series of public statements
and reviews in which he had very publicly declared himself a convert to Fichte’s position in the
Wissenschaftslehre, despite the fact that Fichte had first developed his own positions in an
unmistakably critical engagement with Reinhold’s Elementar-Philosophie.9 When Jacobi’s Open
Letter was made public in March and Fichte finally recognized that his fate at Jena was sealed, one of
his first acts was to write to Reinhold in an attempt to explain his situation. With this letter Fichte
included a short fragment, which opens with a characteristic bit of confrontational prose: ‘Once again I
must call attention to the essence of transcendental philosophy, and I beg the philosophical public to
allow this reminder to be the last.’ 10
5
Böckelmann 1969 collects a broad array of these writings.
Kant, ‘Open Letter on Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre’; Intelligenzblatt d. ALZ; Aug 28, 1799; 876-878; for a
translation see Zweig 1967: 253-4. For a discussion see Martin 2003.
7
Jacobi, Jacobi an Fichte; GA III,3: 224-281; translation in Behler 1987: 119-141.
8
For a summary of the facts pertaining to the controversy, and Fichte’s clumsy handling of it, see Breazeale 1988:
1-46.
9
Reinhold privately endorsed the position of the Wissenschaftslehre in a letter to Fichte dated 14 February, 1797
(III,3: 48-51). There followed a series of more public endorsements, most importantly in an extensive review
published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung in January 1798. For a reprint see Fuchs et al. 1995: I, 286-322.
10
GA III,3: 330; for an English translation of the fragment see Breazeale 1988: 432-435.
6
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Why does Fichte see fit to remind Reinhold at this juncture of the essence of transcendental
philosophy? What does he take that essence to be, and how does it bear on the allegation that the
Wissenschaftslehre is a crypto-atheistic philosophy? Finally, what if anything does this teach us about
Fichte’s contributions to the notion of transcendental philosophy itself, either as it was conceived in
Kant’s day or in our own? These are the questions I set out to explore below. I argue that the stress of
the Atheism Controversy exposed fundamental tensions in Fichte’s position and provoked him to
formulate a novel, proto-phenomenological account of the scope and structure of transcendental
investigation.
§1 Orthodox Transcendentalism
Before taking up these questions directly, it will help to have in hand a somewhat firmer
characterization of the essence of transcendental philosophy as it is ordinarily understood; call this
‘orthodox transcendentalism’. I have already mentioned two features usually thought to be constitutive
of transcendentalism: its contrast both to empirical inquiry and to transcendent metaphysics.
Transcendental philosophy is meant to mark a distinct alternative to (and indeed a turning away from)
the tradition of metaphysical inquiry which seeks to use a priori philosophical reasoning to determine
the character of some ultimately transcendent reality. But it is also meant to provide a mode of
investigation of human cognitive capacities that is not to be conflated with or reduced to a ‘merely’
empirical psychological investigation.
But so far these are merely negative characterizations: transcendental philosophy is not
transcendent metaphysics; it is not empirical psychology. So what is it? Here again I think there is a
fairly standard answer. For now I want to distinguish four points: (a) Transcendental inquiry is
characterized in part by is subject matter. As Kant puts it at B25: it is knowledge ‘occupied not so
much with objects as with the mode of knowledge of objects.’ More specifically, transcendental
philosophy investigates our capacity for objective representation of entities, events, and states of
affairs. (b) Transcendental philosophy issues in results of a distinctive logical form. In particular,
transcendental philosophy aims to specify the conditions on the possibility of something (of
experience, of representation, of judgment, perhaps also of action or determinate intention.) What is
crucial here is the distinctive and quite robust modality of transcendental claims: we are to discover
not only how certain things actually are, but how they necessarily are – that is, how they have to be,
given certain other things known to be actual. This is one of the areas of greatest concern in
transcendental investigation, since one wants to know what this robust modal claim amounts to and
how it is to be justified. (c) Transcendental philosophy is usually characterized as involving some
kind of anti-skeptical ambition. I should add right away that this is not always the case, and is not
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always the case in the same way.11 But Kant himself famously writes as if his transcendental inquiry
provides some kind of response to the ‘scandal of skepticism,’ and as if the specific attempt to answer
Humean skepticism about necessary relations among matters of fact was one of the driving
considerations in his investigation. In the modern British tradition, this conception of transcendental
inquiry has been particularly strong, given impetus by Strawson, who very nearly defines
transcendental arguments as anti-skeptical. (d) Finally transcendental inquiry is typically
characterized in terms of what Kant distinguishes as the quid juris, as opposed to the quid facti. A
transcendental deduction, for Kant, is not meant to establish the facts about how we actually use or
came to use certain concepts or principles; it addresses rather the question of whether and when we are
justified in using them. This last point is clearly implicated in several of the others. It is in part
because of its normative or justificatory ambitions that transcendental philosophy cannot be a merely
empirical investigation. If it succeeds in answering Humean skepticism, for instance, it is because it
establishes our right to apply the categories – not merely the fact that we do indeed apply them.
Moreover, the strategy for achieving such a justification is to exhibit the necessity of certain
conditions on the possibility of consciousness or self-consciousness.
I will suppose that at least in broad outline, the foregoing account of transcendental ambitions
is uncontentious, and moreover that it is common to Kant himself and to more recent attempts to
appropriate Kantian strategies. One key aspect of these strategies deserves special comment. As I
would like to put the point, transcendental philosophy as characterized has both a subjective and an
objective aspect – or perhaps better: it is engaged both on the side of subjects and on the side of
objects. Subjectively it investigates the capacity for representation, self-consciousness, experience,
determinate intention, etc. But this investigation of subjective capacities is ultimately in the service of
an investigation of the objects of representation or experience or judgment. This two-sidedness of
transcendental investigation is crucial to the success of its distinctive ambitions. If we think, for
instance, about Kantian responses to Hume, the backbone of the strategy is to establish something
about objects (namely, that they are party to causal relations) by discovering something about
representing subjects (namely, that their experience would not be possible without deploying the
categories). In the Critique this two-sidedness of transcendental inquiry is concisely summed up in a
famous and emblematic passage:
We then assert that the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are
likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience, and that for this
reason they have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgment. (A158/B197)
In sum, it is characteristic of transcendental philosophy to use an investigation of subjective capacities
in order to warrant claims about objective reality.
11
For two recent extremes in the range of approaches to this problem see Ameriks 2000 and Beiser 2002. Beiser
assumes that answering the traditional skeptic is an index of success within the transcendental tradition, driving it
toward ever more extreme philosophical positions; Ameriks denies that that refutation of traditional skepticism
should be seen as an integral part of the transcendental agenda. For an intriguing suggestion about a path between
these two readings see Franks 2005: 148-152.
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This in turn raises an issue that I shall mention but shall not pursue in any detail here: the link
between transcendental philosophy and transcendental idealism. The issues here are vexed, but it
seems natural to think that this sort of strategy in transcendental investigation must of necessity bring
along a distinctive form of idealism in its wake. If I seek to establish something about objects by
discovering something about the conditions under which they can be represented by subjects, then it
would seem that the results of my investigation must be restricted to objects as they are represented or
representable, i.e., to what Kant calls appearances. After all, the facts (even if they are necessary facts)
about my capacity to represent things would not seem to fix the conditions on some fully independent
or transcendent reality. What they limit is what can be an object for me. In this sense then, the very
broad strategy of orthodox transcendental philosophy seems to bring with it a form of transcendental
idealism, and an implicit commitment to a distinction between appearances and things in themselves.
§2 Elements of a Heterodox Theism
With this framework in hand we are now in a position to consider whether and what Fichte
might have contributed to this heady mix. Given the very last point – about things in themselves – it
might seem natural to begin with Fichte’s notorious resistance to this notion and then work back to see
where he gets off the usual transcendental train. But I propose here to work in the other direction, and
accordingly begin with Fichte’s characterization of the essence of transcendental philosophy,
specifically in connection with the Atheism Controversy. To do so we must begin with a few words
about the dispute itself.
The text which occasioned the furor over Fichte’s purported atheism was in fact an editorial of
sorts. In 1798 Fichte was co-editor of the so-called Philosophical Journal,12 which in that year
published several articles touching on issues in philosophical theology. The article that was ultimately
censured as atheistic was titled ‘On the Basis of our Belief in a Divine World Order’; it was written as
an editorial comment to clarify an article on the same topic by Friedrich Forberg, whose essay was
censured and banned along with Fichte’s.13 The Divine Governance essay was one of a pair of closely
related editorials by Fichte scheduled to appear in the journal that year. It became, for a few dramatic
weeks, the most-discussed philosophical essay in the German language. The second editorial, entitled
simply ‘Concluding Remark by the Editor,’ was Fichte’s postscript to an article by Ritter.14 Because of
various delays in the production of the journal, the second editorial seems not to have appeared in print
until after the storm over Fichte’s purported Atheism had passed; it has accordingly languished in
obscurity by comparison. But the two editorials were written at the same time, and address common
themes; hence in what follows I shall consider them as a closely matched pair.
12
Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft Teutscher Gelehrter.
For Fichte’s editorial see SW V:177-189; English translation in Breazeale 1994: 141-155. ‘Divine world order’
is Breazeale’s translation of Fichte’s term, ‘göttliche Weltregierung,’ a phrase which has also frequently been
translated as ‘divine world governance.’ In what follows I use these two translations interchangeably.
14
Ritter 1798/1799. For Fichte’s editorial comment see GA I,6: 411-416; Breazeale 1994: 178-184.
13
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The flashpoint for the controversy concerning these editorials was Fichte’s particular way of
appropriating and reformulating Kant’s so-called postulates of practical faith. Kant had argued
repeatedly that belief in God is somehow implicated in and hence justified by the authority of the moral
law. If, as Kant held, recognition of the authority of the moral law is a requirement of reason, and if, as
Kant argued, the coherence of the unconditional demand of morality ultimately depends on our
confidence in the existence of God and a future life, then, Kant concluded, belief in God is rationally
warranted. We cannot offer a theoretical proof of God’s existence, but our assent [fürwahrhalten] to
theism is nonetheless rational. Different versions of this argument can be found in most of Kant’s
major published works, including all three Critiques, the book on Religion, and several important
essays; at the time it was seen as one of the central teachings of the Critical Philosophy.15 But Fichte
seemed to go further than Kant, apparently equating God with the moral order, and denying that any
other belief in God was required or indeed intelligible.
In the context of his editorial commentaries, Fichte did not see fit to elaborate these claims in
detail, but the main outlines of his position are clearly and forcefully articulated. He is insistent, first
of all, that it is a mistake to try to understand or defend theism by the path philosophers have so often
chosen -- by positing God as the ultimate first cause of the universe. Part of his objection here is a
straightforward application of what he takes to be settled Kantian results: to apply the principle of
causality in this way is to extend it beyond its legitimate range, and in so doing to court antinomy. But
his deeper objection is that this cosmological construal of God’s existence systematically mistakes
what he repeatedly calls the ‘original locus of faith.’ 16 Authentic religious faith, Fichte insists, is
distorted and misrepresented when assimilated to a theoretical posit of cosmological physics. Tracing
back the train of effects and causes may bring us to ever-more distant natural events or abstract forces,
but we will not thereby find the source or content of faith in something truly divine. Fichte: ‘[R]eason,
when it thinks about the cause of the world, arrives only at a universal force of nature … . By no
means, however, could reason ever arrive in this way at what the theory of religion calls God.’17
Fichte’s alternative is to locate faith in a specifically practical or moral context. Here the
framework of Fichte’s proposal is drawn from the fundamental principles of the Jena
Wissenschaftslehre, which finds the basic structure of human self-conscious subjectivity in the twin
demands of radical autonomy and responsibility to inescapable ideals. To be an I [Ich] or ego, Fichte
holds, is to find oneself oriented by a demand for an uncompromising self-determination. To engage in
judgment I must be capable of making up my own mind; to be a genuine agent is to be tasked with
determining my own actions. But this orientation toward autonomy also goes along with the positing
15
One index of this is the prominence given to the postulates argument in Reinhold’s original Letters on the
Kantian Philosophy, which appeared in Der Teutsche Merkur in 1786. Reinhold’s initial letters say nothing of the
doctrines we now associate centrally with Kant’s position. There is nothing about the ideality of space and time,
nothing about the aims or strategy of the deduction, nothing about his answer to Hume. For Reinhold in 1786, the
headline news about the Critique of Pure Reason was its distinctive strategy for adjudicating what Reinhold there
calls ‘the disarray in which the concerns of reason in matters of religion now find themselves among us’
(Reinhold 1786: 4).
16
‘ursprüngliche Ort des Glaubens.’ See for instance GA I,6: 413 and SW V: 387.
17
GA I,6: 413.
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of non-negotiable ideals to which this self-determination is answerable. In the case of judgment, the I
posits as its standard the ideal of truth; in the case of agency the I posits the ideal of just or right action
– what Fichte very broadly refers to as ‘the final goal of morality.’ 18 To be a self-conscious, finite
intellect is to find oneself – or as Fichte has it, to ‘posit’ oneself – in an inescapable relation to these
ideals.
For Fichte, it is precisely in this context that we find the proper ‘locus’ of religious faith. In
acting I am in effect positing for myself the goal of making the world as it ought to be.19 Yet what I
have immediate control over is at most the determination of my own will. Fichte compares this
situation to that of a farmer planting a field.20 What the sower actually controls is simply his act of
placing a seed in the ground. Yet in so doing his goal is the of gathering of a harvest; moreover his
planting of the seed is intelligible only in relation to this goal. In this case, the gap between what the
sower controls and what he seeks to attain is bridged by what Fichte calls ‘the order of nature.’ In
sowing his field the farmer acts upon and exhibits his enduring confidence in this natural world order.
He could, after all, simply make a meal of his seed here and now, but instead he invests it in an
uncertain future yield that can only come about through something he can neither know nor control.
The authentically moral subject, Fichte maintains, displays an analogous confidence in a moral world
order. Rather than investing his energies in satisfying his own immediate inclinations, he sets as his
goal ‘the moral end’ – nothing less than that the world be just and right. Like the sower, his doing so is
intelligible only in light of his confidence in something ultimately beyond his control: a moral order in
the universe that will ensure that his moral endeavor is no more wasted than is the sower’s seed. Hence
whenever someone devotes the meager resources of a single life to an apparently impossible struggle
for justice – or simply refuses to tell a lie despite a host of obvious reasons for doing so – Fichte sees
faith in the moral world order at work. Authentic religious faith, for Fichte, is properly understood as
this confidence in a moral world governance -- a confidence which sustains hope and forestalls despair,
and which is manifest in an uncompromising commitment to right action. To adapt a formula from one
of Fichte’s early reviews: belief in God is striving to be good.21
But this positive account of religious faith has a sharply critical correlate, also grounded in the
most basic commitments of Fichte’s philosophy. Consciousness, according to Fichte, must be
consciousness of something; it has a representational or objective character. But the constitutive
objectivity of consciousness is possible, he insists, only because the conscious subject finds itself
limited, its outward direction ‘checked’, its striving resisted by something which it cannot fully fathom
or control.22 The details of this phenomenology of consciousness are quite intricate, but its application
18
See for instance GA I,6: 413 and SW V:181-183.
As Fichte puts the point in one of his notorious Sunday morning lectures: ‘Man’s ultimate and supreme goal is
complete harmony with himself and – so that he can be in harmony with himself – the harmony of all external
things with his necessary practical concepts of them (i.e., with those concepts which determine how things ought
to be.)’ SW VI:299.
20
For the simile of the sower, see SW V:388ff.
21
See SW I:23. This equation of religious belief with the hope that animates moral action is also found, albeit less
openly and confrontationally, in Fichte’s Sittenlehre; see SW IV:350.
22
I have discussed this analysis in more detail in Martin 1997, ch. 6. For a penetrating analysis of Fichte’s
doctrine of the ‘check’ [Anstoß], see Breazeale 1995.
19
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to theological matters is stark. If consciousness requires limitation then there can be no sense in the
thought of an infinite consciousness or personality. Hence any attempt to explain the moral world
order as the product of God as a particular conscious agent is simply incoherent. Fichte:
Even if one wished to permit … this inference and to assume the existence of a
particular being as the cause of this moral world order, what is it that you would
actually have assumed in this case? This being is supposed to be distinct from both
you and the world. It is supposed to act efficaciously within the world, and it is
supposed to do so in accordance with concepts. Accordingly, it must be capable of
entertaining concepts; it must possess personality and consciousness. But what do
you mean by ‘personality’ and ‘consciousness’ in this case? … By paying the least
attention to how you construct such concepts … , you could learn that you simply do
not have and cannot think of personality and consciousness apart from limitation and
finitude. (SW V:187)
Fichte concludes that religious faith – theism, properly understood – is strictly exhausted by our
hopeful confidence in a sustaining moral world order. The entrenched metaphysics of God as infinite
conscious substance is an extrinsic and ultimately incoherent imposition on authentic faith. In the
crucial passage of the Divine Governance editorial, this accounting of faith was summed up in a
formula that was to become the centerpiece of the legal cases for rescription:
Faith of the sort we have just derived is, however, faith in its entirety. This living
and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can
we grasp any other.23
In the ensuing debate this claim was soon boiled down to a slogan: ‘God is the moral world order;
beyond this there is no God.’ 24
To his contemporaries, Fichte had here turned a corner. Kant had attempted to use an analysis
of moral consciousness to justify belief in God. In his own earlier writings on religion, Fichte himself
had argued that revealed religion must always be assessed in terms of its moral teachings.25 But here
Fichte seemed to propose that belief in God simply is belief in a moral order in the universe, and
moreover to deny that any other form of faith is coherent. This seems to transform Kant’s argument
from a rational defense of theism into a position indistinguishable from atheism. For conservative
opponents of this new philosophical movement, it also served to expose the true face behind the mask
of ‘criticism.’ 26
No doubt there are many philosophical as well as specifically theological objections that could
be levied against Fichte’s analysis of religious faith. It invokes an implausibly grand (one might say:
napoleonic) conception of the aims of human action, and there is more than a hint of a false dilemma in
the choice Fichte seems to offer between his faith in the moral world order and a theology which treats
23
SW V:186.
For versions of this slogan see, e.g., GA I,6: 372 and 415.
25
For Fichte’s early account of the moral criticism of revealed religion see SW V:9-172.
26
For a taste of the conservative response to the World Governance essay, see the pamphlet, Schreiben eines
Vaters an seinen studierenden Sohn über den Fichteschen und Forbergischen Atheismus (1798); reprinted in
Böckelmann 1969: 61-82. The anonymous author, purportedly writing to his son at University, opens with a tone
of outrage: ‘That the greatest atheism is openly taught at a Christian university is indeed outrageous’ (61-62). He
closes with a suggested reading list for his son, but also with the admonition to steer quite clear of the ‘critical’
writers: ‘In these books I have mentioned you will find more fundamental instruction in these matters than in all
of the Kantian and Fichtean writings. Above all I would not advise you to enter into the study of the critical – and
certainly not of the Fichtean -- so-called philosophy’ (82).
24
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God as an infinite and particular conscious personality. It is not my purpose here to adjudicate these
objections, however, nor indeed to offer any direct comment on the question as to whether Fichte was
justly charged with atheism. Certainly the account Fichte provided in his two brief editorials was never
intended as a systematic exposition and defense of his theological views; indeed they fail to provide
much more than a suggestive sketch of a highly provocative position. But brief as Fichte’s remarks
may be, they do exhibit one structural feature that will be of importance as we proceed. In particular,
we should recognize in Fichte’s account of religious faith a version of the two-aspects that we have
seen to be characteristic of transcendental inquiry on the orthodox construal. On the one hand, Fichte
is explicitly concerned with the subjective side of religious faith, in particular with its distinctive
‘locus’ in the life of a conscious moral agent. But Fichte also seems to use this account to make an
object-oriented or world-oriented claim: a claim about what God is and is not. Since the author of the
Wissenschaftslehre must surely deny that he is making any claim about God ‘as he is in himself’, his
account must presumably be provided as an account of God as a distinctive appearance – the objective
correlate of faith. As we shall see, the tension between these two dimensions of Fichte’s position soon
showed itself in the storm of controversy that followed.
§3 Two Senses of ‘Proof’
In considering these matters more carefully, we will do well to begin where Fichte himself
begins in his two editorials. Before addressing specifically theological questions, each editorial
proposes a distinction between two senses of the word ‘proof’ [Beweis]. The less famous of the two
editorials was commenting on an article which itself commented on Paul Vogel’s discussion of the
‘Theoretical-Practical Proof for the Existence of God.’ 27 Fichte accordingly begins by applying his
distinction to Vogel’s particular case. Allow me to quote the relevant passage at length:
First of all, we need to ask what the word ‘proof’ [Beweis] means in this context.
Why does Herr Vogel seek a proof of the existence of God? What is the real aim of
his proof? Does he really intend (as, judging from the content of his essay, it would
appear that he well may intend) to demonstrate [andemonstriren] belief in God to
human beings, and does he think that by means of his proof he will, for the first time,
succeed in placing the concept of a God within their understanding? If so, then the
editor believes that it has long been shown that any such proof is superfluous,
impossible, too late, and (in those areas where argumentation is appropriate) certain
to fall short of its goal. (GA I,6: 411)
So far this will seem familiar ground for those of us steeped in the orthodox conception of the
transcendental. Philosophy misunderstands its distinctive task if it takes itself to be ‘placing concepts
in the understanding for the first time.’ This is a matter for pedagogy, and it is a process properly
investigated by empirical psychology, not transcendental inquiry. Fichte nonetheless thinks there is a
kind of proof [Beweis] that is relevant to the pedagogical project; he calls it ‘demonstration’
[Demonstration]. Here it may be useful to think of the kind of demonstration that might take place in
27
Vogel 1799.
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a chemistry lecture or in one of Goethe’s demonstrations of the refraction of light: the instructor
‘demonstrates’ a phenomenon like oxidation or refraction (preferably with some dramatic and
memorable experiment) and thereby introduces the onlookers to a new concept for the first time –
‘placing the concept within their understanding.’ But such demonstrations, Fichte clearly signals, are
not properly part of the task of philosophy at all; they should be left to what he calls ‘der Erzieher oder
VolksLehrer dieses Individuums’ -- roughly: to school teachers and public moralists (GA I, 6: 414).
Philosophy is constitutionally ill-suited to such an undertaking, which is, at any rate, strictly redundant
in the case of the concept of God.
In pressing this point, Fichte offers an instructive analogy, which I quote again in full:
Suppose that some sophist came along [with the promise] to bring us to posit bodies
in space or assume the existence of things outside us, etc. Anyone who needs a proof
[Beweis] of the former (that is, of the existence of God) more than of the latter will
obtain no assistance from such a sophist. Belief in God is a living and animating
principle within human beings, and it springs from life itself and not from dead
concepts. (GA I,6: 411) 28
The thing to notice here is Fichte’s isomorphic treatment of questions about the existence of ‘bodies in
space’ (or ‘things outside us’) and questions about the existence of God. In both cases there are certain
kinds of demonstration that would be absurd for philosophers to undertake. No amount of conceptual
argumentation will produce belief in such objects or faith that there is a God. Such conviction, as
Fichte puts it here, ‘springs from life.’ To think otherwise is to make a mistake both about life and
about the proper scope and task of philosophical reflection. An analogous point appears at the opening
of Fichte’s more famous editorial on Divine World Governance, where he treats the recognition of this
point as marking a kind of threshold in the history of philosophical theology.29
So far, then, we have met one of Fichte’s two concepts of proof. A proof for the existence of
God or of the reality of ‘things outside us’ might undertake to provide what he calls a ‘demonstration’
– and yet no such demonstration is actually required. But if this conception of proof is inappropriate to
philosophy, what is Fichte’s preferred alternative? If we follow in the grooves of orthodox
transcendentalism then the answer should be straightforward. Philosophy should not address itself to
issues about the factual occurrence of the concept of God or of independent objects; its distinctive
question concerns our warrant in using those concepts, and specifically our justification in claiming
28
I have here modified Breazeale’s translation of this passage. Breazeale has Fichte inviting us to imagine a
sophist who tries to ‘convince us that we are justified in positing bodies in space …’ (Breazeale 1994, 178-9,
emphasis added). I can find no warrant in Fichte’s text for the use of the notion of justification in this context.
Here is the sentence in Fichte’s original: ‘Komme doch dann irgend ein BegriffKünstler, und bringe uns auch
dahin, daß wir die Körper in dem Raum setzen, oder Dinge außer uns annehmen, und dergl.’ I should note,
however, that the German text here is less than clear, particularly as regards the sense of the crucial verb phrase:
‘bringe uns auch dahin’. I read Fichte’s use of this phrase in light of his use of the verb ‘hinbringen’, which
Breazeale elsewhere translates as ‘to inculcate.’ For an example see the following note.
29
‘Until now, almost every view of this topic [the divine world order] has been confused, and will perhaps
continue to be confused for a long time to come, by treating the so-called moral proof [Beweis] of a divine
governance of the world (or indeed, any philosophical proof of the same) as if it constituted a proof [Beweis] in the
proper sense of the term. The confusion lies in the apparent assumption that belief in God is supposed to be first
inculcated in and demonstrated [hingebracht und andemonstriert] to humanity by means of such demonstrations
[Demonstrationen]. Poor philosophy! Were such a belief not already present within human beings, then from
where, I would like to know, did philosophy’s representatives (who, after all, are also nothing but human beings)
themselves obtain what they wish to convey to us through the force of their proofs?’ (SW V:178; see Breazeale
1994: 143).
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that there are such objects or such a God. This may indeed be the task Fichte meant to set himself, but
his manner of doing so was rather less clear than one might have hoped or expected. Indulge me
another long citation, this one from the Divine Governance essay. I here follow Breazeale’s
translation, though I raise some questions about it in what follows.
Philosophy can do no more than explain facts; by no means can it produce any facts
– beyond, that is, the fact of philosophy itself. Just as it would never occur to a
philosopher to try to persuade men that, from now on, they are entitled to think of
objects as matter in space and that they may also think of the alterations of these
objects as following each other in time, so too would it never occur to him to try to
persuade men that they do indeed believe in a divine governance of the world. Both
surely occur without any help whatsoever from the philosopher, who presupposes
this as a fact, and whose sole task is simply to derive such facts, as such, from the
necessary manner in which every rational being must operate. Consequently, we by
no means wish our argument to be considered as a means for convincing the
unbeliever; instead we wish it to be considered as a derivation of the believer’s
conviction. Our sole concern is to answer the causal question, ‘How does a human
being arrive at this belief?’ (SW V:178-179, emphasis original)
This passage is messy, both philologically and philosophically. To contrast with the idea of proof as
demonstration, Fichte here introduces the idea of proof as a derivation [Ableitung]; elsewhere he also
calls it a ‘deduction’ [Deduction] or ‘genetic explanation’ [genetische Erklärung] 30 But while Fichte
here echoes Kant’s language, it is unclear just how closely he follows Kantian usage. From the
perspective of orthodox transcendentalism it is certainly surprising to be told that philosophy is
exclusively in the business of ‘explaining facts’ [Facta erklären], and that its sole stake in issues about
the existence of God and the external world is to answer a ‘causal question’ [Causalfrage]. This seems
to leave philosophy on the wrong side of the divide between factual and juridical questions. And the
idea that philosophy is meant to determine how human beings arrive at their beliefs about these matters
[wie kommt der Mensch zu jenem Glauben?] threatens to bring us back to an investigation of
psychological origins rather than epistemic warrant. Finally, if Fichte’s ‘deduction’ or ‘derivation’ is
not intended for ‘convincing the unbeliever’ [eine Ueberführung der Ungläubigen], then it is hard to
see what force such proof could have against a skeptic. There is certainly not an easy fit between these
elements of Fichte’s formulation and the familiar characterization of orthodox transcendentalism. At
the very least one might suspect a subtle shift of emphasis here: away from specifically justificatory
matters and towards more explanatory ambitions.31
But if the editorials suggest the possibility of this kind of shift in the remit of transcendental
inquiry, the indications they provide are far from unambiguous. Some of the problems here are
philological. Breazeale’s translation has Fichte scorning the idea of ‘persuading men that, from now
on, they are entitled to think of objects as matter in space’ (emphasis added). This certainly suggests a
rather dramatic step away from orthodox, anti-skeptical transcendental philosophy, which seemed to
30
See, e.g., GA I,6: 412.
The problem of distinguishing between psychological and epistemic doctrines has of course been a contentious
matter in the interpretation of Kant’s own writings. Paul Franks has suggested in conversation that the rigid
distinction between these two domains of inquiry is more a legacy of the neo-Kantian revival than of Kant’s
original conception of his own transcendental project. For a reading of Kant that resists the sharp separation of
these two domains see Kitcher 1990.
31
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promise just such a establishment of title. But the translation may have made this passage more
heterodox than it is in the original. The German verb is ‘denken möchten.’ In conversation Breazeale
has defended his translation on the grounds that möchten, as the subjunctive form of mögen, carries the
sense of a permission or entitlement. But mögen is one of those modal verbs that can sustain a broad
array of meanings – roughly equivalent to the range of the English modal verb ‘may/might.’
(Depending on the context, for instance, ‘He may Φ‘ can express either a permission of a possibility;
the same is true of mögen.) Moreover there may well be ways in which the seemingly heterodox
formulations can be brought back into line with more familiar specifications of the ambitions of
transcendental philosophy. After all, if one’s answer to the ‘causal question’ about our belief in God
and external objects involves tracing these beliefs back to ‘the necessary manner in which every
rational being must operate,’ then this might seem to be tantamount to posing the question of
justification and answering it affirmatively, even if this is carried out in the guise of ‘explaining facts.’
Still, if that were the case then wouldn’t the proposed ‘deduction’ suffice as a proof that should
‘convince the unbeliever’?
The text of Fichte’s brief editorial statements does not suffice to resolve the tension between
these two readings. Indeed in retrospect, the systematic and many-layered ambiguity of the two essays
is one of their most striking features. Certainly this did much to shape the ensuing dispute, which
quickly resolved into a quarrel between two sides, each of whom charged the other with distorting the
plain meaning of the disputed texts. Was Fichte justifying belief in God as rational or was he rather
explaining the fact everyone believes in God – a belief which, he seemed to suggest, involved a
fundamental incoherence? For my purposes what is most important in all this is the way in which
Fichte seeks to specify the distinctive character of transcendental philosophy – a distinction which he
marks here with his distinction between proof as demonstration and proof as derivation or deduction.
But while the editorials mark this distinction, they fail to make it entirely clear. And for our purposes,
they leave it unclear as to whether Fichte’s position is best understood as a version of what I have
called orthodox transcendentalism, or whether it marks a departure from therefrom. In the subsequent
months Fichte would be pressed to clarify this matter.
§4 A Boundary Settlement Between Two Standpoints
When the atheism controversy first broke in the Autumn of 1798, Fichte at first professed
astonishment at the charges, and disdain for those who, so he claimed, had willfully misread and
distorted his ‘theory of religion.’ Nonetheless, he did not come straight out and deny that his
philosophy was atheistic, nor did he make any straightforward profession of faith. This was
undoubtedly seen as a kind of evasiveness by Fichte’s critics, and may well have swayed the opinion of
those who might at first have been left undecided. Indeed Fichte’s systematic evasion of any
straightforward profession of his theism seems to echo quite precisely – if less poetically – the
famously evasive passage from Faust I when Gretchen presses Faust for a clarification of his religious
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convictions. Asked flat-out whether he believes in God, Faust replies with a question: ‘Who, my dear,
can say “I believe in God”?’ When Gretchen replies, ‘So you don’t believe in him?’ Faust embarks on
his notorious Creed:
Don’t misunderstand me, sweet girl, please.
Who can give a name to him?
Or in good conscience say he believes?
…
The all-embracing, all-sustaining
Power of heaven and earth,
Doesn’t he embrace and sustain
You, me, himself? …32
This may have satisfied Gretchen (she replies: ‘I guess what you say is all right; the priest speaks so, or
pretty near’) but it hardly seems to answer the question that had been posed. It certainly didn’t help
Fichte’s cause that this was exactly the passage that he had quoted at the close of the Divine
Governance essay.33 Worse, he went on to quote a stanza from Schiller’s already-famous poem, ‘Die
Worte des Glaubens’ [words of faith], but elided its opening clause: ‘und ein Gott ist.’ 34
But was it simply evasiveness that prompted Fichte’s silence on this crucial question? It is
precisely at this juncture that the fragment sent to Reinhold becomes relevant. As we have seen, the
fragment opens with Fichte’s ‘reminder’ concerning the essence of transcendental philosophy. What is
that essence, according to Fichte? His account reiterates several of the points we have been
considering, but the discussion is framed using a different trope. Whereas the editorials sought to
distinguish the task of transcendental philosophy by distinguishing two conceptions of proof, the
fragment sent to Reinhold distinguishes in the first instance between two standpoints of inquiry.
There are two very different standpoints for thinking: from the natural and common
standpoint, one thinks objects immediately; from the standpoint which is generally
called artificial, one intentionally and consciously thinks one’s thinking itself. On
the first standpoint rests ordinary life and science … ; on the latter rests
transcendental philosophy, which, for precisely this reason, I have called
Wissenschafts-lehre -- the theory and science of all knowledge.35
In considering the significance of this formulation, we can begin by noticing what in retrospect we can
call Husserlian elements in Fichte’s emerging position. Notice first the way in which Fichte here
assimilates the respective standpoints of ‘ordinary life and science.’ Much of the philosophy of the 17th
and 18th centuries received its impetus from the problematic contrast between ordinary life (or
‘common sense’) and science – a contrast made both salient and pressing by the advent of the New
Science, and by heliocentricism in particular. But Fichte here effectively lumps these two together in
opposition to transcendental philosophy. What unites ordinary and scientific consciousness is what
32
Goethe, Faust I, translation by Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 111. I have here
cited only a few lines from Faust’s creed.
33
SW V:188-189.
34
SW V:189.
35
GA III,3: 330-1. In distinguishing between the standpoint of life and the standpoint of philosophy, Fichte was
redeploying a distinction he had drawn on several earlier occasions in his Jena writings. For a survey see
Breazeale 1989.
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Husserl would later call their ‘naiveté.’36 Both in ordinary life and in science one simply assumes that
mind-independent objects really are there, and one takes for granted that they present themselves in our
experience. From the ordinary standpoint, Fichte writes, ‘the world is, simply because it is; and it is
the way it is, simply because that is the way it is’ (SW V:179). The tasks of life and science are to
determine the properties of those objects and the laws that govern them, and to manipulate them in
accordance with one’s aims. Like Husserl, Fichte calls this the ‘natural’ standpoint, and he claims that
it is the only standpoint which engages in what he calls ‘real thinking’ [reelle Denken] – i.e., the direct
representation of real objects.37 Like Husserl, Fichte contrasts this naively realistic standpoint to an
‘artificial’ standpoint of philosophical reflection, where the task is neither to know nor to act on
objects, but rather to describe and explain how they can be presented to consciousness at all.
Accordingly, Fichte claims,
it would never occur to us in turn to try to employ our system to expand the sphere of
ordinary thinking (which is the only kind of thinking which deals with reality).
Instead, all that our system aims to do is to comprehend and present [umfassen und
darstellen] this ordinary way of thinking in an exhaustive manner. (GA III,3: 331;
emphasis added)
Finally, there is at least a hint here of another Husserlian idea: the idea that transcendental philosophy
is characterized by a distinctive methodology as well as by a distinctive subject matter and standpoint.
In order to investigate our representation of objects we are called upon to ‘reflect on representing
itself,’ to ‘intentionally and consciously think one’s thinking itself,’ or as Fichte famously puts it to his
students, to ‘think the wall, and notice how you do it.’ All this should be enough to cast doubt on the
thought that Fichte contributes nothing to the development of the idea of transcendental philosophy. At
the very least we can say that the distinctive mode in which he took up the Kantian framework points
the way toward the phenomenological transcendentalism of a later tradition.
But what is the bearing of all this on the disputed issues in the Atheism Controversy? Except
for one parenthetical remark, the fragment we have been considering does not explicitly mention
theological issues at all, nor does it explicitly address the controversy in which Fichte was embroiled at
the time. But its inclusion in Fichte’s letter to Reinhold – which is entirely devoted to these topics –
certainly warrants the assumption that Fichte took it have some relevance. In particular, Fichte’s
insistent characterization of the distinctive logic of the standpoint of transcendental inquiry suggests a
strategy of defense against the allegations of atheism. For if the Wissenschaftslehre in general and its
philosophy of religion in particular are conducted as exclusively transcendental investigations, and if
transcendental inquiry takes place from the ‘standpoint of philosophy,’ as Fichte has here defined it,
then strictly speaking Fichte’s philosophy of religion can be neither theistic nor atheistic. After all,
either to assert or to deny the existence of God would be to engage in what Fichte here calls ‘real
thinking’; for it would be to commit oneself to a real existential thesis, whether positive or negative.
But Fichte insists that ‘real thinking’ takes place only from the standpoint of life and hence has no
place in transcendental philosophy.
36
37
On the naïveté of the natural attitude see Husserl 1911: 87.
GA III,3: 331.
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If he is to avail himself of this defense strategy, however, Fichte must subtly adjust – or at
least reinterpret – some of the critical claims in his philosophy of religion. Recall in particular that the
account of faith in the two editorials was naturally read as presenting both a subjective and an objective
aspect. An explanation of the place of faith in the conscious life of a subject was supplemented by a
highly critical account of certain common claims made about the attributes of God as a particular
substance. In order to square the content of his philosophy of religion with the line of defense
suggested by the fragment, Fichte would have to purify his account of faith of its objective elements;
transcendental philosophy would have to adhere to its principle to ‘represent only representing,’ while
abstaining from any direct commitment as to the objects of such representation. In one otherwise
puzzling line of the fragment we can find one piece of evidence of Fichte’s commitment to carry
through this gambit. ‘The Wissenschaftslehre,’ he there insists, ‘is in no way an instance of real,
objective knowledge [keineswegs … ein reelles und objectives Wissen]’38 This, I submit, should not be
taken to mean that the Wissenschaftslehre is not knowledge, much less that it is merely subjective
opinion or assertion. The point is that it is not knowledge of something real and objective; it is a
wholly subject-directed rather than object-directed doctrine.
As the political and philosophical pressure increased through the difficult Winter and Spring
of 1799, this idea came to figure centrally in Fichte’s increasingly desperate and ill-fated attempts to
extricate himself from the controversy. At the heart of Fichte’s gambit lay his proposal for what he
called a ‘boundary settlement’ [GrenzeBerightigkeit] between two distinct and mutually exclusive
modes of discourse – one an object-directed ‘real’ discourse of ordinary life and science, the other a
subject-directed discourse which sought to explain the ordinary standpoint but vowed not to interfere
with it.39 This is a delicate balance to be sure, but for a time Fichte seemed to hold out the hope that it
might allay the anxieties of his critics while preserving the liberty of philosophical inquiry by confining
it within strictly-delimited bounds. A particularly important document in this connection was the
excerpt purported to be an extract ‘From a Private Letter,’ that Fichte penned in 1799 and made public
early in 1800.40 In it Fichte repeats verbatim the passage from the Divine Governance essay where he
had restricted his investigation to ‘the causal question’ and ‘the explanation of facts.’ But he then
continues, in the tone of someone who is clearly feeling the pressure of his situation:
Consequently – and I ask you to state this loudly and clearly to all my opponents –
my philosophy alters nothing concerning religion as it has dwelt within the hearts of
all well-meaning people from the beginning of the world and will continue to dwell
there until the end of time; and my philosophy would be false if it did alter anything
… [M]y purposes are exclusively scientific. SW V:386.
The transcendental philosophy of religion is no threat to religious faith, Fichte here insists, since
strictly speaking it makes no claims from the standpoint or in the mode of discourse in which religious
38
GA I,6: 331.
The idea of a ‘boundary settlement’ occurs explicitly at I,6: 416, as well as in an earlier letter to Jacobi (Aug.,
1795). It is a trope that can be seen at work in a number of the writings of the Atheism Controversy, notably in the
rather comic oath that Fichte swears in the excerpt ‘From a Private Letter’: ‘I solemnly affirm that no part of my
philosophy, including my philosophy of religion, seeks to produce anything new within the minds of human
beings’ (I,6: 384-385).
40
SW V:375-396; Breazeale 1994: 155-176.
39
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faith finds its place. Fichte’s transcendental project was not, he insists, to attack faith but simply to
explain it ‘scientifically’. Accordingly the faithful should not feel threatened by transcendental
philosophy; neither, Fichte implies, should they threaten it.
This theme finds its most dramatic statement in the final paragraph of the fragment that Fichte
sent to Reinhold. There Fichte’s always-strident tone rises to a crescendo. The whole long paragraph
is underlined in Fichte’s original, and portions are written in all upper-case letters. After battling his
critics and losing his job, Fichte can perhaps be forgiven for shouting.
In short, it is here that the duality which permeates the entire system of reason and
which has its foundation in the original duality of subject and object reaches its
highest level. … Life and speculation can only be defined in terms of each other.
LIVING is, strictly speaking, NOT PHILOSOPHIZING; PHILOSOPHIZING is,
strictly speaking, NOT LIVING. … There is here complete antithesis. It is just as
impossible to find any common meeting point between life and philosophy as it is to
comprehend the X which lies at the foundation of the subject-object (the I). The only
place where these opposites meet is in the consciousness of an actual philosopher,
since he has access to both standpoints. (GA III,3: 333, emphasis original41)
The duality about which Fichte here is shouting is in effect a duality of two discourses, which he now
insists must be kept strictly separated from one another: living is not philosophizing, and
philosophizing, at least when construed transcendentally, is not living. In this ominous pronouncement
we can recognize Fichte’s almost frantic insistence that the object-directed discourse of ordinary life
and the subject-oriented discourse of transcendental philosophy are to be utterly disentangled. Note,
however, Fichte’s final point here, which is indeed the final line of the fragment itself: the two
standpoints do find a meeting point, and indeed they must do so, in the conscious life of the
philosopher. This is not only because the philosopher is, like anyone else, a living human being. It is
also because the transcendental philosopher needs access to both standpoints – precisely in order to
carry out his distinctive task of explaining one using the resources available only from the other.
As a strategy of legal and political self-defense in the context of the atheism controversy this
gambit was disastrous. Religious conservatives were certainly not to be satisfied by Fichte’s promise
to ‘alter nothing’ with his clearly heterodox pronouncements, nor could they be expected to withdraw
their protests when Fichte repeatedly insisted that his deductions were directed ‘only to philosophers,
and indeed only to those whom I myself consider to be “transcendental” philosophers’ (I,6: 395). But
though these pronouncements may indeed have been politically inadvisable, we can see in retrospect
that they were deeply motivated, and indeed can serve as a fitting marker of Fichte’s most important
contribution to the idea of a transcendental investigation. Transcendental philosophy was born as a
distinctive strategy for warranting objective metaphysical claims in a novel manner. But under the
stress of the Atheism Controversy, Fichte effectively proposes a novel reformulation of this
fundamental structure. Transcendental philosophy should not be concerned with objects, but should be
a pure discourse of subjectivity, a discourse concerned, as Fichte puts it, only with the ‘comprehension
and presentation’ of ordinary consciousness. In undertaking such an accounting, the transcendental
41
I quote here only a few sentences from this remarkable paragraph, which certainly merits close attention in its
entirety.
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theorist does not cease to occupy the ordinary, object-positing natural standpoint. It remains ‘in his
mind’ as a living human being and as the object of his investigation. But it is placed, as Husserl would
later put it, ‘out of play’ and indeed out of bounds for the distinctive object-purified discourse of
transcendental inquiry. In all this, I submit, we should recognize the outlines of what Husserl would
later call ‘transcendental phenomenology.’
§5 Conclusion
In his 1989 Inaugural Address as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy,
Christopher Peacocke praised the legacy of P.F. Strawson in reinvigorating the Kantian tradition of
using philosophical inquiry to investigate the conditions of possibility of one or another feature of the
lives of individuals.42 In the philosophical work of the address, Peacocke distinguished a variety of
possible configurations of transcendental investigation, starting with a distinction between what he
calls ‘truth-directed’ and ‘mind-directed’ transcendental arguments. It is notable, however, that all the
varieties of transcendental investigation Peacocke canvasses are defined in one way or another by their
ambition to draw conclusions about what he calls ‘a mind-independent world.’ Truth-directed
transcendental arguments are said to aim at some conclusion ‘whose truth does not require the
existence of experiences at all,’ while knowledge-directed transcendental arguments seek to establish,
as Peacocke puts it, ‘that subjects of the experiences mentioned in their premises are in a position to
know certain truths about a mind-independent world.’ 43 One benefit of studying the earliest reception
and development of the transcendental movement is that it can awaken us to the narrowness of this way
of seeing the options. In Fichte’s Jena Wissenschaftslehre, particularly as it was applied to topics in
religion and subjected to stress in the controversy that followed, we find a configuration of
transcendental investigation that falls quite outside the range that Peacocke considered. I have argued
here that Fichtean transcendental investigation sought to leave the mind-independent world quite out of
its concerns, not because it denied that God or an external world exists, but because it conceived of the
concerns of transcendental philosophy in a novel way. Transcendental philosophy, as Fichte conceived
it, was indeed concerned with the conditions on the possibility of our experience, judgment and agency.
But it proposed to keep its focus on the subject of such experiences – not in order to provide an answer
to the skeptic about the external world or a novel defense of the principle of sufficient reason, but to
disclose the distinctive mode of being of the finite conscious subject itself. I have not here attempted
to assess the viability of Fichte’s radical gambit; certainly his proposal for a pure discourse of
subjectivity was to be intensely contested in the subsequent tradition. For my purposes here I shall be
content if I have succeeded in broadening our sense for the range of transcendental projects that merit
closer scrutiny.
42
43
Peacocke 1989.
Peacocke 1989, 4-5. For an attempt to broaden Peacocke’s typography see Cassam 1999.
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