Guenter Zoeller at the Fichte Workshop

Guenter Zoeller presented a very interesting paper ('From Transcendental Philosophy to Wissenschaftslehre: Fichte's Modification of Kant's Idealism') at the Fichte workshop. The paper traced out Fichte's philosophical methodology and aims by highlighting similarities and differences between the Fichtean and Kantian philosophical projects. Zoeller emphasised a greater deal of continuity between Kant and Fichte than is often acknowledged. He argued that Fichte was, like Kant, concerned to bring out the role of the formal structure of non-empirical subjectivity in constituting the natural and social world. However, Zoeller stressed that we should not conceive of the Kantian-Fichtean project as too narrowly focussed on investigating ‘the self’ in an anthropological manner. The project is rather better conceived as concerned with “the ultimate condition or ground for all…being and beings,” so that we should think of Kant and Fichte as concerned with a “transcendental science…that is to transcend and – at the same time, to condition – any and all categorical distinctions….”

In pursuing such a ‘transcendental science’ Zoeller argued that Fichte was concerned to show how the different object domains that are the correlates of the different activities of reason are unified in his conception of the ‘absolute I’. Thus Zoeller argued that for Fichte the ‘absolute I’ is the ground of not just theoretical judgement and its correlative objects, but of practical and aesthetic judgement and their respective object domains. As a generic structure and set of formal conditions the ‘absolute I’ apparently makes possible, and is the unifying structure within, all the various judgemental activities and correlative object domains that make up what Fichte calls ‘life’. Zoeller also articulated Fichte’s conception of philosophy as an ‘artificial reconstruction’ of lived reality in all its variety. The main difference between Kant and Fichte here is that the latter sees such a transcendental reconstruction as concerned primarily with bringing out the conditions of possibility of particular acts of will. According to Zoeller, Fichte thinks that such acts require a “…pre-individual, non-empirical ‘mass of determinability’… called ‘pure willing’,” as their condition of possibility.

It was not entirely clear to me on what grounds we should accept Fichte’s conception of an ‘absolute ground’ – the ‘self-positing’ activity of the ‘I’ - that unifies and makes possible all particular acts of will and thus makes possible, for Fichte, all forms of human knowledge. Certainly, we might see this ‘absolute ground’ as a necessary condition of experience if we are concerned to give a thoroughgoing transcendental account of all forms of human knowledge. But we are not likely to grant it as a premise in a transcendental argument if we think such an account is fanciful or wrongheaded in the first place.

It was also not clear to me how we are supposed to know when an ‘artificial’ rational reconstruction of ‘life’ has got things right. Are we satisfied with such a reconstruction when we have found a way to see all human experience as an expression of a few basic principles of subjective activity? Or are we supposed to prove that such a reconstruction is the only way to see all human experience as an expression of such principles? Indeed, how are we to know that we have come upon the right principles of subjective activity we are to ground all experience on? Although Zoeller’s paper was intentionally pegged at a certain level of generality, anyone unconvinced of the need for the transcendental turn – indeed, anyone convinced of the need but worried about how to execute it – would want more detailed answers to these questions.