Johann Gottlieb Fichte addresses Creuzer’s skeptical concerns in this highly critical review published in 1793. Fichte specifically considers Creuzer’s assertion that the capacity to determine oneself to moral and immoral action violates the principle of sufficient reason. Fichte dismisses the objection as having already been refuted by Reinhold in the second volume of the latter’s Letters on the Kantian Philosophy. In that work Reinhold argues that it is absurd to inquire after an objective ground through which the free will determined itself to a given action because it is supposedly intrinsic to the freedom of our will that it have the capacity to determine itself independently of objective grounds. Furthermore, Fichte affirms Reinhold’s claim that the (logical variant) of the principle of sufficient reason demands not that all existents have an external cause, but only that nothing be thought without a ground. Although Fichte agrees with Reinhold that reason has a very real ground to think of freedom as an absolute cause, he criticizes Reinhold for supposedly naturalizing the will’s supersensible capacity of self-determination.

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Hegel’s life. This chapter offers an introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and explains the role of the work vis-à-vis what Hegel calls “science.” The work is intended to refute different forms of dualistic thinking. A close reading of his analysis of the lord and the bondsman and the unhappy consciousness from the “Self-Consciousness” chapter is given. Hegel’s account of intersubjective recognition is explored. Self-consciousness is our awareness of ourselves in contrast to our awareness of objects. We like to think of ourselves as independent individuals. We know who we are, regardless of what the circumstances are or what others might think of us. But Hegel goes through a series of arguments to refute this view of common sense. He demonstrates that our awareness of ourselves is in fact dependent on other people. It is argued that the Phenomenology can be read as a book primarily about alienation. At each level in the work, there is some kind of other that confronts the human mind. The goal is to work through these different conceptions and overcome them by showing the deeper, hidden unity.

This chapter reviews how the early post-Kantians perceived the need of reforming Kant’s Critique in order to complete the philosophical revolution it had initiated. In 1785, Jacobi had brought Spinoza to the discussion, claiming that his monism undermined human freedom and personality. He further claimed that this monism was the logical conclusion of all philosophy. The post-Kantians’ task was thus threefold: (1) to demonstrate that personalism is consistent which monism, which they in principle accepted as the necessary standpoint of reason; (2) to show that Kant’s idealism could be the basis for the desired personalism; and (3) to overcome what they took to be the formalism of Kant’s system that stood in the way of it. All this came down to ridding the system of its presumed unknown “thing-in-itself” while finding a principle that would unify it internally, not just by means of external reflection. Fichte had attempted this with his “I.” Even more important, however, was his analysis of feeling, which he considered the concrete counterpart of the “I” and which, as in the feeling of guilt, brought reason and nature together. This was the synthesis that the post-Kantian idealists explored in their different ways.

After his controversy with Schelling, Fichte orally presented several new versions of his Science in which he adopted, if not a new standpoint, certainly a new methodology that had repercussions for the earlier standpoint. Where the “I is I” was the principle of the earlier Science, the trope of “light,” used alternatively with Evidenz and Reason, was the new principle. Where Fichte had earlier urged his auditors to engage in productive thinking, he now encouraged them to practice “attention,” an attitude of being actively engaged in the passive reception of the objects that presented themselves to their grasp. They had to detect in them, but only indirectly, the source of the intelligibility that made their presence compelling yet itself remained unseen. The aim was to let this source pervade one’s life. Fichte was adopting a new kind of realism which was in fact more consistent with the monism to which he had been committed from the beginning. Chapter 3 explores in detail a key text of 1804 in which these changes are introduced. The ontological quietism to which Fichte’s Science now led was one possible existential attitude that the assumed monism fostered.

Prior to 1800, Schelling had tried to overcome Kant’s alleged formalism with a theory of nature which presented the latter as a process of progressively more complex forms of inanimate and organic existence. The process culminated in the reflectively intelligent life which made idealism possible. As Schelling contended regarding Fichte, in his Science the latter had abstracted only this last moment of the process, and this was a claim that Fichte could not accept. By 1800, Fichte was thus defending his Science of the “I” on two fronts – against Kant who in 1799 had singled it out as being empty logic and against Schelling who was in effect making the same claim. Chapter 2 is dedicated to an account of these events and the exposition of the texts associated with them. What transpires from Fichte’s response to Kant, and his controversy with Schelling, is that there was a disconnect between all involved because of an ambiguity inherent to the monism, and the intuitionism the latter required, which all concerned accepted (Kant only hypothetically, by default). The ambiguity was an encumbrance from classical metaphysics that still affected the new Idealism. It was Spinoza’s challenge.

Religion is for Hegel the language of a community about itself. Its practices and beliefs reflect the sense of self-identity that animates the community’s members, and, since that identity is a product of reason, they also reflect the level of explicit rationality the community has achieved. Religion, however, is not the same as rational knowledge. Evil, for Hegel, is not a cosmic event as it is for Schelling but a historical and eminently individual act – in effect, the product of reason doing violence to nature. Religion’s specific function is thus one of reconciliation, a function that assumes different forms depending on historical circumstances and the advent of self-aware rationality. Nonetheless, reconciling cannot be the same as understanding reconciliation. Chapter 6 contrasts religion in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. It returns to the theme of feeling of Chapter 1, for feeling is an experience of identity. It also examines Hegel’s interpretation of the Christian story of incarnation and redemption as an imaginative portrayal of incarnate rationality. It then again returns to Chapter 1 by interpreting Hegel’s Logic, the science of this rationality, as an extension of Kant’s doctrine of the categories but without the classical metaphysical presuppositions still encumbering that latter.

The general introduction briefly presents the historical-philosophical context in which Fichte's System of Ethics was published and its connection to Fichte's overall project of a philosophical system. The Introduction stresses the complexity of the plan of the System of Ethics, and surveys the main issues discussed in the work, thereby presenting the topics of each chapter in the volume.

Prior to Hegel’s portrayal of the French Revolution’s “fanaticism for destruction,” F. H. Jacobi criticized the impoverished, abstract conception of reason that he sees realized in the politics, philosophy, and broader intellectual culture of the era. Inaugurating a tradition of reflection in German thought, Jacobi labels this conception “nihilism.” While Jacobi identifies and analyzes both the theoretical and the practical sides of nihilism, its basic sense is practical. Practical nihilism equates ideal rationality with the realization of a pure form, minus the “way of sensing [Sinnesart]” that allows us to see what is at stake in any situation. Jacobi further argues that one’s “way of sensing” is the source of individuality and so of one’s irreplaceable value as a person. For Jacobi, the otherwise diverse group including the French philosophes, Kant, and Fichte all exemplify practical nihilism in some manner or other. This account starts from Jacobi’s initial reactions to the French Revolution, eventually captured by the letter “To Erhard O.” (1792). This discussion establishes the core of Jacobi’s objection to his era’s dominant conception of rationality. The open letter “To Fichte” (1799) in which the charge of nihilism first appears is explicable against this decades-old concern on Jacobi’s part.

By closely connecting “free” and “dutiful” action, Kant appeared to some of his contemporaries to have a serious problem with the imputability of immoral actions. K. L. Reinhold attempted to avoid this problem by introducing a sharp distinction between freedom of choice (Willkür) and practical reason (as expressed through Wille), such that any free action must involve a choice between “selfish” and “unselfish” drives. After Kant rejected Reinhold’s proposed distinction, Fichte defended it by introducing a new distinction between the original, purely “formal” freedom of every spontaneously self-positing I and the “material” freedom that every I strives to achieve. Whereas formal freedom concerns the choice of means to predetermined ends, material freedom determines the ends as well as the means of acting. Fichte provides a detailed account of how a formally free individual might acquire material freedom through a series of “reflections” upon formal freedom, at which point freedom of choice is supposed to coincide with the categorical demands of the moral law—and Willkür with Wille. Fichte’s distinction between kinds and degrees of freedom was introduced in order to resolve the conflict between Kant and Reinhold, but it raises new questions concerning how one might “freely” acquire material freedom.

My aim in this chapter is to address what looks like a tension in Fichte’s derivation of ethical content for the moral law in his System of Ethics. In the first place, Fichte seeks to derive the content of our duties from our “natural drive [Naturtrieb],” which he defines in terms of our striving for enjoyment. But later in the book we find a second argument that derives the content of our duties from what Fichte calls the conditions of our “I-hood [Ichheit],” namely, our embodiment, intelligence, and sociality. I argue that a careful re-reading of Fichte’s notion of a natural drive is consistent with this second derivation. The key to this reading lies in Fichte’s effort to reframe the natural drive through the category of “reciprocal interaction [Wechselwirkung],” which allows us to view the natural drive as a “formative drive [Bildungstrieb]” that is both active and passive. For Fichte, the formative drive amounts to a striving for self-organization, and this striving, I argue, prefigures what becomes the ethical drive to engage in reciprocal interaction with other members of the rational community.

In his Foundations of Natural Right, J. G. Fichte advances the innovative thesis that the theory of right is independent of, or separate from, moral theory. Although Fichte is concerned to stress the originality of his approach, he refers approvingly to some “excellent hints” in the writings of J. B. Erhard. Given the recent scholarly interest in Fichte’s account of the relationship between right and morality, it is surprising that Erhard’s position is seldom discussed. Where it is discussed, it is often presented as merely a hesitant precursor of Fichte’s position. This paper provides a corrective to that view by arguing that Erhard’s account of the relationship between right and morality constitutes a distinctive and philosophically compelling position. In the first two sections, I reconstruct Erhard’s account of the relationship between right and morality. I argue that Erhard’s position is best characterized as focusing on the dynamic interplay between the theory of right and the requirements of morality as articulated by Kantian moral theory. In the third section, I demonstrate the coherence and significance of Erhard’s position by considering it in relation to a central debate in the philosophy of law—the debate between legal positivism and natural law theory.

The debate in 1792-94 between Wilhelm von Humboldt and Karl von Dalberg focuses on the legitimacy and limits of the state’s promotion of welfare for its subjects. It represents a clash between the Kantian school and advocates of the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy. Dalberg advocates a strongly interventionist state, while Humboldt circumscribes narrowly the scope of rightful political action. Humboldt’s post-Kantian perfectionism aims to maximise freedom and its conditions, rather than to promote happiness, as older perfectionisms had done. Dalberg, in contrast, appeals to Wolff’s defence of enlightened absolutism, viewing the state as the agency for eliminating obstacles to individual and social thriving, or the good life. While illustrating the reception of Kant’s critiques of previous ethical systems, and the persistence of Wolffian themes, the debate is also indicative of the diversity of political positions advocated by Kantians in the aftermath of The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). In conceiving the individual as a spontaneous monad with a unique developmental trajectory, Humboldt shares with Dalberg a revised version of Leibniz. The blending of Leibnizian and Kantian concepts constitutes the central theoretical interest of the political thought of this period.

Mahler’s private philosophical interests and ambitions, and, in particular, his determination to use music to address the problem of mortality, are less the result of hubris than a symptom of the thinking at the foundation of his worldview. Mahler came of age as a thinker in the late nineteenth century, a time of great intellectual upheaval and contesting philosophies regarding the world and humanity’s place within it. The epistemological and ontological debates of this era saw idealism and materialism, empiricism and rationalism, as well as many other strands of thinking propagated in the search for a fundamental understanding of life. This chapter considers the place of idealism within contemporaneous intellectual history, defining it and encapsulating the thought of its more important figures, particularly Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The impact of this philosophy on German-speaking culture was profound, as it pervaded the Romantic movement, in which Mahler’s own aesthetics was ultimately rooted.

This chapter shows that in the German intellectual tradition, Kant, followed by Fichte and Hegel, saw the reliance upon the opinion of others (“recognition”) in a completely different way than the French and British traditions. Specifically, in Germany recognition was seen as a condition not only for self-control, but also for individual self-determination. The chapter provides a detailed explanation of how this shift in orientation became possible, its connection with the “idealistic” presuppositions of German philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, and the broader political claims of this new interpretation of “recognition”.

Kant developed an understanding of justice to enable free and equal citizens to coexist in ways that respected the moral status of each. Individuals owe each other the founding of states to coexist under public law that protects safety and integrity. An account of distributive justice is part of what we need to explain what sort of entity the state ought to be. But even though the modern concept had become available in the late eighteenth century, important intellectual movements organized around alternative responses to the social question arose roughly at that time. Rawls’s theory is a response to them that offers a substantial elaboration of the notion of social justice. Rawls does not merely defend one idea as central to distributive justice but integrates various approaches. Recognizing the breadth of the domain to which considerations of distributive justice apply makes it doubtful that a unitary criterion could guide distribution.

The second chapter turns to the specific examples of Plato and of Socratic teaching as a template used for formulating an approach to the study of antiquity. It also introduces the institution of the philological seminar as a space for academic sociability modelled on Platonic precedent. Compared to an earlier interest in mainly Socrates (rather than Plato) as a mostly ambivalent figure, I trace a new understanding of Plato as the ostensibly unified author of systematic works centrally concerned with educational progress. My main example in this chapter is Wolf’s directorship of the philological seminar in Halle, together with his edition of Plato’s Symposium. I also look at the Socratic Memorabilia of J. G. Hamann (1759) and finally at some of the programmatic writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher for a new university in Berlin.