George J. Seidel. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre of 1794: A Commentary on Part I. West Lafayette, Indiana; Purdue University Press, 1993. ix + 126.

Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre is a fearsome book. Its terminology is not adequately clarified; the writing itself is frequently obscure and repetitive; and Fichte's tone is often maddeningly annoying, sometimes even offensive and off-putting. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that the book's initial publication was greeted with equal measures of incomprehension and derision. Perhaps the only truly surprising thing that accompanied its appearance was Fichte's perplexity in the face of this unfavorable reception. In spite of these flaws, however, the Foundations is a philosophical masterpiece, but it is one whose brilliance will never be immediately apparent to most readers (and was certainly not to this reviewer when he first read the book years ago). Therefore, commentary is required. Fortunately for us, Professor Seidel has performed the difficult task of introducing the Foundations to a contemporary audience in a manner likely to win for himself many readers.

Professor Seidel's book has been published by Purdue University Press in a history of philosophy series that consists of introductory commentaries on, among others, Augustine, Hume, and Kierkegaard. The book is thus intended for the classroom market, and hence is aimed at the beginning Fichte student. But since Professor Seidel carries off his project with such admirable skill and patience, more advanced readers will likely find much that is helpful.

The introduction quickly sets the Foundations in its philosophical and cultural context. One of its more pleasing features is its efforts to relate Fichte's thought to the German Romantic movement. Readers whose interests in Fichte exceed the merely philosophical will find this information helpful.

The heart of the commentary is devoted to Part I of the Foundations and accounts for two-thirds of the book's length. Professor Seidel works through the text in a straightforward fashion: using the standard Heath/Lachs translation, he first quotes a passage in English and then in Fichte's original German; the citations are subsequently followed by commentary on the passage as a whole and detailed discussions of particular sentences or phrases. He proceeds in this fashion through the entirety of Part I. A happy result of this procedure is that readers with enough German can work through the original text of the introduction if they so desire.

Along the way, Seidel refers the reader to other places in Fichte's collected works that serve to elucidate the passage in question. This is especially useful not only because it contributes to making sense of Part I, but also because it shows the continuity between the Foundations and the rest of the Wissenschaftslehre.

That there was such continuity among Fichte's works might not always be clear to the reader, since Fichte abandoned the style of exposition developed in Part I of the Foundations shortly after its publication. In the Foundations Fichte begins with the law of identity, A=A, and by means of a difficult piece of reasoning attempts to establish the fundamental proposition of the Wissenschaftslehre, namely, "The I simply posits itself." He then attempts to establish two further propositions, which, it seems, are intended to correspond in some fashion to the law of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason: namely, "The not-I is posited in opposition to the I" and "In the I a divisible not-I is opposed to a divisible I." These are the three fundamental propositions of the Wissenschaftslehre that are supposed to ground the rest of the deductions found throughout the system.

Despite the crucial importance of the deduction of these three principles, exactly how they relate to the aforementioned logical laws has never really become fully clear to us. Readers who suspect, if only momentarily, that they have been victimized by some sort of dialectical sleight of hand are to be forgiven for their temporary malice towards Fichte. His exceedingly obscure beginning was certainly one reason, maybe the chief one, why the Foundations found few sympathetic readers when it first appeared.

Professor Seidel squeezes as much sense as possible from this inauspicious starting point. He reads the argument for the first proposition as involving the condition for the possibility of asserting that A=A, that is, of synthesizing the subject A and the predicate A by means of the equal sign. The various elements of the judgment must be posited and then combined in an ordered fashion into the judgment that A=A. Such activity requires a subject, an "I" in Fichte's terminology, that itself remains the same across time (however we construe that identity) and is potentially aware of relating the elements in the judgment to itself in an ordered fashion. In other words, a being capable of saying "I am I" — that is, a conscious, reflective being that endures throughout the judgment that A=A — is required for the possibility of asserting the law of identity. Fichte's indebtedness to Kant's ideas about the transcendental unity of apperception is quite clear at this juncture in the argument.

But why Fichte would be tempted by such an argument, if we grant that Professor Seidel has reconstructed it adequately (and also that his reading has been properly interpreted by this reviewer), is difficult to fathom. Presumably, any assertion could serve in the place of A=A, if all that Fichte is doing is deducing a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. Why A=A is the necessary starting point for deducing the first proposition of the Wissenschaftslehre, rather than a merely sufficient one, is never really addressed. If this is the case, then the law of identity has no special argumentative role in the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre.

Fichte's arguments for the other two propositions are similarly obscure. Professor Seidel gamely attempts to explicate them, but he gets his greatest results whenever explains the concepts that result from these deductions. We might call this approach phenomenological, since it proceeds by reflecting on the structures of selfhood, cognition and action that come to light through explicating Fichte's obscure argumentation.

Therefore, the merit in Professor Seidel's commentary lies not so much in his reconstruction of the proofs of the three fundamental propositions as in his clarification of the meaning and significance of these propositions. By carefully sorting out what Fichte is saying about the I and the not-I in these principles, Professor Seidel guides his readers to a better understanding of the basic structure of the Wissenschaftslehre.

What are we thus enabled to learn about the Wissenschaftslehre? At the basis of all experience Fichte argues that we discover a self-conscious being that understands itself as a rational creature in the midst of a world that is not its own creation, and hence a world that is at best only imperfectly rational. Insofar as the I understands itself as rational, it takes itself to be free, i.e., to be a moral being responsive to more than natural necessity. Yet it finds itself causally conditioned by the surrounding world, the not-I, which prevents it from being fully moral simply as a consequence of positing itself as rational. Therefore, it sets for itself the demand that it become fully moral by acting autonomously, by setting ends for itself and developing the appropriate means to those ends; but in doing so it must respect the freedom of others by acting in a lawful fashion.

This demand is an infinite one, a striving to make that which is only imperfectly rational into that which is perfectly rational. But a world in which this transformation occurred would be a world entirely subject to the moral demands that the I makes on it. Such a world is thus merely an ideal intended to guide our conduct, since the not-I is never completely pliable to our will. In other words, the I sets for itself the task of making the not-I conform as fully as possible to the moral demands that the I makes on itself. An infinite demand is imposed by a finite being on itself in the face of opposition to its purposes in a finite world that is indifferent if not completely hostile to those purposes.

The influence of Kant is once again palpable, what with Fichte's intertwining of freedom and rationality, the theoretical and the practical, the infinite and the finite. Professor Seidel carefully discusses these issues in the detailed commentary on Part I as well as the brief sketch of Parts II and III of the Foundations that makes up the final section of his book. The book closes with a bibliography that contains many useful suggestions for further reading.

Much more could be said in praise of Professor Seidel's book, but the preceding sketch should give potential readers an idea of what they can expect to encounter therein. His book is highly recommended not only for beginners and those who might be searching for a teaching aid for them, but also for more advanced readers of Fichte who appreciate skillful commentary. Professor Seidel's book is thus a worthy addition to the growing body of secondary literature on Fichte in the English language. We are indeed lucky to have such a book.

Posted on March 6, 1999.

Revised on January 6, 2005.

Copyright © 1999, 2005 by Curtis Bowman.
All rights reserved.