German Idealism As Constructivism by Tom Rockmore;

Author:Tom Rockmore; [Rockmore, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226350073
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-04-13T05:00:00+00:00

Fichte and Hegel’s Turn to Phenomenology

Hegel, who was very critical of Reinhold, thought better of Fichte, who turned to phenomenology in the course of working through Kant’s cognitive approach. It is plausible to infer that Fichte’s turn to phenomenology influenced Hegel’s own phenomenological turn.

The term “phenomenology,” which became very popular in the twentieth century through the writings of Husserl and his students, is so widely and imprecisely used that it is difficult to define. Contemporary phenomenologists seem to understand the core concept in different ways. It is unclear there is any central insight linking together, say, Husserl, Heidegger (who substitutes phenomenological ontology for the latter’s phenomenological epistemology), Merleau-Ponty (who is influenced by them both), Scheler, Sartre, Ricoeur, Henry, Levinas, and so on.

In German idealism, “phenomenology” is related to Kant’s influential distinction between noumena and phenomena. This term does not appear in either Fichte’s initial version of the Wissenschaftslehre or, to the best of my knowledge, in his other Jena writings. Yet this concept, though not under that name, is arguably important in this text. Fichte’s turn toward phenomenology derives from his turn away from the thing in itself, hence away from Kantian representationalism, toward his own post-Kantian form of constructivism. Fichte’s turn toward constructivism is a turn toward phenomenology, even before he uses the term. He is throughout committed to explanation of cognition through the activity of the subject—hence from the subject pole—and not from the object pole through the causal activity of the object on the subject.8 Yet his so-called deduction is misnamed, since Kantian representation presupposes a mind-independent object, which Fichte, in giving up the thing in itself, abandons as an explanatory concept.

In writings after the Jena period, Fichte continues to move in a phenomenological direction in developing his version of the constructivist approach to cognition. Certain features of the new method Fichte experiments with in 1800–1801 (and which were incorporated in the 1801–1802 Darstellung, such as the terms “Konstruktion” and “Nachkonstruktion”) become distinctive features of later attempts to characterize the activity of the transcendental philosopher.9

In the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre—which was not published during Hegel’s lifetime, and hence probably did not influence his position—Fichte reworks the Kantian distinction between false appearance and true appearance. According to his son and editor, Fichte entitled the second part of his 1804 Wissenschaftslehre “Erscheinungs- und Scheinlehre.”10 At the beginning of the second set of lectures, Fichte announces his intention to argue for the intrinsic unity of being and thinking. Yet he continues to subordinate this view to faith while explicitly adding a phenomenological dimension. The tenth lecture provides a short overview of Fichte’s view of the science of knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) at this point. This science, which turns on consciousness, is both “a doctrine of truth and reason” as well as “a phenomenology, a doctrine of appearance [Erscheinungslehre] and illusion [Schein].”11 According to Fichte, phenomenology is a theory of true appearance and false appearance, which he understands as a “theory of reason and of truth” (WL, pp. 150–151). Unlike Lambert and the early Kant, for whom phenomenology concerns false appearance, Fichte uses the term here in a positive sense.

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