Abstract

Fichte offers separate analyses of the conditions for the possibility of representing or referring to (i) material objects and (ii) other minds – extra-subjective entities of importantly distinct sorts. These analyses are importantly akin, in that both postulate, as a necessary condition for the mental accomplishment under consideration, some sort of basic incapacity or limitation that is partly constitutive of human rationality. But the two accounts also involve interestingly different understandings of the nature and implications of the basic constraints in question. As a first approximation, we can say that, for Fichte, (i) a rational being posits a putatively mind-independent object only if that being’s self-initiated mental activity encounters a pre- or proto-objective “check” or “affront” (Anstoß), and (ii) a rational being can first become concretely conscious of its own capacity for rational self-determination only as the addressee of a “summons” (Aufforderung) that calls upon it to actuate that very capacity. In this essay I roughly reconstruct the indicated arguments. In the process, I endeavor to show that Fichte does not suppose that either argument firmly backs philosophical assent to the existence of material objects or of other minds. On the contrary: the goal of his professed ‘deductions’ of our everyday ‘convictions’ concerning such things is not to philosophically legitimate those prephilosophical beliefs. Instead, the aim of these arguments is to vindicate Fichte’s transcendental idealism – which, if anything, epistemically undermines said beliefs – by demonstrating that any experience that is putatively ‘of’ such things has, as its necessary and sufficient conditions, nothing but states and activities of the I. Thus, in the case of material objects, a radical difference manifest within the I – self-initiated rational activity versus “simple sensation” – is ‘set forth’ (vorgestellt) in a representation (Vorstellung) of an extra-subjective bearer of sensed qualities. And – much more controversially – in the case of other minds, a demand that the I (qua pure reason, constitutively committed to its own unlimited self-activity and efficacy) makes upon itself (qua rational individual capable of intelligent self-determination) is outwardly depicted as an appeal originating from an extra-subjective source.