Journal of the History of Philosophy

Like many of Kant's successors, J. G. Fichte attempted to overcome the various dualisms that were left to us by Kant with a higher and more all-encompassing philosophical standpoint. During the Jena period (1794-99), Fichte appealed to the self-positing I as the ground of both subject and object, matter and spirit, the sensible and intelligible worlds. Although he is best known for this "subjective idealism," in his later work Fichte abandons the method of transcendental philosophy and instead turns to metaphysics. Later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre explain the subject and object as manifestations of the absolute, which [End Page 259] Fichte alternatively calls Being or God. Although Fichte claims that the two approaches are different expressions of the same philosophy, historians of philosophy have struggled to understand their continuity.

F. Scott Scribner and some other Fichte scholars explain this shift by focusing on the imagination, the productive power by which the subject and the object are represented to consciousness. According to these scholars, the role of the imagination changes, or undergoes a displacement, after the Jena period. The imagination goes from being a faculty of the subject, a very Kantian idea, to a force by which Being expresses itself through the subject. The Fichtean subject becomes merely a conduit for the absolute. Scribner goes beyond this, however, in claiming that there is also a second displacement in Fichte's thought, a shift that is relevant for the philosophy of technology.

According to Scribner, the later Fichte became preoccupied with providing an empirical proof of his metaphysics, a Physicirung des Idealismus. Fichte believed that this was necessary to guard against an overly abstract philosophy with little experimental relevance, and that it was needed to answer the challenge of scientific materialism, whose claims were gaining popularity. To supply this proof, Fichte turned to Anton Mesmer's magnetic psychology and its concepts of "subtle matter" and "magnetic rapport." Subtle matter was thought to have both spiritual and material properties, and thus Fichte believed it would serve as a third term that allowed matter and spirit to affect and transform one another. And with magnetic rapport, like hypnotism, the material barrier between the patient and the magnetist is overcome, and the self is transformed into a vessel through which the unifying, spiritual force expresses itself. The possibility of spirit-to-spirit communication becomes crucial in Fichte's account of the summons (Aufforderung) by which the I is called to self-activity by other free beings, and it plays a role in Fichte's explanation of how someone becomes a self through the process of education.

Ultimately, Fichte abandoned his search for an empirical proof of idealism. However, according to Scribner, Fichte's attempt to understand communication in material terms marks an important point in the history of philosophy. The externalized imagination that had been the exclusive domain of spirit can now be appropriated by technology. That is, when the subject becomes merely a conduit through which Being is expressed, and the power of Being is identified with empirically accessible phenomena (subtle matter and magnetic rapport), then Being can be mimicked by modern technology. The subject becomes a receiver of images that are or may be reproduced materially rather than arising from the spiritual activity of the imagination, a worry that reemerges in the work of Martin Heidegger, among others.

Scribner's impressive grasp of Fichte's oeuvre and his facility with the various concepts allow him to range over the whole of Fichte's thought. One drawback of his immersion in Fichte's philosophy is Scribner's reliance on Fichte's own jargon. Especially in the first half of the book, Scribner often restates Fichte's ideas rather than explaining them, which makes it a tough read for anyone who is not already well-versed in the Wissenschaftslehre's key ideas. In the first hundred pages, Scribner contents himself with cataloging the different dualisms...