A Note on Friedrich Schlegel’s Reception of the Wissenschaftslehre

1 The Anti-foundationalist Spirit of Fichte’s Foundationalist System

It is customary to discuss Fichte’s distinction between the spirit and the letter of philosophy in connection with the view on the relationship of the Wissenschaftslehre to Kant’s Critical philosophy (FW p. 479n). But his most formal exposition of the distinction is in fact given over the course of three lectures dealing with the issue of the contribution of a philosophical curriculum to the “cultivation” or “education” (Bildung) of scholars. These lectures were delivered as part of the celebrated series of weekly public lectures on “Morality for Scholars.”^[5] In them, Fichte defines spirit in terms of the capacity of the productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) to raise feelings to consciousness^[6] and distinguishes a broad and a narrow sense of spirit. Spirit in the broad sense produces (experience of) the outer sensible world by converting inner feelings that pertain to that world into representations of objects in it. However, there are “deeper feelings” underlying the feelings that pertain to the sensible world. Spirit in the narrow sense is the ability to produce (consciousness of) a “higher world” by converting those deeper feelings into ideas. A philosophy that contributes to Bildung – the Wissenschaftslehre – is produced with spirit in the narrow sense. It turns on spirit’s ability to raise to consciousness a specific deeper feeling – namely, the “sense for truth, that is, a presentiment that something can be found in a particular place and that one should pursue this or that path in order to find out” (Breazeale, 1988, p. 210). Accordingly, a study of philosophy that is “spirit-induced” (begeistert) contributes to one’s Bildung.

At first glance, the claim that Fichte is a foundationalist cannot be more obvious. In his characterization of philosophical science in Concerning the Concept of a Wissenschaftslehre (1794), he states that philosophy is possible as a science only if there is at least one absolutely certain proposition from which all its other propositions can be directly or indirectly derived, i.e. “first principle” (Grundsatz) (FW 1, pp. 41–43). However, the picture is quickly blurred as Fichte shifts from a purely hypothetical structural consideration of philosophical science to an actual procedural consideration of the same. It becomes increasingly apparent that “his thought also contains strong anti-foundationalist elements, and he certainly recognized the limits and difficulties of a foundationalist approach in philosophy” (Hoffmann, 2018, p. 218).^[7]

After stating that philosophical science must take the form of a system, Fichte defines it as the “science of the sciences in general” (FW 1, p. 44). In doing so, he sets for it the task of laying the foundation for any possible science, i.e. demonstrating the possibility of that science both with respect to its form and its content. Following in the footsteps of Kant and Reinhold, Fichte assumes that one of the primary tasks of philosophy is to safeguard empirical knowledge against various forms of Humean skepticism. This involves proving a set of basic concepts and principles to be valid and necessary for “not only what [a human being] is capable of knowing at his present level of existence, but what he is capable of knowing at any possible and conceivable level of his existence” (FW 1, p. 58). In Fichte’s words, it is philosophy’s task to provide an “exhaustive” (erschöpfende) treatment of the “the whole of human knowledge” (FW 1, p. 58).

To be sure, Fichte cautions, it does not follow from the fact that we can conceive of such a purpose that we can achieve it. Yet this need not stop us from setting a clear purpose for philosophical science (just as the fact that Archimedes does not know whether there is a place from which to operate his lever need not stop him from setting for it the purpose of moving the earth). Importantly, Fichte is forthright about the arbitrary and contrived nature of such an approach to philosophical science and its purpose: “it is something which can only be produced by the freedom of our mind, turned in a particular direction” (FW 1, p. 46).

As a science of the sciences, philosophy has human knowledge (Wissen) for its object. It is possible as a science (viz., a systematic whole founded upon a single first principle) only if human knowledge itself constitutes a system – what Fichte calls the “system of human knowledge” or “system of human spirit” (menschlichen Geistes). To be clear, the system of philosophy that is supposed to constitute the Wissenschaftslehre is not the human-spiritual system but a journalistic “presentation” (Darstellung) of the human-spiritual system. Nevertheless, if the philosophical system is to fulfill its purpose, the principles expressed by its propositions must correspond with universally valid and absolutely necessary principles of human knowledge (expressed by original acts of the human spirit). For Fichte, the procedural challenge of philosophy lies precisely in demonstrating such a correspondence. On the other hand, he is painfully aware of the limited extent to which we are able to meet it. The existence of a system of human knowledge is at the beginning of philosophical investigation a “presupposition” and at the end a practical “postulate” at best. Our knowledge, Fichte admits, might well consist of nothing but (i) an infinite chain in which one proposition is grounded on another without end or (ii) several finite chains whose first principles are completely unrelated to each other (FW 1, pp. 52–53). The first scenario, we will see, echoes Friedrich H. Jacobi’s view of rational knowledge, while the second scenario anticipates Schlegel’s.

It is clear from his admission of the possibility of the second scenario that Fichte does not think that the immediate certainty of a first principle like “The I posits itself purely and simply” establishes it as the first principle of an exhaustive system of human knowledge: “Not only is the first principle a proposition which is, as such, incapable of proof, it also cannot be demonstrated that it is the first principle of all knowledge. Everything depends on experiment” (FW 1, p. 54).

Given the limits of demonstrative proof, the best we can do to establish a proposition as the first principle of an exhaustive system of human knowledge is to present a complete system of human knowledge on its basis. A proposition cannot serve as the first principle of such a system if no complete system of human knowledge can even be presented on its basis in the first place. However, we cannot, upon presenting a complete system of human knowledge, conclude that we have thereby provided an exhaustive account of the whole of human knowledge. For why, Fichte asks, “should not one or more systems in addition to this one which has been completed be able to exist in the human spirit?” (FW 1, p. 60). Granted that all proofs are based immediately or mediately on the system’s first principle, no non-circular way of proving its singularity in the human spirit (i.e. that it is the only possible first principle) is forthcoming. Accordingly, Fichte remarks further down the road that “one may never claim infallibility” concerning one’s philosophical system and its first principle. The question of whether and to what extent a philosophical system accurately presents the human-spiritual system is “something we can never show by strict proofs, but only by probable ones” (FW 1, 76, 77).^[8]

As I see it, Fichte’s concession of the fallibility of any system of philosophy and its first principle (including his own) is an ineluctable result of his view that the first principle of a philosophical system is ultimately an item of faith or belief (Glaube). Put differently, his philosophical system entails its own fallibility. For viewed in its relation to the conditioned, the putatively Unconditioned – the I’s act of positing itself purely and simply – turns out to be an infinite striving, i.e. the idea of an unattainable goal. Correspondingly, the certainty of the act turns out to be the certainty of belief. In this way, “Fichte ends up acknowledging that a philosophy of first principles is ultimately grounded in imagination and feeling” (Hoffmann, 2018, p. 218).

The foundational role Fichte assigns to belief in his philosophical system appears to bring his position very close to Jacobi’s. According to Jacobi, philosophy offers us no viable path to the truth. As every proposition is dependent on other propositions for its rational grounding, propositions which are dependent in their turn on yet other propositions for their rational grounding, the pursuit of rational grounds turns out to be a fool’s errant. Tellingly, Fichte held Jacobi in high esteem and took himself to be “in complete agreement” with him (Breazeale, 1988, p. 413). However, from the antagonistic stance Jacobi took in the Atheismusstreit, it soon became clear that this is only wishful thinking on his part. To be sure, there are striking similarities in their thinking: both recognize the limits of demonstrative proof and discursive rationality; both admit the unprovability of the Unconditioned; both think of belief and certainty in terms of a subjective feeling. However, the similarities belie profound differences. There were in fact two distinct concepts of belief in currency in the aftermath of the Pantheismusstreit: the Jacobian concept of belief as an immediate, irrational mode of access to Being and the Kant-Reinholdian concept of belief as a practical-rational mode of access to the supersensible. Fichte was implicitly critical of the Jacobian conception of belief when he remarks:

I base everything in the human spirit on feeling. But you have quite failed to understand me if you believe that I think the issue could ever rest with feeling. Feeling must be illuminated and developed. It has to be analyzed and determined by judgment. It is a sign of spirit to raise one’s feeling to clear consciousness; but to appeal to mere feeling as a proof is a sign of lack of spirit and is the abundant and inexhaustible source of all overheated enthusiasm and fanaticism. (Breazeale, 1988, p. 211)

For Fichte, belief and feeling are mediated by, and a function of, practical reason and to this extent subordinate to “the higher law” of reason in general. But even upon being “analyzed and determined by judgment” within the sphere of speculative philosophy, feeling remains that upon which “everything in the human spirit” is based within the sphere of ordinary life.

2 Schlegel’s Fichtean Critique of Fichte

For Schlegel, the spirit of a philosophy is “its philosophy of the philosophy” (KA 18, 37, nr. 197). The distinctive spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre lies in its self-conscious, thoroughgoing application of the meta-Critical insight that a philosophical system is a Kunstwerk to itself.^[9] In his 1796 review of the first volume of Friedrich I. Niethammer’s Philosophical Journal – which he gleefully dubbed his “debut on the philosophical stage” (KA 23, 363, nr. 197) – Schlegel sought to settle the dispute between Fichte and Carl E. Schmid by appeal to the former’s “theory of spirit and letter” (KA 8, 26).^[10] The spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre boils down, in his view, to its claim that its

sole beginning and complete ground […] is an act [Handlung]: the totalization of reflexive abstraction, a self-construction bound to observation, the free inner intuition of I-hood, the being-posited of self [Sichselbstsetzens], the identity of the subject and the object. The entire philosophy is nothing but an analysis of this one act that is fixed in its movement and presented in its activity.” (KA 8, 28)

A philosophical system is a Kunstwerk insofar as it is the product of a “free act.” By applying this meta-Critical insight to itself, the Wissenschaftslehre emerges as “[t]he creative philosophy that originates in freedom and belief in freedom and shows how the human spirit impresses its laws on all things and how the world is its artwork [Kunstwerk]” (KA 2, 192, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 168, emphases mine). It carries the Critical spirit to a higher pitch than Kant’s Critical philosophy by being “always simultaneously philosophy and philosophy of philosophy” (KA 2, 213, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 281): it “represent[s] the producer along with the product and contain[s] at the same time within the system of transcendental thoughts a description of transcendental thinking” (KA 2, 204, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 238).

However, in applying the insight to itself, the Wissenschaftslehre falls short on one pivotal score: it fails to apply the meta-Critical insight (that all philosophical systems are Kunstwerke) to its method: “the method must also be Critical in the Wissenschaftslehre; this is not the case with Fichte” (KA 18, 8, nr. 52). By the method of the Wissenschaftslehre, Schlegel has in mind the deductive or demonstrative form it inevitably assumes as it is being systematically expounded. In this sense, “[e]very philosophy, and even if it were wholly spirit, is, as soon as it is spread, exposed to the risk of being transformed by formula-philosophers [Formularphilosophen] into letter” (KA 8, 27). Yet one is to receive the Wissenschaftslehre “through sense [Sinn] and cultivation [Bildung], not at all through demonstrations” (KA 18, 35, nr. 178).

Prior to Fichte’s arrival in Jena in the spring of 1794, criticism of and skepticism over the need for and feasibility of a foundationalist system were already rife among Reinhold’s students like Niethammer, Johann B. Erhard, Franz P. von Herbert and Novalis. Scholars generally agree that the Niethammer circle’s campaign against foundationalism played a role in shaping Schlegel’s critique of Fichte. On his way from Dresden to Jena in the fall of 1796, Schlegel had stopped at Weißenfels for a visit to Novalis’ home. During the one-week stay with Novalis, Schlegel wrote a review of Jacobi’s “philosophical novel” Woldemar (1779). It was the review in which he first proposed to replace proof based on first principle/s by an “alternating principle” (Wechselerweis). However, I will argue that Schlegel’s anti-foundationalism is a step removed from the Niethammer circle’s insofar as its primary concern is not the philosophical one of whether any concept could fill the role of a first principle, but the metaphilosophical one of whether philosophy should have any determinate subject-matter or task at all.

In the Woldemar review, Schlegel rejects Jacobi’s characterization of his novel as “philosophical” as being based on an unphilosophical view of philosophy. The “first true subjective condition of all philosophy” is “love of well-founded knowledge [Wissenschaftsliebe], unselfish, pure interest in cognition [Erkenntnis] and truth” (KA 2, 69; KA 18, 519, nr. 18). The phenomenon of philosophy as it is originally embodied in the historical figure of Socrates is nothing more or less than a comportment of “logical enthusiasm,” i.e. a single-minded, unyielding and indefatigable search for the truth. And if we are to take seriously the original, Socratic view of philosophy as love of well-founded knowledge, any attempt to define philosophy in terms of a distinctive subject-matter, or an exclusive task, vis-a-vis the other sciences, is arbitrary and unwarranted.

Philosophy, which should be its own end, cannot set its purpose (ihre Bestimmung setzen) in justifying the claims of common understanding against skepticism, or seeking scientific unity with the given knowledge, without losing its high dignity. (KA 8, 13)

To the contrary, Jacobi assesses philosophy through the lens of an arbitrarily fixed and unduly restrictive view of what it should deliver, bringing with him an “obstinate demand that this or that should be true” and renouncing philosophy for its failure to meet such requirements (KA 2, 70). In his estimate, Jacobi’s view of philosophy is antithetical to the original, Socratic view, a view whose exponents were Socrates’ adversaries, namely, the Sophists (KA 2, 179, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 96).

As we have seen, in defining philosophy as a science of the sciences, Fichte stipulates a certain subject-matter and task for it. On my reading, Schlegel finds Fichte also to be guilty of the charge of sophistry.

Philosophy [in the true sense] has neither a first principle, nor an object, nor a determinate task. The Wissenschaftslehre has a determinate object [Gegenstand] (I and not-I and their relations), a determinate alternating ground [Wechselgrund] and thus a determinate task. (KA 18, 7, nr. 36)

Apparently, Schlegel considers Fichte’s move to define philosophy as a science of the sciences and to delimit its task as one of furnishing a foundation for all possible sciences to be beneath the “high dignity” of philosophy. This is not to say that Fichte’s project has no place in philosophy. “The apology of the Wissenschaftslehre against the objection of transcendentalism belongs to philosophy in the occasion of the presentation of problems” (KA 18, 515, nr. 104), such as the problem of skepticism or the lack of scientific unity in our knowledge.^[11] Nevertheless, it must not, insofar as the problems are merely occasional, be equated with the whole of philosophy: “Fichte must be refuted for his claim of the Wissenschaftslehre to be identical with philosophy” (KA 18, 515, nr. 104). Thus, it is not so much Fichte’s philosophical system per se as the insularity, partisanship and myopia that come with his self-constrictive assertion of its universal validity and absolute necessity that Schlegel finds problematic. Moreover, philosophy as love of well-founded knowledge has its “original source” (Urquelle) in history and so “must be completely and analytically developed from out of history.” The Wissenschaftlehre as part of philosophy should not “dispense with historical material and historical spirit” (KA 18, 520, nr. 20) but provide a genealogical account of the occasional problems with which it is occupied in terms of them – something it fails to do.

An inevitable consequence of Jacobi and Fichte’s arbitrarily fixed and unduly restrictive view of philosophy is their approach to the grounding of its propositions as proceeding from one (completely unified set of) first principle(s) in one direction. Jacobi’s repudiation of philosophy belies his preconception of the philosopher as a “thinker, who takes off from a single proof,” i.e. builds his philosophical system on one (completely unified set of) first principle(s). But, Schlegel continues, “what if the ground of philosophy were an externally unconditioned [von außen unbedingter], but mutually conditioned and self-conditioning alternating proof [Wechselerweis]?” (KA 2, 72) The suggestion, as I understand Schlegel, is that we think of grounding as proceeding from two or more completely unrelated (sets of) first principles in two or more directions. Insofar as each of these (sets of) principles is externally unconditioned, none of them takes an absolute precedence over the other(s). This does not, as Fichte had suggested, leave us with “a piecework” of “several threads which have no point of connection” (FW 1, 53). For – this is where Schlegel’s originality lies – the (sets of) principles could, insofar as they are “mutually conditioned and self-conditionally,” take turns to be the first principle(s) upon which the other(s) is/are based.

There is, as we have seen, an anti-foundationalist face to Fichte’s epistemological outlook, right from the get-go. Interestingly, Schlegel does not fail to recognize that the Wissenschaftslehre itself involves the use of alternating proof: “There is ONE alternating proof in the Wissenschaftslehre because the whole is a self-completed circuit; multiciplicity of the alternating proof in the derived sciences, and totality of the alternating proof in the system.” (KA 18, 505, nr. 2). From this angle, his critique of Fichte’s foundationalism can be seen as a critique that is immanent to the Wissenschaftslehre, one that salvages its spirit by way of repudiating its letter.

With regard to the need for rational grounding and systematicity, Schlegel allies himself with Fichte contra Jacobi. He is not so much against grounding and systematicity as such as he is against a fixed single, absolute ground, and a complete unitary, exhaustive system. In connection with rational grounding, he writes: “the ultimate ground in my system is actually an alternating proof. In Fichte’s [it is] a postulate and an unconditioned proposition” (KA 18, 521, nr. 22). The ground in question here is that of the “whole of foundational science” (as opposed to its parts). The ground of a whole is not fixed but oscillating between “two ideas, propositions, concepts, intuition[s] without any other material.” Accordingly, there is no single, absolute principle from which an exposition of philosophy can begin. Much like the recitation of an epic poem, the exposition of philosophy must begin “in the middle,” media res, and progress in “a circle,” visiting and modifying the same principles recurrently (KA 18, 518, nr. 16; KA 2, 171, 178, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 43, 84).

In connection with rational systematicity, Schlegel remarks: “It is equally deadly for spirit to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two” (KA 2, 173, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 53). Accordingly, his philosophy is “a system of fragments and a progression of projects,” with fault-lines in between, a system that “grows out of fragments” (KA 16, 126). Each fragment “must, like a small artwork [Kunstwerke], be wholly cut off from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a porcupine” (KA 2, 197, Athenäum Fragments, nr. 206). Yet philosophy as love of well-founded knowledge requires that the fragments be brought into connection with each other, however rough and ill-fitting the connection is: “Every different opinion is in philosophy something posited in opposition [ein Entgegengesetzt]. Hence polemical totality [is a] necessary condition of method and criterion of system.” (KA 18, 515, nr. 101). This is accomplished by means of the alternating proof, which functions with this regard as a “constant alternation between self-creation and self-annihilation” (KA 2, 149, 151, 171).^[12] In this way, it mediates between incommensurable and conflicting points of view, each of which revealing a world unto itself.

For all his disagreement with Fichte, Schlegel saw himself as a partaker of the Fichtean project of unending cultivation and perfection of humankind through the spirit-induced study of philosophy. What he took away from the Fichtean meta-Critical insight that philosophical systems are Kunstwerke is not that we are free to delimit the task of philosophy or take side with one system against all the others, but that we are obliged to maintain a neutral and liberal stance in our philosophical quest for the truth. The latter alone is befitting of a genuinely philosophical, i.e. logical-enthusiastic, comportment. To appropriate the Wissenschaftslehre in the way Fichte wants us to, i.e. as a science of the sciences, is to fixate on its letter at the cost of passing over its spirit.