Fichte’s Certainty in the Spirit by the Letter

Abstract

ABSTRACTFichte’s Jena writings sought to combine the apparently conflicting requirements of settling philosophy on scientific grounds and of respecting its character as a self-determined vocation. In reconciling these tasks, he understood himself to be faced at once with the meta-philosophical one of motivating the questions he addressed, the pedagogical one of adequately communicating his position, and the polemical one of accounting for the incomprehension of his adversaries. I show how these layers constitute Fichte’s response to the larger problem of specifying the relation between the rote ‘letter’ of a philosophical doctrine and the intersubjective ‘spirit’ of its communicability.