Abstract
Fichte’s project has much to offer contemporary continental philosophy and Laruelle’s project is an inspiring example of the continuing creative power and possibility latent in Fichte’s work. In a well-known ad hominem flourish, Fichte famously asserts that the choice between founding foundational philosophical first principles, between freedom and dogmatism (idealism and realism), cannot itself, in turn, be justified by philosophy alone. Yet what if the philosophical decision itself, the decision of and for philosophy is itself an ad hominem choice that, as Laruelle contends, is little more than a narcissistic game? Indeed, Laruelle radicalizes such stakes by suggesting it is not merely the dogmatism of realism that is the problem, but that all philosophy is a narcissistic dogmatism. And it is this very decision for philosophy that remains our oldest dogmatic prejudice.
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Notes
- 1.
While twentieth-century continental philosophy has explicitly drawn on the work of Kant and Hegel (for instance), reference to Fichte has been largely indirect, oblique, or entirely absent. Any bibliography of Kant’s and Hegel’s explicit influence on the twentieth century would be massive and would reference the names of such figures as Bataille, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Habermas, Foucault, Lacan, Sartre, and Arendt, among many, many, others; by contrast, while Fichte’s indirect influence may well be arguably as large, his direct influence (registered by way of explicit reference to his work) is comparably quite small. Exceedingly small, in fact. Even then, the references tend to be oblique. Among the names that reference Fichte’s influence—such as Michel Henry and Axel Honneth, and to a lesser extent Habermas and Heidegger—the name François Laruelle stands out to the degree that Laruelle explicitly makes Fichte central to the founding architectonic of his work.
- 2.
Fichte writes, “The kind of philosophy one chooses depends upon the kind of person one is.” (J. G. Fichte, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965), 1.434.
- 3.
François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Hereafter cites as PNP.
- 4.
While one could argue that Fichte’s ad hominem claim is one that grounds epistemology upon the foundation of ethical considerations, it could equally be understood as a meta-philosophical gesture that grounds philosophical theory in pragmatic (read: non-philosophical) concerns.
- 5.
Anthony Paul Smith, Francois Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy: A Critical Introduction and Guide. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 12.
- 6.
“The operation of force ‘over’ resistance makes non-philosophy, rather than a ‘pragmatic history of the human spirit’ (Fichte), a pragmatic theory of philosophy in terms of man as last-instance” (PNP 158).
- 7.
Smith, Laruelle’s Principles, 69.
- 8.
J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) Nova Methodo (1796/99), trans. and Ed. Daniel Breazeale. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 402.
- 9.
F. Scott Scribner, Matters of Spirit: J. G. Fichte and the Technological Imagination (University Park, PA.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 89–91.
- 10.
It is likely Laruelle offers a productive misreading of Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition. See note 16.
- 11.
John Mullarkey writes of Laruelle, he is “abstaining from philosophy as such while simultaneously taking on its raw material.” Quoted in Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis and London” University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xxv.
- 12.
He writes: “[O]nce the Ego is thus given without an operation of constitutive givenness, but only givenness as a first name, what happens beyond it for the dyad of thought and being, in which it no longer participates? The general economy of the philosophical triad is shattered as soon as the Ego ‘leaves’ philosophy….” (PNP 104).
- 13.
J.G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. and ed. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Hereafter cited as SK.
- 14.
And while Fichte’s account of this original unity of knowing and acting is described as an intellectual intuition, his own—often ambiguous—use of this term can be confusing because he will also use it to describe philosophical reflection’s attempt to lay bare the transcendental conditions of ordinary empirical experience.
- 15.
Fichte’s efforts to articulate a non-representational ego through an ever-expanding vocabulary of a “self-feeling self,” “self-seeing I/eye,” and the notion of “life” are all continued attempts to develop the ego as a kind of auto-affection. For more detail see: Scribner, Fichte, 98–100; 124–129.
- 16.
“Auto-affection is in one case assumed to be already the very content of the Ego, which is thereby reduced, while on the other the force-(of)-thought infers itself from the ego which determines it.”
- 17.
Laruelle’s criticism of the intuitive aspect of Fichte’s “intellectual intuition” is largely misplaced given that even for Fichte so-called “intellectual intuition” is something inferred, not intuited. This critical difference is likely a productive misreading on Laruelle’s part given that without it his entire reading of “givenness” in auto-affection would likely fall apart.
- 18.
Laruelle explains the difference in axioms as follows: “I = I is moreover the synthesis of intuition and object, so an auto-intuition, the circle of an absolute I which is resolved in the circle of the transcendental imagination…. which is to say the auto-position of phenomenological distance. On the other hand, the vision-in-One is not the circle of the auto-given; it is the circle of the auto-position-without-given. As a given-without-givenness….” (PNP 141).
- 19.
Laruelle concedes his own distance from Fichte. He writes, “Fichte would undoubtedly refuse this importance logically and would denounce this interpretation in principle” (PNP 142).
- 20.
Laruelle writes: “The real-One allows us to understand that Life, Affect, the Originary Impression, or the Internal, etc., are the real in-the-last-instance and that, precisely because of this, they are not the Real but only—given their constitution as symbols—the first terms which describe it without determining it” (PNP 221).
- 21.
Smith, Laruelle’s Principles, 105.
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Scribner, F.S. (2023). Reading Fichte. In: Rajan, T., Whistler, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Poststructuralism. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27345-2_2
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