Abstract
Fichte’s System of Ethics was written independently of Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, although inspired by Kant’s general approach to moral philosophy. Thus Fichte’s system of ethical duties parallels Kant’s rather than responding to it. They are naturally similar in many ways, but the chief difference is that for Fichte all individuals are to be treated as means to the end of freedom (self-sufficiency) as such, while for Kant the freedom of each individual is to be treated as an end in itself. This does not always lead to substantive differences, but in some cases it does; one notable example is Fichte’s treatment of the membership of individuals in the “estates.”
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Notes
- 1.
In his brief account of Fichte’s System of Ethics, Manfred Kuehn stresses the difference between Fichte and Kant more than the similarity; see Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Ein deutscher Philosoph (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012), 374–75. Anthony J. La Vopa likewise stresses the difference: “Informing Fichte’s idea of wholeness … was a rigorism that may have been extreme even by Kantian standards”; see Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 221. I will argue that the relation between the two views is more nuanced than these authors suggest.
- 2.
Whether such freedom requires the metaphysical freedom of the will or libertarianism that is argued to be possible in the Critique of Pure Reason and actual in theCritique of Practical Reason is a question that can be left aside here.
- 3.
I have argued for the foundation of Kant’s theory of right in his moral theory in Paul Guyer, “Kant’s Deductions of the Principles of Right,” in Mark Timmons, ed., Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: Interpretative Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 24–64 (reprinted in Paul Guyer, Kant’s System of Nature and Freedom: Selected Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 198–242), and contrasted Kant’s approach to a Fichtean approach to the philosophy of right in Paul Guyer, “The Twofold Morality of Kantian Recht: Once More Unto the Breach,” Kant-Studien 107 (2016): 34–63.
- 4.
I have developed this argument at greater length in Paul Guyer, “Setting and Pursuing Ends: Internal and External Freedom,” in Virtues of Freedom: Selected Essays on Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 87–104. A similar point has also been suggested by Robert N. Johnson in Self-Improvement: A Essay in Kantian Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 89–94.
- 5.
For further discussion of the duty of sympathy, see Paul Guyer, “Kant on Moral Feelings: From the Lectures to the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Virtues of Freedom, 235–59.
- 6.
I have discussed Fichte’s attempt at a deduction of the moral law more extensively in Paul Guyer, “Fichte’s Transcendental Ethics,” in The Transcendental Turn, ed. Sebastian Gardner and Matthew Grist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 135–58. For suggestions that Kant’s own approach might begin from the supposition of a specifically normative or practical, indemonstrable first principle, see his early prize essay, Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Ak 2:299), and CPrR 5:31 (the “fact of reason” passage). However, one can also find suggestions of an alternative approach in Kant, namely a derivation of the moral law from the nature of reason as such, not specifically practical reason.
- 7.
On the moral law as a form of cognition, see Stephen Engstrom, The Form of Practical Knowledge: A Study of the Categorical Imperative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
- 8.
This aspect of Fichte’s account is stressed by Allen W. Wood in Fichte’s Ethical Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), especially chap. 7, “The Social Unity of Reason: The Human Vocation,” 211–50. In Wood’s view, Fichte’s conception of reason is fully particularized, thus to regard others “as ‘tools of reason’ is to regard them as tools of their own reason” only (228). I will suggest that Fichte’s conception is not so unequivocal as this.
- 9.
Kant briefly discusses this in the Doctrine of Right (MM 6:235–36), which Fichte could have seen before finishing his System, rather than in the Doctrine of Virtue.
- 10.
Fichte does not appear to mean by this that everyone is obliged to institute a single, worldwide state, and his subsequent conception of the “closed commercial state” (geschloßenes Handelstaat) would confirm that this is not what he has in mind.
- 11.
Wood tries to remove the sting from Fichte’s account of the estates by arguing that it includes a proto-Marxist suggestion that the working class can ultimately be aufgehoben (Wood, Fichte’s Ethical Thought, 247). The present passages do not bear that interpretation out.
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Guyer, P. (2019). Freedom as an End in Itself: Fichte on Ethical Duties. In: Hoeltzel, S. (eds) The Palgrave Fichte Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26508-3_12
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