On the Very Idea of a Method of Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract

In an often cited passage in the “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge” (1797), Fichte asserted that “my system is nothing other than the Kantian; this means that it contains the same view of things, but is in method quite independent of the Kantian presentation.”¹ This statement (and others in the same vein) would naturally lead one to infer that transcendental philosophy as presented in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre did, in fact, have a distinctive “method” that could be contrasted with that deployed by Kant (and perhaps those of other “transcendental” or idealist thinkers as well). In this chapter, I suggest that, although this statement is doubtless valid with respect to the differences between Kant’s and Fichte’s manners of “presentation,” it should not be read as licensing the further assumption that Fichte regarded himself as deploying some unique or distinctive method that could be taken as valid or normative for his own or any other “transcendental inquiry.”