5 Difference within Identity? Fichte’s Reevaluation of the First Principle of Philosophy in § 5 of the Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre

In: The Enigma of Fichte’s First Principles
Author:
Philipp Schwab
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Abstract

The aim of the article is to discuss a reevaluation of the first principle in § 5 of Fichte’s Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. The article makes the case that this reevaluation takes place in an attempt to resolve the key systematic issue of a transition from identity to difference, which can be traced back to the very first draft of Fichte’s system in the Own Meditations on Elementary Philosophy. Especially as Fichte, in § 1 of the Foundation, conceptualizes the principle of the I as pure identical self-positing, it proves deeply questionable how any proper transition can take place from this immanent self-relation to any other element of the system. While the first sections of the Foundation do not address this issue directly, it is in § 5 that Fichte truly approaches the problem. In this light, § 5 of the Foundation shall be interpreted as Fichte’s quite dramatic struggle with the absolute I, and as a complex back and forth movement: On the one hand, even more clearly than in § 1, Fichte repeatedly stresses that the absolute I must have the structure of absolute identity. Yet on the other hand, he thereby realizes that it is indeed impossible to construct a plausible transition from pure identity to difference, and that he thus has to modify his first principle. Ultimately, Fichte outright sacrifices the idea of a first principle of identity, and rather inserts difference into the identity principle, unfolding a much more complex structure of I-hood than before.

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