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Abstract
This paper aims at building an accomplice reading of Fichte from Latin America. By crossing statements and perspectives from this side and the other side, of both the Atlantic Ocean and the Andes Mountains, my aim is to stress the asymmetric correspondences between words and reflections of authors as distinct as Fichte, Galeano, Cortázar, Allende, Marx, Freire and others. That is the way I propose to rescue the question of Latin America’s Second Independence from oblivion, and to demonstrate the urgency of the exemplary and consequent attitudes from both sides in order to subvert the meaning of M. Thatcher’s TINA.
Abstract
There was no direct influence of Fichte’s thought on the independence patriots of South America, but it is undeniable that his call to action in order to transform society and the State had an effect on countries fighting for their freedom after the failure of the French Revolution, as it happened in Spain after the Napoleonic invasions or in colonial America. This paper highlights the points of contact and coincidences of ethical Idealism with the ideas of the liberators Belgrano, San Martín, Miranda and Bolívar. The causes that account for this indirect process of transmission and its channels are also analyzed, focusing on three questions: (1) The human type to which Fichte’s philosophy is directed is perfectly embodied in the liberators of America, who are men of action, ethical subjects who, without the need for any coercion, fight for freedom within themselves and in society; (2) The revolution in Latin America was shaped under the deep admiration for the French Revolution and not for the North American one. In this regard, there is no doubt that Fichte was the inspiration; (3) All of these patriots were Freemasons and, before the beginning of the independence wars, had contact with the Lodge of London. Thus, Fichte’s activity in Freemasonry, thanks to his Letters to Constant, paved the way for the reform of the Order in Germany, fermented later in Great Britain.
Abstract
The contribution places Fichte’s abolitionist stand regarding unfreedom and inequality against the background of the politico-philosophical debate about the respective merits of ancient, “civic” republicanism and modern, “bourgeois” liberalism. As opposed to the emulators of classical antiquity, such as Machiavelli, who seek to retrieve and revive ancient political principles and civic practices, Fichte is allied with those propagating the spread of new principles and practices, chiefly among them freedom in its various guises as personal, civil and political liberty, into all strata of society and into every corner of the globe and, moreover, concerned with the concomitant reassessment, even removal, of traditional values and customary privileges. Yet unlike the proto-liberals, such as Locke, Fichte opposes colonial expansion and other forms of personal, civil and political exploitation on principal as well as pragmatic grounds. The contribution develops Fichte’s politico-philosophical profile with regard to colonialism, servitude and slavery in two sections: a first one on Fichte’s philosophical and political revolutionism; and a second one on the complex constellation of freedom, equality and identity in Fichte’s philosophy in general and his political philosophy in particular. In material terms, the two sections deal with the context and the text, respectively, of one of Fichte’s earliest, most neglected, though not at all insignificant publications, Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgments On the French Revolution from 1793.
Abstract
The text deals with Alejandro Korn’s reception of Fichte, based on passages found in a text entitled Hegel, on the first century of his death [Hegel, en el primer centenario de su muerte] (1931) and in one of his main writings, Creative Freedom [La libertad creadora] (1922). Korn’s reception of Fichte could be characterized as a critical reception, since he accuses the Science of Knowledge of solipsism and proposes different solutions to this problem. First, we will shed light on Korn’s system, taking into account its differences with the Science of Knowledge. Secondly, we will show that, despite his criticisms, it is possible to find a link between both systems. Indeed, Korn states not only that philosophical activity must be transformative, but also that the principle upon which subjective activity is based is that of wanting or desire. Therefore, I argue that based on a similar reading of Kant, both thinkers propose that only two systems are possible: the system of freedom or Dogmatism. We shall see how Korn comes close to the way in which the First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge presents the two possible systems, as well as in the details of his arguments for and against them. This similarity is nothing less than the way in which both Fichte and Korn vindicate the spirit of freedom, of which Kant’s work is the messenger.
Abstract
In 1909, one year before the first centenary of the May Revolution, Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957) delivered to the Ministry of Justice and Public Instruction, La restauración nacionalista [The Nacionalist Restoration], a plan for the construction of a national identity or conscience that proposed a new concept of patriotism. Taking historical education as an axis, Rojas tries to solve the problem of the crisis of conscience that, according to him, was the result of the cosmopolitanism of the beginning of the 20th century. In this context, he presents a report about the impact and development of historical education in European universities. Based on the Addresses to the German Nation, Rojas recognizes Fichte as the initiator of a project aimed at the construction of a nation anchored in a past time with metaphysical foundations. This allowed the birth of an organic German unity, which the egoism of the age had made impossible. My proposal is to show that there is an influence of Fichtean idealism in the elaboration of the new concept of patriotism by Rojas.
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between Walt Whitman’s work and Fichte’s philosophy from four different perspectives: (1) the influence of Thomas Carlyle in Whitman’s reception of Fichte; (2) Fichte’s philosophy as an appropriate philosophy, according to our interpretation of Whitman, for the United States after the Civil War. That appropriateness is grounded in the fact that with Fichte’s philosophy it is possible to think of a unity greater than all differences, a unity in which writing about the Civil War and the oblivion of that same historical event are articulated; (3) Fichte’s philosophy as an insufficient philosophy, although it was adequate for its historical moment. Its insufficiency is to be found, or so I shall argue, in the very modern radicality of the idealist philosophy; (4) the differences between Fichte and Whitman with respect to their religious conceptions (particularly in their links to the sacred books of the Judeo-Christian tradition), differences interpreted in the light of Hans Blumenberg’s ideas on myth, dogma and German Idealism.
Abstract
I shall investigate Saúl Alejandro Taborda’s (1885–1944) appropriation of Fichte’s philosophical, juridical and political thought. Fichte is for Taborda a crucial reference in his configuration of the crisis that the period faces, with respect to both its genesis and its resolution. But he is also a source of inspiration in the spiritualist and idealist climate –in a generic sense– of the early twentieth century in Argentina. This reference to Fichte in Taborda contains a specific way of conceiving Idealism and a critical vision of Modernity. While the former agglutinates and articulates the elements by referring them to an instance of unification, the latter implies dispersion and atomization in a sequence of conflicting relations. In this paper I propose to reconstruct this tension in two moments of Taborda’s work: on the one hand, in Reflexiones sobre el ideal político de América [Reflections on America’s Political Ideal] (1918), where he does not mention Fichte but builds the conceptual framework he will use later; and on the other hand, in Investigaciones pedagógicas [Pedagogical Investigations] (1932 ff.) and, in more detail, in La crisis espiritual y el ideario argentino [The Spiritual Crisis and the Argentine Ideology] (1933). In these two works, Taborda does deal with Fichte and in the latter, he places him in a central place. Such an evocation is not part of a collection of quotations or erudite allusions, but rather assumes the meaning of a strong vindication of the unity of elements and an original appropriation as solution of the epochal crisis.
Abstract
Fichte described his system as “the first system of freedom.” In my essay, I discuss some of the connections between Fichte’s philosophy and the political movements that shaped Latin American in the wake of the independence movements. I focus upon Fichte’s notion of progress and domination to suggest a connection to Latin American Positivism. In particular, I look at the ways in which Fichte’s views of nature in The Vocation of Man, give us a view of science that is focused on facts and the domination and conquest of nature that is similar to the views of Positivism that took over in Latin America to bring progress to the continent.
Abstract
This paper states as hypothesis that the deepest source of influence in Argentinean romantic thinking was not French Romanticism but rather German Idealism and Romanticism. The main objective is to present the impact of the metaphysics of longing that Fichte develops in Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794–1795), upon two romantic works: Esteban Echeverría’s El peregrinaje de Gualpo (ca. 1825) and José Mármol’s Cantos del peregrino (1846). I will investigate the way in which both authors characterize the figure of the pilgrim –as main character and alter ego in their writings. In parallel with that concept, the role of the notions of melancholy and tedium must be highlighted as key points that configure idealistic and romantic thought. On the one hand, we find the melancholy resulting from the lack of absolute satisfaction of the longing drive, on the other hand, we have the constant subjective activity that tends to the realization of said longing. I shall use this tension to demonstrate that Fichte and Argentinean intellectuals participate in an idealistic and –at least in the second case– romantic current of thought that must be described as melancholic, practical and moral.