The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling

F. W. J. Schelling, J. G. Fichte, David W. Wood, Michael G. Vater

Description

The disputes of philosophers provide a place to view their positions and arguments in a tightly focused way, and also in a manner that is infused with human temperaments and passions. Fichte and Schelling had been perceived as "partners" in the cause of Criticism or transcendental idealism since 1794, but upon Fichte's departure from Jena in 1799, each began to perceive a drift in their fundamental interests and allegiances. Schelling's philosophy of nature seemed to move him toward a realistic philosophy, while Fichte's interests in the origin of personal consciousness, intersubjectivity, and the ultimate determination of the agent's moral will moved him to explore what he called "faith" in one popular text, or a theory of an intelligible world. This volume brings together the letters the two philosophers exchanged between 1800 and 1802 and the texts that each penned with the other in mind.
Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Trajectory of German Philosophy After Kant and the “Difference” Between Fichte and Schelling

J. G. Fichte/F. W. J. Schelling: Correspondence 1800-1802

Introduction to the Texts of J. G. Fichte

J. G. Fichte, Texts
-Announcement
-New Version of the Wissenschaftslehre (1800)[Extract]
-Commentaries on Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism and Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1800-1801)

Introduction to the Texts of F. W. J. Schelling

F. W. J. Schelling, Texts
-Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801) and Essays on Philosophical Methodology (1802)

Notes
  to Introduction
  to Fichte-Schelling Correspondence
  to Fichte Texts
  to Schelling Texts

Schelling Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Philosophy
• History of philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 23 mars 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438440194
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor

J. G. Fichte/F. W. J. Schelling
The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling: Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800–1802)
Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by
Michael G. Vater
and
David W. Wood

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854.
[Selections. English. 2012]
The philosophical rupture between Fichte and Schelling : selected texts and correspondence (1800–1802) / F.W.J. Schelling and J.G. Fichte ; edited, translated, and with an introduction by Michael G. Vater and David W. Wood.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in contemporary Continental philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4017-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775–1854. 2. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1762–1814. I. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 1762–1814. II. Vater, Michael G., 1944– III. Wood, David W., 1968– IV. Title.
B2858.V38 2012
193—dc22
2011014141
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
Almost all the texts translated in this volume are based on the established critical editions, the J. G. Fichte Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, eds. Reinhard Lauth, Hans Gliwitzky, Hans Jacob, Erich Fuchs, Peter K. Schneider, and Günter Zöller [GA] and the Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling Historisch-kritische Ausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, eds. Thomas Buchheim, Jochem Hennigfeld, Wilhelm G. Jacobs, Jörg Jantzen, and Siegbert Peetz [HkA]. The editor-translators of the present volume are grateful to the commissions of scholars who have carried out this work, and for the support of the Freistatt Bayern and the Bundesrepublik Deutschland for these institutions and their long-term projects.
We are particularly grateful to Manfred Durner, Thomas Kisser, Walter Schieche, and Alois Wieshuber for the critical edition of the relevant Schelling texts and letters that have been published in the last two years, and to Erich Fuchs, Peter K. Schneider, and Manfred Zahn for their critical edition and notes of the Fichte texts and letters from the corresponding period 1800–1802. Hartmut Traub's edition of the Schelling-Fichte Briefwechsel has been very helpful, and Myriam Bienenstock's elegant French translation of that text and Emmanuel Cattin's of Schelling's Presentation served both as inspirations and benchmarks. Thomas Kisser, Ives Radrizzani, and Hans Georg von Manz provided helpful assistance in the location of manuscripts and texts.
Both of us have especially benefited from long-term support and encouragement in this field from Karl Ameriks, Daniel Breazeale, Hans Jörg Sandkühler, and Günter Zöller. All these people are responsible for whatever merit there is in these translations and analyses; flaws and mistakes of course rest on our doorstep.
Thanks are due to the Frommann-Holzboog Verlag for their kind permission to translate Fichte's short commentary “Vorarbeiten gegen Schelling” and the excerpt from the Neue Bearbeitung der Wissenschaftslehre , and to the editor and publisher of The Philosophical Forum , where earlier and partial translations of the Schelling texts appeared. We are particularly grateful to Andrew Kenyon, Diane Ganeles, and the State University of New York Press for welcoming this manuscript into their collection of works on German idealism.
Finally, David W. Wood would especially like to thank Laure Cahen-Maurel and Erich Fuchs for their help. Michael Vater would like to thank Steve Iverson, Grace Jessen, Sue Firer, and the late Claudia Schmidt for their personal support.
INTRODUCTION
The Trajectory of German Philosophy After Kant, and the “Difference”Between Fichte and Schelling
The most obvious symptoms of an epoch-making system are the misunderstandings and the awkward conduct of its adversaries.
—G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy 1
Although Hegel doubtless had Reinhold's new interest in philosophical realism or perhaps Schleiermacher's psychological interpretation of religious truth in mind as the “awkward symptoms of the age” and its dichotomizing reception of Kant's legacy when he penned these words, they can stand as the epitome of the relations between Fichte and Schelling in the years leading up to Hegel's first published essay. After 1800, Fichte and Schelling each viewed the letters and publications of his “collaborator” with suspicion. Periods of trust and encouragement alternated with spasms of mistrust and outbreaks of accusations of personal betrayal and intellectual short-sightedness. Only one who with Hegel fervently believed in the “power of the negative” could be edified at the sight of titanic strife between powerful intellects who so deftly perceived the divisive issues of the times and addressed their solution with such insight and breadth of knowledge, but who persistently failed to identify the common position they were publicly seen to represent and complained instead of a single, massive “difference” that separated them. Neither Hegel's essay nor any single utterance by Fichte or Schelling exactly pins down the difference between them or underscores the underlying common position that it presumes. That work is left to the reader and her detective instincts. The editors and translators wish to let the texts speak for themselves, and by “texts” they mean both the letters exchanged between the principals from 1800 to 1802 and the published works from those years, which they exchanged in hopes of resolving the “difference.” We think the letters and published works have roughly equal standing, for when the former turn to philosophical topics they generally focus on very broad issues of philosophical presuppositions, certainty, and methodology left over after their various and intricately argued versions of “the system” had been sent to their respective publishers. The letters are placed first to provide an introduction to the texts that follow, not because they have explanatory priority or because the cultural and biographical situations they reference illuminate the “difference” better than the published works. Similarly, the comments in the pages that follow are offered to point out a possible reading of the legacy of German philosophy after Kant, but they will not open up a royal road through the by-ways of the history of philosophy nor will they suggest that what the principals and their contemporaries saw as the one difference was the one that will necessarily stand today as the central philosophical issue. In particular, we are agnostic on Hegelian presuppositions that outcomes are better than prior conditions or that one can make an easy separation between reflection —or the work of intellect —and reason or intellectual intuition . No philosophical distinction can be univocally deployed, and if quantum indeterminacies arise in physics, one can hardly expect unambiguous meanings in social discourse, much less philosophy.

The Legacy of Kant
[T]he metaphysics of nature as well as morals, but above all the preparatory (propaedeutic) critique of reason that dares to fly with its own wings, alone constitutes that which we call philosophy in a genuine sense. This relates everything to wisdom, but through the path of science, the only one which, once cleared, is never overgrown and leads to error.
—Immanuel Kant, Architectonic of Pure Reason, Critique of Pure Reason A850/B878 2
By the early 1790s the bulk of Kant's great systematic writings had appeared, including the three Critiques and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science , but it was not widely recognized that the critical philosophy formed a comprehensive system instead of multiple preliminary sketches for a future system. Kant had given the Critique of Pure Reason a partial rewrite that distanced his position from idealism, furthered its claims to have definitively reconciled rationalism and empiricism, and announced that theoretical philosophy had been given a “scientific” foundation by a Copernican reversal of perspective. 3 The enduring achievement of the First Critique was to insist that philosophy must settle questions of foundations and methodology before it embarked on comprehensive explanation—that quid facti? could not be settled without quid juris? 4 If Kant thought his contribution had ended metaphysics or the attempt to think the supersensible, he did not foresee how the subjective or Copernican turn coupled with methodological introspection could produce the encyclopedic adventures in world-description that would flow from the pens of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel in the coming decades. The Critique of Practical Reason sliced through the theoretical knot of freedom and determinism, declared the primacy of practical reason in the phenomenon of conscience, and put the would-be objects of metaphysical speculation within the reach of hope o