Fichte's Intersubjective I
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00201740500497431
ISSN1502-3923
Autores Tópico(s)Psychoanalysis and Social Critique
ResumoAbstract The challenge to philosophy of mind for the past two hundred years has been to overcome the Cartesian conception of mind. This essay explores the attempt to do this by J. G. Fichte, especially regarding intersubjectivity or the knowledge of other minds. Fichte provides a transcendental deduction of the concept of the other I, as a condition for experiencing the individuality of our own I. The basis of this argument is the concept of the "summons", which Fichte argues is necessary for us to form the concept of an end of our own action. Notes 1. Antonio Damasio. (1994) Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Harper‐Collins Avon Books). No doubt the chief thing Damasio wants to criticize as "Descartes' error" is Descartes' alleged partitioning of intellect or reason from emotions and their rootedness in the body. But this is based on a (common, but nonetheless egregious) error about what Descartes actually thought on this question, perhaps due to ignorance (or a misreading) of his late treatise The Passions of the Soul. The misreading is typically occasioned by the drawing of (fallacious) inferences from the conjunction of Descartes' metaphysical dualism and some of the strictures of his philosophical method to very general conclusions on his behalf about how the human intellect works best. In fact, Descartes recognized the influence of the body on the mind, and especially emphasized the role of the passion he calls "generosity" in helping the intellect to function well in the general affairs of life. It is true that Descartes did not formulate what Damasio calls the "somatic marker hypothesis" in his account of the intellect, but he certainly anticipated the general idea when he recognized that certain passions, which for him are motions of the animal spirits in the brain, help the intellect to keep other passions in check and constitute a kind of bodily infrastructure for the intellect's control over our life. Once Damasio's misreading of Descartes is set aside, what seems to be left of "Descartes' error" is therefore mainly the metaphysical dualism from which Damasio mistakenly inferred that he held the erroneous views that Damasio wants most to criticize. 2. R. Descartes [1645] (1964–1976) Oeuvres, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris: Vrin), 8:7. 3. E. Husserl [1929] (1960) Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff), Fifth Meditation; see especially §52, in which the "style of verification" appropriate to experiencing the mental states of others is discussed. However, as I will mention presently, there are signs elsewhere in Husserl of an approach to the question that is much closer to Fichte's and not open to the objections I am presenting here. I am grateful to Dagfinn Føllesdal for bringing this side of Husserl's thinking to my attention. 4. Fichte's writings will be cited according to the following system of abbreviations: GA (1962‐) J.G. Fichte‐Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Reinhard Lauth and HansGliwitzky. (Stuttgart‐Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann). Cited by part:volume:page number. SW (1970) Fichtes Sammtliche Werke, Edited by I. H. Fichte. (Berlin: deGruyter). Cited by volume: page number. 5. The "not‐I" spoken of in this passage is as yet indeterminate as to what way it differs from the I, but Fichte's first exploration of the 'not‐I' considers it as the material world, or what differs fundamentally from any I. Later Fichte will argue that in order to be aware of my individual I, it is necessary to contrast it with another kind of 'not‐I', namely an I other than myself. 6. From the beginning, Fichte writes as if the method of transcendental philosophy is what we could call a 'linear' method, beginning with a first principle (the I) and progressing one step at a time, in a necessary order, from each transcendentally deduced concept to the next. But we need to recognize that Fichte always regarded his system as something in which there would be a constant "back‐and‐forth" checking procedure, in which even the starting point would need confirmation by the way in which it makes possible a complete and satisfactory theory of experience (SW 1: 54, 58, 61–62). This implies, I think, that each stage of the transcendental procedure is also necessary in some way for the earlier stages – so that the summons is as necessary for our awareness of the not‐I in general as the awareness of the material world is for our awareness of ourselves as embodied and for our awareness of the summons as addressed to us by another embodied I. It may also be relevant here that Fichte never actually brought any version of his system to the completion he projected, so that we have no actual instance in his writings of the kind of systematic structure he was seeking. The issues I have just been discussing, of course, raise questions about Fichte's method that go far beyond the scope of the present paper. 7. Kant [1790] Critique of the Power of Judgment, 5:294–295; [1798] Anthropology from a Pragmatic Standpoint 7:200, 228–229; Logic, Ak 9:57. Cited by volume:page number from (1902‐) Kants Schriften. Akademie Ausgabe (Berlin: deGruyter). 8. This tradition, and its origin with Fichte, is discussed by Kurt Mueller‐Vollmer, "Language Theory and the Art of Understanding," in Marshall Brown (Ed.) The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 162–184. 9. I am grateful to Susan Hahn, the editor of this volume, for a helpful set of comments and queries. I hope I have been able to clarify what I am saying with as much success as she had in making me aware of the need for clarification.
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