Freedom and Matter: From Kant to Fichte

Fichte's mature conception of transcendental freedom is the subject of some controversy. This paper hopes to shed light on Fichte's later conception by examining his earliest thoughts on the matter. The focus is on three pivotal years of Fichte's development between 1791 and 1793: A. 1791: Fichte’s Earliest Account of Freedom; B. 1792: Two Reviews and Fichte’s Doubts; C. 1793: Fichte’s Revised Account of Freedom. The paper begins with a discussion of Fichte's reflections on how a broadly Kantian conception of transcendental freedom can be manifest in the empirical world. Then the paper examines several short works from 1792 in which Fichte's views become significantly more sophisticated. It will be shown that Fichte confronts in these works the worry that neither a metaphysical account of the natural world, nor a mere appeal to ‘facts of consciousness,’ can be sufficient to establish autonomy in the positive sense. It will be argued that Fichte responds to these worries in two ways. One, relatively well known, is his attempt to prove the existence of practical reason from features of self-consciousness. The paper will focus instead on Fichte's account of moral motivation added to the 1793 second edition of the Attempt at a Critique of all Revelation. There, Fichte sketches an account of pure practical motivation that does not depend on direct appeal to features of self-consciousness, but is more in line with Kant's own appeal to the moral law.