The Origins of Fichte's Original Insight: Historical and Systematic Aspects of the Critique of Reflection Theory of Self-Awareness

Both historical and our contemporary philosophers of mind have attempted to explain self-awareness with the help of various relational or reflexive, same or higher-order, models. Notwithstanding the variety of this type of theories, they hinge on the idea that self-awareness is due to a cognitive relation between two mental states belonging to a single organism or to a reflexive relation of a single state to itself. An explicit formulation of the model can be found already in one of the foundational texts of Western psychology, De anima III.4, where Aristotle puts forth the influential idea that the intellect only becomes capable of understanding itself by taking itself as an object of reflection, if it has first been actualized by understanding something else.

The model is not without its critics. Since the 1960’s, the most prominent critical argument has been formulated by Dieter Henrich and Sidney Shoemaker, and subsequently maintained by the so-called Heidelberg school. The epistemic formulation of this critique is straightforward: if the subject of self-awareness is not already somehow familiar with itself, how can it recognize itself in the object of the reflective state? Since attempts to explain this familiarity by means of a further relation lead to infinite regress, we must postulate a primitive form of self-awareness that is conditional to and independent of all reflection. The critique also has a metaphysical aspect. If first-personality first comes to be through the relation that produces self-awareness, what can the state that functions as the subject of the relation possibly be directed at in its cognitive act? Unless the relation is taken to mysteriously produce one of its relata, some sort of self must be there prior to and independent of the relation.

Henrich’s first formulation of the critique took place in a historical article, in which he famously characterized the argument as an original insight by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. According to Henrich, Fichte’s attempt to correct an unquestioned reflection theoretical presupposition characteristic of all early modern philosophy constitutes a major conceptual advance in the close scrutiny of human consciousness and subjectivity that is often taken to be singularly characteristic of modern philosophy.

Thus, the argument has two interesting aspects. One is systematic. Does the argument work? Is it fatal for relational accounts of self-awareness? Does a conceptual argument of this kind really warrant the claim, explicitly made by many of the Heidelberg philosophers, that self-consciousness is in principle a primitive, unexplainable fact that we have to assume about the world? The other aspect is historical. Is the argument really an original insight of Fichte’s? Is it exclusively characteristic of the early modern, or indeed, post-Kantian, philosophical context? How should we understand the strikingly similar arguments found at least in such medieval thinkers as Avicenna (d. 1037) or Peter John Olivi (d. 1298)? Is the similarity merely superficial, or do these thinkers really deal with the same question, perhaps even to the point that it is possible to trace a common line of reflection critical thought from the middle ages to the present?