Fichte’s Political Philosophy and Philosophy of History||NYGIW

Fichte’s Political Philosophy and Philosophy of History

New York German Idealism Workshop

October 24, 2025 – New School for Social Research (6 E 16th Street, D1103, New York)

Confirmed keynotes: Angelica Nuzzo (CUNY), Günter Zöller (LMU)

Organization: Leksa Zhang (NSSR); Gregor Schäfer (University of Basle/University of London).

The truth that Fichte’s systematic conception of transcendental philosophy methodologically aims at – as elaborated in the different versions of his Doctrine of Science [Wissenschaftslehre] from the early Jena period to the later Berlin period – is an eternal, absolute, unchangeable, as such a-historical truth: it is a universal principle that self-consciousness makes explicit in the reflexive act of its liberation from the external givenness of all particular circumstances – interrupting, as an evident insight, the historical burden of entire centuries like a lightning flash. The historical science, accordingly, as it deals with the dispersed mass of empirical facts, is polemically rejected by Fichte – as Friedrich Schlegel reports about a conversation he had with him – as the meaningless business of “counting little peas.” At the same time, as Fichte makes clear from the outset, he understands the systematic work on his doctrine as intrinsically connected with the paradigmatic historical-political events and struggles of this epoch, namely, the French Revolution and its ongoing consequences and challenges. The philosophical liberation from dogmatism — which Fichte considers to be the great irreversible achievement of Kant’s transcendental revolution — insofar as it finds its equivalent in the setting of the event of a political revolution, fosters persistent resistance and self-determination in the historical world. Fichte’s political philosophy and philosophy of history, in line with this, must be understood as an immanent dimension of his overall systematic conception: the founding act of the Doctrine of Science — the I’s self-positing — is in itself a genuinely practical act; and by performing its realization and transformation through all the stages of Fichte’s system, the I opens up to an encounter with difference and otherness, which are essential for intersubjectivity and the constitution of a political-ethical community as well as for emancipatory action bringing about historical change and novelty. It thus is precisely out of its systematic-methodological immanence as transcendental philosophy that, for Fichte, philosophy forces a transition to the dimension of history, enabling political action and engagement that ‘apply’ the universal principle to concrete historical configurations. History – as the field in which political action becomes possible as embodying universality under particular, nationally and culturally determined conditions – represents the infinite process that, whilst a priori deducible as the place in which the ideal aim of reason’s ‘world plan’ approaches its realization, is also the place in which unforeseen events of liberation — a new future — can break into the world. 

In Fichte’s philosophy, accordingly, the dimension of history and its multiple entanglements and conjunctures with figures of political action are present throughout. Being an implicit reference already in his early writings on the French Revolution and thematized in terms of the relation between a priori construction and aposteriority in the different versions of his Doctrine of Science as well as in his dealing with the religious concept of revelation, philosophy of history explicitly emerges as a topic in Some Lectures Concerning the Scholar’s Vocation [Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten] and, most prominently, in The Characteristics of the Present Age [Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters] and finds, in many different aspects, further implicit and explicit elaborations in Fichte’s political philosophy – such as in The Closed Commercial State [Der geschlossene Handelsstaat], On Machiavelli [Über Machiavelli], the Addresses to the German Nation [Reden an die deutsche Nation], or in The Doctrine of the State [Die Staatslehre]. Systematically and methodologically, the project of a philosophy of history hereby addresses the question of how to connect a priori foundationalism with the specifically historical forms of particularity and singularity, along with the problem of how to integrate reflexivity, discontinuity, and the novelty of history’s future on the one hand with tradition, continuity, and history’s origin (as personified as the ‘Urvolk’) on the other hand, and, furthermore, how to conceptualize  the logic and temporality of historical progress from this structure. Politically, this implies the question of how to think, promote, and further develop and specify emancipatory subjectivity and responsible action in concrete historical situations and to answer to the challenges of ongoing social conflicts and their complex dynamics in the tension-filled epoch after the French Revolution, i.e., in the life of modernity and its normative claim to autonomy. 

Keywords: J.G. Fichte, Classical German Philosophy/German Idealism, Emancipation, Philosophy of History, Practical Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Resistance, Revolution, Transcendental Philosophy.