ABSTRACT

J. G. Fichte is claiming that whoever gives an account of the finite or limited character of human knowing – yet without appealing to the pre-critical or dogmatic metaphysical premise of an antecedently given, independent thing-in-itself-will have truly understood Immanuel Kant. Fichte’s argument entails that original “social contract” is itself the non-imaginable, non-representable condition of there being any conscious, genuinely human relations among human beings in the first place. Fichte’s derivation of intersubjectivity implies that “before” a self can be a self-conscious free self at all, it must always already stand in relation to another free self that allows it – and is allowed by it – to be free. The Fichtean account of free selfhood and mutual recognition can be developed to underwrite a fairly robust, critical theory regarding the concrete requirements of justice in actual social practice. Fichte can be said to “out-Rousseau” Rousseau on the issue of the social contract that allegedly grounds society and all social relations.