ABSTRACT
Fichte is notorious for his relegation of nature to the realm of the ‘Not-I’ and for what appears to be his purely instrumental/technological attitude toward the natural world. It is true that Fichte insists that the infinite goal of finite reason is the complete domination and transformation of all that is not I in accordance with the I's spontaneous demand for complete self-sufficiency. Yet the conception of nature developed in his Jena writings is considerably more nuanced than this and includes a highly original appreciation of the human body as the necessary corporeal instantiation of intelligible freedom and of the natural word as the necessary material arena of endless striving. But even this is not Fichte's final word on the matter, inasmuch as he also introduces a still higher, speculative, or religious perspective on nature's purposiveness with respect to our ultimate ends as spiritual/moral beings. Viewed in light of its ‘final end’, nature is neither ultimately alien to spirit nor the Not-I to the I.
