ABSTRACT
The principal significance of the self, that hallmark of modernity, attains perhaps its greatest articulation in transcendental philosophy and the idealist thought which follows upon it. Their relation, as Martin Heidegger sees it, comes into focus through that remarkable “question without an answer: ‘but whence then am I?’” 1 which Immanuel Kant puts into the mouth of the metaphysically conceived supreme being. The unanswered question which the God of the philosophers raises of and directs to himself expresses the critical inability to suspend anything, including apparent divinity, before the fathomlessness of phenomenal causality. Indeed, according to Kant, the very attempt to conceive of an unconditional necessity brings reason—whether human or divine—before its “true abyss.” 2 Faced with this gulf, transcendental philosophy sees itself confronted with reason’s inability to apprehend that necessary ground which it ineluctably demands of itself. Yet as Heidegger summarily observes of the subsequent idealist solution to this quandary of seemingly groundless reason, “Fichte and Hegel seek a ground precisely at that point where there can be for Kant only an abyss” (GA 15, 300). This is so because post-Kantian idealist thought looks for the unconditional ground of reason and therewith the condition of its possibility in nothing other than thinking itself, which cannot think itself away without at the same time reinstating itself. In his Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Science (1794), Johann Gottlieb Fichte replies to this dilemma with the thetic judgment that ‘I am’, which founds his entire system of theoretical and practical philosophy. 3 By contrast, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel responds in his Difference between the Fichtean and Schellingian Systems of Philosophy (1802) to the same dilemma with the artistic, religious, and philosophical construction of absolute subjectivity by that reason whose true infinitude marks its liberation from the limitations of all finite understanding. 4
