ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs the critiques of mysticism in the works of Kant and Fichte while noting crucial differences between them. Kant interprets mysticisms as the expressions of a “dogmatic” attitude which reifies the products of our mental activities by identifying them as something beyond reason’s self-determining activity. In the end, Kant reasons, mysticism produces only “counterfeit goods” that circumvent philosophical labour and stymie the realisation of rational freedom. Fichte’s view of mysticism largely accords with Kant’s. At the same time, Fichte believes that Kant’s dogmatic attitudes about transcendental subjectivity had not only rendered his system less defensible but had also cut him off from a mystical philosophia perennis present in the Gospel of John and the works of Plato. Reading the mystical tradition forward from Plato and backward through Kant, Fichte establishes parameters for the reception of mysticism in the following years. In situating Fichte and Kant’s accounts of mysticism vis-à-vis their respective views on systematicity and the limits of cognition, we will also note the role played by materiality in their critiques. Both thinkers appeal to the language of materiality—affectivity, labour, commodity, and “blind, natural power”—to understand the intellectual and social stakes of contemporary and historical mysticisms.
