R R Williams, "Fichte and Husserl: Life-world, the Other, and Philosophi...

Kant's philosophy of reason is marked by a unique fate, as it is burdened with questions that it cannot ignore but cannot answer. These questions, such as freedom, immortality, and God, arise in human experience and reflection but exceed the capacity of reason to determine cognitively. Kant believes that cognition is restricted to mundane phenomena and the necessary laws governing their operation. However, Kant opens another door to the metaphysical issues of God, freedom, and immortality through practical reason, freedom, and faith.

Kant's critical philosophy denies knowledge to make room for faith, practical faith, and freedom. Practical faith and freedom are important, but this access is for practical purposes only and is not theoretical knowledge of any supersensible object(s). In determining the bounds of cognition and proscribing any cognitive transcendence of such boundaries, Kant raises a paradox: if one knows they are free, they must know themselves as a conditioned phenomenal object subject to causal mechanical necessity. This paradox leads to Kant applying his doctrine of denial of knowledge to make room for faith and distinguishing between appearances (phenomena) and things in themselves (noumena).

In terms of self-consciousness of freedom, Kant argues that there is no cognitive access of the self to its freedom. Instead, the consciousness of freedom is mediated by the moral law, which is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom and freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law. This means that only a being who is free is capable of apprehending a moral imperative and the moral law.

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, a student and translator of David Hume, was a prominent critic of Kant and German idealism. He believed that reason and philosophical cognition are self-subverting, leading to a disastrous choice between false reason and no reason at all. Jacobi's doctrine of immediate knowing or Gefühlsphilosophie offers a mixture of Humean impressions and Kant's practical faith, conceiving faith as an immediate certainty that excludes all proofs absolutely and is simply the representation agreeing with the thing being represented.

Friedrich Heinrich Fichte, a German philosopher, argued that the mediation of the self to itself by the other becomes a major problem in the development and transformation of idealism into a philosophy of spirit. He proposed an alternative explanation to the problem of knowing that one is free: freedom is intersubjectively mediated. Fichte insists that the human being (and so all finite beings generally) becomes human only among others. The relation of free beings to each other is therefore a relation of reciprocity through intelligence and freedom.

Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is a science of the life-world, not to be confused with the mundane natural science of empirical psychology. His transcendental method focuses on subjective meaning-bestowal and the ontological sense of the primordial life-world, which he critiques in his critique of science. Husserl's transcendental idealism asserts that the transcendental subject takes priority over the sense(s) it constitutes, while ordinary consciousness asserts that relations of self and world are inherently two-sided and reciprocal.

Husserl's account of intersubjectivity in the fourth Cartesian Meditation generates two opposing requirements: (i) all sense is constituted by the transcendental ego as part of its self-explication, and (ii) the other must be constituted as other. In ordinary life-world experience, one person is just as "real" as another; each is self-presence and presenting and not reducible to a representation.

The reflective turn of transcendental phenomenology commits Husserl to a firstperson account, with only one being the "primordial I" and all the rest being "others." This implies a fundamental asymmetry between the primordial I and the other, as the other as constituted is not self-presenting or self-manifesting. Husserl accounts for intersubjectivity through the concepts of pairing and appresentation, which is an analogical transfer of sense.

Husserl denies that appresentation is an inference or argument from analogy, blurring the distinction between the human ego and transcendental ego by equivocation. The problem in Husserl's account is that only one ego, the primordial ego, is presented, and all others are appresented, which appears to mean a derivative mode of presence.

The asymmetry between primordial ego and alter ego seems to undermine the reciprocity insisted on by ordinary consciousness. Interpreters like Paul Ricoeur argue that one must renounce the asymmetry of the relationship me-other required by Husserl's monadic idealism to account for the reciprocity and equalization required by empirical and sociological realism.

Fichte's work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic presentation of the relationship between ordinary consciousness and transcendental philosophy. He posits that transcendental philosophy does not create anything but observes an actual I, which embodies this system of thinking described by transcendental philosophy. Fichte's reformulation of the transcendental viewpoint posits that there is nothing outside of reason, which is compatible with the ordinary consciousness thesis that there are persons. However, the question of what the spatial term "outside" means and whether it is appropriate in transcendental philosophy remains an ambiguity.

Fichte's phenomenological descriptions of ordinary consciousness and the experience of being summoned to freedom are discussed in his Lectures Concerning the Vocation of the Scholar and the face of the other, which anticipates Levinas's discussion in Totality and Infinitity. Both agree that the face has broad ethically obligating significance, summoning the individual to responsible freedom.

In his Grundlage des Naturrechts, Fichte addresses the issue of intersubjectivity in philosophy, focusing on how consciousness transcends itself. He proposes the concept of the Auff orderung by other, which contrasts the transcendental-speculative perspective and the ordinary consciousness perspective. The Auff orderung is based on the idea that the other person, the summoner, takes priority over the one summoned.

From the transcendental perspective, freedom is described negatively as not being determined, but as transcendental, pure freedom is radically indeterminate and has the power to determine itself out of this radical indeterminacy. Transcendental analysis emphasizes the importance of self-generating responses to others, even if they refuse the summons.

In Naturrecht, Fichte claims that freedom has a divided ground, partly external to the subject (the "real ground") and partly internal to the subject (the "ideal ground), implying an intersubjective mediation of freedom. In conclusion, Fichte's approach to the issue of intersubjectivity in philosophy is based on the idea that freedom is mediated, with the ground of action lying immediately in the being outside of it and in the subject itself.

Fichte's philosophical work rejects the notion of correlation between ideal and real grounds, arguing that it implies an inadequate conception of the unity of the I. Instead, he believes that the I must be grasped as the unity of synthesis and analysis, rather than a given. He emphasizes that separation occurs in and through the unification, and unity occurs through the separation.

Fichte maintains the primacy of the will over the apparent "externality" of the Auff orderung, demoting it to the status of a phenomenon. This obscures his own important discovery of the Auff orderung, which is that autonomy is mediated and achieved in union with other. The unity of the I, supposed to be a unity of self and other, of synthesis and analysis, turns out to be a subjective unity.

Fichte acknowledges a problem at this crucial step of his argument: the concept of a summons is not the concept of the summons, but rather an act of willing. From the transcendental standpoint, the move from willing oneself as a moral agent to the summons implies that the real ground of freedom collapses into the ideal, short-circuiting mediation. The I summons itself.

Fichte asserts that there is nothing outside of me, no alleged thing in itself can be the object of my consciousness. For reason, there is no limitation by others; all limitation is self-limitation, otherwise we have dogmatism. The original limitation of the will, or practical reason, is expressed by the categorical imperative, which sets for the will a moral task. According to Fichte, the categorical imperative or self- summons is only a first step in self-limitation, as it lacks determinacy and a determinate goal.

Fichte's compromise term, "community-mass," is grounded in transcendental intersubjectivity and reciprocity. He argues that rational beings are thought of and projected into the world of appearances to explain them to oneself, contradicting his earlier claim that there is a community of rational beings conditioning self-individuation.

Fichte maintains that individuation through the categorical imperative is only a first step toward individuation, as the self-imposed categorical imperative remains indeterminate. The transcendental analysis of moral individuation as indeterminate points to the necessity of a complementary Auff orderung for its determinacy and actualization in the sensible world.