Fichte's Creuzer review and the transformation of the free will problem

Wayne Martin

doi:10.1111/ejop.12313

Abstract

AbstractFichte's early review of C. A. L. Creuzer's neglected and idiosyncratic skeptical book on free will posed a serious challenge to what at the time was emerging as a consensus Kantian position on the role of free choice (Willkür) in the generation of imputable action. Fichte's review was directed as much against Reinhold's important (and only recently published) letter on freedom of the will as it was against Creuzer himself. In the course of his brief review, Fichte suggests an important recasting of the strategy of the Kantian postulates of rational faith; he poses a dilemma for the Reinholdian understanding of the relationship among an autonomous practical will, a free power of choice, and the actions of natural human organisms; and he hints at a radical reappropriation of the rationalist doctrine of pre‐established harmony in re‐orienting the search for a defensible reconstruction of a broadly Kantian position on the problem of free will.

Highlights

Thirty‐five years ago, Daniel Breazeale published a seminal article in The Review of Metaphysics with the title “Fichte's Aenesidemus Review and the Transformation of German Idealism” (Breazeale, 1981)
Breazeale's focus was an early review published by Fichte in the Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung (I, 1–27)
Fichte's explicit target in the review was Schulze (1792/1911), Breazeale showed that the larger target was Reinhold himself and that the upshot was a radical transformation of the project of Kantian idealism

Summary

Introduction

I will argue that the main target of Fichte's critical review was not Creuzer himself but Reinhold and that the upshot was a radical transformation of the question to which a theory of free will would be an answer. We can see it at work in Kant's earliest critical writings, and by 1792, it was playing a pivotal role in his account of radical evil.9 While a version of the distinction is adumbrated in some of Reinhold's earlier writings,10 the demonstration to which Fichte refers first appears in the eighth letter of Briefe II.

Results

Conclusion