Transcendental Philosophy as “Therapy of the Mind”

Abstract

The later Fichte famously insists that transcendental philosophy is only intelligible to a person who adopts a distinctive standpoint. This insistence is the centerpiece of Fichte’s lectures on the “Facts of Consciousness” (1810–11). This chapter explores how this lecture course can be helpfully framed by reference to Kant’s characterization of his project in the Transcendental Deduction in the first Critique. It also describes how Fichte remained dissatisfied with Kant on account of the latter’s vestigial empiricism or naturalism, which, according to Fichte, paved the way for a fundamental misconstrual of his own system of transcendental philosophy. Finally, it shows how the “Facts of Consciousness” lectures involve the appropriation of a therapeutic conception of philosophy, which is realized in the lectures’ “quasi-transcendental” argumentation.