文档介绍：History of European Ideas, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 275-294, 1996
Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd
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FROM KANT TO HEGEL---JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE'S
THEORY OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
GUNNAR BECK*
In his influential paper Fichtes Ursprfingliche Einsicht (Fichte's Original
Insight), Dieter Henrich claims that 'the structure of self-consciousness is the
central problem of Fichte's philosophy'.l Henrich's discussion is, by intention,
limited, and concerned exclusively with Fichte's critique of previous so-called
'reflective theories of self-consciousness' central to which is the assumption, in
one form or another, of the individual subject's intuitive and unmediated
awareness of the contents of the mind and of itself as a thinking being. 2 In this
regard, Henrich briefly cites Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Rousseau, and
especially Kant. 3 All these reflective models of self-awareness, Henrich
contends, were dealt a decisive blow by Fichte's original insight into the
essentially mediated nature of all possible self-consciousness, that is, Fichte's
claim that all self-awareness presupposes consciousness of something other
than the self which the self identifies as external to itself and in opposition to
and as distinct from which the self es conscious of itself. 4
What Henrich fails to spell out clearly, however, is the status of this
'other', and in what sense Fichte's views may be regarded as an advance over
Kant's theory of self-consciousness which, rejecting the view of self-
consciousness as une idle certaine et ~vidente, likewise emphasises the need for
knowledge of the external world and awareness of the distinction between
subject and object as essential moments in the genesis of knowledge of self.
To extract a satisfactory answer to these questions from the rank growth of
Fichte's writings is the purpose of