Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty

A short sequel tracing how the I's collision with a limit becomes sensation, intuition, and at last space and time.

by Johann Gottlieb Fichte158 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre
First published: 1795(aged 33)
Original language: German

Overview

The Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre had stopped short. Its theoretical part ended with the I — Johann Gottlieb Fichte's name for the self that is active in all consciousness — finding itself limited by a Not-I, and left open how that limit actually turns up in experience. In 1795 Fichte published this sequel to fill the gap. Gabler, the Jena publisher of the Foundation, brought it out, and its title page, like the earlier book's, called it a manuscript for the use of his listeners. The Outline carries the Wissenschaftslehre — Fichte's "doctrine of science", or theory of knowledge — one stage further and answers in steps: the limit is first felt as sensation, then intuited, and finally what is intuited is set out in time and space. It is his account of how a mind comes to have a world laid out before it at all, worked out as a sequence of deductions rather than taken from the senses. When Fichte issued both again in 1802, they appeared together in a single volume, and the line calling them a manuscript for listeners was gone.

Key concepts

What does it mean to 'deduce' sensation instead of observing it?

It means showing that sensation must occur if a limited I is to be conscious at all, rather than noting that it happens. Fichte starts from the Foundation's result, that the I posits itself as determined by the Not-I, and asks what has to follow for that to be possible. Sensation, then intuition, then time and space are each derived as the next condition, like steps in a proof.

What is 'ideal activity' in the Outline?

Ideal activity is the side of the I's activity that is grounded only in the I itself and goes out beyond the point where it is limited. Real activity is what the limit checks. Without some activity reaching past the boundary, the I could never relate the limit to itself and say 'this is felt by me', so sensation needs both: an activity that is stopped and one that is not.

What is an intuition here?

An intuition is the act in which the I holds what it feels before itself as a definite image, such as a colour or a shape. Sensation only registers that the I is limited; intuition gives that limitation a content the I can look at. Fichte insists the I must also posit itself as the one intuiting, because nothing belongs to the I except what it posits in itself.

Why does space belong to things but not to their inner nature?

Because space is the only thing that tells things apart for knowledge, without being part of what they are inside. Their inner qualities, bitter or sweet, rough or smooth, red or white, concern only feeling and are not open to the theoretical mind. What remains to distinguish one thing from another is the place it fills, so space is ascribed to the things, not to the I, yet is not their essence.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

From a Limit to a World

How does a mind that only meets a boundary end up seeing coloured things laid out in space? Fichte reconstructs the steps instead of taking them from the senses.

The Foundation had left the I simply limited by a Not-I; the Outline asks how that limit shows up in experience. Fichte answers in strict steps. A sensation needs an I that is active and passive at once, and an activity that reaches beyond the limit. Intuition then gives what is felt a definite image, and what is intuited is set out in time, its object in space. Bitter, sweet and red belong to feeling alone, so for knowledge things differ only by the space they fill.

sensation
intuition
space
imagination
perception
representation
ideal activity
spontaneity
passivity
limitation
reflection
synthesis
objectivity
subjectivity
necessity
contingency
transcendental idealism
self-consciousness
subject-object relation

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 158
distinct concepts: 120
by passages held, corpus-wide: #402

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “reflection” and “self-consciousness”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 22 pairings. 82 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
reflection	self-consciousness	17
limitation	self-consciousness	13
self-consciousness	synthesis	11
idealism	self-consciousness	8
freedom	imagination	7
freedom	necessity	7
freedom	self-consciousness	7
idealism	reflection	6
freedom	synthesis	5
imagination	self-consciousness	5
limitation	synthesis	5
necessity	synthesis	5
imagination	synthesis	4
freedom	idealism	3
freedom	limitation	3
freedom	reflection	3
idealism	limitation	3
imagination	necessity	3
idealism	synthesis	2
necessity	reflection	2
necessity	self-consciousness	2
reflection	synthesis	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1792 Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation (Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung)
The debut, written in weeks in Königsberg to impress Kant: a book on religion that made Fichte famous before he had a system of his own.
DE
1794 Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre (Ueber den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre oder der sogenannten Philosophie – als Einladungsschrift zu seinen Vorlesungen über diese Wissenschaft)
A manifesto before the system: the short programme Fichte printed to introduce himself to Jena, months before the first sheets of the Foundation reached his students.
DE
1794 Foundation of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre (Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre)
The first full statement of the system and his best-known treatise, begun as lecture handouts in 1794; the 1795 Outline carries its theoretical half further, and the First Introduction of 1797 starts the explanation again.
DE
1794 Some Lectures concerning the Scholar's Vocation (Einige Vorlesungen über die Bestimmung des Gelehrten)
Popular ethics for students, given the summer Fichte arrived at Jena in 1794, alongside the far harder Foundation.
DE
1795 Outline of the Distinctive Character of the Wissenschaftslehre with respect to the Theoretical Faculty (Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre) you are here DE
1797 First Introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre (Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre)
Written for beginners: the 1797 journal essay in which Fichte, frustrated with how the Foundation had been read, began explaining his system again from first principles.
DE
1799 Streitschriften zur Denk- und Gewissensfreiheit
Gathered here from two separate publications, of 1793 and 1799, that bracket Fichte's rise to fame and his fall at Jena.
DE
1800 The Closed Commercial State (Der geschlossene Handelsstaat)
A venture into economics, offered as an appendix to his theory of right and published in 1800, the same year as The Vocation of Man.
DE
1800 The Vocation of Man (Die Bestimmung des Menschen)
Written straight after the Atheism Dispute, in his first months in Berlin: the system retold for general readers as a first-person passage from doubt to faith.
DE
1806 The Characteristics of the Present Age (Die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters)
One of three popular lecture courses Fichte published in 1806: the philosophy of history that the Addresses to the German Nation would later claim to continue.
DE
1806 The Way Towards the Blessed Life (Die Anweisung zum seligen Leben)
The summit, in Fichte's own estimate, of the popular lectures he gave in Berlin before the war: religion presented as the result of the Wissenschaftslehre, his "doctrine of science", for listeners with no philosophy.
DE
1808 Addresses to the German Nation (Reden an die deutsche Nation)
His most influential book: public lectures once more, but this time a call to a defeated nation rather than a philosophy of history or a doctrine of religion.
DE
1810 Kürzere Darstellungen der Wissenschaftslehre
A Jena beginning and a Berlin summing-up, published separately and gathered on one page, on either side of the many versions of the system Fichte kept to the lecture room.
DE
1845 Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre. Aus dem Jahre 1801 (Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre aus dem Jahre 1801)
An early Berlin reworking of the system, written in 1801 as Fichte and Schelling were drifting apart, and left among his papers.
DE

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