Publication Details

Abstract

The present study represents an extract of a larger work of the author’s on the modern rationalistic philosophy; it deals with one of the central questions born in German classical philosophy — with the question of the creatively objective conception of man. The example of Kant and Fichte is employed о show how the active aspect of man was discovered and what is the ontological, gnoseological and methodological impact of the solution of this question. The character of the present study is, before all, historico-philosophical. The elaboration of the actively objective concept of man is followed as a component of the modern history of philosophy. In the connection with these problems, three so-called anthropological turns are seen in the development of philosophy from Descartes to Hegel; in contrast to the old Aristotelian and scholastic image of the world and to the naive realistic reflective theory of knowledge, these turns assert the opinion that man conceives and recognizes the world from the specifically human stadpoint, i. e., from the standpoint of specifically, theoretically and practically active subject. The first turn took place when Descartes’ Cogito was discovered; the other, more consequential turn towards man was undertaken by Kant in his endeavor to investigate this Cogito critically and thoroughly, to determine the resuppositions, conditions and functions of knowledge in general. Lastly, the third turn took place in Fichte’s philosophy who, in the tradition of Kant’s practical reason, advances the practically active Self not only to the starting point of knowledge but also to a concrete creative principle of reality. The nucleus of the present study is formed by the analysis of Kant’s problem of theoretical and practical reason and Fichte’s philosophy of the practical Self. By confrontation of Kant’s theoretico-noetic and practico-ethical theory, the present author points out difference of Kant’s conception of the scientific and moral law by which Kant manifests the principal dissimilarity of the approach to nature (to knowledge in the natural sciences) and to man (to the socio-practical doings). According to Kant, in the relation to the knowledge of nature, the noetic subject is essential, as defined by sensuous views and rational categories; he is the precondition as well as limit of our knowledge. Reality as such (Ding an sich) remains inaccessible to the transcendental subject. In ethical doing whose bearer is the practical Self, Ding an sich collapses, man recognizes himself in his noumenal essence. The author shows how from this distinction grows Fichte’s criticism of Kant’s thing in itself, the criticism of the traditionally noetic conception of subject and of the transcendetalcategorial definition of experience. Thus, Fichte — on the one hand — gets over even the last remainders of Kant’s realism and declares the material world to be only an obstacle put by the pure Self into its own way; on the other hand, Fichte unveils the idea of the practical Self as a presupposition of man’s theoretical and ethical orientation in the word This moment, as is shown today by many stimulating works on the problems of classical German philosophy, was very favorable for the rise of an important concept of modern philosophy — the concept of practice.