Precursors

They say that the best way to get inside the head of a philosopher is to read all the books s/he read, or at least had on their desk at the time of writing. But what had the Kranke who wrote that bizarre passage ‘the master-slave dialectic’ been reading? It had always puzzled me, until recently when I managed to fill in one more piece in the jigsaw. Sure, I thought, there’s some Hobbes in there, this is some account of the founding of society out of a state of nature, individuals giving up some of their liberties for peace? And maybe there’s some Rousseau there too, the “One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they” of The Social Contract. Much later someone put me on to Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism of 1800, and its discussion of recognition of self by other. But only this week did I realize all this only makes sense in the light of Fichte’s Science of Rights (1796). This is Fichte as doppelgänger, the guy who could be so fearlessly monological in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) has done an about-turn by the time of the Grundlage des Naturrechts (one day I will exclusively reveal the role played in this volte face by Madame de Stäel) and is suggesting that other humans follow axiomatically from my own existence. It still reads like a deduction of otherness (when Hegel will find the other phenomenologically) but its language of ‘mutual recognition’, of the need to create ‘a community of free beings’, and of the danger of ‘a quarrel or war ending with the complete extermination of one of the parties’ is a striking precursor to the Stuttgarter.

And a funny thing in the preface to my library’s 1867 American translation: A.E. Kroeger writes that the Science of Rights “ought to have preëminent interest for the people of this Republic, since what the philosopher has in it deduced as the only rational form of government has been realized and established as such here.”

Comments

[John S. Ransom]

Yup. This is the history of political philosophy that is not written about enough: Schelling indeed does not make sense without Fichte. And Fichte's book is not at all some weird difficult thing to read. It would be great to discuss it.

[John S. Ransom]

I must know the role of Madame de Stael! Also, have you taken a look at Robgert Williams book _Hegel's Ethic of Recognition_?gnition?

[YH]

Hi John, in a forthcoming paper (jealously guarding things until then) all will be revealed. Yes, the Williams book put me onto Fichte, but looking for Fichte's discussion of 'the summons' I instead found much more direct correlation between F's language and train of thought and Hegel's. I'm going to read Neuhauser & Bauer's more recent translation (as 'Foundations of Natural Right') and then be in a position to say more.