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.”
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