Abstract

This essay argues for a unifying and clarifying analysis of Fichte’s diverse and unusual characterizations of the nature of reason and rational normativity. Fichte equates or closely associates reason with “I-hood,” “positing” (especially self-positing), “acting” (as opposed to being), “self-reverting activity,” and “subject-objectivity.” He also claims that reason, qua reason, harbors “an absolute tendency toward the absolute” – and even that, in the final analysis, “only reason is.” I argue that we can readily grasp the meaning, interconnection, and putative justification of such claims, if we suppose that, for Fichte, reason is the self-initiated instatement of self-wrought ordering forms, the first and foremost of which is the idea of precisely this type of activity in a pure and uncompromised (independent, “self-sufficient”) form.