Abstract

Christoph Asmuth’s Das Begreifen des Unbegreiflichen is one of the most comprehensive and advanced studies yet of the development and character of Fichte’s philosophy between 1800 and 1806. Asmuth’s detailed and yet very accessible analysis, which is the published version of his doctoral thesis, focuses particularly on the second 1804 lecture series of the Science of Knowledge and upon the 1806 Way Towards the Blessed Life. It lays particular emphasis upon Fichte’s philosophy of religion, and upon Fichte’s assessment of his thought with regard to Christian doctrine. A fundamental concern of this study is Fichte’s idiosyncratic examination of the activity of thinking, and how the thinking can become aware of the absolute. Asmuth also aims at providing the reader with a comprehensive account of the Science of Knowledge as the thinking’s enquiry into itself and into its foundation. The comprehending of the incomprehensible precisely as the incomprehensible is the crucial act of thinking for Fichte, for the incomprehensible cannot be understood but precisely as incomprehensible. Asmuth examines the genesis of this act by a performance of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge. It is the act in which knowing which tends to know something, nihilates itself. It leads progressively to absolute Reason, pure Being, light, or God as the absolute immanence and the essential Being of thinking.