mathematized until they meshed with instantiations of the highest philosophi-
cal categories. In the end, Kant found a way to continue the project of
rationalist philosophers begun by Descartes and extended by Spinoza, Leibniz,
and Woolf: to derive the principles of science from pure reason, at the same
time guaranteeing their autonomous empirical reality. What was different was
that Kant required this rationalism to pass under the authority of a new master
discipline, critical epistemology.
Reinhold’s Letters in 1786–87 made Kant famous by portraying the critical
philosophy as a middle ground between theology and reason, that is to say,
between Jacobi’s fideism on one side and Mendelssohn’s Deism or Spinoza’s
pantheism on the other (Di Giovanni, 1992: 427–429). Again the academic
theologians were looking for help. Reinhold was a former Catholic teacher
who had converted to Protestantism after the Jesuits were suppressed in 1773;
he now saw alliance with the new philosophy as offering ammunition for
theologians against both Deists and Pietists. The new opening, uniting philo-
sophical and theological turf, quickly appealed to theology students such as
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Fichte was the first to see that Jacobi could be
used as a stepping stone, and his writings often expressed admiration for Jacobi
for pointing the way.
Schultze’s Anesidemus of 1792, pressing the Humean skepticism pioneered
by Jacobi, had charged Kant with being unable to show why the unknowable
thing-in-itself exists, nor why there should be a sensory manifold at all. Even
the categories of the understanding are not deduced but arbitrarily given. Like
all creative thinkers, Fichte seized on unsolved puzzles as a valuable possession,
a territory on which to make his own mark. Kant had given the tools, which
Fichte now explicitly flourished: the transcendental method of searching for
necessary presuppositions, and the synthetic a priori.^33
The search for presuppositional grounding Fichte ([1794–1997] 1982: 95–
96) illustrated as follows: Take any true judgment, such as the undeniable
principle of identity, A A. To say that it is true implies that it is permanently
true; and this requires that there be a permanent subject or self for whom it
is true. Fichte’s Cartesian starting point is logic, not the self, but it demonstrates
immediately the existence of the self, and in a far stronger version than
Descartes’s existent ego.
Let us posit also what seems undeniable, the existence of a difference.
Not-A implies that A is also posited. Not-A not-A implies an A opposed to
not-A (Fichte, [1794–1997] 1982: 103–104). And by the previous argument,
the grounding of oppositions must be the self. Any not-self implies also the self.
Now Fichte brings in Kant’s other tool. The synthetic a priori guarantees
that such deductions not merely are logical tautologies but have ontological
consequences as well. Kant had noted that concepts linked together by the654 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths