The Standpoint of Philosophy, and the Assumptions of Agency

This contribution develops and defends an account of Fichte’s metaphilosophical distinction between the first-order, pre-philosophical standpoint of ordinary life and the higher-order (reflective, transcendental) standpoint of idealistic speculation, with particular attention to the question what we ought finally and fundamentally to believe about ourselves and our world, insofar as we are rationally self-determining subjects who have access to both standpoints and whose beliefs are formed in an ideally rational way. For Fichte, I argue: (1) Our ordinary standpoint comprises various pre-philosophical assumptions about human agency (some broadly moral, some broadly material) that philosophy calls into question and arguably could invalidate. However, (2) dogmatism, which threatens to invalidate the moral assumptions of agency, is a self-undermining attempt at philosophy, and thus is not qualified to do so. Nevertheless, (3) while idealism transcendentally deduces and (to just that extent) rationally legitimates all the basic assumptions of agency (moral and material alike), it is also methodologically empowered and rationally entitled to reflectively invalidate the material assumptions of agency specifically (in addition, of course, to radically vindicating our most basic moral convictions). Hence, (4) philosophy in its only fully authentic and finally viable form establishes the transcendental ideality of the sensible (but not the moral) world as such and as a whole.