What is ‘Real’ in Fichte? Being, Activity, and (In-)Determinacy in the Jena Period
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract If ‘the transcendental’ refers to the a priori conditions for the possibility of experience, it must be radically dissimilar to what is found within experience. Can we understand this difference in metaphysical and/or ontological terms? Should transcendental conditions – in Fichte’s case, understood primarily as activity and/or actions – be considered to be real? Early in the Jena period – most visibly, early in the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre – Fichte appears to articulate a decisively metaphysical idealism that depicts the transcendental (and specifically the absolute I) not only as being real, but even as what is most real or even all that is real. Later in the Grundlage and early in the Novo Methodo, however, Fichte appears to move toward an opposite view, such that only that which is empirical in a strict sense can be called ‘real’. Then, partway through the Novo Methodo, Fichte seems to entertain the possibility that both domains are real in differing respects – at other times, the difference between them seems practically eliminated. At the end of the Nova Methodo, he seems to revert toward a position that asserts both the reality and the priority of the transcendental (and especially pure will). This study traces this development and concludes with a brief analysis of some of Fichte’s reflections on the ‘constructed’ nature of the Wissenschaftslehre and the limits of human reason, which may explain some of the metaphysical ambiguity of the Jena Wissenschaftslehren.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".