Kant’s “I Think” and Fichte’s principle of self-positing

Abstract

This paper discusses the relation between Kant’s doctrine of pure apperception (the doctrine of the “I think”) and Fichte’s theory of self-positing. It shows that Kant’s conception of the transcendental unity of apperception is closer to Fichte’s principle of self-positing than is usually thought, and that Kant’s “I think,” and not Reinhold’s “principle of consciousness”, may have been a source of inspiration for Fichte in his attempt to justify transcendental idealism. As in Kant, in Fichte’s <i>Wissenschaftslehre</i>, the activity of “self-positing” is the fundamental feature of the I-hood. Similar to Kant, in Fichte, too, the fi rst principle expresses a peculiar kind of unity, which he calls the original unity of self-consciousness (<i>Tathandlung</i>).