In this blog post, I offer a line-by-line interpretation of Fichte’s synthesis of substantial exchange, §4.E.III.2.b.β of the 1794 Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, hereafter: Foundation). This section is one of the most important passages in the entire Theoretical Part, i.e. Part II of the Foundation, and my characterization of this synthesis as offered in my previous blog post does not adhere close enough to Fichte’s argument as it ought to.

The purpose of this blog post is to get into the nuts and bolts of Fichte’s argument in his 1794 Foundation of the Entire Science of Knowledge (hereafter Foundation). I want to do this for two reasons. First, it will allow us to bring the high level argument from the previous blog post regarding negation closer to Fichte’s text. In the previous blog post, we tried to stay out of the weeds of Fichte’s formulations, choosing instead to describe largely in our own terms, how the Theoretical Part of the Foundation moves from a theory of qualitative negation to quantitative negation, and finally to Fichtean negation. Now we want to look at the specific terms Fichte introduces to complete this argument and thereby make it easier for the reader to follow this argument in Fichte’s text. Second, the Theoretical Part of the Foundation is a very systematic text that follows a very specific architecture. Strangely enough, there is no account in the secondary literature that does justice to Fichte’s architecture, that displays it in its proper clarity.¹

The purpose of this blog post is to describe in broad strokes Fichte’s aims in the theoretical philosophy he put forth in his 1794 Foundation of the entire Science of Knowledge (hereafter: Foundation).¹ I’m going to argue that Fichte’s salient point concerns the way in which negation structures human experience as something we can call imaginative openness. According to Fichte, every judgment that we have is also, by virtue of being a judgment, connected to an opposing, or negating judgment. Fichte wants to show that the way in which judgment hangs together with its negation explains two seemingly contradictory features of human judgment, namely the objective force of judgment, which is to say, that way in which a judgment makes a claim to being correct, to determining what is the case, as well as this judgment’s inherent fallability. I take it that my car is parked outside, but I may, in fact, despite whatever degree of certainty I may have, be in error. The only way in which these two features of judgment can coexist, according to Fichte, is through the activity of the imagination, which allows for a judgment to carry its own negation with it. The Theoretical Part of the 1794 Foundation unfolds this line of thought gradually but deliberately. It begins with the apparent firmless of our empirical, or we could be generally say: objective judgments, seeks to demonstrate their fallability, and from this, unfolds a surprising claim about the centrality of imagination to all objective judgment and thus also, even more surprisingly, about our search for the infinite (das Unendliche) within the realm of objective experience. The exhilarating feature of this line of thought is that it takes a seemingly dry, or inconspicuous feature of human thought, namely negation, and shows how negation contains within its structure the dynamic of imaginative openness. That is to say that once we understand how objective judgments and their negation hang together, we can understand the force with which imagination undergirds human experience.