How to Make a Spirit? Fichte on the Self and Immortality

Abstract

At one point in his lectures on the history of philosophy, Ernst Bloch offers a hypothesis about the logical development from Kant through Fichte to absolute idealism: he thinks that in this logic, the transcendental subject – as interpreted by Fichte following Kant – plays a key role. Now, the question of what kind of bond connects our empirical self to the higher subject that we ourselves are as intelligence – and how this connection is to be understood – is inherently complex, and only becomes even more complex, when Fichte evasively forges an argument for our immortality from it. In my study, I will point out that the way in which Fichte, by unravelling our intellectual and moral commitments, weaves together the individual with the “life of the species”, can indeed provide a useful starting point for interpreting the intellectual connections between Kant and the idealist thinkers who followed in his footsteps.