Fichte’s Aesthetic of Striving: Context and Development

This book explores Fichte's theory of sensibility, focusing on its theoretical and practical significance. It offers unique insight into Fichte’s reinterpretation of Kant's aesthetic theory. Fichte's theory of sensibility can be found in his unpublished manuscript Practical Philosophy (1793/94). The author approaches this text as Fichte's attempt to reorganize Kant’s transcendental aesthetic and aesthetic of pure practical reason into a unified whole. The first half contains one of the first chapter-length studies of Abicht’s Attempt at a Metaphysics of Gratification (1789) and Fichte’s Practical Philosophy. In this section, the author examines the context and development of a “philosophy of striving” in Practical Philosophy, explains the background of Fichte’s aesthetics, and provides a concise discussion of Kant’s sensationalist view of pleasure. The second half explores how the investigations in Practical Philosophy reemerge in the Jena period through the theory of aesthetic experience and artistic creation, theory of moral deliberation, and theory of truth and justification (particularly in philosophy) and illustrates the pivotal role Fichte assigns to feelings in human spiritual development. Fichte’s Aesthetic of Striving will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in the history of modern philosophy, the history of aesthetics, German idealism, and 19th-century philosophy.