Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T00:00:58.809Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - The Spirit of the Wissenschaftslehre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2009

Sally Sedgwick
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, New Hampshire
Get access

Summary

“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life”

(2 Cor. 3:6)

“The letter kills, and this is especially true in the case of the Wissenschaftslehre. Part of the reason for this lies in the nature of this system itself, but part of it may also lie in the particular form taken by the previous ‘letter’ of the same.”

(J. G. Fichte to E. C. Schmidt, 1–6 September, 1798)

“Spirit” versus “Letter”

To distinguish the “spirit” from the “letter” of a philosophical text or system is always to ask for trouble, since this distinction can all too easily excuse an indifference to what a particular thinker may actually have said and written and often reveals an attitude of cavalier disregard for questions of documentary evidence. Yet it is equally true that a refusal to rise above the most literal construal of a text can all too easily transform the study of the history of philosophy into a lifeless exercise in “the history of ideas” or reduce it to a branch of philology that remains blithely indifferent to the philosophical issues at stake.

The hermeneutic problem that presents itself here is simply another way of describing the relationship between understanding a portion of a text and the text as a whole. Without an appreciation of the “spirit” of a philosophy or of a philosophical work, one can scarcely understand or appreciate the “letter” of the same, and yet it is equally true that there is, in this case, no path to the spirit except through the letter, just as there is no way to grasp “the whole” except by means of the parts.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Reception of Kant's Critical Philosophy
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel
, pp. 171 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×