THE MANY MEANINGS OF “IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE ACT”

Fichte's philosophy made an epoch-defining impression on its first students and readers in Jena. In our own time, after almost two centuries of considerable neglect, it has experienced a remarkable return in popularity that has reached even to the distant circles of analytic philosophy in America. This resurgence has been tied closely to Fichte's claim to improve upon the Critical philosophy by turning Kant's well-known concern with the self into a more focused and radical emphasis on the self's activity, what Fichte called its primordial Tathandlung. This is clearly an idea whose time had come; it is no accident that Goethe called Fichte to take Reinhold's place in Jena, and that his Faust rewrote Scripture for modernity by declaring, “Am Anfang war die Tat,” that is, in the beginning was the act, and not the mere word of speculative theology or “gray” theory. More recently, “moral constructivism” (an ethics that “leaves ontology behind”) is just one striking example of important contemporary trends that, indirectly at least, owe much more than is realized to Fichte rather than Kant. Even within the field of theory itself, contemporary philosophers have proposed a myriad of new ways to follow Fichte's call for a stress on activity under the heading of the many-sided doctrine of the “primacy of the practical.” Both the popular and the academic appeal of Fichte's philosophy can be understood easily enough in terms of its being the first important radicalization of this doctrine.