Um princípio vivo. A defesa do estatuto transcendental por J.G Fichte

This thesis aims to investigate the defense of the notion of the transcendental in J.G. Fichte's Presentation of the Science of Knowledge (1801/02) in light of the critiques addressed to this kind of philosophizing. To accomplish this task, we carried out an extensive historiographical reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the elaboration of this version of the Science of Knowledge. In the first and second chapters, we analyzed the early critiques raised by Fichte's listeners in Jena against his system, especially those concerning a certain emptiness in it as the result of the speculative process (abstraction/reflection) that lies at the beginning of the Wissenschaftslehre. Then, in the third and fourth chapters, we focused on the speculative alternatives that emerged as attempts to solve the shortcomings of the Science of Knowledge and its abstract procedure. We argued that the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and C.G. Bardili represent the most important endeavors of this kind in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Schelling, with his Philosophy of Nature and his Philosophy of Identity, and Bardili with his Logical Realism. Schelling, first tried to conceive a completion of transcendental philosophy by suggesting its parallel, the philosophy of nature. Later, he attempted to present an immanent whole where the subjective and objective would have a qualitative identity under the concept of reason—his absolute. In short, both of his philosophies tried to overcome the problem of the surplus left behind by the abstractive process. In turn, Bardili’s writings showed an attempt to escape from the determination of consciousness by experience to reach a pure immanence called thinking as thinking, which appeared as another understanding of what is the absolute. According to Fichte, both attempts neglected the transcendental principles established years earlier by I. Kant’s Critiques, thus they lack that self-evidence he achieved through the speculative process. In the fifth chapter, we finally exhibited a detailed study on the development of the Presentation of the Science of Knowledge 1801/02, linking Fichte’s procedure in this text with the critiques he was confronting, standing out among them the notion of the absolute that had recently appeared. We defend that Fichte kept his conviction in transcendental principles intact despite the philosophical novelties of that time. More than that, he even presented his own notion of the absolute, reframing the question within the boundaries of transcendental philosophy. More precisely, he conceived the absolute through what we call the transcendental parallax, the pivotal gap between the real and the ideal. Thereby, he understood this concept as an infinite progression in the synthesis of rational capacity and the world: an unattainable completeness, an infinite task as the outcome of that parallax.