Abstract

Today even ambitious philosophers are ironic about pretensions to wisdom. Perhaps their single most characteristic pose in this age of debunking criticism is as "conversationalists" in the "great conversation of mankind" anxious "to help the argument along." The metaphor of culture as a conversation is telling in itself. It has replaced the "enlightened" image of "the republic of letters," that lost common homeland of intellectuals. The polity of ideas has given way to the marketplace on the one hand and the "private" conversation on the other. It is, then, immensely difficult for us to understand a thinker like Fichte who saw himself as not only a sovereign citizen in the Republic of Letters, but as one of its magistrates, who perceived his thinking not as a "voice in the conversation of mankind" but as a "science of sciences," the embodiment of "reason's own self-produced knowledge of itself," the articulation of a principle from which all other sciences must be, in principle, strictly "deducible." It would be utterly quixotic for a contemporary philosopher to write a Wissenschaftslehre.