Abstract

The author compares the linguistic philosophies of Fichte and Hegel, concluding that Hegel's position is more comprehensive than Fichte's. Fichte and Hegel share essential suppositions about language and philosophy, best seen in their remarks on Phantasie, schematism, and especially the idea of unity. The issue of recognition is the primary point of difference between them. Fichte sees man's desire for recognition in the transformation of signs from visual to audible; for Hegel, however, man's desire for recognition is prior to Fichte's placement of it. Whereas for Fichte, man desires to express his thoughts as soon as he realizes that another man is reasonable, for Hegel, man desires to objectify his thoughts, or value, at this moment. With this fundamental difference in their conceptions of recognition, Fichte and Hegel end up with very different conceptions of language that reflect in some ways their differing conceptions of philosophy as a whole. The author closes by corroborating this finding through an analysis of their respective treatments of memory.