Abstract

In his violent charge against the French Revolution, Edmund Burke elevated the political debate to a philosophical level. His deepest argument consisted in reproaching revolutionaries for sinning by apriorism, seeking to deduce, like geometricians, a new constitution from the abstract principles set out in the Declaration of Human Rights. Taken up by the German disciples of Burke, this criticism of the method adopted by the Constituent Assembly drew from the empiricist postulates of the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment all the conservative implications already concealed in Hume’s political and historical texts. Yet, it is from the outset on this speculative ground that the defence of the right of revolution is played out in Fichte. Reproaching empiricism for reducing the mind to the “blind mechanism of the association of ideas”, passively determined by an exteriority in itself, Fichte intends, on the contrary, to base the experience itself on the activity of an absolutely independent “I-in-itself”. Conceived as a free causality, thus being able to free oneself from Humian “customary conjunctions” in order to begin a new series in the order of phenomena, man, for Fichte, not only has the “faculty of self-improvement”, but the very law of his freedom even makes it his duty. With regard to this categorical imperative of self-improvement, there is no Common Law, nor Ancient Constitution, nor “inheritance from our forefathers” that can stand. Hence, Fichte does not shrink from revolution if these venerable institutions of the past are an obstacle to man’s destiny.