Kant’s “I Think” and Fichte’s principle of self-positing

Resumen

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This paper discusses the relation between Kant’s doctrine of pure apperception (the doctrine of the “I think”) and Fichte’s theory of self-positing. It shows that Kant’s conception of the transcendental unity of apperception is closer to Fichte’s principle of self-positing than is usually thought, and that Kant’s “I think,” and not Reinhold’s “principle of consciousness”, may have been a source of inspiration for Fichte in his attempt to justify transcendental idealism. As in Kant, in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, the activity of “self-positing” is the fundamental feature of the I-hood. Similar to Kant, in Fichte, too, the fi rst principle expresses a peculiar kind of unity, which he calls the original unity of self-consciousness (Tathandlung).