In the last decade or so, Fichte has received a remarkable amount of scholarly attention as a moral philosopher with distinctive contributions to the history of ethics. Conferences, edited volumes, journal articles, and monographs dedicated to Fichte’s ethics (as well as his social and political philosophy) have proliferated. Owen Ware’s Fichte’s Moral Philosophy is an important and impactful addition to this burgeoning literature. Ware sets a new standard for work on Fichte’s ethics, both in the approach he adopts and in the specific readings of Fichte that he develops.

It is in keeping with Ware’s emphasis on the methodology employed by Fichte in his System of Ethics (1798) that something be said about Ware’s own approach. He builds on some of the best scholarship available, often providing nuanced and attentive readings of other commentators (see, for example, Chapter 8, ‘Perfection’). Ware employs others’ interpretations like puzzle pieces that capture some aspect of Fichte’s position while leaving out other important features. In some cases, Ware reaches as far back as the nineteenth-century reception of Fichte’s ethics for interpretive resources. He likewise expertly situates Fichte in the debates of his own time, and carefully and insightfully relates Fichte’s ideas and arguments to figures such as Kant and Maimon. (Ware’s discussions of Maimon’s importance for Fichte are particularly valuable.) The exegesis of Fichte’s texts is impressively attentive to the details. And what Ware assembles from these elements is more than the sum of its parts. A genuinely original and distinctly coherent Fichte emerges through Ware’s discussion. In each chapter of this fascinating study, one can see how Ware works to revise received understandings of Fichte’s thought and to build a case for Fichte’s importance in the history of ethics. Rather than proceed chapter by chapter in my discussion, I instead want to bring out several particularly interesting parts of Ware’s complete treatment. I adopt this approach because this book has been reviewed by others who emphasize certain lines of argument or chapters within the book, and also because a summary overview of the whole would not convey the true merits of Ware’s authoritative discussion of the System of Ethics.

Chapter 2, ‘Freedom’, displays some of the key virtues of Ware’s approach. Faced with what he calls the ‘profligacy of definitions for the concept of freedom’ given by Fichte, Ware first brings to the fore the many-sided debate about freedom that followed in the wake of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Ware argues that, taking up Salomon Maimon’s sceptical challenges to Kantian practical philosophy, Fichte develops a distinctive ‘Genetic Model’ of freedom. Fichte’s move is to separate the indeterminacy and determinacy of the will into developmental stages. Ware carefully explains the impasse that Fichte inherited from his predecessors, and proceeds from there to carefully reconstruct what Fichte is saying in key texts. The developmental or stadial feature of Fichte’s thought proves to be something that Ware appeals to throughout the book in resolving the puzzles the text has bequeathed.

In Chapter 3, ‘Morality’, Ware contests a contemporary reading of what Fichte is doing in Part I of the System of Ethics, once again seeing Fichte’s view in terms of stages, this time stages in Fichte’s own intellectual development concerning what Ware calls ‘moral primacy’. Taking his cue from Kant’s conception of the ‘fact of reason’ as basis for cognition of freedom, Fichte once again tries to face down a sceptical challenge from Maimon. Fichte’s response begins by likewise appealing to a ‘fact’, namely the feeling of moral compulsion, but then moves on to an argument that what grounds or accounts for this fact is I-hood as such. On Ware’s reading, since the latter is, strictly speaking, ‘unthinkable’, Fichte has to adopt a ‘multilateral’ approach (in §§1–3 of System of Ethics) to reach the conclusion that ‘the necessity of thinking our freedom under a law (itself a mere aspect of the unity of the I) reveals the origin of the feeling of compulsion in common life’ (65). Along the way, Ware also addresses the contemporary debate about whether the ‘starting point’ of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is moral or non-moral (i.e., theoretical). While it is true that, for Fichte, ‘genetic cognition brings us to the moral law as the necessary manner of thinking our own freedom’, it is also true that no independent, non-moral premise is being offered by Fichte for this genetic cognition.

In Chapter 4, ‘Drive’, yet another virtue of Ware’s approach is on prominent display. Ware takes seriously Fichte’s own claim that his theory of ethics depends upon the ‘principles of the entire Wissenschaftslehre’. The same unthinkable unity of I-hood that Fichte had examined in published and unpublished presentations of his basic principles is likewise, in the System of Ethics, being thought in a determinate way by means of a dialectical method. In light of Fichte’s systematic commitments, Ware defends what he calls Fichte’s ‘monistic drive theory’, which in Part II of the System of Ethics serves to further determine the highly abstract concept of the I developed in Part I. In Ware’s words, Fichte’s position is that ‘All the activity of a free rational being proceeds from a single, fundamental drive’ (85). This unity, conceived of as ‘sheer striving’, is found to be divided by reflection, which engenders ‘a striving for wholeness’ within a divided self, and the ‘ethical drive’ aims to achieve ‘a relationship of mutual formation between one’s actual willing and one’s original being as an Urtrieb’ (95). Against the background of Fichte’s notion of the ‘formative drive’ of nature, Ware formulates the striking claim that, for Fichte, ‘reciprocity is built into the most elemental structure of agency, prior to its higher expression in deliberation, choice, and conscience’ (92). This means that the aim of the ethical drive, contrary to many standard readings of Fichte dating to the first half of the nineteenth century, is ‘coordinative’ and thus ‘nondominating’ and ‘noncontrolling’ (93).

In Chapter 5, ‘Conscience’, Ware wades into another arena of controversy between recent commentators on Fichte. Though worries about Fichte’s theory of conscience date back at least as far as Hegel, two contemporary readings pose challenges for the coherence of Fichte’s thought, as Ware carefully explains. On the one hand, there is the ‘material function’ view of conscience, according to which it determines which action is our duty, and which therefore poses the threat of arbitrariness. On the other hand, there is the ‘formal function’ view of conscience, it serves as a sort of test of the certainty of our moral convictions. Ware argues that this reading threatens to bring on an infinite regress calling into doubt whether we are in fact convinced that we have made the correct judgment in a given case. Regarding the ‘material function’ view, Ware maintains that ‘Fichte is clear that the criterion of duty comes from the final end of our ethical drive, and while he alters his formulations of this end […] he does not confuse it with the faculty of conscience itself’ (103). His response to the potential regress problem faced by the other view is more involved, and once again appeals to Fichte’s ‘monistic drive theory.’ While a given moral judgment might be in error, I cannot mistake the feeling of certainty that conscience provides.

Chapter 8, ‘Perfection’, the final chapter in the book, is to my mind the most important. Once again, Ware attentively reconstructs alternative contemporary interpretations of Fichte and defends his own compelling reading. In recent commentary on Fichte’s ethics, a divide has opened between those who defend a consequentialist reading of Fichte’s conception of moral deliberation and judgment (Michelle Kosch) and a strongly deontological interpretation (chiefly Allen Wood). Both readings attempt to make sense of Fichte’s often puzzling comments about the final moral end and how it relates to individual actions, comments that Ware likewise highlights. His treatment of these alternative readings is remarkably attentive. For his own part, Ware sets up an important distinction between ethical theories that are teleological in a broad sense and those that are more strictly consequentialist. While Ware agrees with those who argue that ‘Fichte is a deontologist of sorts at the level of moral deliberation’, he finds that Fichte is firmly in the teleological camp when it comes to ‘the level of philosophical moral reflection’ (177). Rather than conceiving of the moral worth of actions in terms of their tendency to cause or bring about a desirable state of affairs (i.e., consequentialism), Ware argues that Fichte’s view is that ‘objects are measurable by their tendency to harmonize with a final end’ (178). The reader can see, once again, how Ware brings to the fore the notion of ‘harmony’ as the central concept in Fichte’s ethics. He makes a very strong case that Fichte is a perfectionist, and that what makes Fichte unique within the perfectionist tradition is that his view is resolutely social. On Ware’s persuasive reading, Fichte thinks that we ought to perfect our own powers in order to contribute to the self-sufficiency of the entire community of which we are parts (179). He goes on to raise a deeply important issue about social perfectionism and about Fichte’s ethics as a whole. Ware notes a tension between Fichte’s insistence on the criterial role of individual conscience (Part II) and his shift to ‘practically shared convictions’, a more ‘public’, principle of moral deliberation (Part III). Here again, Ware employs the stadial nature of Fichte’s thinking to show how Part III completes, rather than competes with, Fichte’s position on conscience.

There is a great deal to admire about Ware’s treatment of Fichte, and I concur with many of his careful and persuasive readings. I would hesitate to wholeheartedly endorse some of what Ware puts forth in his original and largely convincing discussion of Fichte’s ‘monistic drive theory’ in Part II of the System of Ethics (discussed in Chapter 4). Ware reads Fichte as thinking of ethical life as a process of restoring a lost, primordial unity of agency. ‘In the System of Ethics’, he writes, ‘we therefore find the striking claim that acts of reflection break up an original wholeness at the heart of the self, the original wholeness of the I considered as sheer activity, sheer striving’ (86). I suspect that how one takes this part of Ware’s account depends on how one understands the nature of Fichte’s idealism. I tend to understand what Fichte is saying about nature as a whole and us as natural beings in Part II of the System of Ethics to be a way in which reason can determine (think about) itself, as opposed to being an account of how agency actually emerges in nature. Be that as it may, Ware certainly breaks new ground by carefully examining this neglected aspect of Fichte’s thought. The treatment of Fichte’s social perfectionism in Part III also points to an area in which more scholarship is needed, particularly how Fichte conceives of the process of harmonizing our convictions as well as about other ways in which he specifies the final moral end in social terms. None of these points are by any means fatal flaws in Ware’s excellent book, but more like rich and suggestive indications of new directions for Fichte scholarship. Ware has made a crucial contribution to properly understanding Fichte and his place in the history of ethics.