Contemporary philosophers interested in Fichte have more reason to rejoice.Footnote ¹ In the last few years, a number of significant publications have appeared on J. G. Fichte, concerned primarily with his moral philosophy. Owen Ware's new book Fichte's Moral Philosophy is one of these. In this review, I shall say a few remarks about how Ware's book fits into the territory being mapped by Fichte scholars, and then ask some questions of the content of the book itself.

The overriding theme of Ware's book is a welcome account of Fichte, presenting him as concerned with wholeness or unity. Humankind is originally one, but rational reflection makes us estranged from ourselves. Fichte, on Ware's account, laments this condition, and articulates a moral philosophy, derived from the foundational principles of philosophical science (Wissenschaftslehre) which incorporates this insight into the human condition and shows us how to make sense of it. As Ware puts it, Fichte's notion of an individual agent's ethical vocation is spelled out in terms of ‘reuniting with our nature, which he views as a state of undivided wholeness’ (p. 12). Naturally, Ware does not mean that Fichte should be read as arguing for a return to a romantic golden age, but rather as thinking that our drives, or dispositions, to self-love and morality can be rendered harmonious through life-long moral effort. In setting out Fichte's vision, Ware traces Fichte's thoughts from the origins, in the discovery that Kant showed the way forward – exposing Fichte's early dilemma, a mindless heart or heartless mind, as a false one (p. 6). He then guides the reader through a second chapter, a historically informed discussion on the nature of the free will, a third chapter on the nature and source of moral authority, a fourth on the theory of the drives, a fifth regarding the nature of conscience, especially paying attention to Fichte's strong claim that conscience never errs, a sixth chapter on Fichte's account of how evil is possible, a seventh focusing on the role of community in moral theory, and an eighth on perfection and the substantive commands of the moral law. He does so with clarity and force throughout. Ware demonstrates himself to be a sympathetic and alert reader of Fichte, and engages in constructive historical-philosophical discussion with recent Anglophone scholarship, but always reminding the reader that the recent uptake in Fichte scholarship has to be seen alongside the long tradition of thinking about Fichte in Continental Europe.

Ware's view, in brief, is that Fichte is a perfectionist about morality. Perfectionism here is a distinctive account in moral philosophy which is not solely deontological nor consequentialist. Occasionally Fichte is said to be a ‘social’ perfectionist (p. 19). Ware seems more sympathetic to the deontological account of Fichte as articulated by WoodFootnote ² than he does to the consequentialist account of Fichte as articulated by KoschFootnote ³, though Ware does think of his own conception as a distinctive third position rather than, say, as a modification of the deontological reading. Ware explains that he thinks that Wood has it right that Fichte, at the level of moral deliberation, is no consequentialist, but that Wood's ‘Unspecifiability argument’ goes too far. In brief, Wood's argument is that Fichte has a ‘final end’ of moral action – variously characterized as ‘material freedom’, ‘self-sufficiency’, ‘independence from nature’, but that this final end can receive no illuminating specification. Therefore, there can be no informative action-guiding rules derived from the final end. Therefore, consequentialism of all kinds is ruled out. Ware then turns his attention to passages in Fichte where we in fact (on Ware's view) find just such specification. Ware finds this in a passage of Fichte where Fichte claims that:

‘The moral law therefore aims to treat every thing in accordance with its final end’ (Fichte System of Ethics).Footnote ⁴

As I read it, Ware takes Fichte to say here that the way to find out how to specify the final end of moral action is to investigate the objects that our moral action is immediately directed toward. Our moral action is in the first place directed toward the features that moral agents have qua moral agents – a body; sociality, and so forth. So our duties must include preservation of our life, respect for the freedom of others, and so on. I think this is what Ware has in mind as he describes perfectionism as a view ‘according to which objects are measurable by their tendency to harmonize with a final end’ – the object in question here being the human capacities that finite rational agents have. In reading Fichte this way, Ware is opening up space to allow that Fichte has simultaneously deontological aspects and teleological aspects – and Ware thinks that Fichte's view does in fact elude easy characterization, and that this is a virtue (p. 167). As a perfectionist, Fichte thinks that we ought to hearken to the voice of conscience in any given moral scenario (of which there are plenty given Fichte's stringent characterization of the moral demand). But when we ask the questions appropriate to philosophical reflection – whether morality aims at anything, or what the purpose of morality as a whole is, as opposed to the purpose of an individual moral action, we think teleologically, and posit a final end – complete harmony or wholeness. The ‘social’ component arises for Ware in two ways. One of these is the fact that Fichte thinks that, whilst moral deference is risky, and frequently immoral, continuous communal moral engagement is necessary. So Fichte builds into his overall picture an account of moral disagreement, which Ware explores in the final chapter. Secondly, the perfectionism is social because the ways in which my vocation and my duties are specified happens in large part because of myself as a distinctly social rational being. As a reading of Fichte's substantive moral philosophy, it is compelling.

I turn now to parts of the work that I wish Ware had said more about. One of these is over the primacy of practical reason and the entry to the Wissenschaftslehre. As Ware draws the map of the territory, there are two broad positions – moralistic readings, and non-moralistic readings. A moralistic reading is one on which the entry to the Wissenschaftslehre is only rendered possible by a morally charged acceptance of oneself as a moral and free being. So, in the standoff between Idealism and Dogmatism, as Fichte sees them – the mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive philosophical systems, defenders of the moralistic reading (such as Daniel Breazeale, Frederick Beiser, and Karl Ameriks) think that Fichte's strategy is to point that the disagreement can only be resolved by a kind of practical taking-myself-to-be-free-and-morally-bound, rather than an argument within the boundaries of theoretical reason. The non-moralistic reading (as defended by Paul Franks) reads Fichte as thinking that the entry to the Wissenschaftslehre can be gained by theoretical insight alone, or that it can be justified theoretically, without this practical ‘taking’. Ware agrees with the moralistic reading, but argues that there are in fact two ways in which this moralism can be taken. One, the strong reading, reads Fichte as having it that the consciousness of an ordinary moral fact – akin to Kant's Fact of Reason – is enough to gain entry to the Wissenschaftslehre. So the Idealist is one that grasps themselves as duty-bound to fulfil my promise, and this first-order moral consciousness is enough to get the philosophical reflection underway. The weak moralistic reading, which is Ware's own, is that the moral law ‘as it appears conceptually in philosophical consciousness’ is the consciousness which ‘reveals the underlying principle of duty in terms of self-sufficiency’ (p. 75).

What puzzles me here is that Ware appears to say that it is the philosophical consciousness of the moral law which allows entry to the Wissenschaftslehre, the philosophical system of self-consciousness. But, surely, in order to attain philosophical consciousness of the moral law, I would have to already be inside the system. Ware has to see Fichte as distinguishing between pre-philosophical, the proto-philosophical, and the fully philosophical cognitions of the moral law. The strong moralistic reading thinks the pre-philosophical conception is necessary and sufficient for entry to the Wissenschaftslehre, whereas Ware's weak moralistic reading thinks the proto-philosophical to be necessary and sufficient.

A second area in which I wish Ware had said more is regarding freedom. Ware rightly emphasizes throughout his chapter on freedom that Fichte has a genetic, dynamic model of freedom and consciousness thereof. Ware tells the story of Fichte's rejection of necessitarianism and his engagement with Kantian practical philosophy, as well as his disagreement with Maimon, which revolves around whether belief in free will requires some appeal to the practical (Fichte) or not (Maimon). To my mind, however, Ware omits a crucial distinction in Fichte. Whilst Fichte believes that the origin of my belief in free will is bound up with a practical attitude, this does not preclude him from thinking that the philosopher can construct arguments for the view. This is what Fichte does with, e.g. the second theorem in the system: ‘A rational being is equally unable to ascribe to itself a power of freedom without finding in itself an actual exercise of this power, that is, an actual act of free willing’.Footnote ⁵ That is to say that I am unable to think of myself as having a power of choice without having actually exercised that power of choice.

Fichte attempts to prove this theorem by an admittedly opaque sequence of paragraphs, though with characteristic optimism himself says that following a series of explanatory points ‘the proof of the above assertion will be easy’.Footnote ⁶ Roughly, Fichte's ‘proof’ here seems to revolve around the central principle that a necessary possession-condition on the concept of a free will is the exercise of a free will. Such an argument is of course open to question. But I want to highlight it as a way in which Fichte does attempt to provide at least some theoretical justification for the belief in free will.

Owen Ware's book, in conclusion, is a first-class contribution to the Fichte scholarship, and presents a compelling case for Fichte as a nuanced, complex moral philosopher who has a original and imaginative insights on a range of central features of humanity's moral life. It will be a staple of the conversation on Fichte for years to come.