Does Knowledge Lead to Nothing? : Nihilism as the Extreme Form of Scepticism in Jacobi, Fichte, and Hegel
Abstract
The article focuses on the question of nihilism in the context of the post-Kantian philosophy. The author takes Jacobi's open letter to Fichte as a starting point.
In this letter, Jacobi raises the objection that Fichte's idealism is substantially tied to nihilism. In nihilism, Jacobi recognizes the attempt to replace the shared but in modernity vanishing certainty of the outer world with a retreat into the inner (the Fichtean I=I), this leading to treating the human subjectivity as an absolute.
Eventually, this absolute collapses into itself as it denies the outer world any sense; this very sense being, however, something the I depends on. The author argues that Hegel's objective idealism needs to be understood on this background.
Against a Fichtean subjectivism, Hegel does not consider sense to be a projection of subjective structures on a world, but understands them instead to be an interaction of the subject and that which the subject is not, the world.