/lit/ - Literature

>In fact, if we take a close look at Fichte’s and Schelling’s use of the concept of intellectual intuition, we can see that it is almost opposite to Mou Zongsan’s. For Fichte and Schelling, Kant’s ‘I think’ remains a fact, a Tatsache, and so cannot furnish the ground of knowing; for the ground of knowing must be absolute, in the sense that it is not conditioned by anything else. For Fichte, beyond the ‘I think’, there must be an immediate consciousness of this ‘I think’, and it is this consciousness that has the status of intellectual intuition. In his Wissenschaftslehre Fichte claims that ‘if the self of intellectual intuition is, because it is, and is, what it is; then it is insofar as it posits itself, absolutely self-sufficient and independent.’ Therefore Fichte proposes to think of intellectual intuition as Tathandlung, as a self-positing act. In the same way, the early Schelling understood intellectual intuition as the ground of knowing, as elaborated in his 1795 essay ‘Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy’.

>However, there are two different developments in Fichte and Schelling, although they both face the same question of the passage from the infinite to the finite. In Fichte, the unconditional I requires a non-l as negation or as check; what is outside of the unconditional I is only the product of such a negative effect; whereas Schelling’s Naturphilosophie moves from the I to nature, and considers that the I and nature have the same principle, as expressed in his famous claim ‘Nature should be Mind made visible, Mind the invisible Nature’. The Absolute, for Schelling, is no longer the subjective pole, but rather the absolute unity of subject-object, which is constantly in recursive movement. In short, it must be said that Fichte’s and Schelling’s concepts of intellectual intuition are based on the search for an absolute foundation of knowing, which is then turned into a recursive model, whether ‘abstract materiality’ in Fichte or the ‘productivity of nature’ in Schelling.

>This distinction between Fichte and Schelling is later described by Hegel in his The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy: Fichte aims for a 'subjective subject-object’, while Schelling seeks an Injective subject-object’, meaning that for Schelling nature is ipnsidered to be independent. In any case, the role played by intellectual intuition in both enterprises is quite different from the use Mou intends to make of it in connecting it with the Chinese tradition.

this is what the Germans were up to prior to Marx. once he showed up, he took his copy of the PoS and just ran with it.