The Primacy of the Practical from Fichte to Schopenhauer

This chapter outlines the two Kantian revolutions: the Copernican one which was already sketched in the Dissertatio, and the primacy of practical reason announced in the Transcendental Dialectic and the Critique of Judgement. It claims that the theoretical antagonist of the Danzig philosopher is not Hegel but Fichte. Having attended Fichte’s lectures in Berlin over the years 1811 and 1812, Schopenhauer had access to reflections that were unknown to most of his contemporaries. One of the decisive points is the role of Soll as a scheme of the absolute, which stresses a mistake on the part of Kant and consists in a functionalization of practical reason in order to serve the theoretical one. This chapter explains that Schopenhauer’s elimination of practical reason goes together with the contemporary foundation of the sphere of theoretical knowledge on the practical will, in which sense the primacy of practice in Schopenhauer differs from that of Kant and Fichte.