Fichte and the Democratic Self According to Walt Whitman

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between Walt Whitman’s work and Fichte’s philosophy from four different perspectives: (1) the influence of Thomas Carlyle in Whitman’s reception of Fichte; (2) Fichte’s philosophy as an appropriate philosophy, according to our interpretation of Whitman, for the United States after the Civil War. That appropriateness is grounded in the fact that with Fichte’s philosophy it is possible to think of a unity greater than all differences, a unity in which writing about the Civil War and the oblivion of that same historical event are articulated; (3) Fichte’s philosophy as an insufficient philosophy, although it was adequate for its historical moment. Its insufficiency is to be found, or so I shall argue, in the very modern radicality of the idealist philosophy; (4) the differences between Fichte and Whitman with respect to their religious conceptions (particularly in their links to the sacred books of the Judeo-Christian tradition), differences interpreted in the light of Hans Blumenberg’s ideas on myth, dogma and German Idealism.