Intellectual Intuition and Rule-Following in Fichte’s Doctrine of Science

Abstract According to Kant, the will is self-legislating if the nature of the will alone ensures that its actualizations – the acts of the will – are subject to a certain law. Thus, there is a primacy of the faculty and its nature over its actualizations. In Fichte, acts of will take precedence over the will as a faculty, a primacy that invites circularity. So is this not the proton pseudos of Fichte’s theory? In my paper, I argue (1) that Fichte has good reasons to make act primary over faculty, (2) that this, however, makes the status of the laws to which these acts are subject indeed problematic, and (3) that Fichte, from 1800 at the latest, attempts to overcome this problem by declaring the concept of rule-following action to be a fundamental concept.