Dies Ich, Das Viel Besagt

At first glance, self-consciousness seems to belong to what almost goes without saying. In a continuous process of reflection, however, it turns out that it presents one of philosophy's most difficult and momentous problems. Dieter Henrich's treatise "Fichtes ursprungliche Einsicht", which was dedicated to this problem was published more than fifty years ago. Here, Henrich showed that it was Fichte who first grasped the problem and made it the guiding theme of his thinking. In this new book, the unaltered reprinting of this text is followed by a new and extensive series of reflections concerning self-consciousness in the context of a philosophical foundation and the problems which, under the guiding principle of his original insight, set Fichte's system formation into a motion without a definitive solution. Henrich's book can be seen as a renewal of Kant's way of thinking - in relation to a problem whose significance for philosophy is hardly disputed any longer, in a perspective appropriate to the contemporary modes of experience, and in the wake of clarifications that can be gained by reflecting on the dynamics in Fichte's system formations.