Paradox, Incompleteness and Labyrinth in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre

This paper studies cases of paradox and circular formulations from the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre of 1794/1795 until the Wissenschaftslehre of 1805. Such formulae are required to produce some of the main concepts of Fichte’s thought, and allow us to draw both systematic and historical-conceptual conclusions about it. After a general presentation of the form and development of the WL, some examples of paradoxical or circular formulae are studied: As a conclusion it is shown why in the WL “we do not so much explain the explicandum as show, rather, that, and why, it is inexplicable.” The paradox and circular formulae converge on an interpretation of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge as a self-referent and self-contained system of incompleteness.