• 1 Cf. M. Guéroult, L’Évolution et la Structure de la Doctrine de la Science chez Fichte. Strasbourg: (...)

Here, I'll just dwell on the 1975 book O espírito e a letra. To identify his purposes, it is worthwhile examining how the interpreter inscribed his research on the imagination in Fichte’s philosophy within the framework of the studies on Fichte in the 1960s. Despite the influence that French philosophical historiography had on University of São Paulo’s department (I will return to this point later), Rubens' book does not follow Martial Gueroult's studies on Fichte. One could even claim the opposite: although he quotes him in a complimentary manner in a note in the middle of the book (TORRES FILHO, 1975, p. 128), Rubens moves away from the idea, dear to Gueroult, that the thinking of Fichte is understandable only if one takes into account his evolution and refinement1. Quite on the contrary, Rubens follow Fichte to the letter regarding the coherence of his work, as he puts it, and it is from this point on that we can measure the controversial scope of his interpretation concerning the international state of the art.

• 2 R. R. Torres Filho, O Espírito e a Letra – A critica da imaginação pura em Fichte. São Paulo: Ática (...)
• 3 R. Lauth, “J. G. Fichtes Gesamtidee der Philosophie”, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch (t. 71) e Zur Id (...)

It is known how Hegel, in The Difference of the Philosophical Systems of Fichte and Schelling (1801), characterizes Fichte`s position as that of the subjective idealist based on the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794). One of the responses to this was to defend that, with the evolution of his thought, Fichte would have revised the point of view defended in 1794 and replaced the absolute self by the absolute Wissen as the principle of his system. The other response to Hegel ("more comprehensive ", as Rubens puts it2) went on to show that the exhibition of 1794 had a simple propaedeutic and preparatory function in relation to the Doctrine of Science itself, whose well-finished exhibition corresponded to the 1804 version. This is the interpretation defended by Reinhard Lauth, who produced a real inflection in the studies on Fichte3.

• 5 P. Arantes, Hegel e a ordem do tempo. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1981; and, from the same author, Um d (...)
• 6 G. Lebrun arrived in Brazil in 1963. Even I had in 1984 my own french professor in the first bachel (...)
• 7 Victor Goldschmidt, “Tempo histórico e tempo lógico na interpretação dos sistemas filosóficos”, in: (...)

The one who most dedicated himself to this was Paulo Arantes, he himself being a contemporary of Rubens and the author of an important book on Hegel, his doctoral thesis of 1975, published in 19815. Reviewing the trajectory of the Department from the 30s until the 60s, Paulo Arantes insists on the importance that the French mission, composed by professors such as Jean Maugué, Lévi- Strauss, Gilles Gaston Granger, Michel Debrun and Gérard Lebrun6, played among brazilian teachers and students. Differences aside, the presence of these professors consolidated the professionalization of philosophy as academic knowledge, dealing with philosophical works with a less ideologically biased attitude, which claimed to return to the texts and their "internal truth". The backbone of this novelty was the structural method, practiced by French historiography and presented by Victor Goldschmidt in a sort of methodological summary translated in Brazil in 1963 by Oswaldo Porchat7, who was then one of the prominent professors.

• 8 P. Arantes, Um departamento, op. cit., p. 17.

As Paulo Arantes rightly points out, the structural method, by making from "the reading of classics the only way of learning to philosophize", was, in truth, "an institutional adaptation of the remote Kantian maxim that it is not possible to teach philosophy, but only to philosophy. According to P. Arantes, by excluding from the list of explanations in the text the analysis of the elements belonging to the "historical time", the structural method became an "effort of internal understanding [...] that turns its back to the raw material of social experience"8. But, assuming the Kantian point of view, one might wonder if debugging the philosophical teaching of the doxographic bias (“Plato said this, Aristotle, that”, etc.) implies turning one`s back to the social reality. The original Kantian intention was the opposite: to achieve neutrality in relation to the dogmas of the philosophies of the past was, according to Kant, the condition for thinking freely and thus for standing in the world with autonomy. To verify the importance that this had in Kant's eyes, one has only to remember the physical geography and anthropology courses that he gave throughout his teaching career. This link between free reflection and practical positioning, incidentally, remained alive in German culture, at least until Fichte.

• 10 J. G. Fichte, WL 1794, SW, I, 284 apud: Torres Filho, O espírito e a letra, op.cit., p. 131.

1 Let's take in consideration the remark of Paulo Arantes, when he says that the adoption of the structural method in Brazil has professionalized philosophy, but at the price of distancing the philosophical studies of Brazilian intellectual and political life. It should be noted that the need to be limited to the internal structure of the text has not been passively accepted. The most widely held examination suggests the opposite: there were many of theoretical choices which, although not abandoning the structural reading of the texts, clearly set out to overcome them. This purpose is central to Rubens' book on Fichte and ist evident already in his title: the spirit and the letter. Starting from the statement made by Fichte in the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794, according to which "the doctrine of science is such that it cannot be communicated in the letter but only in the spirit"10, Rubens puts forward the idea that the work of Fichte requires the transgression of the structural reading, at least in its current meaning:

• 12 P. Arantes, Um departamento, op. cit., p. 19.
• 13 J. G. Fichte, S.W. I, 285; cited in: R. Torres Filho, “A Filha Natural em Berlim”, in: Ensaios de f (...)
• 14 It consists in the examination of the role of imagination in Fichte - even though it is known that (...)

In this way, by relativizing the "explanation according to the order of reasons", Rubens attenuated what, according to Paulo Arantes, was implied by the structuralist method, especially the creation of a "historical vacuum around philosophical discourse, whose autonomy should be preserved".12 However, in which direction does the overcoming of the internal order demanded by Rubens in his interpretation of Fichte point? In the direction of the author's "truth": Fichte himself conceived his work as inseparable from the bias mobilized by each of his listeners or readers. Thus, Rubens ensures that the resumption of the text by the transcendental imagination of its recipient is the condition sine qua non for the understanding of the Wissenschaftslehre. In Fichte’s words, the fundamental ideas of the doctrine of science "must be produced in all those who study it by the creative imagination itself, as it could not fail to be in a science that goes to the last foundations of human knowledge, since all the operation of the human spirit starts from the imagination, and imagination can only be captured by the imagination"13. Conclusion: Even though it lacks any thematic scope14, pure imagination proves to be the indispensable condition for exploring the themes raised by it.

• 15 G. Lebrun, Kant et la fin de la métaphysique. Paris: Armand Colin, 1971.
• 16 I. Kant, KdU, XX, apud: R. Torres Filho, O espírito e a letra, op. cit., p. 34.
• 17 R. Torres Filho, O espírito e a letra, op. cit., p. 35.
• 18 G. Lebrun, Kant e o fim da metafísica, op. cit., p. 386.
• 19 R. Torres Filho, O espírito e a letra, op. cit., p. 250.

At this point, a footnote in the first chapter of O Espírito e a Letra provides a good clue. The context in which it is registered is that of Fichte`s debt with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), in particular with the concept of "Reflection", as it appears in the Erste Einleitung. In fifth part of this text, reflection is presented by Kant as a condition for the formation of concepts in general, which gives him the forefront in relation to formal logic. We are therefore faced with the prerogatives of reflection; to qualitify it, Rubens, in the footnote to which I was referring a moment ago, directs the reader to the interpretation made by Gérard Lebrun in his doctorat d'Etat, defended in 1970 and published in the following year, Kant et la fin de la métaphysique15. In this book Lebrun defends that, with the 3rd Critique, Kant makes reflection the method of philosophy itself. Therefore, because "properly speaking, there is no jurisdiction (Gebiet) in relation to objects"16, the Critique of Judgment was capable of considering the unity between freedom and nature. This would be the core of philosophical activity, understood as a reflective exercise that, taken up and deepened by Fichte, will be built as a "fundamental unit [of transcendental philosophy], from which the sensitive world and the suprasensible world are differentiated''17. The conclusion that Rubens draws from this is twofold. In Fichte`s plan of exegesis, he concludes that there has been a "system" since the Grundlage of 1794 - but "system" understood with a specific and unprecedented meaning, since the "knowledge" made possible by the Wissenschaftslehre no longer relates to any objective region. If, as stated in the 3rd Critique, philosophy corresponds to practicing "a-doctrinal"18 reflection, then Rubens concludes, "the interest of the study by Fichte cannot be exactly in the themes he exploits. It is in that which his philosophy intends, explicitly, to be constituted in a discourse that says absolutely nothing, in a non-thematic science par excellence.'' It is therefore a non-figurative philosophy19 which is definitely breaking with the meshes of Representation.

• 21 R. Torres Filho. O espírito e a letra, op.cit.. p 153.

The expressive nature of language, then, brings to the foreground the metaphorical nature of the discourse; and this, in its turn, reaffirms the central role of transcendental imagination, not only for the Fichte`s philosophy, but also for a more global understanding of philosophy as an essentially non-theoretical activity - in the ordinary sense of theory, understood as an objective and impartial discourse about the world. And that is because “communication is not made in the signs,but through them, and every language, as the transition from the intelligible to sensible, operates only through metaphors”21.

• 22 The result of those researches, which date back to the 60s, are exposed in Prado Jr., “A força da v (...)

First, it is worth recalling the investigations that Bento Prado Jr. (he also being a professor of Rubens) had begun to carry out on the status of language in Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Ruben Torres Filhos' Fichte, the Rousseau of Bento Prado Jr. emphasizes the metaphorical and creative character of language22, against what postulate the proponents of grammar’s utopia, which dismiss the discourse from each and every particular determination, as if words immediately represented things. Rubens Torres Filhos’ interpretation of the Von der Sprachfähigkeit und dem Ursprunge der Sprache (1795) recovers this same critical theme.

• 23 José A. Giannotti, Origens da dialética do trabalho. São Paulo: DIFEL, 1966.

But, perhaps more less evident, but no less important than the dialogue with M. Foucault, G. Lebrun and Bento Prado Jr., is the debate that Rubens Torres Filhos’ book establishes with the investigations that had been carried out by his professor and first supervisor, José A. Giannotti. At that time, more precisely in 1965, Giannotti had already defended his “Habilitation’s Thesis” about the philosophy of the young Marx, entitled Origens da dialética do trabalho23. In the Book’s acknowledgments, Rubens Torres Filho is mentioned — and I heard from Giannotti himself that, besides frequent conversations, Rubens, his student at the time, typed up significant parts of the book at his request. In order to understand what could have been this interlocution, it is worth remembering the year of 1968.

• 24 J. A. Giannotti, “Contra Althusser”, in: Teoria e prática, no 3, 1968; reissued in: J. A. Giannotti (...)
• 25 If these circumstances were not enough to justify the suspicion that there was indeed a contaminati (...)

In 1968, effectively, Giannotti published his famous article which would become very important for marxist studies in Brazil "Contra Althusser"24, in which he refuted the epistemological cleavage proposed by the French philosopher. In the same year, Giannotti also published his translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Wittgenstein (São Paulo, Ed. Nacional) - which is cited right at the beginning of Rubens Torres Filho's book about the problem of expression in Fichte - a point that, as one can guess, has become decisive for an understanding of the relations between the letter and the spirit in Fichtean thinking, as presented by the interpreter25. The question that I am interested in asking could be put in this way: what relationship could exist between Giannotti's Marx and the Transcendental Imagination of the Fichtean philosophy, as Rubens understands it? In other words, how does the reflection followed its course in that moment of debate in São Paulo, from Marx to Fichte, going through Kant?

• 26 José A. Giannotti, Origens da dialética do trabalho. São Paulo: DIFEL, 1966.

If I am not wrong, it was Giannotti who introduced the term "reflexionante'' (the German “reflektierend”) in the Brazilian philosophical lexicon, in the thesis defended in 1965 about the young Marx26. The main ideas of this book were mobilized in 1968 in the polemic against Althusser — he who, as we know, introduced the notion of a “theoretical practice” and, from it, instituted a separation between the orders of concept and of reality. The intention was to make it possible for this "theoretical practice" to take forward the knowledge of reality without interfering with the studied reality. Nevertheless, objects Giannotti, the mirroring of reality by the abstract reality "only becomes possible because a categorical constitution process occurs in reality itself, that is opposed to the becoming of the phenomenon"; the essence of the capitalist way of production and of the kind of social relationship associated with it, as Giannotti had championed, is set up by this dialectic between discourse and reality. There lies the open opposition to Althusser:

• 27 J. A. Giannotti, “Contra Althusser”, op. cit., p. 90.

The essence is part of each moment of the concrete, without, however, exhausting its dimensions, in a manner that the discourse would only become scientific when it reproduced the order of this ontological constitution'27.

• 28 J. A. Giannotti, “Contra Althusser”, op. cit., p. 95.

To paraphrase the text, a genuinely scientific discourse does not close itself or, at least, it can only do justice to its cognitive pretension if it accompanies the movement of the objects it intends to know in its categorical constitution. Thus, social science cannot remain outside its object in its non-closure; on the contrary, the discourse is inseparable from the representations’ historicity and that which is found in its basis - the exchange operations, the processes by which "concrete men [...] transform certain objects into the expression of others, inserting them into an eminently social context."28