Grounding fictions: Systematic skepticism and critical doubt, 1792--1807

This dissertation analyzes the turn to skepticism at the advent of German Idealism and Early Romanticism. Although the epochal fixation on skepticism predictably appeals to a negative epistemology that draws a closed circle around the subjective mind, skepticism also serves as the basis for an interventionist critique that destabilizes the predominant drive toward foundationalism in philosophy. The dissertation argues that this dual deployment informs both a fundamental reassessment of the philosophic system and the formation of new models of subjectivity, imagination and fiction. This first part begins with the "skepticism debate" that occurs between Schulze, Maimon and Fichte in the wake of Reinhold's project to systematize the critical philosophy. Schulze's initial critique in his Aenesidemus exposes Reinhold's system as a self-contained, "groundless" fiction that undermines its own internal coherence by extending beyond its preestablished limits in the moment it tries to ground itself in an external, extra-systemic reality. Accepting this skeptical critique of Reinhold, but not abandoning his project to establish philosophy as a system, Fichte and Maimon employ different forms of mitigated skepticism that reinvest notions of fictionality and groundlessness with a positive, operative function in philosophy. The second part of the dissertation accounts for the simultaneous rise in skeptical concerns in the literature of the period. Here, skepticism becomes a stance adopted in the face of a radical epistemic shift. As the models of systematic unity offered by Enlightenment metaphysics break down, exposing both their own coercive tendencies and possible fictional status, authors begin to explore the subjectivist possibilities of a self-determining skeptical position. Focusing on Tieck's early prose, the dissertation explores the transfer of a skeptical stance from a strictly philosophical question to a more general reflection on the conditions of perception, language and social interaction. The dissertation concludes by examining the parallels between skepticism and satire in Jean Paul's parasitical method of embodied critique. While a fundamentally skeptical assessment of the fictional, ungrounded status of all scientific systems permeates many of his works, with his Clavis Fichtiana Jean Paul turns the skeptical method on a skeptical epistemological structure undermining the possibility of an absolutely self-creative subjectivity. As authors from both the philosophical and literary side explore the possible notions of the subject that take skepticism as a fundamental human condition, what emerges is an inwardly directed critique that throws the subject---that which is traditionally excluded from doubt---into a state of radical instability.