The Pleonastic Mirror: Identität and the Recursive Subject in Gustav Teichmüller’s Subjektivismus
In the vast corridors of philosophical thought, wherein Plato still whispers and Spinoza broods aloof, one occasionally uncovers a lesser-frequented alcove—a domain imbued not with the cold austerity of system-building but with the trembling lucidity of insight. Gustav Teichmüller, a 19th-century Baltic-German philosopher, occupies such an alcove. Though largely eclipsed by the grandiose systems of Kant, Hegel, and their scions, Teichmüller’s independent explorations into subjectivity reveal a remarkably prescient clarity. In his opus *Neue Untersuchungen zur Speculativen Philosophie* (1874), Teichmüller articulates a notion of the self, or *Ichheit*, not as a mere epiphenomenon of perception, but as a recursive kernel—a concept that both echoes and, in subtle detail, transcends his contemporaries.
This essay endeavors to excavate a subtle but significant detail nestled within Teichmüller’s account of subjectivity: namely, his obscure notion of *pleonastic identität*—a surplus-identity that emerges when the self reflects not just upon phenomena, but upon its own act of reflecting. This metaphysical recursion, though tangentially remarked upon and never systematically explicated by Teichmüller, intimates a radical departure not only from Kantian epistemology but from the very notion of a first-order cogito.
Let us proceed with due caution into the textual thicket.
Teichmüller’s philosophical ambitions were, from the outset, rooted in a dual opposition: firstly, an opposition to the prevailing mechanico-materialism of the natural sciences, and secondly, an opposition to the speculative Idealism that rendered the Self an unwitting shadow of Geist. From this dialectic, Teichmüller articulates a version of *Subjektivismus* that is neither solipsistic nor transcendental, but ontogenetic; that is to say, the Self does not pre-exist its own acts but is born through them in recursive strata.
In the second volume of *Neue Untersuchungen*, Chapter VII, paragraph 204, we find the following cryptic assertion:
> “Das Ich erkennt sich nicht bloß als Erkennender, sondern auch als das, was dieses Erkennen selbst denkt. Es ist eine Identität, die mehr ist als bloße Identität: eine pleonastische Identität in sich selbst.”¹
Translation cannot do justice to the baroque curvature of his German, yet a provisional rendering suffices: “The self does not merely recognize itself as a knower, but also as that which the knowing itself thinks. It is an identity that is more than mere identity: a pleonastic identity in itself.”
The term *pleonastic*—drawn from the Greek *pleonazein*, to be excessive—seldom appears in philosophical treatises outside of philological complaints. Yet in Teichmüller’s formulation, it acquires an ontological weight. Here, ‘pleonastic identity’ is not a redundancy to be amputated but an excess to be understood. One is here reminded of the Scholastics’ notion of the self as *superessential*, wherein existence flows beyond essence—not merely a being that is, but a being that knows it is, and knows that it knows it is.
Teichmüller’s contribution lies not in originating this structure, but in gesturing toward its underlying *motor of recursion*. His Self is not content with the Cartesian cogito—“I think, therefore I am”—but demands to *think about thinking*, and more critically, to *think about the thinker of thought*. The distinction here, while minute, inaugurates an entirely new topology of identity. For if the self reflects on its own reflection, it does not merely double itself—it generates a new modality of selfness, one that cannot be reduced to either substrate or act.
To better comprehend this, it is instructive to contrast Teichmüller’s view with that of Kant. In the *Critique of Pure Reason*, Kant assigns the *I think* a transcendental function: the unity of apperception is the a priori condition under which all representations are synthesized. Yet this *I* remains, as it were, empty—a placeholder without empirical substance. Teichmüller rejects this vacuousness. His *pleonastic identity* is neither the formal unity of transcendental operations nor the empirical ego, but a third: a recursive emergence where identity is less a point and more a spiral.
From this spiralized selfhood arises an intriguing implication: that the subject, in reflecting on its own acts, cannot avoid creating *surplus* images of itself. Each act of introspection does not return to the same origin but constructs a new locus; and this multiplication, far from being pathological (as it might be in Fichte’s self-positing ego), becomes the constitutive rhythm of being.
Moreover, this view anticipates—by nearly a century—the post-structuralist theories of subjectivity that would later be advanced by Lacan and Derrida, albeit stripped of their jargon and political tinctures. Particularly, Teichmüller’s surplus-self foreshadows Lacan’s mirror stage, wherein identity is not discovered but constructed through an exteriorized self-image. Yet unlike Lacan, Teichmüller does not decry the illusion of coherent selfhood; he embarks upon it enthusiastically, acknowledging its excess as essential.
One further detail must not be overlooked. In the margins of one of his notebooks (now preserved in the Königsberg Archive), Teichmüller writes:
> “Der Ausdruck meines Selbst im Spiegel gibt mir nicht mich, sondern meine Fähigkeit mich zu überschreiten.”²
“The expression of my self in the mirror does not give me myself, but my capacity to transcend myself.”
Though this remark was never published, it bespeaks the same principle: that identity, when reflected, yields not tautology but transgression. Recognition becomes transgression—it trespasses its own definition.
The consequences of this are twofold. First, Teichmüller establishes a framework in which the self is inherently never complete; its recursion ensures that it is always exceeding itself, never settling into ontological stasis. Second, he subtly redefines individuation not as a limit but as a process of excess: the ego is not an enclosed entity but a pleonastic flux, always reiterating itself in new permutations.
It remains a great misfortune of intellectual history that Teichmüller’s writings have been sidelined, often dismissed as romantic idiosyncrasies amid the more logico-political concerns of his age. Yet the subtlety of his thought—particularly the pleonastic conception of identity—grants him a seat, however overlooked, at the table where Selfhood and Being are eternally debated.
We must conclude, then, with a recommendation: that contemporary philosophers reexamine Gustav Teichmüller not for systematic rigor, but for metaphysical insight; for in his recursive mirror, one finds not merely oneself, but the strange echo that the self becomes when it dares to gaze too long.
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By Martijn Benders – Philosophy Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
identity, recursion, romanticism, metaphysical subjectivity, overlooked philosophers, pleonasm, self-reflection
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¹ Teichmüller, Gustav. *Neue Untersuchungen zur Speculativen Philosophie*, Vol. II, Halle: Verlag Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1874, p. 392.
² Königsberg Archive, Teichmüller Papers, Notebook D, folio 17.