Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)

Fichte sets out to complete and perfect the Kantian project.

Kant’s Project = study the process by which we form our ideas (one characterization to be appreciated alongside other general

assessments provided)

In a broad sense, Fichte’s problem with the Kantian project:1. Its reliance upon dualism (between phenomenal/noumena

realm)2. It does not safeguard human freedom

He transformed the transcendental clarification of the conditions for the possibility of our knowledge into a conclusive explanation based on one single principle.

Monism > Dualism

The ultimate principle itself, the form which all knowledge is derived, cannot be taken as just another given fact; it would otherwise depend on further presuppositions.

Dualism – when it is cool to be cool with apparent contradictions

The only way to avoid regress is to not rely on given structures of consciousness and to better attend to actual consciousness; it must be produced via the activity of consciousness.

Sameness and Difference: a ContinuumThe primordial action in question is expressed in the statement “I am I”. The ego, self or I does not exist before it actively seizes itself. By

converting itself into a self, it makes reference to nothing else but its own identity.

To say “I” means to pose one’s own Being. In saying “I” to itself, it also posits everything else in contrast to itself. Negation is added to

identity in one and the same act.

“I” and “Not-I” need each other

The act of the self is both action and knowledge at the same time. From the very beginning it encompasses the theoretical and practical

aspect of philosophy.

The first principle of philosophy is the self-conscious subject, or the “I” that the “I” can be self-conscious only in virtue of distinguishing itself

from the world, or the “not-I” which is therefore the second principle of philosophy.

Either the “not-I” can determine the “I” (the world can affect the subject) or the I can determine the I (the world can affect the subject).

“I” determines the “not-I” through the mode of determination the ‘will’ a conscious subject striving to realize its ends in the world.

In first mode of determination the I functions as an ‘intellect’, a conscious subject registering the impacts of the world upon it. Fichte’s

philosophical system begins with a deduction of the basic principles that are fundamental to all self-consciousness, and then branches into

theoretical philosophy, which treats the necessary conditions of intellectual activity and practical philosophy which treats the necessary

conditions of willing.

The connection between the self or I and society that was so important for Fichte is established almost automatically if the following is

considered: free existence as a self, which philosophy recognizes as the essence of human beings, is only possible within society.

To be a self presupposes recognition by one’s equals. Self requires mutual recognition.

Kant…AgainFor Kant, society conceived as kingdom of ends – postulated as the

coexistence of purely rational beings.

Recall: Kant’s Metaphysics and Epistemology driven by moral concerns. Laws require universal necessity. Morality requires that the

autonomy of the will is possible. Free through the laws we give ourselves whose universal necessity is provided by reason.

Form of free will is universal in contrast to subjective inclination

Pure form of willing – abstract away from objects of experience/circumstance toward the conformity to universal law

Back to Fichte

In the transcendental dialectic, in order to decide between determination by nature and the assumption of freedom, Kant had

already made an appeal to the rational interest, which, no doubt, aims at freedom.

Fichte’s move was to make the theoretical issue into a fundamental decision of human existence: What sort of philosophy one chooses

depends, therefore, on what sort of person one is.

General Reflections about Critical IdealismIdealism is based on action that needs no prerequisites, an action that necessarily brings forth everything that follows, namely the free act of

the self.

It presents its evidence in revered fashion. It beings with a representation that can be generated in any individual consciousness, and it aims towards the conditions of representation as such, until it

reaches an unconditioned beginning.

The drive to be in harmony with oneself can only be realized in a community with other human beings.

The Vocation of Man

The question Fichte attempts to answer in the book we are reading is: “what am I

myself, and what is my vocation?”3 (5; 3) The word “vocation” suggests a calling. What are we human beings and to what have we been called? Have we been called at all? If so, who or what

has called us? What are we supposed to be? The question intertwines thus with one with which we are already familiar: Can

reason tell us what constitutes the meaningful life?

The first thing we human beings confront is nature. Everything in nature is some something, a concrete entity determined in every

respect.

But not only that: it has become this something. Nature is a ceaseless process of becoming. And we are parts of nature and as such part of

this process.And a third statement can be made about nature. Nature is governed

by causality:

But what happens to the human being on such a view.

But does this not rob the human being of all freedom and thus of responsibility? This is what fills Fichte’s “I” with dread.

And yet I seem to be conscious of myself as a free agent…

Fichte took Kant to be an academic skeptic, for he took him to have shown the impossibility of theoretical knowledge of

reality.

Target 1 – mechanic materialism of 18th century considered as dogmatic philosophy

Book 1 presents mechanistic materialism and the attendant problem of determinism.

Mechanistic materialism seems intellectually satisfying but it makes nonsense of the human adventure in the world by equating it with any

other natural event.

Universal freedom entailed a loss of freedom which deeply offended Fichte.

Target 2 – the limits of Kant’s philosophy

Book 2 presents transcendental idealism as a skeptical dismantling of the threat of mechanistic materialism’s determinism.

Transcendental Idealism is an intellectual exercise open to anyone who accepts the autonomy of theoretical reason.

But if Kant’s philosophy wins out and become the theoretical understandings of reality it would be every bit as bad.

Fichte’s Position (Book 3)Fichte finds equal cause for lament. The task is not to replace one

theoretical philosophical system with another but to get out of philosophy altogether. Philosophical reason is not autonomous, but has

its foundation in practical reason; in the will.

Both yield unacceptable nonsense if taken to their final conclusions. And this precisely this yields the valuable insight that the intellect is

not autonomous

The Will

The will provides this foundation in two ways, (1) first in an act of faith it transforms the apparent picture show of experience into an objective world of things and of other people. The use of the word ‘faith’ should not suggest a kind of Kierkegaardian collapse into orthodox religion.

Rather, (2) faith indicates a free (as in theoretically unjustifiable) act of mind by which the conditions within which we can act and use our

intellects first come to be for us. In The Science of Knowledge, Fichte preferred to use the term “creative imagination.” And second, it is the

conscience which provides us with commands of action.

Fichte and the Self as HistoricalThese fictions also allow a practical consciousness of myself as a task.That appreciation of human beings as essentially historical is relatively

recent. Some trace this to Fichte.

That a human being is not a substance with a permanent nature who behaves in accordance with this nature in much the way a machine works according to its design. Rather, a human being is basically the

activity, the task of making himself be what he will within a given situation

The Preface of the Vocation of Man

In this book, which is explicitly addressed not to professional philosophers but to “anyone capable of understanding a book,” Fichte

is clearly trying to set the record straight and to present a broadly accessible account of his own system, “doctrine of scientific

knowledge,” an account designed to defend the transcendental idealism of the latter against the competing claims of dogmatic realism

and to emphasize the moral foundations of the former and its compatibility with popular religious sentiments.

the sharp conflict between the demands of his “heart” and his “head,” between a burning desire to affirm his own freedom and an intellectual conscience that could recognize only the rule of external necessity; the

way this dilemma is temporarily resolved by dissolving reality itself into a play of mere representations, an “unbearable lightness of being”

that defuses the threat of determinism but still leaves the heart yearning for meaning; and how this hunger is finally satisfied by a

practical ontology that grounds all belief in reality in one’s immediate awareness of moral obligations.

Key moments of Fichte’s positionFollowing Kant, what structures our consciousness accounts for the

way we come to know the world.

Constitutive elements of our conscious experience are generated by the activity of the mind itself.

the necessity of representation must be deduced from the basic fact of self-consciousness

Philosophy which begins from the immediately certain principle of self-consciousness, must serve as the foundation for all of other sciences.

He considers it part of the task of philosophy to deduce the necessity of the experience of a natural world to our self-awareness but regards the particular laws that describe the behavior of objects in the world as contingent with respect to our selfhood (since this could emerge in a variety of possible worlds, but not if there were natural world at all)

and so assigns the examination of these laws to the natural sciences rather to philosophy

Fichte describes with seminal work (The Science of Knowledge) as the attempt to discover the “genetic deduction of what we find in our

consciousness”

Self-consciousness is the transcendental condition for consciousness

the primary impulse of Pure I is an act of will, the purpose or end of which is the fulfillment of a duty or obligation.

In the first stage, the I, by an unconscious impulsion towards its end, produces the object (nature). Such a production must be

understood as the act of Pure I, by which it takes the form of a limited being; it is an act of auto-limitation. Limitation is the mainspring,

as it were, which renders possible the infinite activity of Pure I. Without such limitation there would be no object, but only Pure I alone, with no possibility of action, either theoretical or

practical.

“Not merely to know, but according to thy knowledge to do, is thy vocation:” — thus is it loudly proclaimed in the innermost depths of my

soul, as soon as I recollect myself for a moment, and turn my observation upon myself. “Not for idle contemplation of thyself, not for brooding over devout sensations; — no, for action art thou here; thine

action, and thine action alone, determines thy worth.” (40)

“My world is the object and sphere of my duties, and absolutely nothing more; there is no other world for me, and no other qualities of

my world than what are implied in this; — my whole united capacity, all finite capacity, is insufficient to comprehend any other” (46)