SYNTHESIS AND RECONSTRUCTION: FICHTE.
To get the full effect of a new doctrine it must be brought into
contact with a mind unshackled by those traditional prepossessions
which clung to its original author. Kant, essentially by training a
man of the school, was by heart and character essentially a seeker
after the wider ends of the larger world. His lesson is on one hand
the scholar's disproof of pretended science, and on another an appeal
and an example to the mere scholar to make his philosophy ample for
the whole life, and co-extensive with the whole field of reality. His
first disciples who stand forward as teachers caught only the first
part of his message, and sought to set theoretical philosophy on a
sounder basis. Johann Gottlieb Fichte--perhaps the least professional
of great philosophical professors--with a resolute will, a passion for
logical thoroughness, and great impulse to force mankind to be free
and to realise liberty in an institution--was the first who really
grappled with the searching questions that arose out of Kant's message
to his age. His was a Kantism, not certainly always of the letter, nor
indeed always of the spirit: yet for all that, there was substantial
justice in his claim that his system supplied the presupposition which
gives meaning and interconnexion to Kant's utterances[1]. It is, says
the proverb, the first step that costs. And Fichte took that step.
Before his impetuosity the cautelous clauses which besmirched the great
purpose of Criticism shrunk away, the central truth was disengaged from
its old-fashioned swaddling clothes, and openly announced itself as a
renovating, almost a revolutionary principle.
But, as was to be expected, the unity and force are paid for by a
considerable surrender of catholicity. If Kant's utterances are
fused into comparative simplicity, the unification does not embrace
the whole of the Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier
stage--the stage by which he counts in the history of philosophy--was
to emphasise and exhibit in his systematic statement that priority or
supremacy of the 'practical' over the 'theoretical' reason which Kant
had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that self or Ego
which Kant had indicated, under the title of 'transcendental unity
of apperception,' as the focus which gives coherence and objectivity
to experience. But to put the final presupposition at the head and
front of all, as a principle originating and governing the whole line
of procedure, is really to modify in a thorough-going way the whole
aspect of a doctrine and its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet
analysis: from the given, or what is supposed given, up regressively
to its final presuppositions, its latent _prius._ He shows you the
thing is so, apparently without effort, by judicious application of
the proper re-agent, as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth
a strong current of deduction: Let it be assumed that so and so is,
then _must,_ or then shall, something else be; and so onwards. Instead
of a glance at the secret substructure of the world, you see it, at a
magician's mandate, building itself up; stone calling to stone, and
beam to beam, to fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And you
must not merely read or listen. You are summoned as a partner in the
work; a work the author feels, only half-consciously, he has not yet
quite accomplished, and where therefore he complains of the bystander's
dullness.
This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a new practice,
of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted that the pupil in philosophy
must 'symphilosophise'; but practically, even his aim had been to
describe or narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical
vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetically carried
through the succession of ideas which were called up before him. What
had been generally given in philosophical literature was a sort of
historical account of how thoughts happened: a succession of pictures
presented with the interposition here and there of a little reasoning,
expository of connexions. You enlisted your reader's sympathy: you
set his imagination to work by translating the logical process into a
historical event--the _Logos_ into a _Mythos_--and blending with your
narrative a little explanation as to general drift and relations, you
left him to himself to enjoy the _Theoria._ The nearest approach Fichte
makes to this polite and easy method is in the 'Sun-clear Statement,'
where he, as he says, attempts to '_force_ the reader to understand'
him. But probably these things cannot be forced. And for the rest
Fichte's characteristic attitude is to request, or command, his reader
(or pupil) to think with him, to put himself in the posture required,
to perform the act of thought described. He has not merely to be
present at the lecture, but personally to perform the experiment. It
is not a mere story to be heard and admired and forgotten. _De te_ O
pupil! _fabula narratur._ If it be a play, you are the actor as well as
the onlooker: and the play is not a play, but the drama--the nameless
drama--of the soul transacted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which
bear up its visible life.
You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put before you. Your
_fact,_ in philosophy, must be your own _act_: not something done
and dead, passive, a thing, but something doing, alive, active: your
introspection must be, let us say, an experiment in the growing,
responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the mere _cadaver._ Think,
therefore, and catch yourself in the act of thinking. Get something
before your mind's eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what
you perceive or feel: only realise it fully and penetrate its meaning
and implications. It is of course the perception of something here and
now. And you would be, in ordinary life, eager to get on to something
else--to associate the present fact to something perceived elsewhere,
to draw conclusions about things yet to come. But if you philosophise,
you must check this practical-minded impatience and concede yourself
leisure to ponder deeply all that the single perception involves. Be
content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of Rachel of old. Let
Martha bustle about. Fichte tells you that your perception rests,--and
you, you _see_ that it rests, on the 'I am that I am,'--on the I = I,
i. e. on the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self.
Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it, that is, assert
it: and you have--done what? You have pledged your whole self_--falsus
in uno, falsus in omnibus_--to its truth: its background is your whole
and one mental life. And is that all? You have also called the world to
witness: your statement--if, as it professes, it form an item however
slight in the realm of knowledge--requests and expects every other 'I'
to acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the fact rests on
the certainty of your self: and your self is a self certified by its
ever-postulated identity with other selves, so on _ad infinitum_. In
affirming this (whatever be your statement) you affirm the Absolute
Infinite Ego. Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle[2].
At which plain frankness there was much cachinnation and even
muttering among the baser sort. Even wiser heads forgot--if they
ever knew--that Leibniz a century before had startled the world of
his day by a view that 'the Ego or something like it[3] was, under
the name of _monad_, the presupposition of each and every detail of
existence in any organic total. It was useless for Fichte to repeat[4]
that his philosophical Ego was not the empirical or individual ego
which he in this every-day world had to provide clothes and company
for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does not know that 'I
am I,' and what that means. Later, therefore, Fichte, going along
with the movement of contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid
one source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of Ego from
the absolute basis of all knowledge and experienced reality. But
unquestionably the absolutising of the Ego is the characteristic note
of his first period in philosophy: and it rings with the spirit of
the heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal principle and
foundation of man's conscious moral and intellectual life is identical
with the principle of the Universe, even if the Universe seem not to
know it. It means that self-consciousness--the certainty that I am I
and one in all my manifestations--is the highest word yet uttered. In,
or under, the surface of human knowledge and belief in reality, there
is a transcendental Ego--a self identical with all other selves,--
infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The certainty of human
knowledge--and therefore of all reality in consciousness--is the
Absolute,--an absolute certainty and knowledge--but an absolute with
which I identify myself,--which I am, and which is me. This is the
absolute _thesis_--the nerve and utter basis-laying--at the ground, or
rather under the ground, of all I know, feel, and will.
This, then, is the thesis at the very foundation of all _Wissenschaft_:
and therefore figures at the head of the _Wissenschaftslehre_,--the
name Fichte gives his fundamental philosophy. But alone it is
powerless. A foundation is only a foundation, by being built upon. The
position must be defined by counterposition: thesis by antithesis: ego
by non-ego. Ego, in fact, is first made _such_, as set against _you._
In other words, the perception we assumed to start with does not merely
_suppose_ and indeed pre-suppose the absolute Ego; but it sets in
the absolute Ego an ego and a non-ego,--sets against the lesser ego,
something limiting and limited, something defining it in one particular
direction; or, if the original consciousness we started to examine was
an act of will, then, it may be said, the non-ego appears as about to
be limited and defined by the Ego. Be our consciousness, therefore,
practical or theoretical, of action or of knowledge, its fundamental
characteristic is the conjunction (correlation with subjugation)
of an ego and a non-ego. It is always a synthesis of an original
antithesis[5]; of self and not-self. But every such synthesis which
brings together into one a self and a not-self, is possible only in the
original thesis of a greater self--an absolute Ego--which includes the
not-self and the self it contrasts within its larger self. The unity
of the first principle[6] (A = A, or I = I) parting or distinguishing
itself into the opposition of A versus not-A, Ego set against non-ego,
re-asserts itself again in consciousness (perception of objects, and
action upon them by will) as synthesis, i. e. a conjunction (not a real
union). And this synthesis is either the limitation of the Ego by the
non-ego or the limitation of the non-ego by the Ego. The former gives
the formula of theoretical, the latter that of practical consciousness.
We begin with the absolute Ego. It is absolute activity, utter
freedom. It is the source of all action, all life. Yet if thus
implicitly everything, it is actually nothing. To be something, it
must restrict itself, set up in itself an antithesis:--by the setting
up of a not-self, at once limit and realise itself: translate itself
from ideal absoluteness and unconditionality into a reality which
is also limited and partial. All consciousness and action exhibit
this antithesis of a limited self and an outside and adversative
other-being; but the antithesis rests upon the medium of a larger life,
a thesis which transcends and includes the antithesis, and which leads
to that alternating adaptation of the two sides to one another (their
synthesis) which actual experience presents as its recurring phase[7].
The _Wissenschaftslehre_ leaving the absolute Ego in the background
deals with the play that goes on in human experience between the
correlatives to which it has reduced itself;--the antagonism, but the
moderated and overruled antagonism, of Ego and non-ego.
Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of expression. Popular
language--if the popular philosophers are to be trusted as its
exponents--says 'an impression is produced by an external object on
the senses, and causes an idea in the mind.' The 'object' works a
series of marvellous effects on a mind, which--to begin with--is hardly
describable as anything more than an imagined point of resistance,
getting reality by being repeatedly impinged upon.[8] Fichte's
statements are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say
'I hear, I see';--as if, forsooth, the 'I' did it all. According to
Fichte, the 'I,'--the absolute 'I,' is the real (but secret) source
of the position in which consciousness finds itself limited by a
non-ego. But within the finite ego and its consciousness there is
no reminiscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's--the
absolute ego's--act. For the finite consciousness, the beginning of its
activity--i. e. of all empirical consciousness, lies in an impulse or
stimulus from without--a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the
very minimum of attributes. It is only _felt_ as opposing: and this
is the first stage or grade of theoretical consciousness: Sensation.
But in the perpetual antithesis--in the self-opposition which is the
radical act of consciousness--the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is
confronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which re-asserts the
limitation as its own act. Thus while we are, as it were, impressed, we
re-act against that impression--we set it forth before us, as ours, and
free ourselves from its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead
of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or intuition) of it.
It would be out of place, here, to try to write the interpretation
of that marvellous and difficult piece of dialectic--the
_Wissenschaftslehre_;--a theme to which Fichte returned again and
again up to his death, ever modifying details, selecting new modes of
exposition, and gradually, perhaps, changing the centre of gravity
of his system. It will be sufficient to note the two purposes which
it keeps in view. On the one hand it is a systematic theory of the
categories. It begins, as we have seen, with the three co-ordinates of
all reflection,--identity, difference, and reason why; it proceeds to
the co-relative principles of activity and passivity; to condition,
quantity, &c. And its work is to show how these forms naturally emerge
in the recurrent antithesis which arises in consciousness, and how
again they are brought together by the overmastering Absolute thesis
into a synthesis, from which the same process re-appears. How much this
corresponds in general conception to the Hegelian Logic is obvious, and
Fichte has the merit of the original suggestion. With this however he
conjoins--what Hegel has relegated to his Psychology--an evolutional
or developmental theory of the mental powers. We have already seen how
sensation is forced by the latent intelligence to rise into perception
(_Anschauung_): the line of psychological development is carried on by
Fichte through imagination to understanding and reason. Hegel's work is
far more complete, definite, and detailed: but that need not keep us
from giving due homage to the suggestive sketch of the originator of
the conception[9].
But the theoretical consciousness is not all; and as we already know,
the practical Ego is supreme over it. In it lies the key to the mystery
of the stimulus--the shock from the unknown--which awakened the
activity of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance created
by the Ego so that it may be active; only a stepping-stone on which
it may walk; a spring-board from which it may bound. Only so much
reality has the non-ego; the reality of something which may be shaped,
made, made use of. Call the something which the stimulus (_Anstoss_)
pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself (after Kant): and if you ask How are
things-in-themselves constituted, you get from the _Wissenschaftslehre_
the answer: 'They are as we should make them[10],' Or, as it is said
in another place: 'My world is--object and sphere of my duties and
absolutely nothing else[11]:' if you ask whether there is really
such a world, the only sound reply I can give is: 'I have certainly
and truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of duties
_towards_ such, and _in_ such, objects; and it is only in a world such
as I there represent and not elsewhere that I can perform these duties
which I cannot conceive otherwise,'
This is a grand word: and yet we feel that, in the intensity of
intellectual consecutiveness and moral inflexibleness, we have lost
some elements to which Kant had given their place in the philosophy
of life. The third of Kant's three Criticisms is conspicuous by its
absence from the Fichtean field of view, and has no recognition in
this scheme of the universe: and the great conception of the natural
world as an organism, in which natural man is only a part, and all
is controlled by an autonomous principle of life, has been for the
while allowed to drop. Even more than in Kant religion tends to be an
epilogue or appendix to morality: and God is identified with the moral
order of the world. It is customary to speak of Fichte's idealism as
ethical, or as subjective: and so long as these words are understood,
no harm is done. But to call it subjective does not mean that Fichte
was so far beside himself as to believe the world was only a picture
or a function of his individual brain. It means that he throws the
weight too much on the side of subjectivity. The Absolute is, for him
in his first stage, described as an Absolute Ego--and thereby the
natural world seems to be left without God: and subjective duty has too
exclusively thrown on it the weight of certifying objective existence.
The world, as we shall see, and have indeed indirectly gathered from
Kant, is too good and worthy to be the mere block of stone out of
which our duties are to be hewn. And similarly, to call Fichte an
ethical idealist is only to name him right, when we add that his were
idealist ethics. The world is not here merely that social decorum may
be maintained, and that puritanical virtue may pronounce that all is so
well, that thenceforth there shall be no cakes and ale, nor ginger be
hot in the mouth. The friend of the two brothers Schlegel, and their
remarkable wives, Dorothea and Caroline, touched hands with a social
group[12] which, for good and for ill, had emancipated itself from all
codes except that which bids
'To thine own self be true:
Thou canst not then be false to any man.'
To him, as to Kant, morality presented itself as autonomy, as the
dignity and grace of human nature in freest development; but to him,
more than to Kant, there commended itself the ideal of a city of
reason, a thoroughly socialised community[13], in which the welfare of
each would be an obligation on all, and the machinery of government
would be so marvellously self-corrective that all would do right and
all fare well.
Fichte's place in the annals of philosophy depends on his academic
treatises of 1794-98, and on his more popular works from the first
date down to 1808. In a study of the philosopher as a whole it would
be necessary to go beyond these dates, and take account of the
displacement which a development of thought, which there is no good
reason to suppose other than gradual, made in the scale of his earlier
views. But for our purposes that is out of the question. In justice,
however, it must be added that some things that seem inadequately
treated, some shortcomings in catholicity of mind, would appear in
another light if the later writings--not published till after Hegel's
death--were duly taken into account. But even at the close of the
century the advancing thought of Germany was seeking other leaders.
[Footnote 1: Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 399.]
[Footnote 2: Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 387.]
[Footnote 3: Leibniz, _Werke,_ ed. Gerhardt, iv. p. 392.]
[Footnote 4: Cf. notes and illustrations in vol. ii. p. 393.]
[Footnote 5: The _antithesis_ has two members: the partial ego, and the
non-ego, which confronts. The _synthesis_ is a putting together two
separate things, so as to correlate them; but it falls short of what
would be understood in some present usage by 'synthetic unity' which
has a certain mystical ring. It is important for a student of Schelling
or Hegel to remember this distinction of synthesis from 'absolute unity
e.g. Schelling, _Werke_, v. 43.]
[Footnote 6: _A = A_ is the more purely logical formula: _I=I_ presents
it as a personal and metaphysical identity. The _A_, which is _-A,_ is
to be distinguished from the _A_ which is opposed to _not-A._ But it is
Fichte's standpoint to insist on their being one Ego.]
[Footnote 7: To give this interpretation of the larger Ego as Life and
Blessedness is to assume that the teaching, e. g. of the _Anweisung zum
Seligen Leben,_ is the logical deepening of the earlier language about
the Ego.]
[Footnote 8: Cf. the description of mind as 4 a bundle of impressions.']
[Footnote 9: Especially given in the Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der
Wiss. (_Werke,_ i. 331). Of course Fichte goes through a corresponding
'deduction' of the emotional or moral nature. Schelling (_System des
transcend. Idealismus_) works out the 'deduction' still more at length.]
[Footnote 10: Fichte, _Werke_, i. 286.]
[Footnote 11: Ibid. ii. 261.]
[Footnote 12: It is perhaps hardly necessary to say that the state of
affairs alluded to, which has its literary memorials in F. Schlegel's
_Lucinde_, and in the warm defense of that book by Scheiermacher, was
only a passing experiment in which a high-strung idealism amid a lax
society sought for truth at all costs and dared a noble lie.]
[Footnote 13: In the _Geschlossener Handelstaat_ (of 1800), the
'classical' document of characteristic German Socialism in its earlier
and idealist phase.]