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From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: "Fichte is one of the major figures in German philosophy in the period between Kant and Hegel. Initially considered one of Kant’s most talented followers, Fichte developed his own system of transcendental philosophy, the so-called "Wissenschaftslehre." Through technical philosophical works and popular writings Fichte exercised great influence over his contemporaries, especially during his years at the University of Jena. His influence waned towards the end of his life, and Hegel’s subsequent dominance relegated Fichte to the status of a transitional figure whose thought helped to explain the development of German idealism from Kant’s Critical philosophy to Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit. Today, however, Fichte is more correctly seen as an important philosopher in his own right, as a thinker who carried on the tradition of German idealism in a highly original form."
Fichte presented his first and most illustrious outline of philosophy in the "Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge) in1794. The title is ambiguous since it seems to refer to the foundation rather than to the Science of Knowledge itself, which remained a mere promise throughout his writings of the 1790s, and its final presentation was constantly deferred. For Fichte, the “Science of Knowledge” is another name for philosophy. His avowed goal is to express the fundamental principle of all philosophy, including Kantian philosophy, which was for him the highest state ever achieved by thought. For Fichte, Kant “nowhere dealt with the foundation of all philosophy.” The impetus for Fichte’s work came from Reinhold, his predecessor in Jena whose elementary philosophy had promised such a foundation.
Fichte writes to Reinhold in the spring of 1795: “you, like Kant, have given humanity something it will always retain. He showed that one must begin with an investigation of the subject [i.e., the I]: you showed that the investigation must proceed from a single first principle. The truth which you have uttered is eternal.”
Fichte's fundamental first principle is the Tathandlung. In German, the terms Tat and Handlung are synonymous. The expression is therefore somewhat redundant (as is the title of his famous book Science of Knowledge). Tat means an action, and Handlung an activity. Translated literally, the idea of Tathandlung thus expresses the activity of an action. It only becomes meaningful if it is opposed to Tatsache, which Reinhold used to describe the supposedly first fact that was to be the principle of elementary philosophy. Schulze had argued that no fact can be an absolute point of departure. Every fact, presupposes some more original act.
Rather than start from a fact, which will always be secondary because it is posited by some other thing, why not begin, asks Fichte, from an absolutely primary act or “activity” such as a Tathandlung? Fichte’s idea is the expression of the revolutionary period when newly politically liberated citizens became aware of their power and rights. Fichte was thus the metaphysician of this emancipatory movement. The original activity consists, for him, in a pure act of self-positing, which is both subject and object of its activity. This self-positing is for Fichte the most elementary experience of the I.
According to Fichte, what happens when one says ‘I’ is this: "One supposes that one posits oneself, and that one posits oneself as subject-object."
Now, this notion of activity, which is immediately obvious, has powerful metaphysical connotations: Aristotle had said that God was pure activity (energeia), whereas Leibniz spoke of the monad’s “original activity.” Fichte elevates this "Tathandlung" to the level of first unconditioned principle (erster, schlechthin unbedingter Grundsatz):
"Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, it is to be an absolutely primary principle. It is intended to express that Act [Tathandlung] which does not and cannot appear among the empirical states of our consciousness, but rather lies at the basis of all consciousness and alone makes it possible."
In Science of Knowledge, everything is deduced from this principle that expresses an “original activity.” It is in this way, says Fichte in a preface written in 1798, that it can be called “metaphysics,” but only if metaphysics is not a “theory of the so-called things-in-themselves, but … a genetic deduction of what we find in our consciousness.”
But, adds Fichte, the expression metaphysics is inappropriate here. The Science of Knowledge is not metaphysics; it is even more fundamental. Metaphysics, he says, is supposed to explain “the ordinary point of view of natural understanding.” The critique (or the Science of Knowledge) goes beyond metaphysics and attempts to explain it.
There are therefore three distinct levels to consider here:
the common understanding (or natural point of view),
metaphysics, and
critique (or the Science of Knowledge).
According to Fichte, Kant remained on the level of metaphysics, which seeks to explain the natural point of view, the one that admits of the existence of things-in-themselves that are constituted independently from consciousness. The Science of Knowledge is more reflective: it seeks to explain the origin of these representations by deducing them from consciousness.
The Science of Knowledge radicalizes Kant’s transcendental question: By what right (quid juris?) is there something like scientific knowledge that has universal validity? According to Fichte, Kant shows that there can be objective validity only for the subject or an I, which is the subject of science. Fichte’s I is thus the heir to Kant’s transcendental subject that sought to anchor objectivity in the knowing subject.
If philosophy is to be rigorous, it must start from an “absolutely unconditioned first principle.… [that] lies at the basis of all consciousness and makes it possible,” the Tathandlung. What is the Tathandlung if not a radical self-positing of itself? The I is because it posits itself. Hence, Fichte’s first principle: the I posits its own Being, or I = I (the I is the act of positing itself). But the I does not exist alone. It is unthinkable without its opposite: the not-I, which must then also be posited by the I. Fichte thus arrives at his second principle: the I is opposed by the not-I.
The two main principles of the Science of Knowledge are the I and the not-I. But how is their relation to be thought without one canceling out the other? This is the birth of what can already be called “dialectic” thought, which tries to think the I and the not-I together without one annihilating the other. The I and the not-I must therefore reciprocally limit each other. The concept of limit includes that of divisibility. The I and the not-I must be posited as divisible. Fichte thus arrives at his third major principle: The “I” opposes in the “I” a divisible “not-I” to the divisible “I.”
In the “I,” I oppose a divisible “not-I” to the divisible “I.” No philosophy goes further than this; but every thorough-going philosophy should go back to this point; and so far as it does so, it becomes a Science of Knowledge. Everything that is to emerge hereafter in the system of the human mind must be derivable from what we have established here.
From this reciprocal determination of the I and the not-I, which is the basis for the Science of Knowledge, it is now possible to think the unity of the two main parts of philosophy. In theoretical philosophy, the I posits itself as determined by the not-I, and in practical philosophy, the I posits itself as determining the not-I. Thus beneath the Kantian dualism of practical and theoretical philosophy a common and federating principle is discovered: the principle of the unity of the I and the not-I. This principle is posited as an irreducible requirement of the I, even if its realization amounts to an infinite aspiration (unendliches Streben), says Fichte using terms heralding Romanticism. Yet, such a synthesis of the I and the not-I must be the work of the I, and even of the “absolute I.”
“Now the essence of the critical philosophy consists in this, that an absolute ‘I’ [absolutes Ich] is postulated as wholly unconditioned and incapable of determination by any higher thing; and if this philosophy is derived in due order from the above principle, it becomes Science of Knowledge.”
Now suddenly the I appears as an “absolute I.” The expression will become a political program for German Idealism. But hadn’t Fichte posited that the I was determined by the not-I, and was therefore determinable and far from absolute? Certainly, answers Fichte, but the I must recognize its own position in the not-I. The identity of the I with the not-I can be conceived as an idea or an ideal. If it is not yet realized, then so it must become. How? By the practical action of the I, which will work to shape the form of the not-I.
With this aspect of his philosophy, Fichte’s metaphysical reflections become not only practical, but also political and revolutionary. The I is confronted with a world that resists it. But didn’t the I posit the not-I? Isn’t the I responsible for its imposed limits? To recognize this is to begin to overcome alienation. A world suffused with the rationality of the I then appears as a possible practical, even legal, goal.
Fichte’s ideas fascinated his contemporaries and launched the metaphysics of German Idealism, founded on the idea of an “absolute I” and understood as a thirst for freedom. The idea summed up the new spirit of Kantian philosophy and brought the latter to a level of systematization that Kant had not achieved. Fichte's metaphysical principles gave a rational basis to the spirit of the Enlightenment. Kant had defined Aufklärung [Enlightenment] as the “human being’s emergence from his self-imposed inferiority.”
The concept of the not-I provided a striking model of the experience of limitation and finitude. But Fichte also sees the human tendency - its infinite ambition (unendliches Streben) - to overcome its limitations, which can be realized through practical action. The philosophy of the future was not the old metaphysics, but a proud and rigorous Science of Knowledge. Its first principle (the absolute I) became synonymous with freedom.
The French Revolution was the first practical realization of the ideal of the identity between the I and the not-I, an event that Fichte hailed with great enthusiasm. The “subjects” finally started to overthrow the tyranny of the not-I.
The older Fichte becomes more restrained, reeling under various criticisms: that he is an atheist, that his system is just empty self-reflective subjectivism, or "subjective idealism." Kant wrote a devastating critique of Fichte in 1799, to which Fichte never officially responded. Here is a quote from the later Fichte, where he acknowledges that science is the prisoner of its images and representations and cannot claim to reach Being itself or the absolute:
You wanted to know about your knowledge.… What comes to be in and through knowledge is only knowledge. But all knowledge is only a depicting [Alles Wissen aber ist nur Abbildung], and in it something is always demanded which should correspond to the image. This demand can be satisfied by no knowledge, and a system of knowledge is necessarily a system of mere images, without any reality, meaning, and purpose. (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Peter Peuss (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 64–65 (SW, II:246).
By: Eckhart Förster, in: Beyer, B., & Förster, E. (2022). Grenzen der Erkenntnis?: Untersuchungen zu Kant und dem Deutschen Idealismus (Spekulation und Erfahrung) (J. Haag & D. Emundts (eds.); 1st ed.). frommann-holzboog. p. 314
Fichte’s own philosophy emerged from an examination of Reinhold’s Elementarphilosophie, more precisely, from a critical assessment of Reinhold’s claim that all philosophy can be grounded in a single, self-evident principle, the principle of consciousness. Reinhold’s first principle states that, for all consciousness, a representation is distinguished by a subject from an object and from the subject and is related to both. Fichte soon realized that this cannot be a first principle of philosophy. It already presupposes knowledge the subject must have of itself so that it can refer a representation either to itself as its own or to an object, and also distinguish itself from this representation. Such self-knowledge cannot be representational or propositional in the sense of Reinhold’s principle. As Fichte realized, Reinhold’s principle only expresses the empirical unity of consciousness and hence pre- supposes subject and object as already existing, or understood, parts. This empirical unity thus itself presupposes an underlying ideal unity from which subject and object must have evolved. In fact, all intentional consciousness about something – all propositional consciousness – presupposes and is made possible through something that can no longer be characterized as propositional consciousness, but only as a presuppositionless activity that Fichte called Tathandlung. All his subsequent efforts are directed at elucidating this original activ- ity. Consequently, to understand what he is after, reading his books is not enough: one has to produce the activity in oneself and become aware of it, that is, observe it. Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre is as much a participatory science as is Goethe’s: unless one does it, one doesn’t get it. As Fichte wrote to Reinhold in a letter of July 2, 1795: »What I wish to convey is something that cannot at all be said, nor comprehended [begriffen], but only intuited [angeschaut]: what I say has no other purpose than to guide the reader in such a way that the desired intuition develops in him.«
Arthur Schopenhauer: "Fichte who, because the thing-in-itself had just been discredited, at once prepared a system without any thing-in-itself. Consequently, he rejected the assumption of anything that was not through and through merely our representation, and therefore let the knowing subject be all in all or at any rate produce everything from its own resources. For this purpose, he at once did away with the essential and most meritorious part of the Kantian doctrine, the distinction between a priori and a posteriori and thus that between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself. For he declared everything to be a priori, naturally without any evidence for such a monstrous assertion; instead of these, he gave sophisms and even crazy sham demonstrations whose absurdity was concealed under the mask of profundity and of the incomprehensibility ostensibly arising therefrom. Moreover, he appealed boldly and openly to intellectual intuition, that is, really to inspiration." — Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. I, §13
Søren Kierkegaard: Our whole age is imbued with a formal striving. This is what led us to disregard congeniality and to emphasize symmetrical beauty, to prefer conventional rather than sincere social relations. It is this whole striving which is denoted by — to use the words of another author — Fichte's and the other philosophers' attempts to construct systems by sharpness of mind and Robespierre's attempt to do it with the help of the guillotine; it is this which meets us in the flowing butterfly verses of our poets and in Auber's music, and finally, it is this which produces the many revolutions in the political world. I agree perfectly with this whole effort to cling to form, insofar as it continues to be the medium through which we have the idea, but it should not be forgotten that it is the idea which should determine the form, not the form which determines the idea. We should keep in mind that life is not something abstract but something extremely individual. We should not forget that, for example, from a poetic genius' position of immediacy, form is nothing but the coming into existence of the idea in the world, and that the task of reflection is only to investigate whether or not the idea has gotten the properly corresponding form. Form is not the basis of life, but life is the basis of form. Imagine that a man long infatuated with the Greek mode of life had acquired the means to arrange for a building in the Greek style and a Grecian household establishment — whether or not he would be satisfied would be highly problematical, or would he soon prefer another form simply because he had not sufficiently tested himself and the system in which he lived. But just as a leap backward is wrong (something the age, on the whole, is inclined to acknowledge), so also a leap forward is wrong — both of them because a natural development does not proceed by leaps, and life's earnestness will ironize over every such experiment, even if it succeeds momentarily. — Søren Kierkegaard, Journals, "Our Journalistic Literature", 28 November 1835.