The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (38 page)

That Fichte does often represent the dialectic from the standpoint of the first alternative is strikingly illustrated by some remarks that he makes concerning Spinoza. As I emphasized in
Chapter 2
, Spinoza is a champion of the immanent. But from the standpoint of transcendentalism he has no title to that claim. From that standpoint, to cast the knowing subject as a mere part of the knowable world is, if not to eliminate the knowing subject altogether, then to cast the knowable world at large as essentially independent of it and
ipso facto
transcendent. ‘In the critical system,’ Fichte explains,

a thing is what is posited in the self; in the dogmatic, it is that wherein the self is itself posited: critical philosophy is thus
immanent
, since it posits everything in the self; dogmatism is
transcendent
, since it goes beyond the self. So far as dogmatism can be consistent, Spinozism is its most logical outcome. (I, 120, emphasis in original)

Such bias is very revealing.

The truth is, although Fichte talks in terms of a basic choice here, he takes only one of the two alternatives to be viable. He sees no way of making naturalistic sense of the knowing willing subject. Fichte takes naturalism to include what I dubbed in the previous chapter the Causal Principle, the principle that whatever happens in nature has a cause (
Vocation
, pp. 8–10). And it is in terms of that principle, Fichte argues, that naturalism ‘wishes to explain [the] constitution of intellect’ (I, 436). But this is a task to which he thinks the principle is quite inadequate.

Why?
¹⁵
Suppose we grant Fichte both of these things: that naturalism includes the Causal Principle and that it seeks to explain the constitution of intellect in terms of that principle (neither of which is unassailable – unless simply and unhelpfully written into the very definition of naturalism). Even so, what prevents it from succeeding? Is Fichte perhaps assuming, with what the naturalist might regard as undue deference to Kant, that the only causal laws that naturalism can acknowledge are causal laws of a mechanical kind that preclude any free rational agency?

Certainly, freedom and rationality are crucial to Fichte’s understanding of this issue. But it is not really a question of what sort of causal laws are involved. Whether naturalism acknowledges only causal laws that are mechanical or allows also for beings that ‘govern themselves on their own account and in accordance with the laws of their own nature’ (I, 437, adapted from singular to plural), whether it acknowledges only causal laws that are highly general or allows also for local laws whose instances can appear random, whether it sees causal laws as being of a robust Kantian
kind or of a more anaemic Humean kind, it can never, in Fichte’s view, do justice to that primordial exercise of ‘absolute, independent self-activity’ (
Vocation
, p. 84) which constitutes the subject’s freedom and rationality and which is what allows the subject to be presented with objects in such a way that they become objects
for it
. He writes:

From this absolute spontaneity alone there arises the consciousness of the self. – Not by any law of nature, nor by any consequence of such laws, do we attain to reason; we achieve it by absolute freedom…. – In philosophy, therefore, we must necessarily start from the self…. [The] materialists’ project, of deriving the appearance of reason from natural laws, remains forever incapable of achievement. (I, 298; cf. I, 494–495)

But what entitles us to take for granted that we are free and rational in the relevant sense, or even that we have such ‘consciousness of the self’? Perhaps these are illusions, just as Spinoza took them to be.
¹⁶

Fichte’s response to this objection indicates once again the radical extent to which this whole exercise is, for him, a practical exercise. Just as Kant held that we cannot act ‘except under the idea of freedom’ (see §6 of the previous chapter), so too Fichte holds that we have no choice, ultimately, but to take for granted our own freedom, our own rationality, and our own selfhood (in the relevant senses). I said earlier that, for Fichte, only the first alternative is viable. That literally means that only the first alternative can live. I might also have said that only the first alternative can properly
be lived
.
¹⁷
‘Nothing is more insupportable to me,’ insists Fichte, ‘than to exist merely by another, for another, and through another’ (
Vocation
, p. 84). ‘
Spinoza
,’ he further insists, ‘… could only
think
his philosophy, not
believe
it, for it stood in the most immediate contradiction to his necessary conviction in daily life, whereby he was bound to regard himself as free and independent’ (I, 513, emphasis in original).

Very well; suppose we grant Fichte the unliveability of the second alternative. Now there is a new concern. Why should the first alternative take the form of a Kantian idealism? Kant’s own reasons for accepting such an idealism were complex. They involved the synthetic
a priori
character of our knowledge and the inability of pure reason to address certain metaphysical questions without lapsing into contradiction. Does Fichte believe that some
version of transcendental idealism can be derived merely from ‘consciousness of the self’?

In a way he does. Taking ‘the intelligence’ as a basic datum, and, more to the point, as the only basic datum, Fichte sees the primary metaphysical task as being to explain our experience and knowledge of other things within that framework. ‘The immediate consciousness of myself,’ he writes, ‘is … the … condition of all other consciousness; and I know a thing only in so far as I know that I know it; no element can enter into the latter cognition which is not contained in the former’ (
Vocation
, p. 37, transposed from the second person to the first person).
¹⁸
But since this involves a fundamental contrast between the immediacy with which the self is known and the mediacy, within the framework of such self-knowledge, with which other things are known, precisely what it is is a kind of transcendental idealism.

There is one particularly interesting illustration of the dialectic here when Fichte, finding himself unable to doubt the Causal Principle (which is not a prerogative of naturalism), concludes that it must be an item of knowledge that derives from his own prescription of ‘laws to being and its relations’ (
Vocation
, pp. 54–55). In effect, then, he argues from a kind of transcendental idealism to the existence of synthetic
a priori
knowledge, where Kant, of course, argued in the other direction.
¹⁹

The important point, however, is that Fichte adopts a system that is at root thoroughly Kantian. The urgent question, for us, is how this system assumes, in Fichte’s hands, a
form that seems in so many respects so un-Kantian.

3. Fichte’s System I: The Subject’s Intuition of Itself

The system seems un-Kantian inasmuch as it seems a prime instance of the discredited third option. In Fichte’s developed system there is an infinite self, whose infinite activity involves, first, the positing of itself; second, the positing of a finite field of activity distinct from itself in which it is to act; and third, the positing of a finite self set over against and in opposition to this non-self.
²⁰
Be the detailed interpretation of this as it may, it looks like just the sort of transcendent metaphysics that Kant was trying to
combat.

In a way the appearances are very misleading. In a way they are not at all misleading.

Before we disentangle these, it will be helpful to reconsider the tensions within Kant’s own system that we considered in the previous chapter. These showed Kant, willy-nilly, having to acknowledge some basic substantive truths about things in themselves, truths concerning the knowing willing subject and its spectacles: for instance, that the spectacles make an extraconceptual contribution to some of the subject’s
a priori
knowledge, so that the knowledge counts as synthetic, and that the subject can put pure reason to practical use in accord with the demands of freedom, what Kant called ‘the sole fact of pure reason’. There is also of course the very fact that the subject exists. Not only did Kant have to acknowledge this fact; he also had to acknowledge its immediate accessibility to each of us. For it is something of which each of us is directly aware through self-consciousness. Kant felt the tension. In his
Critique of Practical Reason
he conceded that the subject is ‘conscious of himself as a thing in itself’ (Kant (
1996c
), 5:97). In his
Critique of Pure Reason
he tried to forestall the threat that this posed to his system, and in particular to his principle that there can be no substantive knowledge of things in themselves, by denying that such self-consciousness involved any intuition of the self, or, therefore, that it delivered substantive knowledge of the self. He wrote, ‘I am conscious of myself not as I appear to myself, nor
as
I am in myself, but only
that
I am. This
representation
is a
thinking
, not an
intuiting
’ (Kant (
1998
), B157, emphasis in original).
²¹
And later in the same work he gave the following succinct explanation for why he had been forced to say this:

It would be … the only stumbling block to our entire critique, if it were possible to prove
a priori
that all thinking beings are in themselves
thinking substances, …
and that they are conscious of their existence as detached from all matter
. For in this way we would have taken a step beyond the sensible world, entering into the field of [things in themselves]. (B409, emphasis added)
²²

The problem is that our self-consciousness, like our awareness of the sole fact of pure reason, seems to be too ‘thick’ to be dismissed as mere empty thinking, or thinking in which concepts are exercised without intuitions – just as, by Kant’s enforced reckoning, it is too ‘thin’ to merit the title of substantive knowledge.
²³
Kant was again accrediting us with a distinctive mode of access to things in themselves which, by his very own lights, makes no real sense to us (see §9 of the previous chapter).

Fichte’s reaction to this problem is, in effect, simply to concede that there is self-consciousness (of a sort) which delivers substantive knowledge (of a sort) concerning an ultimate feature of reality.
²⁴
There
is
an intuition of the self, as it is in itself. This intuition provides the very framework for transcendentalism.

That already looks distinctly un-Kantian. But Fichte goes further. He characterizes this intuition as an ‘intellectual’ intuition. Kant repeatedly insisted that no such thing was available to finite creatures such as us.

By an ‘intellectual’ intuition Kant meant an intuition such as we might attribute to God, an intuition which does not consist in the passive reception of objects, but consists rather in the active creation of them, and which, even without the aid of concepts to think about its objects, already constitutes knowledge of them.
²⁵
Fichte likewise insists that ‘my immediate consciousness that I act,’ which is what he is happy to characterize as my intellectual intuition, ‘is that whereby I know something because I do it’ (I, 463). And he assimilates this to my consciousness of the demands of morality, which dictate how I
ought
to act, thereby further calling to mind Kant’s sole fact of pure reason, to which Kant himself, however, denied us any kind of intuitive access. Already, then, we can see important respects in which there is, genuinely, a departure from Kant.

But this requires immediate qualification. Fichte, who is adamant that he is being true to the spirit of Kant’s critical philosophy if not to the letter of it (e.g. I, 420), insists that his own use of the expression ‘intellectual intuition’ is different from Kant’s. As he explains:

in the Kantian terminology, all intuition is directed to existence of some kind …; intellectual intuition would thus be the immediate consciousness of a nonsensuous entity; the immediate consciousness of the thing-in-itself…. The intellectual intuition alluded to in [my system] refers, not to existence at all, but rather to action, and simply finds no mention in Kant…. Yet it is nonetheless possible to point out also in the Kantian system the precise point at which it should have been mentioned. Since Kant, we have all heard, surely, of the categorical imperative [i.e. the fundamental precept of all morality]? Now what sort of consciousness is that? … [It] is undoubtedly immediate, but not sensory; hence it is precisely what I call ‘intellectual intuition’. (I, 471–472)

Fichte is therefore talking about the subject’s consciousness of the principles that direct it in its own purest, primordial agency. That is, he is talking about the subject’s consciousness of the conditions of its very essence. For the subject is not to be thought of as an ‘object’ at all. It is, as Fichte elsewhere puts it, ‘an act’ rather than ‘something subsistent’ (I, 440; cf. the rest of ‘First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge’, §7). Its intellectual intuition is creative, just as Kant took intellectual intuition to be, but it does not create objects. Rather, it creates the conditions for its very own creativity. It creates itself.
²⁶