The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (40 page)

There remains the worry that transcendentalism is based on an illusion. Someone who has made this choice in favour of transcendentalism can always take a critical step back and ask a version of Descartes’ Reflective Question (see
Ch. 1
, §3). That is, he can always ask himself why the sheer
fact that he could not help making this choice, and hence cannot now help regarding it as the right choice, should mean that it really is the right choice. Fichte would be the first to acknowledge the force of this question. He would see the dialectical situation in Kantian terms. We can none of us help thinking of ourselves as free. Nor, therefore, can we ultimately help making this corresponding sense of things, even if what we are really thereby doing is using concepts (which may indeed be confused concepts) merely regulatively. The fact remains that, within the security of our unprincipled choice, everything makes sense. And that is as much as we can expect from any attempt, at this level of generality, to make sense of things. Here, in conclusion, is Fichte again:

If even a single person is completely convinced of his philosophy, and at all hours alike; if he is utterly at one with himself about it; if his free judgment in philosophizing, and what life obtrudes upon him, are perfectly in accord; then in this person philosophy has completed its circuit and attained its goal. (I, 512)

Appendix: Shades of Fichte in Kant

I have tried to give some indication of how Fichte’s transcendentalism arises out of Kant’s. I also mentioned Fichte’s own conviction that the former is true to the spirit of the latter. But what did Kant himself think?

We do not need to speculate. Kant was famously prompted by a reviewer of a book on transcendental philosophy to answer this very question. The reviewer wrote:

Fichte has realized what the
Critique
proposed, carrying out systematically the transcendental idealism which Kant projected. How natural therefore is the public’s desire that the originator of the
Critique
declare openly his opinion of the work of his worthy pupil! (quoted in Kant (
1999
), p. 560, n. 1, emphasis removed)

In an open letter, Kant responded as follows:

In response to the solemn challenge made to me …, I hereby declare that I regard Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre
as a totally indefensible system…. I am so opposed to metaphysics, as defined according to
Fichtean
principles, that I have advised him, in a letter, to turn his fine literary gifts to the problem of applying the
Critique of Pure Reason
rather than squander them in cultivating fruitless sophistries….

There is an Italian proverb: May God protect us especially from our friends, for we shall manage to watch out for our enemies ourselves. (‘Declaration Concerning Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre
’, dated 7
August 1799, in Kant (
1999
), 12:370–371, emphasis in original, some emphasis removed)

That is pretty unequivocal.

Nonetheless, it is not difficult to find passages in Kant’s writings that testify to Fichte’s sense of his own discipleship. There are frequent uses of strikingly Fichtean language
³³
– albeit these are often of relatively superficial significance, since closer inspection often reveals that, although Kant is using Fichtean language, he is using it in a non-Fichtean way.
³⁴
More significant are passages in which Kant adumbrates Fichte’s system by signalling goals which Fichte later pursued and which for Kant remained goals only. For example, in his
Critique of Practical Reason
Kant spoke of ‘the expectation of perhaps being able some day to attain insight into the unity of the whole pure rational faculty (theoretical as well as practical) and to derive everything from one principle’ (Kant (
1996c
), 5:91), the very expectation that Fichte took himself to have realized. Most significant of all, however, are notes that Kant left behind after his death.
³⁵
These notes were for a book on which he had been working for the last decade of his life and which he himself described as his
chef d’oeuvre
. They show him to have been engaged in an absorbing combination of reassessment and development of his own most fundamental ideas, but also, more to the point, to have been drawn closer and closer to Fichte’s vision of a self-positing, other-positing subject.
³⁶

Kant argued in these notes that the subject’s self-consciousness, which is consciousness of itself
as free
, requires that it appear to itself in a certain way, or, more specifically, that it ‘constitute itself’ as an empirical object. The subject does this by, among other things, constituting space and time, along with various conditions of their occupation. Kant also came to regard the concept of a thing in itself as an idea of reason that the subject uses to represent its own fundamental nature and its own fundamental activity. Likewise, for that matter, the concept of God. The subject constitutes itself as a free agent, capable of putting pure reason to practical use by doing its duty. But it also constitutes itself as an animal, with countervailing inclinations. And it makes sense of the obligation to suppress these countervailing inclinations by casting its duty as that which God commands. It also comes to regard itself,
qua
human being, as uniting God and the world. For, inasmuch as the human being is an animal, he is
located in the world; inasmuch as he is free, God is located in him. In one pithy sentence towards the end of his notes Kant summarized his entire train of thought as follows:

Transcendental philosophy is the act of consciousness whereby the subject becomes the originator of itself and, thereby, of the whole object of technical-practical and moral-practical reason in one system – ordering all things in
God. (Kant (
1993
), 21:78 and p. 245)

Kant looked more Fichtean, in some of his writings, than Fichte.
³⁷

1
‘Critical philosophy’ is a name that Kant himself gave to his system: see Kant (
2002a
), 4:383, and cf. Kant (
1998
), A855/B883.

2
In removing the capitalization I am following G.A. Cohen, who writes, ‘The capitals are translators’ impertinences. German orthography requires that every noun be capitalized, not just names of grand entities …, but … names of very mundane entities, such as “finger-nail” and “pig”. German philosophers writing in German … are unable to do what translators represent them as obsessionally doing’ (Cohen (
1978
), p. 5, n. 1).

3
Schelling (
1993
).

4
Schopenhauer (
1969a
) and (
1969b
). (But ‘variation of’ is crucial here. Among the many fundamental differences between Kant and Schopenhauer, mention should be made of Schopenhauer’s dissociation of the will from both freedom and rationality.)

5
For two outstanding overviews of German philosophy in the immediate aftermath of Kant, see Copleston (
1963
),
Ch. 1
, and Gardner (
1999
), pp. 331–341. On p. 341 of the latter, Sebastian Gardner emphasizes another part of the impetus to supersede Kant: not just to overcome the instability in his system but to answer questions that it leaves open, e.g. about the nature of freedom and about why we have the
a priori
intuitions and
a priori
concepts that we have.

6
Cf.
Vocation
, pp. 88–89; and see further §4.

Note: throughout this chapter I use the following abbreviations for Fichte’s works:
Foundations
for Fichte (
1992
);
Gesamtausgabe
for Fichte (
1964
– );
Vocation
for Fichte (
1956
); and
Wissenschaftslehre
for Fichte (
1982
). All unaccompanied references are to
Wissenschaftslehre
, and they are given in the form of the pagination in the edition by I.H. Fichte as indicated in the margin of that work.

7
See e.g.
Ch. 1
, n. 7;
Ch. 2
, §6; and the comments about concept creation in
Ch. 4
, §5.

8
This is in effect the rejection of the third, Cartesian option.

9
At I, 438, he remarks that Berkeley’s system, which is a paradigm of idealism, is dogmatic.

10
In Fichte’s variation, as we shall see in the next section, the subject is said to be an ‘act’ rather than an object.

11
Cf. Martin (
1997
),
Ch. 2
, §3, esp. pp. 41–42.

12
See esp.
Ch. 12
on Quine. (But see also the important qualification in n. 5 of that chapter.)

13
See e.g. Kant (
1998
), Bxxxv.

14
‘Arguably’, because there are some anti-Kantian writers of the time who cheerfully apply the term (in a more or less Kantian sense) to themselves: cf. the quotation by J.A. Eberhard, from
Philosophisches Magazin
, Vol. 1, which Kant gives in Kant (
2002b
), 8:187.

15
In raising the question ‘Why?’, I do not mean to impugn the original point that the choice between the two alternatives is unprincipled. Even on Fichte’s own conception there is nothing in what follows with the suasive power to shift the naturalist. We shall come back to this point, and its significance, in §4.

16
Cf.
Vocation
, pp. 18–20. Note that ‘in the relevant sense’ is an important qualification, since, as we saw in
Ch. 2
, §3, Spinoza distinguished between what he called ‘free will’, which he did not believe in, and what he called ‘freedom’, which he did. Fichte is concerned with something more like the former.

17
Cf. I, 434, where he says that ‘a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it.’

18
Cf. Kant (
1998
), A129, where Kant writes that ‘all objects with which we can occupy ourselves are all in me, i.e., determinations of my identical self.’ Cf. also the opening section of Schopenhauer (
1969a
), in which Schopenhauer identifies as the most certain truth that ‘everything that exists for knowledge, and hence the whole of this world, is only object in relation to the subject, perception of the perceiver, in a word, representation’ (p. 3).

19
Not that this more direct route to transcendental idealism is entirely foreign to Kant. Consider the following notable passage from Kant (
1996b
): ‘No subtle reflection is required to make the following remark …: that all representations which come to us involuntarily (as do those of the senses) enable us to cognize objects only as they affect us and we remain ignorant of what they may be in themselves…. Even as to himself, the human being cannot claim to cognize what he is in himself through the cognizance he has by inner sensation…. [But] a human being … finds in himself a capacity by which he distinguishes himself from all other things, … and that is
reason
…. [This indicates] a spontaneity so pure that it thereby goes far beyond anything that sensibility can ever afford it…. Because of this a rational being must regard himself
as intelligence …
as belonging not to the world of sense but to the world of understanding’ (4:450–452, emphasis in original).

20
There is no
locus classicus
for this. The development occupies pretty much the whole of
Wissenschaftslehre
. I shall have more to say about it in the next section. We shall see in particular that the term ‘posit’ has to be interpreted in a very distinctive way.

21
Note that Kant did not deny that I have an intuition of myself in the sense of an intuition of my body: see the rest of the paragraph (esp. the footnote) from which the passage just quoted is taken.

22
The original has ‘noumena’ where I have inserted ‘things in themselves’. But I do not think that I have done violence to Kant’s intentions. See further ibid., B410; and for the relation between noumena and things in themselves see ibid., B306–307.

23
See §§8 and 9 of the previous chapter for clarification of the ‘thick’/‘thin’ distinction.

24
The first parenthetical qualification is intended to accommodate the fact that Fichte also sometimes uses the term ‘self-consciousness’ to refer to a mediated knowledge of the self, more akin to what Kant would call knowledge of the self as it appears; see e.g. I, 277. The second parenthetical qualification is included for reasons that should become clear in due course.