Chapter 3
The transition from Kant (like Leibniz, one of the first German idealists) to Fichte (the first post-Kantian German idealist) is influenced by idealists as well as non-idealists, and among the latter Reinhold, Maimon, and Schulze. Kantian constructivism inconsistently explains cognition on the basis of the supposed causal action of the mind-independent, uncognizable real on the transcendental subject. This is inconsistent since it assumes as an explanatory factor reality, which cannot be known and of which no account can be given. The critical philosophy relies on both the transcendental subject and the noumenal object to explain the phenomenal object of knowledge from a constructivist point of view. In formulating his own form of constructivism, Fichte improves on Kant’s cognitive approach, which he renders consistent in taking the subject as the sole explanatory factor—at the enormous price of being unable to account for the objectivity of cognition.
Kant is paradoxically both the main progenitor of post-Kantian German idealism—which arises through a series of reactions to the critical philosophy—as well as in a sense its heir through the qualified return to the critical philosophy in the rise of German neo-Kantianism after Hegel’s death. Since Kant did not pass from the scene until 1804, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the main post-Kantian German idealists, were already in the process of reacting to the critical philosophy before he died. Fichte’s first important publication, the Critique of All Revelation (1792), and the Foundations of the Science of Knowledge (1794)—arguably his most important treatise—both date from the first half of the 1790s. Schelling, though younger, began to publish even earlier as a teenager. His System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), which many believe is his single most important treatise, emerged at the turning of the century. Hegel’s initial philosophical text, the so-called Differenzschrift (1801), appeared immediately afterward.
The return to Kant occurred at a time when many observers thought post-Kantian German idealism had ended. After Hegel passed from the scene, post-Kantian German idealism rapidly came to an end in the qualified return to Kant brought about by Liebmann and others, and the associated rise of German neo-Kantianism. When German “idealism” ends depends on what this term means and whom one has in mind. Fichte died in 1814 and Hegel in 1831. Though Schelling did not die until 1854, it is unclear if, say, after the first decade of the nineteenth century, he should still be counted among the German idealists. If one thinks Schelling is the last major figure of German idealism, then it continues and reaches its peak after Hegel’s death. If one thinks it is not Schelling but Hegel, then, as the young Hegelians thought, German idealism ends with his passing. If on the contrary one identifies German idealism with cognitive constructivism, then it continues as a less focused approach to cognition widely diffuse in the contemporary debate.
According to Hegel, modern philosophy begins in independently existing thought freed from authority, or the so-called Protestant principle. Independent thought presupposes various forms of the modern conception of the subject due to Montaigne, Descartes, and others. Since Descartes is still strongly dependent on earlier thought, there is further development, but no clear break from medieval philosophy to the modern tradition. Though the Cartesian view of subjectivity strongly depends on earlier views, the focus changes in modern philosophy. The basically moral conception of the subject, which emerges in medieval thought in order to account for individual responsibility, changes radically in the modern effort to understand knowledge from the perspective of the subject.
An epistemic approach to the subject comes into the modern debate through Montaigne, Descartes, and others. In Descartes’s wake, the problem of the subject becomes key to modern philosophy, which is strongly influenced by the French thinker. This does not mean that there are only Cartesians among modern thinkers. Certainly, there are at least as many anti-Cartesians, who believe we need to distance ourselves from his insights, vocabulary, and concerns. Yet in different ways, modern cognitive theories with few exceptions follow the Cartesian insight that the road to objectivity necessarily passes through subjectivity. The difficulty, which affects all those who write after Descartes, lies in understanding subjectivity in a way that allows for objective cognition.
A philosophical inversion occurs in the critical philosophy. Through the Copernican turn, Kant suggests that we should not understand the cognitive subject as depending on the cognitive object, but rather understand the cognitive object as depending on the cognitive subject. A second philosophical inversion occurs in the transition from Kant to Fichte in the latter’s rethinking of the subject. This second philosophical inversion consists in two main points. First, what for Kant is the final piece in his transcendental deduction is for Fichte the initial element in his transcendental philosophy. Second, and as a result, Fichte rethinks the subject not as an epistemic principle but as a finite human being. In the process, the Kantian tension between the conditions of knowledge and philosophical anthropology—a tension present everywhere in his critical philosophy—is resolved in favor of Fichte’s clearly anthropological approach to cognition.
Kant, who anticipates what Husserl later calls psychologism, introduces a tacit distinction between the finite human and philosophical subjects. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously raises three questions about what one can know, should do, or may hope. In the Jäsche Logic, he later adds a fourth question: What is man? In a deep sense, Kant strives for, constantly approaches, but never finally reaches the real human subject, which is always out of reach. His three Critiques analyze three forms of human experience (theoretical, practical, and aesthetic) against the background of three forms of activity without ever being able to attain the unified human subject they presuppose. For Kant, the subject is the final element in his theory of knowledge, which it rather begins for Fichte. Thus Kant only deduces the transcendental philosophical subject as the last important element—the copingstone, as it were—of his analysis of knowledge. Fichte, who inverts the Kantian approach, begins from his conception of the subject. Unlike Kant, who formulates his account of the subject in transcendental epistemic terms, Fichte reformulates it from an anthropological perspective excluded by the critical philosophy. An anthropological perspective approach to knowledge is clearly rejected by Kant, for instance, in repeated objections to Locke’s so-called physiology.
The relation of Fichte to Kant—hence the relation of post-Kantian German idealism to Kantian idealism—is masked, even distorted by Fichte’s claims. Though an original thinker, Wolff was, and was also understood as, Leibniz’s disciple. Kant claims that Wolff was the greatest of the dogmatists. Yet after Kant, all the post-Kantian German idealists at least initially enter the philosophical debate in presenting themselves as disciples. Thus Fichte claims to be an authentic Kantian. Schelling claims to be an authentic Fichtean. And Hegel suggests, but never clearly claims, that he is an authentic Schellingian.
Toward Interpreting Fichte’s Position
Fichte is clearly a difficult philosopher to understand. This difficulty is due to a number of factors, including the availability of texts, his complex style, and the lack of agreement on even a general description of idealism, let alone German idealism. Thus there is confusion in the debate about whether he is an idealist, not an idealist (according to Philonenko), a romantic (according to Franks and Beiser), or perhaps something else.
These general factors affect the interpretation of all the main German idealists, including Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and, if he is an idealist, Marx as well. The grasp of Fichte’s position is further masked by three specific factors closely linked to his position: first, there is his consistent but misleading claim to be a “faithful” Kantian; second, there is the lack of agreement about even the basic thrust of Kant’s position; and third, there is the rapid evolution of Fichte’s position.
Fichte’s claim to be a faithful Kantian provides an important hint about what he intends to do in his own writings. This claim is often read literally, which has two consequences. On the one hand, such an approach masks Fichte’s considerable accomplishment, which should not be diminished either because he claims to be a disciple of another thinker, or because he is working in a field opened up by Kant. On the other hand, the claim to be a faithful Kantian can easily be refuted in pointing to basic differences between the views of Kant and Fichte. Yet it is probably better understood as pointing to Kant’s important influence on Fichte’s own effort to think through Kantian themes in employing closely Kantian language and Kantian distinctions in radically rethinking one way of understanding the critical philosophy.
The second factor is the deep enigma of how to understand the critical philosophy, which in turn impacts our understanding of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. Since Fichte consciously links his position to Kant’s, an understanding of the critical philosophy is a precondition for understanding Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. It is an understatement to say that, despite the enormous size of the Kant debate, we seem to be no closer to a consensus about it than at the time of post-Kantian German idealism. It is possible (in fact, probable) that Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, who were near contemporaries of Kant (especially Fichte and Hegel), were better readers of the critical philosophy than our contemporaries.
A final factor is the rapid evolution of Fichte’s position, both during his Jena period and after it. The nature of this evolution is masked by Fichte’s obsessive habit of employing the same term “Wissenschaftslehre” in the title of the sixteen or so versions of the basic position. This term, which refers to Fichte’s laudable pedagogical concern, suggests the basic continuity of the position while looking away from important differences. As with any important thinker, there is considerable continuity in Fichte’s position, but also important changes, in fact changes so important that a failure to take them into account undermines our grasp of Fichte’s position. Fichte, who follows Kant in this respect, is concerned with cognition. Further like Kant, Fichte’s normative conception of cognition turns on his original conception of the subject. His view of the subject, hence of cognition, changes as a result of the notorious Atheismusstreit, leading him to resign his position and to leave Jena. Fichte, who thinks the kind of philosophy one has depends on who one is, was forced by circumstances to adjust his theories in the face of immediate difficulties following from this controversy. He did this in later making the subject depend on God, which immediately undermined what is arguably the central insight of the Jena Wissenschaftslehre, or the claim that the subject depends only on itself. In discussing Fichte’s position, I will focus mainly on his early Jena period since this part of his oeuvre was more influential than his later writings and also since I believe his view was significantly weakened through the notorious Atheismusstreit.
Fichte on the Spirit and the Letter of the Critical Philosophy
Fichte is often not understood since his claim to be a Kantian is interpreted as requiring faithful allegiance if not to the letter, at least to the spirit of the position. Yet since there are deep tensions between the spirit and the letter of the critical philosophy, Kant’s epigones, including Fichte, are forced to choose. Fichte wisely eschews mere fidelity to the letter of the critical philosophy in striving to be faithful to its spirit. This accounts for his violent rejection of certain key aspects of Kant’s position (for instance, the thing in itself, or reality), while constantly, perhaps prudently, but certainly inaccurately (if fidelity to the letter is the criterion) proclaiming his Kantian orthodoxy.
Fichte’s position can be understood as an effort not only to call attention to Kant’s position by restating it in different language, but also to interpret, to criticize, and to carry the critical philosophy beyond the point at which Kant left it, which is clearly controversial. In interpreting Kant’s position, Fichte hints at the nature of his own position. Fichte’s so-called orthodox Kantianism is less an effort to call attention to the critical philosophy—though it is that as well—than a highly original effort to provide a further formulation of the critical philosophy that will solve deep difficulties by bringing the Copernican revolution to an end.
The justification for such an approach is provided in the critical philosophy. As already noted, Kant indicates both that nothing in the theory can be revised as well as that an original thinker often works with an idea that person knows how to use but often does not fully understand. Taken together, these indications suggest the position must still be perfected (as Reinhold thinks), or that it is already fully developed (as Maimon believes). This paradoxical view suggests a further point. Since theories are formulated to respond to perceived, still unresolved problems, someone who reacts to the critical philosophy should be able to carry it further than Kant, who claims to end philosophy.
Fichte suggests that he merely restates the critical philosophy in different terms since it has not been understood. In fact he transforms Kant’s position in rejecting doctrines inconsistent with its Copernican thrust. Fichte describes his aim as presenting the critical philosophy in independence of its author. In the mid-1790s in a philosophical context largely dominated by Kant, Fichte writes that his own “aim . . . is the total eradication and complete reversal of current modes of thought on these topics, so that . . . the object shall be posited and determined by the cognitive faculty, and not the cognitive faculty by the object” (SK, p. 4). This statement can be read as a clear claim to identify Kant’s position through the so-called Copernican reversal. It specifies the limits of Fichte’s own position as an independent restatement of the critical philosophy, a restatement faithful at least to its spirit.
On Fichte’s Reading of and Reaction to the Critical Philosophy
Fichte—who poses as an absolutely seamless Kantian (and, by implication, as the only one to comprehend Kant)—describes his aim as presenting the critical philosophy, whose central insight is the Copernican revolution, in independence of its author. In the early 1790s at a moment when the critical philosophy was the central theme, Fichte described his “aim [as] the total eradication and complete reversal of current modes of thought on these topics, so that . . . the object shall be posited and determined by the cognitive faculty, and not the cognitive faculty by the object” (SK, p. 4).
Fichte is correct about Kant’s central insight, the so-called Copernican turn, as well in attributing the view that the object is merely posited to Kant. The latter clearly says that the thing in itself or noumenon (his terms for mind-independent reality) can be thought, but not given in experience. Since all knowledge begins in experience, the uncognizable Kantian cognitive object is a mere hypothesis. Fichte’s term “posit” (setzen) can perhaps best be translated as “to hypothesize.” His use of this term suggests Kant’s analysis of the general possibility of knowledge rests on a number of assumptions. These include the crucial point that there is a mind-independent external world, which we cannot know, but which, together with the mind of the subject, is a main cause of which the phenomenal object or appearance is an effect. In stressing the mind’s determination of the cognitive object, Fichte insists perhaps even more than Kant on the practical role of the subject.
For Fichte, theory—which is not a priori in the Kantian sense—arises in order to account for the practical situation. This basic difference leads to many other differences, which can perhaps be grouped around the relation of theory and practice. Though Fichte suggests his position is an independent statement of Kant’s, his focus is very different from Kant’s. Kant claims in theory to have a priori knowledge about what must occur in practice, whereas Fichte claims to explain through theory what is given in practice.
This theme, which Marxists often regard as having been introduced by Marx, is central in different ways to Kant and Fichte, and no less so to Hegel. In different ways, this theme goes back in the Western tradition at least to Aristotle.1 We recall the latter’s insistence that ethics takes place within a political context. Kant’s austere theoretical approach limits his grasp of practice to what can be subsumed into theory. His inability to come to grips with practice, otherwise than in transforming it into mere theory, is visible on several levels. These include his conception of morality as necessarily following a self-prescribed but inflexible set of moral rules, which is the basis of his deontological approach to morality; his view of theory as containing practice; his preference for obedience over disobedience of any kind, hence his inability to justify revolutionary activity (though he admired the French Revolution, he could not find a way to participate in it within the limits of his position), and so on.
Kant’s entire cognitive perspective is focused on the seamless justification of an a priori, hence theoretical approach. Fichte’s is no less focused on a practical approach—more precisely, on a theoretical analysis of problems arising in practice. Kantian deontological morality is concerned with determining and in fact doing what is right, what one should do according to the inflexible laws of practical reason without regard to possible consequences or usefulness. Kant invokes practical reason that, since it alone chooses the maxim of its act without respect to tradition or other forms of heteronomy, is potentially revolutionary in obeying no law other than its own. Yet he deprives practical reason of the possibility of coming to grips with real-life situations, which can rarely if ever simply be reduced to applying an inflexible set of rules. Kant is concerned with noumenal freedom following from his conception of reality, or the thing in itself—freedom to choose to do what is right according to the moral law and neglecting the problem of freedom in the social context. Fichte, who simply abandons the thing in itself, is interested in real human freedom in a social context as following from the actions of finite men and women. Early in his career, Fichte took social stands on the importance of the French Revolution and freedom of expression, then later on a variety of concrete themes, including German nationalism. There is truth in the view that Fichte’s entire position turns on the problem of human freedom2 as well as on an authoritarian form of socialism closely related to Marx’s view.3
The crucial difference between Fichte and Kant concerning their very different approaches to the problem of theory and practice can be sharpened with respect to the subject. Kant inconsistently proposes views of the subject of theoretical and practical knowledge (based on types of activity) and aesthetics (based on what Kant calls taste). The accounts of the cognitive subject are admittedly chosen according to the requirements of an account of pure reason, and practical reason. The Kantian moral subject is required to act autonomously, hence in a way that, as Kant realizes, no human being has ever acted or could possibly ever act. On the contrary, the aesthetic subject, or finite human being, supposedly reacts to art objects in a manner potentially acceptable to everyone; that is, to everyone who has taste in the Kantian sense.
The difficulty comes to a head in the moral writings, including the second Critique and the Groundwork, where Kant can be read as “reducing” morality, or moral practice, to moral theory. His aim seems to be to ground theory in practice, a goal he addresses in a number of places, including the two introductions, published and unpublished by him, to the third Critique. Yet his argument tends in the opposite direction in suppressing the autonomy of practice that is taken up within theory. It is arguable that practice is always wider, hence richer than any theory about it, which, no matter how good it is and how wide its scope, is never entirely adequate. Kant makes the opposite argument. For practice in general, Kant believes there is no situation that cannot unambiguously be addressed solely on the theoretical plane. That is perhaps the central theme of the neglected, but important article on the relation of theory and practice that does not innovate but rather restates in broader form the argument earlier developed for moral phenomena, which is a type of practice.4
Fichte goes further down the same road in grounding theory in practice. Kant begins with theory before turning to practice; for instance, the concept of practical reason or morality he claims to deduce. Fichte, on the contrary, starts with concrete problems that arise on the practical plane. Foundationalist theories are invariably “linear” in reasoning on the basis of a supposedly fixed point (for Descartes, the cogito). Fichte opposes cognitive foundationalism on theoretical grounds—the inability to demonstrate a first principle—in basing his theory on practical considerations. In reacting to contemporary debate, he invokes circularity against Reinhold’s foundational linearity as the basic form of philosophical reason. As an anti-foundationalist, Fichte denies philosophy can ground itself in some initial starting point that like the Cartesian cogito is known to be true and from which the remainder of the theory follows. Fichte thinks that philosophy, as Hegel later suggests, is neither founded nor grounded. It rather depends on such pre-philosophical factors as who one is (see SK, §5, pp. 12–16). Kant, who begins on the a priori plane, insists that pure theory is always relevant to practice as such. He further implies that practice is wholly contained within theory. This suggests that in the critical philosophy there are—in fact, must be—wholly sufficient theoretical answers for any and all practical concerns. Fichte, on the contrary, contends that philosophy arises through the theoretical effort to respond to practical concerns before returning to the practical plane. In other words, for Fichte, philosophy is intrinsically circular in that practice calls forth theory, which in turn returns to practice.
Fichte’s Transcendental View of the Subject
In the critical philosophy, the cognitive subject is depicted as both passive and active: passive in receiving sensation and active in constructing a perceptual object. In Kant’s wake, Fichte simply drops the thing in itself in featuring an account of experience in which the cognitive subject is understood as solely active. In comparison to Kant, Fichte’s even more important innovation concerns the subject. He proposes, as Hegel points out, to explain experience through a new view of the subject as practically finite, constrained in its action by its surroundings, but theoretically infinite, or wholly unconstrained, hence forever suspended, as it were, between what is and what ought to be.
Kant’s view of the interaction of the transcendental subject and reality is a third-person causal account. In reacting against the critical philosophy, Fichte reformulates the Kantian view as a first-person account of the interaction of subject and object in a statement of the fundamental principles which begins the Science of Knowledge.
In the transcendental deduction, Kant depicts the subject as an abstract series of functions necessary to account for the possibility of experience and knowledge. According to the modern causal approach to perception, objects cause ideas in the mind that in turn supposedly justify a reverse, anti-Platonic cognitive inference from the idea to the mind-independent object. Kant departs from this model in suggesting external reality affects the subject, which in turn constructs empirical objects of perception and knowledge. He sketches his variation on this theme in his functional account of subjectivity. Fichte’s turn away from Kant’s functional account of subjectivity and toward a new concept of finite human being as the philosophical subject leads to novel accounts of ontology from a subjective point of view—philosophy as systematic but “ungrounded”—and to a view of cognitive claims as intrinsically circular.
In “The Aenesidemus Review,” the terminus a quo of his position, Fichte prepares the ground for a new theory of ontology in claiming all philosophy must be traced back to a single principle: the subject. He notes that what is most certain is the self, or “I am,” and then adds that “all that is not-I is for the I only.”5 Fichte’s suggestion that what is not the subject is only for it is a distant reformulation of the traditional Parmenidean conception of mind-independent reality as mind-dependent. The result is a new understanding of objectivity from the perspective of subjectivity.
In the critical philosophy, objectivity takes two incompatible forms: as the mind-independent external object, or thing in itself, as well as the mind-dependent cognitive object of experience and knowledge. In Fichte’s view, objectivity takes the single form of what is experienced in practice but understood theoretically as the result of the subject’s activity.
According to Fichte, the philosophical task consists in explaining experience, which he defines as “representations [Vorstellungen] accompanied by a feeling of necessity” (SK, p. 6). An explanation of experience requires an account of its ground in an object situated outside the possibility of experience (see SK, pp. 8–9). Kant’s regressive analysis, which begins from the cognitive object, runs from conditioned to condition thereof and ends in the subject (or transcendental unity of apperception)—as repeatedly noted, the highest point of transcendental philosophy. Fichte’s rival explanation of experience begins not from the object but from the subject—more precisely, from the assumption that “[a] finite rational being has nothing beyond experience” (SK, p. 8).
Since Fichte thinks the ground of all experience lies outside experience, he, unlike Reinhold, refuses epistemic foundationalism as a cognitive strategy.6 He begins his account of “The Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge” in describing his task as seeking a first principle, which, since it is first in a series of principles, can be neither proven nor defined. “Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle” (SK, p. 93). This principle cannot be proven, since any such proof would necessarily rest on a prior principle and there is none. It also cannot be defined, since definition presupposes limitation, and an absolutely first principle is by definition unlimited.
The term “ground,” which for Fichte does not refer to epistemic foundationalism, can be interpreted in two ways: as the cognitive object, which, in a causal framework, is the cause or source of experience; or again, as the subject, which experiences. For Fichte, a finite rational being, or human individual, cannot cognize anything beyond the limits of experience. We cannot, for instance, aim to know what lies beyond these limits in the form of an object (see SK, pp. 8–9). As for Kant, so for Fichte: one simply cannot know anything about reality, which lies outside experience. In this simple claim, Fichte removes the Kantian thing in itself as even a possible object of investigation.
Fichte’s turn away from the Kantian thing in itself leads to three consequences for his view of cognition. First, following Kant, he gives up metaphysical realism for empirical realism. It has already been noted that metaphysical realism, which goes back at least to Parmenides, runs throughout the Western tradition and remains popular in the debate. Sophisticated thinkers continue to believe that to know, we must aim toward or even reliably grasp the mind-independent world as it is. Fichte simply rules this out as belonging to the philosophical task. Kant did so as well. Second, despite Fichte’s retention of Kantian terminology, and despite his attention to “The Deduction of Representation,” he abandons representation in any form, and hence gives up any form of representationalism.7 For Kant, “representation” and “appearance” are synonymous terms; yet all appearances are phenomena, but only some phenomena are appearances. A phenomenon is an appearance if and only if there is something that appears. If one gives up the thing in itself, then one can no longer refer to reality as appearing, since in this case experience consists of phenomena only. In other words, in the absence of reality understood within a causal framework, there are no appearances, hence no representations. Third, in ruling out a mind-independent cognitive object as an explanatory principle, Fichte’s only remaining recourse, on pain of falling into skepticism, is to appeal to the subject, or in his terminology, the self (das Ich).
The result, as Fichte quickly points out, is a simplified approach to cognition. In Kant’s familiar statement of the problem in the Herz letter, the relation of the representation to the object is triadic, existing between the subject, the thing itself, and the empirical object given in experience and knowledge (see CPR, B xxvii, p. 115). But for Fichte, as a result of his turn away from the thing in itself, the relationship becomes dyadic.
Fichte’s rival deduction of representation is justified by his remark that Kant fails to prove that representations possess objective validity, and hence fails to demonstrate his theory. Fichte’s alternative deduction presupposes inter alia three points. First, there is nothing higher than the subject or self, which functions as his ultimate explanatory concept (SK, p. 224). Second, in philosophy we must start from the subject that cannot be deduced from something else, hence simply cannot be deduced (SK, p. 262). Fichte, who takes the human subject as a given, in this way registers his disagreement with the Kantian effort in the context of “The Transcendental Deduction” to deduce the transcendental subject. Finally, in Fichte’s theory, deduction takes the form of a direct, genetic demonstration focused on the self (SK, pp. 239, 269). In short, in abandoning the conception of the thing in itself, or the mind-independent external world as a presupposition, he gives up the Kantian aim of analyzing the relationship of the contents of mind to the world in favor of a so-called “deduction” of knowledge solely from the point of view of the subject.
Fichte’s deduction—which, like Kant’s, is stated in logical form8—is extremely complex. We need not describe it here in detail. Suffice it to say that, starting from the hypothesis that the self, or subject, is active, he insists on two points: only the subject is left when all objects have been eliminated by the power of abstraction, and the object or not-self is that from which abstraction can be made. Either can be considered as determined by the other, and conversely. The deduction concludes with the claim that the subject is finite (or determined), or on the contrary, infinite (hence determining), and that in both cases it is reciprocally related merely to itself. According to Fichte, theoretical philosophy can go no further. In summarizing his deduction, unlike Kant, Fichte concludes subject and object mutually determine each other.
So far I have stated only enough of Fichte’s position to provide a context for his turn to a post-Kantian form of constructivism. Fichte, as noted, begins the Science of Knowledge (Grundlage des gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, 1794), the first and historically most influential version of his position, through an analysis of the so-called “Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge.” His account of an identity in difference is an obviously revised version of Kant’s transcendental cognitive subject. In this first part of the Wissenschaftslehre, entitled “Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge,” Fichte distinguishes three principles: the first, absolutely unconditioned principle, which postulates that the subject is solely active and never passive; the second principle, conditioned as to content, which is his version of the Kantian reception of sensation through the sensory manifold; and the third principle, conditioned as to form, which is Fichte’s restatement of the Kantian analysis of the categorial synthesis of the sensory contents as a cognizable object.
The central thrust of the Fichtean exposition seems to be to identify the subject and object as well as their interrelation. According to Fichte, their interrelation is explained through the fact that the subject’s consciousness (of the cognitive object) as well as its self-consciousness are both explicable through the supposition of its activity. Fichte, as noted, defines his task as discovering an absolutely unconditioned first principle of human knowledge. This principle expresses the act, which is not given in empirical consciousness, but rather underlies and makes it possible. Fichte’s analysis is perhaps unduly complex, and we need not follow it in detail here, since a reconstruction of the main points will suffice.
Fichte begins from a logical proposition, which he takes as true and then later deduces through an obviously circular argument. According to Fichte, logical identity (A = A) is absolutely certain. He understands this not as an existential claim but rather as identifying a necessary connection. He regards the statement “I am I” as absolutely valid, since in any explanation of the basis of empirical consciousness the self (das Ich)—again, his name for the subject—is presupposed. Therefore, what is posited is the activity of the human mind, which is supposedly both the agent and the product of action, or again its origin and its result since, as Fichte asserts, “action and deed are one and the same” (SK, p. 97). In other words, “the ‘I am,’” which for Descartes is an existential claim, for Fichte “expresses an Act” (ibid.). Fichte’s self is an absolute subject, which posits that itself and the self, from this perspective, exist only as self-consciousness. It follows that A = A amounts to the claim that the self posits itself absolutely, since this applies to reality.
Fichte situates his view of the self as the source of all reality with respect to the ongoing debate. He thinks his view has affinities with the Cartesian cogito and Reinhold’s principle of representation. He further thinks his view was adopted earlier in Kant’s transcendental deduction. Since the object is the result of, hence identical with, the subject’s activity, the object—any object—is no more nor less than the subject in external form. Fichte continues his analysis in an account of the second principle, which, like its predecessor, cannot be proven, and also cannot be derived from the first principle. The overall account serves to identify the cognitive object from the perspective of the subject, hence not as it supposedly is, in beginning, as for the first principle, with a fact of empirical consciousness.
The analysis of the second principle follows that of the first principle. According to Fichte, though it cannot be proven, everyone will accept the proposition that ~A ≠ A. It follows that what Fichte refers to as the absolute and unconditional opposition, parenthetically through a fact given in consciousness, must simply be posited. Fichte further observes that what he calls counterpositing is possible only on the basis of positing, or the identity of the self. This point establishes the priority of the subject over the object, which is possible only through the opposition to, or rather the negation of, the subject. Yet the subject and object, or the self and what opposes it are not only different but also unified, since opposition presupposes the unity of consciousness. In other words, ontological difference rests on cognitive unity. From the perspective of the subject, the not-self, or object, is merely what is opposed to the self, or subject. In sum, the proposition “I am” is equivalent to A = A, and ~A ≠ A, which is the principle of opposition, which presupposes negation.
Fichte so far has sketched the basis of a novel form of subject-object ontology from the subject’s angle of vision. The first principle, in following Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, asserts the centrality of subjectivity. The second principle describes sensation, or formless content, through the subject. In his account of the third principle, conditioned as to form, Fichte restates Kant’s Copernican view that we know only what we construct through an account of the interaction between the other two principles.
Since Fichte’s account is again unnecessarily complex, it will suffice to mention only some main points. His central insight, which he restates in many different forms in this passage in stressing his resolutely first-person perspective, is that this interaction must be understood from the perspective of a subject that is theoretically unlimited but practically limited by its surroundings.
The analysis is divided into three parts (A, B, C). In part A, Fichte suggests that the subject and object are opposed. In part B, he describes the task at hand as discovering, on the basis of an act of the mind (Y), the relation between subject and object (X) that preserves what he calls the identity of consciousness. The obvious answer is that subject and object limit each other by virtue of what Fichte calls their divisibility. This is an early form of what later becomes a theory of dialectical interaction between human individuals in a social context. In part C, Fichte examines his proposed solution. According to Fichte, consciousness contains the whole of reality; that is, insofar as reality is not attributed to the object, subject and object are posited within the subject. In other words, the context or surroundings are known through the interaction with the subject on the level of consciousness and from which they are inseparable. Fichte suggests that it is possible to bring together subject and object in an account of knowledge only if we take into account synthesis, what he calls counterpositing, and the so-called act of combination. In that case, subject and object can be understood as interacting from the angle of vision of the subject. In other words, he appears to be trying to grasp the cognitive subject as simultaneously limited and unlimited by its surroundings, and on that basis to understand knowledge as arising in the interaction between the subject and object, leading to consciousness.
Since the third principle concerns synthesis, Fichte regards this account as answering Kant’s question about the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. According to Fichte, all syntheses are rooted in the interrelation between subject and object. Further according to Fichte, the critical philosophy turns on the view of the absolute self as “wholly unconditioned and incapable of determination by any higher thing” (SK, p. 117). Since a philosophy that opposes anything to the subject is dogmatic, or not critical, Fichte sharply rejects the Kantian conception of reality, or the thing in itself, as inconsistent with the critical philosophy and akin to Spinozism, which, in his account, grounds consciousness in a substance. As a further consequence of rejecting the thing in itself, he also rejects Kant’s effort to combine both subjective and objective sources in a single cognitive approach. In short, Fichte is suggesting that Kant inconsistently relies on a mind-independent noumenon, which is incompatible with the critical philosophy. This suggests that Kant is finally a dogmatist and that Fichte’s revision is the initial version consistent with Kant’s position. On Fichte’s reading of the critical philosophy, the cognitive object—hence experience—must be explained solely from the perspective of the subject. According to Fichte, for whom the only two possible approaches are criticism and dogmatism, Kant inconsistently seeks to straddle this unbridgeable divide. For Fichte, who follows a strict reading of the critical philosophy, it is not possible to go beyond the subject.
Fichte’s Deduction of Representation
It has already been noted that Kant’s Copernican turn inverts the subject/object relation so that the object depends on the subject. In his new ontology, Fichte restates this Kantian cognitive insight on the epistemic plane in making the ontological object depend on the ontological subject. Though Fichte’s position is later restated in many different ways—there are some sixteen versions of the Wissenschaftslehre—his novel view of the ontological relation of subject and object remains constant in later writings. Two basic points run throughout his writings. In different versions of his position, Fichte continues to understand the subject as act or active, and as theoretically unlimited but practically self-limiting. From this perspective, Fichte expounds a theory of human action in theory and in practice. In practice, where the subject’s range of action is limited, practical issues arise, which are resolved in theory, and in which the subject is understood to freely act. This theory rests on a presupposed identity in difference between the subject, which acts to limit itself, and the object, which is understood in theory but not in practice as the subject itself in the form of externality, hence as the limit (or limits) against which it strives in continually widening its sphere of practical action. The identity in difference between subject and object grounded in the subject’s activity is a qualified restatement of Kantian constructivism. It was pointed out above that Kant argues for constructivism in different places (above, in the transcendental deduction). Fichte similarly argues for constructivism in his restatement of the Kantian theory in his “Deduction of Representation,” which is the deduction of an identity in difference between subject and object, knower and known.
The obscure account of “The Deduction,” which is scarcely clearer than “The Transcendental Deduction” it is meant to replace, is presented in eleven numbered steps, which can be simply condensed as follows.
1. Fichte begins in claiming that the subject’s activity—or again, the imagination—encounters a check, which can be intuited, and through which the activity is reflected in the reverse direction.
2. He elucidates this claim in asserting the subject posits—or again, considers itself—as intuiting in virtue of a so-called interplay in the imagination between itself and something else, which is the object or not-self. On the philosophical plane, productive activity is ascribed to the subject, which in turn is said to produce its object.
3. Fichte further distinguishes two types of activity: a real or practical activity due to the check, and an ideal or purely theoretical activity described as an absolute spontaneity.
4. Fichte takes the occasion to make a series of related points:
(i) Through the so-called absolute self—which results through abstraction from the surrounding context—the subject reflects its own activity, which extends to its object, where it is limited and determined.
(ii) There is an unconscious activity on the level of the productive imagination resulting in a so-called determinate product limiting reflected intuition. This product is the object, or not-self—in short, the surrounding context. In this setting, the object has a twofold function in limiting the subject, which, in this way, is determined, and which in turn makes possible the subject’s intuition (of something).
(iii) Imagination is both productive and intuitive.
(iv) The subject’s activity is opposed by another activity, which is “conserved” in the understanding.
(v) There is intuition of the opposing activity, since we are aware of our surroundings.
(vi) For Fichte, who distinguishes between what is represented and the representation, there is an interrelation between reality and negation, or between the subject as intuiting and the not-self as intuited.
5. Fichte explores this relation by calling attention to the distinction between activity in general (or pure activity), which is unlimited but which, as he says, “determines itself to determinate action (self-affection)” (SK, p. 212), and objective activity, which is limited.
6. In order to understand how intuition is conditioned or limited, Fichte differentiates free activity and passivity (or necessity), which he further unites in three ways: through compulsion determined by freedom, through freedom determined by compulsion, and when each determines the other in an interaction. At stake is a conception of the subject as both wholly free and as also determined. This is Fichte’s version of Kant’s dualistic view of the subject as causally determined but noumenally free.
7. Fichte claims that through reason, hence through an act of thought, the subject determines itself in the form of an object of thought, whose substrate is a noumenon. According to Fichte, the subject is not in fact, but only in theory, limited through a noumenon, which is nothing more than the result of the imagination.
8. If the subject is restricted, but not restricted by an object, then it is restricted only by itself. Fichte makes this point in introducing the concept of judgment.
9. Fichte posits the possibility of abstracting from objects in general, which, he asserts, is pure reason, or theoretical reason in the Kantian sense. What remains is the self-determining subject. In other words, after abstraction from the object, hence from the entire surrounding context, only the subject remains. According to Fichte, who differentiates between empirical and pure forms of consciousness, one can abstract from the former but not from the latter.
10. This step merely confirms the contradiction between the subject’s understanding of itself as both determinate and determining, as both practical and theoretical, which Fichte regards as the source of the Kantian antinomies. From the theoretical point of view, it is not possible to go further than to point out that the object is determined by the subject. It follows that, since the object is due to, or again explained through the subject, the subject determines itself.
11. Since in either its finite or infinite modes, the subject relates only to itself, Fichte thinks we have reached the limits of theoretical philosophy.