Fichte

Fichte created a great sensation in his time; his philosophy is the Kantian philosophy in its completion,
and, as we must specially notice, it is set forth in a more logical way.

He does not pass beyond the fundamentals of Kant's philosophy, and at first regarded his own
philosophy as no more than a systematic working out of the other.

In this first version of the Wissen-schaft-slehre (Doctrine/Science of Knowledge) Fichte employs a

dialectical method, invented by him, which is very close to the method later used by Hegel in his Science
of Logic.

The method is dialectical because it proceeds “synthetically” via the “unification of opposites”

In this respect the Foundation is crucial to understanding the profound changes German Idealism went
through between Kant and Hegel.

Brief Biography
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born on the 19th of May, 1762, at Rammenau, near Bischofswerda, in Upper
Lusatia. He studied at Jena (Y), and for some time was a private tutor in Switzerland. He wrote a treatise
on Religion, termed a “Critique of all Revelation,” where the Kantian phraseology is employed
throughout — so much so that it was thought to be the work of Kant. After this he was in 1793
summoned to Jena by Goethe as Professor of Philosophy, which appointment he, however, resigned in
the year 1799, on account of an unpleasantness which had arisen through his essay “On the ground of
our Belief in a Divine Government of the World.” For Fichte published a journal in Jena, and a paper in it
which was by someone else was regarded as atheistical. Fichte might have kept silence, but he
published the above-mentioned essay as an introduction to the article. The authorities wished an
investigation to be made into the matter. Then Fichte wrote a letter which contained threats, and
respecting it Goethe said that a Government ought not to allow itself to be threatened. Fichte now
taught privately for some time in Berlin; in 1805 he became professor at Erlangen, and in 1809 at Berlin,
at which place he died on the 27th January, 1814.

Systematic representation of Kant’s Philosophy

The new presentation Fichte envisions is, above all, a systematization of Kant’s philosophy.

Giving systematic form to Kant’s doctrines – making them into a science, or Wissenschaft – is essential
to defending them against a host of objections.

Philosophical systematicity: philosophy must begin with a single principle.

It fulfils to distinct philosophical needs:

The first is certainty: If philosophy is to provide us with genuine knowledge, it must begin with a
principle that itself possesses absolute certainty, independently of the system that follows from it.

The first principle has the task of conferring its certainty on the propositions derived from it so that each
of them possesses the same degree of certainty as it has.

Second is coherence: Philosophy strives to be more than a collection of unrelated propositions: it seeks
not only to achieve certainty but also to know the relations among its parts.
Philosophical propositions acquire properties they lack in isolation:

First, by being derived from a certain starting point such propositions acquire a firmer foundation than
they have on their own

Second, unifying them within a single chain of arguments establishes their relations to the other
philosophical truths in the system.

Aims of systematic philosophy

Fichte thinks there are two problems that critical philosophy faces in its unsystematized form, which fall
into two categories: Kant’s failure to provide a critique of reason adequate to reason’s nature as an
autonomous and self-transparent faculty, and skeptical challenges to Kant’s accounts of knowledge and
morality.

In the theoretical sphere Fichte’s objection amounts to the claim that Kant fails to provide a genuine
deduction of the a priori elements of experience.

Arguments establishing space and time as the a priori forms of sensible intuition proceed not from some
basic feature of subjectivity itself (such as its self-identity) but from the merely factical existence of
geometry and arithmetic, two sciences whose synthetic a priori character points to the a priori nature of
the pure intuitions

Second charge: Kant deduces categories in the sense that he establishes the necessity of pure concepts
if experience is to be possible, he fails to deduce each individual category. The focus of this criticism is
not the transcendental deduction but the metaphysical deduction of the categories that precedes it.

“[How can the critical philosopher] who does not derive the presumed laws of the intellect from the
very nature of the intellect ... know that those laws are precisely these, substantiality and causality? ... It
is of no help to borrow them in some roundabout way from logic ... [for this] does not provide us with
any understanding of ... why [the intellect] must act in precisely this way. In order to obtain an
understanding of this, we must specify some property that can belong only to the intellect, and the laws
of thinking must then be derived from these premises.” Fichte

Fichte also questioned, “Why these (categories) and not others?” What Fichte thinks is needed to
answer that question is a series of proofs that derives the individual categories from a single first
principle that articulates a fundamental feature of the subject.

The third charge: the relation between theoretical and practical reason.

Kant delivers two distinct accounts of reason, in two separate critiques, but fails to bring them together
into a unitary account of reason in general.

Fichte’s Task: Can the principles of theoretical and practical reason be derived from a common first
principle?

Fichte intends not only to derive the principles of the two employments of reason within a single system
but also to reveal their underlying structural affinity; theoretical subject on its representations and the
unity (or consistency) of will that the practical subject is called on to realize by morality.
Sceptic’s challenge to Kant’s theoretical reason: Kant’s doctrine restricting human knowledge to
appearances and asserting the unknowability (for us) of things in themselves. Even if Kant’s arguments
in the first Critique are sound, the skeptic objects, the most they can establish is the subjective necessity
of the forms of intuition and the categories. Thus, Kant’s critique might show that we must experience
the world as spatial, temporal, and causally ordered, but it cannot tell us whether such features pertain
to things independently of our cognizing activity.

Fichte concludes that the source of their skepticism lies in their unexamined commitment to an
untenable conception of things in themselves.

Fichte’s claim is that as long as a critique of reason fails to provide a proper deduction of the pure forms
of intuition – as long as it is constrained to regard them as contingent features of the cognitive faculty
humans happen to have – the possibility cannot be ruled out that the world could be known differently,
and perhaps more adequately, by knowers with a different cognitive make-up, thereby leaving critical
philosophy open to the skeptical charge that our knowledge of the world falls short of what knowledge
ought to be.

One goal Fichte hopes to achieve with his new system, then, is to give a more rigorous defense of the
validity of the moral law and hence of human freedom than the second Critique provides.

First Principle
To make critical philosophy into a system, he thinks he must begin by finding the principle that is
explanatorily basic to all of experience.

“The I originally and unconditionally posits its own existence” Fichte. The subject’s basic feature is its
self-positing activity and that this activity is fundamental to (a condition for the possibility of) all
consciousness.

The subject is absolute, or self-grounded and unmediated (undetermined) by anything other than itself.

Fichte’s two basic claims:

1. The subject is essentially self-relating; it consists in a kind of activity it directs at itself, one
intimately related to its own self-consciousness.
2. The second is that the subject is self-constituting; its existence depends only on its own activity
(of self-positing).

The awareness involved in self-positing is self-referring in the sense that through it representations are
grasped as belonging to a single subject. Following Kant, Fichte understands this unity among its
representations to be something the subject brings about rather than a given, already existing fact it
discovers.

This identity of the subject is established through the spontaneity of thought rather than given in
sensible intuition, Fichte sometimes calls it “intellectual intuition.”

The awareness involved in self-positing is fundamental to consciousness: as an activity that brings

empirical representations into a single consciousness, it establishes one of the conditions without which
experience of an objective world would be impossible.

The self-awareness involved in self-positing differs fundamentally from the consciousness of objects.
In self-positing what one is aware of is not a fact independent of that awareness but something that is
first brought about through it; what makes a representation mine is my apprehending it as such.

This thought leads to the second thesis mentioned above, namely, that the self-positing subject is self-
constituting (or a Tathandlung , a“fact-act”)

The I’s facticity (or being) consists in – is nothing more than – its distinctive activity, that of intuiting its
representations as its own. Thus, to intuit diverse representations as one’s own (as belonging to a single
consciousness) is to be a subject, and being a subject consists in nothing beyond such self-awareness:
“to posit oneself and to be are, as applied to the I, perfectly identical”

Fichte does not mean to assert that the I is absolute in the sense of being either the cause of or
identifiable with all of reality. Rather, the subject is absolute, or self-grounded, in the sense that it is a
self-constituting being: its existence depends on nothing other than its own self-positing activity.

Second and third principles: Fichte’s dialectical method

Its second principle, like the first, cannot be proved from anything more fundamental than itself.

The second principle: “A not-I is unconditionally posited in opposition to the I”

The idea that the subject is always directed at something other than itself, at an object it takes to be
distinct from itself (a not-I).

Fichte means to draw attention to a separate point, namely, that the mental activity picked out by the
second principle – “counterpositing”1 – is qualitatively distinct from self-positing.

Each of these activities is sui generis2 and in this sense underivable from its counterpart. When joined
with the claim that self-awareness is inseparable from the consciousness of a not-I, this point translates
into a thesis about the irreducibly dual structure of subjectivity.

Consciousness is a unity of two distinct activities: an outward, other-directed awareness of objects and
an inward, self-referential awareness that relates each representation to one and the same subject.

The object’s status within consciousness as a not-I – its status as something counterposed to the subject
– depends on the I’s taking it to be distinct from itself.

awareness of an object involves an act of interpreting it as something other than the subject, an act that
has its ground in the subject itself rather than in the given contents of consciousness. That the object is
something other is a judgment the I makes, a relation it establishes.

In the third principle we encounter the first instance of derivation (or proof).

the third principle is derived not transcendentally but by showing it to be necessary in order to resolve
an apparent contradiction between the first two principles.

Fichte laid out third principle in two propositions:

1. Insofar as the not-I is posited, the I is not posited; for the I is completely nullified (aufgehoben)
by the not-I. ...
1
Opposite positioning
2
Unique
 2. The not-I can be posited only insofar as an I is posited in the I (in the identical consciousness) to
which it (the not-I) can be counterposed.

Proposition (2) simply repeats the claim, implicit in the second principle, that the positing of the not-I
depends on there being an I in contrast to which it can be taken as an ‘other’.

According to (1), however, the not-I also completely nullifies the I.

Thus, the contradiction must be located in the (alleged) fact that the not-I both requires the I and does
away with it.

But why should the positing of a not-I imply the I’s nullification? Focus on the I’s status as absolute and
to view the contradiction as arising between the Foundation ’s first two principles: a contradiction
between the subject’s absoluteness and its finitude (its necessarily being related to something other
than itself).

Interpret the first principle as asserting not merely that the subject posits its own existence but also that
nothing exists (nothing is posited) other than the subject. On this reading, the very presence in
consciousness of something distinct from the I is incompatible with the I’s absolute self-positing.

It is indeed plausible to interpret the first principle as identifying the I with all that is (with all that is
posited) if we bear in mind Fichte’s remarks in §1 (first principle) that part of what qualifies the subject
as absolute is its being fully “self-identical” – its being an awareness in which subject and object are one
(an awareness in which “I = I”).

A contradiction arises between the first two principles, then, because to posit a not-I is by definition to
posit something beyond the I, something that therefore constitutes a limit to the I’s existence. Thus, the
I’s positing something other than itself – its according reality to the not-I – nullifies the I in the sense that
it conflicts with the I’s nature as absolute.

In §3 Fichte characterizes the contradiction at issue as arising out of the second principle itself rather
than from a tension between the I’s finitude and its absoluteness, for both of the conflicting
propositions set out in (1) and (2) above are said to be contained in the second principle.

This implies that, abstracting from the I’s character as absolute, there is something directly contradictory
in supposing that the I posits a not-I.

But what could this be? “How can A and -A, being and not-being, reality and negation, be thought
together without mutual elimination?” Fichte

Remember Wissenschaftslehre’s aims is to derive the basic categories of thought, those presupposed in
any attempt to know the world.

In accordance with this “logical” aspect of Fichte’s project, we should think of each stage of the
Wissenschaftslehre as having at its disposal only a limited set of conceptual resources consisting only in
those categories derived in previous stages.

Before the introduction of the third principle, then, only two categories – corresponding to the activities
of positing and counterpositing – are available in attempting to conceive of the subject and its relation
to the world, namely, reality and negation, or being and not being.
With this in mind it is possible to see why the second principle must appear self-contradictory: to say of
a not-I that it is posited is to say that it is (just as, in the first principle, to say that the I is posited is to say
that it is).

Thus far the not-I has been defined merely as a negation of the I; however, since our conceptual
resources are restricted here to the categories of being and not-being, the only kind of negation of the I
that can be attributed to the not-I is a simple negation of the I’s being.

Hence Fichte’s statement: “Insofar as the not-I is posited, the I is not posited.”

Fichte is using dialectics: asserting “the not-I is” implies “the I is not,” and thus positing a not-I amounts
to the I’s nullification. This, however, threatens the coherence of the second principle because, as is
asserted by (2) above, positing a not-I requires an I in contrast to which the not-I can be defined as such.

Fichte claims to find the key to resolving this contradiction in the idea of mutual limitation, where “to
limit” means to negate a thing’s reality partially rather than to nullify it completely.

Limitation, then, presupposes the concept of divisibility (or quantifiability) since for a thing to be only
partially negated it must be divisible. This thought is expressed in the third principle: “Both the I and
not-I are posited as divisible” or “the I and not-I ... limit each other”.

Being is ascribed to both I and not-I and that each is now taken to constitute only a part of all that is
real. The I is what the not-I is not, and vice versa.

In using the concept of limitation to resolve this contradiction Fichte takes himself to have derived a new
category of thought that provides a further resource for conceiving of what is. 3

But Fichte means to extract more than just this point from how the third principle resolves the
contradiction posed by the second. This is made clear by his calling the newly derived category
determination. only now can both I and not-I be thought of as “something”, that is, as beings with
determinate (specific) qualities.

In asserting a connection between limitation and the possession of determinate qualities, Fichte
espouses Spinoza’s dictum “all determination is negation,” according to which ascribing a determinate
quality Y to a being always involves situating that being in relation to what it is not (in relation to not-Y)
and hence requires the “negation” of something other than itself.

Thus, the conception of being that issues from the first three principles is not captured simply in the idea
of the quantity of reality being divided up among different beings; it is also a conception of what might
be termed “determinate being.”

3
The method Fichte actually employs in the Foundation is not that of transcendental arguments. For the third principle is not
deduced in response to the question: what further condition (beyond those set out in the first two principles) makes it possible for
the I to posit a not-I?
Rather, the third principle results from asking: what conceptual resources are required to conceive of the not-I and its relation to
the I coherently? The latter question concerns the adequacy of our philosophical concepts and how they must be revised in order
to provide a coherent and comprehensive account of the subject and its world.
Understood in this way, Fichte’s method appears closer to the dialectical arguments of Hegel’s Logic than to the transcendental
method of Kant.
According to this conception, to say that something “is” is to say both that it is a determinate part of
what is real and that it depends for its determinations on its opposition to – its being distinguished from
– something that is not itself.

What the third principle tells us, then, is that the I can be what it is only in relation to an object (to some
thing not itself) to which it ascribes determinate qualities.

But here another question arises: if the I is now posited as limited by the not-I, how can it still be entirely
self-constituting?

In §3 Fichte brings into a single formula all that he takes to have been established thus far, namely: “I
posit within the I a divisible not-I in opposition to the divisible I”

“Both the I and the not-I are posited, in and through the I, as capable of mutually limiting one another ”

In uniting all three principles into one, they reassert the I’s absoluteness in a way that incorporates the
third principle and thereby transforms our understanding of what it means for the I to be absolute.

Both formulations reassert the subject’s absoluteness in that they regard the I as what posits both itself
and the not-I; thus, it remains the case that all reality is posited by the I and within the I (within
consciousness).

It is no longer possible to think of the I’s positing as having the simple, unmediated character suggested
by the first principle alone, for the I’s relation to itself is now taken to be inextricably bound up with –
“mediated by” – its relation to the not-I.

It is the first attempt at fulfilling a task that, in one form or another, will stand as a challenge to the
system until its end: to find a way of conceiving of subject and object such that the I’s necessary relation
to its other is compatible with its status as absolute.

What is most striking about the formulas that bring together the first three principles is that they
reconcile the absolute and finite natures of the subject by dividing it into two parts: an absolute I that
remains the unconditioned source of all positing and a finite I whose being is limited by its opposite and
whose qualities are defined only in relation to that opposite.

I be thought of as having a dual nature. It is helpful to think of this Fichtean doctrine as corresponding to
Kant’s distinctions between the transcendental and empirical subjects (in the theoretical sphere) and
the noumenal and phenomenal subjects (in the practical sphere).

Hence the finite I (the I insofar as it is has determinate qualities in relation to a not-I) should be taken to
include both the theoretical subject with its manifold empirical representations and the practical subject
with its particular desires.4

The Foundation uses “absolute” in ways that are not obviously related.

In discussing the first principle we located the I’s absolute character in its being self-constituting in the
sense that it depends on nothing other than its own spontaneous activity for its existence.

4
Defined as the subject insofar as it is undetermined by anything other than itself, the clearest Kantian analogues
to this conception of the absolute I are the spontaneous activities of the theoretical subject and the practical
subject’s autonomous legislation of the moral law.
But other uses of “absolute” can be found throughout Part I. As we saw above, in §3 the I’s claim to be
absolute is understood as a claim to be all of reality, to be completely unlimited with respect to its
existence.

At other places the I’s absoluteness seems to consist in its being the source of the preconscious activities
of synthesis that secure the conditions for the possibility of experience. And at the end of Part I Fichte
introduces what appears to be yet another conception of the absolute subject, one that emphasizes the
idea of complete self-determination and therefore figures prominently in the discussion of ethical
themes that dominate later sections of the work.

This conception is spelled out as an I “whose consciousness has been determined by nothing outside
itself” and that instead determines everything through its consciousness.

Foundation ’s first three principles – which precede the division into theoretical and practical reason –
should be understood as an attempt to give an abstract account of the fundamental structure of
subjectivity in all its forms.

The bifurcation of the subject into an absolute and a finite I implies a revision of the “dual structure of
subjectivity” thesis: the subject is always consciously related both to something other (an object) and to
itself (as a self-identical subject of consciousness).

What results when the third principle is joined with the first two is a view of subjectivity that regards the
subject’s self-relation not simply as an immediate self-positing but as a more complex relation between
the I’s absolute and finite aspects, where the latter is determined by, and hence dependent on, its
relation to a not-I.

In the practical sphere this account translates into a picture of the existential situation of agents who,
like us, are both finite and unlimited (at least aspirationally). The central practical task facing such beings
can be characterized as bringing the two aspects of the I’s nature into agreement.

On this model, the I’s self-relation consists, first, in an awareness of a disparity within itself between its
finite and absolute aspects and, second, in a perception of the need – expressed through the moral
‘ought’ – to bring the empirical I in line with the ideal of complete self-determination implicit in its
nature as absolute.

Fichte’s account of the basic structure of subjectivity leads him to a view for which the I’s central feature
is a practical striving to overcome its finitude and achieve absoluteness.

Theoretical and practical reason

“The Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge,” begins by dividing the principle established at the end of §3
into two parts:

1. “The I posits itself as determined by the not-I”

 2. “The I posits itself as determining the not-I”

It is natural to think of knowledge as a relation between subject and object where the latter determines
the former (since knowledge must be adequate to the object known rather than determined by the
subject’s needs or desires).

Part II is an attempt to reconcile (dialectically) the theoretical subject’s apparent passivity and
dependence on an object with its absolute character, which requires it to be wholly active and self-
determining.

Its most prominent move is the introduction of the faculty of imagination in response to the
contradiction implicit in the founding principle of Part II, namely, that the theoretical subject is taken to
be both determined by the not-I and at the same time wholly self-determining.

Imagination becomes crucial for Fichte’s account of theoretical reason because in conjunction with the
“check [ Anstoß ]” it supplies consciousness with the sensible content of intuition and is therefore
essential to explaining the possibility of representing empirical objects.

The aim of the Foundation ’s theoretical part is to account for the features of theoretical consciousness
by explaining them as due to the subject’s own nature rather than to that of the object (thus giving
expression to the I’s infinitude5), while at the same time doing justice to the belief of ordinary
consciousness that in knowledge the subject is determined by the object (and is therefore finite).

At this point Fichte returns to the issue of thing in itself, rejecting Kant’s position that viewed the
subject’s activity as the source of the formal elements of empirical knowledge but regarded the content
of that knowledge as a result of the subject’s passive affection by an object (a thing in itself).

In order to make the I wholly self-determining, Fichte must rid philosophy of the thing in itself by
showing that the subject plays an active role, not merely with respect to the formal aspects of cognition,
but in generating the content of knowledge as well.

Fichte makes clear that the theoretical part of the Wissenschaftslehre cannot do full justice to the I’s
absoluteness.

While the doctrine of the check makes it possible to go farther than Kant in accounting for the content
of empirical knowledge in terms of the subject’s activity, from the perspective of theoretical philosophy
there always remains an element of knowledge that cannot be traced back to the subject’s spontaneity.

Although the check can explain how the I represents its object as due to the I’s activity, it cannot explain
the fact that the I represents as having its source in the I alone, and so there remains a respect in which
the theoretical subject must be seen as determined by something other.

But this dependence on the not-I contradicts the I’s claim to be absolute, which (in this context) requires
that “the I, in all its determinations, ... be absolutely posited by itself and therefore wholly independent
of any possible not-I”
5
the state or quality of being infinite or having no limit.
The realization that this contradiction cannot be resolved within a framework that regards the subject as
only a knower necessitates the transition to practical reason in Part III.

Fichte’s long-sought deduction of practical reason: Showing that only practical reason can eliminate the
contradiction between theoretical philosophy and the first principle’s assertion of the I’s absoluteness.

“The dependence of the I ... must be eliminated, and this is conceivable only on the assumption that this
hitherto unknown not-I to which the check is attributed ... be determined by the I itself ”

The first principle would be satisfied if the I could be regarded as having determined or caused the check
required for empirical representation.

For in this case, what the I depended on in knowledge would be nothing but the (absolute) I’s own
product.

Also the I would remain fully self-determining, even though its self-determination would be mediated by
what ordinary consciousness takes to be an independent object.

This resolution of the contradiction engenders a further contradiction, this time with the I’s finitude
expressed in the second principle: I requires a relation to something distinct from itself in order to be an
I, then the solution just sketched is untenable.

The I cannot be the cause of the check, for if it fully determined the not-I, the latter would no longer
truly be a not-I. All difference between subject and object would be eliminated and the second principle
negated.

But, Fichte reminds us, the opposition between I and not-I cannot be eliminated, because without it the
I would cease to be an I.

Fichte finds the solution to this problem in the idea of striving: Fichte now takes the absolute I’s activity
to be “a striving towards determination” of the not-I.

The goal of this striving is the I’s complete independence from the not-I.

That the determinations (properties) of the object are to depend wholly on the subject.

The striving subject is absolute with respect to its goal (that the not-I conform only to itself), but its
activity is “mere” striving because it can never attain its goal of complete independence.

The principle of striving takes into account the ineradicable finitude of the subject while attributing to it
an absoluteness that, by the end of the Foundation, is no longer understood as a fact about the subject
but as a demand the I makes upon itself and its world.

Fichte’s final move is to identify this striving with practical reason: what the moral law demands, on this
view, is that the subject act on the world in order to make it conform to a law the subject gives to itself
in accordance only with its own nature.
What practical reason gives us is an ideal of complete self-determination that enjoins us to modify the
world in accordance with our conception of how it ought to be, an ideal that our nature as subjects
requires us to strive to realize, even though it can never be fully attained.
Conclusion
The actual structure of Fichte’s argument does not cohere with his most prominent descriptions of what
the deduction of practical reason is supposed to establish.

In some places Fichte says that he deduces practical reason transcendentally, as a condition of the
possibility of theoretical subjectivity.

But this misleadingly implies that the deduction of practical reason relies on nothing more than an
analysis of the necessary conditions of knowledge.

In fact, however, the I’s striving is introduced not to explain how knowledge is possible but rather to
show how the relation of the knowing subject to its object can be rendered compatible with the
subject’s nature as self-determined.

Fichte’s argument, then, does not deduce practical reason as a necessary condition of either theoretical
self-consciousness or the knowledge of objects but, rather, dialectically, as the only subjective activity
that can reconcile the I’s theoretical capacities with its claim to be absolute.

The facts that many of the Foundation ’s doctrines turn out to be unsatisfactory and that conflicting
concepts of absoluteness seem to be invoked in its arguments should not blind us to the genuine
interest and fertility of Fichte’s text.

Despite its often careless execution, the Foundation articulated a philosophical project – and in that
context developed a new, dialectical method – that determined the shape of German philosophy for
several decades and continues to exert its influence on us today.