A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 1. The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy

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Chapter V
The tension between the ideal of science and that of personality in the identity-philosophy of post-Kantian freedom-idealism

§ 1 - The transitional period between critical idealism and monistic freedom-idealism. From Maimon to Fichte

So the inner dialectic of the religious ground-motive of nature and freedom could not come to rest in Kant's dualistic separation of the ideals of science and personality. It drove post-Kantian freedom-idealism beyond the Kantian transcendental criticism.

The critical¹ separation between understanding and sensibility, universal form and individuality, form and matter of experience, understanding and reason, had to be overcome. The freedom-motive, which since Kant was increasingly recognized as the very root of the Humanistic life- and world-view, called into play with a growing urgency its proper inner postulate of continuity. It must with a truly dialectical necessity transform the transcendental Idea concerning the coherence and mutual relations among the modal aspects. Thereby the whole cosmonomic Idea of Humanistic thought changed its form.

The dialectic of theoretical reason with its transcendental Ideas, by which in Kant reason elevates itself above the limits of sense experience, was to be transformed and enlarged into a new dialectical logic, as a true ‘organon’ of freedom-idealism. Henceforth, all limits of reason ought to be abrogated and ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ should be thought together in a dialectical way. In philosophic thought this program could be realized only by a further pushing back of the classical science-ideal and by its

1 Translator's note: This term and the noun ‘Criticism’ are used here to designate the Kantian philosophy as expounded in the three Critiques of the sage of Koeningsberg.
W.Y.

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complete subjection to the ideal of personality. Whereas for Kant the theoretical dialectic with its insoluble antinomies was the proof of a speculative misuse of the transcendental Ideas, by which theoretical reason tries to exceed its critical boundaries, the antinomy was now sanctioned as a necessary transitional phase of dialectical thought which must continually proceed to a higher synthesis in order finally to overbridge the religious antithesis in the starting-point of Humanistic philosophy.

Maimon's attempt at a solution of the antinomy in Kant's form-matter scheme by means of Leibniz' principle of continuity.

A first attempt at bridging over the fundamental dualism in Kant's critiques of theoretical and practical reason (with their antithetic or rather antinomic relation between ‘reason’ and ‘sensibility’, universally valid apriori form and sensory ‘empirical’ matter) was undertaken by Salomon Maimon (1753-1800). He intended to transform Kant's antithesis between sensibility and logical understanding from a fundamental into a gradual one by introducing into Kantian epistemology Leibniz' doctrine concerning the ‘petites perceptions’. For that very reason he eliminated in a radical manner the intrinsically antinomic metaphysical concept of the ‘thing in itself’ which Kant had maintained because he considered sensibility as merely receptive.

With Maimon an absolute idealistic trend entered into the transcendental thought which issued from Kant. This trend would even have the ‘matter’ of experience originate solely from the transcendental consciousness. But Maimon's method for the realization of this program is to be qualified only as an apostasy from the veritable transcendental motive in Kant's philosophy. This qualification holds in spite of the considerable influence Maimon exercised on the development of transcendental idealism in Fichte.

Kantian epistemology is completely dissociated from its ὑπόϑεσις, from the Idea of the autonomous freedom of human personality. The critical self-reflection on the ideal of personality, as the root of the ideal of science, had begun in Kant's philosophy only to be lost again in Maimon.

It is essentially the mathematical science-ideal that regains the upper hand in his critical thought. Leibniz' mathematical principle of continuity is introduced into Critical philosophy, to

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overcome, if possible, the internal antinomy of the Critical form-matter schema. As if this antinomy had a ‘purely theoretical’ origin and could be resolved by the methods of the mathematical ideal of science!

Maimon even reduced the ‘sensory matter of experience’ to the creative consciousness, understood as purely theoretical. The matter of knowledge is produced unconsciously in the consciousness: its genesis is unknown to the latter. But if it is not to remain completely foreign to ‘reason’, it must be understood as the ‘transcendental differential’ of clear transcendental-logical thought.

Maimon's falling away from the veritable transcendental motive. How the transcendental Idea loses for him its direction toward Kant's ideal of personality.

The ‘Ding an sich’ then actually loses all metaphysical meaning. Its signification is merged in that of a theoretical limiting concept. It indicates the limits under which our consciousness can no longer control its content by its own creative thought-forms.

This limiting concept, however, lacks all veritable transcendental meaning, which it had possessed for Kant. Rather it is exclusively oriented to the continuity-postulate of the mathematical science-ideal, as will appear below.

The basic problem which Maimon encountered even in his first work, Versuch über die Transcendentalphilosophie, was that of the relation between the universal apriori forms of the ‘transcendental consciousness’ and the particular matter. This was the same problem that Kant had tried to solve in his Kritik der Urteilskraft and in the year 1789 Maimon's book had been sent by Marcus Herz to him for criticism even before Kant's third main work had appeared. To bridge the gap between the universal and the particular in our knowledge Kant had also used Leibniz' theological Idea of the ‘intellectus archetypus’ with its mathematical analysis completed in a single intuition (uno intuito) of the whole individual reality (not to be penetrated by our finite understanding). But with him this idea remained a merely regulative principle for the use of the understanding, a normative Idea that obtained its transcendental turn in the teleological view of nature, insofar as the latter referred in the last analysis to the supersensible realm of free-

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dom. On the basis of his transcendental ground-Idea, Kant must reject the metaphysical turn of Leibniz' Idea of the ‘intellectus archetypus’, resulting in a mathematical idealism that seeks both the origin and root of our cosmos in creative mathematical thought. This metaphysics of the science-ideal was incompatible with the freedom-idealism of Kant's Critical philosophy.

Maimon's mathematical Criticism and the Marburg school among the Neo-Kantians.

Maimon actually tried to reconcile this mathematical idealism with the Critical transcendental philosophy¹. According to him, the Idea of the ‘divine understanding’ in its Leibnizian sense remains ‘an Idea, to which any Critique of Pure Reason must be reduced, if it is to be satisfying’².

This was doubtless a regression into the dogmatic attitude of thought which, under the supremacy of the faith in the mathematical science-ideal, could not penetrate to the true ῦπόϑεσις of the latter.

Leibniz had wanted to give to phenomena in their sensory form a foundation in creative mathematical thought (hence his continual speaking of ‘phénomènes bien fondés’) Similarly Maimon seeks a mathematical basis for Kant's matter of consciousness, as such. This matter could no longer be relegated to the mere receptivity of sensibility, once a break had been made with Kant's doctrine of the ‘affection’ of our subjective sensory function by the ‘Ding an sich’.

The understanding cannot simply accept the sensory impressions of the ‘Gegenstand’ as a datum; it necessarily asks after the principles of their origin. ‘Since the business of the understanding is nothing but thinking, i.e. producing unity in the manifold, it can think no object, except by indicating the rule or manner of its origin. For only thereby can the manifold of the same be brought under the unity of the rule. Consequently it can think no object as already originated, but merely as originating, i.e. flowing. The special rule of origination of an object or the nature of its differen-

1 In modern times the Neo-Kantians of the Marburg School have made a similar attempt.

2 Über die Progressen der Philosophie, Streifereien, p. 42, cited by Cassirer III, p. 96: ‘eine Idee, worauf eine jede Kritik der reinen Vernunft zurückgebracht werden musz, wenn sie befriedigend sein soll.’

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tial makes it a special object, and the relations of different objects originate from the relations of their rules of originating or their differentials’¹.

Thus the Kantian Idea, or the noumenon, as limiting concept, gains with Maimon the significance of a mathematical differential concept as the foundation of Kant's sensory matter of consciousness.

The pure categories of thought can never be immediately applied to sensory perceptions ‘but merely to their elements which are Ideas of reason concerning the mode of origination of these intuitions, and by means of these to the intuitions themselves’².

The Idea as such becomes the logical origin-principle that knows no other ἀϱχή but creative mathematical thought. This was the methodical way which presently was to be taken by the Marburg school, much more consistently than Maimon had done. This school began to apply Leibniz' principle of continuity as a transcendental logical ‘principle of creation’ (‘Erzeugungsprinzip’) to Kant's categories. The latter could no longer be analyzed as a static datum from the table of the forms of logical judgment; rather they must be derived in a dynamic process of creation from their logical origin, from an original synthesis of thought.

But even for this dynamic, genetic view of the ‘pure forms of consciousness’ we find the point of contact in Maimon's mathematical Criticism. Maimon carries through his view of the datum as ‘transcendental differential of consciousness’ not only with

1 Versuch über die Transzendental philosophie, cited by Cassirer III, p. 98: ‘Denn da das Geschüft des Verstandes nicht anderes als Denken, d.h. Einheit im mannigfaltigen hervorzubringen ist, so kann er sich kein Objekt denken, als blosz dadurch, dasz er die Regel oder Art seiner Entstehung angibt: denn nur dadurch kann das Mannigfaltige desselben unter die Einheit der Regel gebracht werden, folglich kann er kein Objekt als schon entstanden, sondern blosz als entstehend, d.h. flieszend denken. Die besondere Regel des Entstehens eines Objekts oder die Art seines Differentials macht es zu einem besonderen Objekt, und die Verhältnisse verschiedener Objekte entspringen aus den Verhältnissen ihrer Entstehungsregeln oder ihrer Differentialen.’

2 Ibid., p. 355: ‘sondern blosz auf ihre Elemente, die Vernunftideen von der Entstehungsart dieser Anschauungen sind und vermittels dieser auf die Anschauungen selbst.’

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respect to the sensory matter of knowledge, but also with respect to the apriori forms of the knowing consciousness.

The problem as to the relation between the universal and the particular in knowledge within the domain of Kant's apriori forms of consciousness. Maimon's cosmonomic Idea.

It was the relation of the particular to the universal in knowledge which he tried to clarify by his new conception of the Idea as ‘differential of consciousness’. The same problem, however, occurs in the apriori forms of consciousness. Here it becomes that of the relation of the transcendental logical origin of the theoretical cosmos to the modal diversity of formal logical, mathematical and natural scientific concepts. In other words, the basic problems which must be answered by the transcendental ground-Idea (cosmonomic Idea) here come into play.

If the origin, the ἀϱχή, is to be found only in the Idea of deified creative thought, then the modal particularity of meaning must also be reduced to its origin, according to a logical principle of creation.

This modal particularity may at first sight appear as a transcendental apriori datum in the apriori organization of our consciousness. Nevertheless, the Critical science-ideal requires the indication of the rule of origin according to which this particularity is to be created logically.

Thus the problem of specification that Kant had tried to solve in his Critique of Judgment is now set immediately in the frame of a cosmonomic Idea.

Maimon starts from the problem concerning the specification of the formal logical concepts of the understanding into the special concepts of mathematics.

Finding a point of contact in Kant's doctrine of space and time, as forms of sensory intuition, he conceives space as a particularity which may not remain merely a datum, as an ‘apriori form of intuition’, a ὕλη νοητή, but must be referred to its logical origin. The problem broadens, however, immediately to the question concerning the principle of the origin of all so-called real thought, which comes about in universally valid synthetic judgments of knowledge having a special sense. Maimon tries to answer this question in his principle of deter-

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minability (‘Satz der Bestimmbarkeit’). What is to be understood by this principle?

With Maimon it expresses the Idea of logical domination (by a system of further categorical determinations) of the manifold in the special ‘Gegenstände’ of thought, which may not be derived from the merely analytic principles, i.e. from the principles of identity and of logical contradiction alone.

As the ‘principium contradictionis’ is the basic principle of all merely formal analytical judgments, so the ‘Satz der Bestimmbarkeit’ becomes the origin-principle of all particular judgments of knowledge, in which thought, according to Cohen's later pronouncement, becomes ‘thinking of being’ and all being becomes ‘being of thought’. For, according to the cosmonomic Idea here laid at the foundation, reality can hold as reality only insofar as it is derived from its logical origin, in the creative process performed by theoretical thought.

In the explanation of his ‘principle of determinability’ Maimon starts from three fundamentally different ways in which thought can combine a manifold of ‘objects of consciousness’ into a logical unity.

There are three possibilities with respect to the relation between the elements of the manifold which are combined by thought into unity. In the first place, they can be entirely independent with respect to each other, so that each can be thought for itself separately, e.g. the sensory qualities of colour and taste, or ‘substances’ as table and chair.

In this case, thought remains merely formal and arbitrary and connects the ‘objects of consciousness’ only according to the analytic principle of contradiction. Realiter, however, the objects are not unified with one another according to a fixed principle.

In the second place, it is possible that the elements of the manifold, to be combined in thought, are interdependent in such a way that the one cannot be thought apart from the other. According to Maimon, the judgment of causality, as a pure judgment of relation, is typical of this mode of logical synthesis, since cause and effect stand in correlation to one another. From this relation of thought, however, no independent ‘Gegenstand’ can arise. Since each of its two elements supposes the other, both lack the characteristic of that independent existence, required for the ‘realen Gegenstand’.

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Only in the third mode of logical connection or synthesis does thought become thought of reality, in which the origin-principle of the ‘Gegenstand’ can be demonstrated. In this mode of logical connection, the ‘subject’, to be sure, can be thought in the judgment without the ‘predicate’, but not conversely. Only a subject in the judgment that can be thought entirely independently, is a true ‘Gegenstand’ in thought. Thought here ties to the concept of the ‘Gegenstand’ an entire system of further determinations.

For this mode of logical synthesis the mathematical style of thinking is the prototype. For the totality of mathematical concepts and judgments forms a system, which, taking its beginning from an independent transcendental logical origin, is created by the continual addition of further logical determinations. Subject and predicate are constantly combined in the mathematical judgment according to the ‘principle of determinability’ (‘Satz der Bestimmbarkeit’).

The break between form and sensory matter of knowledge. Maimon's later critical scepticism with respect to Kant's concept of experience.

Not all ‘real thought’, however, answers to this basic principle. The ‘empirical’ judgments, which make their appeal to the sensory aspect of experience, are synthetic to be sure, but do not hang together in an apriori and systematic fashion according to the ‘principle of determinability’. Sensory perception always affords us only a group of characteristics, which regularly exist together, but with respect to which it can never be proved that one characteristic is determined by the other. So, for example, the ‘complex sense-perception’ which we call gold is characterized by its yellow colour, by its specific gravity, its solubility, and so on. But, the reason why these very qualities and not any others make their appearance together, remains hidden from our limited understanding. The conclusion from the constant perception of their configuration to the necessity of their combination rests upon the psychological association of Ideas, which Hume had previously analyzed. It is a product of the creative imagination but is not grounded in creative thought.

Maimon has thus landed in a critical scepticism with respect to the actual possibility of applying the apriori forms of consciousness to the Kantian matter of sensory experience.

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According to him, the category of nature-causality remains a merely formal synthesis of thought, creating no actual ‘Gegenstand’. It is not to be deduced according to the ‘principle of determinability’.

The exact natural sciences do not relate the ‘pure categories of thought’ to sensory perceptions themselves, but rather to ideal limiting concepts, to the ‘differentials’, which they substitute for these perceptions. The sensory phenomena do not permit themselves to be connected by thought, in conformity with the logical origin-principle of determinability.

Thus Maimon's mathematical Criticism ends in a fundamental scepticism with respect to Kant's apriori principles of experience, which actually intended to relate the constitutive logical thought-forms apriori to the sensory material of knowledge. The only synthetic apriori sciences which he allows to be valid are the logicized mathematics and the transcendental philosophy as science of the synthetic origin of the pure forms of consciousness.

The continuity-postulate of the mathematical science-ideal halts in Maimon's Critical philosophy before the boundary of sensory phenomena!

How is this to be explained in view of the fact that in his first work, Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie, Maimon had expressly maintained that the categories of thought can be related also to sensory perceptions themselves by means of the Ideas of reason (as limiting concepts in the sense of ‘differentials of consciousness’)?

The explanation is to be found in the circumstance that in Maimon's first work, Leibniz' mathematical idealism was accepted to an extent that did not really agree with Kant's Criticism. With Leibniz, in the last analysis, the sensory aspect of reality becomes a mode of mathematical thought, while the concept of the differential took a metaphysical speculative turn. It was Leibniz' idea of the divine Origin as mathematical thought creating the whole cosmic coherence, that originally dominated Maimon's entire Critical standpoint.

Leibniz' conception of the relation between phenomenon and noumenon was, however, altogether different from that of Kant.

Only the metaphysics of the science-ideal could attempt to reduce sensory phenomena to mathematical thought as their ultimate origin and assume that, in the creative analysis of the divine thought, they answer adequately to the pure concepts of the understanding.

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Kant could not relativize and eventually annul the boundaries between sensibility and reason in this metaphysical manner.

The way which Kant took to synthesize both antagonistic factors was eventually determined by his conception of the transcendental Idea of theoretical reason as limiting concept of freedom. That Kant thereby involved himself in insoluble antinomies was due to his dualistic transcendental ground-Idea, which did not permit a veritable bridging of the gap between form and matter.

Maimon who tried to understand Kant's doctrine of the transcendental Ideas in a ‘purely theoretical’ sense now stood before the dilemma of giving to the ‘Ideas’ either the metaphysical speculative turn which they had possessed in Leibniz' mathematical idealistic conception of the ‘intellectus archetypus’, or of letting them shrivel up into mere fictions of the creative phantasy in the sense intended by Hume.

The first way would have carried him back irrevocably into pre-Kantian metaphysics, which he had rejected more consistently than Kant himself in his radical critique of the ‘Ding an sich’.

Within the limits of the Critical standpoint, the mathematical science-ideal appears unable to overcome Kant's dualism between sensibility and reason.

As in Maimon's later works Leibniz's speculative Idea of God lost positive significance and the limits of the mathematical science-ideal were drawn more sharply in the critical sense, the Ideas in Maimon also tend more and more pronouncedly to become mere fictions¹. To the same degree, the boundaries that Kant had drawn between reason and sensibility gain in sharpness in Maimon's criticism. The differential-concept and the continuity-principle originating from mathematical thought halt before a boundary between sensibility and reason, which Kant, however, had drawn for the sake of his new conception of the ideal of personality. Maimon's transcendental ground-Idea ultimately lacks unity in its Archimedean point, despite his falling back into the supremacy of the mathematical science-ideal.

Only from the personality-ideal itself, could the immediately following development of transcendental idealism attempt to overcome Kant's dualism. The science-ideal conceived according to Criticism did not prove capable of this.

1 Cf. on this in detail Cassirer III, pp. 104 ff.

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§ 2 - The continuity-postulate in the new conception of the ideal of personality and the genesis of the dialectical philosophy in Fichte's first ‘Theoretische Wissenschaftslehre’ (1794)

The ‘Naturding an sich’ with the doctrine (attached to it by Kant) of the matter of experience, altogether passively received by the sensory function of consciousness, had become the butt of the most effective criticism, in the first controversy that developed about the new critical transcendental-philosophy. Above all, the gross form which Kant's disciple Reinhold had given to the doctrine concerning the ‘Affizierung’ (affection) of the subjective sensibility by the mysterious ‘Ding an sich’ had sharply exposed the antinomy inherent in it. Reinhold conceived this ‘Affizierung’, in fact, as a ‘causal process’ and this conception fell prey to the annihilating attack which Gottlieb Ernst Schulze, oriented to Hume's psychologistic criticism, in his anonymously published writing Aenesidemus directed against the ‘presumptions’ of the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’. According to Kant, the category of causality is restricted to the sensory aspect of experience. How then could it be related to the ‘Ding an sich’ beyond all experience?

Maimon had given the sharpest form to the problem of the relation of sensibility and reason, matter and form of knowledge. In his first work he had set the requirement of explaining also the origin of the matter of experience from the ‘transcendental consciousness’ itself. He had further ventured a first attempt at giving a veritable genetic system of the ‘pure forms of the consciousness’ with the aid of the origin-principle.

All this was only a preparation for the dialectical development which the transcendental freedom-idealism was to undergo after Kant.

The ground-motive of Fichte's first ‘Wissenschaftslehre’. The creative moment in the personality-ideal.

Not until Fichte's first Wissenschaftslehre (doctrine of science)¹ of the year 1794, does this dialectical development take

1 This is the translation of ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ in D.D. Runes' Dictionary of Philosophy (1951). The terms: ‘Grammar of Science’, ‘Philosophy of science’ and ‘Science of science’ usually do not have the meaning intended by Fichte. The German term will often be abbreviated as W.L.

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its start from the transcendental reflection upon the Idea of freedom as an hypothesis even of the science-ideal.

The metaphysical concept of the ‘Naturding an sich’ (before Kant, the basic denominator for the rationalistic science-ideal, in Kant's system itself a threat to both the science- and personality-ideal) was completely abandoned. As the basic concept of ‘dogmatic realism’, it must be abolished in the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ which, as the self-reflection of reason upon its own activity, refers all functions of consciousness, even the receptive sensory one, to their absolute, transcendent root, viz. the self-consciousness as absolutely free ego, determined by nothing else.

That ego is not itself a being; it is no more a given super-individual, universally valid logical unity of consciousness, as in Kant, but it creates itself in a free activity determined by nothing, by means of a free ‘Tathandlung’ (‘practical act’).

This absolute ego, creating itself in free activity, is not found among the ‘empirical’ (read ‘psychological’!) determinations of our consciousness and cannot be found among them, but is at the basis of every consciousness (which it alone makes possible)¹.

This ego is no longer the fundamental static form of all synthetic thought, as was Kant's ‘transcendental unity of apperception’. As absolutely free thesis, it is necessarily thought of as the dynamic totality of activity, in itself still undifferentiated, out of which our entire cosmos must originate through a series of further acts of consciousness². Nature can posses no independent root in contrast with this absolute thetic ego. Necessity itself in the causal coherence of nature can be understood only as a product of the free activity of the absolute I.

1 Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (in J.J. Fichte's Sämmtl. Werke, Bnd. I, hrg. v. J.H. Fichte), p. 91. I cite henceforth this edition of Fichte's works, consulted by me.

2 Op. cit., p. 99: ‘Auf unseren Satz, als absoluten Grundsatz alles Wissens hat gedeutet Kant in seiner Deduction der Kategorien; er hat ihn aber nie als Grundsatz bestimmt aufgestellt.’ [‘Kant, in his deduction of the categories, has hinted at our proposition as absolute principle of all knowledge. But he has never established it definitely as a principle.’]

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The Archimedean point in Fichte's transcendental ground-Idea.

What is this ‘absolute ego’ which Fichte makes the basis of his entire philosophy, in the first and highest principle of his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’: ‘Das Ich setzt sich selbst’ (the ego posits itself)?

For a moment we might suppose, that here the deepest religious root of the whole temporal cosmos was discovered, and, as religious apriori, was made the starting-point of philosophy.

This might be supposed all the more readily, since Fichte, in his treatise, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre (1th ed. 1794, 2d ed. 1798), expressly declares that his doctrine of science, with its absolute thetic principle, is not determined by logic, but, rather the reverse, provides the basis of the latter¹.

Thus even theoretical logic, the ‘organon’ of all hypostatizing in the immanence-philosophy, is subjected to the doctrine of science.

The transcendental synthesis of the ‘ego’ must itself be understood to be the origin of the analytic principles - a thesis, which Kant had posited in all its sharpness, if taken in a merely transcendental-logical sense, but to which he became unfaithful in his deduction of the categories from the analytical forms of judgment.

Maimon had accepted a mutual dependence of analysis and synthesis, but in the material sense he likewise recognized the transcendental-logical synthesis as a condition of the analytical. Fichte, however, was the first to reduce the origin of the analytic in the last analysis to the absolute ‘ego’, which appears to be elevated above all logical determination.

But it soon turns out that in the first ‘Grundsatz’ (principle) of the doctrine of science there is nothing embodied but the proclamation of the absolute sovereignty of ‘practical reason’, in the sense of the Humanist ideal of moral freedom.

1 W.W. I, p. 68: ‘die Wissenschaftslehre wird nicht durch die Logik, aber die Logik wird durch die Wissenschaftslehre bedingt und bestimmt. Die Wissenschaftslehre bekommt nicht etwa von der Logik ihre Form, sondern sie hat sie in sich selbst und stellt sie erst für die mögliche Abstraction durch Freiheit auf.’ [‘The doctrine of science is not conditioned and determined by logic, but rather logic by the doctrine of science. The doctrine of science does not in any way obtain its form from logic, but has it in itself and only plans it through freedom for the sake of the possible abstraction.’]

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The first absolute ‘Thathandlung’ (practical act) of reason originates, as Fichte himself explains, from the thinking of itself on the part of the absolute ego. ‘This necessitates a reflection on that which in the first place might be taken for it, and an abstraction from all that which does not really belong to the same’¹.

He further grants: ‘The laws (of general logic) according to which that activity must be thought of absolutely as the basis of human knowledge, or - what is the same - the rules, according to which that reflection is executed, are not yet demonstrated to be valid, but they are tacitly pre-supposed, as known and established. Only below will they be derived from the principle whose formulation is correct only on condition of their correctness. This is a circle; but it is an unavoidable circle’².

It will have to be granted to Lask, that the ‘absolute ego’, thus gained by abstraction and reflection, cannot be otherwise qualified than as an ‘hypostatizing of the universal concept “ego” as the totality of reason’³.

1 Op. cit. I, u. 91: ‘Dies macht eine Reflexion über dasjenige, was man etwa zunächst dafür halten könnte, und eine Abstraction von allem, was nich wirklich dazu gehört, nothwendig.’

2 Ib. I, p. 92: ‘Die Gesetze (der allgemeinen Logik), nach denen man jene Thathandlung sich als Grundlage des menschlichen Wissens schlechterdings denken muss, oder - welches das gleiche ist - die Regeln, nach welchen jene Reflexion angestellt wird, sind noch nicht als gültig erwiesen, sondern sie werden stillschweigend, als bekannt und ausgemacht, vorausgesetzt. Erst tiefer unten werden sie von dem Grundsatze, dessen Aufstellung blosz unter Bedingung ihrer Richtigkeit richtig ist, abgeleitet. Dies ist ein Cirkel; aber est ist ein unvermeidlicher Cirkel.’

3 Lask, Gesammelte Schriften I, p. 88: ‘Hypostasierung des Allgemein-begriffs “Ich” zur Totalität der Vernunft.’

Fichte's ‘absolute ego’ as origin and totality of all cosmic diversity of meaning is nothing but the hypostatization of the moral function.

The ‘absolute ego’ in Fichte is the absolutely unlimited free activity of the moral function, hypostatized in the ideal of personality. As sovereign function of reason, it has the infinite task to create from itself the cosmos as the product of freedom.

The continuity-postulate inherent in the Humanist science-ideal as it was conceived of in pre-Kantian rationalism had

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required that mathematical thought should produce a cosmic order after its own pattern.

Similarly the postulate of continuity, implied in the religious freedom-motive and first discovered by Kant in the Humanist ideal of personality, moves philosophic thought to exceed the modal boundaries of the different aspects of the cosmos and to elevate the moral function of human personality to a basic denominator of the modal diversity of meaning. To this end, natural necessity must be interpreted as a product of the hypostatized moral freedom in the ‘reflexive’ thought of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’.

‘Theoretical reason’, ‘practical reason’ and ‘faculty of judgment’ may no longer remain mutually isolated ‘departments of reason’. They must be related to the root of self-consciousness, viewed by Fichte as freely creative moral activity.

This was the boundary before which Kant had halted in the interest of maintaining the science-ideal. There loomed up, in his Critical philosophy, the antinomy between moral freedom hypostatized in the Idea of the homo noumenon, and the science-ideal, based on the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, which found the scepter of its sovereignty in the category of natural causality. In the critical dialectic he tried, though fruitlessly, to ‘mummify’ this antinomy by relegating ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical reason’ each within its limits.

Kant would have the understanding bow under the logical principle of contradiction. The transcendental Idea of freedom may not be related as a category of the understanding to sensory experience and thereby to nature, as little as the category of natural causality may be related to the practical Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’.

With Fichte, dialectical thought begins to overpass these critical limits, in order to make the cosmos originate from the free activity of the ‘absolute ego’, from the supposed radical unity of reason itself: ‘There may be indicated something from which every category is itself derived: the ego as absolute subject. Of everything else to which it possibly may be applied, it must be shown that reality is transferred from the ego to it: - that it must be, insofar as the ego is’¹.

1 W.W. I, p. 99: ‘es läszt sich etwas aufzeigen, wovon jede Kategorie selbst abgeleitet ist: das Ich als absolutes Subject. Für alles mögliche übrige, worauf sie angewendet werden soll, musz gezeigt werden, dass aus dem Ich Realität darauf übertragen werden: - dass es seyn müsse, wofern das Ich sey.’

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Fichte's attempt at a transcendental deduction of the Kantian forms of thought from the self-consciousness.

In the first place, the logical principle of identity is derived from the first principle of the doctrine of science. According to Fichte, it is nothing but the form of the conclusion from ‘being posited’ to ‘being’ (‘vom Gesetztsein auf das Sein’), which has been abstracted from the fundamental proposition ‘I am’, by elimination of the content implied in the ego. In the logical judgment ‘A is A’, no possible A can be anything other than an A created and activated in the ego. As surely as the ego itself is not a static datum, but an infinite activity, so surely is identity not merely an immobile logical form, but an infinite task in the process of the synthetic determination of the cosmos in the course of reason's becoming self-conscious.

The ‘mode of activity of the human mind in general’ (‘Handlungsart des menschlichen Geistes überhaupt’), which discloses itself in the logical form of the judgment of identity, is the category of reality. ‘All that to which the proposition A = A is applicable, has reality, insofar as this proposition is applicable to it. That which is posited by the mere positing of anything at all (i.e. posited in the Ego) is reality in it, is its essence’¹.

The category of reality, to Kant one of the categories of the class of quality, which he simply derived from the various forms of the logical judgments, is thus reduced by Fichte in the logical judgment of identity to the absolute ego, as actual origin of all reality. Its relationship to sensory experience can no longer be grounded in the ‘natural thing in itself’ which affects our sensibility. Rather it is based entirely upon the ‘absolute ego’ as the source of all reality created freely in self-consciousness. After the logical judgment of identity has received this basis, the logical judgment of contradiction (non-A is not A) is also referred to the first principle of the doctrine of science.

The first-mentioned as well as the second logical principle is

1 ‘Alles, worauf der Satz A = A anwendbar ist, hat, inwiefern derselbe darauf anwendbar ist, Realität. Dasjenige, was durch das blosze Setzen irgend eines Dinges (eines im Ich gesetzten) gesetzt ist, ist in ihm Realität, ist sein Wesen.’

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found among the ‘facts of empirical consciousness’ and must in the doctrine of science be subjected to the ultimate justification which logic itself cannot offer. In the logical judgment of the antithesis (non-A is not A), the question: ‘Is then the contrary of A posited, and under what condition of the form of the mere act is it then posited?’¹ remains entirely unanswered.

The logical antithesis is an absolute act of the ego. ‘Opposition as such is posited merely by the Ego’².

This act of consciousness which is enacted in the anti-thesis is possible only on condition of the unity of consciousness in its thesis and antithesis. If the consciousness of the first act did not hang together with the consciousness of the second, the second ‘positing’ (the antithesis) would be no ‘counter-positing’, but a thesis and nothing else. Only by virtue of its relationship to the absolute thesis does it become an anti-thesis.

Originally nothing is posited but the ego. Therefore all opposition must be made with reference to the latter. But the anti-thesis of the ego is the non-ego. Thus a non-ego is set in opposition to the ego, as certainly as the absolute evidence of the logical judgment, ‘non-A is not A’, is found among the facts of empirical consciousness.

By abstraction from the content of the ego, Fichte derives the logical principle of contradiction from the material judgment, ‘To the ego a non-ego is opposed.’ Finally, if total abstraction is made from the act of judgment and attention is directed solely to the form of the conclusion from the antithesis to non-being, Kant's second category of quality, that of negation, originates. This category also has its true origin in the free, infinite activity of the ego; it is not merely a static logical form. It is to be understood, just as all other categories of thought, only as a dialectical point of transition through which the ego becomes conscious of itself as infinite free activity.

Now there is included in the second ‘principle of the doctrine of science’ (‘Grundsatz der Wissenschaftslehre’) an overt antinomy. For the non-ego (i.e. nature), as appears from the first principle, is to be posited only in the ego as absolute totality,

1 W.W. I, p. 102: ‘Ist denn, und unter welcher Bedingung der Form der blossen Handlung ist denn das Gegentheil von A gesetzt?’

2 W.W. I, p. 103: ‘Das Entgegengesetzsein überhaupt ist schlechthin durch das Ich gesetzt.’

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but at the same time, as antithesis, it cancels the ego. ‘Thus the second principle is opposed to itself and cancels itself’¹. Yet, in the absolute thesis of the first principle there is implied the demand that the ego and the non-ego be thought together in the absolute ego. Thesis and antithesis thus require their synthesis, which is contained in the third principle: ‘The ego posits in the ego the non-ego by limitation of itself.’ If abstraction is made from the definite form of this judgment (i.e. that it is founded upon a basis of distinction or relation) and attention is paid only to ‘the universal feature of the mode of action - the limitation of the one by the other’, there originates the category of determination (in Kant, that of limitation): ‘Namely, a positing of quantity in general, whether it be quantity of reality or that of negation, is called determination’².

1 W.W. I, p. 106: ‘Also ist der zweite Grundsatz sich selbst entgegengesetzt, und hebt sich selbst auf.’

2 t.a.p. 122/3: ‘Nemlich ein setzen der Quantität überhaupt, sey es nun Quantität der Realität oder der Negation, heiszt Bestimmung.’

Dialectical thought, dominated by the ideal of personality, usurps the task of the cosmic order.

What occurs in this synthesis is clear. Dialectical thought usurps the task of the cosmic order, which regulates the relationship of the modal law-spheres in the cosmic continuity of time. As we demonstrated in Part I, the cosmic order of time grounds and at the same time relativizes the sphere-sovereignty of the modal law-spheres, by bridging over their boundaries. Consequently, if logical thought in the line of speculative dialectic is set in place of the cosmic order, that thought must relativize the boundaries of the modal spheres. But since logical thought in its very principium contradictionis requires a strict maintenance of these boundaries, it can take upon itself this impossible task only by a false logical relativizing of its basic laws.

Logical thought, conscious of its boundaries, can never come to the point of making the meaning of the pre-logical aspects of reality - conceived of in theoretical abstraction as ‘nature’ - originate from the moral function of free personality. Dialectic thought, however, supposes it can accomplish this magical deed by conceiving the absolutized moral aspect as an unlimited totality, from which by division (cf. the division of a geometrical straight line, an image to which Fichte appeals again and

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again!) the limited, finite functions are to originate: ‘We have united the opposed ego and non-ego through the concept of divisibility’¹. The limited ego and the limiting non-ego of the antithesis have both originated by quantitative division or self-limitation of the absolute ego, in which, naturally, a spatial division is not to be thought of. Thus in the synthesis, finite ‘nature’ and finite ‘freedom’, sensibility and finite reason, matter and form, are thought together, after moral freedom is hypostatized by a first theoretical synthesis as a basic denominator for both! This basic denominator is again viewed rationalistically as the moral law!

Fichte himself has formulated the moral function of law as basic denominator for temporal reality in his pronouncement: ‘Our world is the material of our duty, rendered sensible; this is the authentically real in things, the true basic matter of all appearance’².

But the absolutized moral freedom of action of the ego cannot serve as a basic denominator for the theoretical synthesis of meaning. By hypostatization it is torn out of the cosmic temporal coherence of the modal aspects, and becomes an abstract meaning-less form and no totality of meaning.

In Fichte's ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ of the year 1794, according to Kroner's excellent observation, ‘ethics is raised to the position of metaphysics’.

Speculative dialectic, which was not to be elaborated consistently until the system of Hegel, demands that the thesis, the ‘absolute ego’, should not be posited as absolute in the sense of really falling outside the dialectical system. It requires that both thesis and antithesis should be viewed only as momenta of the synthesis which determine and mutually limit each other. But although Fichte laid the foundations of modern speculative dialectic, his moralism prevented him from accepting this consequence.

The absolute ego of the thesis is separated by him from the limited ego of the antithesis.

1 W.W. I, 110: ‘Wir haben die entgegengesetzten Ich und nicht-Ich vereinigt durch den Begriff der Theilbarkeit.’

2 W.W. V, 211: ‘Unsere Welt ist das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht; dies ist das eigentlich Reelle in den Dingen, der wahre Grundstoff aller Erscheinung.’

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To Fichte the ‘absolute ego’ remains outside the dialectical system. The Idea of the absolute ego as ethical task.

The dialectical system which the doctrine of science develops, does not concern the absolute ego of the thesis (which does not itself reflect as does the finite ego), but only the finite ego, which originates through the creation of the antithesis in the ego.

The absolute synthesis, the return of the absolute ego into itself, remains a task never to be realized.

Here the Idea of the absolute ego as ethical ‘task’ makes its entrance into Fichte's dialectic: ‘So far as the predicate of freedom can hold for man, i.e. so far as he is an absolute Subject, and not one that is represented or capable of being represented, he has nothing in common with the natural being, and is therefore not even opposed to it. In accordance with the logical form of the judgment which is positive (namely: Man is free from natural necessity), both concepts should, nevertheless, be united. Not, to be sure, in any concept, but merely in the Idea of an ego, whose consciousness is not determined by anything outside itself, but which rather determines everything outside itself by its mere consciousness. But this very Idea is not thinkable, inasmuch as it contains a contradiction. Nevertheless, it is set up for us as the highest practical goal. Man should more and more approximate infinitely the freedom which in itself is unattainable’¹.

Therefore, in the development of the dialectical system, the final antinomy may not be reconciled logically. In the process of thought, too, it may only be solved ethically. Therefore, Fichte writes that, in the antitheses which are united through the first synthesis, thought has to seek after new antinomies, in

1 W.W. I, p. 117: ‘der Mensch, insofern das Prädicat der Freiheit von ihm gelten kann, d.i. insofern er absolut und nicht vorgestelltes noch vorstellbares Subject ist, hat mit dem Naturwesen gar nichts gemein, und es ist ihm also nicht entgegengesetzt. Dennoch sollen laut der logischen Form des Urteils, welche positiv ist (scl. Der Mensch ist frei von Naturnotwendigkeit), beide Begriffe vereinigt werden; sie sind aber in gar keinem Begriffe zu vereinigen, sondern blosz in der Idee eines Ich, dessen Bewustseyn durch gar nichts ausser ihm bestimmt würde, sondern vielmehr selbst alles ausser ihm durch sein blosses Bewusstseyn bestimmte: welche Idee aber selbst nicht denkbar ist, indem sie für uns einen Widerspruch enthält. Dennoch aber ist sie uns zum höchsten praktischen Ziele aufgestellt. Der Mensch soll sich der an sich unerreichbaren Freiheit ins Unendliche immer mehr nähern.’

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order to unite them through a new synthesis, ‘until we come to opposites, which can no longer be perfectly united and we thereby pass over into the realm of the practical part’¹.

Kroner rightly compares the first absolute principle in Fichte's first sketch of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ with Kant's categorical imperative and calls the proposition of the self-creative absolute ego ‘the basic law of pure practical reason in its speculative use.’ The production of the synthesis in the dialectic is set in perfect analogy with moral activity. It is viewed as moral activity continuing itself in thought and become speculative². Thus Fichte's observation may be explained: ‘We accordingly begin with a deduction and go with it as far as we can. The impossibility of continuing it will doubtless show us the point where we have to break it off and to appeal to that unconditioned authoritative dictum of reason, which will result from the task’³.

1 W.W. I, p. 115: ‘bis wir auf Entgegengesetzte kommen, die sich nicht weiter vollkommen verbinden lassen, und dadurch in das Gebiet des praktischen Theils übergehen.’

2 Kroner I, 398.

3 W.W. I, p. 106: ‘Wir heben demnach mit einer Deduktion an, und gehen mit ihr, so weit wir können. Die Unmöglichkeit sie fortzusetzen wird uns ohne Zweifel zeigen, wo wir sie abzubrechen, und uns auf jenen unbedingten Machtspruch der Vernunft, der sich aus der Aufgabe ergeben wird, zu berufen haben.’

Fichte attempts to give an account of the possibility of theoretical knowledge by referring the latter to the selfhood. Why this attempt cannot succeed on Fichte's immanence-standpoint.

Even in the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ of 1794 Fichte ventured a serious attempt to clear up the problem of synthesis in epistemology, a problem which Kant had not really solved. To this end he will relate the theoretical synthesis to the root of the self-consciousness⁴.

4 op. cit., p. 114: ‘The celebrated question which Kant set at the apex of the Critique of Pure Reason: How are synthetic judgments possible a-priori? is now answered in the most general and satisfactory fashion. We have in the third principle performed a synthesis between the opposed ego and non-ego, by means of the posited divisibility of both, about the possibility of which nothing further may be asked, nor may a ground for the same be adduced. It is simply possible, one is authorized to it without any further ground. All other syntheses that are to be valid must be implied in it. They must at once be performed in and with it. And thus, as this is demonstrated, the most convincing proof is provided that they are valid even as the former.’ [‘Die berühmte Frage, welche Kant an die Spitze der Kritik der reinen Vernunft stellte: wie sind synthetische Urteile a priori möglich? - ist jetzt auf die allgemeinste und befriedigendste Art beantwortet. Wir haben im dritten Grundsatze eine Synthesis zwischen dem entgegengesetzten Ich und nicht-Ich, vermittelst der gesetzten Theilbarkeit beider, vorgenommen, über deren Möglichkeit sich nicht weiter fragen, noch ein Grund derselben sich anführen lässt; sie ist schlechtin möglich, man ist zu ihr ohne alien weiteren Grund befugt. Alle übrigen Synthesen, welche gültig seyn sollen, müssen in dieser liegen; sie müssen zugleich in und mit ihr vorgenommen seyn: und so, wie dies bewiesen wird, wird der überzeugendste Beweis geliefert, das sie gültig sind, wie jene.’]

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On the immanence-standpoint of Fichte's Humanistic cosmonomic Idea, however, this problem proves to be insoluble, notwithstanding Fichte's penetrating philosophical vision. The elevation of the moral noumenal man (homo noumenon) as root of the self-consciousness has only the effect of rooting the synthesis in the antinomy, which is always the token of a breaking through the modal boundaries of meaning by hypostatizing thought!

The antithetical relation of theoretical thought here becomes a logical contradiction, in the dialectical sense!

Fichte derives the Kantian categories of quantity¹ and quality by abstraction from the absolute ego (as origin of the Kantian forms of consciousness as well as of the sensory matter of experience).

1 By setting the ego and the non-ego in the third ‘Grundsatz’ as limited parts of the absolute ego, according to Fichte, both are united by quantity (vid. § 3 of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’). ‘Just as there (viz. in § 3) the ego was first simply posited as absolute reality according to quality, so here something, i.e. something determined by quantity, is simply posited in the ego, or the ego is simply posited as determined quantity’ (I, 205). [‘So wie dort’ (viz. in § 3) ‘zuvörderst das Ich, der Qualität nach als absolute Realität schlechthin gesetzt wurde; so wird hier etwas, d.h. ein durch Quantität bestimmtes, schlechthin in das Ich gesetzt oder das Ich wird schlechthin gesetzt als bestimmte Quantität.’]

Transcendental deduction of the Kantian categories of relation from self-consciousness. The science-ideal is here derived from the ideal of personality.

In the further dialectical development of his system, Fichte tries to deduce in this manner the Kantian categories of substance and inherence, causality and interaction. The synthesis between reasonable freedom (of the ego) and sensory nature, posited in the third principle, is the starting-point for this deduction. Here we shall not follow in the wake of this dialec-

[p. 425]

tical development, but shall simply fix our attention upon the fact that Fichte actually sought to derive the Humanist ideal of science - which found its focus in the category of causality - from the ideal of personality. To this end his thought followed the way of dialectical continuity, contained as a postulate in Kant's practical Idea of freedom. In Fichte's dialectic this domination of the continuity-postulate implied in the freedom-motive finds its clear expression in the transcendental deduction of the natural-scientific categories of relation (substance, causality and interaction). Here Fichte observes: ‘The independent activity (as synthetic unity) determines the change (as synthetic unity) and vice versa, i.e. they determine one another reciprocally, and are themselves united synthetically. The activity, as synthetic unity, is an absolute transition (Übergehen); the change, an absolute intrusion (Eingreifen) entirely self-determined. The former determines the latter, would mean: only by virtue of the transition, is the causal intrusion of the changing terms posited; the latter determines the former, would mean: as the terms interpenetrate, the activity must necessarily pass over from the one to the other... All is one and the same. - The whole, however, is absolutely posited; it bases itself upon itself’¹. And a little later: ‘Thus the activity returns into itself by means of the change; and the change returns into itself by means of the activity. Everything reproduces itself, and there is no hiatus possible there; from any single term one is driven to all the rest’².

1 I, 169: ‘Die unabhängige Thätigkeit (als synthetische Einheit) bestimmt den Wechsel (als synthetische Einheit) und umgekehrt, d.i. beide bestimmen sich gegenseitig, und sind selbst synthetisch vereinigt. Die Thätigkeit, als synthetische Einheit, ist ein absolutes Uebergehen; der Wechsel ein absolutes durch sich selbst vollständig bestimmtes Eingreifen. Die erstere bestimmt den letzteren, würde heiszen: blosz dadurch das übergangen wird, wird das Eingreifen der Wechselglieder gesetzt: der letztere bestimmt die erstere, würde heissen: so wie die Glieder eingreifen, muss nothwendig die Thätigheit von einem zum anderen übergehen... Alles ist Eins und Ebendasselbe. - Das Ganze aber ist schlechhin gesetzt; es gründet sich auf sich selbst.’

2 I, 170: ‘Also die Thätigkeit geht in sich selbst zurück vermittelst des Wechsels; und der Wechsel geht in sich selbst zurück vermittelst der Thätigkeit. Alles reproducirt sich selbst, und es ist da kein hiatus möglich; von jedem Gliede aus wird man zu allen übrigen getrieben.’

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The domination of the continuity-postulate of the ideal of personality. The Humanist transcendental ground-Idea in its transcendental monist-moralistic type.

It would be unfair to disregard the deep philosophical tendency that is present in this entire process of thought: the search for the radical unity of philosophical reflection in a selfhood beyond the theoretical diversity of syntheses and the insight into the continuous coherence of meaning of the cosmos. But this insight is directed into wrong channels by Fichte's Humanistic cosmonomic Idea. It is by means of dialectical logical thought that the Humanistic ideal of personality attempts to carry the continuity of the freedom-postulate, which tolerates no hiatus, through all cosmological thought and in this attempt multiplies the basic antinomy between the ideals of science and of personality in each new synthetic phase of the dialectical thought-process. With Fichte, the antinomy cannot be solved by thought, because he makes the categorical (i.e. the hypostatized) moral law the basis of his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’, in its theoretical as well as in its practical part, and because - in the line of the Kantian practical Idea - he proclaims the absolute synthesis of nature and freedom to be an eternal ‘task’ for human personality. The limits which reason sets to itself in each new antithesis, in each new antinomy between ego and non-ego, between moral freedom and natural necessity, do not lie to Fichte in a cosmic order set by God in his creation and not to be transgressed by reason, but they rest upon free self-limitations of reason itself. Therefore, theoretical reason in the dialectical system can also again and again annul the limits and in each new synthesis attempt to carry through the continuity-postulate of the freedom-idealism, until, of itself, it brings to light the fact that the absolute synthesis should be effected ultimately by the hypostatized ethical thought of ‘practical reason’, by a ‘Machtspruch der Vernunft’ alone.

Productive imagination is to Fichte the creative origin of sensory matter.

Which function of reason, however, achieves this absolute synthesis, which is thought of, otherwise than in Kant, as a material productive synthesis, as a synthesis that creates form and content alike (though it be in the infinite task through which the ego becomes self-conscious as a productive capacity)? This

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function is to Fichte the ‘power of productive imagination’ (‘productive Einbildungskraft’), which he - again different from Kant - proclaims as the free creative origin of sensory matter. It is a theoretical as well as a practical function. Kant could not really subject the sensory ‘matter of experience’ to a transcendental deduction; rather he excluded it as the ‘contingent’ and ‘empirical’ from the transcendental inquiry and, for the explanation of this matter, he again appealed to the affection of our senses by the ‘natural thing-in-itself’.

Fichte's absolute thesis, however, requires the deduction even of sensory matter as the product of the freely creative ego, and as comprehended in the absolute ego.

To this end, he introduces the productive imagination, which in a transcendental sense had for Kant only the function of achieving a synthesis between the given sensory matter and the ‘pure forms of thought’. In Kant this synthesis is performed by means of the ‘schematizing’ of the categories in time as a ‘form of intuition’, by the creation of a ‘transcendental pattern’ for all empirical ‘Gegenstände’.

The dialectical process was described by Fichte as a transition from the free ego into its opposite (the non-ego) that limits the former and as the synthetic reduction of this non-ego to the absolute ego through the mutual determination and limitation of the two momenta: the limited ego and the limiting non-ego, both posited by and in the absolute ego.

The determining theoretical thought, however, that posits rigid conceptual boundaries, cannot bring about the highest synthesis. It remains confined in the final antinomy between the free infinite ego and the finite ego limited by the non-ego, two egos reciprocally excluding each other.

The opposed terms of the final theoretical antithesis can be synthesized only in the concept of mere determinability (Bestimmbarkeit), not in that of determination (Bestimmung); and here Fichte clearly exhibits the influence of Maimon's ‘principle of determinability’: ‘For if the boundary set between the opposites (one of which is the very element that creates the opposition, while the other, in respect of its existence, lies entirely outside the consciousness and is posited merely in view of the necessary limitation) is posited as a hard and fast unchangeable limit, then both elements are united by determination, but not by determinability; then, however, the required totality in the change of substantiality would not be fulfilled either... Accor-

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dingly, that limit must not be accepted as a fixed limit’¹.

The final theoretical synthesis is thus attainable only by relativizing the boundaries which determining thought sets between the finite ego and the finite non-ego in the infinite ego. Dialectical thought can grasp this final synthesis only as ‘determinability’, as ‘the Idea of determination which is not attainable in this way.’ (I, 216): ‘The ego is only that which it posits itself to be. That it is infinite, is to say that it posits itself as infinite: it determines itself through the predicate of infinity, thus it (the ego) limits itself, as substratum of infinity; it distinguishes itself from its infinite activity (both of which are one and the same in themselves). And this must be the state of affairs if the ego is to be infinite. This activity going on to infinity, which distinguishes it (i.e. the ego) from itself must be its own activity; it must be ascribed to it: consequently, simultaneously in one and the same undivided act which allows no further distinctions, the ego must also again take up this activity into itself (determine A + B through A). But if it takes this activity up into itself, the former is thus determined and consequently not infinite: however, it should be infinite, and thus it must be posited outside the ego.’

‘This change of the ego in and with itself, inasmuch as it posits itself as finite and infinite at the same time, is the faculty of imagination. It is a change which consists, as it were(!), in a conflict with itself, and thereby reproduces itself, in that the ego seeks to unite that which is incapable of being united, and at one moment seeks to take up the infinite into the form of the finite, and at another, driven back, posits it again outside of the same, and in the same moment again seeks to take it up into the form of finiteness’².

1 I, 216: ‘Wird nemlich die zwischen die Entgegengesetzten (deren eines das entgegensetzende selbst ist, das andere aber seinem Daseyn nach völlig ausser dem Bewusstseyn liegt, und blosz zum Behuf der notwendigen Begrenzung gesetzt wird) gesetzte Grenze als feste, fixierte, unwandelbare Grenze gesetzt, so werden beide vereinigt duch Bestimmung, nicht aber durch Bestimmbarkeit: aber dann wäre auch die in dem Wechsel der Substantialität geforderte Totalität nicht erfüllt... Demnach muss jene Grenze nicht als feste Grenze angenommen werden.’

2 I, 214, 215: ‘Das Ich ist nur das, als was es sich setzt. Es ist unendlich heisst, es setzt sich unendlich: es bestimmt sich durch das Prädicat der Unendlichkeit; also es begrenzt sich selbst (das Ich) als Substrat der Unendlichkeit; es unterscheidet sich selbst von seiner unendlichen Thätigkeit (welches beides an sich Eins und ebendasselbe ist); und so musste es sich verhalten, wenn das Ich unendlich seyn sollte, - Diese ins Unendliche gehende Thätigkeit, die es von sich unterscheidet, soll seine Thätigkeit sein; sie soll ihm zugeschrieben werden: mithin muss zugleich in einer und ebenderselben ungetheilten und unzuunterscheidenden Handlung das Ich diese Thätigkeit auch wieder in sich aufnehmen (A + B durch A bestimmen). Nimmt es sie aber in sich auf, so ist sie bestimmt, mithin nicht unendlich: doch aber soll sie unendlich seyn, und so muss sie ausser dem Ich gesetzt werden.
‘Dieser Wechsel des Ich in und mit sich selbst, da es sich endlich und unendlich zugleich setzt - ein Wechsel der gleichsam(!) in einem Widerstreite mit sich selbst besteht, und dadurch sich selbst reproducirt, indem das Ich unvereinbares vereinigen will, jetzt das unendliche in die Form des endlichen aufzunehmen versucht, jetzt, zurückgetrieben, es wieder ausser derselben setzt, und in dem nemlichen Momente abermals es in die Form der Endlichkeit aufzunehmen versucht - ist das Vermögen der Einbildungskraft.’

[p. 429]

Fichte conceives of the productive imagination as an unconscious function of reason.

This productive imagination (in its thetic, antithetic and synthetic activity) does not consciously produce the content of representations. It is rather the case that it alone makes consciousness possible. Only reflection raises it to the level of consciousness. It is a free act not determined by any grounds. In the deduction of the power of imagination the theoretical doctrine of science reaches its highest synthesis. Imagination is operative prior to all reflection, as pre-conscious activity, and in its antithetic activity it sets no fixed limits at all. It is only reflection that sets fixed limits, inasmuch as it is first to fix the power of imagination: ‘The power of imagination is a faculty which hovers between determination and non-determination, between the finite and the infinite... This very hovering indicates the power of imagination by its product; the latter is produced by imagination, as it were during its hovering and by means of its hovering’¹.

So, in order to solve the basic antinomy in his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’, Fichte withdraws behind reflective analysis toward a ‘pre-conscious’ - by which is apparently meant pre-theoretical - productive imagination. He supposes that, after having arrived at this point, he has overcome all antinomies. He keenly recognizes that the antinomies arose through thought which

1 I, 216f. ‘Die Einbildungskraft ist ein Vermögen, das zwischen Bestimmung und nicht-Bestimmung, zwischen Endlichen und Unendlichen in der Mitte schwebt... Jenes Schweben eben bezeichnet die Einbildungskraft durch ihr Produkt; sie bringt dasselbe gleichsam während ihres Schweben, und durch ihr Schweben hervor.’

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overpassed its boundaries. The productive imagination, however, sets no fixed limits, since it has ‘no fixed standpoint’, but in its hovering nature keeps the mean between definiteness and indefiniteness, finitude and infinitude. And then Fichte supposes he can conclude: ‘All the difficulties which presented themselves are removed in a satisfactory manner. The task was that of uniting the opposites, ego and non-ego. They can be completely unified through the power of imagination which unites contradictories’¹.

The ‘productive power of imagination’ explicitly qualified by Fichte as ‘Faktum’ (i.e. present before all reflection in the human mind), is expressly announced by him as a synthesis and at the same time is expressly called a ‘Funktion des Gemüths’ (function of feeling)².

Here it clearly appears that in his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ of 1794 Fichte was still deeply involved in Kant's functionalistic way of thinking, although in his conception of the productive imagination he deviated fundamentally from his master. Kant had attempted to solve the problem of apriori synthesis by his doctrine concerning the transcendental productive imagination in which understanding and sensibility are united. In the last analysis, however, it was the transcendental logical function from which the apriori synthesis should issue. Fichte saw clearly that this could not be a real solution of the problem,

1 op. cit., p. 218: ‘Alle Schwierigkeiten, die sich uns in den Weg stellten, sind befriedigend gehoben. Die Aufgabe war die, die entgegengesetzen Ich und nicht-Ich, zu vereinigen. Durch die Einbildungskraft, welche widersprechendes vereinigt, können sie vollkommen vereinigt werden.’

2 op. cit., p. 226: ‘The absolute opposites (the finite subjective and the infinite objective) prior to the synthesis, are a mere object of thought and, in the sense in which we have always taken the word, ideal. As they ought to be unified by the power of thought but cannot, they acquire reality through the hovering of the feeling (Gemüth) which, in this function, is called the power of imagination, since by means of it they become intuitable: i.e. they acquire reality as such; for there is and can be no other reality than that which is mediated by the intuition.’ [‘Die absolut entgegengesetzen (das endliche subjektive und das unendliche objektive) sind vor der Synthesis etwas bloss gedachtes, und, wie wir das Wort immer genommen haben, ideales. So wie sie durch das Denkvermögen vereinigt werden sollen, und nicht können, bekommen sie durch das Schweben des Gemüths, welches in dieser Funktion Einbildungskraft genannt wird, Realität, weil sie dadurch anschaubar werden: d.i. sie bekommen Realität überhaupt; denn es gibt keine andere Realität, als die vermittelst der Anschauung und kann keine andere geben.’]

[p. 431]

because the synthesis between understanding and sensibility requires a faculty which exceeds the antithetic relation of theoretical thought. But, instead of focusing his reflection towards the supra-theoretical ego, he seeks only a ‘pre-logical’ function of the ego as a connecting link, not yet involved in the rigid antithetical relation of the theoretic attitude of thought. Obviously he supposes that he appeals here to the pre-theoretic attitude of naïve experience. This, however, is a fundamental error.

In his concept of the productive imagination, Fichte does not penetrate to pre-theoretical cosmic self-consciousness but remains involved in Kant's functionalists view of knowledge.

A synthetic function of consciousness in its isolation can never be independent of theoretical thought, and certainly can never bridge the theoretical antithesis implied in the ‘gegenstand-relation’.

Only the cosmic self-consciousness (to be examined later in the discussion of the problem of knowledge) can grasp the deeper unity of all aspects of reality, because in the transcendent root of the selfhood it transcends all its modal functions, which are interwoven in the cosmic order of time¹.

But how can a ‘function of feeling’, prior to all logical reflection, accomplish an obviously inter-functional synthesis, and in this synthesis guarantee the unity of functions that are theoretically opposed to each other, and which consequently cannot be derived the one from the other?

In the ‘productive imagination’ the basic antinomy of

1 That self-consciousness remains an abstraction just as much to Fichte as to Kant, should appear from the following passage (I, 244): ‘Das Ich aber ist jetzt als dasjenige bestimmt, welches, nach Aufhebung alles Objects durch das absolute Abstraktionsvermögen, übrig bleibt... (Dies ist denn auch wirklich die augenscheinliche, und nach ihrer Andeutung gar nicht mehr zu verkennende Quelle des Selbstbewustseyns. Alles, von welchem ich abstrahieren, was ich wegdenken kann... ist nicht mein Ich und ich setze es meinem Ich blosz dadurch entgegen dass ich es betrachte als ein solches, das ich wegdenken kann)...’ [‘But the ego is now determined as that which is left after the removal of every object through the absolute faculty of abstraction... (This is therefore really the apparent source of the self-consciousness which is no longer to be disregarded after it has been indicated. All from which I am able to abstract, all that I am able to think away... is not my ego, and I set it in contrast to my ego, merely by considering it as something that I can think away.)’]

[p. 432]

Fichte's dialectic lies open and clear before us. Being prelogical, it would make fluid all boundaries fixed by thought between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ and thereby ‘unify the contradictory’.

The cosmic order imposed by God's sovereign creative will is set aside by the ὕβϱις (pride) of ‘sovereign reason’. The boundaries of the law-spheres in the realms of ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ become a creation of reason itself and can therefore again be cancelled by the same reason.

Since by Fichte the tension between the ideal of science and that of personality is itself conceived of as an infinite ethical task¹, he rejects without hesitation the attempt at a solution of the antinomy by dialectical thought. Rather he raises this antinomy to the position of condition and basis of the whole ‘Wissenschaftslehre’, as a necessary result of an ungrounded, preconscious act of the free personality bound to no laws: ‘We see, how that very circumstance which threatened to annihilate the possibility of a theory of human knowledge here becomes the only condition for the building of such a theory. We did not see, how we could ever unify absolute opposites; here we see, that an explanation of the occurrences in our mind could not at all be possible without absolute opposites; since that very faculty on which all those occurrences rest, i.e. the productive power of imagination, would not at all be possible, unless absolute opposites which cannot be synthesized appeared as fully unsuited to the power of apprehension... It is from this state of absolute opposition that the entire mechanism of the human mind issues; and this entire mechanism may not be explained otherwise than by a state of absolute opposition’². In this manner,

1 See I, 156.

2 op. cit., p. 226: ‘Wir sehen, dass gerade derjenige Umstand, welcher die Möglichkeit einer Theorie des menschlichen Wissens zu vernichten drohte, hier die einzige Bedingung wird, unter der wir eine solche Theorie aufstellen können. Wir sahen nicht ab, wie wir jemals absolut entgegengesetzte sollten vereinigen können; hier sehen wir, dass eine Erklärung der Begebenheiten in unserem Geiste überhaupt gar nicht möglich seyn würde ohne absolut entgegengesetzte; da desjenige Vermögen, auf welchem alle jene Begebenheiten beruhen, die produktive Einbildungskraft gar nicht möglich seyn würde, wenn nicht absolut entgegengesetze, nicht zu vereinigende, dem Auffassungsvermögen des Ich völlig unangemessene vorkämen... Eben aus dem absoluten Entgegengesetztseyn erfolgt der ganze Mechanismus des menschlichen Geistes; und dieser ganze Mechanismus lässt sich nicht anders erklären, als durch ein absolutes Entgegengesetztseyn.’

[p. 433]

Fichte supposes that he has cancelled dogmatic idealism as well as dogmatic realism in a higher critical idealism.

The first formal-dialectical part of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ (1794) begins with the absolute principles (‘Grundsätze’) and ends thus with the deduction of the ‘productive imagination’.

In the second part, described only schematically in the W.L. of 1794, and further elaborated in his Grundrisz des Eigentümlichen der W.L. in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen of 1795, Fichte follows the very reverse method. The starting-point is here the ‘fact’ of consciousness. He tries to show how the ego which originally experiences only sensory impressions, can rise to that philosophical abstraction and reflection with which the philosopher begins the theoretical doctrine of science. In the second part it appears still more clearly that Fichte's absolute ego cannot be the supra-temporal totality of the temporal diversity of meaning¹.

The schema of Fichte's train of thought is namely as follows: The ego unifies in itself two conflicting, irreconcilable momenta; it must distinguish itself from itself, it must set itself in opposition to itself as something foreign and contradictory - i.e. as ‘nature’, as non-ego. Inasmuch as it produces itself, it must produce this non-ego by imagination, it must create sensory images, it must undergo perceptible sensory impressions (the Kantian ‘Empfindung’). But since the consciousness which discloses itself in the perceptible impression is only a part of the ego itself, the ego must find itself in it. That is to say, it must transcend the sensory function, it must make the sensory perception its own. This activity cannot cease until the selfhood

1 From the following passage - in which he attempts to conceive the synthesis between form and matter as an interaction between ego and non-ego - it may appear that Fichte in fact understands the totality of the ego as a relative one: ‘Neither of the two’ (namely form and matter) ‘is to determine the other, but both are to determine each other reciprocally, means: - to come to the point in few words - absolute and relative ground of the totality-determination are to be one and the same; the relation is to be absolute and the absolute is to be nothing more than a relation’ (I, 199). [‘Keins von beide’ (viz. Form und Materie) ‘soll das andere, sondern beide sollen sich gegenseitig bestimmen, heisst: - um ohne lange Umschweifungen zur Sache zu kommen - absoluter und relativer Grund der Totalitäts-bestimmung sollen Eins und Ebendasselbe seyn; die Relation soll absolut, und das absolute soll nichts weiter seyn, als eine Relation.’]

[p. 434]

has come to the consciousness that the ego has produced the non-ego in itself. Since consciousness proceeds continuously in this way, the original mere sensation is changed into the object of intuition and experience, which in turn becomes the transcendentally conceived ‘Gegenstand’ of epistemology, until finally the ego becomes conscious of itself as the transcendental consciousness or as ‘theoretical reason’, which itself creates this ‘Gegenstand’¹.

In other words, the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ rests entirely upon the Kantian position with respect to reality, i.e. upon the view of empirical reality as phenomenality of nature, constituted in a synthesis of sensory and logical functions, but with definitive elimination of the ‘natural thing-in-itself’. The ‘impulse’ (‘Anstosz’), which the non-ego gives to the ego, and which Fichte continues to consider necessary for the explanation of the mental representation, is explicitly referred to the hypostatized moral function of the free personality: ‘Only the question how and whereby the impulse to be assumed for the explanation of mental representation is given to the ego, is not to be answered here; for it lies beyond the limits of the theoretical part of the ‘doctrine of science’².

1 cf. Kroner I, 487.

2 Grundl. der ges. Wissenschaftslehre, Werke I, 218: ‘Blosz die Frage wie und wodurch der für Erklärung der Vorstellung anzunehmende Anstosz auf das Ich geschehe, ist hier nicht zu beantworten; denn sie liegt auszerhalb der Grenze des theoretischen Theils der Wissenschaftslehre.’

Fichte's doctrine of the productive imagination and Heidegger's interpretation of Kant.

It is remarkable that Fichte, in this second part of the theoretical W.L., makes the categories, along with the sensory objects in their apriori sensory forms of space and time, arise dialectically from the productive imagination³. That is remarkable,

3 Fichte points (I, 387) expressly to Kant's view of the matter, without however, like Heidegger, ascribing his own view to Kant: ‘Kant, der die Kategorien ursprünglich als Denkformen erzeugt werden läszt, und der von seinem Gesichtspuncte aus daran völlig Recht hat, bedarf der durch die Einbildungskraft entworfenen Schemata, um ihre Anwendung auf Objecte möglich zu machen; er läszt sie demnach eben so wohl, als wir, durch die Einbildungskraft bearbeitet werden, und derselben zugänglich seyn. In der Wissenschaftslehre entstehen sie mit den Objecten zugleich, und, um dieselbe erst möglich zu machen, auf dem Boden der Einbildungskraft selfst.’ [‘Kant, in whom the categories are produced originally as thought-forms and who, from his own point of view, is fully entitled to do it, was in need of the schemata projected by the power of imagination, in order to make their application to objects possible; accordingly, just as we do, did he have them fashioned by the power of imagination and made them accessible to the same (power). In the “doctrine of science” they originate along with the objects, and on the soil of the imagination itself, in order to make the objects possible.’]

[p. 435]

since Martin Heidegger, though from an altogether different train of thought, in his interpretation of Kant's critique of knowledge (to be dealt with in vol. II), likewise supposes that he has found in this productive imagination the root of the two sources of knowledge, the understanding and sensibility.

§ 3 - The tension between the ideals of science and personality in Fichte's ‘Praktische Wissenschaftslehre’ (1794)

The guiding thesis of the theoretical ‘doctrine of science’ was the following: ‘The ego posits itself as determined by the non-ego.’ This thesis was contained in the result of the three basic theses of the entire ‘Wissenschaftslehre’: ‘The ego and the non-ego determine each other reciprocally.’ In this latter thesis is expressed the necessary interaction between the antithetic elements in the activity of the self-consciousness, i.e. the interaction between the (free) subject and the (natural) object.

In this thesis, however, there is also implied the ‘guiding principle’ of the practical ‘doctrine of science’: ‘The ego posits itself as determining the non-ego.’ The latter is meaningful only after the demonstration in the theoretical doctrine of science that the ego actually produces the non-ego as real, so that the non-ego actually possesses reality for and in the ego¹.

Only in the practical part is the ethical-idealistic basis even of the theoretical doctrine of science fully clarified.

Fichte observes forthwith, on the occasion of the ‘Leitsatz’ (‘guiding thesis’) of the practical doctrine of science: ‘For this thesis implies a main antithesis, which contains the entire contradiction between these entities as being simply posited and consequently unlimited, and compels us to assume a practical faculty of the ego for the sake of uniting them’². Only in the

1 Fichte observes (I, 247) significantly: ‘es versteht sich, für das Ich, - wie denn die ganze Wissenschaftslehre, als transcendentale Wissenschaft, nicht über das Ich hinausgehen kann, noch soll...’ [‘naturally for the ego, - in as much as the entire doctrine of science, as transcendental science, neither can go beyond the ego, nor ought to do so...’]

2 I, 247: ‘Es liegt (nehmlich) in diesem Satze eine Haupt-Antithese, die den ganzen Widerstreit zwischen ebendenselben, als schlechthin gesetzten, mithin unbeschränkten Wesen umfasst, und uns nöthiget, als Vereinigungsmittel ein praktisches Vermögen des Ich anzunehmen.’

[p. 436]

‘practical’ part, is an account eventually given of the reduction of the ‘theoretical’ to the ‘practical’ reason, and implicitly of the ideal of science to that of personality. The essence of the theoretical reason consisted in nothing but the restless dialectical movement, in which it sets limits to itself (in the ‘antitheses’) in order to overpass them again and again by a new synthesis. It appeared dependent on ‘sensation’ as the first groundless (and therefore theoretically incomprehensible) limit, that the ego sets to itself. The theoretical ego discovered the antinomy between the unlimited and the limited activity as the ground of its entire dialectical movement of thought, without being able to understand this ground. The first impulse for the development of the entire dialectical series, i.e. the sensory impression (Empfindung), alone makes ‘theoretical’ reason possible, and so is not to be derived from it.

Fichte refers the impulse toward sensory experience to the moral function of personality, in which the ideal of personality is concentrated.

The ground of this impulse can be sought only in the fact that the ego is ‘practical’, so far as its innermost nature is concerned, and that the true root not only of personality but even of ‘nature’ must be sought in the moral function¹. In the ‘Leitsatz’ of the practical doctrine of science is implied the requirement that the ego operate causally upon the non-ego. Thereby the antinomy between the independence of the ego as an absolute being on the one hand, and its dependence and limitation as intelligence on the other, should be overcome. In this very demand, however, an antinomy is implied. The demand that the free ego operate causally upon the non-ego is based upon the absolute essence of the ego, allowing nothing alongside of or opposed to itself. The objection against this postulated causality is grounded on the fact that a non-ego is simply opposed to the ego, and that it must remain so, if the I-ness is not to become an empty form.

1 Fichte gives to this insight pregnant expression in his ‘Grundlage des Naturrechts’: ‘Das praktische Vermögen ist die innerste Wurzel des Ich, auf diese wird erst alles andere aufgetragen und daran geheftet,’ III, 20 ff. [‘The practical faculty is the innermost root of the ego; on it alone all the rest is built and affixed.’]

[p. 437]

The antinomy which is contained in the practical ‘Leitsatz’ may be reduced to the antinomy between the ego as unlimited and infinite and the ego as limited and finite activity. Consequently, at this point, a higher discrepancy is involved in the very nature of the ego. How is this antinomy solved by Fichte?

The infinite and unlimited ego as moral striving. Elimination also of Kant's practical concept of substance. The ego as infinite creative activity is identified with Kant's categorical imperative.

The antinomy is resolved in that the infinite and unlimited character of the ego is viewed not as an infinite substance at rest, but rather as an infinite striving. The free unlimited and infinite ego ought again and again to sets limits to itself as ‘intelligence’ by an objective non-ego, in order to provide its infinite striving activity with a resistance to be overcome ever and anon, which alone gives content to this striving.

‘Just as the ego is posited, all reality is posited; in the ego everything is to be posited; the ego is to be simply independent; everything, however, is to be dependent upon it. Consequently, there is required accordance of the object with the ego; and it is the absolute ego which for the very sake of its absolute being, does require it’¹.

In the striving resides the final ground of the opposing and of that which is set in opposition, the final ground of the ‘impulse’, which the theoretical W.L. was unable to explain. Therefore, the practical reason is at the basis of the theoretical as its condition, for without striving no object is possible².

In a note to the passage just cited, Fichte observes: ‘Kant's categorical imperative.’ Thus it clearly appears that Fichte really seeks the deepest root of the self-consciousness in the hypostatized moral law, identified with the ideal subject in the rationalist conception of the cosmonomic Idea of Humanistic thought³.

1 I, 260: ‘So wie das Ich gesetzt ist, ist alle Realität gesetzt; im Ich soll alles gesetzt seyn; das Ich soll schlechthin unabhängig, Alles aber soll von ihm abhängig seyn. Also, es wird die Uebereinstimmung des Objects mit dem Ich gefordert; und das absolute Ich, gerade um seines absolutes Seyns willen, ist es, welches sie fordert.’

2 I, 264.

3 Windelband rightly observes, op. cit. II, 224: ‘Das Sittengesetz also, d.h. die Forderung eines Handelns, das lediglich sich selbst zum Zwecke hat ist der die Welt erzeugende Trieb des absolutes Ich.’ [‘Consequently, it is the moral law, i.e. the demand of an acting which has only itself as its aim, that is the impulse of the absolute ego whereby the world is generated.’]

[p. 438]

At the same time it appears from the sequel that the Divinity, as the absolute ego, is nothing but the result of this moralistic hypostatization. The striving activity of the ego, going on to infinity, is as striving characterized again as finite: ‘Even the very concept of striving, however, implies finiteness, for that which is not counter-acted (striven against), is no striving’¹.

The finite (moral, ‘practical’) ego, however, can have no other goal for its infinite striving than again to become absolute.

The tension between ego and non-ego, between form and matter, consciousness and being, freedom and nature, the ideal of personality and the ideal of science, should be eliminated in the absolute ego (the Divinity), which is just so far an unthinkable Idea (unthinkable, because reason is unable to emerge beyond the antinomy). Actually, however, the absolute ego is nothing but a hypostatized, activistically conceived moral Idea of reason, which as such remains involved in the antinomy between the ideal of science and the ideal of personality; for, on the one hand, it must contain the origin as well as the totality of meaning, but, on the other hand, it is nothing but an absolutized abstraction from the cosmic temporal coherence of meaning². From the Humanist standpoint, Kroner correctly observes: ‘Even the absolute ego needs necessarily the “impulse” if in any sense it is to be an ego’³. In other words, even

1 V, 270: ‘Im Begriffe des Strebens selbst aber liegt schon die Endlichkeit, denn dasjenige, dem nicht widerstrebt wird, ist kein Streben.’

2 Fichte has given to his conception of the Deity as absolutized moral law a pregnant expression in his treatise Ueber den Grand unseres Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung (WW. V, 185), where he writes: ‘Dies ist der wahre Glaube; diese moralische Ordnung ist das Göttliche das wir annehmen’; [‘this is the true faith; this moral order is the Deity which we accept;’] and in his Appellation an das Publikum gegen die Anklage des Atheismus (1799; WW. V, 210), where he writes: ‘Erzeuge nur in dir die pflichtmäszige Gesinnung und du wirst Gott erkennen.’ [‘Produce only in yourself the inclination in conformity to moral duty and you will know God.’] The moral order, as Deity, is to Fichte pervaded with the activity-motive of his philosophy of the ego. It is: ‘Thätiges Ordnen’ (active ordaining), ordo ordinans. Cf. WW. V, 382, Aus einem Privatschreiben.

3 Kroner, I, 511: ‘Der “Anstosz” ist auch dem absolutem Ich, damit es nur überhaupt ein Ich sein könne, notwendig.’

[p. 439]

in the ‘absolute ego’ as a hypostatized function there is latent the basic antinomy between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’.

In the practical doctrine of science, the ego is conceived of as absolute striving. With the striving there is connected a counter-striving, and the theoretical ego is now viewed by Fichte as necessarily coherent with the practical. For, by reason of the counteraction (i.e. of ‘nature’ as the non-ego), the ego is determined by something outside itself. Because it is an ego, it must reflect about this being-limited, it must relate itself to the ‘Gegenstand’, as to its opposite. In the theoretical doctrine of science, in the deduction of the representation, the ego (conceiving itself as limited by the non-ego) is deduced genetically by ascending from the sensory consciousness (limited by the non-ego) to the free transcendental consciousness. Likewise, in the second constructive part of the practical W.L., beginning with par. 6, the origin of the practical ego, which conceives itself as free and determines the non-ego, is deduced from the ego that is determined merely by the ‘impulse’. There is a strict correspondence between these two ways of deduction.

Besides, it appears in the nature of the case that the theoretical and the practical ego are one and the same (for we saw previously that Fichte tries to reduce the ideal of science to the ideal of personality and to absorb the former in the latter!). ‘All reflection is based upon striving, and there is no reflection possible, if there is no striving’¹. Striving is the final common root of the theoretical and the practical ego: all theoretical reflection, all sensation, all intuition stems from the practical striving, from the activity of the moral ego-function, which transcends its boundaries. In this context we will quote a passage which is very characteristic for the whole system, because it gives a clear expression to the eventual absorption of the ideal of science in the ideal of personality. We insert it here entirely on that account: ‘From this follows, indeed, in the clearest manner the subordination of theory to the practical; it follows that all theoretical laws are based upon practical ones and, as there can be only one single practical law, upon one and the same law; consequently the most complete system in the total (human) being; if the impulse should permit itself to be elevated, then also follows the elevation of the insight, and vice versa;

1 ‘Alle Reflexion gründet sich auf das Streben, und es ist keine möglich, wenn kein Streben ist.’

[p. 440]

then follows the absolute freedom of reflection and abstraction also in a theoretical respect, and the possibility of focusing one's attention to something according to moral duty and of abstracting it from something else, without which no morality would be possible at all.’

‘Fatalism is destroyed at its very root, this fatalism based on the opinion that our acting and willing depend upon the system of our representations; for it is shown here, that the very system of our representations depends upon our impulse and our will; and this is indeed the single way to refute this view thoroughly. - In short, by this system there is brought unity and coherence into the whole man, a unity and coherence which are lacking in so many systems’¹.

The totality of meaning of the consciousness, the very root of human existence, and consequently of the entire cosmos, resides in the absolutized moral function. It is that which must bring unity and coherence in the whole man.

1 I, 294/5: ‘Hieraus erfolgt denn auch auf das einleuchtendste die Subordination der Theorie unter das Praktische; es folgt, dass alle theoretischen Gesetze auf praktische und da es wohl nur Ein praktisches Gesetz geben dürfte, auf ein und ebendasselbe Gesetz sich gründen; demnach das vollständigste System im ganzen Wesen; es folgt, wenn etwa der Trieb sich selbst sollte erhöhen lassen, auch die Erhöhung der Einsicht, und umgekehrt; es erfolgt die absolute Freiheit der Reflexion und Abstraktion auch in theoretischer Rücksicht, und die Möglichkeit pflichtmäszig seine Aufmerksamkeit auf etwas zu richten, und von etwas anderem abzuziehen ohne welche gar keine Moral möglich ist.
Der Fatalismus wird von Grund aus zerstört, der sich darauf gründet, das unser Handeln und Wollen von dem Systeme unserer Vorstellungen abhängig sey (the italics are mine!), indem hier gezeigt wird, das hinwiederum das System unserer Vorstellungen von unserem Triebe und unserem Willen abhängt: und dies ist denn auch die einzige Art ihn gründlich zu wiederlegen. - Kurz, es kommt durch dieses System Einheit und Zusammenhang in den ganzen Menschen, die in so vielen System fehlt.’
Vid. also I, 284, note: ‘Die Wissenschaftslehre soll den ganzen Menschen erschöpfen; sie läszt daher sich nur mit der Totalität seines ganzen Vermögens auffassen...’ [‘The doctrine of science ought to exhaust the whole man; it is consequently to be conceived only with the totality of all human faculties...’]

The ‘fatalism’ so keenly opposed by Fichte is nothing but the science-ideal of the ‘Aufklärung’, dominating the ideal of personality.

The ‘fatalism’ so sharply opposed by Fichte is nothing but

[p. 441]

the Humanistic science-ideal of the ‘Enlightenment’, which had no place for the freedom of human personality, because it was made independent of the latter.

In the polar tension between this ideal of science and the ideal of personality, Fichte chooses unconditionally for the absolute primacy of the latter - at the expense of the former, as we are still to see!

In his practical doctrine of science, Fichte consequently does not stay with the Kantian dualism between moral self-determination and sensory ‘inclination of nature’. Just as the ‘sensory ego’, quâ ego, is driven forward dialectically by itself to become the ego that knows itself as intelligence, so also the ego dominated by its sensual impulses becomes the ego determining itself as ‘pure ethical will’.

So Fichte intends to show that even in the ‘triebhafte Ich’, the ‘pure will’ or the ‘absolute impulse’ is operative, and that only thereby does the ego feel itself ‘driven on and ahead’ by natural impulses. The sensory nature must finally take its rise dialectically from moral freedom itself. In the ego there is an original striving to ‘fill out’ infinity. This striving conflicts with all limitation in an object. A self-producing striving is called impulse (‘Trieb’).

Infinite striving requires on the other hand the resistance, the counter-action from an object, in order to overcome this latter. The ego has in itself the law, according to which it must reflect about itself ‘as filling out infinity’. But it cannot reflect about itself, if it is not limited. The fulfilling of this law, or - what amounts to the same thing - the satisfaction of the ‘Reflexionstrieb’ (impulse to reflection), is thus determined by the non-ego, and depends on the object (the non-ego). This impulse toward reflection cannot be satisfied apart from an object: hence it may also be described as an ‘impulse toward the object’¹. The striving therefore requires a counter-action that holds it in balance.

In the limitation, which the ‘impulse’ experiences through the object, the feeling arises as the expression of a suffering, a passivity, an inability: ‘The expression of impotence in the ego is called a feeling. In it is united most intimately an activity - I feel, I am the feeling subject; and this activity is that of reflection - and a limitation - I feel, I am passive and not active; there is

1 I, 291.

[p. 442]

present a constraint. This limitation necessarily supposes an impulse to go beyond it. That which wills, needs, embraces nothing more, is - naturally with respect to itself - unlimited’¹.

In its limitation by feeling, the ‘Reflexionstrieb’ is at the same time satisfied and not satisfied:

a - It is satisfied: the ego must reflect on itself: it reflects with absolute spontaneity and is thereby satisfied with respect to the form of this operation of consciousness. So far the feeling can be related to the free ego.

b - It is not satisfied with respect to the content of this operation of consciousness. ‘The ego was to be posited as filling out infinity, but it is posited as limited. This, too, is now necessarily present in feeling’².

c - The originating of the condition of non-satisfaction, however, is determined by the ego proceeding beyond the limit which is set by feeling³.

1 I, 289: ‘Die Aeusserung des Nicht-könnens im Ich heiszt ein Gefühl. In ihm ist innigst vereinigt Thätigkeit - ich fühle, bin das fühlende, und diese Thätigkeit ist die der Reflexion - Beschränkung - ich fähle, bin leidend, und nicht thätig: es ist ein Zwang vorhanden.
Diese Beschränkung setzt nun notwendig einen Trieb voraus, weiter hinaus zu gehen. Was nichts weiter will, bedarf, umfasst, das ist - es versteht sich, für sich selbst - nicht eingeschränkt.’

2 ‘Das Ich sollte gesetzt werden als die Unendlichkeit ausfüllend, aber es wird als begrenzt. - Dies kommt nun gleichfalls nothwendig vor im Gefühle.’

3 I, 291/2.

The dialectical line of thought of the practical doctrine of science: feeling, intuition, longing, approbation, absolute impulse (categorical imperative).

The course of Fichte's deductions is therefore as follows: the ego, as a limited and finite ego, is moral striving according to its deepest being. To be able to create itself as such, and to become aware of itself as such, it is, however, required, that it should be and feel itself as a sensibly driven feeling and intuiting ego. But conversely, it would never feel itself as sensibly limited, if it were not moral striving according to its deepest being.

In consequence of the appropriation by the striving ego of the feeling of compulsion, which arises from the counter-action of the non-ego, i.e. in consequence of the conscious reflection about it as the ego's own limit, there arises a new feeling, in

[p. 443]

which the feeling ego feels itself in the impulse which strives out beyond the limit.

So far as the drive which is formally satisfied in the reflection about the feeling ego, strives out beyond the limit set in reflection, as a force that strives outward, it becomes longing, (‘Sehnen’), ‘a drive toward something completely unknown, which merely manifests itself by a want, by an uneasiness, by a void, which seeks to be filled out, and does not indicate from where.’ Fichte here makes this note: ‘This longing is important, not only for the practical, but for the whole doctrine of science. Only by the same the ego is in itself driven beyond itself: only by the same does an outerworld disclose itself in the very ego’¹.

This longing, however, is also limited, for otherwise it would be no desire, but fulfilment of desire: causality. Through this limitation by the non-ego there arises a new feeling of compulsion, which again becomes the ground for the creation of an object, the production of something outside the ego through ‘ideal activity’, the ‘ideal’ for which the ego longs in its striving.

The object of the feeling of compulsion produced by the limitation is something real. The object of the longing, however, has no reality (since the ego in itself can have no causality, without cancelling itself as ‘pure activity’), ‘but it ought to have it in consequence of the longing; for the latter seeks reality’². Both objects stand in an antinomic relation to one another (‘nature’ and ‘freedom’!).

The reality felt determines (limits) the ego. The ego, however, is ego only insofar as it determines itself (in the reflection about the feeling). Therefore its longing becomes the impulse to determine itself. Or indeed, since it feels its determination (limitation) in the reality of the object, its longing becomes the impulse to determine this reality for the object and thus to create the determination in itself.

In the ‘longing’ arises the impulse to sensory perception

1 I, 303: ‘einen Trieb nach etwas völlig unbekannten, das sich bloss durch ein Bedürfniss, durch ein Misbehagen, durch eine Leere offenbart, die Ausfülling sucht, und nicht andeutet woher.’ ‘Dieses Sehnen ist wichtig, nicht nur für die praktische, sondern für die gesammte Wissenschaftslehre. Lediglich durch dasselbe wird das Ich in sich selbst - ausser sich getrieben: lediglich durch dasselbe offenbart sich in ihm selbst eine Aussenwelt.’

2 I, 306: ‘aber es soll sie zufolge des Sehnens haben; denn dasselbe geht aus auf Realität.’

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(‘Empfindungstrieb’) and the ‘drive toward knowledge’ in general, which strives to regain for the ego the natural object created by it, but not created with reflection on this act (and therefore not experienced as the ego's own); it strives to represent the object in the I-ness. The limit is felt as felt, i.e. as one created in the ego by the ego. The sensory feeling (‘Empfinden’) is changed (as the theoretical W.L. has shown) by a new reflection into an intuition. So far as the ego has not yet, in the self-reflection of thought, theoretically appropriated that which is sensibly perceived, it does not yet regard the sensory image as a product of the ego, but the image is intuited as an ‘objective character’. Since the free spontaneity of the ego in the activity of intuition is the driving force, the image is, to be sure, intuited as a character belonging to the object, but contingent, determined by no necessity¹.

If, however, the object is to become an object for the ego, then the ego must become aware of this self-determination of the object as a product of the ego itself. The feeling ego feels itself limited, the intuiting ego freely exceeds the limit. The feeling and the intuiting ego are, however, one and the same: feeling and intuition must therefore be synthetically united. In themselves they have no coherence. ‘Intuition sees, but it is empty: feeling is related to reality, but is blind’². They can be united only when the feeling ego no longer feels itself as such to be limited, when, so to speak, it keeps pace with the intuition, which views what is felt as something contingent in the object. This is only possible in such a way that the feeling ego as such exceeds its limits, and that it, as feeling ego, goes on ad infinitum, or that it is driven on in its longing, instead of losing itself in sensuous feeling.

So the longing discloses itself, as an ‘impulse toward change of

1 I, 317: ‘Würde das Ich seiner Freiheit im Bilden (dadurch, dass es auf die gegenwärtige Reflexion selbst wieder reflektirte) sich bewuszt, so würde das Bild gesetzt, als zufällig in Beziehung auf das Ich. Eine solche Reflexion findet nicht statt; es muss demnach zufällig gesetzt werden (in Beziehung auf ein anderes nicht-Ich, das uns bis jetzt noch gänzlich unbekannt ist).’ [‘If the ego should become aware of its freedom in its production (thereby, that it reflects again on the present reflection itself), the image would be set as contingent in relation to the I. Such a reflection does not occur; it is consequently to be set contingently (in relation to another non-ego, which up till now is still entirely unknown to us).’]

2 I, 319.

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feelings’: only where the feelings change, is the primitive longing satisfied.

Feeling as such, however, cannot determine the change of feelings. The ego can reflect about what is felt only at a higher stage of consciousness. ‘Consequently, the changed situation cannot be felt as changed situation. This other should therefore merely be intuited by the ideal activity, as something other and opposed to the present feeling’¹. The changed feeling must therefore be intuited as changed, if the ego is to be able to reflect about the impulse to change its feelings.

Only through this reflection does the ego become an ego, because it is an ego only insofar as it not merely longs, but insofar as it becomes aware that it longs to change the feelings. If the ego is to be able to arrive at this consciousness, then it must be able as feeling ego to relate itself to a feeling which is not itself that which is felt. And to this end intuition and feeling must be synthetically united in this feeling. This is the feeling of longing, which is necessarily accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction. The altered feeling must satisfy the longing after a change of the feeling. The synthesis here achieved Fichte calls ‘approbation’ (‘Beifall’).

The ego reflects about its feeling in the intuition of it. The act of determining the feeling (the intuiting) and the drive toward determination (the longing) are now one and the same².

The ego cannot produce this synthesis of impulse (longing) and action (intuiting) without distinguishing the two, but it cannot distinguish the two without positing some respect in which they contradict each other: So the feeling of approbation finds its opposite in the displeasure (‘Misfallen’), in which the disharmony between impulse and act comes to expression. ‘Not every longing is necessarily accompanied by displeasure, but when it is satisfied, there arises displeasure as to the former; it becomes insipid, flat.’ So are ‘the inner determinations of the things (which are related to feeling) nothing more than degrees of displeasing or pleasing’³.

The synthesis in the approbation, however, may not be per-

1 I, 321: ‘Also der veränderte Zustand kann als veränderte Zustand nicht gefühlt werden. Das andere müsste daher lediglich durch die ideale Thätigkeit angeschaut werden, als etwas anderes und dem gegenwärtigen Gefühle entgegengesetztes.’

2 I, 325.

3 ibidem.

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formed merely by the spectator, i.e. only theoretically, but the ego itself must perform it. The ego must be driven on to desire approval as such; it must also be aware of the impulse which strives toward approval, and therewith towards the unity of its selfhood.

If the ego is to become aware of the synthesis between intuition and feeling in approbation, then the intuition and the impulse alike must be understood as determined and self-determining at the same time. Then alone is the ego aware of itself as an ego that determines itself absolutely and consequently is also absolutely determined.

If the action that satisfies the impulse is determined and self-determining at once, then it happens out of absolute freedom, as the self-creation of the absolute ego. If the impulse which determines this action is absolute in the same way, then it is grounded in itself. It is the impulse that has itself for its goal. The drive towards change (‘Trieb nach Wechsel’) is in the last analysis determined by the ‘drive towards mutual determination of the ego through itself’ (‘Trieb nach Wechselbestimmung des Ich durch sich selbst’) or the drive towards absolute unity and perfection of the ego in itself (‘Trieb nach absolute Einheit und Vollendung des Ich in sich selbst’)¹.

1 I, 326.

The categorical imperative as the absolute impulse that is grounded in itself.

It is the impulse that has itself for its goal which strives to create itself (and thereby the harmony in the ego, of which the latter is aware): i.e. the absolute drive: ‘der Trieb um des Triebens willen.’ To this, Fichte adds: ‘If it is expressed in terms of a law, as for the very sake of this determination at a certain point of reflection it should be expressed, then it must be established that a law for the very sake of the law is an absolute law, or the categorical imperative: - You ought unconditionally. It is easy to understand, where in such an impulse the undetermined moment lies: it drives us, namely, out into the indefinite without an aim (the categorical imperative is merely formal without any object)’².

2 I, 327: ‘Drückt man es als Gesetz aus, wie es gerade um dieser Bestimmung willen auf einem gewissen Reflexionspunkt ausgedrückt werden muss, so ist ein Gesetz um des Gesetzes willen ein absolutes Gesetz, oder der kategorische Imperativ: - Du sollst schlechthin. Wo bei einem solchem Triebe das unbestimmte liege, lässt sich leicht einsehen; nemlich er treibt uns ins unbestimmte hinaus, ohne Zweck (der kategorische Imperativ ist bloss formal ohne allen Gegenstand).’

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If now action and impulse are to determine one another reciprocally, the object produced by the action (i.e. the effect of the drive which can be intuited in the theoretically determinable sense-world) must be determined by the impulse and agree with the ‘ideal of longing’. Conversely, the impulse must be intuited in the reflection itself, as desiring this object alone. In this case the longing striving finds its consummation. But since the longing and striving in their very essence cannot be completed, the ego must again be driven out away from the feeling of harmony and into the infinite.

The ‘Du sollst’ remains, entirely in the Kantian line, ‘ewige, nimmer erfüllbare Aufgabe’ (an eternal task, never to be fully accomplished).

In Fichte's identity-philosophy, the Humanist-ideal of personality in its moralistic sense has, to be sure, absorbed the science-ideal entirely along the line of the continuity-postulate of freedom, but, as we saw continually, at the cost of sanctioning the antinomy.

Fichte's dithyramb on the ideal of personality: ‘Ueber die Würde des Menschen’ (On the dignity of man).

Dithyrambically Fichte sings the praise of this ideal of personality in the address ‘Ueber die Würde des Menschen’ delivered at the close of his philosophical lectures in 1794: ‘Only from man does orderly arrangement spread around him up to the limit of his observation, - and when he extends the latter to a greater distance, order and harmony are extended too to the same degree. His observation indicates the place of all things in their infinite diversity, so that no single one may suppress the other; it brings unity into the infinite diversity.

‘Through this the celestial bodies maintain themselves together, and become only one organized body; through this the suns turn in their determined orbits. Through the ego the gigantic ladder (of entities) rises from the lichen up to the seraph; in it is the system of the entire world of spirits, and man expects with reason, that the law which he imposes on himself and on this world, must be valid for the latter; he expects with reason the future universal recognition of the

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same. In the ego lies the sure pledge that from it order and harmony shall be extended ad infinitum where it is lacking until now; that with the expanding human culture at the same time the culture of the universe shall expand. Everything which still lacks form and order, shall be resolved into the most beautiful order, and what is already harmonious shall - according to laws not developed till now - become continually more harmonious. Man shall bring order into the confusion, and a plan into the general destruction; through him shall putrefaction produce form, and death summon to a new glorious life. This is man, when we consider him merely as observing intelligence; what would he not be, when we think him as practically active power!’¹.

1 I, 413: ‘Allein von Menschen aus verbreitet sich Regelmässigkeit rund um ihm herum bis an die Grenze seiner Beobachtung, - und wie er diese weiter vorrückt, wird Ordnung und Harmonie weiter vorgerückt. Seine Beobachtung weist dem bis ins unendliche verschiedenen, jedem seinen Platz an, dass keines das andere verdränge; sie bringt Einheit in die unendliche Verschiedenheit.
Durch sie erhalten sich die Weltkörper zusammen, und werden nur Ein organisierter Körper; durch sie drehen die Sonnen sich in ihren angewiesen Bahnen. Durch das Ich steht die ungeheure Stufenfolge da von der Flechte bis zum Seraph; in ihn ist das System der ganzen Geisterwelt, und der Mensch erwartet mit Recht, dass das Gesetz, das er sich und ihr giebt, für sie gel ten müsse; erwartet mit Recht die einstige allgemeine Anerkennung desselben. Im Ich liegt das sichere Unterpfand, das von ihm aus ins unendliche Ordnung und Harmonie sich verbreiten werde wo jetzt noch keine ist; dass mit der fortrückenden Cultur des Menschen, zugleich die Cultur des Weltalls fortrücken werde. Alles was jetzt noch unförmlich und ordnungsloss ist, wird durch den Menschen in die schönste Ordnung sich auflösen, und was jetzt schon harmonisch ist, wird - nach bis jetzt unentwickelten Gesetzen - immer harmonischer werden. Der Mensch wird Ordnung in das Gewühl, und einen Plan in die allgemeine Zerstörung hineinbringen; durch ihn wird die Verwesung bilden, und der Tod zu einem neuen herrlichen Leben rufen. Das ist der Mensch, wenn wir ihn bloss als beobachtende Intelligenz ansehen; was ist er erst, wenn wir ihn als praktisch-thätiges Vermögen denken!’

The passion for power in Fichte's ideal of personality. The science-ideal converts itself into a titanic ideal of culture.

The Faustian passion for power in the Humanistic science-ideal has dissolved itself into the passion for power in the personality-ideal. The science-ideal has converted itself into a

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moralistic ideal of culture that comes to full expression in titanic activity!¹

There is, however, no longer any place for the science-ideal in its earlier sense which hypostatized ‘nature’ in its mathematical and mechanical functions, in order to extend the continuity of natural-scientific thought across all modal boundaries of the aspects. With respect to Fichte's system, Windelband justly writes: ‘Nature has meaning only as material for the performance of our duty. Therefore Fichte's doctrine does not embrace a natural philosophy in the earlier sense of the word. He could not have given such a philosophy, since - apparently because of the one-sidedness of his education as a youth - he lacked any detailed knowledge of natural science. However, the very principles of his philosophy did not permit him to project it. The doctrine of science could not consider nature as a causal mechanism existing in itself’².

Fichte could view nature neither as a mechanistic ‘world in itself’, nor as an organic world immanently adapted to its own end. His teleological conception of nature had no other intention than to demonstrate in the dialectical way of his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ that nature, as it exists, must have been created by the free ego in order to render possible a resistance against the realization of its moral task³.

1 This conversion of the authentic ideal of science into a culture-ideal comes pregnantly to expression in Fichte's writing ‘Die Bestimmung des Menschen’ which appeared in 1800, (W.W. vol. II, pp. 267 ff).

2 Windelband, op. cit. II, 226 f: ‘Die Natur hat Sinn nur als Material unserer Pflichterfüllung. Deshalb gibt es für die Fichtesche Lehre keine Naturphilosophie im sonstigen Sinne des Wortes. Er hätte sie nicht geben können, weil ihm, wie es scheint bei der Einseitigkeit seiner Jugendbildung genaue und spezielle naturwissenschaftliche Kenntnisse mangelten. Aber die Prinzipien seiner Philosophie erlaubten sie ihm gar nicht. Als einen in sich bestehenden Kausal-mechanismus konnte die Wissenschaftslehre die Natur nicht betrachten.’

3 For the rest, Fichte did not abandon this standpoint, even in his fourth metaphysical period. Cf., e.g., his writing ‘Thatsachen des Bewusztseyns’ (1810-'11), based on the Transzendentale Logik included in the first volume of the ‘Nachgelassene Werke’ (W.W. vol. II, p. 663): ‘Die Natur ist Bild unserer realen Kraft, und so absolut zweckmässig; wir können in ihr und an ihr das was wir sollen. Ihr Prinzip ist schlechthin ein sittliches Prinzip, keinesweges ein Naturprincip (denn dann eben wäre sie absolut)...’ [‘Nature is the image of our real power and thus absolutely purposive, we can do in it and in respect to it what we ought to do. Its principle is simply a moral one, by no means a nature-principle (for in this very case it would be absolute)...’]

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The antinomy between the science-ideal and personality-ideal has actually converted itself in Fichte's first period into an antinomy between Idea and sense within the personality-ideal itself.

In Kant's dualistic world-picture, the antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality actually implied the recognition of both factors. For Fichte this antinomy is really converted into a contradiction within the personality-ideal itself between free activity (spontaneity) and bondage to the resistance of the lower nature or between ‘Idea’ and sense¹.

Kant too had posed the latter antinomy in his Critique of practical Reason. The ideal of personality cannot cancel the bondage to sensory nature without dissolving itself into an empty abstraction. With the hypostatization of the moral norm, this antinomy must be retained. Windelband justly remarks in this connection: ‘For this very reason the world is to Fichte the posited contradiction, and dialectic is the method to know it’².

1 See also the characteristic pages in Die Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of Man) II, 313-319.

2 Op. cit. II, 227: ‘Eben deshalb ist die Welt für Fichte der gesetzte Widerspruch und die Dialektik die Methode ihrer Erkenntnis.’