CHAPTER 5

 

The 1790s: Fichte

 

 

ANESIDEMUS CONTROVERSY:  These reached a new crescendo with the publication in 1792 of an anonymous piece chiefly known by the abridgment of its title, ÒAenesidemus." At first the author was anonymous, although his identity was quickly revealed to be that of G. E. L. Schulze, a professor of philos­ophy at Helmstadt. The literary conceit of the piece involved Schulze's adopting the pseudonym, Aenesidemus (a first-century BC Greek skeptic), who enters into a dialogue with Hermias, a so-called Kantian, so that Aenesidemus-Schulze could demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Kantian position. Offering a self-styled "Humean" attack on Kantianism in general and on Reinhold in particular, ÒAenesidemus" proved to be devastating for Reinhold's career. Although the piece covered quite a bit of ground, its criticisms boiled down to roughly three: (I) both Reinhold and Kant introduced the notion of a thing-in-itself as the cause of representations or sensations in the thinking subject, a claim which violated the strictures of both Kant's and Reinhold's theory; (2) Reinhold's alleged "fact of consciousness" was anything but such a "fact"; some mental states, such as sensations of pain, did not fit the model of "subject/ representation/ object" at all; (3) there was a massive inconsistency in Reinhold's account of self-consciousness, since Reinhold required all consciousness to involve representations, and a self-conscious subject therefore had to have a representation of itself, which, in turn, re­quired a subject to relate the representation of the subject to itself, which, in turn, implied an infinite regress. In effect, ÒAenesidemus" kept alive and underscored the interpretation of Kantian idealism as primarily an attempt to refute skepticism; and, in response, it argued that Kant had in fact not only not refuted the skeptic but also that Kant himself was only a sort of "phenomenalist," somebody who believed that we construct our ideas about physical objects as hypotheses to explain our own sensations. It concluded with the assertion that Hume (again, interpreted as a skeptic) was right, that we have no real knowledge of things, only knowledge of our subjective states.  pp. 105-106

 

Although ÒAenesidemus" in some ways dealt a lethal blow to Reinhold's "Elemental Philosophy," it also became the launching point for his successor, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814.).  p. 106

 

Fichte was removed from his familial home (which by his own later accounts was an emotionally cold environment) and eventually sent to a Gymnasium (university preparatory school), where he was always made to feel acutely aware of his social inferiority to the other students.  p. 106

 

The Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung commissioned the newly famous Fichte to do a review of ÒAenesidemus," which finally appeared early in 1794; that review served only to raise his own status even further, and, quite inadvertently, helped to lower Reinhold's, since in the review he conceded many of the points raised by Schulze against Reinhold's views. However, he turned the tables on both Schulze and Reinhold; to be sure, so Fichte conceded to "Aenesidemus," Reinhold's "proposition of consciousness" only ex­presses a "fact," and, to be sure, it cannot make good on the basic claims in Kantian thought. However, why should we assume, so Fichte argued, that we have to begin with a "fact" if any sort at all? Since the basic, first principle of the kind of philosophical "science" for which Reinhold was striving had to be itself normative and not "factual" in character, that first principle could not be a "fact" (a "Tatsache" in the German) but a kind of "norm guided action" (a "Tathandlung," literally a "deed-act"), a funda­mental mode of doing something that serves as the basis of other norms. The kind of "distinguishing" and "relating" that the subject is supposed to do in Reinhold's philosophy should be conceived along more truly Kantian lines in terms of basic acts of synthesis according to normative rules not in terms of being derived from some fundamental ÒfactÓ of any sort.  p. 107

 

Building on that point, Fichte argued that SchulzeÕs major criticism of Reinhold and Kant – that they were internally inconsistent in positing things-in-themselves as the ground of our sensations of them – was itself misguided. p. 107

 

That rejection of things- in-themselves and what it entailed was elabo­rated by Fichte in the first version of his own system of philosophy, given as his initial lectures in Jena and published in 1794 as simply, "The Foundations of the Whole Doctrine of Science.Ó 

pp. 107-108

 

FICHTEÕS RADICAL COMPLETION OF KANT: For Fichte, the key problem to be solved in completing the system Kant had begun was the problem of self-authorization, that is, of what we have called the "Kantian paradox" (the paradox seemingly lying at the core of what it means to say that we are subject only to those norms for which we can regard ourselves as the author). The core insight at the root of Fichte's attempt to complete the Kantian system and "solveÓ the problem of self-authorization had to do with what he saw as the basic dichotomy at the root of the Kantian system. As Kant had shown, in the world as we experience it, we encounter ourselves as subjects (unities of experience, "points of view") making judgments about objects (as substances interacting causally with each other in space and time), which, if true, answer to those objects that make them true. However, so Fichte concluded, that dichotomy itself - that core distinction between subjects and objects - was itself subjectively established; it was a normative distinction that "subjects" themselves institute.4 As Fichte saw it, Kant had shown that everything we encountered was either an object or a subject; but the dynamic of Kant's own thoughts should have shown him that this distinction itself was subjectively established.  pp. 108-109

 

To elaborate this notion, Fichte drew on two other key ideas that he wove into one overall conception: first, there was his reworking of a tra­ditional rationalist insight. Second, there was his innovative adaptation of the Kantian notion of autonomy to explain this rationalist insight. p. 109

 

INTELLECTUAL INTUITION AS PRIMARY ACT: The initial rationalist insight, in Fichte's own reminiscences, came to him all at once and concerned the notion of the relation of things­-in-themselves to thought about them, namely, that "truth consists in the unity of thought and object." That is, Fichte believed that the only pos­sible account of justification had to see the mind as capable of grasping certain necessary, a priori features of reality through an act of what he called "intellectual intuition" (the term was Kant's, although he could just as easily have called it "rational insight"). p. 109

 

INTELLECTUAL INTUITION = APPERCEPTION OF ONEÕS BEING THE GROUND OF THE RELATION OR ÒIDENTITY OF SUBJECT AND OBJECTÓ = SEEING THAT ONE IS THAT TYPE OF BEING TO WHOM OTHERS BEINGS SHOW THEMSELVES: In the Critique if Judgment, Kant had entertained the thought of such intellectual intuition as that which would be directly aware of the "supersensible basis" of nature and freedom, even though he made it clear that in his system such intellectual intuition would be, strictly speaking, impossible for human knowers. See Kant, Critique if Judgment, ¤77:  : "But in fact it is at least possible to consider the material world as mere appearance, and to think something as [its] substrate, as thing-in. itself (which is not appearance), and to regard this thing-in-itself as based on a corresponding intellectual intuition (even though not ours). In that way there would be for nature, which includes us as well, a supersensible basis of its reality, though we could not cognize this basis" (p. 293). Fichte distinguished his view from Kant in that he took intellectual intuition to be directed at a mode of acting – the ÔTathandlung' - and took claims to something's "being" (what we might just call "existence") to be justified only by sensible intuition. Intellectual intuition only justifies asserting the existence of the "pure I" as self-positing activity: "Since the Wissenschaflslehre derives the entire concept of being only from the form of sensibility, it follows that, for it, all being is necessarily sensible being. . . The intellectual intuition of which the Wissenschqftslehre speaks is not directed toward any sort of being whatsoever; instead it is directed at an acting - and this is something Kant does not even mention (except, perhaps, under the name 'pure apperception')," J. G. Fichte, "Second Introduction to the Wissenschaflslehre," in J. G. Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschajlslehre and Other Writings (ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale) (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1194)  p. 109-110 footnotes

 

GEOMETRY AS EXAMPLE: FichteÕs own examples of such intellectual intuition are geometrical (and resemble a Platonic conception of "noesis"): if we have two sides of a triangle and are told to supply the missing side, we immediately "see" that, necessarily, there is only one side that can com­plete the triangle; this is a necessary truth about triangles themselves; it is not a statement about our mode of apprehending them, nor is it a statement about how we use words; it is rather an insight into the necessary structure of things themselves.  p. 110

 

IDENTITY OF THOUGHT AND BEING: In intellectual intuition we are not, that is, grasping our mode of apprehending reality or the way we use words; we are apprehending the necessary structure of reality itself. Thus, our thought about reality and the necessary structure of reality itself are in the case of intellectual intuition one and the same, not because we subjectively "make up" or "produce" the real world, but because intellectual intu­ition gives us insight into the way that world necessarily is (that extended bodies in space cannot, for example, be red and green all over).  p. 110

 

In almost all of his writings, Fichte drove the point home that the basic first principle of all true "science" (which Reinhold had vainly sought in his "proposition of consciousness") can only be given in such an intel­lectual intuition and that therefore no further justification can be given nor should be sought for it.  p. 110

 

It is immediately evident" - it is the "absolute intuition of reason through itself.Ó p. 111

 

The traditional rationalist solution to that problem had been to search for some object that was appropriate for such rational insight (such as Plato's forms, math­ematical structures, God in his eternal nature, and so forth).  p. 112

 

Instead, noth­ing other than our own spontaneity, our autonomy itself, could serve as such a basis; and that very basic autonomy had to be itself construed non-metaphysically, not as expressing any ground-level metaphysical fact about some supersensible object, but as expressing some absolutely basic norm, which itself could only be grasped in its necessity through an act of rational insight, of intellectual intuition. II That is, we simply had to grasp through an act of "intellectual intuition" that our thought could be sub­ject only to those norms of which it could regard itself the author. In many ways, the rest of Fichte's philosophy revolved around testing out the ways to best express that norm while avoiding its most paradoxical aspects.  p. 112

 

 

THE FACT OF LEGISLATION = THE LEGISLATION OF FACT: AGAINST DOGMATISM AND SKEPTICISM: Fichte at first obscurely formulated this basic norm as "I = I." In the first version of the Wissenschqftslehre, he tried to show how such a norm was even more basic than the statement of identity, ÒA = A." To understand Fichte's argument, it is important to note that he construed ÒA = AÓ as equivalent to a conditional - in his own words, "if A is posited, then A is posited." That is, a statement of identity is something more like what we might nowadays call an inference license, something that (normatively) entitles an agent to a particular type of performance (in this case, making an inference).12 Such inference licenses involve normative statuses, that is, statuses that entitle one to do something (in this case, to infer from ''AÓ that ÒAÓ). Such normative statuses are not, however, to be found in nature; indeed, to seek them in the physical world would be an instance of what Fichte labeled "dogmatism." From the physical standpoint, saying ÒA=AÓ is just causing sound waves to be sent through the air; it is only from the normative standpoint that it can be taken to mean anything. (Signing a check, hitting a home run, making an assertion, shopping at a sale are all other examples of normative activities that cannot be captured in a purely physical or "naturalistic" description of them.) Such statuses must therefore be instituted and not, as it were, discovered in the world. As such they cannot be "facts" in any ordinary sense. pp. 112-113

 

á          We are all familiar with board games and sports, so think about FichteÕs insight into the Òground of the identity of subject and objectÓ in the following, simple way.  We can never read off from the physical motions of football players what moves they are making in the game.  In other words, described from a purely physical perspective – e.g. a right knee makes contact with the grass – we can never discern the Òplay,Ó Òmove,Ó or ÒeventÓ of the game.  What counts as a touchdown, for instance, is a matter of the subject first legislating and then applying with others a set of commonly established rules and conventions, and, most importantly, such rules, norms, and conventions (laws) are not natural facts but, instead, normative statuses assigned by reason-able subjects to physical motions.  Moreover, we can get it right or wrong!  Instant replays allow officials to review and to deliberate about the correct application of rules, norms, or Òlaws.Ó  So, the subject is, first, with others in the business of issuing Òinference licensesÓ or ÒconclusionsÓ regarding the facts of the matter, and, second, this activity of officiating – giving and asking for reasons in regard to the status of some play – is, yes, something that the subject does – itÕs an activity (Tathandlung) – but such activity allows the subject to identify what the object is.  In short, this deed lies at the basis of the epistemological relation between subject and object, where this relation is what allows the subject to Òget it right.Ó

 

Identity statements, whose necessity seems to be first self-evident when grasped in an act of intellectual intuition, in fact derive their neces­sity from a prior inference license ("if A, then A); if so, then even more ba­sic than the identity statement itself must be the notion, so Fichte argued, of issuing the license. The license involves authorizing an inference ­necessarily, if A, then A - whose necessity seems to be derived from the authorization itself; but, as Fichte clearly saw, that only raises the further issue of what (and how) anything could acquire the authority to institute such a license. (The intuited necessity of A = A turns out, Fichte was claiming, to be derivative from the intuited necessity of something else that is more basic.)  p. 113

 

Since inference licenses (again, not Fichte's own term) could only be instituted by something that would be, to return to Fichte's own ter­minology, not itself a "fact" (a Tatsache) but an "act" (Tatthandlung), and, since natural things cannot be said to act (in any normative sense), the subject that institutes the license must itself be such an "act," indeed, an act that somehow institutes the license and also simultaneously authorizes itself to institute such licenses.14 This would be the apperceptive self, ex­pressed in the necessary proposition, "I = I," and the necessity for this act of instituting licenses and authorizing itself to institute such licenses is available only in an act of intellectual intuition, a necessity which can itself "neither be proved nor determined."15 The self, that is, is not a nat­ural "thing" but is itself a normative status, and "it" can obtain this status, so it seems, only by an act of attributing it to itself. (Fichte, as we will see, qualified this in his writings on political philosophy and in later presen­tations of the Wissenschaftslehre.) Outside of its own activities of licensing, attributing statuses, and undertaking commitments, the thinking self is quite literally nothing. There simply can be no deeper ground of the self than this act of self-positing. One cannot give a causal, or, for that matter, any other non-normative explanation of the subject's basic normative act of attributing entitlement to itself and to other propositions. (This is why Fichte also continually identified the "I" with "reason" itself, since it was as "reason" that it was authorizing itself to institute such normative statuses; the basic normative fact, as it were, at the root of the "Kantian paradox" was, so Fichte was arguing, not a "fact" at all, but a status, something instituted by an act, that is, a Tathandlung.)  pp. 113-114

 

POSITING = PUTTING FORTH FOR CONSIDERATION = ASSERTING = TAKING A POSITION ON HOW THINGS STAND: "Positing" (Setzen) was a term Fichte took over from eighteenth-century logic books; it can be roughly rendered as attaching a "that" to a proposition. Thus, there is "P" and "That-P" or "P-as-asserted." The term also carries other senses to be found in the English, "posit": such as "to postulate," or "to put forward for discussion."

á          In the Philosophy of language and mind, itÕs important to distinguish between the content and the force of what someone has said, thought, or done.  For instance, I can imagine that itÕs raining, wish that it rain, hypothesize that itÕs raining, fear that itÕs raining, or, finally, believe that itÕs raining.  The italicized verbs above are called the ÒforceÓ or the ÒmodeÓ of the act, while its ÒcontentÓ or Òpropositional contentÓ is ÒitÕs raining.Ó  So too we can suggest, guess, express our fears or desires, or simply assert to another that itÕs raining – all different types of acts with the same content.  What Ficthe is getting at is simply this: we are responsible for such acts, since, in the case of beliefs and assertions, we are committing ourselves to something for which we must subsequently give reasons.  In short, we freely enter, so to speak, the game of asserting and believing, which is a social matter of appraising and assessing our believes in terms of the reasons that we have.

 

13 Although I developed part of this manner of understanding normativity in terms of entitlements and commitments in Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Robert Brandom's important and influential book, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, (994) is not only the most well known, but also the best treatment of the topic. In this chapter, I have adapted Brandom's powerful use of the language here of commitment, entitlement, and institution to make sense of Fichte's idealist claims. p. 113 footnotes

 

POSITING ÒIÓ AS NORMATIVELY ESTABLISHED: THE PRIMACY OF PRACTICAL REASON: What struck Fichte's readers as odd and what Fichte himself proudly asserted was that this subject came into existence as it acted; prior to the act of instituting norms, there simply is no "self," no subject of en­titlement, nothing that can be said to be responsible for its utterances, nothing that can be "discovered" or encountered in empirical investiga­tion. There may indeed be bodies equipped with brains, but there are no normative statuses until the "I" attributes such statuses. This of course, as Fichte clearly saw, raised the further issue: are there any criteria for attributing such statuses outside of what the "I" itself "posits" or could the "I" posit anything? Fichte's answer: there can be no ultimate criteria for positing except that which is entailed by the necessity of such positing in the first place, by whatever is necessary to maintaining a normative conception of ourselves.

pp. 114-115

 

FICHTEÕS MELDING OF THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL RATIONALITY: Fichte's notion of a Tathandlung might also be explicated in terms of the way in which normative judgments have a semantics that is, as it were, midway between the semantics of imperatives and declaratives, an idea worked up and developed in Mark Lance and John O'Leary-Hawthorne, The Grammar of Meaning: Normativity and Semantic Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 1997). p. 114 footnotes

 

FichteÕs colorful metaphor of the "deed-act" expresses this "midway semantics" perfectly. p. 114 footnotes

 

Since normativity involves doing something correctly or incorrectly, there must exist the possibility of denying or affirming an assertion's correctness. p. 115

 

Negation, like normativity in general, is not a part of the natu­ral world but is the result of subjects instituting certain normative sta­tuses, and this act of negation is, like the first principle of "I = I," Òan absolutely possible and unconditional act based on no higher ground.Ó 17   Since the "I" at first attributes ("posits") a normative status to itself - indeed, attributes to itself that it is nothing more than a normative status­ - it must be able to entertain the notion of there being a "not-I," some­thing whose normative status does not consist in its being attributed by the "I." So Fichte thought, that means that the "1's" self-authorizing acts must be conceived as constrained by something that is not the result of its own self-authorization (otherwise, it could authorize anything, including, "I authorize X and do not authorize X").  Thus, the most basic inference to which we are entitled would be the conjunction that "I am by virtue of positing myself, and there is something whose normative status is not posited by me."  p. 115

 

How is this apparent contradiction to be recon­ciled? Fichte's so-called third principle involves postulating an "infinite task" of coming to grips with the necessity to understand why certain ÒpositsÓ – that is, the whole complex of entitlements to assert this or that, commitments to certain norms, attributing authority or responsibility or entitlements to others – are indeed necessary and why some are not necessary. 

pp. 115-116

 

The activities of assertion and negation themselves, moreover, must be derived from the necessity of a self-conscious subjectÕs coming to think of itself as having an absolute normative status that is confers on itself – ÒabsoluteÓ in the sense that nothing else except it itself could confer that status on itself.  p. 116

 

In the rest of his 1794 Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte went on to argue how this activity of self-consciousness (as an act of normatively positioning oneself and authorizing oneself to attribute such positions to oneself) is the manner through which the ÒIÓ constitutes itself as a cognitive, thinking self – as constituting itself through the acts of assuming a set of justificatory responsibilities with respect to the various assertions one makes.  In par­ticular, he argued that our ordinary experience of a "given" world does nothing to undermine this transcendental idealist picture of things. To take a non-Fichtean example to make his point: in ordinary perception, we see, for example, a tree, and no act of will can change the fact that the tree just presents itself to us and causes a belief ("there is a tree") to arise in us; there is no activity, so it seems, on our part. The world, in fact, seems to offer up a series of such "checks" or "stimuli" (Anstoess) to us in the forms of experiential data whose status is not posited by us.  Fichte agreed, pointing out that something can function as a piece of "given" data only to the extent that we take it up as data, as having some kind of cognitive potential: as he quite succinctly put it, "no activity of the self, no check."20 Fichte's point was that everything that has been said to exist - the Greek gods, natural objects, sensations, monarchies – is to be regarded as a "posit" and what we ultimately take to exist has to do with which set of inferences are necessary in order to make the most sense of those "checks" found in our consciousness.  21  pp. 116-117

 

HENRICH/HEIDEGGER AND THE NORMATIVE TURN: 19 One of the most influential readings of Fichte's work on self-consciousness has been Dieter Henrich's "Fichtes Ursprungliche Einsicht," in Dieter Henrich and Hans Wagner (eds.), Subjektivitiit und Metaphysik: Festschrift fuer Wolfgang Cramer (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1966). Henrich ar­gued that Fichte saw that all "doubling" accounts of self-consciousness are doomed to failure - ac­counts that see the self as aware of itself as an object of awareness - since they will beg the question or lead to an infinite regress. Henrich famously concluded that Fichte nonetheless failed to draw the correct conclusion from this, namely, that we must have an immediate, non-propositional "Vertrautheit" (familiarity) with ourselves that defies any "subject/ object" scheme. The notion of self-awareness as "normative positioning" sidesteps these difficulties. In any event, even if it is true that we have a certain "familiarity" with ourselves, it need not be "immediate" in any robust sense. We can be directly aware of things (for example, in perceptual cases), and that kind of direct awareness can be immediate (non-inferential) in the sense that we do not make any infer­ences while engaged in them. (I can see a tree as a tree without making any inferences about it.) However, I could not have those kinds of direct awareness without already being in possession of a whole host of other abilities to make inferences. Thus, an "immediate" awareness can, in fact, presuppose a set of (mediated) abilities. This is at least what I take to be rudiments of the arguments made by Wilfrid Sellars in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1963); and Science and Metaphysics (London: Roudedge and Kegan Paul, 1968). Something like this view of "normative positioning" is attributed to Fichte by Robert Pippin in his Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 3.

 

FICHTEÕS RESOLUTION OF THE KANTIAN PARADOX: This tension in Fichte between "positing" the "Not-I" as that to which it is also responsive, and the demands that the "I" be subject only to laws of which it can regard itself as the author is essential to understanding of Fichte's attempt at dealing with the "Kantian paradox."  pp. 117 footnotes

 

NORMATIVE TURN, NOT AN ONTOLOGICAL ISSUE: Some took him to be saying that "I" creates the empirical world by "positing" it; and certainly his language and mode of exposition easily suggested that that was what he meant.  Others took him to be claiming that one could "deduce" from the mere concepts of identity and negation all of the a priori concepts concerning knowledge, action, and the objects of experience.  p. 118

 

Fichte had by 1797 dropped his earlier man­ner of exposition of his basic principles, and, in a newly published set of introductions and new first chapter, he avoided his earlier discussions of assertion and negation, focusing instead on the way the subject of thinking and doing is a normative status established in the very act of positing itself and its other.  p. 118

 

The intentionality of conscious­ness - its character of being "about" anything, including itself and objects in the natural world - has its original source in a self-bootstrapping act of self-authorization, and without this act there would be no conscious­ness to introspect (or no act of introspection itself). (Fichte himself spoke of "original consciousness" rather than "original intentionality."22) By focusing so straightforwardly on self-consciousness, Fichte was trying to get his readers to grasp the common Kantian-Fichtean point that the Òtranscendental selfÓ was not an ÒitemÓ within experience but a normative status that made conscious and self-conscious experience possible in the first place and could therefore not be found in any act of introspection.  p. 118

 

In the later introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte stressed that his major point was that "I can be conscious of any object only on the condition that I am also conscious of myself, that is, of the con­scious subject. This proposition is incontrovertible."23 He now claimed that this self-consciousness was an example of "self-reverting activity" ­ - "in sich zurueckgehende Tatigkeit," literally "activity returning back into it­self" - and was a form of "immediate consciousness," an act of intellec­tual intuition.24 By that Fichte meant to argue not that we were immedi­ately conscious of our internal mental states, but that the necessity of this act of licensing and self-authorization could only be grasped in an act of intellectual intuition. It was "immediate" (non-inferential) because the possibility of making any inference at all itself depended on this original act of constituting oneself as a subject of thought and action; and the possibility of being such a "subject" itself had to be unconditioned by any natural object, since only in terms of our ability to assume such a norma­tive stance could we be conscious of such objects. Thus, all consciousness is conditional on our acquiring the ability to make inferences, and the ability to make inferences is conditional on our self-authorization, on a type of self-relation we freely establish to ourselves, and the necessity and nature of this self-relation (as authoring the norms by which it is bound) can only be grasped in an act of intellectual intuition.  p. 119

 

 

In 1796 and 1797, Fichte published two volumes - Foundations of Natural Law according to Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre - in which he elaborated on and qualified his assertions about what he meant in claiming that the "I posits itself absolutely." He gave it a new turn: self-consciousness, he argued in Foundations, requires positing other self-conscious entities.  p. 119

 

 

As Fichte put it in his System of Ethics According to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre (1798), "freedom is the sensuous representation of self-activity (Selbsttatigkeit)"27 - or, to put it in other terms, freedom is the ability of the agent effectively to respond to his (ultimately self­-authorized) normative commitments by acting in the ways required by those commitments.  p. 120

 

Crucially, however, Fichte claimed (although his arguments for the claim are often quite difficult to follow) that this can come about only if it is another free agent that performs this solicitation. 28  The relation between cognition and practice therefore is, as Fichte describes it, "circu­lar," by which he meant that the nature of our normative commitments (epistemic or otherwise) can only be cashed out insofar as acknowledgment of those commitments results in some kind of performance (making an assertion in the epistemic case, acting or transforming the world in the more obviously practical case), and that characterizing something as a performance requires that we have a prior understanding of what would entitle us to characterize something s being that kind of performance.  p. 120

 

The solicitation to effective freedom of which Fichte speaks - the ability both to form normative commitments and to perform the appropriate actions in light of those commitments - is thus, as Fichte explained, "what one calls education," that is, a social activity in which other agents "solicit" an agent to such freedom. Thus, Fichte claims, ÒAll individuals must be educated into being persons (Menschen), otherwise they would not be persons.Ó  p. 121

 

Although the "I" is a self-authorizing entity, it nonetheless becomes one only through acts of mutual (social) recognition and through education, never through some miraculous act of self-positing out of nowhere.  p. 121

 

So, Fichte thought, the relation to other rational, embodied agents would therefore itself have to be construed not as a causal relation but as itself a normative relation, one of recognition (Anerkennung). (The English term, "recognition," is ambiguous on this point; in Fichte's, and later, under his influence, Hegel's, usage, it should be taken in the sense of at­tributing or conferring a normative status on someone or something, as when two states diplomatically recognize each other, or when an individ­ual is awarded a medal in recognition of her service.)  p. 121

 

Fichte's talk in this context of each agent's "compelling" (noetigen) the other to such recognition, of agents "binding" each other to such recognition, of each not merely privately but only through public action bestowing such recognition, is fairly strong evidence that freedom for him - or, more generally construed, agency itself-is a normative sta­tus that is sustained only by some type of mutual sanctioning.34 Indeed, he says explicitly that this kind of mutual expectation of recognition is a condition of self-consciousness itself.  p. 122

 

FUNDAMENTAL INTERSUBJECTIVIST ORIENTATION: Without such mutuality, there are no "selves" at all; the in­tentionality that is most basic turns out not to be an individual "I's" self-authorization but something more like a social authorization; and without such reciprocal authorization, there is no "I" on either side to refuse or accept such authorization. 37  The necessity for a normative constraint that is both posited by the "I" and yet not posited by it (the animating problem of the 1794 Wissenschaftslehre) was thus reformulated into a doctrine of mutual recognition and sanctioning, or each agent constraining the content of the otherÕs commitments.  Fichte thought of this in a pair-wise way, of two agents mutually recognizing each other such that each agent becomes for the other the normative ÒNot-IÓ that serves to limit and constrain the normative commitments the other undertakes.  p. 122

 

 

This conception of agency and the fact that we are necessarily em­bodied agents yields a basic principle of "right" (Recht), which Fichte formulates as "limit your freedom so that the others around you can also be free," and that principle in turn yields a "primordial right" (Urrecht) – a phrase Fichte claims is to be preferred to the potentially misleading notion of "natural right" (despite the title of his book) - which, in turn, at­tributes to people the entitlement to sanction the performances of others who violate the "primordial right" (and what follows from it). Interest­ingly, the "primordial right" is not that of property but of a particular form of freedom, expressed as the ability to be the "cause" of what takes place around oneself and not the "effect" of other's actions.  p. 123

 

Therefore, besides executive and legislative powers, there must be a third, impartial evaluative power, which Fichte called Ephorat.  p. 123

 

Doubtlessly in response to the sting of having lost his position because of the "atheism controversy" (as Fichte's ordeal at Jena became called), Fichte also came to be more and more interested in how the philosophy of religion fit into his scheme, and, as he began to work out the new versions of the Wissenschaflslehre in his private writings and lectures, the tensions inherent in Kant's view, in Reinhold's adaptation of it, and in Fichte's own views reappeared, with the old Kant-versus-Spinoza debate resurfacing again in those unpublished works. Were the various modes in terms of which we described ourselves and the world - both as free and as naturalistically determined - in fact compatible with each other? Or were they simply different, incompatible aspects of one underlying reality or different descriptions of that one reality? Was the "Kantian paradox" to be resolved by claiming that each side of the paradox was only an appearance of some deeper underlying unity?  p. 127

 

Moreover, there was the related and underlying issue about whether there could be a non-normative basis of the normative, which Fichte himself had first introduced into the debate. Was there, as Reinhold thought, a "factual," positive foundation for the various norms that Kant had asserted? The early versions of the Wissenschaflslehre, obsessed with elaborating the "Kantian paradox," had taken a radical, normative-all­-the-way-down stance toward that problem, arguing in effect that the difference between the normative and the factual (the non-normative) was itself a normative issue about how we ought to treat things.  p. 127

 

In picturing itself, the self is also picturing God as the founda­tion of its own being.

p. 129

 

 In his earlier writings, Fichte had followed Kant in identifying God with the "moral order" of the world. His later writings on religion clearly went on a different track. Had Fichte's doctrine turned out after all to be Spinozism combined with Kantian transcendentalism, an attempt to somehow unite Kantian spontaneity with pre- Kantian metaphysics? Or was this a way of pointing to a metaphysical "fact" of divinity that would supposedly ground our normative commitments and resolve (if that is the right word) the Kantian paradox by putting the originary reasons in the hand of the revealed God? That is, was Fichte suggesting that what, in Kant's words, was "neither nature nor freedom and yet is linked with the basis of freedom, the supersensible" was in fact the Christian God's being ÒpicturedÓ in our own activities?  The original idea of building up a new world based on "reason alone" as a replacement for modern, "dogmatic" world seemed to be foundering on the worry that Òreason alone" was not enough, and that the promise of modernity expressed in the Kantian notions of spontaneity and autonomy, was suffering from an anxiety as to whether reason was really up to the tasks it had set for itself and that the modern public had set for it.  pp. 129-130