Page images
PDF
EPUB

tion of pure Will, the symbol of the moral Idea, which is the real thing-in-itself, the real absolute.1 To philosophize is to convince one's self that being is nothing, that duty is everything; it is to recognize the inanity of the phenomenal world apart from its intelligible essence; it is to regard the objective world, not as the effect of causes foreign to our practical reason, but as the product of the ego, as the objec tified ego. There is no science except the science of the ego or consciousness. Knowledge is neither in whole (Hume, Condillac) nor in part (Kant) the product of sensation; it is the exclusive work, the creation, of the ego. There is no philosophy but idealism, no method but the a priori method. Philosophy does not discover ready-made truths, or establish facts that already exist. To philosophize, or to know, is to produce such facts, to create such truths.2

Speculative thought does not begin with a fact, with something received or suffered by the ego, but with a spontaneous act of its creative energy (nicht Thatsache, sondern Thathandlung). Its theses result from a regular succession of intellectual acts, which follow the law of opposition and reconciliation, foreshadowed by Kant in his threefold division of the categories (affirmation, negation, and limitation). The original act of the understanding, and every intellectual act in general, is threefold: (1) The ego posits itself; this is the act by which the ego takes possession of itself, or rather, the act by which it creates itself (for to take possession would presuppose an ego existing prior to the ego, or a given fact); (2) A non-ego is opposed to the ego, or the ego is negated; (3) The ego and the non-ego reciprocally limit each other.

As the essential elements of one and the same concrete reality, these three original acts (thesis of the ego, antithesis of the non-ego, and synthesis of the ego and non-ego) form but a single act. By affirming itself as a subject, the ego 1 Complete Works, II., p. 657. 2 Id., V., pp. 381 ff.

8 Id., I., 91 ff.

distinguishes itself from an object which is not the ego; in producing itself, it at the same time produces its opposite, its limitation: the objective world. The latter is not, as "common sense" and empiricism claim, an obstacle which the ego encounters; it is a limitation which it gives to itself. The sensible world has the appearance of something existing outside of the perceiving and thinking subject. It is an illusion which Kant himself could not wholly destroy. The limitation of the ego, the objective world, exists, but it owes its existence to the activity of the subject. Suppress the EGO, and you suppress the world. Creation is reason limiting itself; it is the will or pure thought, limiting, determining, or making a person of itself.1

However, Fichte is obliged to confess, the ego limits itself by an inner necessity, which it cannot escape through thought alone for it cannot think without thinking an object; it cannot perceive without affirming the existence of something which is not itself. Fichte recognizes with Kant, that the thing-in-itself cannot actually be reduced to thought, but he nevertheless maintains, in principle, that the thing-in-itself is merely the thinking principle itself. The dualism of the thinking subject and the thought object is an inevitable illusion of theoretical reason, from which, considering the infirmity of thought, action can and must free us. Hence, practical activity is the real triumph of reason, the affirmation of its omnipotence. True, in reality, the will is no more successful than the understanding in completely conquering the resistance of matter; in the phenomenal world, in which thought holds us captive, we cannot entirely escape the determinism of facts, or fatalism. The absolute autonomy of reason is an ideal which the ego pursues, but never attains. But this very conflict between the empirical and ideal reality proves that we are destined

1 Complete Works I., pp. 83 ff.; V., 210.

for an immortal lot: it is the source of our progress, the moving principle in history.1

[ocr errors]

Fichte thus confirms the "primacy of practical reason,' proclaimed by Kant. Moreover, he endeavors to insert this essential doctrine, which had been mechanically added to the Kantian system, into the very body of his philosophy.

Freedom is the highest principle, the essence of things.2 It is even superior to truth, considered from the purely theoretical standpoint, or rather, it is the highest Truth. For that very reason it is not an abstraction, but the supreme reality. But this reality, the source of all other realities, precisely because it is freedom, cannot be an empirical datum, an immediate, brutal, and fatal fact. If freedom were given, or made, or produced, as the facts of the physical order are produced, it would not be freedom. True freedom is the freedom which creates itself, or realizes itself. Self-realization means self-development in a series of stages, or entrance into the conditions of duration and time. Now time, like space, is an a priori intuition of theoretical reason, a form of the understanding; time is the intuitive faculty itself, or the understanding exercising its elementary and original function. And since it is, as we have just seen, the necessary instrument of freedom, we conclude that the understanding, the theoretical reason, the faculty which divides the ego into subject and object, is the auxiliary of practical reason, the organ of the will, the servant of freedom.

Again: Freedom realizes itself in time; time is its means, its indispensable auxiliary. But time is the intuitive faculty itself, the theoretical reason perceiving things successively. Theoretical reason, or the understanding, is therefore the means, the organ, which practical reason em ploys to realize itself. Instead of being, as Kant seemed to conceive it, a power foreign and therefore hostile to 1 Die Grundlage des Naturrechts (Complete Works, III.). 2 Works, I., 489.

practical reason, theoretical reason thus naturally and neces sarily becomes subject to the will; it humbly enters the service of the moral ideal. The dualism of the "two reasons" disappears; the understanding simply becomes a phase in the development of FREEDOM; knowledge is a means, a secondary thing; action is the principle and final goal of being. The non-ego is, in the language of Aristotle, the matter which the form needs in order to realize itself as supreme energy; it is the limit which the ego sets itself in order to overcome it, and thus to realize its essence, freedom. Self-assertion or self-realization means struggle; struggle presupposes an obstacle; this obstacle is the phenomenal world, the world of sense and its temptations.2

Liberty, we said, realizes itself in time and by means of thought, i. e., by distinguishing between a subject which perceives and thinks, and an object which is perceived and thought. But this object, which the magician Reason shows to the ego, the external world, the non-ego, is in turn composed of a multitude of egos, of personalities apart from mine. Hence, freedom does not realize itself in the separate individual (the empirical ego), but in human society. In order to become a reality, the ideal ego divides itself into a plurality of historical subjects, and realizes itself in the moral relations established between them, and these relations are the source of natural, penal, and political rights.

Considered apart from the individuals which realize it, the absolute or ideal ego is a mere abstraction. The real God is a living God, or the God-man. "I abhor all religious conceptions," says Fichte, "which personify God, and regard them as unworthy of a reasonable being." And why? Because a personal being, or a subject, does not

1 Read will, and you have, word for word, the teaching of Schopen hauer minus his pessimism.

2 Works, V., 210.

Kritik aller Offenbarung, (Works, V.L

exist without an object that limits it. True, this limitation is the work of the subject itself; but whether limited by itself or by something else, the subject is a limited being, and God cannot be conceived as such. God is the moral order of the world, the freedom which gradually realizes itself in it: he is nothing but that.

Fichte's opposition to the idea of a personal God is the criticism of his own system, or, at least, of the subjectivistic form which it assumed under the influence of Kant, and of which it gradually divested itself under the influence of Spinoza. By denying the personality of God, he condemns both the notion of an absolute ego, as the creator of the non-ego, and the method of a priori construction.

Schelling, Fichte's most brilliant disciple, turns his attention to this contradiction.

§ 65. Schelling 1

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph SCHELLING, born 1775, at Leonberg, in Würtemberg, received the master's degree from the University of Tübingen, when seventeen years old, and continued his studies at Leipsic. In 1798 he was made professor of philosophy at Jena, where he became acquainted with Fichte and renewed his friendship with his fellow-countryman Hegel. In 1803 we find him at the University of Würzburg; then he becomes the General Secretary of the Munich Academy of Plastic Arts (1806

1 Complete works in two series, ed. by his son, 14 vols., Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1856 ff. [Engl. translations in the Journal of Speculatice Philosophy.] French translations: Selections, by C. Bénard; System of Transcendental Idealism, by Grimblot; Bruno, by Husson. [Cf. Rosenkranz, Schelling, Dantzic, 1843]; Mignet, Notice historique sur la vie et les travaux de Schelling, Paris, 1858; [J. Watson, Schelling's Trans cendental Idealism (Griggs's Philosophical Classics), Chicago, 1882. See also Willm, o. c., vol. III.; Kuno Fischer, o. c., vol. VI.; and R. Haym, Die romantische Schule, 1870. — TR.].

« PreviousContinue »