created by God, but a world of sensations, such as Hume supposed, only combined, not by association, but by synthetic understanding into phenomenal objects of experience, which are phenomenal substances and causes—a world of phenomena not noumena. This second position is a new form of metaphysical idealism, containing the supposition, which lies at the foundation of later German philosophy, that since understanding shapes the objects out of sensations, and since nature, as we know it, consists of such objects, “understanding, though it does not make, shapes nature,” as well as our knowledge. Known nature is a mental construction in part, according to Kant.
c. As to existence, Kant’s position is the wholly illogical one that, though all known things are phenomena, there are things in themselves, or noumena; things which are said to cause sensations of outer sense and to receive sensations of inner sense, though they are beyond the category of causality which is defined as one of the notions uniting phenomena; and things which are assumed to exist and have these causal attributes, though declared unknowable by any logical use of reason, because logical reason is limited by the mental matter and form of experience to phenomena; and all this according to Kant himself. This third position is a relic of ancient metaphysical realism; although it must be remembered that Kant does not go to the length of Descartes and Locke, who supposed that from mere ideas we could know bodies and souls, but suggests that beneath the phenomena of outer and inner sense the thing in itself may not be heterogeneous (ungleichartig). In this form we shall find the thing in itself revived by A. Riehl.
d. As to the use of reason beyond knowledge, Kant’s position is that, in spite of its logical inability to transcend phenomena, reason in its pure, or a priori use, contains necessary a priori “ideals” (Ideen), and practical reason, in order to account for moral responsibility, frames postulates of the existence of things in themselves, or noumena, corresponding to these “ideals”; postulates of a real free-will to practise morality, of a real immortality of soul to perfect it, and of a real God to crown it with happiness.
The fourth position is the coping-stone of Kant’s metaphysics. It is quite inconsistent with its foundation and structure. Kant first deduced that from the experience of mental phenomena all logical use of reason is limited to mental phenomena, and then maintained that to explain moral responsibility practical reason postulates the existence of real noumena. But what is a postulate of practical reason to explain moral responsibility except a logical use of reason? Nevertheless, in his own mind Kant’s whole speculative and practical philosophy was meant to form one system. In the preface to the second edition of the Kritik he says that it was necessary to limit speculative reason to a knowledge of phenomena, in order to allow practical reason to proceed from morality to the assumption of God, freedom, and immortality, existing beyond phenomena: “Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu machen.” He forgot that he had also limited all logical use of reason, and therefore of practical reason, to phenomena, and thereby undermined the rationality not only of knowledge, but also of faith.
Fichte now set himself in the Wissenschaftslehre (1794) to make transcendental idealism into a system of metaphysical idealism without Kant’s inconsistencies and relics of realism. His point was that there are no things in themselves different from minds or acting on them; that man is no product of things; nor does his thinking arise from passive sensations Fichte. caused by things; nor is the end of his existence attainable in a world of things; but that he is the absolute free activity constructing his own world, which is only his own determination, his self-imposed limit, and means to his duty which allies him with God. In order to prove this novel conclusion he started afresh from the Cartesian “I think” in the Kantian form of the synthetic unity of apperception acting by a priori categories; but instead of allowing, with all previous metaphysicians, that the Ego passively receives sensations from something different, and not contenting himself with Kant’s view that the Ego, by synthetically combining the matter of sensations with a priori forms, partially constructs objects, and therefore Nature as we know it, he boldly asserted that the Ego, in its synthetic unity, entirely constructs things; that its act of spontaneity is not mere synthesis of passive sensations, but construction of sensations into an object within itself; and that therefore understanding makes as well as shapes Nature.
This construction, or self-determination, is what Fichte called positing (setzen). According to him, the Ego posits first itself (thesis); secondly, the non-Ego, the other, opposite to itself (antithesis); and, thirdly, this non-Ego within itself (synthesis), so that all reality is in consciousness. But, he added, as the Ego is not conscious of this self-determining activity, but forgets itself, the non-Ego seems to be something independent, a foreign limit, a thing in itself, or per se. Hence it is the office of the theory of knowledge to show that the Ego posits the thing per se as only existing for itself, a noumenon in the sense of a product of its own thinking. Further, according to Fichte, on the one hand the Ego posits itself as determined through the non-Ego—no object, no subject; this is the principal fact about theoretical reason; on the other hand, the Ego posits itself as determining the non-Ego—no subject, no object; this is the principal fact about practical reason. Hence he united theoretical and practical reason, which Kant had separated, and both with will, which Kant had distinguished; for he held that the Ego, in positing the non-Ego, posits both its own limit and its own means to the end, duty, by its activity of thinking which requires will. The conclusion of his epistemology is that we start with ourselves positing subjective sensations—e.g. sweet, red—and refer them as accidents to matter in space, which, though mental, is objective, because its production is grounded on a law of all reason. The metaphysics resulting from this epistemology is that the so-called thing in itself is not a cause of our sensations, but a product of one’s own thinking, a determination of the Ego, a thing known to the Ego which constructs it. Fichte thus transformed the transcendental idealism of Kant by identifying the thing with the object, and by interpreting noumenon, not in Kant’s sense of something which speculative reason conceives and practical reason postulates to exist in accordance with the idea, but in the new meaning of a thought, a product of reason. This change led to another. Kant had said that the synthetic unity “I think” is in all consciousness one and the same, meaning that I am always present to all my ideas. Fichte transformed this unity of the conscious self into a unity of all conscious selves, or a common consciousness; and this change enabled him to explain the unity of anything produced by the Ego by contending that it is not the different objects of different thinkers, but the one object of a pure Ego or consciousness common to them all. According to Kant, the objective is valid for all consciousnesses; according to Fichte it is valid for one consciousness. Here he was for the first time grappling with a fundamental difficulty in metaphysical idealism which is absent from realism, namely, the difficulty of explaining the identity of a thing, e.g. the sun. As long as even the meagre realism of the Kantian thing in itself is maintained, the account of there being one sun is simply that one thing causes different phenomena in different minds. But as soon as the thing in itself is converted into something mental, metaphysical idealists must either say that there are as many suns as minds, or that there is one mind and therefore one sun. The former was the alternative of Berkeley, the latter of Fichte.
Thus the complete metaphysical idealism of Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre formed out of the incomplete metaphysical idealism of Kant’s Kritik, is the theory on its epistemological side that the Ego posits the non-Ego as a thing in itself, and yet as only a thing existing for it as its own noumenon, and on its metaphysical side that in consequence all reality is the Ego and its own determinations, which are objective, or valid for all, as determinations, not of you or of me, but of the consciousness common to all of us, the pure or absolute Ego. Lastly, Fichte called this system realism, in so far as it posits the thing in itself as another thing; idealism, in so far as it posits it as a noumenon which is a product of its own thinking; and on the whole real idealism or ideal realism.
God does not seem to find much place in the Wissenschaftslehre, where mankind is the absolute and nature mankind’s product, and where God neither could be an absolute Ego which posits objects in the non-Ego to infinity without ever completing the process, nor could be even known to exist apart from the moral order which is man’s destination. Hence in his Philosophical Journal in 1798 Fichte prefaced a sceptical essay of Forberg by an essay of his own, in which he used the famous words, “The living moral order is God; we need no other God, and can comprehend no other.” Having, however, in consequence, lost his professorship at Jena, he gradually altered his views, until at length he decided that God is not mere moral order, but also reason and will, yet without consciousness and personality; that not mankind but God is the absolute; that we are only its direct manifestations, free but finite spirits destined by God to posit in ourselves Nature as the material of duty, but blessed when we relapse into the absolute; that Nature, therefore, is the direct manifestation of man, and only the indirect manifestation of God; and, finally, that being is the divine idea or life, which is the reality behind appearances. In this extension of metaphysical idealism he was influenced by his disciple, Schelling. Nevertheless, he refused to go as far as Schelling, and could not bring himself to identify either man or nature with Absolute God. He wanted to believe in the absolute without sacrificing personality and freedom. God determines man, and man determines Nature: this is the final outcome of Fichte’s pure idealism.}}
Fichte completed the process from psychological and epistemological
to metaphysical idealism, which it has been necessary to
