Fichte (Adamson)/Chapter V

GENERAL IDEA OF FICHTE'S PHILOSOPHY. philosophy of Fichte attaches itself, by a kind of natural necessity, to that of Kant, of which it is an extension and development, and in relation to which it has its special significance. The difficulties in the way of obtaining a summary view of its nature and tendency are thus, for the general reader, increased. From the peculiar form of the system, it is not at all possible to effect an easy entrance into it; but the closeness of its connection with the Kantian philosophy renders it necessary not only that the reader should become acquainted with the specific character of the critical method, with the point of view from which the problems of speculative thought are regarded in all later German systems, but also that he should have a sufficient grasp of the details of the critical philosophy to appreciate what is peculiar in Fichte’s advance upon it. Of these fundamental requisites for comprehension of Fichte’s doctrine, the first is the more important,—even, one may say, the more essential. The English student who has been accustomed to the analytical and psychological method of Berkeley, or Hume, or Mill, or even to the more developed forms of recent realistic or scientific thinking, as in Spencer, finds himself, as it were, in a new world, when he is brought into contact with the Kantian and post-Kantian speculations—a world in which at first sight all appears to be inverted or reversed. Apparent inversion, as we know, may arise either from the position of the things themselves, or from the inverted view of the observer; and the extraordinary difference between the English and the later German philosophy is merely the result of the fundamental difference in point of view from which they contemplate philosophical questions. The problems with which both are engaged are of necessity the same—no philosophy is ever new—but the methods employed are radically divergent, and not without careful analysis and criticism can they be brought within sight of one another. It is indispensable, in attempting to give a systematic account of one phase of German speculation, that we should endeavour to make clear the characteristic feature which distinguishes that mode of thought, and we can hardly do so without comparing it to some extent with the prevailing type of English philosophy. So soon as the point of view and method of treatment have become clear, we are in a position to consider the problems to which the speculative method must be applied, and thus to obtain a preliminary outline or general conception of the whole system. This, in the first instance, is what we propose to undertake, leaving to the more detailed account of the system the second introductory subject—the contents or results of the Kantian philosophy.

If we consider what is involved in the descriptive adjectives which have been, applied to what may be called the current English philosophy, we shall be able to discover, by mere force of contrast, some of the most important characteristics of the Kantian method of speculative research. Historically, indeed, the Kantian method was an attempt to revise what had appeared as the final result of English philosophy; and though the later post-Kantian writers make little or no reference to English thought, the connection between the two is not to be overlooked. A more fruitful conception of the aim and function of speculative thinking is to be obtained by working towards Kant from the position of Locke and Hume than from that of Leibnitz, important as the influence of the latter undoubtedly was. The English philosophy, we have said, may be distinguished as prevailingly analytical or psychological in method. In other words, if it be regarded as the primary and all-comprehensive function of philosophy to render intelligible the whole of experience, to give a systematic and reasoned account of all that enters into the life of the human thinking being, then the method of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and their successors, proposes to supply answers to the various problems into which this one comprehensive inquiry divides itself, by an analysis of the conscious experience of the thinking subject, by a complete psychology of human nature. Conscious experience, that of which the individual subject becomes aware as making up his existence, is regarded as material upon which the processes of observation, classification, analysis, employed to good purpose in physical inquiries, are to be directed. At first sight, indeed, such a method appears not merely natural, but the only possible way in which a philosophical theory, granting such to be feasible, can be constructed. For is not a philosophical theory a kind of knowledge? And how otherwise than by investigation of the contents of mind can we arrive at any conclusions regarding the nature and limits of knowledge? “It surely needs no argumentation,” says a distinguished exponent of the view, “to show that the problem, “What can we know? cannot be approached without the examination of the contents of the mind, and the determination of how much of these contents maybe called knowledge.” Since that which stands in need of explanation is experience itself, we evidently cannot explain it otherwise than by looking at it. To look beyond experience is absurd; there is evidently nothing left but the examination of experience, and to this philosophy must needs be confined.

It may here be remarked that any difference between the philosophical methods under comparison does not arise concerning the restriction of knowledge to experience. Fichte as well as Kant is aware that philosophy has only to think experience, that it in no way adds to experience, and that it must contain nothing beyond experience. “I declare,” he writes in one of the most popular of his expositions, “the very innermost spirit and soul of my philosophy to be, that man has nothing beyond experience, and that he obtains all that he has, from experience, from life only. All his thinking, whether vague or scientific, whether popular or transcendental, proceeds from experience and concerns nothing but experience.” Any divergence arises, not from disagreement respecting the quite empty proposition, that there is nothing beyond experience, but from some difference in conception of experience and in the method of dealing with it. Critical examination often shows that under an apparently simple question or statement a whole theory lies concealed, and that the inferences drawn follow not from the fact contained in the query or proposition, but from the underlying theory. Thus, in the case in point, the restriction of philosophical inquiry to experience has always meant, to writers of the English school, that phenomena of inner and outer life are known in the same way, and that beyond the knowledge thus obtained there is nothing standing in need of investigation or capable of being investigated. “Psychology,” says the writer previously referred to, “differs from physical science only in the nature of its subject-matter, and not in its method of investigation.”

English philosophy thus starts with a definite conception of the nature and limits of speculative inquiry. Experience, inner and outer, is equally matter for scientific treatment; and the results of such treatment form, on the one hand, natural science strictly so called—on the other, mental science, of which certain generalised propositions make up the substance of philosophy. It is not putting the matter too strongly to say that the categorical rejection of this psychological method is the very essence of the critical philosophy, the key-note of the critical spirit in speculation. For Kant, as for Fichte, psychology is a science or doctrine subordinate to philosophy proper, involving in its method assumptions which it is the very business of philosophy to discuss, and employing notions which it is the function of philosophy to criticise. So far from speculative principles being generalisations from psychological data, they are antecedent to the establishment of such data as facts of experience. The naïve doctrine that since cognition is an aspect or form of conscious experience, its nature, extent, and validity are to be considered by investigating it according to the rules of scientific method,—just as we should investigate an object presented in outer experience,—is not to be identified with the truth which the most metaphysical thinker acknowledges, that only by thought can thought be tested and examined. The special lesson of the critical philosophy is that the assumption of a distinction of the whole field of experience into the two realms of objective facts and of subjective facts itself requires examination and defence. We must consider what the significance of such a distinction is for the conscious subject within whose experience it presents itself, and under what conditions it can be recognised by him. Were we to begin our philosophical analysis, as psychology must begin, with the distinction as in some way a fact given, and assume simply that the thinking subject is confronted with two orders of phenomena to be interpreted through the same notions, we should commit a twofold error. For, on the one hand, while in words we appear to assert that the two orders of facts make up all that is, we have in reality placed alongside of them, in a quite inexplicable fashion, the thinking subject or mind, a tertium quid which certainly stands in need of some explanation; and, on the other hand, the qualities and relations discoverable among facts, when contemplated as matters of observation for the thinking subject, are only such as appear to a supposed external observer, and not their qualities and relations for the intelligence whose very substance they compose. We voluntarily abstract from the essential feature of the problem, the existence of the conscious subject for whom the orders of facts are there present, and must therefore recognise that any conclusions from investigation of the facts have validity only in subordination to the abstraction from which we start. Thus psychology, as ordinarily conceived—the scientific account of the phenomena to be observed in consciousness, the description, analysis, and history of mental phenomena—stands on precisely the same level as the natural sciences, and like them, leaves out of consideration the problem with which philosophy as such has to deal. Even the analysis of mental states, which forms a portion of psychological treatment, is the analysis of them as facts of observation,—that is, the determination of the conditions on which their occurrence depends, the separation of simpler and more complex states, and the formulation of general laws of coexistence and succession, not the analysis of their significance as elements of the cognitive or moral experience of a conscious subject The fundamental notions which we apply in psychological research are those of all scientific method, and concern objects—i.e., things regarded as existing in conjunction and mutual interdependence. Their very applicability, therefore, depends on the resolution of the prior questions as to the significance of knowledge of any thing or object, and the relations involved therein. Such prior questions may be called, in Kantian phraseology, transcendental, and the whole method by which they are treated the transcendental method. The substitution of this transcendental method for the earlier abstract metaphysics, and for the prevailingly psychological fashion of dealing with philosophical problems, is, in brief, Kant’s contribution to modern thought.

The fundamental difference between the psychological method of dealing with philosophical problems, the method which regards the states of mind as so many definite objects for a conscious observer, and the transcendental method, which proposes for consideration the conditions under which knowledge of a thing is possible for a thinking subject and the significance of such knowledge, appears with great clearness in the philosophical system of Berkeley—a system in which both methods may be discerned, though neither receives precise expression, and the combination seems to have remained unobserved by the author. Berkeley’s thinking is in so many ways typical of the English spirit, his idealism has affected so much of current speculation, and his position in the general development of modern philosophy is so peculiar, that it is worth while here to scrutinise somewhat closely the principles upon which he proceeded.

Beyond all question, Berkeley started, in his philosophical analysis, with a doctrine which in terms may be regarded as identical with the principle of the transcendental method. He proposed to investigate philosophical notions or terms in the light of the doctrine, that no fact can possibly be admitted which is not a fact for some conscious subject. Every metaphysical theorem or notion must be subjected to the same test, reduction of its terms to the experience of a thinking being. His attack on abstractions is thus virtually identical with the Kantian criticism of things-in-themselves. For Berkeley an abstraction is a supposed fact of experience which from its nature cannot possibly form part of the experience of a conscious subject. If we remove from a fact those relations or qualifications through which only it enters into and forms portion of the conscious experience of some subject, we have as result an abstractum or contradiction,—something supposed to be a possible object of experience, and yet at the same time wanting in the qualities requisite for any such object. Material substance as distinct from the varied and specifically qualified material things, unqualified matter as the cause of objective phenomena, things as existing out of relation to conscious intelligence, abstract ideas of facts of experience, are instances of such abstraction. Berkeley’s demand that, before discussing problems as to matter, cause, substance, and other metaphysical notions, we shall first determine what they mean for us, has the true note of the transcendental method.

On the other hand, it is equally beyond doubt that Berkeley, under the influence of Locke’s philosophy, accepted as the criterion of the possibility of entrance into the conscious experience of a subject, the possibility of forming one fact of observation in the observed sum of states making up conscious experience. In his view, as in that of Locke, existence for a self-conscious subject meant individual or particular existence as an object of internal observation. Thus from the outset he united in one system the transcendental and the psychological methods, and the history of the development of his thoughts is an instructive record of the struggle between the two principles. The manifold inconsistencies which criticism discloses in his doctrine are natural results of the attempt, however unconscious, to combine two radically incompatible views.

Berkeley’s earliest reflections, those contained in the ‘Commonplace Book,’ discovered and published by Professor Fraser, are dominated throughout by the individualist notion which is part of the psychological method. He is even disposed at times to reject his underlying doctrine of the necessary implication of subject and object, and to regard mind itself as but a collection of particular ideas, as, indeed, mind necessarily is, for internal observation. In the first formal stage of his philosophy, the stage represented by the ‘Principles,’ the most characteristic features are due to the steady application of the individualist criterion. It seems evident to him that to the observer, regarded as standing apart from conscious experience, nothing can be presented but isolated, single states, connected externally or contingently, containing in themselves no reference to underlying substance or cause, and existing only as facts for an observer. The result is one aspect, unfortunately almost the only aspect known, of the Berkeleian idealism. Existence is the sum of states making up the experience of the individual; there is nothing beyond the mind and its own phenomena. From such a mere subjective fancy no philosophical aid is to be found for resolving any of the harder problems of thought. As the matter is well put by Dr Stirling: “The same things that were called without or noumenal, are now called within and phenomenal; but, call them as you may, it is their systematic explanation that is wanted. Such systematic explanation, embracing man and the entire round of his experiences, sensuous, intellectual, moral, religious, aesthetical, political, &c., is alone philosophy, and to that no repetition of without is within, or matter is phenomenal, will ever prove adequate.” In short, the slightest reflection enables one to see that the most airy subjective idealism and the crassest materialism are one and the same. In both cases we are left with the mere statement that things are what they are, and it matters not whether we call them ideas or forms of matter.

This, however, is but one side of Berkeley’s so-called idealism. Although, while developing from the individualist principle, he could arrive at no other conclusion than that experience consists in the isolated states of the individual thinker, yet it seemed to him equally clear that the conscious subject could not be regarded as merely one of the objects of internal observation. The independent existence and activity of the conscious self were therefore admitted by him as somehow beyond experience in the narrow sense, and in a very confused fashion he proceeded to ask what the significance of experience could be for such a self-conscious subject. His answer, given briefly and without adequate investigation of its real ground, was practically that for such a subject conscious experience must present itself as a conditioned and dependent fact, as a series of accidents of which intelligence or mind is the substance, as a series of effects of which intelligence or mind is the cause. Thus the psychological idealism, reached by application of the one method, was transformed by application of the other into a species of objective or theological idealism. The conception of a mere flux of conscious states was converted into the more complex notion of an intelligible system—a world of free and independent spirits, whose modes of action and passion are the several modifications of actual experience as known to us. Finite minds are related to one another and to the Infinite Mind by mutual action and reaction. The course of nature is the result of the operation of the Divine Mind on finite intelligences.

A notion like this is essentially what Kant and Fichte call “dogmatic.” It implies or starts from the assumption of an absolute opposition between two orders of real existences, the finite and the infinite mind, and endeavours to explain their reconciliation or conjunction by means of a conception which has validity only for the diverse objects of one conscious subject. A conscious subject can only think the objects which make up his experience as mutually determining, for only so do they compose one experience. To transfer this notion to the possible relations of infinite and finite intelligences, which by supposition are not mere objects for mind, is to make an invalid, or technically, a transcendent use of it. No ingenuity can render a finite and relative notion like that of causal action, or of mutual determination, adequate to express the possible connection between experience and the ground of all possible experience. God and the world are not to be thought as respectively cause and effect.

The Berkeleian theological idealism thus yields no solution of the problem it was intended to answer. It is simply a translation into the language of idealism of the popular view that the experience of the conscious subject is due to some action from without; and if no further analysis be given, it is not of the slightest consequence, philosophically, whether we say that God is the cause of the varied character of conscious experience, or that things in themselves are the cause. In both cases we have started with the conception of the finite, self-existent mind, and explain its experience as communicated to it from without. Such a mere fashion of speech makes clear neither what the significance of “coming from without” can be for an intelligence possessing only subjective states, nor how the notion of “without” can possibly arise in its consciousness, nor how it comes to regard itself as finite, and to refer for explanation to an Infinite Mind.

The later stages of Berkeley’s thinking show the gradual perception on his part of the deficiencies in his earlier doctrine. On the one hand, it became increasingly apparent that the results of the psychological method required to be qualified or limited by reference to the counter-conception of the conscious subject as in no sense a possible object of conscious experience: on the other hand, it began to appear doubtful to Berkeley how far any worth or validity could be ascribed to the psychological method. He had assumed throughout his earlier inquiry that to the supposed external observer, whether our own mind or not, the facts of conscious experience would present themselves as a contingent series or stream; but it now occurred to him that in so doing, he had simply cast into the mind of this external observer all that was required to render knowledge possible, all that must be investigated before we can determine what knowledge really is. Thus, in ‘Alciphron,’ stress is laid upon the fact that Self is not an idea—i.e., not an object of observation; and on the analogy of this, the wider inference is rested, that many intellectual principles may likewise have validity, although what they refer to can in no sense be reduced to ideas, or isolated individual elements of conscious experience. In ‘Siris,’ Berkeley begins to point out that the stream of contingent facts of experience is not a datum requiring merely to be observed, but is possible material of knowledge only for an intelligence which combines the scattered parts in relations not included in the conception of them as mere objects. In fact, in the latest stage of his philosophical development, it becomes evident to him that the so-called simple ideas of Locke are really concrete and complex units of cognition; and that sense, so far from furnishing a kind of knowledge, supplies only elements, which for a thinking subject are possible material of knowledge.

Berkeley’s doctrine has been considered in some detail, partly because no subsequent English philosophical thinking seems to have advanced beyond his position, partly because one can discern very clearly in him the principles upon which English philosophy has always proceeded. The results of his work will probably have made intelligible what is to be understood by the psychological method of treating speculative problems, what is the precise nature of the assumptions underlying it, and what, on the whole, must be the characteristic feature of the opposed method. The psychological method, starting from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, in which the individual subject is confronted with two dissimilar series of facts, inner and outer experience, and in which each series, as it presents itself separately, is viewed from the same quasi external position, proceeds to treat these facts by the help of the familiar category or notion of the thing and its relations to other things. The world of external experience appears as a totality of existing things, reciprocally determining and being determined, each of which is what it is because the others are what they are. It matters not that, by the introduction of some subjective analysis, we reduce the supposed things to more or less permanent groups or series of sensations: the essential fact is, that they are thought as making up a mechanical whole. When the same conception is applied to inner experience, to the thinking subject, his states and relations to experience in general, the only logical result is a system of completed determinism, or, as Fichte calls it, dogmatism. Even without raising the question as to the legitimacy or validity of the notion thus applied to the interpretation of things in external nature, Fichte points out that the same conception, the same method, cannot be applied to the interpretation of the life of the conscious subject. For, here, each fact is to be regarded, not only as a thing standing in relations to other things,—relations only conceivable when we secretly postulate the presence of some mind which relates the things to one another,—but as a fact for the conscious subject. They are not external to him, but form part of his very being and substance, and philosophy has specially to deal with their significance for him. The psychological method has simply thrown out of account or neglected the fundamental fact, that of self-consciousness. Mechanical or dogmatic explanations of mental phenomena may be adequate as statements of the conditions under which these phenomena come to be, but they are utterly inadequate as explanations of what these phenomena are for the conscious subject. Take as an example of the difference between the modes of treatment, the important distinction appearing in consciousness between Ego and non-Ego, self and not-self. The psychological theory, if it is wise and enlightened, begins by assuming provisionally the existence of objective conditions under which specific sensations arise, and points to the variable nature of these conditions, and the variable combinations of sensations which result—e.g., the constant presence of motor or muscular sensations with different groups of passive sensations as giving the key to the origin of the notion. But such an explanation tacitly assumes the very point at issue. Why should either passive or active sensations, or any combinations of them, appear to the conscious subject himself as limitations? If we represent to ourselves the conscious subject as a thing acted upon and reacting, we may try by the help of this metaphor to render intelligible the fact that some states of his experience appear as objective and determined, while others are thought as subjective and relatively undetermined; but our explanation extends only to the metaphor and not to that which is symbolised. There is no resemblance between passive and active sensations, and the assumed actions and reactions from which they arise; and the only problem, how the consciousness of difference arises out of the sensations, is not answered by reference to actions and reactions which are not in the sensations at all, but, if in consciousness at all, are added by thought. On the other hand, the speculative method proposes, by an analysis of self-consciousness and of the conditions under which it is possible, to clear up the significance for the conscious subject himself of those important differences which characterise his experience. Nothing must here be assumed which transcends self-consciousness, but nothing must be accepted as solution which is not for self-consciousness. The distinction between Ego and non-Ego is one for the thinking subject; it is hopeless, therefore, to look for solution to hypotheses which lie outside of the thinking subject. The so-called scientific method in philosophy is emphatically the method of metaphysical assumptions, for throughout its procedure it has recourse to explanations which transcend experience.

Thus the philosophy of Fichte starts with the demand that the facts of experience shall be examined as facts of self-consciousness. They exist only for a thinking being, and their significance or interpretation for the thinking subject is the substance of philosophy. Philosophy is thus the re-thinking of experience,—the endeavour to construct by rigid and methodical analysis that which to ordinary consciousness presents itself as a completed and given whole. Speculation, therefore, in no way transcends the limits of experience; it does not extend the bounds of thinking; it intrudes in no way into the province of natural science, which is but an extension of ordinary consciousness. “No proposition of a philosophy which knows itself is, in that form, a proposition for real life. It is either a step in the system, from which further progress may be made; or if speculation has in it reached a final point, a proposition to which sensation and perception must be added, as rationally included therein, before it can be of service for life. Philosophy, even when completed, cannot yield the element of sense, which is the true inner principle of life (or actuality).” Philosophy is thus the subjective side of that which objectively appears or presents itself as reality, in ordinary life. The experience of the finite subject, an experience in which, so far as cognition is concerned, the inner and outer worlds are distinct; in which, so far as action is concerned, sensuous impulse and reasoned purpose, personal desire and general or rational will, are combined; in which, so far as the whole sphere of his finite existence is concerned, the feeling of personal independence is curiously allied with those strivings after infinite being in which independence would cease;—this experience, in all its diversity, is the matter to be explained; and while philosophy may divide itself into various branches according to the different problems proposed, it is in a twofold sense a unity. For the experience to be interpreted is one, and the whole interpretation is but the exposition of the significance of experience for self-consciousness, which is also one.

If, now, we call any fact of experience which presents itself in consciousness, a cognition or matter of knowledge, and every systematic account of any series or class of such facts, a science (Wissenschaft), we shall be prepared to understand why it was that Fichte selected, as title for philosophy in general, the term, theory of science or of knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), and what are the formal requirements of this comprehensive doctrine. It is the business of Wissenschaftslehre to develop from its first principle the organic plan or complete framework of human knowledge. We may assume hypothetically that there is system in human cognition, and if so, we assume that all principles can be shown to rest upon some one comprehensive absolute principle—a principle incapable of proof, but giving the ground of proof to all other principles. Our assumption can receive justification only in and by the course of the development itself,—i.e., we can show that there is system in human knowledge if we develop completely, from its first principle, all that is contained in human knowledge.

Fichte’s earliest systematic work, the tract “On the Notion of Wissenschaftslehre,” contains a number of formal determinations regarding the new science; but the true meaning of what is there laid down becomes apparent only when the nature of the doctrine itself has been seen. It is desirable therefore to omit all reference to this tract, at least until the system has been explained.