Ellen Bliss Talbot

“ There can be no doubt that the concept of the ideal is fundamental for him. But I see no reason to think that he conceives the ideal as purely volitional and affective. Man’s life is in all its phases a striving. But the striving, far from being blind, is constantly illuminated by conception and idea,—by intellectual factors. And, further, I see no ground for supposing that Fichte conceives all action to exist for the sake of practical ends in the narrow sense. Much, at any rate, of what he says about the scholar and the artist suggests the opposite interpretation. ”

“ But reality, according to Fichte, is not merely changing; it is also developing. The world-process is at the same time a world-progress, a continual approximation to a far-distant goal, the ‘Idea of the Ego’ or the ‘divine Idea.’ If one must characterize the Idea of the Ego in a single phrase, the best that can be suggested is ‘organic unity.’ The world as we apprehend it is obviously not unitary. It is characterized both by pluralism and by dualism. If you say that it is in a certain sense one, in that it is all consciousness and nothing but consciousness, Fichte would readily admit this. ”

“ What we commonly call ‘will’ contains an intellectual element, crude or developed. The higher forms of volition involve judgment and reasoning, just as truly as the higher forms of intellection involve desire and will. And in the lower forms of volition, a crude intellectual element,—image, idea, or at least sensation, or perception,—is as noticeably present as the crude volitional element in the lower forms of intellection.
In other words, ‘mere will,’ uninformed by intellect, would be action without any purpose, a mere doing which was not meant to do anything, a blind striving. ”

“ Not even Kant sees more clearly than he that the thing which we try to know is other than the knower and persistently evades our attempt to penetrate the secret of its being; that the material world thwarts our purposes and opposes its brute resistance to our most earnest efforts; that within the realm of moral and spiritual experience, there is ever the conflict of warring impulses, the incompatibility of moral ideal and natural desire. All this Fichte sees clearly and emphasizes sharply. ”

“ And just as Fichte here ignores the fact that in knowing we force the world, to a certain extent, to conform to our purposes, so, on the other hand, he fails to point out that in all our doing we have to take account of the nature of things. There is a certain stubbornness on the part of objects which makes the realization of our purposes dependent upon our ability to adapt ourselves to the material with which we are to work. If it be true that observation is usually futile without hypothesis, it is equally true that docility and adaptability are an important element in practical success. ”

“ From this we see that Fichte’s doctrine of the infallibility of conscience rests upon the proposition that, if conscience is not unerring, life has no moral significance. Since this proposition would hardly be granted by many thoughtful men to-day, it seems to me that we may pass by the question as to the possibility of an erring conscience, and consider simply the general principle that whatever is necessary in order that life may have moral significance is true. For it is this which really constitutes Fichte’s doctrine of the primacy of the practical reason. ”

“ The doctrine that all real thinking is for the sake of some result, that judgment is purposive thought, pursuing an end, seems to me sound, and I think it is fully in harmony with the teachings of Fichte. His insistence that human life is throughout activity, and that all activity is purposive, is a distinctive feature of his philosophy. But the assertion of the purposive nature of thought may signify two rather different things. ”

“ That every judgment that an individual can make must be, in a sense, an individual matter, that it is his judgment, his reaction upon the material furnished by experience, is certainly true; and the philosophical world owes a debt to Professor James and others for having emphasized it. But in their zeal for showing that our volitional and emotional nature inevitably colors our intellectual life, the pragmatists have sometimes failed to take sufficient account of that element of constraint in judgment, which, to my thinking, is its most distinctive characteristic. ”

“ It is, in its essence, the expression of a will, more or less steadfast, to conform one’s life to the requirements of the moral ideal. Fichte brings out this point in his essay, On the Ground of Our Belief in the Divine Government of the World. The most certain of all beliefs, he says, is the belief in God, if by ‘God’ you mean, not a person, but the moral world-order. But the declaration that the universe is moral “is not a wish, nor a hope, nor a considering and balancing of reasons for and against, nor a free resolve to assume something the opposite of which one regards as possible. ”

“ Until we can see the relations which bind the many into one, until we can show that the apparently diverse happenings are workings of the same principle, we say that we have failed to understand. Unity is thus the goal of the knowing process. But it is equally the ideal of all that we commonly call ‘practical,’ as distinguished from ‘intellectual,’ endeavor. ”

“ In the realm of mathematics, we find ourselves similarly bound or forced at certain stages of our reasoning. We may, at the outset, assume what we like; we may will that the space with which we are to deal shall be of three dimensions, or of four dimensions, or of dimensions. But when we have once made our choice, we are no longer free to think what we will. It is not merely that, having agreed to think in terms of Euclidean space, I ought not to deny the truth of the Pythagorean proposition ”

“ Pragmatism lays emphasis, and rightly, upon the doctrine that our desires and choices influence our judgments, that the intellectual nature cannot act altogether independently of the rest of the self, so that we can always be sure of having intellectual products, pure and undefiled, free from any admixture of feeling and will. ”

“ Thus he does not bring out the thought that there is much that we must do if we would know, and that this doing is not a mere preliminary, but an essential part of the knowing process itself; that every real act of knowledge is, to a certain extent, a subduing of the objective world, an imposing of our will upon it. ”

“ But while it will readily be conceded that Fichte’s description is far from furnishing an adequate account of the thought-process, it emphasizes a difference between knowing and doing that we cannot afford to ignore. In every intellectual process that reaches completion, we come, at some stage or other, face to face with a ‘not-ourselves’ which constrains us, and to which we must conform if we would know. In the field of natural science, this constraint is an important factor in the testing of hypotheses, and, for that matter, in all observation. ”

“ Since the law commands that we shall act solely in accord with our conviction of duty, and since conviction is possible only if there be an absolute criterion of its correctness, there must be such a criterion. “From the existence and the necessary causality of the moral law, we infer something in the faculty of cognition. We assert, accordingly, a relation of the moral law to the theoretical reason,—a primacy of the former, as Kant expresses it. That without which there could be no duty is absolutely true, and it is duty to accept it as true.” ”

“ When we inquire which of the two positions Fichte would take, we are reminded at once that he says repeatedly that we are, above all, practical beings, that we are essentially will. But it may be well to ask what we mean by ‘will.’ And as soon as we raise the question, it becomes clear to most of us, I think, that we do not mean something utterly devoid of an intellectual aspect. ”

“ This world of human experience is a temporal world; time is a fundamental characteristic of consciousness and hence a necessary form that actuality wears. Thus reality is not something static; it is in continual process. What the present age produces has never been before and will never be again. Change, uniqueness, is characteristic of all that is actual. ”

“ One is the conception of judgment as involving the recognition of a norm. The other is the assertion that whatever is a necessary condition of duty is absolutely true. We shall take up these points in order.
I agree with Rickert that Fichte teaches that all judgment, no matter of what sort, implies a reference to a norm or value. In judgments which explicitly evaluate some aspect of our experience, declare it to be true or false, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly, this reference is obvious. ”

“ The multiplicity of individuals he not only recognizes, but tries to ‘deduce.’ That is, just as he tries to deduce the dualism by showing that it is a necessary condition of consciousness, and thus of the realization of the world-purpose, so he attempts to deduce the pluralism by showing that a multiplicity of consciousnesses is necessary as a means to this same realization.↑ The description of the knowing process which we have already given considers it as an attempt to get beyond pluralism. In this account of Fichte’s, it is represented as an effort to overcome dualism. ”

“ This, then, is what Fichte understands by ‘the primacy of the practical reason.’ His doctrine does not mean that our moral nature can establish for us theoretical propositions which the intellect is unable to establish. It means that certain propositions which we are wont to call ‘theoretical’ are not theoretical after all,—that doubt in regard to them is a disease of the will. ”

“ If all reality were actually created by the individual finite wills and the thought-processes of individual finite subjects, much of the determinateness of experience would, as Professor Rogers has shown, be inexplicable. ”

“ We may distinguish between ‘theoretical’ purposes and ‘practical’ ones, and may maintain that, while all thinking is for some purpose and would lose its distinctive character as thinking if it lost its purpose, still its conscious end,—and its proper end,—may often be a knowing, rather than a doing or a feeling. ”

“ But reality is characterized by pluralism, as well as by dualism. The actual world is not a single consciousness, but a number of consciousnesses, a multiplicity of finite beings. And these finite consciousnesses are all more or less opposed to one another. Again, in the sense-experience of each individual we have a multiplicity of external objects. The sense-world is not an organic whole, but an aggregate ”

“ Nay, he even insists that without this inherent strife, consciousness could not be, that the opposition of subject and object, in its various phases, is the indispensable condition of intellectual life, of practical endeavor, of moral and spiritual achievement. ”

“ The man, who doubts whether it is worth while,—I do not mean, of course, from the pleasure-pain point of view,—to cherish ideals and try to act worthily of them, is one whose will and whose attitude toward life are in need of healing. ”

“ Some of our hypotheses will not ‘work’; we discover facts which compel us to abandon them. Thus the particular unitary principle which we at first devised is rejected by the facts, and we are forced to invent another. ”

“ This suggests an important difference between Fichte’s theory of knowledge and that of the pragmatists; for it is in its attitude toward this element of constraint in the thinking process that many critics of pragmatism see one of the great weaknesses of the theory. This aspect of knowing is not indeed altogether overlooked by pragmatism. ”

“ But Fichte maintains that even those judgments which are concerned with the establishment of matters of fact have this aspect. And a little reflection shows that he is right. Even the simplest of our factual judgments,—if it be a real judgment, i.e., if it be meant as an assertion and not as the expression of an opinion,—implies the recognition of an ought. ”

“ But, before we go farther, we must consider what is meant by ‘the recognition of a norm.’ Rickert’s discussion does not seem to me perfectly clear, either in his article upon Fichte or in his Gegenstand der Erkenntnis. ”