Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ Let us posit in advance of all possible utterance of freedom an objective contemplation of the power of life generally, as a manifestation in the contemplation of the world. That objective contemplation must be in all regards one. There is no subject in it at all, for that contemplation does not reflect itself, but is a mere objective existence of such a contemplation, a mere pouring out and a pure externality, without any inner essence. ”

“ Of course, freedom would remain as a faculty—a possibility; and hence such a will—for in its continuance we must call it will, and not, as in the moment of its origination, resolve—must uphold itself eternally through itself, which upholding is precisely the continuous annihilation of the always possible real freedom, and will manifest itself as such an upholding. But continuous self-determination, to be moral, is now no longer possible, since this self-determination has been achieved for all eternity. ”

“ We comprehend a product of freedom only as the cancellation of a development of nature, and we measure it only by ascertaining how far the power of nature has been annihilated by it; consequently, by restoring nature in thought to its previous condition. We must, therefore, be able to restore it, and hence possess it in our universal contemplation. ”

“ From the concentration of life in one point onward, which itself is an absolute fact, everything is factical. But the natural man is merely a historical intelligence, who can very well take hold of facts, re-image them in his reproductive power of imagination, substitute and exchange one for the other, but has also in this the limit of his range of vision. Whenever the problem is no longer merely to exchange facts for facts, but to rise beyond all facticity in its absolute form to its absolute ground by pure thinking, the faculty of the natural man is at an end ”

“ And here let me make a remark, which I trust will remove many a misapprehension of previous propositions of the Science of Knowledge. No individual contemplates, or beholds, beings of his own kind in himself and in his self-contemplation, but in the immediate contemplation of the one life. Whatsoever else there is in nature—physical force, etc., down to coarse matter—is contemplated, of course, by each individual in himself, in the immediate contemplation of his universal power. ”

“ Result.—The determinatedness of moral consciousness is not produced by the freedom of thinking, but absolutely creates itself. It is true that freedom co-operates in the process, but somewhat differently. By killing the impulse, it puts itself into the condition wherein it can realize itself that determined contemplation propounds a problem, which the individual can freely make his own, and which he ought to and most certainly, according to the above, can solve. But the acting of the individual is an infinite line, and, by virtue of that infinity, stands under the moral law. ”

“ The individual must have the power to determine himself for all eternity never to admit any more as a fact the freedom which nevertheless continues as a possibility forever.
Determination through freedom is called a free Willing—not the previously described natural Willing. That determination would, therefore, be a resolve henceforth and forever to obey—without flinching or considering, and without any separate resolve of freedom—the moral law, in whatever form it may present itself in our infinite contemplation. ”

“ Since life itself thus soars over its modifications, it soars all the more over the fixed determining contemplation of them; it is even less in space than it is in time. It is a mere power—a pure power without substrate, a power which does not at all appear immediately, and hence is not contemplated, and which, therefore, is also not contemplated in any of the possible forms of contemplation. Here, therefore, we hit upon a thinking, which by its very content excludes all contemplability, and hence every form of possible contemplation. ”

“ What is this universality, and where is its limit? It is this: that all individuals, without an exception, have a special moral destination of their own; and whatever this destination is for every particular individual, lies beyond the limit. ”

“ Positively in no other way than by following the purely scientific principle to regard consciousness as a phenomenon existing for itself, and to explain it out of itself. What, then, is the hitherto described consciousness? It is an exhibition of free activity, and utterance of power, merely and solely for the purpose of making power manifest and cause freedom to be visible as freedom—an exhibition which has no other end than to make the freedom appearing in it to be really freedom. ”

“ A knowledge exists actually, in fact, and independent; for this knowledge is a free and independent life. This must be conceded to us and accepted by all who desire to occupy the same stand-point with us of a philosophy which proceeds from knowledge as a phenomenon in itself. ”

“ The principle of nature is absolutely a moral principle, and by no means a natural principle; for, if it were the latter, nature would be absolute. Nature is heteronymous, and by no means autonomous. Nature is to be explained, partly from its ends, and partly from the visibility of those ends; from both, indeed, as we have shown in the case of the power, whose image nature is. If we forget the latter point, we shall fall into absurdities.
Morality, therefore, appears here as the absolute determining principle of nature. ”

“ Why this contemplation of life should dirempt into a duplicity of form we have already stated; the reason given being, that it is thinkable, as it must be, only in this manner. But it cannot be thinkable without being contemplated, since it is thinkable only under the condition of being an object of contemplation, the tact of thinking being merely a going beyond contemplation, and being, therefore, conditioned by it. Adding thinking to contemplation, the whole would be a revelation of life unto itself. ”

“ Life, indeed, is only thought, as we have seen. Now, if this thinking of life examines itself in order to discover whether it has its ground in itself or not, it most certainly finds that it cannot constitute a fact the ground of the thought life, since life is thought as in itself the ground of all facts, and the only ground of facts. If, therefore, life cannot be thought as being its own ground, a final end can and must be thought as such ground. ”

“ We have further shown how that limitation of freedom through the law does not need to enter into clear consciousness, and that it does not enter consciousness in original construction any more than the power of life did in the original construction of nature, being merely the invisible ground of determination of such a limitation of the productive power of imagination, through which there arises for us the appearance of a product of freedom of a free being. ”

“ All individual life is, at its beginning, immoral, not in regard to its destination and what it ought to achieve, but in actuality. Morality is the product simply of absolute freedom. No individual is engendered a moral being, but each must make himself a moral being. ”

“ What is this nature, firstly, in regard to its form? Not a substrate, or anything of that kind, but pure and absolute life and power, which creates the merely possible into an actual, the immediate fundamental principle of all actuality. The ground of its being, as well as the ground which irresistibly and, like a law of nature, determines the manifestation of its power, is the final end itself. Here we find the absolute union and the true connecting link of both worlds, the visible and the invisible. ”

“ We here obtain, therefore, a new determination of universal contemplation, the basis of the Legal Conception, whereby freedom is turned into nature, as it were, and called upon to operate and produce a fixed and permanent Being like an irresistible and compulsory law of nature. ”

“ A material body, for instance, moving in space, moves itself, of course, first of all; and is, in so far, only self-determination. But immediately through that self-movement it propels everything, which resists it with less power, out of that space, which it enters. Its self-movement and its movement of another are absolutely one and the same, and there is no mediating link. (In the same manner we regard our own free action upon the material world. Our hand, for instance, propels something immediately in accordance with a law, by moving itself according to a law.) ”

“ Hence, the unity of life reposes for all eternity in the unity of the self-consciousness of the individuals, which began in this world, and in the unity of its contemplations of all its worlds, which, on that account, must also remain connected. ”

“ This happens, because all of us have first developed our consciousness within the sphere of sensuous contemplation, and have passed a good part of our life in it, and because sensuous contemplation has thus become, through habit, almost a second nature with us. Even if any one succeeds so far as to be able to keep that sensuous admixture aloof so long as he is attentive to himself, he still is, nevertheless, very easily surprised by the old habit whenever he has to reason, and when he can, therefore, no longer keep his attention fixed upon himself. ”

“ The moral destination of the individual, which is altogether completed by his going beyond universal life, as a Being, can thus arise to consciousness only in an infinite, never-to-be-finished series of separate, determined contemplations, which series is connected and remains the same through the law of conditionedness; and the determined act, we are called upon and actually can do, is valid only for the determined time-moment.
The impulse, as an essential component part of the individual, remains eternal; hence freedom also remains eternal. ”

“ We have discovered that the use of freedom (the actual development of the existing power of life) is subordinated to a higher law addressed to inner freedom itself, in consequence of which the latter is to determine itself through itself; Whether this law appears in that unity and universality in which we have announced it just at present, or whether it is, perhaps, in this its formal unity, merely a conception produced by ourselves, does not concern us here at all. ”

“ We saw above that the mere sensuous individuality, even without any appearance of the moral law in consciousness, makes actual acting completely possible, and real freedom, the possibility of determining one's self to do a specific act, in every way perfectible. ”

“ An exposition of the Fact of Consciousness would therefore be, as it were, a natural history of the development of life. 5. Such a history, being a history of the development of life, must begin from the lowest point; from that point wherein life is given to itself without any previous development. This point, the terminus a quo of that history, is external perception. I have said, Knowledge is simply because it is; it has an independent existence, and the only independent existence known to us. But that knowledge, in its essence being freedom, it must really be freedom, which is independent. ”

“ Consciousness is the freedom of a Being; determined consciousness, freedom of a determined being. Whatsoever is to be the immediate consciousness of a subject must be immediately the actual being of that same subject. If the subject is absorbed by the natural impulse, his moral determinatedness still remains, of course ”

“ A moral consciousness of not being permitted to do something—namely, to destroy the product of freedom—connects immediately, and is synthetically united with the consciousness through which an utterance of freedom, that has occurred in any individual form of life, arises in the consciousness of all other individual forms—a consciousness of physical inability to do something which is absolutely universal for the originator as well as for all others. ”

“ I have asserted that that life of knowledge changes itself. In my view it, being itself thoroughly in earnest, produces a Beings which is also actual and remains in fact, and which, after beings cannot be canceled again; a Being in itself, since Life is in itself. Now this Being expresses itself immediately in a knowledge, since such a Being is itself knowledge. How can any one, who entertains such a view seriously, have a doubt as to the reality of such a knowledge, which is, after all, nothing but that Being itself? ”

“ Now, it is the faculty of contemplation which remains permanent in every manifestation, makes it enduring and actually endures throughout the whole infinite series. Hence this contemplation, in its absolute form, does not become, but is; and by its form it keeps up the infinite becoming. The fundamental Being of life, therefore, is, in its form, a contemplation, which has not become, but which is, eternally and unchangeably, the same. All activity, which belongs after all only to formal life, is to be eliminated from it in thought. ”