Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ Hence the content of Philosophy can claim no other reality than that of necessary Thinking, on the condition that you desire to think of the ground of Experience. The Intelligence can only be thought as active, and can only be thought active in this particular manner! Such is the assertion of Philosophy. And this reality is perfectly sufficient for Philosophy, since it is evident from the development of that science that there is no other reality. ”

“ You can show the dogmatist the insufficiency and inconsequence of his system, of which we shall speak directly; you can confuse and terrify him from all sides; but you cannot convince him, because he is unable to listen to and examine with calmness what he cannot tolerate. If Idealism should prove to be the only real Philosophy, it will also appear that a man must be born a philosopher, be educated to be one, and educate himself to be one; but that no human art (no external force) can make a philosopher out of him. ”

“ The systems of Kant and of the Science of Knowledge are idealistic—not in the general indefinite, but in the just described definite sense of the word; but the modern philosophers are all of them dogmatists, and are firmly resolved to remain so. Kant was merely tolerated, because it was possible to make a dogmatist out of him; but the Science of Knowledge, which cannot be thus construed, is insupportable to these wise men. The rapid extension of Kant’s philosophy—when it was thus misunderstood—is not a proof of the profundity, but rather of the shallowness of the age. ”

“ The Thing in itself is a mere invention, and has no reality at all. It does not occur in Experience, for the system of Experience is nothing else than Thinking accompanied by the feeling of necessity, and can not even be said to be anything else by the dogmatist, who, like every philosopher, has to explain its cause. True the dogmatist wants to obtain reality for it through the necessity of thinking it as a ground of all experience, and would succeed, if he could prove that experience can be, and can be explained only by means of it. ”

“ Such is the first task imposed upon the student by Philosophy. We speak of nothing that is without thee, but merely of thyself.
The slightest self-observation must show every one a remarkable difference between the various immediate conditions of his consciousness, which we may also call representations. For some of them appear altogether dependent upon our freedom, and we cannot possibly believe that there is without us anything corresponding to them. Our imagination, our will, appears to us as free. ”

“ It might be easily shown to such a one, that scholars have at all times designated exactly what we have just stated to be Philosophy, and that whatever else he might assert to be Philosophy, has already another name, and that if this word signifies anything at all, it must mean exactly this Science. But as we are not inclined to enter upon any dispute about words, we, for our part, have already given up the name of Philosophy, and have called the Science which has the solution of this problem for its object, the Science of Knowledge. ”

“ III. The finite intelligence has nothing beyond experience; experience contains the whole substance of its thinking. The philosopher stands necessarily under the same conditions, and hence it seems impossible that he can elevate himself beyond experience.
But he can abstract; i.e. he can separate by the freedom of thinking what in experience is united. In Experience, the Thing—that which is to be determined in itself independent of our freedom, and in accordance with which our knowledge is to shape itself—and the Intelligence—which is to obtain a knowledge of it—are inseparably united. ”

“ But who can prevent Dogmatism from assuming the Soul as one of the Things, per se? The soul would thus belong to what it has postulated for the solution of its problem, and, indeed, the category of cause and effect would thereby be made applicable to the Soul and the Things—materialism only permitting a reciprocal action of the Things amongst themselves—and thoughts might now be produced. To make the Unthinkable thinkable, Dogmatism has, indeed, attempted to presuppose Thing or the Soul, or both, in such a manner, that the effect of the Thing was to produce a representation. ”

“ It requires a certain degree of independence and freedom of spirit to comprehend the nature of the intelligence, which we have described, and upon which our whole refutation of Dogmatism is founded. Many persons have not advanced further with their Thinking than to comprehend the simple chain of natural mechanism, and very naturally, therefore, the Representation, if they choose to think it at all, belongs, in their eyes, to the same chain of which alone they have any knowledge. ”

“ Every logical dogmatist is necessarily a Fatalist; he does not deny the fact of consciousness, that we consider ourselves free—for this would be against reason;—but he proves from his principle that this is a false view. He denies the independence of the Ego, which is the basis of the Idealist, in toto, makes it merely a production of the Thing, an accidence of the World; and hence the logical dogmatist is necessarily also materialist. He can only be refuted from the postulate of the freedom and independence of the Ego ”

“ If the results of a Philosophy do not agree with experience, that Philosophy is surely wrong; for it has not fulfilled its promise of deducing the whole experience from the necessary action of the intelligence. In that case, either the presupposition of transcendental Idealism is altogether incorrect, or it has merely been incorrectly treated in the particular representation of that science. ”

“ That the object of every philosophy, as explanatory ground of Experience, must lie beyond all experience, is required by the very nature of philosophy, and is far from being derogatory to a system. But we have as yet discovered no reasons why that object should also occur in a particular manner within consciousness. ”

“ In the present sketch I write only for those, in whom there still dwells an inner sense of love for truth; who still value science and conviction, and who are impelled by a lively zeal to seek truth. With those, who, by long spiritual slavery, have lost with the faith in their own conviction their faith in the conviction of others; who consider it folly if anybody attempts to seek truth for himself; who see nothing in science but a comfortable mode of subsistence ”

“ These men have only a desultory consciousness, linked together with the outward objects, and put together out of their manifoldness. They receive a picture of their Self only from the Things, as from a mirror; for their own sake they cannot renounce their faith in the independence of those things, since they exist only together with these things. Whatever they are they have become through the outer World. Whosoever is only a production of the Things will never view himself in any other manner ”

“ In so far as those final results of Idealism are viewed as such, as consequences of our reasoning, they are what is called the a priori of the human mind; and in so far as they are viewed, also—if they should agree with experience—as given in experience, they are called a posteriori. Hence the a priori and the a posteriori are, in a true Philosophy, not two, but one and the same, only viewed in two different ways, and distinguished only by the manner in which they are obtained. Philosophy anticipates the whole experience, thinks it only as necessary ”

“ In the immense gulf, which in that system remains always open between Things and Representations, it places a few empty words instead of an explanation, which words may certainly be committed to memory, but in saying which nobody has ever yet thought, nor ever will think, anything. For whenever one attempts to think the manner in which is accomplished what Dogmatism asserts to be accomplished, the whole idea vanishes into empty foam. Hence Dogmatism can only repeat its principle, and repeat it in different forms; can only assert and re-assert the same thing ”

“ The dispute between the Idealist and the Dogmatist is, in reality, the question, whether the independence of the Ego is to be sacrificed to that of the Thing, or vice versa? What, then, is it which induces sensible men to decide in favor of the one or the other? ”

“ The dogmatist is in danger of losing his Self when his system is attacked; and yet he is not armed against this attack, because there is something within him which takes part with the aggressor; hence, he defends himself with bitterness and heat. The idealist, on the contrary, cannot well refrain from looking down upon his opponent with a certain carelessness, since the latter can tell him nothing which he has not known long ago and has cast away as useless. ”

“ But in this deduction Philosophy consists. Hence Dogmatism, even when viewed from a speculative stand-point, is no Philosophy at all, but merely an impotent assertion. Idealism is the only possible remaining Philosophy. What we have here said can meet with no objection; but it may well meet with incapability of understanding it. That all influences are of a mechanical nature, and that no mechanism can produce a representation, nobody will deny, who but understands the words. ”

“ Hence, this Science expects few proselytes from men who have already formed their character; if our Philosophy has any hopes at all, it entertains them rather from the young generation, the natural vigor of which has not yet been submerged in the weak-mindedness of the age.
VI. But dogmatism is totally incapable of explaining what it should explain, and this is decisive in regard to its insufficiency. It is to explain the representation of things, and proposes to explain them as an effect of the Things. Now, the dogmatist cannot deny what immediate consciousness asserts of this representation. ”

“ The chemist’s sight is, a priori; he sees the separates; the ordinary beholder’s sight is a posteriori; he sees the Whole. The only distinction is this: the chemist must first analyze the Whole before he can compose it, because he works upon an object of which he cannot know the rule of composition before he has analyzed it; while the philosopher can compose without a foregoing analysis, because he knows already the rule of his object, of reason. ”

“ If the presupposition of Idealism is correct, and if no errors have been made in the deduction, the last result, as containing all the conditions of the first act, must contain the system of all necessary representations, or the total experience;—a comparison, however, which is not instituted in Philosophy itself, but only after that science has finished its work. ”

“ The author believed that he had understood the latter; he resolved to devote his life to a representation—totally independent from Kant’s—of that great discovery, and he will not give up this resolve. Whether he will succeed better in making himself understood to his age, time alone can show. At all events, he knows that nothing true and useful, which has once been given to mankind, is lost, though only remote posterity should learn how to use it. ”

“ Idealism cannot refute Dogmatism. True, the former system has the advantage, as we have already said, of being enabled to point out its explanatory ground of all experience—the free acting intelligence—as a fact of consciousness. This fact the dogmatist must also admit, for otherwise he would render himself incapable of maintaining the argument with his opponent ”

“ According to the Dogmatist, all phenomena of our consciousness are productions of a Thing in itself, even our pretended determinations by freedom, and the belief that we are free. This belief is produced by the effect of the Thing upon ourselves, and the determinations, which we deduced from freedom, are also produced by it. ”

“ Hence he can prove by nothing that his postulated Laws of Thinking are really Laws of Thinking, are really nothing but immanent laws of the Intelligence. The Dogmatist asserts in opposition, that they are not, but that they are general qualities of Things, founded on the nature of Things, and there is no reason why we should place more faith in the unproved assertion of the one than in the unproved assertion of the other. ”

“ Or give the Other the highest quality which you can give a thing—Sensibility—whereby it will follow the laws of its own inner nature, and not the law given to it by the cause—and it will, to be sure, react upon the outward cause; but it will, nevertheless, remain a mere simple Being, a Being for a possible intelligence outside of it. The Intelligence you will not get, unless you add it in thinking as the primary and absolute, the connection of which, with this your independent Being, you will find it very difficult to explain. ”

“ If anybody should not be able to convince himself of the truth of what we have just said, this would not make his conviction of the truth of the whole system an impossibility, since what we have just said was only intended as a passing remark. Still in conformity to our plan we will also here take possible objections into consideration. Somebody might deny the asserted immediate self-consciousness in a free act of the mind. Such a one we should refer to the conditions stated above. This self-consciousness does not obtrude itself upon us, and comes not of its own accord ”