Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ Unless I act upon him according to the conception of a rational being, I can not prove to him that he must necessarily have taken me for a rational being. For every manifestation of power can be the result of a power of nature working by mechanical laws; and only the moderation of power through conception is the sure and exclusive criterion of reason and of freedom. ”

“ The reality of the world—of course for us, that is, for all finite reason—is a condition of self-consciousness; for we can not posit ourselves without positing something outside of us, to which we must ascribe the same reality which we ascribe to ourselves. To ask for a reality which shall remain after having abstracted from all reason, is contradictory; for he who asks that question, has also, in all probability, reason, and is impelled by reason to ask his question, and desires a rational answer; hence he has not abstracted from reason. We can not go out of the sphere of our reason ”

“ Now, although the philosopher immediately afterward sees that the rational being must first posit its suppressed practical activity before it can posit and determine the object, and that thus the object itself is not immediately given, but is originally produced only by virtue of another—this need not disturb common sense; for it can not become conscious of the just now postulated process, since that process conditions the possibility of all consciousness, and is therefore beyond its sphere; it even does not disturb the philosopher as soon as he gets to the sphere of common sense. ”

“ The conception of the causality of the rational being is produced through absolute freedom; and hence the object of this causality in the sensuous world, being its opposite, must be fixed and unalterably determined. The Ego is infinitely determinable; the object, because it is an object, is once and for ever determined. The Ego is what it is in Acting; the object is what it is in Being. The Ego is incessantly becoming, and there is nothing permanent in it; the object is, as it is, forever; is what it is and is what it will be. In the Ego lies the ultimate ground of its acting ”

“ It is here maintained, that the practical Ego is the Ego of original self-consciousness; that a rational being perceives itself immediately only in Willing, and that it would not perceive itself, and hence would also not perceive the world, and that it would therefore not be Intelligence, if it were not a practical being. Willing is the real essential character of reason; and representation—although in the insight of the philosopher it stands in reciprocal causality with willing—is posited as the accidental. The practical faculty is the inmost root of the Ego ”

“ For those primitive peoples, of which we still have memorials, who little united their experiences, but rather allowed their observations to lie scattered and separate in their consciousness, no such causality or universal relation of things had existence. They gave separate life to almost every object of the sensuous world, and thus made those objects first free causes, as they were themselves. ”

“ The Ego must posit an external world, because it can posit itself in self-consciousness only as practical activity; and because, since it can not posit any thing but a limited, it must posit a limit to this, its practical activity. This is the original procedure of every rational being, and is, doubtless, also the procedure of the philosopher. ”

“ On the field of Natural Law a good will is counted for nothing. It must be possible to carry out the conception of Law though not one individual had a good will; and it is the very business and object of the Science of Rights to establish such a condition. ”

“ III. The conception of Law is the conception of a relation between rational beings. Hence it results only when such beings are thought as in relation to each other. It is nonsense to speak of rights between man and nature, or between man and the ground, soil, or animals, etc., as such; nonsense to speak of such rights as existing direct between Man and Nature. Reason has only power over Nature, not a right in relation to Nature; for the conception of Rights does not arise at all in such a relation. ”

“ II. Only free, reciprocal causality upon each other through conceptions and after conceptions, only this giving and receiving of knowledge, is the distinguishing characteristic of mankind, through which alone every person shows himself to be man.
If man is, then there must also be necessarily a world, and precisely a world like our own, which contains irrational objects and rational beings. ”

“ The subject must distinguish itself through opposition from the rational being, which it has assumed outside of itself. The subject has posited itself as one, which contains in itself the last ground of something that is in it, (for this is the condition of Egohood, or of Rationality generally;) but it has also posited a being outside of itself, as the last ground of this something in it.
It is to have the power of distinguishing itself from this other being; ”

“ How does the Representing subject arrive at the conviction that there exists an object of its representation outside of it, and that this object is determined precisely as it represents it? If those who asked this question had but considered what it really meant, they would themselves have arrived at the correct conception.
The Ego itself, through its acting, makes the object; the form of its acting is itself the object, and no other object is to be thought of. That, the manner of acting whereof necessarily becomes an object, is an Ego ”

“ It is, at any rate, very unphilosophical to believe, that the Ego is something else than both its deed and product at once. Usually, however, as soon as we hear the Ego spoken of as an active, we hasten to picture a substrate, of which we proclaim this activity to be mere power or faculty. This substrate, however, is not the Ego, but is a product of our own imagination, which we sketch in consequence of the demand made upon us to think the Ego. The Ego is not something, which has powers; it is no power at all ”

“ After the contemplation, the activity in this contemplating may certainly also be ascribed by the rational being to itself, or raised into its consciousness; that is, the rational being may posit itself as the Contemplating. Nay, from the stand-point of transcendental philosophy, it appears quite clearly that even this Contemplating is nothing but an in itself returning Ego, and that the World is nothing but the Ego contemplated in its original limits. But if the Ego is to ascribe that activity in the contemplation of the world to itself, it must already have existence ”

“ But the carrying out always follows the conception, and the perception of the desired product of my causality is always—in relation to its first conception—a matter of the future. Freedom is therefore always posited in the future; and if it is to constitute the character of a being, it is posited for all the future of the individual; is posited in the future as far as the individual himself is posited in the future.
Now, my freedom is possible only if the other individual remains within his sphere ”

“ Every effect can be taken up in conception, after it once exists, and the manyfold of the effect arranges itself under the unity of the conception more easily and happily only as the observer himself has more sense and understanding. ”

“ All other attempts to deduce the Ego in self-consciousness have failed, because they must always presuppose what they wish to deduce; and we here see why they must fail. How was it indeed possible to assume, that the Ego arises through the connection of many representations, in none of which the Ego is contained? that an Ego is produced by the mere connection? On the contrary, only after the Ego is, can any thing be connected in it. The Ego must, therefore, exist [1] —of course for the Ego—in advance of all connection. ”

“ Between persons who do not know each other, or whose spheres of action are utterly separated, a legal relation is not possible. It involves an utter misapprehension of the conception of rights, when people speak of the rights of the Dead upon the Living. ”

“ It is through this reciprocal causality between the Contemplation and Willing of the Ego, that the Ego and every thing which is for the Ego, that is, every thing which is at all, first becomes possible. ”

“ I posit myself in opposition to C as a rational and free being only by ascribing also to him freedom and reason, hence only by assuming that he has also chosen a sphere of his free activity different from mine. ”

“ It does not occur in consequence of having been taught, nor through experience, nor in virtue of arbitrary arrangements among men, etc., but in consequence of man being a rational being. It is a matter of course that the manifestation of this conception in empirical consciousness is conditioned through a given case of application; and that this conception does not lie originally—like some empty form—in our soul, waiting for experience to put something into it, as certain philosophers seem to hold in regard to a priori conceptions. ”

“ The being outside of the subject is posited as free, hence as a being, which might also have overstepped the sphere by which it is now determined, and might have overstepped it in such a manner as not to leave to the first subject the possibility of a free acting. It has voluntarily not overstepped that sphere, and has, therefore, itself restricted its own freedom, materialiter, that is to say, the sphere of the acts, which its formal freedom could have realized ”

“ Now, there is nothing which can not be thought possible through mere force of nature, and which must be thought as possible only through cognition, except cognition itself. Hence, when the object—and here also the end of an effect—can only be, to produce a cognition, then it is necessary to assume a rational cause of the effect. ”

“ Only the absolutely self-active, or practical, is posited as subjective, as belonging to the Ego, and by its limitation the Ego is limited. Whatsoever lies beyond this sphere of the absolutely self-active, is posited, for the very reason that it lies beyond it, as not produced nor producible through the activity of the Ego; hence, it is excluded from the sphere of the Ego, and the Ego is excluded from its sphere ”

“ All that is required is activity in general, but the conception expressly involves that the subject must choose in the sphere of possible acts one act through its free self-determination. It can act only in one way; can determine its power of sensation, which is here the power of sensuous causality, only in one manner. As sure as it acts, it chooses through absolute self-determination this one way, and is in so far absolutely free and a rational being ”

“ But I assume all this only on the presupposition that he, in choosing his sphere, has taken my free choice into consideration, and has voluntarily and with fixed purpose left my sphere open to me. (Only by positing him as treating me like a rational being do I posit him at all as a rational being. My whole judgment proceeds from me and his treatment of me, as could not well be otherwise in a system which has the Ego for its basis. It is only from this determined manifestation of his reason that I draw a conclusion as to his rationality generally.) ”

“ As soon as we look merely at the activity in the representation and seek only to explain it, a necessary doubt regarding the existence of external things will arise. The transcendental idealist comprehends the practical and theoretical activity at the same time as activity generally; and hence there being now no passivity in the Ego, as, indeed, there can not be he arrives at the result, that the whole system of objects must be produced for the Ego by the Ego itself. ”

“ Those acts beyond common consciousness have reality, therefore, only for the philosopher who posits them. If the activities of the human mind are to be systematically united in an ultimate ground, then this and that must be assumed as necessary acts; such, and nothing more, is what the philosopher asserts. Those original deed-acts have the same reality which the causality of things upon each other in the sensuous world, and their universal reciprocal relation, claim to have. ”

“ The subject can not find itself compelled to act; for then it would not be free, would not be Ego; nor, when it resolves to act, can it find itself necessitated to act in this or that determined manner; for then, again, it would not be free, would not be Ego. How, then, must we think it as determined to be active, in order to find itself as object? Only in so far, that the subject finds itself as something which may be active or not, to which a requirement is addressed to be active or not, but which may also not follow that requirement.
The rational being shall realize its free activity ”

“ As soon as you proceed to determine this conception fully, you are driven from the thinking of a single man to the assumption of another one, by means of which to explain the first. Hence, the conception of man is not at all the conception of a single one, for such a one is unthinkable, but of a race.
The requirement addressed to the rational being to manifest its free self-activity, is what is called education. All individuals must be educated to be men ”

“ It might be asked, What reality shall be ascribed to those acts which lie beyond the sphere of consciousness, and are not posited in consciousness, if reality is properly ascribed only to that which is necessarily posited by the Ego? ”