Early Modern Philosophy Term Paper

Allen, Brandon J

NOVEMBER 28, 2014

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Doing this paper has to be the hardest paper that I have done so far. This is because I am

doing my paper on Fichte’s Determinism. Fichte is a philosopher during the end of the Early

Modern Philosophy era whom was right after Kant. A lot of people associate Fichte with Kant

due to being a Transcendental Idealist. Fichte is well known for his Political Philosophy and

Ethical Philosophy. Due to this, people have focused on his work on Wissenschaftslehre.

However, due to Kant being an intellectual powerhouse in the field of Transcendental Idealism,

it seems as if not many Americans focus on Fichte’s philosophy. Even Fichte has claimed that

only one person could truly understand his whole system of Philosophy and this is Kant. What I

hope to do in the best of my analyzation skills is to go over Fichte’s text The Vocation of Man

and to look at the differences that have resulted since his work compared to his Early Modern era

counterparts (i.e. Descartes, Leibnitz, Hume, etc.). Sadly, I have not even reached the brink of

understanding fully Fichte’s Philosophical system even after dedicating my time and efforts into

reading the Vocation of Man twice over plus supplementary texts totaling over 250 pages of

philosophical text. However, I have grown to at least understand some of Fichte’s concepts with

the self-identity of individuals by doing what Fichte says to put themselves as the character of

the person going through the text.

In the first book of Fichte’s Vocation of Man we see that he holds the Cartesian system

by labeling his book calling it Doubt. According to Beardsley, the shortest summary that one

can give of this book is that “Fichte holds a contrast between the individual’s inward conviction

of his own freedom of will and the ridged determinism that intellect finds in Nature”. (490) I

have received a very high sense of determinism while reading Fichte’s first book Doubt. This is

because Fichte purposes that all of our attributes that a man has is bestowed upon us from

Nature. Fichte states, “The time at which my existence commenced and the attributes with which

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I came into being, were determined by this universal power of Nature…” (Fichte 6) Since

individuals are determined by Nature, Fichte claims the following:

“ Everything that actually exists has a determinate number of all possible attributes of actual existence. And each of these in a determinate measure, as surely as it exists, although I may

admit my inability thoroughly to exhaust all the properties of any one object or to apply them to any standard of measurement.” (3)

As we see from this line of text, Fichte believes that Nature bestows upon every object a finite

amount of attributes at a specific point in time and location in space. On page 3, we also see the

importance of once again refuting Barkley from the very get-go. This is due to the fact that our

consciousness (which Fichte gets to way later about consciousness being the main function of

our being which is way later, in book 2 called Knowledge.) imagines objects, such as a general

tree. However, this tree does not exist outside of our thought because the general tree does not

have a definite number of leaves, and humans cannot define the number of branches. As Fichte

puts in his Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, “People should be able to say that an

object as itself should exist as itself and not some other different representational form of its pure

existence.” (Fichte 99) Thus, we have to reject that the idea of a general tree should exist.

However, in putting this in respect to Barkley, we see that God can perceive of the idea of a

general tree because whomever can perceive of that specific object, in our case a general tree,

then one can conceive of the idea of a general tree. (Slowik 8) We now see the dividing line

between Barkley and Fichte where everything just does not resort down to Barkley’s Idealism

with Fichte. Now that I have gone over on the creation of people through determinism of Nature

I will now move onto Fichte’s definition of substance.

Fichte defines substance as the following:

“I find their substance to be this—that in every stage of progress an antecedent is necessarily supposed, from which and through which alone the present has arisen; in every condition a

previous condition, in every existence another existence and that from nothing, nothing whatever can proceed.” (Fichte 4)

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Substance, according to Fichte, is ever changing in which has a connection with the history of

itself throughout time. However, these properties are not in us, but Nature itself, because humans

are a derivation of Nature. However, when comparing this against Descartes and Spinoza’s

version of substance, we see that the definition of what a substance is has radically changed over

the course of time. According to Descartes, substance is just the body (objects that have

extension out in the universe) and mind which perceives of objects. Spinoza on the other hand

just puts that there is one substance and this is God. (Slowik) When reading Fichte’s work I

thought he would be more concerned with Barkley since Kant was as well and Fichte idolized

Kant’s works. However, it comes apparent time and time again that Fichte puts forward that he is

not like Spinoza because God could just be the fundamental root of the transformation of

substances whom is disguised as Nature. Spinoza presents a system in which separates the pure

and empirical consciousness. The first is reserved in God whom has no conscious of himself,

because pure consciousness can never obtain true consciousness according to Fichte, not even

God. The second are in the modifications of the deity in which bestows upon life to objects in

our universe. With the two parts of consciousness unified, Fichte states that Spinoza’s definition

of substance is wrong, because it just pertains to and ideal that can never be obtained even by the

most ultimate God that humans can imagine because God cannot achieve having true

consciousness as a whole in Spinoza’s system. (Fichte 101) Now that we have gone over how

Fichte’s system of substance is different from the Spinozism and Cartesian systems we shall

move onto a point which must be examined and that is how can a substance change from one

state to another.

We see Fichte in a massive struggle with determinism that is accruing next from his

definition of substance. It may not be the case that our world is preordained even though the

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result of who I was initially was a chain of events from Nature itself. However, Nature instills in

me, according to Fichte, what he calls an active power. This active power is a part of me and

constitutes myself and no other beings that exist outside of myself. The active power inside

myself sets itself in motion as it sees fit and will unite with the outward circumstances that are

outside of myself to produce a change to my consciousness and being. When an action is not

being done in respect to the exterior world of my consciousness it is considered to be an inactive

power because I know the effect that proceeds from it. Fichte gives an example of both active

and inactive power in respects to a flower. When I water and give a certain amount of sunlight to

a flower that I perceive it’s being to be a flower there I have an innate power within myself in

which can say that that flower with a certain properties as I have experienced before will result in

growth of the flower. There are certain capabilities in my mind in respect to innate power in

which one can reflect on. Fichte goes over this as well with his stances on limitation on page 111

of Foundations of Scientific Knowledge. However, the active power is within the flower itself

and unites itself with the water and sunlight in order for its growth to happen because there are

certain laws that are preordained by Nature or has been transmographied throughout the process

of its being. As a result of the unity of the exterior world and the flower’s active power, we

perceive a change in the flowers being according to its perceived extension. Now that I have

gone over this in respect to flower’s being we can see this in accordance with the human being.

When reflecting upon the above argument further, we are phased by the continuity of

Fichte’s idea of active and innate power with Locke’s concept of personal identity. However,

there arises yet again a difference between Fichte and Locke in retrospect that the soul just

doesn’t exist in Fichte’s system, at least for what I have read over my course of studying Fichte.

(Locke, 372) For Fichte the consciousness does not have a soul attached to it. However, there

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does resonate the feeling that human individuals and things around us are composed out of a

continuum of time which constitutes who a person is in respect to their character. Now we shall

move onto what Fichte calls the man-forming power.

Man-forming power is a bit easier to understand than the powers that I have stated before.

Because man is a creation given by Nature with a finite amount of attributes, including thought.

Fichte puts that Nature has instilled in human beings the function of thought-power. Thought-

power is as follows:

“Its existence is absolute and independent: as the formative power of Nature exists absolutely and independently. It is in Nature for the thinking being arises and develops himself according

the laws of Nature; therefore thought exists through Nature… I am not what I am because I think so, or will so, nor do I think and will it, because I am so; but I am, and I think, both absolutely; --

both harmonize with each other by virtue of a higher cause” (Fichte 7)So now we see that thought is something that is independent of Nature even though

created by it with Fichte because Nature somehow lets go of it even though it installs information

about the what the consciousness can have. We think what we think due to our inner laws being

the way that they are, not because I will my thoughts to think of something. Even if we try to will

our thoughts to think of something that is also part of our being in which are part of the laws that

we follow. When thought happens, we see in ourselves a restructure of our whole entire essence

and the laws that we following in accordance to the self. My man-forming power of thought,

active and inactive powers are seen as independent of Nature then I seem to be free as long as

I’m not restrained and limited by Nature. (Fichte 8) However, Fichte gives an example of a tree

that is banded against the wall and still performs its law which is intrinsic to itself, which is

growing. The tree is still free in the sense that it still gets to perform all of its functions such as

growing and producing fruit like other trees. However, it doesn’t have true freedom in which the

tree is not constrained by anything else. However, everything is constrained by the laws that they

hold which constitute their personal identity, and thus nothing can really have true freedom.

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(Fichte 9) Due to laws having cause and effect relationships it is important to go over Fichte’s

view on the principle of causation.

According to Fichte, there is a way to look at the principle of causation. The principle of

causation according to Fichte shows what a person’s consciousness can understand the outside

world around myself. The principle of causality was first inferred by Hume in which put forward

that sometimes a cause does not really produce an effect out there in world. We just conjoin both

the cause and effect together in order to describe two events in our world. However, for Fichte,

everything is mostly considered internal because information is processed in the self. The

principle of causality also holds that it subjects the transition between the self to a universal

particular which lies beyond myself. The two different ways that the principle of causality is

obtained in an individual is by immediate perception of what is happening where my

consciousness immediately picks up on the relation between the two objects, or through

inference where my mind will have to make logical deductions to arrive to the cause effect

relationship that has just occurred. The principle of causality also holds that it subjects the

transition between the self to a universal particular which lies beyond myself. However, there is

one way that the individual may have freedom in respect to themselves and that is their will.

(Fichte 10)

The will, according to Fichte, is what takes into effect contending issues in which we are

filtering through our own consciousness to decide which one is more right to believe in. When

reflecting back onto what Fichte has said about the telos of man we see that we want to become

the most fully conscious and to be as free as possible. However, isn’t this just the laws which

govern our being which our law can just be determined from Nature by the get-go? It must be,

unless we have some processing power in our thought in which can change our being gradually

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or dramatically. And once again we are stuck at ground zero with trying to get out of the free-

will determinism problem of Fichte. Since we see that Determinism is a problem let’s look over

the accusation of Fichte’s philosophy being considered to be just deterministic solipsism.

There have been people whom have argued that Fichte philosophy is just Solipsism all

over again. This is due to people seeing Fichte’s work to be very focused on the self and how the

self perceives of the world through themselves. We may see Solipsism from his quote stating:

“Thus far I remain within myself and upon my own territory; everything that has an existence for me unfolds itself purely and solely from myself; I see everywhere only myself and no true

existence outside of myself. But in this my world I admit, also, the operations of other beings, separate and independent of me, as much as I of other beings, separate and independent of me, as

much as I do of them. How these beings can themselves know of the influences that proceed from them may easily be conceived; they know them the same way I know my own. But how I can know of them is absolutely inconceivable, just as it is inconceivable how they can possess

that knowledge of my existence, and it’s manifestations, which never the less I ascribe to them.”(Fichte 529)

However, Fichte does believe that there does exist other individuals in the world and that

they are each different from one another. To understand Nature fully there would have to be an

infinite amount of individuals in the universe. With what has been stated we see the school of

thought of Perspectivism of Aguste Comte is blooming out of Fichte’s philosophy. (Fichte 10)

Perspectivism is the school of thought where we gain a better insight onto on object based on

how many people perceive that object and the position we are in determines our perception of an

object. We see Fichte stating more importantly that people may think in a different manner than

any other individual does in accordance to understanding certain aspects about the world. But

there can be other individual consciousness’s that are out there that do think and contrive of

concepts out there in the world. To note here I have been using the self, me, and I as individual

statements of stating what Fichte calls the ego. Also, according to Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of

Knowledge by Thompson, states that “Fichte’s Ego is universal consciousness in its fullest

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conceivable extent, that the individual is only a member of the true Ego and subject to its laws,

that he does not create but finds a world of fixed fact, and that he is forced to know the

multiplicity of egos as a condition of knowing self.” (3) The origin of many individuals stems

from the reflection of the Absolute Ego. The Absolute Ego according to Fichte is the opposition

of through the subject and object, thus dialectically evolves the universe. (SEP) Thus through

this reflection we see that there is a multitude of egos that come into the world with their own

individual identity and existence. (Unity of Fichte’s Doctrine of Knowledge 47) We see here that

Fichte’s system isn’t Solopstic because the absolute ego differs the subject and the object in

respect to their counter parts. So if there exists me who is happy there must have been someone

who has existed who was sad, if there was me who couldn’t rationalize about mathematical

concepts there exists someone else that does. Now that I have extensively looked over the

determinism in Fichte’s work, I will now attempt to evaluate Fichte.

One thing that was blatantly obvious when reading his works is that God seems to be

non-existent in the first two books. We see that God is very much implemented into the third

book of the Vocation of Man however how the world is formed and how objects are formed

seems to be nonexistent of a God. Bringing in Leibniz into the picture we saw that God formed

the world into the best of all possible worlds even though there was sin in it the outcome would

be overall good for the world. It seems for Fichte though that Nature itself is the designator of

the being and what laws they do follow. When we talk about laws we are talking about following

the laws of gravity and things in our moral consciousness as well. We see a beautiful example of

this in Fichte’s third book stating:

“I cannot say that in the material world my hand, or any other body which belongs to that world

and is subject to the universal law into operation; these bodies themselves stand under this law,

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and only in so far as that body, by virtue of this law, partakes in the universal power of Nature.”

(Fichte 526)

I feel as if though that these laws do though change over the course of time in

consciousness of human beings though. This is because humans evolve into a greater and even a

smarter society than in the previous chain of time. This can be seen in correlation with Fichte’s

view of the personal self in which people are supposed to reach a higher virtue than before with

their consciousness and being than in previous states of time. Contrasting Fichte’s view of the

telos of the world compared to Leibniz’s world we see that the world is not always perfect but in

retrospect to Fichte’s philosophy we see there is a progress of at least the individual trying to

become perfect in the universe. However, there is one point that has been bugging me with

Fichte.

I do have an instance in which I am uncomfortable agreeing with Fichte in respect to his

views on death. Fichte states: “The same circumstances can never return unless the whole system

of Nature should retrograde and two Natures arise instead of one: hence the same individuals

who have once existed, can never again come into actual being.” What happens when someone

dies and comes back to life though? There have been many occurrences of this happening but

they retain their same being as they did before. Nature does not retrograde when you die and

come back alive since your being though. I could see Fichte stating that Nature instils in the

person again what attributes they have had before but now they are a different person because

they have a different attribute to themselves due to their experience of death that can be added

into the individual. However, if we look at the Locke’s way of describing personal identity then

we see that the person may have maintained the same ideas that were there before thus a

transformed human being in which was greater and contains the past self. However, for Fichte he

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is telling the patient who awoke from death that they are now a totally different person with

totally different attributes and laws confided in themselves than previously before even though I

think of myself as the same person in the past.

Therefore, I conclude that Fichte’s arguments are not like his previous counter parts in

which we have encountered in class. I have distinguished him from many other philosophers that

we have discussed in class and have stated his deterministic philosophy of the world. I have also

presented an argument for and also against Fichte’s philosophy based on rigorous reading of his

texts and contemplation of Fichte’s philosophy in The Doctrine of Knowledge. This paper is

mostly focused on the first third of the book and is already seen as complicated as stated before.

Maybe I have not understood Fichte fully, but trying to understand this guy is just a feat in itself

to be proud of.

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BibliographyAriew, R., & Watkins, E. (2009). Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Indanapolis:

Hackett Publishing Company.

Beardsley, M. (1799). The European Philosophers From Descartes to Nietzsche. In J. Fichte, The Vocation of Man: Faith (pp. 491-531). New York: Random House Inc. .

Fichte. (1799). The Vocation of Man. Sophia Project. Retrieved from http://www.sophia-project.org/uploads/1/3/9/5/13955288/fichte_vocation.pdf

Kaufmann, B. &. (n.d.). 19th Century Philosophy. Fichte.

Thompson, A. B. (1895). The Unity of Fichte's Doctorine of Knowledge. Boston: Ginn & Company.