According to Fichte, the stage of ontology he has reached contains the highest relational concepts, but also the truth and solution of all the earlier dialectical problems. In other words, he explains, all the previous main concepts receive here their final, completing expression. Conversely, Fichte adds, this result has already been anticipated earlier, since, for instance, the level of causality showed many instances of the result, which he identifies with the category of reciprocal interaction (Wechselwirkung). Indeed, he points out, we have for a long time seen that individuals are intimately connected with one another and that this interconnectedness of an infinity of individuals was based on an absolute unity compassing everything. Yet, Fichte notes, these two moments have not before this been related with necessity, so that we would have seen how infinity of related individuals required in itself the absolute unity, which would then contain the former infinity. This has been done, he thinks, for the first time at this point, leading us then explicitly to the concept of interaction.
Despite this, Fichte admits, the transition from infinity to unity was already anticipated, when we noted that finite causal relations had to be based on the concept of absolute, which was first regarded as a law governing all these causal interactions and then developed into positing of absolute purpose for a system of means and purposes. The result of this development, he repeats, is that individuals are thinkable only in an infinity that is ordered into a system of individuals reflecting this infinity. Such a system of individuals, each of which is both a purpose and means to others, Fichte suggests, should be called an organism.
Organism, Fichte begins, is in general a system or totality and thus resembles the stage of monads. The difference is, he explains, that organism is specifically a system of purposes and means. Now, Fichte continues, the concept of purpose contained the contradiction that it can be generated only through its means and that it still must act before its means. This contradiction drove us to the concept of organism, and indeed, Fichte notes, in organism the system of means simply brings about just its purpose. In other words, he explains, organic process is a purposeful activity determined uniquely in all its moments by a not yet existing purpose. On the basis of this organic activity, Fichte thinks, lies an ideal and not actualised model that comprehends all the separate parts of the organism in a substantial unity. Thus, the concept of organism completes, in addition to the category of purpose, also the categories of substance and monad.
Earlier, Fichte recalls, the substantial unity was the real possibility or ideal totality of distinctions or individual actualisations, but it still remained indifferent, how this unity actualised itself in individuals, since any individual could as well be replaced by another individual from this totality of possible options. He notes that this was a conceptual step forward in comparison with abstract necessity, but this indifference of actualisation was still a gap to be filled. The solution, as Fichte sees it, was the concept of purposefulness: the individual actualisation is not posited by mechanical necessity, but it is also not indifferent to its unity or contingent, and instead, the individual is connected to the unity by being purposeful. Substantial unity or monad has thus become an organism, where individual moments are purposes and means to each other and realise in their interaction as their absolute purpose this ideal totality or the model of organic activity that corresponds to and is present everywhere in this system of independent, but related parts or organic body.
Fichte notes that in the organism the conflict between the fact that means exist before the purpose and the fact that means exist only for the purpose has not vanished, but confirmed. In other words, he explains, the individual parts of organism realising the organic unity are each of them relative totalities or organic unities that divide again into other similarly organised parts in infinity. Fichte refers to the proposition that the organic or living is not just divisible in infinity, but is actually divided into internal, qualitative infinity, but also immediately overcome through the organic process in the unity of purpose mediating everything. The goal of the organic process is then realised only through this process, but is also its beginning as an exemplary model.
The organism as the absolute or highest purpose generates then itself from its means, or as Fichte also puts it, the organism subdues the previously given conditions, appropriates them to itself and quenching their own determination imposes at them its own character, in order to renew and preserve itself from this transformation. This is, he notes, a description of reproduction and assimilation. Organic processes are, Fichte says, absolutely powerful toward all shapes of lower existence, that is, those characterised only by the previous categories, which might be purposes in themselves, but in relation to the organism are mere means in an organic process. Organism is thus revealed as the final cause in the hierarchy of purposes, realising itself in the lower causal or mechanical and chemical relations, which are then essential moments in the total organism.
The organism is at first, Fichte states, a living individual that imposes its uniqueness on its preconditions and thus confers external actuality or body to its organic Ur-model. All other individual determinations, he explains, are only elements serving the self-preservation of a living individual, Fichte continues, but just like individuals in the previous stages, the individual life is driven beyond itself to relation toward others, and in this case, to other living individuals. Regarding its body, he notes, the living individual is open to the subordinate causal relations and is interwoven in the external course of causes and effects. Similarly, the elements of its body form a complex of specific forces, Fichte adds, and without the organising unity, these forces enter immediately into other chemical combinations. Yet, he insists, neither the mechanism of the body nor the chemical relation of its elements correspond to the relation of living individuals toward one another. Instead, Fichte emphasises, this relation must incorporate the relation of means and purposes: the living individuals must mutually complement each other in order to generate from themselves another living individual as their common purpose, which describes the process of generation.
The result or purpose of the process of generation is itself a living individual, Fichte emphasises, but can still be not the true purpose beyond organic life. Thus, he explains, it must again become means in the same sense as the previous members were, renewing the process of generation in external infinity. Concept of life merely can then get no further than self-preservation of individuals and genus.
Just like at all previous stages, the relation of an individual to another individual points to a comprehensive infinity. Thus, Fichte concludes, the living individual and the genus of life would stop being living, if they were not members of an infinite series of organisms, in each of which the absolute purpose is realised in a completely unique manner, or of a total organism which encompasses everything and where each member is an essential condition for all other life and also means and purpose for everything. This means, he explains, that the individual does not live merely in itself, but is sustained by a common element of all-life. Fichte assures the reader that living individuals are not absorbed in the all-life, but the all-life ensures to the individuals their existence, since individuals are not just indifferent realisations to the all-life, but all-life realises itself in each individual in a unique manner appropriate only for this particular individual.
Fichte has thus found a new description for the essence of absolute: it is an activity of positing an absolute end goal to a harmonious system of an infinity of purposes and means forming a living organism comprehending everything. In effect, Fichte is presenting a new variation of the old teleological proof, suggesting the existence of a principle harmonising the whole universe or an ideal model of the world organism. Yet, he notes, there still remains the contradiction that this Urbild of the world is actualised only through the infinite organic course of the world, but should also exist eternally. This contradiction is just heightened repetition of the contradiction involved in all life, Fichte emphasises, but it drives us further to explain how such a model could exist before an actual organism.
What Fichte needs is a model that in a sense exists in the organism, but in another sense not and that is evenly present in all the parts of the organism, although no individual part can fully actualise it. He latches on to the notion of soul as sensing (Empfinden) of itself in the other and of the other in itself. The just described problem has now found its solution, Fichte thinks, since the non-actual model of organism can still pre-exist ideally in the sensation. He compares this concept of sensing with the usual notion of instinct as a state where we immediately go into ourselves and let ourselves be guided by something that does not yet exist. Following this analogy, Fichte emphasises that all relations to the other are present to the soul here only in a semiconscious manner, as a deeply purposeful certainty of feeling and acting, but not as an express representation, and similarly, it can not sense itself in full clarity.
The model of the organism has become an internal sensing of manifoldness in itself or soul, Fichte summarises, and thus is the beginning and the final goal of organic activity. It is the absolute purpose of all organisms to serve the soul, not in order to generate the soul, because the soul more likely generates itself. Since the soul posseses itself in the whole manifoldness of its perceptions, Fichte explains, it becomes self-sensation, but this self can become sensible to it only in its relation to others. In other word, he emphasises, sensation of self and sensation of world are inseparable, and this immediate relation of soul to other or sensibility is then the second fundamental determination of soul after self-sensation. Fichte compares sensibility of the soul with passivity of the monad and notes that similarly sensation of something else must be linked to a self-determined reaction or irritability as the third moment in the concept of soul. Thus, he points out, the soul is not just withdrawn to pure impenetrable internality from the external course of cause and effects, but has also the capacity to begin causal series from itself. These three moments of the soul, Fichte adds, are connected also with the reproductive and generative processes of the organic body.
The soul is still only a purpose in an organism, Fichte underlines, but does not yet itself posit purposes. In other words, he clarifies, the soul is purposeful, but not aware of its innermost purpose. The internal purposefulness of the organism of the world has thus strengthened into an internal reasonableness of activity, but only in an instinctual manner and not yet into a consciousness of freely chosen purpose. Hence, Fichte thinks, we are once again driven from individual sensing and acting souls into something that posits their absolute purpose as a world plan harmonising everything. This means thinking the absolute as a world soul. Fichte admits that this is a more satisfying notion of absolute than the world organism, since the former makes at least the notion of the Urbild of the world more comprehensible as an instinctual grasping of the world plan by the world soul, which then shapes the world in a dreamlike fashion or unconsciously.
According to Fichte, such a notion of absolute is unsatisfying and indefensible, because it stays undecided in the middle between the lower and higher categories. The idea of world soul, he says, just repeats the familiar contradiction that the absolute should posit the purpose of the world, because it orders all the individuals of the world toward a common goal, but does not posit this purpose, because it should still be unconscious of this order and this goal.
The concept of world soul transitions then into a higher notion, Fichte explains, where the absolute is abstract spirituality that infinitely thinks of purposes and means in things. Such an ideal cosmos of thoughts should then as absolute be, he notes, thinking that is at the same time actualising what is thought. This rather Hegelian absolute thought becomes therefore something else by necessarily separating the world from itself, but because it is still thinking, it should recognise and know just itself in the world, thus returning from separation and isolation back to itself.
It is no wonder that Fichte also finds this concept lacking, because it is abstract and, according to him, contradictory. From the Hegelian standpoint, the individual is just finite and a mere moment in the infinite process of thinking, while for Fichte the individual is always a specific Ur-position and thus internally infinite. Thus, while Hegelian abstract thinking as an infinite subjectivity is in a sense individual, because it orders itself into a system of concrete thoughts, it is not an individual unity grasping in itself the whole infinity of the world.
Absolute thinking still requires something that drives it over mere universality, Fichte concludes and identifies this required element with the act of generating itself from its own real possibility. In other words, he emphasises, willing is what makes mere thinking into Geist or spirit and what makes absolute into a unified personality, because thinking can be understood abstractly, while willing can only be thought as linked to a self-determining substantial unity.
Fichte instantly declares spirit as the highest category, mediating all earlier categories. Summarising the development thus far, he points out that the ontological study of actuality had revealed a tension between the unified Ur-determinations and their manifold and varying characteristics, which was mediated by the concept of self-actualisation, where unity posits a manifold of determinations that return to the unity as their basis. This fundamental concept of actuality was then connected to the second fundamental concept of an infinity of relations between individuals and finally to the third fundamental concept of all compassing absolute. This threefold set of relations, Fichte recounts, was developed through various causal relations to a relation of purposefulness and then through the notions of organism and soul to the final concept of spirit.
As the final concept, Fichte insists, spirit must solve the contradiction or problem of how an individual can be both based on itself and its own uniqueness, but also always in relation to something else. The solution is, he explains, that a spirit is a self-realising individuality knowing itself in this self-creative act, but this self-knowing can develop only through knowing something else. Spirit, Fichte states, has replaced the instinctual self-sensation of soul as consciousness that is certain of itself in all its distinctions.
What makes the spirit, like everything actual, into individual, Fichte explains, is the concept of self-actualisation. Spirit should thus be no abstract universality, he declares, or spirit is actual only as a person. In other words, Fichte insists, free self-determination is not just an individual property of personality, but its fundamental element, and in its power to choose or posit purposes freely, it is conscious of both itself and of something else, namely, the purpose. Hence, he notes, thinking and willing are inseparable, and the willing is the substantial or the fundamental essence of an individual spirit, while thinking is only a property of this essence.
Fichte emphasises that the self-actualising act of personality is possible only in relation to other personalities or that reciprocal interaction holds even between spirits. This is true, he notes, even of absolute personality, whereby God must differentiate itself from the created infinity and Fichtean philosophy must be separated from pantheism. Absolute personality, Fichte summarises, must be infinitely creative.
Just like a monad posited distinctions that it then merged into its unity, Fichte argues, the same should hold also of an individual spirit. Thus, spirit is the free power to be this or its opposite, and the two possibilities exist in the spirit ideally. In other words, Fichte underlines, spirit is free in two sense, that is, firstly, as a self-creative act it has positive freedom, and secondly, as not restricted by any of the individual possibilities it could choose from it has negative freedom. Spirit is hence able to withdraw itself from the causal course of things and posit a new causal series, subduing the causality to its own purposes.
Fichte points out that the capacity of subduing causality connects spirit to earlier categories. This means, firstly, that spirit as the final ontological category is the highest actuality and the proper goal of all preceding. Yet, Fichte adds, we will also discern a hierarchy within spirits, leading us finally beyond ontology.
Secondly, Fichte continues, spirit also assumes the former shapes of existence as moments of its own actuality. Similarly, he reminds the reader, individual organisms surpassed all mechanical and chemical causality, but also acted through such causal relations, and on a higher level, an individual soul had to have an organic body. In the same fashion, Fichte states, an individual spirit can be self-conscious only through an organic body and a sensing soul. More particularly, he points out, the moments of sensibility and irritability in the soul receive here new characteristics, sensibility becoming in spirit knowing and irritability respectively conscious self-decision, while the vague self-feeling that mediated both in the soul is replaced by self-consciousness of spirit.
Just like an individual organism could be thought only as a moment in a system of organisms and an individual soul only in a totality of souls, Fichte argues, a personal spirit presupposes also a community of personalities or a spiritual universe, in which the spirits create through their free interaction a world of freedom or history. He muses how each spirit acts completely in its own, but all these actions intertwine into a harmonious unity, realising an absolute purpose. Fichte considers this the final contradiction that the ontology has to solve: how can spirits act independently and still serve something else or the purpose of the world?
Fichte note that the conclusive solution of this contradiction has been prepared in the development of the ontology. Thus, he begins, the infinite organism of the world was comprehended in the unity of an eternal model or Urbild, containing timelessly or ideally the actual events of the world. This eternal model was then understood as contained in an instinctual sensation of the world soul, but this unconscious reason had to still be clarified into a transparency of knowledge. The final step, Fichte concludes, was to complement the notion of absolute thinking with that of willing, in order to avoid the pitfall of abstract pantheism.
The result of this development is, Fichte summarises, that the Urbild of the world is something eternally created by the absolute in the same act of creating the infinity of the world, as a sort of collected unity of this infinity. Expressing this differently, he suggests that the consciousness of everything cannot be thought of, except as a unified self-consciousness that is reflected in each part of the infinite world.
Consciousness of an infinite world is then preceded by an original self-consciousness, although conceptually, Fichte clarifies, not temporally. Conversely, as we have seen, he reminds us, self-consciousness is possible only in distinction from something else, which is then the infinite world. This original self-consciousness is then, Fichte declares, the person of God that views the unity of the world or its absolute purpose and actualises it through a free self-determining act. The person of God is then united with the created personalities and both establishes their freedom, preserving their individuality, and also mediates their freedom into unity, steering the conflict of spirits into a harmonious whole. Fichte admits that this mediation creates further problems, solution of which is then the task of speculative theology.
Looking back at the course of the whole philosophy, Fichte suggests that the theory of knowledge formed a sort of new version of the ontological proof, justifying the existence of an absolute mediating all separation between being and consciousness. This result opened up a new problem on how to characterise this absolute, especially in its relation to the given existence of finite. This problem required the dialectical thinking of the ontology, the first part of which could then be seen as a version of cosmological proof, showing that absolute must be a unified essence of the seemingly finite, while the second part was then a version of teleological proof, arguing that this essence must be a personal spirit assigning purpose to the world.
The ontology proper has now been finished, Fichte notes, and the only remaining task is to point out what in the concept of absolute spirit is left to do for the next part of philosophy or the speculative theology. The absolute is, he begins, the Ur-ground and therefore posits the quantities of space and time and also fills them with infinite Ur-determinations. On the other hand, as a person the absolute unites these distinctions in the spiritual unity of all-consciousness, which still does not cancel the independent existence of these determinations.
The absolute or God is then both an individual unity and infinite allness, gathering the infinity into its spiritual unity, but not cancelling it. Yet, Fichte adds, this infinity is God only through self-actualisation or it is a self-determining capacity infinitely actualising itself and also collecting this infinity into the unity of a power mediating everything. Furthermore, this self-actualisation is not just a result of abstract omnipotence, but of self-conscious will, and only through such all-will can God become all-consciousness. The three moments of God, or being, will and consciousness, Fichte states, form one absolute, where the will as the innermost middle point of God unites the objective being of God with the subjective consciousness of God.
God is thus distinguished from created personalities, Fichte suggests, by being only spirit and not requiring an organic body or a soul. Created spirits, on the other hand, as created, live only in a determined limitation by one another, which is the obscure fate that ties them to the conditions of finity and thus makes them connected to an individual body and a sensing soul. On the contrary, the subject of God transparently penetrates everything objective that it has itself willed, thus, God does not require mere instinctual sensing characteristic to soul. In addition, the analogue of the body in God, which Fichte identifies as the infinity of God in creation, is merely the transparent actualisation of God’s will.
Fichte notes also that God alone is in the proper sense of the word free, because the infinity of the world exists through God’s will, which is free of any conditions, while all creatures have only an imparted and therefore conditional existence. Yet, he adds at once, even the creatures are not bound by external necessity or compulsion, but develop freely through their innermost character that also ties them to God.
The act of God’s will that is filled with absolute consciousness and that posits and realises an infinite purpose is, Fichte concludes, creation, which is also the concept that ends the ontology. Creation solves all the ontological contradictions and extinguishes therefore negative dialectics, he adds, but it also generates a new task. The infinitely creative will posits a purpose and actualises itself according to it in a hierarchy of purposeful systems. Each level of this hierarchy, Fichte imagines, manifests in different measures the absolute purpose of God or the world plan. These different levels of creation need still to be developed, he insists, and this task belongs to speculative theology, which is supposed to analyse the concept of divine creation and thus turn into a speculative knowledge of God’s properties in revelation. In addition, according to Fichte, it will also be a study of ideas or principles of all actuality in God’s creative will. The method of speculative theology cannot anymore be negative or based on contradictions, since the concept of creative God is supposed to solve all contradictions. Instead, it is to apply what Fichte calls positive dialectics that deepens and develops the richness inherent in this concept.
maanantai 25. marraskuuta 2024
torstai 7. marraskuuta 2024
Immanuel Hermann Fichte: Outline of a system of philosophy. Second division: Ontology – Causality and dependence
Fichte now approaches causal categories that he points out as familiar to common thinking. Yet, he at once adds, the ontological meaning of these categories is far more removed from their common meaning than it was the case with otherwise similarly causal concepts of ground and consequence. Indeed, Fichte points out, the dialectical refutation of the notions of ground and consequence was in a sense proof of inherent flaws in the everyday causal concepts. Thus, he argues, when it was shown that everything actual is a realisation of its self-creative ground, this showed that causes and effects are not separated, as it is commonly thought. Instead, the effect should not be external to the cause, but only its actuality, and the acting cause thus brings about only itself or its own actuality, and both are just aspects of one substantial unity.
All acts of substance or monad toward another substance or monad, Fichte argues, are thus immediately only self-actualisation of this substance and only mediately affect the other substance: when the first substance varies its state, this variance evokes a varying relation to the other substance and also a variance of the state of this other substance. He connects this outward effect of the self-actualisation with the necessary quantitative, and more particularly, spatio-temporal form of substances – each substance or monad must be in the same system of relations with an infinity of others. Monads are thus self-creative, but also dependent from all others. Understood in the most immediate manner possible, Fichte states, this means that they act externally or mechanically on one another as causes and effects.
Monads as in itself locked substantial unities arrive through their self-assertion immediately to having causal relations to one another. The reciprocal influence between them, Fichte explains, is external, because their independent essences are not reshaped by these causal relations. Being a cause is then accidental to the substances, he adds, and in their acting they just assert the integrity of their original essence. Thus, in the first type of causality external independent entities act on one another, but the effect is immediately extinguished and the old state returns, because the causal relation remains contingent and accidental to acting entities.
Fichte notes at once that this notion of causality requires some correction. As we have seen, he reminds the reader, self-assertion is connected to a relation with an infinity of others, thus, self-asserting monads must also at least exclude or provide resistance to one another. Hence, Fichte concludes, their mere existence implies also immediately that they act and are acted upon. We have thus found a seeming contradiction: earlier cause and effect were described as something accidental or inessential to the things, but now they appear as inseparable to the notion of self-asserting existence.
Fichte notes that the balance to this contradiction is already achieved in the concept of abstract self-assertion that essentially implies causal relations toward others, which still touch only part of the existence of things, but remain contingent to their internal essence. Thus, he explains, things act and are acted upon, because they in general are, not because they are these specific entities, but because they are independent of one another and thus exclude others. Hence, Fichte concludes, all things universally affect one another.
The opposition of isolated cause and effect is null, Fichte states and adds that this just repeats the same development that refuted the idea of individual grounds and consequences. In other words, he explains, an individual effect would have its cause in something else, which would then have its cause in yet further things, presupposing a realised external infinity. Instead of such a series of infinite causes, Fichte suggests, each individual should receive an effect from an infinity of other entities and cause such an effect in all of them. The concept of individual causes and effects is then dissolved in this system of reciprocal acting and reacting, where these opposite directions are intertwined in every moment, while the internal infinity of this system produces unity and rest from these varying causal relations.
Concrete things act on other things through their mere formal existence. In other words, Fichte explains, a thing modifies the being of another thing through its own determination or transmits something to the other thing without destroying its independence and in general leaving it essentially what it is. The interacting things remain then external to one another, he states, but they balance themselves by modifying their nature, without still losing their essential characteristics.
Now, when a thing influences another, Fichte continues, this influence opposes the unique nature of the other. The other thing does not just passively accept this influence, he explains, but reacts against it and thus acts on the first thing. Fichte notes that we could picture this intertwining of reaction and interaction with a physical example of two objects putting pressure on one another. Since the two things have now affected one another and transmitted some determinations, the result should be a resting balance, where the action and the reaction are extinguished, or at most, a new action and a new reaction are reproduced cyclically. In any case, Fichte insists, causality at this stage produces nothing really new.
The relative difference of interacting things is extinguished through their balancing communication. Thus, Fichte notes, a uniformity appears, binding things into a larger unity, although the individual entities do remain essentially untouched by it and thus different from one another. The result of the interactions of things is then this universal link that comprehends everything, but also leaves space for things to be different from one another, he explains and adds that this result is both the end and the beginning of this causal process. In fact, Fichte suggests, it is not the things themselves that make it possible for them to act on one another, but this is done by a universal or fundamental cause or principle that acts through and realises itself in individual things.
Fichte’s conclusion is that at this stage of causality it is actually not the individual things that act, but an absolute or universal principle acts through the individuals and their actions and reactions. He calls this principle that is realised through the specification of things a resting cause that reveals itself in a system of uniform actions and reactions. The principle thus rules a manifold of things, only to present its universality at each of these individual things. Then again, Fichte notes, this universal joining of things does not just allow specification of things, but indeed, even presupposes and requires such. This raising of the status of specificness implies a transition in a higher causal relation, where precisely the distinction of things or their specific opposition enters into the relation of acting and reacting. Still, Fichte assures us, the just described interaction of universal causes does not completely vanish, since any two abstract existences act at least in this universal fashion to one another.
Fichte begins a new phase by stating that things do not interact just externally or their specified essence affects the causal processes. Thus, he explains with a reference to an earlier stage of ontology, things are related not like abstract distinctions nor only like opposites, but like specific differences: what one is, lacks precisely the other, and each finds in its other or in the cancellation of their difference its complement, so that only both together or the whole forms their true essence. Fichte describes this new position as things becoming forces. In other words, things specified in such a manner do not have, but are forces: determined manners of acting with a specific, self-asserting existence, which does not affect vaguely anything whatsoever, but only a sharply limited circle of other determinations. Fichte lists a number of phenomena involving such forces: attraction and repulsion of matter, chemical affinity and chemical combinations and dissolutions, sexual attraction, love and hatred and intertwining of various characters in a human society. According to him, the common feature of all these forms of interaction is that it is not anymore a case of external action and reaction, but internal, where both opposites produce a common third that cancels their independence and tension toward one another.
Force is the specific essence of a thing in a relation to its specific complement, Fichte sums up and adds that the force as such is nothing outside its effect, but also nothing outside the specific essence of things. In other words, he explains, just by the sheer existence of a suitably specified thing, the force is activated and starts to interact with it, while without this appropriate counterpart the essence of the thing remains the same, but it cannot become active or force. Fichte notes that when such a specification is not related to a counterpart, it has been called a latent force, which seems a contradictory concept, since force is both assumed to exist and still its actuality or effectiveness is denied. Yet, he admits, the notion of latent force at least implicitly designates the true character of force that it is nothing in itself: it is just an immanent determination of each specific essence that it in general has its counterpart and can interact with it.
There is no simple force, Fichte thinks, since a thing is not specified just in a single relation, but toward many other things. Thus, he insists, substance or monad must be a system or a closed totality of forces. The notion of force replaces then such earlier notions like characteristic, property, part and perception, all of which described the relations of a thing to other things. More precisely, Fichte explains, we can differentiate between the fundamental Ur-force of a thing and its manifestation in a manifold of activities that forms the system of forces.
Fichte suggests that the notion of causality is also intensified in the notion of force, in the sense that the relation of actions and reactions has become more intimate. In other words, the force does not just act and then react, but its actions are always also reactions and vice versa, because the relation of the interacting substances is not just external to them. The notion of distinguished causes and effects is thus destroyed, Fichte insists, and in the interaction of forces there is no separation of an active and a passive party, but instead, this interaction forms a completely new entity.
Moving on from the topic of how the notion of force is related to previous categories, Fichte begins anew by describing the start of the interaction of forces: a force finds its specific counterpart and offers itself as a counterpart to this other, and both are then at least relatively independent of one another. This relative independence or the distinction of the forces, he says, is the first moment in the process, but then this relative independence is cancelled by the very relation of the forces to one another: each requires the other, and only both together form their whole truth. The process of the forces is characterised by this drive to self-cancellation, while the whole produced is not just an abstract unity, but a completely new entity cancelling the independence of the forces.
Fichte goes through the process again from a different angle. The specific nature of an independent thing finding its counterpart makes it into a force acting on the specific other. This mutual interaction, Fichte suggests, is then striving to overcome their own isolatedness and a search for their truth in this intertwining with the other. This striving or internal attraction transitions in the process of actual intertwining, where the forces realise their balance and reach their truth. As a third point in the process, following this mutual neutralisation of forces, appears a new actual substance or product that both has extinguished the difference of the forces and still contains them balanced in itself.
According to Fichte, the product mediating the differences is again just a new individual specification and thus must have a further counterpart of its own. The process that was extinguished in one sense, is in another sense only rekindled. In other words, Fichte clarifies, each neutralising individual product generates only new differences that again balance themselves in a product and so forth in the external infinity. He declares this infinite and never terminating play of combining forces and dissolving combinations as the second moment of the category after the first moment of a single process of interacting forces. Then again, Fichte notes, the independence of individuals is nowhere the final truth and therefore this external infinity of interactions of forces is also not the true expression of this relation. Instead, he insists, all these individual processes must display a universal and absolutely fundamental law as their internal infinity.
Fichte sees still a contradiction: the forces should be relatively independent in the sense that they subsist beside one another and step from this isolation only when they find their counterpart, but on the other hand, they should also exist only in relation to others. In other words, he explains the second part of the contradiction, the forces are not just neutralised and combined into new products in their interaction, but weren’t even independent in the first place. Fichte thinks that this contradiction is solved by noting that the conflicting concepts are more determinately limited by each other, that is, although each specific force is independent, it is still at the same time prepared for its counterpart in the sense that it has precisely what the other lacks. Thus, the state of isolation of forces is unsatisfactory and in need of completion, and the counterparts prepared to one another are so mediated by something beyond them.
Relatively independent forces are from a different viewpoint not originally independent, but exist only through a higher principle realising itself in them. Fichte reminds us that a similar result was found at the previous stage of causality, where the infinitely isolated actions and reactions were also mediated by a common ground. The difference was that in the first stage the specific internal essence of things was untouched by the principle of causality, while here it is precisely the specific content of the thing or force that appears from the all mediating law that penetrates the very essence of forces. In other words, Fichte suggests, each force is what it is only through the law that posits it in a specific relation with its counterpart, and this law or principle precisely balances them, so that each is capable of providing what the other is in need of. Furthermore, he adds, this law is not just abstract universality that would make everything just the same as everything else, but results in a system or universe of specific forces complementing one another through this all prevailing fundamental principle.
What is established here, Fichte suggests, is the importance of the third moment of this category or the all mediating principle, in which the specific forces return, when they cancel their isolation. He notes that we could thus define the absolute as the specifying law that connects the prepared forces and activities into an intertwined world with eternally varying interactions still repeating only this one fundamental principle. Fichte immediately adds that this is not the highest notion of absolute and that we cannot stop with the concept of law that only abstractly unifies things in a pantheistic manner. Thus, this absolutely specifying law and the world order presenting the law are again mere moments or preconditions of a higher principle and a higher order. Similarly, Fichte explains, the interaction of forces is also not the highest and final form of causality, but serves only as a foundation, in which a higher causal relation realises itself. Indeed, he suggests, all causal relations of lower kinds are merely tools or means for realising a purpose or a final cause.
Fichte goes over this transition from a different viewpoint. Individual forces are one-sided and thus search for a complementing counterpart. Finding it and so their truth, they neutralise one another and produce a new individual, which again as an individual requires a new complement. This whole sphere of causality, Fichte insists, is afflicted with a contradiction that, on the one hand, forces seek something beyond them, but on the other hand, they fail to generate this beyond by themselves, being capable of producing only individuals. The internal truth or solution of this contradiction, he thinks, can be found only in a higher form of causality, while the interaction of forces serves as a mere middle step between the most abstract and the highest forms of causality.
In the new form of causality, Fichte states, the relation of the cause and the effect is turned around, that is, what is generated is now the cause for that from which it appears, while the generating element is dependent on and determined by what follows from it. Ground and consequence or cause and effect do not so much swap their roles, so that the cause would become effect and the consequence ground, he explains, but these concepts are given a new meaning. Thus, the cause is still a cause, but in another sense a mere consequence, while the consequence becomes a true cause or ground for that, from which it appears, just because it can only appear from such a cause. The product of neutralised forces is the most original, because of which the forces are presupposed, or it is the cause for these, but this cause of forces is conversely only to be brought about by them or is their consequence, in other words, the forces have the product as their goal or end (telos), to which they are prepared and in which they are destroyed. Thus, the earlier opposition of cause and effect transitions, Fichte notes, in a new relation between purpose and means. Purpose, he explains, is the cause assumed as consequence or it is active without being already actual and causes its own cause. Similarly, Fichte adds, means is the consequence as a cause that generates its own proper cause.
Fichte continues from this general characterisation of the new conceptual field to the relation it has to earlier forms of causality. At first, he begins, it seems that the product of the interaction of forces is simply nothing final, but only for the sake of something else, of which we do not yet know what it might be. What we do know, Fichte suggests, is only that it is simply beyond the earlier circle of concepts, which is then the means for the beyond as purpose. The earlier causality of infinitely each other balancing and differentiating opposites is then complete in itself, but at the same it acts toward a distant and never completely reachable goal. This means, Fichte insists, that this earlier series of causes and effects has been turned around and the cause is now what follows and what is caused is the preceding. In other words, the cause as purpose acts already in the means throughout, but without being itself already expressly there, since it can become actual only through the means, the cause of which it is. What isn’t yet, Fichte summarises, acts back to what is and thereby becomes, which he admits to be a contradiction.
Because the concept of final cause or purpose is the truthful expression of the category of causality, Fichte states, purposes must have appeared already in the earlier, mechanical and chemical forms of causality. In other words, he clarifies, the world of mechanical and chemical processes should realise a system of purposes, and while an effect might seem just external, it still realises a purpose. Thus, Fichte concludes, final causes are not a form of causal relation in opposition with the other forms, but they are more likely present in all causality as the absolute goal of all causal processes. Of course, he admits, this absolute goal or purpose has earlier remained unknown, but now the dialectical process of the causal concepts has shown that the notion of goal is demanded by their very nature. Fichte refers back to Kant as the originator of the idea that purposes are not merely humanly subjective, but that to all things is implanted a purpose as a shaping principle, not in the sense of human or even divine intervention into the mechanical course of the world, but as an absolute purposefulness penetrating everything actual. Fichte considers himself as giving a proper ontological account of this idea, but he has to at first try to solve the previously mentioned contradiction in it, and this solution cannot be, he says, a subjective notion of a universal law nor a vague instinct guiding all things.
Before going to this contradiction, Fichte starts to investigate individual moments of the concept of purpose. At first, he says, purpose and means appear as externally related opposites: the purpose is a concrete, in itself completed thing, opposed to its means, but beyond this relation these two things are not dependent on each other. Thus, one thing is one-sidedly considered as means and another thing as its purpose, and both are in this manner externally related to one another. This relation could be interpreted as a mere judgement of an external observer or as a concrete instance of a person taking one thing and using it as means. Both of these interpretations, Fichte insists, belong not to ontology, but more to the field of practical philosophy, where human spirit mimics the creator by imprinting their varying purposes on the things. This mimicry is, he states, finite and contingent, and indeed, refutes itself immediately, since each of these judgements could be replaced by a different assignment of purposes.
According to Fichte, the first, provisional opposition of purpose and means is insufficient because the externality of the relation of purpose and means displaces us back to the causality of forces or even to the mechanistic causality of externally independent substances, while the proper concept of final cause has been lost. He suggests moving on to the original contradiction of purpose acting without yet being. This contradiction breaks into an opposition of two conflicting propositions, Fichte says, namely, on the one hand, that the purpose must be already contained in its means as acting through it, but on the other hand, that the purpose cannot be contained in its means, because it in general is not yet, but should only become through this. Both propositions are equally valid, he insists, and neither can be rejected.
The contradiction cancels firstly the separation or contingent externality of purpose and means toward one another, Fichte says, or the true purpose cannot be sought outside the means and the true means cannot be found outside a purpose. Instead, he emphasises, both are in one another, that is, the purpose has simply its means, in and through which it realises itself, while the means fulfils and satisfies immediately its purpose. Thus, the purpose realises itself constantly, because it is immediately present in its means, and so the externally mechanical process of causality is, Fichte emphasises, what Kant and Hegel have called internal purposefulness. Thus, it is essential that a purpose does not remain outside its means and also not outside the mechanical causalities, as if it would lie above them, in a distant world, or would be added to them as a completing supplement. Fichte notes that the standpoint of mechanical causality is, on the one hand, reproduced, since the purpose realises itself immediately through the subordinate causal relations in every point, but on the other hand, these causal relations have been lowered only to the status of means.
Fichte thinks only the first of the contradictory propositions has been engaged with, while the other side has been disregarded. In other words, no matter that the purpose is also a self-completing means, still, according to the second proposition, it must behave either as purpose or as means to something else. Thus, Fichte suggests, just like in all the previous stages, the isolation of the individuals has to be cancelled and their infinite relation has to be reproduced. This means, he says, that each individual has its purpose in itself and at the same time in something else, and conversely, that each individual is means to all others. Thus, the earlier seemingly isolated things have now been integrated into a system of an infinity of to each other related purposes and means. Fichte connects this idea with the earlier concept of a monad, which should be precisely such an identity of purpose and means, because it is a unity resulting from and renewing itself from distinctions, but each of these distinctions is also a self-purpose.
The problem is, in Fichte’s opinion, that if everything is both a purpose and a means, nothing in fact remains anymore true means or true purpose. Indeed, he suggests, we have just returned to the notion of causality between all things. This consideration, Fichte thinks, renews the conflict of the two propositions. Firstly, the final cause must suppose an absolute purpose that can in no sense become means. Yet, secondly, this absolute purpose is to be thought only in a system of infinite relations of means and purposes, which the absolute purpose uses as its means. The conflict is, Fichte explains, that the absolute purpose must be completely separate from the system of means and purposes used as its means, but the absolute purpose must also be embodied in this system.
Fichte suggests solving this conflict in such a manner that, on the one hand, the purpose is present in the totality of its means by them being also self-purposes, but that none of these are pure purposes, still striving to a truly absolute purpose. In other words, the purposes would form a hierarchy, so that what would in one sense be a self-purpose, would in another sense be just means for a higher purpose, all the way to the highest purpose that is not means to anything. Thus, each relative purpose fulfils the idea of purposes being also means, but this series of purposes does not reach into infinity, since there is an absolute final purpose that still is eternally embodied in the system of subordinate purposes.
The final turn highlights the other side of contradiction in the most heightened sense possible, Fichte suggests, since the higher final cause is actual in lower final cause, but also not actual, because it first requires this as its means of realisation. He begins solving this contradiction by pointing out that actuality is here understood in two senses. Firstly, it means the anticipation of non-actual purpose in its means, and secondly, the reality of the purpose generated through the means. The second concept is clear by itself, Fichte deems, but the first concept is the proper seat of contradiction. The anticipation of the still not actual purpose, he thinks, can only mean its pre-existence or ideal presence in its means, so that the means is prepared for the sake of purpose in such a manner that only the purpose can appear from the means. In order that means can be prepared in such a manner, Fichte argues, there must be something preparing it and this something cannot be the non-actual purpose, but can only be the creative absolute that orders means and purposes. We have thus arrived, he points out, to the third and final moment in the category of final cause, namely, by moving from isolated purposes and means to a system of an infinity of means and purposes and finally to the creative absolute unity. The notion of absolute, Fichte concludes, has thus gained an important new feature as the ultimate positing of purposes that lead the whole created world through subordinate causal relations to a goal beyond them.
The true concept of purpose cannot be thought without assuming the existence of the absolute positing all purposes, Fichte summarises, or the world of purposes is only possible, insofar as it is penetrated by an absolute consciousness. In other words, as certainly as there are purposes or goals that have not yet been actualised, as certainly there should be an actual absolute that orders everything to anticipate these purposes. Fichte explains that we have not yet fully proven an existence of such a purposeful absolute, but it has not yet been made properly comprehensible in an ontological manner.
All acts of substance or monad toward another substance or monad, Fichte argues, are thus immediately only self-actualisation of this substance and only mediately affect the other substance: when the first substance varies its state, this variance evokes a varying relation to the other substance and also a variance of the state of this other substance. He connects this outward effect of the self-actualisation with the necessary quantitative, and more particularly, spatio-temporal form of substances – each substance or monad must be in the same system of relations with an infinity of others. Monads are thus self-creative, but also dependent from all others. Understood in the most immediate manner possible, Fichte states, this means that they act externally or mechanically on one another as causes and effects.
Monads as in itself locked substantial unities arrive through their self-assertion immediately to having causal relations to one another. The reciprocal influence between them, Fichte explains, is external, because their independent essences are not reshaped by these causal relations. Being a cause is then accidental to the substances, he adds, and in their acting they just assert the integrity of their original essence. Thus, in the first type of causality external independent entities act on one another, but the effect is immediately extinguished and the old state returns, because the causal relation remains contingent and accidental to acting entities.
Fichte notes at once that this notion of causality requires some correction. As we have seen, he reminds the reader, self-assertion is connected to a relation with an infinity of others, thus, self-asserting monads must also at least exclude or provide resistance to one another. Hence, Fichte concludes, their mere existence implies also immediately that they act and are acted upon. We have thus found a seeming contradiction: earlier cause and effect were described as something accidental or inessential to the things, but now they appear as inseparable to the notion of self-asserting existence.
Fichte notes that the balance to this contradiction is already achieved in the concept of abstract self-assertion that essentially implies causal relations toward others, which still touch only part of the existence of things, but remain contingent to their internal essence. Thus, he explains, things act and are acted upon, because they in general are, not because they are these specific entities, but because they are independent of one another and thus exclude others. Hence, Fichte concludes, all things universally affect one another.
The opposition of isolated cause and effect is null, Fichte states and adds that this just repeats the same development that refuted the idea of individual grounds and consequences. In other words, he explains, an individual effect would have its cause in something else, which would then have its cause in yet further things, presupposing a realised external infinity. Instead of such a series of infinite causes, Fichte suggests, each individual should receive an effect from an infinity of other entities and cause such an effect in all of them. The concept of individual causes and effects is then dissolved in this system of reciprocal acting and reacting, where these opposite directions are intertwined in every moment, while the internal infinity of this system produces unity and rest from these varying causal relations.
Concrete things act on other things through their mere formal existence. In other words, Fichte explains, a thing modifies the being of another thing through its own determination or transmits something to the other thing without destroying its independence and in general leaving it essentially what it is. The interacting things remain then external to one another, he states, but they balance themselves by modifying their nature, without still losing their essential characteristics.
Now, when a thing influences another, Fichte continues, this influence opposes the unique nature of the other. The other thing does not just passively accept this influence, he explains, but reacts against it and thus acts on the first thing. Fichte notes that we could picture this intertwining of reaction and interaction with a physical example of two objects putting pressure on one another. Since the two things have now affected one another and transmitted some determinations, the result should be a resting balance, where the action and the reaction are extinguished, or at most, a new action and a new reaction are reproduced cyclically. In any case, Fichte insists, causality at this stage produces nothing really new.
The relative difference of interacting things is extinguished through their balancing communication. Thus, Fichte notes, a uniformity appears, binding things into a larger unity, although the individual entities do remain essentially untouched by it and thus different from one another. The result of the interactions of things is then this universal link that comprehends everything, but also leaves space for things to be different from one another, he explains and adds that this result is both the end and the beginning of this causal process. In fact, Fichte suggests, it is not the things themselves that make it possible for them to act on one another, but this is done by a universal or fundamental cause or principle that acts through and realises itself in individual things.
Fichte’s conclusion is that at this stage of causality it is actually not the individual things that act, but an absolute or universal principle acts through the individuals and their actions and reactions. He calls this principle that is realised through the specification of things a resting cause that reveals itself in a system of uniform actions and reactions. The principle thus rules a manifold of things, only to present its universality at each of these individual things. Then again, Fichte notes, this universal joining of things does not just allow specification of things, but indeed, even presupposes and requires such. This raising of the status of specificness implies a transition in a higher causal relation, where precisely the distinction of things or their specific opposition enters into the relation of acting and reacting. Still, Fichte assures us, the just described interaction of universal causes does not completely vanish, since any two abstract existences act at least in this universal fashion to one another.
Fichte begins a new phase by stating that things do not interact just externally or their specified essence affects the causal processes. Thus, he explains with a reference to an earlier stage of ontology, things are related not like abstract distinctions nor only like opposites, but like specific differences: what one is, lacks precisely the other, and each finds in its other or in the cancellation of their difference its complement, so that only both together or the whole forms their true essence. Fichte describes this new position as things becoming forces. In other words, things specified in such a manner do not have, but are forces: determined manners of acting with a specific, self-asserting existence, which does not affect vaguely anything whatsoever, but only a sharply limited circle of other determinations. Fichte lists a number of phenomena involving such forces: attraction and repulsion of matter, chemical affinity and chemical combinations and dissolutions, sexual attraction, love and hatred and intertwining of various characters in a human society. According to him, the common feature of all these forms of interaction is that it is not anymore a case of external action and reaction, but internal, where both opposites produce a common third that cancels their independence and tension toward one another.
Force is the specific essence of a thing in a relation to its specific complement, Fichte sums up and adds that the force as such is nothing outside its effect, but also nothing outside the specific essence of things. In other words, he explains, just by the sheer existence of a suitably specified thing, the force is activated and starts to interact with it, while without this appropriate counterpart the essence of the thing remains the same, but it cannot become active or force. Fichte notes that when such a specification is not related to a counterpart, it has been called a latent force, which seems a contradictory concept, since force is both assumed to exist and still its actuality or effectiveness is denied. Yet, he admits, the notion of latent force at least implicitly designates the true character of force that it is nothing in itself: it is just an immanent determination of each specific essence that it in general has its counterpart and can interact with it.
There is no simple force, Fichte thinks, since a thing is not specified just in a single relation, but toward many other things. Thus, he insists, substance or monad must be a system or a closed totality of forces. The notion of force replaces then such earlier notions like characteristic, property, part and perception, all of which described the relations of a thing to other things. More precisely, Fichte explains, we can differentiate between the fundamental Ur-force of a thing and its manifestation in a manifold of activities that forms the system of forces.
Fichte suggests that the notion of causality is also intensified in the notion of force, in the sense that the relation of actions and reactions has become more intimate. In other words, the force does not just act and then react, but its actions are always also reactions and vice versa, because the relation of the interacting substances is not just external to them. The notion of distinguished causes and effects is thus destroyed, Fichte insists, and in the interaction of forces there is no separation of an active and a passive party, but instead, this interaction forms a completely new entity.
Moving on from the topic of how the notion of force is related to previous categories, Fichte begins anew by describing the start of the interaction of forces: a force finds its specific counterpart and offers itself as a counterpart to this other, and both are then at least relatively independent of one another. This relative independence or the distinction of the forces, he says, is the first moment in the process, but then this relative independence is cancelled by the very relation of the forces to one another: each requires the other, and only both together form their whole truth. The process of the forces is characterised by this drive to self-cancellation, while the whole produced is not just an abstract unity, but a completely new entity cancelling the independence of the forces.
Fichte goes through the process again from a different angle. The specific nature of an independent thing finding its counterpart makes it into a force acting on the specific other. This mutual interaction, Fichte suggests, is then striving to overcome their own isolatedness and a search for their truth in this intertwining with the other. This striving or internal attraction transitions in the process of actual intertwining, where the forces realise their balance and reach their truth. As a third point in the process, following this mutual neutralisation of forces, appears a new actual substance or product that both has extinguished the difference of the forces and still contains them balanced in itself.
According to Fichte, the product mediating the differences is again just a new individual specification and thus must have a further counterpart of its own. The process that was extinguished in one sense, is in another sense only rekindled. In other words, Fichte clarifies, each neutralising individual product generates only new differences that again balance themselves in a product and so forth in the external infinity. He declares this infinite and never terminating play of combining forces and dissolving combinations as the second moment of the category after the first moment of a single process of interacting forces. Then again, Fichte notes, the independence of individuals is nowhere the final truth and therefore this external infinity of interactions of forces is also not the true expression of this relation. Instead, he insists, all these individual processes must display a universal and absolutely fundamental law as their internal infinity.
Fichte sees still a contradiction: the forces should be relatively independent in the sense that they subsist beside one another and step from this isolation only when they find their counterpart, but on the other hand, they should also exist only in relation to others. In other words, he explains the second part of the contradiction, the forces are not just neutralised and combined into new products in their interaction, but weren’t even independent in the first place. Fichte thinks that this contradiction is solved by noting that the conflicting concepts are more determinately limited by each other, that is, although each specific force is independent, it is still at the same time prepared for its counterpart in the sense that it has precisely what the other lacks. Thus, the state of isolation of forces is unsatisfactory and in need of completion, and the counterparts prepared to one another are so mediated by something beyond them.
Relatively independent forces are from a different viewpoint not originally independent, but exist only through a higher principle realising itself in them. Fichte reminds us that a similar result was found at the previous stage of causality, where the infinitely isolated actions and reactions were also mediated by a common ground. The difference was that in the first stage the specific internal essence of things was untouched by the principle of causality, while here it is precisely the specific content of the thing or force that appears from the all mediating law that penetrates the very essence of forces. In other words, Fichte suggests, each force is what it is only through the law that posits it in a specific relation with its counterpart, and this law or principle precisely balances them, so that each is capable of providing what the other is in need of. Furthermore, he adds, this law is not just abstract universality that would make everything just the same as everything else, but results in a system or universe of specific forces complementing one another through this all prevailing fundamental principle.
What is established here, Fichte suggests, is the importance of the third moment of this category or the all mediating principle, in which the specific forces return, when they cancel their isolation. He notes that we could thus define the absolute as the specifying law that connects the prepared forces and activities into an intertwined world with eternally varying interactions still repeating only this one fundamental principle. Fichte immediately adds that this is not the highest notion of absolute and that we cannot stop with the concept of law that only abstractly unifies things in a pantheistic manner. Thus, this absolutely specifying law and the world order presenting the law are again mere moments or preconditions of a higher principle and a higher order. Similarly, Fichte explains, the interaction of forces is also not the highest and final form of causality, but serves only as a foundation, in which a higher causal relation realises itself. Indeed, he suggests, all causal relations of lower kinds are merely tools or means for realising a purpose or a final cause.
Fichte goes over this transition from a different viewpoint. Individual forces are one-sided and thus search for a complementing counterpart. Finding it and so their truth, they neutralise one another and produce a new individual, which again as an individual requires a new complement. This whole sphere of causality, Fichte insists, is afflicted with a contradiction that, on the one hand, forces seek something beyond them, but on the other hand, they fail to generate this beyond by themselves, being capable of producing only individuals. The internal truth or solution of this contradiction, he thinks, can be found only in a higher form of causality, while the interaction of forces serves as a mere middle step between the most abstract and the highest forms of causality.
In the new form of causality, Fichte states, the relation of the cause and the effect is turned around, that is, what is generated is now the cause for that from which it appears, while the generating element is dependent on and determined by what follows from it. Ground and consequence or cause and effect do not so much swap their roles, so that the cause would become effect and the consequence ground, he explains, but these concepts are given a new meaning. Thus, the cause is still a cause, but in another sense a mere consequence, while the consequence becomes a true cause or ground for that, from which it appears, just because it can only appear from such a cause. The product of neutralised forces is the most original, because of which the forces are presupposed, or it is the cause for these, but this cause of forces is conversely only to be brought about by them or is their consequence, in other words, the forces have the product as their goal or end (telos), to which they are prepared and in which they are destroyed. Thus, the earlier opposition of cause and effect transitions, Fichte notes, in a new relation between purpose and means. Purpose, he explains, is the cause assumed as consequence or it is active without being already actual and causes its own cause. Similarly, Fichte adds, means is the consequence as a cause that generates its own proper cause.
Fichte continues from this general characterisation of the new conceptual field to the relation it has to earlier forms of causality. At first, he begins, it seems that the product of the interaction of forces is simply nothing final, but only for the sake of something else, of which we do not yet know what it might be. What we do know, Fichte suggests, is only that it is simply beyond the earlier circle of concepts, which is then the means for the beyond as purpose. The earlier causality of infinitely each other balancing and differentiating opposites is then complete in itself, but at the same it acts toward a distant and never completely reachable goal. This means, Fichte insists, that this earlier series of causes and effects has been turned around and the cause is now what follows and what is caused is the preceding. In other words, the cause as purpose acts already in the means throughout, but without being itself already expressly there, since it can become actual only through the means, the cause of which it is. What isn’t yet, Fichte summarises, acts back to what is and thereby becomes, which he admits to be a contradiction.
Because the concept of final cause or purpose is the truthful expression of the category of causality, Fichte states, purposes must have appeared already in the earlier, mechanical and chemical forms of causality. In other words, he clarifies, the world of mechanical and chemical processes should realise a system of purposes, and while an effect might seem just external, it still realises a purpose. Thus, Fichte concludes, final causes are not a form of causal relation in opposition with the other forms, but they are more likely present in all causality as the absolute goal of all causal processes. Of course, he admits, this absolute goal or purpose has earlier remained unknown, but now the dialectical process of the causal concepts has shown that the notion of goal is demanded by their very nature. Fichte refers back to Kant as the originator of the idea that purposes are not merely humanly subjective, but that to all things is implanted a purpose as a shaping principle, not in the sense of human or even divine intervention into the mechanical course of the world, but as an absolute purposefulness penetrating everything actual. Fichte considers himself as giving a proper ontological account of this idea, but he has to at first try to solve the previously mentioned contradiction in it, and this solution cannot be, he says, a subjective notion of a universal law nor a vague instinct guiding all things.
Before going to this contradiction, Fichte starts to investigate individual moments of the concept of purpose. At first, he says, purpose and means appear as externally related opposites: the purpose is a concrete, in itself completed thing, opposed to its means, but beyond this relation these two things are not dependent on each other. Thus, one thing is one-sidedly considered as means and another thing as its purpose, and both are in this manner externally related to one another. This relation could be interpreted as a mere judgement of an external observer or as a concrete instance of a person taking one thing and using it as means. Both of these interpretations, Fichte insists, belong not to ontology, but more to the field of practical philosophy, where human spirit mimics the creator by imprinting their varying purposes on the things. This mimicry is, he states, finite and contingent, and indeed, refutes itself immediately, since each of these judgements could be replaced by a different assignment of purposes.
According to Fichte, the first, provisional opposition of purpose and means is insufficient because the externality of the relation of purpose and means displaces us back to the causality of forces or even to the mechanistic causality of externally independent substances, while the proper concept of final cause has been lost. He suggests moving on to the original contradiction of purpose acting without yet being. This contradiction breaks into an opposition of two conflicting propositions, Fichte says, namely, on the one hand, that the purpose must be already contained in its means as acting through it, but on the other hand, that the purpose cannot be contained in its means, because it in general is not yet, but should only become through this. Both propositions are equally valid, he insists, and neither can be rejected.
The contradiction cancels firstly the separation or contingent externality of purpose and means toward one another, Fichte says, or the true purpose cannot be sought outside the means and the true means cannot be found outside a purpose. Instead, he emphasises, both are in one another, that is, the purpose has simply its means, in and through which it realises itself, while the means fulfils and satisfies immediately its purpose. Thus, the purpose realises itself constantly, because it is immediately present in its means, and so the externally mechanical process of causality is, Fichte emphasises, what Kant and Hegel have called internal purposefulness. Thus, it is essential that a purpose does not remain outside its means and also not outside the mechanical causalities, as if it would lie above them, in a distant world, or would be added to them as a completing supplement. Fichte notes that the standpoint of mechanical causality is, on the one hand, reproduced, since the purpose realises itself immediately through the subordinate causal relations in every point, but on the other hand, these causal relations have been lowered only to the status of means.
Fichte thinks only the first of the contradictory propositions has been engaged with, while the other side has been disregarded. In other words, no matter that the purpose is also a self-completing means, still, according to the second proposition, it must behave either as purpose or as means to something else. Thus, Fichte suggests, just like in all the previous stages, the isolation of the individuals has to be cancelled and their infinite relation has to be reproduced. This means, he says, that each individual has its purpose in itself and at the same time in something else, and conversely, that each individual is means to all others. Thus, the earlier seemingly isolated things have now been integrated into a system of an infinity of to each other related purposes and means. Fichte connects this idea with the earlier concept of a monad, which should be precisely such an identity of purpose and means, because it is a unity resulting from and renewing itself from distinctions, but each of these distinctions is also a self-purpose.
The problem is, in Fichte’s opinion, that if everything is both a purpose and a means, nothing in fact remains anymore true means or true purpose. Indeed, he suggests, we have just returned to the notion of causality between all things. This consideration, Fichte thinks, renews the conflict of the two propositions. Firstly, the final cause must suppose an absolute purpose that can in no sense become means. Yet, secondly, this absolute purpose is to be thought only in a system of infinite relations of means and purposes, which the absolute purpose uses as its means. The conflict is, Fichte explains, that the absolute purpose must be completely separate from the system of means and purposes used as its means, but the absolute purpose must also be embodied in this system.
Fichte suggests solving this conflict in such a manner that, on the one hand, the purpose is present in the totality of its means by them being also self-purposes, but that none of these are pure purposes, still striving to a truly absolute purpose. In other words, the purposes would form a hierarchy, so that what would in one sense be a self-purpose, would in another sense be just means for a higher purpose, all the way to the highest purpose that is not means to anything. Thus, each relative purpose fulfils the idea of purposes being also means, but this series of purposes does not reach into infinity, since there is an absolute final purpose that still is eternally embodied in the system of subordinate purposes.
The final turn highlights the other side of contradiction in the most heightened sense possible, Fichte suggests, since the higher final cause is actual in lower final cause, but also not actual, because it first requires this as its means of realisation. He begins solving this contradiction by pointing out that actuality is here understood in two senses. Firstly, it means the anticipation of non-actual purpose in its means, and secondly, the reality of the purpose generated through the means. The second concept is clear by itself, Fichte deems, but the first concept is the proper seat of contradiction. The anticipation of the still not actual purpose, he thinks, can only mean its pre-existence or ideal presence in its means, so that the means is prepared for the sake of purpose in such a manner that only the purpose can appear from the means. In order that means can be prepared in such a manner, Fichte argues, there must be something preparing it and this something cannot be the non-actual purpose, but can only be the creative absolute that orders means and purposes. We have thus arrived, he points out, to the third and final moment in the category of final cause, namely, by moving from isolated purposes and means to a system of an infinity of means and purposes and finally to the creative absolute unity. The notion of absolute, Fichte concludes, has thus gained an important new feature as the ultimate positing of purposes that lead the whole created world through subordinate causal relations to a goal beyond them.
The true concept of purpose cannot be thought without assuming the existence of the absolute positing all purposes, Fichte summarises, or the world of purposes is only possible, insofar as it is penetrated by an absolute consciousness. In other words, as certainly as there are purposes or goals that have not yet been actualised, as certainly there should be an actual absolute that orders everything to anticipate these purposes. Fichte explains that we have not yet fully proven an existence of such a purposeful absolute, but it has not yet been made properly comprehensible in an ontological manner.
Tilaa:
Blogitekstit (Atom)