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.
