Fichte does not completely ignore the history of philosophy, and his outlook is that of many other German philosophers of the time: all the different philosophies are just moments of one whole, developing through periods of division into different systems and contraction of them into one whole. Still, he admits, this context is something we can just anticipate at the very beginning of philosophy and nothing we can assume. Remembering this, he says, we could still preliminarily note that different philosophical standpoints are its different self-definitions, and while further standpoints become more and more clear about the meaning of philosophy, in the very beginning we can have only the most universal and simplest definition of philosophy.
Beginning of philosophy is an indefinite notion, Fichte continues. It can mean a subjective drive to do philosophy. This drive can take many forms, depending on the individual, but it still is something we can find immediately in ourselves. Beyond these subjective drives, there is an objective beginning of a system. There can be only one objective beginning, Fichte emphasises, but finding it is not an easy task. Yet, what he wants to especially guard us against is confusing the objective beginning of philosophy with subjective beginnings. In fact, he adds, many philosophers have begun subjectively from historical conditions that have driven them to choose some concrete beginning. Such a beginning based on our subjective drive is arbitrary, because it works only for this particular individual, Fichte argues. He mentions several such subjective beginnings, which all happen to be ways other recent German philosophers began their philosophies: I of the older Fichte, identity of subjective and objective from Schelling and Hegelian being that equals nothing.
Although Fichte insists on not confusing objective and subjective beginning of philosophy, he suggests that the objective beginning could be found through the subjective beginning – that is, although we should not take any particular subjective beginning as the objective beginning, we could determine objective beginning from the very fact that we do have subjective drives toward making philosophy. This means, he explains, returning to the absolute beginning of our thinking: what made us do philosophy? This is the only way to discover a foundation for philosophy, he adds. Naturally, the beginning cannot be justified through any arguments, since it is supposed to predate anything else in our thinking. Still, we should be able to discover it as a beginning for all our cognitive abilities.
What then is this subjective drive to philosophy? Fichte describes it as a decision to think. In other words, it is a decision to move from the immediate state of consciousness and its given content through cognitive labour to knowledge of truth. This drive is still just an indefinite craving for a higher cognition and it can be further determined only within philosophy. Since we already know many things in our immediate state of consciousness, the question arises why is this not enough. Fichte explains, quite in the manner of the first chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of spirit, that the content of our immediate state of consciousness is variable and with the destruction of this content the supposedly true knowledge becomes untrue. Thus, in striving to do philosophy we search for proper stable knowledge, because consciousness can rest only with such knowledge.
Fichte has thus discovered the opposition between knowledge of variable and contingent matters and knowledge of non-variable, eternal, necessary and lawlike matters. Furthermore, he adds, this latter type of knowledge can be achieved only through a certain activity, which he preliminarily calls thinking. This knowledge of eternal matters Fichte names science. Problem is that there are many particular sciences and we thus have to distinguish philosophy in particular from the other sciences. Fichte notes that the other individual sciences have particular topics, while philosophy does not. Indeed, such an individualisation of topics is even against the notion of philosophy, because philosophy should be the universal science. Fichte then defines philosophy as the science of sciences, that is, as knowledge of the highest and most universal laws of all being and cognition.
The next obvious question is what is this activity of thinking that is supposed to be required for realising philosophy. Fichte notes that to understand what thinking is we must ourselves think, because only the activity of thinking makes us internalise our concepts. In other words, to become thinkers we must see how to progress from the immediate state of non-thinking to thinking. Indeed, this is for Fichte the only universally valid objective beginning of philosophy. At the same time, since this progression is the development of our consciousness, the beginning or the first part of philosophy must be a theory of consciousness or the study of the faculty of cognition.
At the beginning of this study, we know very little about consciousness. Indeed, the only thing we should know is what our beginning from the subjective drive determined: we know immediately only contingent and variable matters, but we should strive to know what is necessary and stable. If the object of our striving Fichte named thinking, he calls its beginning perceiving. What other states possibly lie between these two extremes is yet unknown. Still, we do know we have to begin from the immediate state of consciousness, because nothing else is given to us. Indeed, Fichte adds, we can never really escape the standpoint of our consciousness, and other things come into our attention only when they are revealed to our consciousness.
Fichte notes that the transition from perception to thinking is not possible, unless there’s something common that stays the same between these two states. The simple solution is that this common element is our being conscious of these states or our self. This consciousness, Fichte explains, is then a stable unity in comparison with a variable manifold of states, which are then like images representing some content that exists independently of the consciousness and toward which it just points without making it. Fichte describes this content as being (Sein) in relation to non-objective image (Bild), both of which are concepts mutually determining one another: image has the content of being as reflected, while being has the same content as not reflected. Consciousness then consists of placing being and image in opposition and of connecting them as inseparable.
Consciousness can relate being and image, Fichte continues, only through a higher image, where consciousness ponders its own activity of opposing and relating being and image. In other words, he explains further, consciousness must be an image that conceives itself to be an image in opposition to being. This more complex state of consciousness Fichte calls self-consciousness. In this complex state, consciousness is thus aware of being in some determined state of consciousness, but also of its own self as a resting unity behind these particular states. The self Fichte describes as purely self-transparent and self-knowing unity in multiplicity. Because it thus has an essential link to these multiple states, it can exist only in connection with determinate consciousness. Consciousness must thus always be determined or in particular conditions, while the self is a formal unity for the variable content.
The first state the self or consciousness finds itself in Fichte calls Empfindung, which we might translate in this context as sensation: consciousness has given, determined affections, content of which it cannot change. These on-going sensations form the external world, and the self becomes gradually aware of being distinct from this external world. The receptivity to this necessary effect of the external world on the self Fichte calls Sinn, which somewhat confusingly we should also translate as sense or sensation. Still, this passive receptivity is the original root of our consciousness.
Now, we do not have just one, but many sensations, which are differentiated from one another spatially and temporally. In a Kantian fashion, Fichte notes that our faculty of sensation is based on an intuition of space and time, which enable the differentiation of sensations. Yet, he immediately adds, this intuition is actually just an abstraction or indicates a mere possibility of differentiating sensations, since we always intuit space and time only as filled by sensations. Following the lead of his father, Fichte notes that we also intuit ourselves as in space and time, which means that we have an immediate spatio-temporal presence or a body. Compared to abstractions of pure space and time, the body is our actualised receptivity. It is also our immediate individuality and we exist only as embodied.
Fichte notes in passing that receptivity of our body is divided into individual senses, but adds immediately that a more detailed study of these senses is the task of, on the one hand, psychology (when it comes to sensations as conscious states, and on the other hand, physiology (when the sensations are taken as preconscious state of our bodily presence). What is important for the theory of consciousness is that these various sensations received by different senses (cold, warm, sweet, sour, etc.) are the material elements of our consciousness. Furthermore, they act as stimuli that make the soul first sense itself as separate from what is sensed, then to consciousness proper and finally to self-consciousness. Fichte explains that, in a sense, self-consciousness is present even in the first sensations, since only self-conscious entities can sense, but it is still, as it were, sleeping and awakened only by the external stimuli. One could thus say that the sensations as the first state of consciousness already drive the consciousness to proceed to further states of its development.
Although consciousness has been thus far described as mere passive receptivity, Fichte explains that its feeling of being restricted by sensations brings immediately forth an opposed tendency to appropriate what is external to it. This opposite tendency is will, and as it also needs the stimulus of sensations, it must be embodied. Indeed, Fichte says, the first act of will is its mastery over its own body, which is then an absolute tool of the will. The embodied will or drive develops different goals, which it tries to achieve through an ordered series of actions.
Creation of this ordering, Fichte concludes, is performed by a third faculty besides sensation and will, which remains neutral and mediates between passive sensation and active will. In effect, this third faculty is the free representation of ideas in our consciousness. This faculty of representation is the true centre of consciousness, which both conserves sensations and makes them the property of consciousness by renewing them, but also creates new ones, through which it leads the will. Thus, the representative activity has as its parts both memory and imagination. Awakened by the first strike of sensation, consciousness changes sensation into an inner representation and thus makes it into its own property. When new sensations constantly arise, the internal flow of these representations becomes self-imagination, which both conserves sensed representations and forms new ones. This flow of representations works then as a material for further development of the whole cognition and for the actions of the will. The three faculties of sensation, representation and will are thus entwined to one another, Fichte insists, and indeed, just aspects of one faculty of representation.
The main conclusion of Fichte’s study has been that the representative consciousness is determined by spatio-temporal sensations. This, he explains, is the essence of perception, which was the supposed starting point of the development of consciousness to thinking. Yet, he says, even the perception has its own development, and in its first state it is just an undeveloped sensation, where the consciousness just passively observes what it senses. In this specific state, confused sense impressions flow in the consciousness that still cannot separate anything determinate from this flow and that cannot even separate itself from these external representations. In a sense then, while plenty is observed, nothing is yet known, since there are yet no distinctions or comparisons.
Without really any evidence, Fichte speculates that children live in such a state at the first moments of their lives. In such a state, the sensations are felt more intensively and strongly and thus awaken the consciousness forcefully. He also assumes, again without much evidence, that we might return to such a state during severe depression, especially if it proceeds to a level of complete stupor. In the posts to come, we shall see how Fichte thinks consciousness will develop from this supposed starting point to its final phase, where it should be capable of doing philosophy.
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