Immanuel Hermann Fichte: Outline of a system of philosophy. First division: knowledge as self-knowledge – Constitution of perceptions

Last time we saw Fichte define the starting point of philosophy: the assumed barest state of consciousness, in which a flow of sensations is just passively received, without any further development. Fichte presumes that the development starts, when this flow of sensation begins to be distinguished. First, individual senses are separated from one another: we note e.g. that visual sensations differ from auditory sensations. Then, distinctions begin to be made between sensations of one kind of sense. Some of these distinctions are qualitative – for instance, when we differentiate blue from green – while some are qualitative – when we differentiate more intensive shade of blue from less intensive.

In addition to distinctions among sensations, a completely different sort of sensation appears, that is, the flow of sensations stimulates the consciousness to sense itself as separate from all the other sensations. This separation, Fichte states, is a necessary result of making distinctions within sensations in general: while conscious of different sensations, we are also conscious of ourselves as attached to all these different sensations.

Now, Fichte suggests, with this first sensation of ourselves we also start to act on sensations. In other words, we do not just distinguish sensations from one another, but we also combine these sensations into further unities, which Fichte calls by the word Anschauung – a difficult word to translate, and while in the tradition of Kant scholarship intuition has often been used, we might as well speak of perceptions in this context. Fichte notes that this unifying activity resembles judgements, in which we combine concepts to one another. The difference is that this unifying activity is unconscious.

What Fichte is describing here is the process by which we, for instance, first separate our field of vision into individual visual sensations and then perceive certain combinations of these sensations as unified things. Similar processes occur e.g. with auditory sensations, when we first distinguish individual sounds in an auditory stream and then perceive a certain series of sounds as melody. Indeed, a process of this kind might even involve different senses, such as when we perceive a certain collection of visual, olfactory and tactual sensations as a rose.