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

The result of his work, in Fichte’s opinion, has been that God is the absolute content of consciousness or its only truth and reality, or because we are talking actually of a system of knowing, the original ground of all truth: everything true is true for consciousness only because it follows from God’s revelation. Fichte calls this universal, inviolable standpoint speculative knowledge. Earlier subjectivity of consciousness should now have been completely overcome, and even the most confused, one-sided errors or the most contradictory worldviews are only insofar subjective and thus false as they are mere parts or moments of truth. Consciousness in all its forms and shapes is just more implicit or explicit knowing of the divine revelation. Thus, Fichte continues, what was earlier called the sense world or world of finite things is the same reality, surrounded and interwoven with sensuous illusion, and consciousness just has to work through this illusion in order to know in it the same one truth. Since all actual in general should be revelation of God, all disunion and dualism of any kind should have vanished. In addition to the opposition of thing and consciousness, Fichte says, things are not divided into sensuous and supersensuous realities, but there should be just one world of self-revealing God that is one as well as infinite.

The immediate recognition of eternal, Fichte notes, can be characterised only as an immediate confidence or faith. In other words, it is perception or intuition, since it is not found or discovered through any mediated knowing or reflection. Yet, he adds, it is not sensuous perception, but derives from pure thought or reason, that is, from the first original thought in which and through which every further determined thinking becomes possible. Because consciousness is at all stages and standpoints just undeveloped or developed thinking, Fichte’s argument continues, its absolute, even if not consciously recognised essence is at the same time to recognise eternal, infinite or divine. Fichte immediately draws the conclusion that any purely atheistic worldview would be only highest unconsciousness, or at best, in trying to understand this original intuition of the eternal it remained with such unsatisfying abstractions like natural necessity and unconscious fate. Intuition of reason is then just a beginning leading to the truth, because divine is to be comprehended according to more special determinations than mere abstract infinity.

Fichte clarifies that although the intuition of reason is original and absolute, it cannot be called immediate, because it is mediated by the previous stages of reflection, through which consciousness arrived at it. This mediation should justify and prove the possibility of the intuition of reason for philosophy that starts from other standpoints. Still, the content of this intuition is not invented through reflective consciousness, but consciousness has just returned from its engagement with various individual instances of knowing and illuminated the original knowledge and truth behind these individual truths.

The intuition of reason, Fichte explains, does not immediately have any determined content expressible as propositions or as a system of truths. Instead, it is just a beginning or a principle for further speculative progress. This intuition must then be extended from its simple abstraction to mediated comprehending of all truth as an absolute revealing itself in consciousness. The next question, Fichte notes, is  how this absolute is to be comprehended, since its abstract understanding as eternal or infinite seems too sparse to exhaust its concept. He reveals that religious mysticism and church faith have anticipated this development, when they have expressed God as the highest personality or as the conscious original good. According to Fichte, this religious notion has to be just confirmed in philosophical thinking.

More definitely, Fichte continues, unsatisfactory in the knowledge of absolute or God at this standpoint is that the intuition of reason has not been balanced with the consciousness of immediately given, and this imbalance drives us to speculative investigation. In other words, Fichte expounds, intuition of reason shows God alone as undeniable truth, but in immediate consciousness this confidence is replaced by finite, variable things: consciousness of eternal and consciousness of finite fall completely apart. Eternal appears to become a beyond for finite, which on its part is immediately certain, and thus a struggle is created between the absolute confidence of knowing God and the immediate consciousness of merely finite beings. The original certainty of eternal is driven to test and justify itself, Fichte continues, in other words, the eternal becomes a topic of investigation and at least a theoretical uncertainty. Thus, the immediate confidence of God, Fichte insists, turns into Jacobian yearning for eternal as unknown.

Finite is just an illusion, Fichte ensures us, but we still must explain the appearance of finite from eternal, which requires developing one concept from the other through thinking. Since these are pure concepts, that is, not abstracted from concrete intuitions, this investigation can happen only in speculative or dialectical thinking. Fichte notes beforehand that the investigation breaks into three phases. First, the eternal must be comprehended as such, and secondly, the finite must be derived from this comprehension of eternal: this will be the content of ontology. Thirdly, the essence of the finite must then be further determined, which will then be content of the philosophy of nature and spirit. Despite dividing it into these three parts, Fichte assures us, the whole investigation is dialectical development of one fundamental concept of self-revelation of God in consciousness.

At the stage of speculative thinking, Fichte says, the previous opposition between subjective and objective has not just been cancelled, but the concept of objectivity has received a higher meaning: objective is just divine revelation in consciousness and thus not a world opposed and impassable to knowledge. Consciousness and objective being are at this standpoint not identical, Fichte emphasises, since there is still some difference between them, but they do correspond to one another. Consciousness, just because it is consciousness, takes simply part in objectively real or lives in truth. It should thus know the essence of the finite things as they are in God, which Fichte compares to Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge.

The first manner in which speculative thinking understands God or absolute, Fichte begins, is to note that all the oppositions of finite thinking have vanished and are without meaning in it: absolute is the abstract indifference to oppositions. Yet, Fichte continues, this is not the whole truth, since the absolute also determines these opposites and is thus their underlying identity, like in the early Schellingian philosophy. Even further, the absolute is not just a passive identity, but it is an absolute process that in its identity determines itself to oppositions or differences, but again cancels and returns all these oppositions and differences in itself as mere moments: in other words, Fichte notes, it is the Hegelian self-related negation.

Fichte follows the lead of Hegel in emphasising the role of contradiction. Contradictions, Fichte says, were generated in incomplete forms of thinking by fixating on isolated categories, while here these must be developed from the concept of the absolute identity. In this development, the categories must be shown as moments that have their truth only in the final category, in which all earlier categories converge as their common result. This final category, Fichte concludes, will be the correct, contradictionless standpoint of the whole truth, which will itself be this dialectics that again and again complements itself from its individual contradictions and one-sided oppositions and reinstates them into reconciled contradictions that alone are the result and the truth.

Categories receive in this dialectical process a new, higher meaning, Fichte thinks, where they are original forms of the divine self-revelation. Fichte emphasises against Hegelian school that universals are actual only in their individuality as concrete, while universal as such is to be understood as untrue and one-sided. Thus, the categories, according to Fichte, are merely the most external and formal abstractions that are actual only in individuals, but are nothing in themselves. Hence, even the poorest and most imperfect of natural entities are infinitely richer than abstract categories. Indeed, Fichte points out, the very dialectical process of thinking categories shows how these abstractions are cancelled and lead to concrete actuality as their truth. We shall see this process in more detail when dealing with Fichte’s ontology, but he already reveals that one important result of this process will be that self-conscious personality is the most real feature in both God and in creatures. Fichte also emphasises against Hegel that this whole development of categories through contradictions does not mean that reality itself would be governed by contradiction, but the contradictory categories refer merely to incomplete philosophical standpoints about the absolute or God and its relation to creatures. Fichte especially objects to the idea he thinks Hegel had in mind with the notion of contradiction that divinity is nothing but destruction of finite entities: instead, the seemingly finite or imperfect entities are supported by divinity.

Even this standpoint of dialectical thinking is still the one-sided, Fichte notes: speculative thinking still stands opposed to previous states of consciousness, like perceiving and representing. As long as speculative knowing grasps itself as the only form of truth, the disunion in consciousness and opposition between a priori and a posteriori remains in full force. Thus, the final task, Fichte insists, is to collect all the previous moments of consciousness under speculative thinking: consciousness has known itself in all forms, not just as speculative thinking, as being in truth or as revelation of God. In other words, consciousness has always dealt with just one world and reality that remains present at all stages of its development. Therefore even immediate consciousness or perception immediately grasps the actuality of this revelation in its absolute presence, and just like there is one world or divine revelation that is all, similarly there is only one knowing of it in both perception and in thinking, which both complement one another.

Fichte calls this highest form of consciousness speculatively intuiting or perceiving knowing. Here intuition or perception is required to emphasise the importance of individuation that speculative thinking forgets, when it fixates on pure concepts. Thus, Fichte insists, perception as such lives already in truth, as long as it is not ruined by one-sided thinking. When this harmony between perception and speculative thinking is understood, God is not anymore just a yearned beyond, but omnipresent, originally certain truth, because it reveals itself in all consciousness infinitely. Furthermore, Fichte continues, God is known not just as abstract omnipresence, but as original personality, whereby its creation does not remain an absolute process of creating and then destroying individuals. Instead, Fichte suggests, the created universe is the actualisation of infinitely individualised thoughts of God or of one original thought developed into a system. This creative thought of God, Fichte explains, does not create mere abstract universal concepts, as if the spirit of God would be so poor that it thought only abstractions, but infinitely concrete individuals.

As the universe should be the effect of divine thought, Fichte continues, we knowing the universe become conscious of it by thinking about it afterwards (pun on German word Nachdenken, meaning contemplation, but literally thinking afterwards), just like God has thought it previously or originally. In other words, we know the essence of ourselves and other things only insofar as we take part in the original knowledge, through which all is: we as subjects can reach objective things, because they are not dead beings or chaotically obscure, but divine thoughts.

Philosophy has finally become, Fichte concludes, theosophy or knowledge of divine in its works, but it does not possess this content exclusively, because consciousness is in all moments only knowing this infinite self-revelation of God. The final opposition between a priori and a posteriori therefore vanishes. True knowing in both perception and thinking is not opposed to any dead object that would remain absolutely unknown, but is essentially the immanent genesis of what is to be known. In other words, like speculative thinking is dialectical unfolding of pure concepts, the correct experience is also the genetic perception or living through and developing an object through its whole course of life and its connections to other things. Such a genetic perception does not reveal just an individual, but the universal or eternal in this individual, thus complementing speculative thinking. After philosophy has completed its immanent course through pure concept, it finally is reconciled with itself and turns back to the perception of immediate actuality in order to recognise in it the presence of divine revelation, with which it is to infinitely rejuvenate itsef.

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

Fichte has mentioned the notion of reflection already at the beginning of this work: it is the capacity of consciousness to isolate a representation and separate it from its connection to other things, thus creating an abstraction that would not exist without this reflection. By reflective thinking or knowledge he means a sort of perfection of this capacity, where thinking turns back from what is empirical to itself and its own categories, which it has thus far used in thinking, but never really thought themselves. Now reflection abstracts from every individual content of thinking in order to hold onto thinking and its forms. Fichte notes that this is the true beginning of philosophy, as differentiated from all empirical thinking.

We have already seen that Fichte considers as the first result of this reflective knowledge the opposition between subjective and objective, which finally leads consciousness to scepticism, which first targets the theory of sensuous certainty. This theory holds that consciousness senses objective or external things and sensation makes consciousness certain of them. Yet, Fichte notes, these perceived or sensed external things seem just a sum and unity of certain sensations, like colour and shape. What is before and outside being sensed cannot be known by senses and lies beyond this sphere. In other words, external things are not sensed, but the concept of a thing is just added in thought to sensations as an otherwise unknown substance underlying sensations. This thing is supposed to be the ground of these sensations, but in itself it remains unknown, while sensations do not present what the thing is in itself and seem just subjective.

Question remains what and whether perceived thing is “in itself”, Fichte continues. It is added to sensations by thinking, but this addition would require further justification: thing should be the hidden substance of sensations, because it lies beyond them, but since sensed properties are merely subjective, there is no trace of such objective substance in the whole field of perception. Indeed, only images or representations are given for consciousness and nothing else, thus, we can know nothing about their supposed ground, because this lies in the unknown beyond. Fichte even notes that concepts like object and ground are just images that have no meaning for the thing that is supposed to be not just an image. The sceptical result is that all categories are completely inapplicable to the thing in itself, because whatever predicate is attached to it can be only an image. Instead of an objective world that we know immediately with senses or at least mediately through deduction, we have a completely unknown and unknowable beyond, while the sense world seems a complete delusion.

The other side of this scepticism, Fichte thinks, is that the very categories in their isolation lead to contradictions. For instance, a thing is a subject with predicates, but it is also nothing more than a sum or unity of these predicates, thus, it is one, in order that it can be a subject, but many, because the subject is inseparable from its predicates. Furthermore, a thing becomes, thus, it becomes what it is not and is what it wasn’t, that is, it is both being and not being. The result should be, Fichte insists, that every individual, seemingly fixed category is changed to its opposite: they are turning points, fixed by reflection and abstraction, of the internal development of thinking, but by themselves they have no meaning. From the standpoint of scepticism, this means that every category is equally correct as its contradictory, in other words, that nothing is certain, not even that nothing is certain.

All reality and all truth seem to have receded, according to Fichte. Truth cannot be known sensuously, because sensation is purely subjective, but thinking cannot reach it either, since it will just annihilate all its individual categories and show them as contradictory. Objectivity remains completely unknown, Fichte concludes, but at least its relation to subjective remains: consciousness has objectivity opposed to it, but as unknown. Only certainty is the very existence of consciousness and the immediacy of the subjective appearance that we call the world. Everything beyond this must remain undecided, and insight to this undecidedness and in the completely subjective meaning of consciousness in perceiving and in thinking is the first result of sceptical investigations. Calling this result mere doubt seems too weak for it, Fichte insists, since it means nothing less than absolute destruction of all determinations in general.

A sort of speculative crisis has ensued: thinking has set itself free from all presuppositions and assumptions of empiricism and the uncritical use of categories. It has completely released itself of all particular knowledge and of every other kind of object and is, Fichte points out, for the first time occupied only with itself. It thus can only make itself the topic of its own thinking or think itself. This characterises a new standpoint, where subject and object for the first time do not fall apart, but knowing and what is known are the same. Thinking consciousness has a completely new task to immerse itself in itself and its own activities, thus perfecting itself to perfect self-knowledge, which, according to Fichte, is also the proper scientific beginning of philosophy. Indeed, this is the very task, from which Fichte began at the beginning of this work, and he now considers himself to have justified this beginning by explaining how consciousness in general can become self-knowing.

This new standpoint, which Fichte indicates as characteristic to Kant’s critical philosophy, should begin from the final result of the previous one or from the opposition of a completely subjective consciousness enclosed in itself and external objectivity that is opposed to consciousness and also purely undetermined and unknown and in itself remains closed from thinking, because every determination of it through categories generates contradictions. Fichte points out that one contradiction still remains in this sceptical standpoint, since the objective is still thought and known as absolutely negative that cannot be thought in categories. This contradiction suggests that there is still something further to say about the relation of subjective and objective, and this relation in its various modifications becomes the characteristic task of the Kantian standpoint.

First step of this investigation, Fichte begins, is to differentiate more sharply what in consciousness is subjective and what of objective origin. Here the opposition of a priori and a posteriori appears: what is universal and necessary in consciousness and something from which we cannot abstract is a priori and added as universal form to every particular content. What is a priori is thus empty form, while what is a posteriori is content filling the empty form. Yet, Fichte notes, since the form is subjective, the content becomes also subjective, when the form is applied to it.

Applying this distinction to the immediate, perceiving or intuiting consciousness, Fichte thinks, Kant found that what cannot be abstracted from perceptions are just the pure intuitions of time and space, which thus should be a priori forms and therefore completely subjective. Objectivity, on the other hand, should be in itself thought as timeless and spaceless, in other words, these subjective forms should have no meaning to it. Consciousness at the stage of perceiving is just absolute receptivity, which just takes in something external in its already subsisting forms of space and time that without it would remain empty. Perceptions are so mere external combinations of subjective and objective, where objective is known only as it appears and not as it is in itself.

In opposition to merely receptive intuition or perception, Kantianism places the free thinking or pure spontaneity that works through the material received by perception. Fichte notes that the fixed opposition of a priori and a posteriori must occur also in thinking or understanding, as Kant calls it. Thus, thinking also has its own a priori forms with the same subjective meaning – the categories. Thinking or understanding uses its categories to understand what appears in perception, while the objective underlying these appearances remains unknowable by thinking and its categories. Kantian criticism, Fichte thinks, does not then just confirm the former, sceptically negative standpoint, but even drives it further: because categories are mere subjective forms of consciousness, they cannot be categories of truth, which remains completely beyond. Thinking is thus completely limited to subjective appearances, while true as objective hides itself without any possibility of digging it up.

Thinking applied to sense experience is completely unrestricted, Fichte continues, and it can extend its individual, and therefore limited knowing in infinity and rise to evermore universal conditions. Indeed, the activity of common knowledge of experience consists of just this infinite progress. This striving to extend all conditioned knowledge and to always ground it further aims for the highest or original condition, which is not anymore also conditioned, but unconditioned. This idea of unconditioned, as Kant called it, is a completely new aspect of thinking and consciousness in general. The unconditioned is not appearance of objective in the forms of sensuousness, but completely un- and supersensuous. It also cannot be found among categories, because it is the principle or the goal, toward which all thinking in categories should infinitely move. Unconditional must therefore also belong to a new capacity of consciousness called reason, or it is the absolute content of consciousness underlying all thinking of individuals. Fichte is careful to speak of content, as unconditioned cannot anymore be grasped as objective or as just opposite to consciousness, but as completely internal and present to consciousness: knowledge of such unconditioned cannot be a product of deductions and proofs, because all conditioning, deducing and proving refers consciously or unconsciously to it as their final condition.

Fichte regards the discovery of this unconditioned as the greatest result of Kantianism, but notes at the same time that Kant’s philosophy still fails to completely understand it. Indeed, as Kant said, when categories are used for knowing unconditioned, they lose all meaning and justification or become transcendent. Thus, the negativity of the sceptical standpoint returns with full force and even seems to have been developed further: sensuousness and understanding have both just a subjective meaning, and while reason strives toward unconditioned, it cannot know this, but remains an empty, unfulfilled striving. As a final result of Kantianism remains just absolute unknowing of truth and assertion that the form of theoretical knowing or all knowing in categories changes truth immediately into just subjective.

Fichte thinks that we have not yet found the final completion of the development of consciousness, but just another turning point. Thus, he continues investigation by turning to the main concept of Kantianism or the appearance of a thing in itself in forms of subjectivity. We still have the contradiction that the thing appearing in these subjective forms covers its truth: consciousness requires the concept of appearing or self-revelation of thing in itself, because otherwise its subjective forms would remain completely empty and void, but appearing in these forms the thing becomes also subjective. Yet, Fichte remarks, the very concept of the thing in itself must also appear subjective, since it is just a thought produced by applying the category of ground. In other words, we can think of an appearance in and for consciousness only as appearing of something outside and independent of consciousness, which should be the ground for appearing, thus a thing in itself, but this thinking of a thing in itself is again just subjective necessity. Hence, Fichte concludes, the whole objectivity is just a necessary thought of subjective thinking.

The whole opposition between subjectivity and objectivity is therefore found only in and for consciousness, Fichte notes. As the thing in itself has lost all determinations, it remains a mere empty abstraction and a subjective concept of thinking for fixing this internal opposition. This new standpoint of consciousness is essentially that of the Wissenschaftslehre of the older Fichte. Consciousness is now seen as an immanent capacity of self-development, which cannot be related to any alien objectivity, because when such objectivity is thought as opposed to subjectivity, it stops being opposed to subjectivity and becomes merely represented in consciousness. Thus, Fichte concludes, every being for consciousness is only in consciousness or merely represented. The previous question about the relation of subjectivity and objectivity turns into investigation why consciousness itself requires this internal opposition to something else.

Basic form of consciousness, Fichte continues, is to comprehend oneself as an image (Bild) of something else that is imaged in the consciousness, where this imaged or content exists without the help of consciousness, while consciousness in its imaging is dependent on the content. Since consciousness understands itself as a mere image of content, it places itself in opposition to the content as not-image or being. This reciprocal opposition or this self-division in absolute unity is the universal form of consciousness that goes through all its individual moments. Thus, Fichte concludes, it is originally not an image of something else, but merely an image of itself or self-understanding as image. Consciousness can therefore never reach anything outside itself, because when supposedly knowing something objective, it still knows only its own knowing of this or sees its own seeing. Thus, consciousness divides itself always to an opposition of seeing and seen or subject and object.

Consciousness is in every given state more than it knows itself to be, Fichte states, and its true focus is to posit itself to a higher level than where it sees itself to be. Reflection has revealed this unavoidable contradiction in consciousness, since it has shown everywhere how consciousness in any individual case is higher than it knows about itself: reflection forces every given state of self-consciousness to always go over its current limitations, since every finite, individual object of consciousness and its supposed reality is driven away from it through discovery of its merely represented reality. Thus, self-consciousness is in general forced to leave the whole realm of these individual finite realities. Reflective consciousness searches in individuals eternally the being or reality for its resting point, but it also eternally finds these individuals insubstantial: it relates to being, but reflection makes it always recognise that everywhere and thus also here it knows only itself or that knowing and asserting being more likely cancels the being and makes it into merely represented. Reflection leads not just to doubt of these finite things, Fichte insists, but to their absolute annihilation, since contradiction lying in asserting their existence has been discovered and followed down to a complete idealism of reflection. Reflection disturbed the immediate unity between knowing and being, in which the naive, unreflective consciousness lived, both making them opposed and separate, and it ends this separation only by completely annihilating one member of this opposition. The individual, finite realities of empirical knowing are now comprehended only as necessary representations, and the former objectivity has resolved itself in an opposition within consciousness. Fichte calls this the apex of reflection and its highest negative result, where consciousness is the abstract knowing only oneself, where all objects appear only as products of making oppositions, grounded in the form of consciousness.

This idealism of reflection, according to Fichte, is a necessary negative moment leading to speculative knowledge. It is a sort of self-purification of consciousness from finite, which absolutely annihilates the untrue opposition of individual realities against consciousness. Next step, Fichte continues, is to note that when consciousness has in the reflective process of clarification evaporated all individual reality and objectivity, it finds in its universality as image an absolute content. In other words, when consciousness immerses into the formalism of its empty self-seeing or only imagining reality, it would be just a consciousness of nothing, that is, not-consciousness. In order to be consciousness, it should know not just formally about itself, but in knowing itself it should know about something completely other in itself or of absolutely real: consciousness presupposes an absolute content or first and at the same time final reality as the fundamental condition of its own being as knowing. Fichte insists that this fundamental basis of consciousness can be thought only as absolute being: as being, because it is not consciousness, but in consciousness, and as absolute, because it is not posited or merely represented by consciousness, as was shown of individual objectivities, but it is the root, foundation and presupposition of all consciousness. This absolute being is not objective or external to consciousness, since everything objective is just a product of opposition to subjective, but this opposition has lost here all meaning: absolute is neither objective, because it doesn’t fall into the sphere of represented finite things and realities, nor is it subjective, because it has nothing to do with the formalities of consciousness. Instead, Fichte says, absolute is simply present in consciousness.

Consciousness finds in itself or in its universality, Fichte says, that it itself is just secondary and derived or an image and revelation of unconditionally being, which the consciousness must accept as certainly as and because there in general is consciousness. Through its own existence and essence, consciousness gives simply testimonial for being of absolute, points over itself and denies being original and unconditional. While earlier reflection led to annihilating doubt, as long as consciousness was locked in the opposition of subjective and objective and grasped reality only in the form of an opposed external thing, now it only annihilates itself in the concept of absolute. Absolute, according to Fichte, is true, certain being, because consciousness in itself and through its universal essence justifies its existence: just because reflection has completed itself, it is forced to move beyond formal, empty consciousness and accept something absolute. Fichte thinks that the scientific meaning of reflection and its completion is that consciousness frees itself from dispersion over manifold illusions of sensuousness, lights upon its original essence and finds in its depths an undeniable relation to not seeming, but originally being or true, whose imaging consciousness it can only be.

A new and highest standpoint for self-knowledge of consciousness has appeared, Fichte points out. Consciousness does not receive reality from outside, through an objective world of things, which the scepticism annihilated, noting that sensuous things are mere sensuous illusions. Consciousness also does not have reality merely against itself as unknowable thing in itself, and in general, the whole opposition between subjective and objective and self-division of consciousness has vanished, because it is just absolutely imaging consciousness immanent to itself, remaining in itself and developing from itself. Consciousness is also not just empty, formal or abstract self-knowledge imaging only itself, but it relates to and presupposes in itself an absolute content or the final, undisturbed reality. This reality is simply present for consciousness, fulfils it and makes it an actual consciousness.

Absolute is the only content of consciousness, Fichte summarises, and while consciousness earlier appeared to know of many other things, this was just an opinion and actually it knew also there only of absolute as self-revealing. Worldviews that have developed at the previous levels of knowing, he thinks, are just different standpoints, in which this one and only content is comprehended. While he has earlier talked of absolute, Fichte now reveals that we might as well call it God, although proper justification of this name comes at later parts of philosophy. Everything in and for consciousness is just the revelation of God in it, and also in all individual instances of knowing, insofar as they truly are knowing and not mere opinions, is known only God in some aspect of their revelation. As knowing of God, consciousness has found the source of truth in itself, and the next step is to unfold this divine revelation. This unfolding Fichte calls speculative knowing, which is thus thinking development of the revelation of God in consciousness, which now remains the only content of philosophy and consciousness. The task of the final part of this work should be then to show in general how also the seemingly lost world of experience will be truly reborn from speculative knowledge, but not anymore as a world of finite things and realities.

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

As we embark on the topic of knowledge or Erkenntnis, Fichte notes that it is not really anything beyond perceiving or thinking, but is just perceiving and thinking filled with actual content, while earlier they were regarded as mere capacities. Thus, he explains, we again pass through the very same development we have already witnessed: we begin with indivudual perceptions and by collecting, comparing and distinguishing them try to reach thinking. Although thinking is thus the goal of knowledge, the world of perception in its qualitative infinity remains the basis of all knowledge. Perception in its purity, Fichte concludes, remains thus an ineradicable basis, towhich we must return to orient us. Although speculation then occasionally contradicts common concepts and opinions of empirical thinking and declares them unsatisfying, it should not despise pure content of perception, because this is the first source of reality for consciousness.

Fichte thus speaks for a return to the beginning or to the immediacy of consciousness, which has received now a new meaning: the immediate is the revelation of eternal. Thus, he continues, taken purely as such, without addition of any one-sided categories, immediate consciousness always has truth, and no purely grasped phenomenon is without universal meaning. True a posteriori is then, Fichte insists, always at the same time a priori, and in their essence the two are not opposed. Perception or Anschauung is thus awareness of the immediately present truth, yet, perception itself does not yet understand this, but this requires a more developed form of consciousness.

The principle of correct experience, Fichte explains, is then pure, genetic perception of the object: only when I live through the object or when it develops itself in front of me in all its conditions and connections to others or in its whole life process, have I experienced and known it. This perceptual knowing contains also the concept or the essence of the object, because what it reveals in its whole lived through appearance is not just individual and contingent, but its internal nature or universal essence. Fichte calls such a freely performed perception immersed in an object observation (Beobachtung).

First condition of observation, Fichte says, is to grasp the object in its purity. This means especially removal of categories or abstract concepts, which have been used with the erroneous presupposition that phenomena are to be explained and interpreted. Worst option, he thinks, is to inject one’s own opinion or theory into topic, because this does not ruin just a perception of an individual object, but disturbs the whole perception as a source of knowledge. Fichte considers it thus the most important step toward correct experience to keep away all untested categories, like matter, fluid, capacity, force, drive etc. as unrequired and interrupting research. If such are required for understanding a certain group of appearances, this should happen with awareness that these categories mean nothing real, but are mere fictions.

Second condition, Fichte adds, is to grasp the object in its natural development and attached to the whole complex of its surrounding phenomena. This second condition, he thinks, completes and justifies the first, isolating step: to grasp the most sharply defined characteristics of an object presupposes its foregoing isolation, which is thus essential for knowing its genesis and for bringing into consciousness the whole context of its appearance. Nothing is really isolated, Fichte suggests, thus, nothing is to be grasped as such. The main error in all scientific studies is to take an individual as a ground for other individuals, when ground lies always in a complex of interacting moments. Only by looking at the context can the reciprocal interaction of ground and consequence or their internal identity be perceived and recognised.

The investigation of the context of an individual phenomenon already presupposes, Fichte says, that we can generate this phenomenon under certain conditions and thus govern its true essence. Thus, we need to progress to experiments or creation of determined phenomena through art in order to know the law governing it. Experimenting observation is only more closely developed consciousness of what lies as immediate presupposition of all perception, Fichte thinks, because we have already seen, he reminds the reader, that all individuals manifest universal concept and the immediate manifests an eternal law or essence, so that immediate individual is only a determined expression of law. Correct method of experimenting lies in conducting experiments with what is previously known suggesting problems and defining questions that we want to direct at the nature.

Third form of experience complementing observation and experiments, according to Fichte, is testimonial (Zeugniss), by which he means experience that is reported by someone else. A testimonial widens experience over limits of a mere individual person and makes it possible to combine the experience of everyone to a holistic result. This is especially important, Fichte emphasises, because of the historical observations and experiments that we can access only through testimonials. This raises the obvious question of the historical trustworthiness of testimonials. Fichte thinks that it is not enough to ask whether a witness could know the truth and whether they were impartial and wanted to tell it, but we must also remember that falsehoods and fictive accounts are unavoidable, when facts move from one person to another, and indeed, might affect even the original statements.

Objective validity of testimonials, Fichte suggests, must be decided by testing how they fit categories and especially those of possibility and actuality. In other words, we must consider first the abstract or formal and then physical possibility of what testimonials suggest and from that proceed to consider internal or positive reliability or actuality of it. By comparing several testimonials and by combining them with their underlying context and with analogical phenomena they can be raised to historical certainty, which is justified by experience, but is still not apodictically or a priori certain, but has instead an infinity of possible grades and levels.

The testing of testimonials, Fichte thinks, is perfected only through thinking, that is, through deduction and development of categories used for testing. At this stage, it means thinking conditioned by experience or a posteriori thinking. From the standpoint of thinking, observations, experimentations and testimonials have the same fundamental failure that they can lead to individual, but not to universal truths The next task is then, Fichte notes, to satisfy universality and necessity through experience, which leads us to developments similar to those in judgements and deductions: individuals are determined according to their predicates, but as long as they are determined as mere individuals, no knowledge is reached, thus, we must discover predicates that correspond to all individuals. The problem is again that finding all possible individuals would be an infinite task, and we are thus forced to substitute unreachable allness with multiplicity and assume that where many agree with one another, the rest of or all individuals will agree also.

We are thus led again to the principle of induction that tries to count individuals and thus derive something universal, which is only searched for, but never reached, and that replaces absolute universality with mere particularity. Fichte points out quite correctly that the step from multiplicity to universality is completely unjustified, since deductions usually move from universal through particular to individual, but not from particular to universal. The imperfection of induction is also expressed, he continues, in that finding just one individual that does not have the asserted predicate cancels the whole induction. In other words, even one instance against a statement of experience points to a complete absence of concept in purely a posteriori studies that concern what is merely contingent in things. On the other hand, Fichte thinks, genetic perception mentioned earlier manages to grasp the concept in its immediate shape and self-actualisation and so cannot be overturned by any opposite instance, but further progress can just confirm and develop it.

Just like the absolute universality that induction tries to reach has been replaced by particularity, Fichte says, absolute certainty is also replaced in induction by relative probability that has an indefinite number of grades and levels according to the completeness of induction. Insofar as this grade of probability can be expressed quantitatively as a relation of numbers, it can be expressed as a mathematical probability, which, according to Fichte, is correctly applied in mere quantitative relations that deal with mere empty combinations of numbers. Then again, he at once adds, mathematical probability becomes worthless with more qualitative matters.

In Fichte’s opinion, empirically complete induction can be given only in a limited sphere, where it is not a case of a universal concept, but only of a completely relative, contingent truth: for instance, it can be justified by complete induction that all known Greek historians were very objective writers, but no concept lies behind this statement. Induction tries to justify a universal concept through collection of all individuals in their universality, but its true worth lies not in the number of collected individualities, but in studies made through genetic intuition. In other words, Fichte says, all induction is worthless, if it is not immediately complemented by the internal concept, presence of which in individuals would perfect induction.

Perfecting induction requires then raising an individual to a position of a representant of its whole genus, from which the concept could be known. In other words, Fichte concludes, induction is based on the principle of analogy: an individual should completely manifest its universal concept, thus, it should be not just individual as such, but universal presented in individual or normal individual. At the same time, we should find another individual that corresponds with the first in most of its properties and therefore also in others, that is, in all properties, which is the supposed conclusion of the analogy. Fichte notes that analogy applies the same unwarranted step from plurality to allness as induction. Hence, certainty is again replaced by probability, which is greater, the more individual properties there are, in which the compared things correspond with one another. We encounter the same fault as in the induction that the study of probability is turned into just quantitative counting of evidence, without any consideration of internal, essential properties corresponding to a concept: if two things agree on some essential properties, it is more certain to conclude to total correspondence than if they share merely contingent or even just negative determinations. Just like with induction, Fichte thinks, it is genetic perception that gives analogy internal confidence, although it is not enough for formal certainty.

Analogy and induction, Fichte suggests, are both based on a common principle that multiplicity can replace allness and relative correspondence the absolute totality, because of the concept that is present in many instances. This assumption of the presence of concept in individuals is expressly brought to consciousness in the third form of a posteriori thinking, hypothesis, where a universal concept is presupposed as the ground of a series of similar appearances. In other words, from appearances is deduced back to the assumed ground that must be characterised so, because the appearances are characterised thus. Fichte calls this an important principle of knowledge, because ground is not grasped anymore as remote and separate from appearances, but is recognised more as actualised in appearances in an immediate manner: appearances are given, but in themselves they are nothing or they present only their ground. The existence of such a ground can be deduced, Fichte thinks, because it is thus also given.

Form of hypothesis resembles externally the hypothetical deduction, Fichte points out, with the slight difference that when a proper hypothetical deduction derives from being of ground A the necessity of its consequence B, in hypothesis B is given and from this the existence and characteristics of its ground A should be deduced. Now, Fichte continues, knowledge of cause or ground implies knowledge of its effect or consequence, but not conversely, because it is an essential determination of ground that as richer and deeper or as more universal in general it cannot be exhausted by its consequence. Thus, just like induction and analogy, hypothesis is not a proper deduction, and again only the internal presence of ground completes the lacking formal evidence: in genetically grasped characteristics of a series of recurring appearances lies also their ground. This internal relationship of appearances to their concept or ground gives the principle of a hypothetical method that the hypothetical assumption of the characteristics of the ground should not overreach the limits that lie in the appearances themselves.

An immediate result of this principle, according to Fichte, is that nothing is to be more carefully avoided with hypotheses than intrusion of completely unfounded categories. Fichte derives from this result individual rules that logic usually states about hypothesis, starting with the rule that hypothesis should be in full harmony with the appearances to be explained, in other words, that the ground must show itself as their universal concept. Furthermore, hypothesis should be as simple as possible, because the more one has to assume further determinations – this would be the reprehended intrusion of other categories – the more improbable it becomes. Generally, Fichte notes, explanatory principles are not to be multiplied without a special reason, thus, all additional hypotheses are to be banned. These rules of logic, Fichte thinks, state just what he earlier pointed out in a more general fashion: the more the hypothesis distances itself from the character of the given appearances, the less analogous it is to their concept and thus the more condemnable. Hence, Fichte concludes, instead of clever conjectures it is often better to openly acknowledge that for certain appearances the correct empirical context has not yet been found and that they still are too isolated from analogous appearances to comprehend them through a hypothesis of their ground.

When empirical thinking has worked through the whole field of given with the methods of induction, analogy and hypothesis, Fichte thinks, it has tested all categories in individuals and thus perfectly brought them to consciousness in concrete shape. In other words, it thinks according to these forms or categories that are given, and what it thinks with the categories is something equally given or individual objects of its perception: in the forms it has its formal, and in the objects its qualitative basis and presupposition. The next step, Fichte continues, is to become aware that the forms of thinking are universal compared to what is thought or variable content, which therefore appears external to these forms and derived from elsewhere. It is an essential consequence of this standpoint that it is possible to completely abstract from content and leave behind pure and thus also empty forms.

Fichte calls this new standpoint philosophical, because it has the task to free thinking from its external, empirical content and immerse itself in its pure content or categories. This standpoint handles the categories still in an empirical manner, since it tries to grasp categories and externally order them only as they are found.

Fichte starts going through the characteristic signs of this standpoint. Firstly, it assumes that the opposition between content and form is completely essential and unavoidable. Form as “empty” requires content it has to find elsewhere, while content is to be worked through to fit form that is something originally alien to it. Thus, form and content do not intermingle one another reciprocally, although perception immediately presupposes this intermingling, where form would create from itself its own content and similarly content would already have its own form. Instead, the stated sundering of both can be overcome only in individual cases by applying form to some content and so finding filling to it, while content receives through this connection to form an understandable shape.

Just like the opposition between form or categories and their content remains unavoidable in this standpoint, Fichte insists, categories also remain fixed in their differences toward one another. Categories are used for thinking given content, that is, some category is related to this content and from its application is discovered a predicate in the content beside other predicates, and the sum of these applications of individual categories to a topic is its truth. Here, Fichte suggests, categories remain opposed to one another and are not determinations moving constantly to each other. This fixed opposition of categories is for Fichte the essential characteristic of both empirical knowledge and dogmatic philosophy. It thus becomes a particular task to separate the categories from the content and present them as completely ordered abstractions: a task of both ordinary logic the empirical psychology. Although Fichte takes this task to be of the highest importance, he thinks that both logic and psychology handle it in an unsatisfying manner, because they remain with a mere empirically discovered and external ordering of categories that might be correct in its internal relations, but has not been discovered and even less proven scientifically.

Finally, Fichte states, this standpoint develops consciousness of a deeper opposition that perfects the division of this empirical standpoint and drives it to further, properly speculative studies. This is the opposition between subjective and objective. Form or thinking engages with externally given content and is thus only mine, internal and originally locked in the realm of consciousness – subjective. Content, on the other hand, is external to thinking – objective. Subjective and objective belong then to two distinct worlds, and neither should have anything in common with the other. Objectivity should originally be foreign to categories and it is in itself given without requiring categories or without any internal relation to thinking. Thinking, on the other hand, is in itself empty and formal and therefore requires objectivity, which gives it filling, application and meaning. When thinking works its originally subjective forms into objectivity, it should receive truth, but this truth is valid only in the context of thinking or it is a subjective truth. The result is then a complete separation of both fields. Fichte considers it a fact that despite this opposition, the subjectivity and the objectivity correspond to one another completely, and suggests that this fact requires explanation and becomes so a topic of a proper philosophical study.

First answer to this problem is sensualism, which is fixated to lowest form of consciousness or receptivity, without the ability to bring into consciousness the hidden spontaneity or thinking. Fichte calls it the roughest kind of philosophy (“first philosophy”), because it is derived from the most immediate and lowest viewpoint of consciousness or perceiving. Therefore its critique, he thinks, is actually performed by consciousness itself, when it develops into thinking. At the standpoint of sensualism, there is nothing else actual and certain, but sensuous individuality, while thinking and all universal knowledge and necessary truth seems only a product of abstraction, invented and completely subjective. We learn bit by bit to separate universal concepts from given, and this is thinking that thus shows all its supposedly a priori laws and determinations as derived from repeated observations and thus from summarised experience. Proper a priori as a subjective form is not present, and the whole opposition of a priori and a posteriori has fully disappeared, because there isn’t anymore a priori as independent from a posteriori.

According to sensualist philosophy, Fichte states, consciousness or soul is no independent power and does not develop from itself, but is a mere mirror or receptivity for external things. Consciousness is affected by sensations, and while Fichte thinks he has shown how sensations as the first awakener of self-consciousness thus develop its self-activity or spontaneity, in the sensualist viewpoint all is locked in the lowest state and sensation is the only content and the only reality of consciousness, without understanding of the proper character of perception. Sensualism remains in the most superficial reflection that external things impress through sensations images of themselves in the soul and that the soul is a mere empty capacity to receive such impressions (tabula rasa of Locke), and the capacity to reflect explains these sensations as the only truth and source of all knowledge.

The next step, Fichte says, is to show that according to sensualism there can be no universal and necessary knowledge, because what has been collected through mere abstraction from repeated observations can never receive a character of a universal and apodictic necessity. Fichte singles out Hume as the discoverer of this fault, since what appears as universal and necessary was for him just an assumption from mere habit that in its essential character is as contingent as any individual knowledge. Hume made us aware of the unsatisfactoriness of the sensualist standpoint without getting over it. Still, because thinking of universal and apodictically certain remains completely impossible from the standpoint of sensualism, the standpoint itself is cancelled.

The whole foundation of empirical knowledge and the philosophy of experience has been cancelled, because both presuppose thinking of things according to categories, Fichte points out. On the other hand, it is stated that categories and thinking with them do not generally reach any truth that is here understood as interior of objectivity, which remains hidden and unknowable for consciousness, because this can grasp only appearances or exterior of objectivity. The result is that knowledge vanishes into negative. Categories have no truth, because they are just subjective abstractions, while sensations also allow us to know only the external surface of things and not their kernel or their true hidden properties. Nothing can be known and nothing is true for consciousness: scepticism is the next philosophical standpoint Fichte will turn to.