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.
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