Last time, we saw how the pure being of the beginning of ontology was determined to something and then opposed with others. Fichte continues by noting that in this opposition is also expressed the absolute relation of the opposed. In other words, he is suggesting that opposition isn’t the final truth, but at least implies that all positing of something and putting the something against another is possible only within the common sphere where both are reciprocally related. Thus, both previous categories develop into a third: affirmative positing and negative opposing are just one-sided expressions for positing or placing in a relationship. Fichte insists that this relatedness is the only true Ur-category, while the two first Ur-categories are just its interconnected moments or constituents. In other words, all determining is at the same time opposing, while this is just placing in a relation. Thus, Fichte notes, while earlier the original activity of thinking was seen to hover between affirmation and denial, we now find out that within this hovering movement, thinking relates the affirmative and negative members reciprocally to one another. In this sphere or space of relations, he declares, all thinking moves. Thus, all further categories and even all determined thoughts could be seen as mere further development of this Ur-category of relatedness.
Fichte describes the first three Ur-categories also with terms borrowed from his father: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. What he stated could then also be expressed by saying that the thesis and the antithesis led to synthesis, which is then something that could be discovered dialectically in all further oppositions. We thus find Fichte discovering the method of his ontology, which begins by noting how every position or thesis is one-sided and limited by its opposite of antithesis. He also points out that this is where the unspeculative thinking stops: it either fixates on one of the opposites, ignoring the other, or then it becomes aware of the opposition, but then just sceptically denies both positions. On the other hand, speculative thinking tries to solve these oppositions, even if it is not always aware of doing this or works only instinctually. Thus, speculative thinking should lead to the unification of opposites in something higher.
Fichte calls the result of uniting something (Etwas) synthetically with its opposite as this (Dieses). Fichte’s point appears to be that by determining something and relating it to other we can point out to it as one specific individual among many individuals, all of which are in the same space of relation and differentiation. Thus, he admits, opposition has not completely vanished, but the reciprocal exclusion of individuals goes on to infinity: even if we literally united two individuals together into a unity, this unified individual would have then to be determined in comparison to yet another individual etc. Fichte promises to return to this point later and continues to point out that every individual thus always reflects the sum of all individuals, because being determined by its relation to the other individuals, just like this sum or “all” reflects each single individual. This original synthesis of everything being in everything will then be developed further in the later parts of the ontology, he reveals, and should find its final form in the relation of the original personality or God to infinity of creations.
An important conclusion of the ontology so far, Fichte thinks, is that everything that is is determined as an individual. Thus, universal abstractions are not in the proper sense of the word, but are at most the unactual ontological foundation of the individual. This conclusion, together with the earlier one that everything reflects everything else, are, according to Fichte, truths that are just implicitly present in the Ur-categories and that must be developed in more detail through the course of the ontology. Then again, he assures us, if the development is done by following the dialectical method of mediation of opposites, the result cannot be different, no matter who is using this method: Fichte’s philosophy should just bring about what is already contained in its first principles.
Although Fichte adopts the three-level schema so often used in the German philosophy of his times, the origin of which he sees in Kantian idea that in all triplets of categories the third is the synthesis of the first two, but especially in the first presentation of his father’s Wissenschaftslehre, he warns the reader that by itself it does not exhaust the whole ontology. Instead, Fichte says, it is just the most empty or most abstract expression of the truth that will be found again in all more detail later. Only the highest synthesis will be the final truth, and each previous synthesis, including the original Ur-synthesis, are just more or less abstract preconditions of the highest synthesis.
Fichte recapitulates that the original being, which was still nothing, was determined as something and thus as a certain individual against other individuals. Now, in the category structure presented in a summarised fashion in his theory of knowledge, Fichte continued forward to space and time as the forms of perception or intuition, because we determine individuals through their positions in space and time. Ontology, on the other hand, should be involved only with pure thinking, not yet touched by perception and intuition, and thus this way of proceeding should not be open to it. Instead, Fichte continues by noting that describing an individual merely as this does not really tell us what it is and how it is different from other individuals: it is both distinguished and also not distinguished from them. Tantalisingly, Fichte just suggests that this contradiction leads us to the notion of quantity, but his point might be that at this stage the division of the infinity of everything into individuals is completely arbitrary: we might as well say that a set of individuals were combined instead of distinguished. As Hegel had already pointed out, such an arbitrary assignment of limits characterises in fact quantities, since e.g. a length of 6 metres could be divided into two lengths of 3 metres, but also to lengths of 4 and 2 metres.
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