German Idealism's Picture
of the World
Idealism as an Awakening
of the Soul: Johann Gottlieb Fichte
In his addresses on The Basic
Characteristics of Our Present Age and To the German Nation,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte seeks to portray the spiritual forces working
in the evolution of mankind. Through the thoughts he brings to expression
in these addresses, he imbues himself with the feeling that the motive
force of his world view streams from the innermost being of the German
people (Volksart). Fichte believes he is expressing the thoughts
that the soul of the German people must express if it wants to reveal
itself from the core of its spirituality. The way in which Fichte struggled
for his world view shows how this feeling could live in his soul. It
must seem important to someone observing a thinker to investigate the
roots from which the fruit of his thoughts have sprung; these roots
work in the depths of his soul and are not expressed directly in his
thought-worlds, yet they live as the motive forces within these
thought-worlds.
Fichte
once expressed his conviction that the kind of world view one has depends
upon the kind of person one is. He did so out of his awareness that
all the life forces of his own personality had to bring forth —
as its natural and obvious fruit — the conceptually strong heights
of his world view. Not many people want to get to the heart of this world
view because they consider what they find there to be thoughts —
estranged from the world — into which only “professional”
thinkers need penetrate. This feeling is understandable in someone without
philosophical training who approaches Fichte's thoughts as they
appear in his works. Still, for someone who has the possibility of entering
into the full life of these thoughts, it is not strange to imagine that
a time will come when one will be able to recast Fichte's ideas
into a form comprehensible to anyone who wants, out of life itself, to
think about the meaning of this life. These ideas could then be accessible
even to the simplest human heart (Gemüt), however far
removed from so-called “philosophical thinking.” For, these
ideas have in fact received their philosophical form from the character
assumed by the evolution of thought in thinking circles at the turn
of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century; but these ideas get their
life from experiences that are present in the soul of every human being,
To be sure, the time has not yet arrived when it is fully possible to
recast Fichte's thoughts from the language of the philosophy of
his time into a universally human form of expression. Such things become
possible only through the gradual progress made by certain ways of
picturing things in man's spiritual life. Just as Fichte himself was
obliged to carry his soul experiences to the heights of what one usually
calls “abstract thinking” — and finds cold and estranged
from life — so today also it is only possible to a very limited
degree to carry these soul experiences down from those heights.
From his early
youth until his sudden death while still in the prime of life, Fichte
struggled for ever new forms of expression for these soul experiences.
In all his struggles, one basic cognitive impulse is evident. Within
man's own soul Fichte wishes to find a living element in which
the human being grasps not only the basic force of his own existence,
but in which there can also be known — in its essential being
— what weaves and works in nature and in everything else outside
him. In a drop of water, relative to the ocean, one has only a tiny
sphere. But if one knows this little sphere in its character as water,
then in this knowledge one also knows the whole ocean in its character
as water. If something can be discovered in the being of man that can
be experienced as a revelation of the innermost weaving of the world,
then one may hope, through deepened self-knowledge, to advance to world
knowledge.
Long
before Fichte's time, the development of mankind's view
of the world had already taken the path that proceeds from this feeling
and this hope. But Fichte was placed at a significant point in this
evolution. One can read in many places how he received Ws most direct
impetus from the world views of Spinoza and Kant. But the way he finally
acted in understanding the world through the essential nature of his
personality becomes most visible when he is contrasted with the thinker
who came forth just as much from the thinking of the Romance peoples
as Fichte did from the German: Descartes (1596–1650). In Descartes
there already comes to light — out of the feeling and hope described
above — the way a thinker seeks certainty in world knowledge by
discovering a solid point in self-knowledge. Descartes takes doubt in
all world knowledge as his starting point. He says to himself: The world
in which I live reveals itself within my soul, and from its phenomena
I form mental pictures for myself about the course of things. But what
is my guarantee that these mental pictures of mine really tell me anything
about the working and weaving of the world in its course? Could it not
be the case that my soul does indeed receive certain impressions from
the things of the world, but that these impressions are so far removed
from the things themselves that in these impressions nothing of the
meaning of the world is revealed to me? In the face of this possibility
can I say that I know this or that about the world? One sees how, for
a thinker in this ocean of doubt, all knowledge can come to seem like
a subjective dream, and how only one conviction can force itself
upon him: that man can know nothing. But in the case of a person for
whom the motive force of thinking has become as alive as the motive
force of hunger is in the body: for him the conviction that man can
know nothing means for the soul what starvation means for the body.
All the innermost impressions about the health of one's soul,
in a higher sense, right up to feeling the salvation of one's
soul (Seelenheil) are connected with this.
It is
within the soul itself that Descartes finds the point upon which he
can base conviction: The mental pictures form for myself of the world's
course are no dream; they live a life that is a part in the life of
the whole world. Even though I can doubt everything, there is one
thing I cannot doubt, for to express doubt in it would belie
my own words. For is it not certain that when I give myself over to
doubt I am thinking? I could not doubt if I did not think.
Therefore I cannot possibly doubt my own experience in thinking. If
I wanted, through doubt, to kill thinking: it would just rise up living
again out of the doubt. My thinking lives, therefore; it does not stand
in some dream world; it stands in the world of being (Sein).
If I could believe that everything else, even my own body, gave me only
the illusion of being, still my thinking does not deceive me.
Just as true as it is that I think, it is true that I am, insofar
as I think. It was from sentiments such as these that Descartes'
“I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum) rang
out into the world. And whoever has an ear for such things will also
hear the power of this statement resounding in all subsequent thinkers
until Kant.
Only
with Fichte do its reverberations cease. If one enters deeply into his
thought-world, if one seeks to experience with him his struggles for
a world view, then one feels how he too is seeking world knowledge in
self-knowledge; but one has the feeling that Descartes' statement,
“I think, therefore I am” could not be the rock upon which
Fichte, in his struggles, could believe himself secure against the waves
of doubt that can turn man's mental pictures into an ocean of
dreams. Looking at what Fichte wrote in his book
The Vocation of Man
(published in 1800), one feels how his ability to doubt lives
in a very different part of the soul than with Descartes: “Nowhere
is there anything enduring, neither outside me nor within me; there
is only unceasing change. Nowhere do I know of any being, not even my
own. There is no being. I myself do not know at all
and do not exist. Pictures exist: they are all that there is,
and they know about themselves in the manner of pictures — pictures
that float past without anything there for them float past; pictures
that relate to each other through pictures of pictures; pictures without
anything pictured in them, without significance and purpose. I myself
am one of these pictures; no, I am not even that; I am only a confused
picture of the pictures. — All reality transforms itself into a
strange dream, without a life that is dreamed about, and without a spirit
who is dreaming; transforms itself into a dream that is connected with a
dream about itself, My perceiving is the dream; my thinking
— the source of all being and all reality that I imagine to myself,
the source of my being, my power, my aims — is a dream
about that dream,” These thoughts do not arise in Fichte's
soul as the ultimate truth about existence, He does not wish, as one
might suppose, really to regard the world as a dream configuration,
He wants only to show that all the usual arguments for the certainty
of knowledge cannot withstand penetrating examination, and that these
arguments do not give one the right to regard the ideas one forms about
the world as anything other than dream configurations. And Fichte cannot
allow that any kind of certainty about being is present within thinking.
Why should I say, “I think, therefore I am” since, after all,
if I am living in an ocean of dreams, my thinking can be nothing more
than “a dream about a dream”? For Fichte, what penetrates and
gives reality to my thoughts about the world must come from a completely
different source than mere thinking about the world.
Fichte
claims that the distinctive spirit (Art) of the German people
lives in his world view. This thought makes sense when one brings before
one's soul precisely his picture of that path to self-knowledge
which he seeks in contradistinction to Descartes. This path is what
Fichte felt to be German; and as a traveler on this path, he
differs from Descartes, who takes the spiritual path of the Romance
peoples. Descartes seeks a sound basis for self-knowledge; he expects
to find this sound basis somewhere. In thinking he believes he has found
it. Fichte expects nothing from this kind of search. For, no matter
what he might find, why should it afford a greater certainty than anything
already found? No, along this path of investigation there is absolutely
nothing to be found. For, this path can lead only from picture to
picture; and no picture one encounters can guarantee, out of itself,
its being. Therefore, to begin with, one must entirely abandon
the path through pictures, and return to it again only after gaining
certainty from some other direction.
With
respect to the statement “I think, therefore I am,” one
need only say something that seems quite simple if one wants to refute
it. This is after all the way with so many thoughts a person incorporates
into his world view: they are not dispelled by elaborate objections
but rather by noting simple facts. One does not undervalue the thinking
power of a personality like Descartes by confronting him with a simple
fact. The fable of the egg of Columbus is true forever.
[1]
And it is also true that the statement “I think, therefore I
am” simply shatters upon the fact of human sleep. Every sleep, which
interrupts thinking, shows — not, indeed, that there is no being in
thinking — but that in any case “I am, even when I am not
thinking.” Therefore, if only thinking is the source for
being, then nothing could guarantee the being of soul states
in which thinking has ceased. Although Fichte did not express this train
of thought in this form, one can still definitely say: The power lying
within these simple facts worked — unconsciously — in his
soul and kept him from taking a path like that taken by Descartes.
Fichte
was led onto a completely different path by the basic character of his
sense of things. His life reveals this basic character from childhood
on. One need only let some pictures from his life arise before one's
soul to see that this is so. One significant picture that rises up vividly
from his childhood is this. Johann Gottlieb is seven years old. Until
this time he was a good student. In order to reward the boy's
industriousness, his father gives him a book of legends,
The Horned Siegfried.
The boy is completely taken with this book. He neglects his duties
somewhat. He becomes aware of this about himself. One day
his father sees him throwing
The Horned Siegfried
into the brook. The boy is attached to the book with his whole heart;
but how can the heart be allowed to keep something that diverts one from
one's duty? Thus the feeling is already living unconsciously
in the young Fichte that the human being is in the world as an expression
of a higher order, which descends into his soul not through his interest
in one thing or another, but through the path by which he acknowledges
duty. Here one can see the impulse behind Fichte's stance
toward certainty about reality. Perceptual experiences are not what
is certain for man, but rather what rises up livingly in the soul in
the same way that duty reveals itself.
Another
picture from Fichte's life: The boy is nine years old. A landowner
near his father's village comes into town one Sunday to hear the
minister's sermon. He arrives too late. The sermon is over. People
remember that nine-year-old Johann Gottlieb retains sermons in his soul
so well that he can completely reproduce them. They fetch him. The boy,
in his little farmer's smock, appears. He is awkward at first;
but then presents the sermon in such a way that one can see that what
lived in the sermon had utterly filled his soul; he does not merely
repeat words; he speaks out of the spirit of the sermon that lives within
him entirely as his own experience. This ability lived in the boy: to
let light up in one's own self what approaches this self from
the world. This was, after all, the ability to experience the spirit
of the outer world in one's own self. This was the ability to
find within the strengthened self the power to uphold a world view.
A brightly-lit, evolving stream of personality leads from such boyhood
experiences to a lecture by Fichte — then professor in Jena —
heard and described by the gifted scientist Steffens. In the course
of his lecture Fichte calls upon his listeners: “Think about the
wall,” His listeners made every effort to think about the wall.
After they had done this for a while, Fichte's next demand follows:
“And now think about the one who thought about the wall,”
What striving for a direct and living relationship between one's
own soul life and that of one's listeners! What pointing toward
an inner soul activity to be undertaken immediately — not merely
to stimulate reflection on verbal communications, but rather to awaken
a life element slumbering in the souls of his listeners so that these
souls will attain a state that changes their previous relationship to
the course of the world.
Such
actions reflect Fichte's whole way of clearing the path for a
world view. Unlike Descartes, he does not seek an experience of thinking
that will establish certainty. He knows that in such seeking there is
no finding. In such seeking one cannot know whether one's discovery
is dream or reality. Therefore do not launch forth in such seeking.
Strengthen yourself instead, by waking up. What the soul experiences
when it wants to press forward out of the field of ordinary reality
into that of true reality must be like an awakening. Thinking does not
guarantee the being of the human “I.” But within
this “I” there lies the power to awaken itself to being.
Every time the soul senses itself as “I” — in full
consciousness of the inner power that becomes active in doing so —
a process occurs that presents itself as the soul awakening itself.
This self-awakening is the fundamental being (Grundwesenheit)
of the soul. And in this power to awaken itself there lies the certainty
of the being (Sein) of the human soul. Let the soul
go through dream states and states of sleep: one grasps the power of the
soul to awaken itself out of every dream and every sleep by transforming
the mental picture of its awakening into the image of the soul's fundamental
power. Fichte felt that the eternity of the human soul lies in its becoming
aware of its power to awaken itself. From this awareness came statements
like these: “The world I was just marveling at disappears before
my gaze and sinks away. In all the fullness of life, order, and growth
that I see in it, this world is still only the curtain — by which
an infinitely more perfect world is hidden from me — and the seed
from which this more perfect world is to evolve. My belief goes behind
this curtain and warms and enlivens this seed. My belief does not see
anything definite, but expects more than it can grasp here below or
will ever be able to grasp in the realm of time. — This is how
I live and this is how I am; this is how I am unchangeably — firm
and complete for all eternity; for, this being is not taken on from
outside; it is my own one true being and existence.”
(Vocation of Man)
When
one looks at the whole way Fichte approaches life and at how permeated
all his actions and thinking are with an attitude friendly to life and
fostering of life, one will not be tempted to regard a passage like
this as proof of a direction in thought hostile to life, that turns
away from immediate and vigorous life on this earth. In a letter from
the year 1790 there is a sentence that sheds significant light on Fichte's
positive attitude toward life, precisely in relation to his thoughts
about immortality: “The surest means of convincing oneself of
a life after death is to lead one's present life in such a way
that one can wish an afterlife:”
For Fichte,
within the self-awakening inner activity of the human soul there lies
the power of self-knowledge. And within this activity he also finds
the place in the soul where the spirit of the world reveals itself in
the spirit of the soul. In Fichte's world view the world-will
weaves and works in all existence; and within the willing of its own
being the soul can live this world-will within itself. The grasping
of life's duties — which are experienced differently in
the soul than are the perceptions of the senses and of one's thoughts
— is the most immediate example of how the world-will pulses through
the soul. True reality must be grasped in this way; and all other reality,
even that of thinking, receives its certainty through the light shed upon
it by the reality of the world-will revealing itself within the soul. This
world-will drives the human being to his activity and deeds. As a
sense-perceptible being, man must translate into reality in a
sense-perceptible way what the world-will demands of him. But how could
the deeds of one's will have a real existence if they had to seek this
existence in a dream world? No, the world cannot be a dream, because in
this world the deeds of one's will must not merely be dreamed; they
must be translated into reality.
Insofar
as the “I” awakens itself in its experience of the world-will,
it attains firm supports for certainty about its being. Fichte
expressed himself on this point in his
Vocation of Man:
“Without any instrument weakening its expression, within a sphere
completely similar in nature to itself, my will must work absolutely in
and through itself: as reason it must work upon reason and as something
spiritual upon something spiritual; it must work in a sphere for which
my will nevertheless does not provide the laws of life, activity, and
continuity; this sphere has them in itself; my will has therefore to work
upon self-active reason. But self-active reason is will. The laws
of the supersensible world, accordingly, would be a will ... That
lofty will, accordingly, does not separated from the rest of the world
of reason — take a path all its own. There is a spiritual bond
between this will and all finite reasonable beings, and this will itself
is the spiritual bond of the world of reason ... I hide my face before
you and lay my hand on my mouth. I can never see how you are for yourself
nor how you appear to yourself, just as certainly as I can never become
yourself. After living through a thousand times a thousand spiritual
worlds, I will still grasp you just as little as now, within this hut of
the earth. — What I grasp, through my mere grasping of it, becomes
something finite; and this, even through infinite intensification and
enhancement, can never be transformed into something infinite. You are
different from the finite not in degree but in kind. Through that
intensification they make you only into a greater and ever great man;
but never into God, the Infinite, Who cannot be measured.”
Fichte strove for a
world view that pursues all being into the very roots of what lives in
the world, and that learns to know the meaning of what lives in the
world: learns to know it through the human soul's living with the
world-will that pulses through everything and that creates nature for
the purpose, in nature, of translating into reality a spiritually moral
order as though in an outer body. Such a world view seemed to Fichte to
spring from the character of the German people. To him a world view seemed
un-German that did not “believe in spirituality and in the
freedom of this spirituality,” and that did not “want
the eternal further development of this spirituality and freedom.”
In his view, “Whoever believes in a standstill, a regression, or a
circle dance, or even sets a dead nature at the helm of world
rulership” goes not only against any more deeply penetrating
knowledge, but also against the essential nature of what is truly
German.
Notes:
1.
The problem was to stand an egg on end.
Columbus's table companions tried to do this without breaking
the egg and of course failed. Columbus was more realistic. He flattened
one end of the egg. – Ed.
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