CHAPTER XI
J. G. FICHTE’S OPTIMISTIC-ETHICAL WORLD-VIEW
Speculative philosophy and Gnosticism
THE vision of an optimistic-ethical philosophy cast in one mould hovers in front of speculative philosophy, which hopes to discover the meaning of the world by the most direct route. It will have nothing to do with analysing the phenomena of the universe in order to deduce its nature from them. It proceeds deductively, not inductively. In pure abstract thinking it hopes to learn for itself how the real world has evolved out of the notion of Being. It is imaginative nature-philosophy in a logical dress.
The right to deal with the world in this fashion is derived by speculative thought from the results of the theory of knowledge, according to which the world as we observe it is more or less our own representation of it. We have, somehow or other, a creative share in its coming into existence. It follows that the logic which is the rule with the finite ego is to be conceived as an emanation of that which holds good with the Absolute. The individual is therefore entitled to disclose in his own thinking the motives and the process of the emanation of the empirical world out of the notion of Being. Speculation, or in other words constructive logic, is the key to the secret door into knowledge of the world.
Generically, speculative German philosophy is essentially related to the Græco-Oriental Gnosticism, which in the first centuries of the Christian era advances its views concerning the emergence of the sensible world from the world of pure Being._(_43_)_ The Gnostic systems aim at establishing a world-view [pg 126] of redemption. They concentrate on the question how the spiritual individualities which find themselves in the material world came there, and how they can return from it into the world of pure Being. Speculative German philosophy on the other hand tries to obtain such a knowledge of the world as shall give a meaning to the activities of the spiritual individualities in the world. Speculative thinking at the beginning of the Christian era is dualistic and pessimistic; that at the beginning of the nineteenth is monistic and optimistic. In both cases, however, the method of obtaining the world-view is the same.
Among the representatives of the speculative philosophy the most eminent are: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). It is only Fichte and Hegel, however, who produce world-views with a characteristic stamp of their own. Schelling gets no further than a nature-philosophy, and stands almost completely aside from the struggle for an optimistic-ethical world-view with which his age is occupied. Kept in a perpetual state of flux, his thinking makes use of all possible starting-points one after another and is now more concerned with natural science, now more akin to Spinoza’s thought, and now to Christian. He never makes a definite, conscious attempt to found an ethic.
Fichte’s speculative founding of an ethic and of optimism
Fichte begins as the antipodes of Spinoza._(_44_)_ He aims at extracting from the universe a confession that it is a purely [pg 127] optimistic ethical one, by thinking Kant’s thoughts out to a conclusion.
Kant, according to him, made the mistake of not bringing his two discoveries, viz. epistemological idealism and the ethic of the categorical imperative into that inward connexion with one another in which they really stand.
What is the meaning of the fact that the moral law and the sensible world both become actual in me? That is the starting-point of Fichte’s philosophizing.
Through the categorical imperative I experience that my particular ego is a self-determined will to activity. Correspondingly, every “thing in itself” which I assume to exist behind phenomena as the real on which they are based, is similarly a self-determined will to activity. The essential nature of infinite Being also can consist of nothing else. The universe is, therefore, the phenomenal form of an infinite, self-determined will to activity.
Why does the absolute Ego appear as a phenomenon in a sensible world? Why is Being revealed as Becoming? If I understand this, I have comprehended the meaning of the world and of my own life.
Now the absolute Ego, because it is infinite will to activity cannot persist in being merely an Ego. It establishes a non-Ego to be a limit to itself in order that it may again and again overcome it, and thereby become conscious of itself as will to activity. This proceeding takes place amid the multiplicity of finite rational beings. In their power of intuition the sensible world becomes actual, and in their overcoming of it they recognize a duty which makes itself mysteriously felt within them and unites them with the world-spirit. This is the meaning of the philosophy of the identity of Ego and non-Ego.
It is not only, then, that the world exists merely in my mental creation of it: it is, further, only produced in me in order that I may have something on which my will to fulfilment of duty can exercise itself. The phenomena of becoming and disappearing which I project out of myself [pg 128] exist only that I may through them comprehend myself as an ethical being. In this way epistemological idealism and the categorical imperative, when they act together and one climbs on the shoulders of the other, can look behind the curtain which hides the secret of the world.
Kant protests against the idea that Fichte’s system is to be considered the completion of his philosophy. As a matter of fact, however, Fichte does with ingenious art continue the lines which were begun in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ and the _Critique of the Practical Reason_, and think out the ideas of the philosopher of Königsberg to a self-contained world- and life-affirming ethical world-view. He presents them in a generally intelligible form in _The Destiny of Man_, published in 1800. This book is one of the most powerful documents produced by the struggle for an ethical world-view.
Fichte gives a content to the abstract, absolute duty of Kant, making it consist in this, that man, as the instrument of the ever-active absolute Ego, assigns to himself the destiny of working with the latter “to bring the whole sensible world under the sovereignty of reason.”
Since his fundamental moral principle possesses a content, Fichte is able to deduce particular demands from it, but that content is so general and vague that the code of duty which is drawn out from it has but little vital force. Nothing can really be got out of this fundamental principle beyond the demand that man shall in every situation of life fulfil the duties which from time to time fall to him as a result of his destiny of having to help forward the sovereignty of reason over nature. Fichte therefore distinguishes the general duties which man, as such, has to fulfil, and the special ones which are incumbent on him according to his natural gifts, his social position, and his profession. The latter are emphasized as specially important.
By defining ethics as activity which aims at subjecting the sensible world to reason, Fichte gives a cosmic formulation to the utilitarian ethic of rationalism, and thus [pg 129] produces a comprehensive and deep foundation for the ethical enthusiasm which was a discovery of his time. In this matter also he carries through something which hovered before the mind of Kant.
Thereby he opposes the representatives of the popular philosophy of the Illumination, and in a polemical pamphlet he criticizes very severely Christoph Friedrich Nicolai. At bottom, however, the only reproach he can level at them is that they wish to go on housing ethics and belief in progress in the naïve world-view arrived at by the healthy human reason instead of accepting both of them from the world-view produced by the union of epistemological idealism and the categorical imperative. To persist in imperfect rationalism when the perfect has been made a reality by Kant and himself is, in his opinion, a crime against truth. To him the beginning of wisdom is insight into the paradox that “consciousness of the world of actuality springs from our need of action and not, _vice versâ_, our need of action from our consciousness of the world.”
The spirit of Fichte’s world-view, then, is completely that of rationalism, only that it believes it has found itself at home with him in the real nature of Being, and now comes forward with still stronger conviction and a still more burning enthusiasm. In Fichte’s writings, men are positively driven with the lash to work for the improvement of the world. With impressive pathos he teaches them to obey the inner voice which urges them on to activity, and indicates to them their definite duty whatever may be the special circumstances of their existence, and to recognize in so doing that they are thus fulfilling the highest, and indeed the only destiny of their lives.
It is as the result of this inner urge to activity that we long for a better world than the one which we see around us, and belief in that better world is the food by which we live. Fichte makes confession of unbounded optimism. “All those outbreaks of untamed force before which human power is annihilated, those devastating hurricanes, [pg 130] those earthquakes, those volcanic eruptions, can be nothing else than the last wrestlings of the wild mass of nature against the uniformly progressive, purposive, and life-promoting course to which, in opposition to its own tendencies, it is being compelled.” . . . “Nature is to become to us more and more transparent and capable of examination even to its innermost secret, and enlightened human power, armed with its own inventions, is destined to master it without trouble, and then to exploit peacefully its once for all made conquest.”_(_45_)_ Here Fichte gives us the triumphant pagan of the belief in progress which the spirit of the modern age, that lives on the achievements of its knowledge and power, has been composing since the Renaissance. He is as thoroughly convinced as the staunchest rationalist that nature is the buffalo which has remained refractory so long, but will at last be brought beneath the yoke.
That mankind will perfect itself and reach a condition of unbroken peace, is to him as certain as the perfection that nature will one day arrive at. At present, it is true, we are in a period of arrested progress with temporary setbacks, but when this is past, and all useful things which have been discovered at one end of the world, get known to and distributed to all, then mankind, using its powers in complete co-operation and marching forward in step, will raise itself uninterruptedly, without arrest of progress or setback, to a culture of which we can form no conception.
To the State Fichte assigns in his early writings a not very important _rôle_, but in his later ones a great one. In _The Foundations of the Law of Nature_ (_Grundlage des Naturrechts_) (1796), it is for him only the maintainer of law and order. In his work _The Complete Commercial State_ (_Der geschlossene Handelsstaat_), which appeared in 1800, he allows it to organize industry and to take over social duties. In his _Addresses to the German Nation_ (_Reden an die deutsche Nation_, 1808), he makes it a moral educator and a protector of the virtue of humanity.
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The man who, with the help of epistemological idealism, has made his way through to the higher rationalism, is safe from losing his optimism, even though he goes through the cruellest experiences. He has grasped the fact that the sensible world is only the limit which the infinitely active will has created on purpose to be overcome. This lends him inward independence in the face of all happenings. He has no need to understand them individually. He can let a large proportion of them be put aside as puzzling to his finite spirit. What is essential he knows: viz. that what is real in the world is not matter, but spirit only.
Partaking of the eternally active spirit, man is raised above the world, and is eternal. The sufferings he meets with afflict nature only “with which he is connected in a marvellous way,” but not himself, the being who is exalted above the whole of nature. Of death he has no fear. He does not die to himself, but merely to those who survive him. . . . “All death in nature is birth. . . . Nature is throughout nothing but life. It is not death which kills, but the living life which, concealed behind the old one, now begins and proceeds to develop. Death and birth are nothing but the struggle of life with itself in an effort to reveal itself more and more clearly and more and more like its real self.” It is in similar words that the Chinese monist, Chwang-tse, announces that life is eternal and the dying of an individual only means that one existence is being re-cast to form another. .
Fichte’s mysticism of activity incapable of being carried through
Fichte’s philosophy of absolute activity is the expression of his own strong ethical personality, which with impetuosity and self-sacrifice takes problems in hand, and uses itself up in the strain involved. But even he is unable to make a genuine combination of epistemological idealism and ethical so as to produce an ethical world-view which is a [pg 132] necessity of thought. The impossibility of the undertaking reveals itself everywhere.
In order to conceive ethics as a part of the normal course of world-happenings, Fichte, like all others who make the same attempt, gives up as hopeless any differentiation between human action and world-happenings. The world-spirit’s impulse to activity, he says, experiences itself in man as will to ethical action. But, indeed, the whole world is filled with this will to activity which is for ever surging against the limitations it has set up for itself. Everything that happens is only an expression of it. What difference, then, is there between natural happenings and ethical? Between activity in itself and ethical activity? Purposive activity directed with knowledge and intention to the subjection of the sensible world to reason is ethical, decides Fichte. But what does that mean, when closely examined? It means that the finite spirit becomes moral by entering into and taking seriously the play of the infinite spirit which aims at overcoming its own self-created limitations. Looking in this way at Fichte’s thought, we see clearly that with the world-view which results from the combination of ethical and epistemological idealism, ethics have no longer any meaning.
Again, what is the meaning of “bringing the whole of the sensible world under the sovereignty of reason”? This conception of the ethical is not only too wide, but fantastic also. To a limited extent man is able to harness the forces of nature for his service, and with a little stretching of language he can, with Fichte, describe such action as not purposive merely, but also in the widest sense ethical. Upon this terrestrial globe he has some “influence,” but upon the world none. That he gives names to the mighty heavenly bodies and can calculate the orbits of many of them, cannot mean that he brings them under the sovereignty of reason. Upon deep-sea life, too, he exercises no other influence than catching specimens of it and giving them names.
That he may be able to assert that there is such a thing [pg 133] as an ethical purpose in the world, Fichte falsifies the world’s birth certificate, and gives it the categorical imperative for father and epistemological idealism for mother. But this is of no use. The ethical purpose thus produced cannot satisfy ethical thought.
By conceiving the infinite spirit, in which the finite spirit has a share, as will to activity, Fichte tries to make possible a world-view of ethical world- and life-affirmation. In reality, however, this takes him no further than a more emphatic world- and life-affirmation, into which, with the help of speculative thought, he smuggles the idea of duty, thereupon proclaiming it to be ethical. It fares with him just as with the Chinese philosophers, who similarly exert themselves in vain to produce an ethic out of world- and life-affirmation.
Absorption in the Absolute by means of action is, as Fichte thinks, something prodigious, but, just like its counterpart, absorption in the Absolute which is effected by an act of thought, it is not ethical but supra-ethical. The element which is needed by the mysticism of absorption in the Absolute to make it ethical cannot be secured either by enhancing or by depreciating the will to activity.
Fichte’s mysticism of activity in which man lets loose his energy in the world is related to the ethic of deed, just as Spinoza’s mysticism of knowledge in which man is absorbed in the world is related to that of self-perfecting, but it is only very incompletely that either can develop itself into a real ethic.
The absorption in the Absolute which comes into actuality in an act of thought lies nearer to nature-philosophy than that which completes itself in an active deed. The Brahmans, the Buddha, Lao-tse, Chwang-tse, Spinoza, and the mystics of every age, have experienced the becoming one with the Absolute as a coming-to-rest in it. Fichte’s mysticism of activity lies more in the path of dualistic thinking than in that of real nature-philosophy. It is something which has been extorted by enthusiasm, but Fichte [pg 134] is devoted to it, and rightly, because he has a feeling that the interests of an active ethic are better guarded by it than by the other. Since, however, he thus once and for all decides for a nature-philosophy, he comes, dominated though he is by the ideal of an active ethic, more and more to the natural quietist consequences of a nature-philosophy. He goes through a process of evolution which brings him nearer to Spinoza’s world-view. In his _Instruction Concerning the Blessed Life_, which appeared in 1806, six years later than _The Destiny of Man_, it is to him no longer the ethical which in itself is the highest, but the religious. The ultimate meaning of life, as he now recognizes, is not to act in God, but to be merged in Him. “Self-annihilation is the gateway into the higher life.”
He believes, indeed, that he is thereby merely deepening his world-view without diminishing its ethical energy, and he remains himself, right to the end, the fiery spirit which consumes itself in activity for promoting the progress of the world. But his thought has bent under the weight of nature-philosophy. Without clearly admitting it to himself, he recognizes that out of nature-philosophy there can be drawn only an intellectual, not an ethical meaning for the world and life. Spinoza observes with a smile how he retires upon the thought beyond which a nature philosophy cannot advance.
Fichte is the first philosopher to declare plainly that no world-view is ethical which does not enable man to explain that an enthusiastic active devotion to the universe is something grounded in the nature of the world and of life. But the road he takes in order to develop this thought leads him astray. Instead of going more deeply into the question how ethical happenings, though coming from the world-spirit, and directed upon the world, are nevertheless different from normal world-happenings, and investigating the nature of this difference, he employs the trick, which had been made possible by Kant, of declaring, with the help of epistemological idealism, that the ethical world-view is a necessity of thought. Many of his contemporaries [pg 135] believe with him that it has thereby really reached a position of supremacy, and even those who cannot go with him the whole length of the philosophy of the Ego and Non-Ego, are gripped by the force of the ethical personality which speaks from Fichte’s writings.
The direct effect, then, of Fichte’s philosophy is that the optimistic, ethical spirit of rationalism maintains its position and becomes stronger and deeper. His philosophy is a source of inspiration which produces a mighty impulse to ethics and civilization. But the vessel in which, with a magnificent wind behind him, he starts with his companions on a voyage over the sea of knowledge is a leaky one. A catastrophe is only a question of time.
Fichte’s belief that he has obtained from the nature of the universe the living compulsion to ethical duty and ethical work which he feels within himself, is an illusion. The manner, however, in which he conceives the problem of the optimistic-ethical world-view, and perceives that for its solution the ordinary processes of life afford no help, so that more or less violent ones must be allowed to take their turn, reveals him as a great thinker.
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