The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  More specifically, Fichte argued that human beings could achieve consciousness of themselves not in isolation from each other but only in community with each other and in a “free community” at that. While centering the political order of law around the self-determined, free individual human being and introducing right as a legal principle along with its plural realizations (rights) for the ulterior purpose of individual freedom, Fichte considered individuality and its legal entitlements not natural occurrences but the result of a legal and political formative process that turned pre-social intelligent animals into free citizens.

  For Fichte the transition from the single, asocial, and pre-political human individual to a juridico-political community of socialized and freely associating individuals involved an act of “recognition,” more precisely the recognition of one intelligent agent by another such being and as such a being. In a fictitious original scene of association Fichte had an already emerged, practically rational human being seek to initiate the emergence of freely chosen rational conduct in a human being of only dormant practical rationality. The “solicitation” or “summons” to a life of rational willing was to be based on facial and other bodily features that indicated the rational potential in a still pre-rational individual.

  As a call to conscious practical freedom, the educational influence exercised by one individual on another was not to operate through sheer physical force. Rather the summons to a life of practical reason was to take the form of symbolically mediated communication, such as speech. Moreover, the recognition involved was not to remain a singular and one-sided event but was to result in reciprocal and continuing recognitional conduct and to extend beyond the two parties involved in the original social scene to include an entire community constituted and maintained by free mutual influence.

  According to Fichte, the instrument for enabling and assuring consistent communal recognitional conduct was the principle of right, according to which everyone was to have the use of their individual freedom informed—in effect, limited—by the notion of everyone else’s individual freedom. The sphere of right so established allowed and assured the socially compatible exercise of freedom in a common space delimited by the multilateral recognition of everyone’s equal status as a free rational agent.

  The right so derived, as a condition of the original emergence and continued existence of self-conscious intelligent agency, was not, as in Kant, a moral necessity but a matter of pragmatic rationality. On Fichte’s account, it would constitute an illogical inconsistency in the conduct of one’s life to first benefit from the social initiation into intelligent agency and subsequently negate and even undermine the very conditions of such rational socialization by refusing to continually and reciprocally recognize other intelligent agents as such in one’s own continuing conduct toward them.

  In order to lend stability and reliability to the rationally indicated practice of continued recognitional conduct, Fichte had the original institution of right include the establishment of a power sufficiently strong to assure and effectively enforce conformity with rightful conduct. That social power was the state understood as a state of right in which the exercise of power and the use of force were subject to restricting conditions reflecting the state’s narrow purpose as a guarantor of the legal order and not as a guardian of morality or a provider of social welfare.

  The basic outlines of political governance provided by Fichte’s philosophy of right stood in the early-modern tradition of the social contract and included an entire series of such contracts by means of which the state was first instituted and the citizens originally subjected themselves to its power. Most notable among the further features that made up the Fichtean state as the political protector of right were: an account of property that sought to balance private ownership and social utility, a conception of punishment for legal transgression that considered transgressors, who had disregarded the law’s constraining forces, as also having placed themselves outside the law’s protective force, and the institution of a supervisory body (“ephorate”) overseeing the just order and operation of the state and entitled as well as called upon to intervene in circumstances of bad governance.

  A certain tendency to legal overregulation of citizens’ compliance with the law notwithstanding, Fichte’s early philosophy of law belongs to the modern tradition of the liberal state according to which the state is set up to enable and safeguard the citizens’ personal freedom in the exercise of their rights, which involve the acquisition and exchange of material and immaterial property. Accordingly, the equality involved in mutual recognitional conduct is primarily a legal equality, to the exclusion of the political freedom expressed in participatory legislation or popular rule.

  Nor did Fichte’s legal egalitarianism include a specifically legal concern with social equality. Fichte was to address the latter issue outside the confines of legal philosophy proper in the sphere of “applied politics.” In particular, in his later work in political economy (The Closed Commercial State; 1800) he advocated from a juridico-political standpoint the socio-political goal of individual and national economic self-sufficiency, arguing for its legal basis in the universal right to be able to live from one’s work and its political grounding in the state’s extensive governance of the market of goods and labor.

  1.4 A CONCRETE ETHICS

  By assigning the philosophical foundation of law and politics to contractual rules of prudence governing the institution and preservation of socially enabled individual flourishing, Fichte had reduced practical philosophy in the Kantian sense of a moral philosophy based on an unconditional law of conduct (moral law) to the narrow field of ethics. Still, Fichte’s System of Ethics, published in 1798 closely after the appearance of Kant’s late material ethics, the “Metaphysical First Principles of the Doctrine of Virtue” in Part Two of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), differed considerably from his predecessor’s ethics of unconditional command (categorical imperative). For Fichte ethics was not a matter of imposed instruction or even of self-imposed lawfulness in one’s ethical intentions (maxims) but of enhancing naturally and socially embedded individual life by means of rational choice in light of the ultimate end of complete freedom. Accordingly, ethics was not to focus on curbing affects and passions but on seeking out and marshaling those natural forces inside and outside the human being which, in a given situation, could best contribute to the ever-closer approximation to the elusive final goal of supreme self-determination.

  The methodological ideal of a naturally and socially embedded, concrete ethics notwithstanding, Fichte’s System of Ethics was for the most part not concerned with specifying ethical obligations (duties) according to social circumstance but with the derivation (“deduction”) of the chief rule of ethical conduct and of the formal and material conditions that assure its possible effective application under suitable circumstances. Given the preponderance of basic reflections on the conditions of the very possibility of ethical action, Fichte’s System of Ethics presented itself, to a large extent, as a proto-ethics addressing the pre-ethical requirements for an ethical life, which chiefly included a constitution of the self and of the world amenable to the ethical project of transforming determined nature into self-determining freedom.

  In its core Fichte’s (proto-)ethics offered a transcendental theory of free willing. Fichte had the self (“I”) originally come to self-awareness as a being that wills, i.e. that self-determines its actions through the concept of an end to be chosen, intended, and enacted. Fichte’s specific claim was that a finite intelligent being originally encountered itself only as willing; no other relation to itself would afford such a being an incipient awareness of itself as a self—as a being essentially involved in a self-relation that let it both grasp and generate its own, free being. At the most basic level, the originally free, will-endowed being was said to will itself, more precisely its own freedom in the practice of self-determination. For Fichte, being free of any alienating determination from within and wi
thout and constituting oneself in genuine, pure self-determination required that one’s willing be guided by concepts, and by a conception of free agency at that.

  Considered in its overall design, Fichte’s ethics was marked by the seemingly contrary characteristics of aiming at concreteness in terms of the content of ethical action and at absoluteness in the modality of the overall pursuit of freedom for freedom’s sake. Fichte sought to reconcile these contrary tendencies by distinguishing between the matter of ethical freedom, which was provided by changing circumstances and specific situations, and its identical form, which consisted in free self-determination for its own sake. Moreover, he placed the material and the formal factor of ethical action in a developmental relation according to which a given ethical action was to be identified and chosen in view of its hypothetical standing in an infinite sequence of interrelated acts (“series”) ideally terminating in the final purpose of absolute freedom.

  The claimed correlation of a given ethical act to an ideal ethical series reflected Fichte’s concern with the integration of nature and morality. Natural ends as well as means were to be regarded as instrumental in view of a supra-natural project—the project of complete, absolute freedom—that could only be realized, or rather infinitely approximated, in the natural world and under the latter’s conditions, which were therefore to be regarded as enabling as much as limiting conditions for the free final end of ethics.

  But it was not only the natural world that was subordinated to ethical ends. On Fichte’s account, the human individual, too, ultimately was only an instrument for the supra-individual end of reason realized across individuals and beyond personal limits. Rather than being the subject and author of ethical perfection, the individual human being was but the vehicle and medium for the implementation of the moral law. For Fichte the point of ethics was to ensure that, in the long run, all would act in the same, perfectly rational way.

  In order to assure the proper match of a particular end or action willed with the infinite series terminating in sheer self-determination and perfect freedom Fichte resorted to “conscience” as an ethical arbiter. He considered the latter’s unreflected consent to a considered course of action an infallible indicator of the action’s ethical qualification for advancing the long-term goal of all ethical pursuits, i.e. the exclusive rule of reason in the world within and without. For Fichte ethical qualification did not involve the possible universalization of subjective principles of action (maxims), as Kant maintained, but the action’s possible integration into the road to reason revealed by the inner voice of conscience.

  In addition to seeking to correlate natural and ethical ends of willing Fichte’s concrete ethics also aimed at coordinating the independent course of ethical action of plural, and even infinitely many, individual human agents. Drawing on older metaphysical speculations, chiefly to be found in Leibniz, about a divinely prearranged match and fit between independent, self-sufficiently operating individual beings (monads), Fichte maintained a pre-established harmony of sorts between individual agents that assured, in principle, the effective cooperation of ethical agents in pursuit of the common goal of reason’s rule. Fichte sought to avoid the deterministic implications of such a preordained ethical world order by distinguishing between the ethical necessity of a given action and the factual contingency as to who would carry out the preordained action at what point in time and what place in space.

  The dual concern with the natural embeddedness and the supra-natural freedom of ethical action also animated Fichte’s account of the “drives” that were said to orient and motivate all human activity including specifically ethical pursuits. Kant had entrusted pure practical, “moral” reason with the exceptional ability of sufficiently determining the will to action entirely independently of other motivating grounds such as sensory impulses (“incentives”), in the process construing morality as anti-nature and burdening reason with complete responsibility for moral motivation. For Fichte any ethical efficacy on the part of practical reason had to be grounded in the agent’s nature broadly conceived. The latter chiefly included the agent being driven in one way or another to this or that end. On Fichte’s account there could be no action without a corresponding directing and driving force in the agent.

  Rather than juxtaposing drive-ridden and reason-driven action, Fichte sought to integrate naturally based and ethically based action into a comprehensive account of human agency. In particular, Fichte both distinguished and conjoined the “natural drive,” originating in human sensory nature, and the “pure drive,” issuing from human rational nature. The two drives were said to merge to form the “ethical drive” as a “mixed drive,” reputedly taking its content from the natural drive and its form from the pure drive. Alternatively to this compositional, synthetic account, Fichte considered the duality of formal and material drives as one-sided and complementary manifestations of an originally unitary drive (“proto-drive”) that eluded direct presentation.

  While Fichte’s integrationist construal of the mixed drive managed to combine natural and rational determining factors in the constitution of the ethical drive, it did not address the essential element of freedom in human action in general and in ethical action in particular. With respect to human freedom Fichte argued that any drive-based action still required the approval through freely given consent without which no drive could become effective in a being acting not on impulse alone but in view of a conception of ends. The freedom so exercised was the “formal freedom” involved in each action to be called free, as opposed to the “material freedom” that constituted the specific end of ethical action, namely complete self-determination as an end in itself.

  Its strict separation from law and politics notwithstanding, Fichte’s concrete ethics included a critical perspective on human social existence in the modern state. For Fichte the state as a legal instrument for the institution and preservation of right relying on force and constraint was an essentially temporary measure eventually to be supplanted by a genuinely ethical community. The alternative socio-political organization envisioned in Fichte’s System of Ethics was an ethical, inner state or a “church,” where the latter term was not being understood to designate a particular religious community with a special creed and a specific set of beliefs but the potentially universal quasi-political body of ethically minded human beings that had overcome the limitations of selfish individuality in favor of regarding and treating their individuality as a vehicle for the ethical state.

  Fichte’s supra-political conception of a universal ethical community added to the rather liberal features of his philosophy of law, which had stressed the rule of law and the equality of rights, a more communitarian ethos of social life marked by the subordination of the individual under the whole of which it was at once a constitutive member and a resultant function. For Fichte the ethical purpose of social existence was not the material and moral flourishing of the individual as such but the latter’s integration into a “world of spirits” that transcended spatial and temporal location and limitation and was expressive of the unconditional, “absolute” nature of reason.

  1.5 PHILOSOPHICAL TEACHER AND PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

  Fichte’s innovative and rapid development of philosophy as a comprehensive system of knowledge based on human spontaneity and freedom had taken place in the institutional context of his academic teaching and publishing. But within four years Fichte’s prominent position as a professor of philosophy at the University of Jena came to a sudden end when he lost this influential post over charges of atheism leveled against his published views on religion, according to which what was traditionally called “God” amounted to nothing but the sum-total of the world viewed in a perfectionist moral perspective (“moral world order”). Further accusations included the identification of idealism with “nihilism” or the denial of any reality other than the one brought forth (“posited”) by the human being. Fichte spent the next decade mainly in Berlin, giving private instruction and offerin
g public lecture courses to an adult audience, before eventually assuming a professorship at the newly founded University of Berlin (1810–14), where he served as rector, dean, and professor until his early death from an infectious disease contracted from his wife, who had worked as a nurse in a Berlin military hospital.

  The willful misrepresentations and grotesque misunderstandings of his published views made Fichte ever more skeptical of lending a fixed form to his ongoing philosophical work. On the average, Fichte offered a new, substantially revised, if not radically altered, presentation of his core philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) once a year during the 14 remaining years of his life, none of them brought to publication by him and all of them only made available in the posthumous publication of his complete works. His contemporaries only knew of Fichte’s further work through a number of published lecture series in the philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, philosophy of education, and philosophy of culture that built on his core philosophy but substituted systematic rigor for popular appeal, exhortation for argument, and rejection for refutation.