Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)

1998 / 1. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Is there a place for God int he inn of Philosophy?

S7s {/tere a piacé for Socí..?

what can prevent them from claiming more and more power, until they claim to be absolute?

Fichte takes Kant’s ’Copernicum revolution’ a step further: there is no objective noumenal world-in-itself: everything circles around one’s subjective view of things. It is no longer God or an objective world that is absolute, but rather the human ego now becomes the Archimedean point. We must remember that Fichte does not mean the individual ego (self) is absolute, but rather the supra-individual ’transcendental’ consciousness (’reason’). Reality is the expression of the self-unfolding of this absolute thought, reason, consciousness, or ’ego’. Later Hegel would try to build a whole system on this perspective. In his Wissenschaftslehre (1794) Fichte places an emphasis on self-consciousness as a function of an absolutely free ego: "Das Ich setzt sich selbst" (the ego posits itself). Kant still had God and universal morals as ’practical postulates’. Fichte starts from an absolute ego which posits itself and its interpretation of the world. What has happened is that Kant stressed moral autonomy within the bounds of universal reason, while Fichte stresses personal freedom within the bounds of the creative possibilities of the ego. The ’ego’ for Fichte is more than the individual ego; it is rather collective consciousness or human thought and action as a whole. And since Fichte said that the ego is always striving ("alle Reflexion gründet sich auf das Streben"), we do not have to worry about limits to our understanding since there is continual movement by means of the will and the action of the ego. Fichte radicalizes Kant’s "Du sollst" (You must, therefore you can.). Kant had said that the search for truth and ethical improvement is an eternal task, never to be fully accomplished ("ewige, nimmer erfüllbare Aufgabe"). For Kant it was the task (Aufgabe) which had prime importance; for Fichte it is the striving toward change and the perfecting of the ego that counts ("Trieb nach Wechsel", and "Trieb nach absolute Einheit und Vollendung des Ich in sich selbst"). Kant’s idea of pure reason was kept within limits by the noumenal world; Fichte’s idea of the ego becomes boundless. For Romanticism, passion becomes more important than abstract explanations: soon ’believing in’ becomes more important than ’believing that’. For Kant, faith (religious or secular) had to be reasonable; for Fichte, faith (religious or secular) has to be more emotional. Kant’s idea of God was rather shadowy compared to the

vő. Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre (Bnd.1,260}. "So wie das Ich gesetzt; im Ich soll alles gesetzt sein; das Ich soll schlechthin unabhängig, Alles aber soll von ihm abhängig sein."

RoV't C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy, ch.3.

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