Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)
1998 / 1. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: Is there a place for God int he inn of Philosophy?
2)/'. Jr an/i c5 ( arvyer light of the Gospel. The tendency was to be "heathen with the head, Christian with the heart". Fichte saw no need for even the deistic God of Kant, and so Fichte turned to a pantheistic idea of divinity flowing though the universe and identifying itself with the progression of the ego. But then the ego has no personal Other to which it can or must relate. Fichte posits a monism of the ego. The metaphysical and epistemological ’Copernicum revolution’ is then complete. Fichtian Ethics In the area of ethics, Kant’s universally valid categorical imperative becomes individualized by Fichte. Now the maxim is not: act in such a way that your actions could be universalised. Rather: act according to your individual destination (genius) and your individual situation! (Kierkegaard would later write an essay about the difference between a genius and a disciple.) Fichte tells us: whether we doubt something or are certain about it, the ground is not rational argumentation, but immediate feeling (intuition): "This feeling never deceives". It is interesting that Fichte also says that people choose the philosophy they follow not on the basis of logical deduction, but on the basis of feeling and on the basis of what kind of person we are. This is all part of the view that "Das Ich setzt sich selbst". Hume had examined the ’self and only found psychical sense phenomena. Fichte recognizes that there is more to the self than that! Fichte places the priority on people as free, morally active persons making their own choices, rather than merely being intellectual students of philosophy. Fichte certainly called upon us to pursue a higher morality. He emphasized that each person’s freedoms, rights, and duties must allow for the other person’s freedoms, rights and duties. He said: Act always according to your best conviction of your duty...Act according to your conscience. For Fichte, the conscience can never be wrong. When we go wrong it is because we do not listen to our conscience, or because we have obscured or even lost our conscience. While this is well intended, it does raise the question of what to do given the fact that people do have different levels and kinds of conscience. Also: we know our conscience is socially conditioned, so it seems difficult to 1 * 3 1 A saying contributed to Jacobi: "Heiden mit dem Verstände, Christen mit dem Gemüt." Hendrikus Berkof, Two Hundred Years of Theology, ch.2:"Fichte at the Crossroads". 3 For a discussion on this, see Copleston, A Historty of Philosophy, Vol.7, p.88ff. 38
