Sárospataki Füzetek 2. (1998)

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

j)r. JranJí őawt/er

the major themes of western thought until today. For Kant and classical philosophy, the autos finds itself only by means of the nomos. Beginning with Fichte and for much of modern subjectivist thought (found in various romanticist, historicist, and existentialist forms), the nomos is depends upon the will or view of the autos. For Fichte there is no point in talking about ’things-in-themselves’ (Dinge an sich), for what we call the world-order is really only my interpretation.

I think it is important to notice that the question of choice between reason and feeling is really an ’antinomy’: a contradiction, or a false dilemma. Such false choices are founded upon the problem of absolutizing various aspects of reality. From a Christian viewpoint we know that no aspect of created reality is absolute. There are two ways to try to overcome false dilemmas. One is to try to create a superior form of thinking called ’dialectical thought’, which says that both choices are only relative moments in on-going enlightenment. Fichte spoke of thesis, antithesis and synthesis and meant that all contradictions are resolved by on-going knowledge and development. For when we look more closely, he said, we find a more adequate definition of any thesis or antithesis will lead to a fuller synthesis of understanding. Dialectical thinking, I would suggest, is an important method. It is not a final answer. Another way to solve dilemmas is to return to a new wholeness. As Christian philosophers our wholeness is rooted in our under-standing of reality as God’s creation. Beginning with faith in God as the only absolute helps us see the problem of false absolutizations. Our knowledge of God points us in the right direction and teaches us to be even more self-critical about philosophical assumptions and systems.

From Fichte we can learn that the personal and practical aspect is important to any application of philosophy. But we also see the danger of focusing too strongly on the abilities of the ego and humankind, without a fuller view of how to keep object and subject well-related. German idealism is closely related to theology because it kept trying to deal with the question of how to relate the finite to the infinite. Is there a noumenal world? Is God a personal being or a process? Fichte emphasized God as a moral process. But later in life he came back to the idea of God as being and even claimed that the religious teachings (dogmas) of Christianity were the same thing as what he was teaching in a different, philosophical way. But Fichte seems closer to pantheism than Christian theism.

With Fichte we see steps taken toward turning philosophy into a promotion of humanism in a secular sense. Of course, Fichte was

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