Fichte (Adamson)/Chapter VIII

by Robert Adamson

CHAPTER VIII.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

Of the two stages into which Fichte’s speculations have been divided, only the first has exercised any influence on the historic development of philosophy, and to it consideration must be limited when the attempt is made to define the historic value of the system. As has been already indicated, this value appears to lie in the extended application made by Fichte of principles implicit in the critical philosophy. It is not too much to say that the full bearings of the critical method only become apparent when viewed in the light of the development it has received at the hands of Fichte and Hegel. In the Kantian system, the problems of speculation were taken up in the form presented by the antecedent, popular philosophy,—a form essentially limited in scope,—and it was therefore matter of some difficulty to discern the real import of the new treatment to which they were subjected. One may even say that from Kant himself the significance of much of his work was concealed by the limited and partial character of the questions which presented themselves to him as the essential problems of speculative inquiry. In the critical philosophy can be traced the transition from the somewhat narrow, psychological method, characteristic of modern thought, to the larger view of speculative problems which recalls the great work of the Greek thinkers. The analysis of human knowledge, which had been for Locke and his successors the sole function of philosophy, appears in the critical system as part, though an essential part, of the more comprehensive inquiry dealing with the whole round of human interests, to which only the title philosophy by right belongs. The question how the human mind, regarded as a thing of definite or indefinite characteristics, comes to have the filling-in which we call experience, opens out, when duly considered, into the much wider problem as to the relation of any individual consciousness to the sum total of things, a relation which may be either cognitive, or practical, or religious. The merely subjective or psychological analysis of the cognitions possessed by the individual mind, even if the result, as stated in Locke and his followers, be accepted—that such cognitions are effects produced we know not how—still leaves at an immeasurable distance the true problems of philosophy. For it offers no explanation of the nature of this individual consciousness, formed in whatsoever fashion; effects no junction between it and the universe of things supposed to originate it; and can offer as final philosophic solution nothing beyond the barren propositions that experience somehow is, and that it consists of states of the individual mind.

Enough has been said, in the introductory remarks to the account of Fichte’s system, to show that this solution is internally incoherent, and also to indicate where the root of the incoherence is to be found. If we start in our philosophic inquiry with the supposition of an individual mind and a system of things, no human ingenuity can ever effect a reconciliation between the two isolated members of our hypothesis. The notion of individuality, one of the hardest to solve, has been the stumbling-block in the way of all the eighteenth century philosophy, and it is the pre-eminent merit of the critical system to have for the first time subjected the notion to detailed and rigorous treatment. The forms under which the critical method is applied—such as the distinctions between a priori and a posteriori elements in cognition, between matter and form, between phenomena and noumena, between sense, understanding, and reason—ought not to disguise from us the true nature of the question which underlies all of them. How knowledge becomes possible for any intelligence, is in fact the problem how are we to think, under one of its aspects, the relation between individual consciousness and the wider sphere of reality?

To Kant himself, as was indicated, the full bearing of his work was not apparent. There still runs through all the critical work, the obtrusive idea that the ultimate reality is the individual consciousness, given as a fact, and that this individual consciousness is mechanically related to the sum of existence. Hence arise the numerous obscurities and inconsistencies of the Kantian system. Term after term is introduced in order somehow to effect the final synthesis between the individual mind and the wider sphere disclosed by reason; but such final synthesis is never reached, and indeed never can be reached, if at the outset an absolute difference is postulated.^[1] That there lay in the Kantian system the germs of a wider, more comprehensive solution, was undoubted; and the work of that which is called by pre-eminence German philosophy, has been the development of these germs.

To this development, the first great contribution was the ‘Wissenschaftslehre.’ In it the critical method was carried out with definite consciousness of its full import, and the effort was made to work out systematically the thought upon which that method rested, and to apply it to the resolution of the whole body of philosophical problems. It has been, historically, the misfortune of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre,’ that only its earlier form has played a part in influencing subsequent thought, for the defects of that form are manifest on the surface. Earnestly as Fichte strives to enforce the doctrine that self-consciousness, which is for thought the ultimate ground of reality, is not to be regarded as individual, but as that in and through which individuals are, and are connected with one another, he never succeeds in divesting his system of a certain air of subjective idealism. Moreover, the special applications of his method in the sphere of concrete, historical reality, show that in certain important aspects it had not yet lost its abstractness. His treatment of empirical science, of aesthetics, and of history in the widest sense, is essentially abstract and barren.^[2] In fact, although Fichte was perfectly successful in seizing the critical principle, and in apprehending its universal bearing,—although, further, his work manifests a wonderful subtlety and skill in tracing the necessary consequences of the principle,—he was not able to evolve systematically from it the whole body of philosophy, nor do his results form a complete and perfectly concatenated whole. It was left for a later philosopher to take up afresh, in the light of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ and of Schelling’s contributions, the critical principle, and to incorporate all that was of value in them in one comprehensive system. The Hegelian method contains nothing but the systematic development of that which had already been brought to light in the ‘Wissenschaftslehre;’ but as opposed to Wissenschaftslehre, the Hegelian work has all the value of the system to which the other has been the introduction. In some respects, it is true, an introduction has advantages over a system. The treatment is occasionally freer and more independent; and so one may always assign to the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ an honourable position alongside of the Hegelian work, and may obtain from it much light on what is obscure in the systematic result. But so far as solution of the philosophic problem is concerned, there seems nothing in the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ which is not carried out with greater concreteness and fulness in the later system.^[3]

With this view of the historical value of Fichte’s philosophy, it seems unnecessary to attempt any statement as to the relation in which it stands to what one may call the present radical opposition of philosophic doctrines—the opposition between Hegelianism on the one hand, and scientific naturalism or realism on the other.^[4] A single remark, however, may be permitted upon the defect already noted in Fichte’s system, for this defect indicates the point towards which, as one may conjecture, philosophic thinking must be directed, and at which the opposed doctrines touch one another. The final notion of Fichte’s philosophy, expressed more clearly in the later works than in the ‘Wissenschaftslehre,’ has been seen to be that of the divine or spiritual order of which finite spirits are the manifestation or realisation, and in the light of which human life and its surroundings appear as the continuous progress in ever higher stages towards realisation of the final end of reason. Under this conception, the oppositions of thought which play so important a part in philosophy,—Being and Thought, Mind and Nature, Soul and Body, Freedom and Law, Natural Inclination and Moral Effort, Mechanism and Teleology,—are reconciled. They appear in their due place as different aspects of the several stages in and through which the spiritual order is realised. But, as has also been seen, the element wanting in Fichte’s system is the definite reconciliation between this view of the spiritual development of reason and the natural, historical development of nature and humanity. It is this second element that forms the substance of modern scientific realism;^[5] and, as in Fichte’s system the difficulty is the transition from the spiritual to the real order, so here, the counter-difficulty of transition from the real order to the order of thought presents itself as the ultimate problem. Of the value of scientific realism as a contribution to philosophic reflection, there can be no question. Every effort of speculative thought is affected by the general condition of knowledge, and every advance in scientific inquiry opens up new aspects of these notions through which explanations of speculative difficulties have been found. The problem which now lies before philosophy is, in brief, the effort to rethink the new materials that have been furnished in such ample quantity. So far, however, as scientific realism has yet endeavoured to offer a metaphysical explanation of its own procedure, its success has been small. The attempt to regard thought as somehow arising from mechanical conditions has only resulted in the reappearance of the old perplexities which pressed with such intolerable weight upon the earlier English philosophy. We cannot regard thought as merely a product, a thing, of which the characteristics are due to the nature of the mechanical antecedents out of which it has arisen. When we do so, we are at once confronted with the problem, how are we to conceive the nature of these antecedents? By supposition they are not in thought, but external to it, and therefore never to be reached in thought. Shall we then say there are varied modes of consciousness, thoughts of different kinds, and, as these are products, they must be due to some ultimate reality, the nature of which is for ever inconceivable? This is merely to give, as explanation, the impossibility of any explanation.

A fundamental difficulty of this nature is clear evidence of the abstract or one-sided character of the principle which has been applied. It is not possible that the view of thought as a thing or product should also be competent to explain the nature of thought as self-consciousness. Reflection upon self, in which the individual consciousness transcends its own individuality, through which only it can recognise itself as one with other individuals, is not explicable through the notion of mechanical composition. Nor is scientific realism more successful in the application of its favourite conception, that of development. Neither the evolution of consciousness, nor the concrete nature of consciousness which appears as the final term of evolution, can be regarded as completely explained by mere reference to the simplest, most abstract elements involved in the development. The true notion of humanity is not to be found by consideration of the undeveloped thought, but in thought in all the fulness of its concrete life and reality. The external history of the several stages by which human thought and culture have developed, though an indispensable auxiliary to philosophic reflection, can never be accepted as adequately solving the problem of the significance or meaning of experience. The full treatment of the whole mass of empirical detail is impossible without a more thorough metaphysic—that is, without a more systematic discussion of the notions by which experience becomes intelligible for the conscious subject. No contrast is sharper than that between scientific realism and the philosophic method of which the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ is a type; nevertheless the two are complementary, and the very sharpness of the contrast shows that in the reconciliation of the apparent difference between them lies the problem for our present speculative efforts.

END OF FICHTE.

Notes

1. The forms of this ultimate difficulty are well known to Kantian students. They appear in the constant tendency to regard thought as analytic, in the independence assigned to sense-affection, in the subjective solution offered of antinomy, in the abstract deism of the Kantian theology, in the formalism of the Kantian ethics, and in the obscurity attaching to the critical treatment of teleology. The conjecture may be hazarded that, had Kant been penetrated with the spirit of the Cartesian philosophy, had he known anything of Spinoza—as he certainly did not—his work would have been more systematic and fruitful.
2. At the same time it is to be said that the continuous objection to the Wissenschaftslehre by Schelling and Hegel, on the ground of its neglect of Nature, is not in all respects justified. So far as Natur-philosophie is concerned, Fichte’s position seems to us much more secure and in harmony with the philosophic notion than that of either Schelling or Hegel. The weakest portion of the Hegelian system is, beyond all question, the philosophy of nature.
3. The historic influence of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ is not exhausted in its influence on Hegel. At least two offshoots from the Kantian philosophy owe much to the Fichtian method and principles. Except his pessimism, which is no necessary consequence of the system, there is absolutely nothing in Schopenhauer’s philosophy which is not contained in the later works of Fichte. And Herbart’s Metaphysic, though deviating widely from preceding systems, owes no small portion of its fundamental notion to Fichte’s analysis of reality as simple positing by the Ego.
4. Hegelianism is here taken in a wide sense. It is not implied that all or any who in the main would rank themselves on this side, are inclined to accept the Hegelian work in its entirety. A thoughtful and instructive notice of what is here called the radical opposition of philosophic doctrines will be found in Professor Masson’s ‘Recent British Philosophy’ (3d ed.), pp. 277-297.
5. A system of which Mr Spencer may be taken as the best known, though by no means the only or the best, representative.