The Spirit of Modern Philosophy/Lecture 5
LECTURE V
FICHTE
Now that we have reached and passed for the first time in our study the thinker upon whom, more than upon any other centre, modern thought turns, as upon a fulcrum, I am tempted to pause, at the beginning of this lecture, until I have suggested still more of what Kant means to modern thought. It is not, I suppose, merely historical sketches of the philosophers that you desire from me. You want to get from these philosophers such help as this brief study can suggest towards a comprehension of the spiritual problems of our own day. So, after suggesting at the last lecture what manner of man the historical Kant was, and what was the essence of his doctrine, I shall now try to draw afresh the moral from this part of our story.
I.
The movement from Spinoza to Kant has taught us a lesson which human thought everywhere has to learn, namely, that deeper truth is too valuable to be won by any short and easy process, and that spiritual history has everywhere a decidedly tragic element. We begin with our world simply, in a cliildlike faith that nature and God are ours by right of our birth. Our first lesson is that they are both of them at all events far deeper realities than we had supposed. Nature for Spinoza, as for all other great thinkers, isn’t the nature that you see with your eyes. It is the nature that you think with your reason; and to think it with your reason you have to go behind sense to the law, to the substance of things. Even so, in your relations with God, you have, according to Spinoza, to forsake the naive and joyous trust in life through which you first see him. “When,” says Spinoza, “I had learned that all the surroundings of life are vain and futile,” — so his pilgrimage began. A long training, he tells us, was needed ere he became at home in those solitudes where he ultimately found God. It was, he declares, through a contempt for all the things which the multitude seek that he came to learn the true good, beyond all that they seek, namely, the peace which the world can neither give nor take away. Encouraging to us about Spinoza was, then, that his tale ended joyously, in a wisdom whereby he was exalted beyond all the phantom world of sense; but grave and stern about him was his teaching that the way to this wisdom is so toilsome; “for all things excellent,” he says, “are as difficult as they are rare.”
This lesson, that the true joy of the spirit is indeed res severa, a stern thing, is still further deepened in our minds by the struggle of thought in the eighteenth century. It was not the mere waywardness of the eighteenth-century thinkers that forbade them to accept as final the guidance of even the intuitive reason to which Spinoza and his fellows had all trusted so implicitly. It was a necessary progress in reflection that drove these men to their scrutiny of the inner life, a scrutiny whose tragedy we found exemplified by Hume’s lightly and cheerfully spoken, but weighty and gloomy words, “sophistry and illusion.” But this, at all events, still seems to me sure: Whoever has not wandered that Via Dolorosa of the eighteenth century’s doubt of both reason and sense alike, will never be able to knock at the door at the end of that way, the door which Kant first of all men found opened to him. It has opened before us now in the last discussion. We have entered, and what do we find? We find, not what, in the childlike simplicity of our first love of truth we should have desired, a God revealed direct to sense, or a divine order manifest even to our intuitive reason; but something very different. We read, when we enter the new door, as it were a mysterious writing, prepared by unseen and unknown hands, a letter, left for our guidance by a remote and even unknowable guide. The letter contains only the moral law, and the word, “Serve the unseen God as if he were present with you.” That is in the first place all. Upon this and this only, according to Kant, our faith must build. For this, as the inner voice now tells us, is the call that, with all our better nature, we are henceforth minded to obey. Our will is the solution. “Work out the divine,” says the new philosophy. “Build anew the lost spiritual world, which skepticism shattered;” such is the command of Kant’s practical reason. All this is unquestionably a hard doctrine. It is not what we sought. We sought peace, and the philosopher has brought us not peace, but a sword. We sought the joy of God’s presence, and Kant has sent us to work out a divine mission in a wilderness far remote from all absolute insight. And yet, stern as this doctrine is, you must feel its courage and its wisdom. After all, here is at least a part of the truth. Life is not an easy thing; the spiritual life is the hardest of all lives; and of all spiritual gifts, next perhaps to charity itself, insight is surely the most difficult to win. As long as these things are so, Kant’s doctrine will retain its profound ethical and religious significance. But, you will ask, is this, then, wisdom’s last word, “der Weisheit letzter Schluss?” Well, for my part I do not think so. I warn you indeed that in philosophy, if you will go beyond Kant, you must meet new dangers, and must attempt new and venturesome wandering. But for my part I love to wander, far and long, and I hold that there are indeed heights yet to climb that cleave the heavens far above and beyond this dwelling-place of Kant. If you will go with me, we will try also these new adventures; but meanwhile I want to point out to you, ere we bid farewell to our greatest modern thinker, how there are more senses than one in which henceforth, wherever our feet carry us, his wisdom will go with us and direct us. After all, the spiritual world that Kant bade us build is the modern world; and Kant is the true hero of all modern thought. If in one sense it is only by transcending him and even by forgetting some of his limitations that we are to triumph, he is none the less forever our guide. Kant is, if you like, the homely and somewhat incongruous figure, a sort of John Brown of our century of speculative warfare. Derided as a rebel and an enemy of the faith by many of his own time, he dies before the modern conflict is fairly begun, but his soul goes marching on through the whole of it. Or to take another more suggestive, but similarly inadequate comparison, he resembles the hero of the Heroic Symphony, who is dead and buried in the second movement, but who is none the less spiritually and obviously present in the romantic and fairy-like outburst of new life in the scherzo, and the joyous apotheosis of the triumphant warriors that, in the fourth movement, crowns the symphony. Both these figures, I grant you, are somewhat imperfect; but still, I insist, in some such sense Kant will henceforth be our companion, — the leader who inspires us while we no longer see him at the head, the man whose precise system we no longer hold, but who still is the creator of our thought.
I must indeed have failed entirely in my summary of Kant’s own theoretical views, in the last lecture, if I did not suggest to you how full Kant’s cautious and skeptical doctrine is of motives that will lead us beyond him. Remember how, for the first, he declared the world of the things in themselves to be wholly inaccessible to our intellect, just because the world for our intellect is our own world. The search for accessible truth, thinks Kant, is then the search for one’s own personal larger self. Because I am sane, because I have what Kant calls unity of apperception in me, because I need an orderly consciousness, therefore it is that the world of sense and of experience has an outwardly visible good order about it. My understanding, working upon sense, gives laws to nature, because if there were no such laws given by my understanding I should have no true inner experience at all. The show world of experience is the poem of our constructive imagination, the product, then, of our deepest nature, of our largest selves. Moreover, even Kant, with all his caution, has to speak of that true self, to which you and I alike appeal, whenever we discourse about the things of space and time, as if it were something that we all shared in, a certain universal self, whose offspring are we all, with our flying moments of sense, our weak efforts at truth, our study of experience, our common trust in understanding. The world that we know is, according to Kant, the world, not of dead outer things, but of human thoughts; and when we try to get at truth we are trying to find how the world in space and time would seem to the experience of a perfectly sane and rational and far-seeing onlooker; in other words, we are trying, all of us alike, as we think, to find out the mind of the ideal man. Well, I say, that is the essence of Kant’s thought, restated in one word.
II.
And now for a very natural extension of this view. I suggest this extension here first merely as a possible view, then as the one that we shall find history developing. You will think it at first fantastic, but I shall not try as yet to defend or to attack it. I am so far only chronicler.
Grant, if you will, the existence of such a universe as Kant describes, a universe of numerous, free, but ignorant moral agents, each naturally engaged in imaginatively building up, with an unconscious but thoughtful art, an inner personal world, in the sense-forms of space and time, and through numerous forms of thought, applied to experience by their various constructive imaginations. Each one of these moral agents is bound, by his manhood and by his rationality, to serve an unseen and eternal moral law, and to believe in a divine order that supports this law. Such a universe as this of Kant, viewed as it were from without, suggests irresistibly an interpretation which at first sight may seem as romantic as indemonstrable, but which is at all events not excluded by the facts. Let us look at them dispassionately, — these moral agents, blind to absolute truth, but each and all properly destined to be willing servants of an unseen order; world-creators, meanwhile, each and all of them, but creators solely of their inner worlds, communing somehow with one another, by virtue of their common rationality, but cut off from things in themselves. How does such a state of things appear? Does it not suggest at once a plan of reality which might not yet demonstrably, but just possibly, stand for the true divine order itself? Might not this whole universe of the apparently separate and sense-encompassed creatures be an organized spiritual community? — where, like bees working each in his own part of the cell-wax, but all combining to build the honey-laden comb, these creatures, in the very isolation and darkness of each life, labored together for the realization, — yes, I mean it literally, — for the very expressing and constituting of God’s life; a divine life, I repeat, of infinite complexity, whose purposes were so manifold that an endless number of agents might be needed to embody them; whose ideals were so lofty that only such courage and fidelity and devotion as finite beings, in this ignorance and isolation, would have opportunity to develop, could serve the stern and noble ends of the divine decrees. Suppose, in a word, that the infinite whole made up of these finite lives were itself the divine life. From such a point of view, which I now suggest only by way of a pure hypothesis, could not this Kantian universe be both interpreted, and, after a fashion, even justified? To be sure, by such an interpretation it would be indeed transformed. In my opening lecture I ventured to suggest to you the doctrine that the universe, despite its seemingly stubborn physical fixity, is a live thing, an infinite spirit. According to Kant, the world of the natural order, in space and in time, cannot be thus alive, simply because, apart from our sense and our constructive imagination, this natural order has no existence. Spinoza’s substance, then, would be for Kant a mere mirage; but now, as you see, the true universe for Kant consists of perceiving moral agents, and of the dim and shadowy things in themselves, and of what the practical reason postulates; and that is all. If this be so, however, do we care much for those shadowy things in themselves? Perhaps they aren’t worth knowing. Perhaps they even do not exist at all. Our inner world doesn’t contain them. They are no object of natural science. You can’t weigh them or measure them, much less see them. Perhaps they are, as Hume would say, “sophistry and illusion.” What, then, remains to us? Why, precisely this: the world of the natural order, which, mirage though it be, is the very mirror of our sanity, and is therefore useful enough; this, and the world of our fellow-men, the world of practical and therefore of spiritual relationships, the world of live beings, ignorant, but rational like ourselves. With these we live, we act; we seek to realize through them the moral order; we respect their rights, we love them, we treat them as God’s children. But see: perhaps, in dealing with them, we touch the divine order itself. Perhaps, to use a more modern phrase, God simply differentiates himself into the forms of all these live beings, who may be, for all we know, as numerous, and as various in their degrees of loftiness, as the stars and the atoms of physics. Perhaps in the very depths of their finite ignorance he doesn’t quite lose himself; perhaps his transcendent wisdom consists simply in knowing, in establishing, in harmonizing their relationships, so that, as Schiller says, “while no one of them is his equal, his own endlessness foams up to him from out this beaker of the infinite world of spirits.” Then, indeed, their lonely heroism is his triumph; their seeming isolation is simply the manner in which he realizes, through them, the organization of his own life; their diversity and ignorance are merely his way of expressing the unity in variety, the completeness in differentiation, of his own manifold nature. If so, then God isn’t somewhere far off there, outside the world, so that we feel in vain for him amongst the dead and dismal things in themselves. God is in you, just in so far as you are alive and hearty and humane; in your human relationships, just so far as they are devoted, loyal, organic; in your very ignorance, in so far as it enables you to be heroic; in your very finiteness, in so far as it is a condition for your accomplishment of a definite task. God, outside of such a world of finite agents, would rejoice only in his empty infinity; he would be, as Schiller also said, in the poem from which I have just quoted, — he would be “friendless,” he would “suffer lack.” To be the God in reality, he would have to enter into finite form, and preserve his infinity merely through the unity, the organization, the conscious spiritual form of his universe of active creatures. We were wrong then, when we sought him as it were afar off, in the mirage of space and time, or even in the laws of outer nature as Spinoza did. We were even wrong to say, as Kant said: We never take hold of his real self, we only postulate him. The fact is that, in our spiritual life, we already possess him, are flesh of his flesh, are one with him, just in so far as we have vitality, courage, loyalty, wealth, strength, sanity, of will and of understanding. We know of him just so much as we are. And we are of him just so much as we are morally worthy to be.
This is the interpretation which dawns upon us when we reflect awhile upon Kant’s universe. Mystery enshrouds his world. The curtain of sense is “so thick!” Such darkness is for us beyond it! We know so little. We have nothing left us but morality; and that is just a postulate. But no, is this so little, after all? Suppose that the curtain itself were the picture, that the dark mystery lay simply in this, that we have refused to recognize as divine so much of God’s own essence as we ourselves possess, and have failed to see how our life, just in so far as it is spiritual, is, not a postulating, but a realizing of the divine life. Suppose all this to be no mere hypothesis, but a certainty. Would it not transform our philosophy? Well, I suggest here this transformation, because, as an idea, it was precisely the transformation of the Kantian doctrine which was the common undertaking of the great post-Kantian German idealists, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
Philosophy is full of surprises. Just when you think that the road is ended against a dark and impassable wall, the door opens, as it opened to Kant. And just when you think again that Kant’s discovery is the end, a new life for the first time begins. This is the new life of modern idealism. It accepts in one sense Kant’s result. Yes, it goes further in negation than even he went. He held fast by the things in themselves, whose existence he acknowledged, although he could know nothing about thera. The later German idealists say frankly that they care nothing for the things in themselves, and either doubt or deny whether there are any such things at all. Kant, however, paused at the threshold of the show-world. Beyond, he said, dwells, as we must faithfully believe, a God whom we serve, but who is forever the unknown God. The later idealists say: Indeed, the deepest truth is the truth of the manly will to act morally; but then this will itself embodies in each of us a portion of the divine personality. This is, so to speak, the real presence of God in us, to wit, just as much of our own nature as is holy. Our holiness, if we have any rag of holiness about us, much more if we are filled with heroism and with reasonable service, is, in its own inner quality, divine. As for God, his life is just this eternal sacrifice of his infinity by entering into the rational lives of a world of limited, but moral beings. For in this sacrifice he wins himself. He enjoys his peace, not apart from the world,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow
Nor ever lowest moan of thunder rolls,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts."
No, his peace is the peace of triumphing in the midst of our world of agony and of passion, as the tragic poet triumphs even while losing himself in the sufferings of his own creations. God's life is simply all life, and it is not concealed, but revealed by our own lives. God lives in every kindly friendship, in every noble deed, in every well-ordered society, in every united people, in every sound law, in every wise thought. He has no life beyond such rationality. His personality is just this, the communion, the intercourse, the organization of all finite persons. Here, you see, is in one sense indeed a new notion of personality. A person beyond our whole world, even of morality, was what we had hoped for. The new doctrine declares that the infinite one pervades the whole finite world of spirits, and simply lives by constituting, by unifying, and by enjoying, this very life of ours and of all our brethren, the rational beings, wherever and whatever they may be. Thus indeed we are limited, and may be even transient embodiments of God's life; but we ourselves, in so far as we make for unity and for righteousness, are in nature one with him. New is the doctrine, I say, namely, as a reflective speculation in modern thought. But in one sense, as these idealists are never weary of pointing out, it is a very old doctrine; it is the very core of Christian faith. When Paul said to the faithful, “Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God;” when the fourth Gospel makes the Logos say, “I am the vine, ye are the branches;” when the whole doctrine of the church rested upon the idea of a God revealed in the flesh; when even a simpler and more primitive Christian tradition, that of the first synoptic Gospel, represents the final judgment as dependent upon the principle, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me;” when, finally, the deep mysticism of the historical church represented the faithful as actually feeding upon God’s very essence and living thereby, — what doctrine was this but the very teaching upon which rests the new philosophy which now undertakes to transform Kant’s dark world of faithful and isolated beings into the world of God’s own realization and presence? These moral agents of Kant’s world are not isolated, for, ignorant as they are, they work together. And what better revelation of a divine order than a world where spirits can commune and can work together?
Once more, as you see, the philosopher invents nothing; he only reflects. In reflection he has cast down the dogmas of a blind faith; in reflection he builds anew their rational and eternal significance. So, at least, these German idealists hold. As for me, I am so far, as I just observed, a mere chronicler. This doctrine, too, may be an imperfect speculation. I am not now defending it, but only expounding it. As expositor I present it now before you. So far we find it as an hypothesis. It needs proof. Perhaps it will need further alteration and adjustment. At all events, here is for us a new experience in philosophy, namely, the very essence of Christianity embodied in a speculative theory.
III.
Meanwhile, the form which this doctrine takes in German thought is one dependent upon the special conditions of a very charming and a very wayward age, the age of German classical and romantic literature. Whether or no you find this sort of speculation in itself satisfactory, you will at all events be interested in watching with me, during the rest of this lecture and during the next, some of the more obvious and immediately human aspects of a time so full of fire, of imagination, of productiveness, of faults, of wanderings, and of glory. But let us proceed at once to the man who first embodied this new idealistic doctrine in a series of writings wherein the spontaneity, the eloquence, the confidence, the complexity, and the fragmentariness of the work done reflect very well the character of this period. I refer to Fichte.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte is the first of the great successors of Kant. He was a man three years younger than Schiller, thirteen years younger than Goethe, and thirty-eight years younger than Kant himself. The story of his life is one of ardor, poverty, high aims, brilliant literary success, bitter conflicts, and an untimely death in his country’s service. For at the close of his career, during the great war of liberation, in 1813, he and his devoted wife busied themselves in the encouragement of the warriors and in the care of the wounded. Fichte, as you see, had just passed the age of fifty. His wife, while nursing wounded soldiers, was stricken with typhus fever. She recovered, but the contagion had already passed to Fichte, to whom it proved fatal, in January, 1814. A nobler death, in a more heroic time, was scarcely possible to a professor of philosophy and a patriot. Fichte was spared the pain of seeing the darker years of national stagnation and of illiberalism in Germany, that followed the triumph over Napoleon. And for the rest, his work was in one sense already done. He had influenced younger men who by that time had already transcended him.
This work had been, however, manifold and exacting. Fichte had a temperament at once logical and enthusiastic. The struggle between a keen and subtle intellect and a warm and imaginative emotional nature, had joined itself with outer hindrances to make his early years eventful and arduous. The son of a poor weaver, and one of a large family of children, Fichte chanced to attract, while yet a boy, the kindly attention of a nobleman, who adopted him, showed him a little of the great world, and then, suddenly dying, left him a penniless youth, only the more keenly ashamed, under such circumstances, of his poverty. At the university he supported himself by private teaching, was more than once near to despair in his neediness, and at length, after graduation, became a Hofmeister in a Zürich family. While here, in 1788, he met his future wife, a certain Johanna Rahn, a niece of the poet Klopstock. They were soon betrothed, but were too poor to marry until 1793.
Fichte’s since published love-letters to his betrothed are described, by those who have read them through (I have not), as somewhat pedantic — the natural product of a mind conscientious, learned, but impulsive, and so far at once flighty and even a little despondent. He is fond of accusing himself of many faults, laments his restlessness and unsteadiness of ideas and plans, knows no guiding star but her love, and wonders what Providence can be meaning with him. Meanwhile, during this period of his betrothal, he changed his position often and traveled much, looking for a permanent occupation, — a project-maker and an unpromising wanderer. In philosophy he was so far a sort of amateur Spinozist, and occupied a position to which he later looked back as one of darkness and of the gall of bitterness. Suddenly a change came. It was 1790, and he was now twenty-eight years old. While in Leipzig he undertook to give a young man private lessons in philosophy, and to that end took up for the first time the study of Kant. Very soon he wrote to Fräulein Rahn in an entirely new vein. It is a wonderful philosophy, this of Kant, he asserts. It tames a man’s wild imagination; it gives one “an indescribable elevation above all earthly affairs.” “I have obtained from it,” he continues, “a nobler ideal. I don’t concern myself so much now with outward things; I am busied within myself. Thence has come to me a peace that I have never before known. In the midst of my perplexing material situation, I have been enjoying the most blessed days of my experience. I mean to devote to this philosophy at least some years of my life. It is above all conception a difficult doctrine, and it deserves to be made easier. Its basis, to be sure, is a mass of head-splitting speculations that have no immediate bearing on human life, but the consequences are vastly important to an age which, like ours, is morally corrupt to the very source; and one would deserve well of his time if he made these consequences luminous to the world. Tell your dear father that he and I used to err in our investigations about the necessity of all man’s acts. . . . I have found out now that man’s will is free, and that not happiness, but worthiness is the end of our being. And I ask your pardon, too, that I used to teach you false doctrine about these things. Henceforth believe your own feeling, even if you can’t refute a sophist.”
One might wonder whether this confession to Johanna Rahn, of the superlative blessedness of days passed out of her company, and alone with the “Critique of Pure Reason,” might not have made her a trifle jealous of Kant; but in fact, as she was a person of both maturity and discretion, being four years the senior of Fichte himself, she wrote him that, since after all he appeared unable to earn his living, and since her father’s means were now apparently sufficient, he might return to Zürich and marry her, and then devote himself to philosophy at his leisure. A curious wavering followed in the mind and conduct of Kant’s new disciple. He wrote to his brother that Fräulein Kahn was indeed the noblest soul in the world, but that for one thing he himself was a wanderer, an independent creature, and that for the rest something new had just come into his life, which seemed to drive him out to conquer the whole world afresh. Marriage would clip a man’s wings, would imprison him yonder in Switzerland, would perhaps hinder his philosophizing in this wondrous and novel way. He felt restless; he was even often disposed to flee altogether and never write to her again.
To Johanna herself, Fichte’s letters expressed of course nothing of these rebellious sentiments, and I mention them only to suggest a little of the ferment which in this needy young tutor’s soul was then under way. He must do everything, — teach Johanna the new insight, marry, cease this wavering that had made him like a wave of the sea; and yet, he must also convert the whole world to the Kantian doctrine, in all its spirituality and earnestness; he must save his countrymen in this time of revolution and of corruption; he must wander, work, think incessantly. One has here, you see, something of the typical erudite German of the story-books, crude and elevated in one — lover, world-stormer, sentimentalist, and cynic, all at the same time. For Fichte, too, was occasionally a bit of a cynic. “When I met Johanna,” he once writes to his brother, “my heart was empty. I just let her love me. I didn’t care much about it.” “Dear one,” he writes to her in all sincerity, at about the same time, “take me with all my faults. What a creature I am! Men have attributed to me fixity of character, but I have always been merely the creature of circumstances. You have the stronger soul. Give fixity to my waverings.”[1] In this state of mind Fichte journeyed, in the way of business, to accept a tutor’s position at Warsaw. He failed there to give satisfaction, because his French pronunciation was poor, and on his way back he called upon Kant at Königsberg, in July, 1791. The aged, prudent, and, as you will remember, highly economical philosopher regarded this reverent, fiery, but obviously impecunious young disciple with a certain suspicion, and received his confidences coolly. The rebuff only heated Fichte the more. He tarried in Königsberg two months, in order during that time to write, for presentation to Kant, a work on religious philosophy, which, once finished, proved to be so thoroughly in Kant’s spirit that, when in the spring of the next year the book was published anonymously, it was very generally hailed by Kant’s admirers as a new production of the master’s own genius. Kant himself had to correct this misapprehension, and in doing so named, and now with warm praise, the real author. Thus at one stroke, as it were, Fichte’s career was made. He had won the great philosopher’s approval and the ear of the public at the same time. Within another year he returned to Zürich. He was at length famous, and, as his beloved was now, by chance, even more obviously in comfortable circumstances than she had been at the time when she wrote the aforementioned highly practical letter, there was nothing further to hinder his marriage, which took place in October, 1793, and remained to the end a very happy one. In 1794 came the call to the University of Jena, which was then at the centre of the mental life of Germany.
IV.
Fichte’s career has thus been suggested to you through a sketch of its first important crisis. There is the same interesting union of the great, the ardent, the thoughtful, and, if one wants to be frank, of the petty also, in the rest of his life. Accused of atheism in 1799, the heroic, but lamentably indiscreet man replied to an unjust charge in so violent and unhappy a fashion as to make him thenceforth impossible at Jena, so that even the chief patron of liberal culture and free thought in Germany, Goethe’s own duke at Weimar, had regretfully, and by Goethe’s personal advice, to dismiss him from his chair. Then followed, however, the Berlin career, with its noble ending. Later years, indeed, in some respects mellowed Fichte; but to the end he was always a fighter, and a man of books as well, with all the faults of both these species, with a temperament whose lofty heroism and true piety could not save it from an appearance of polemical narrowness and furious self-assertion whenever he was in an actual conflict with any man or party. In argument Fichte is, so to speak, all temperament. His dialectic is indeed keen, his analysis is deep and searching, his sense of the unity of all science is profoundly rational; but deeper than all is the strong sense of his own personality, the love of making articulate his own character, which led him to say with truth, but with a peculiar and individual strength of accent: “What system of philosophy you hold depends wholly upon what manner of man you are.” Hence, in all his lengthy and frequently very technical writings, he after all never merely argues; he appeals to more than your understanding; he appeals to your honor, to your dignity of soul, to agree with his system. He would not merely convince you; he would convert you from an error which, as he feels, shows in you a defect of character. Goethe used to say that, by way of amusement, he occasionally read Fichte, “just to let myself be abused by him for a little while.” Meanwhile, Fichte abused frankly his own early blindness, before Kant came into his soul, with all the ardor of the ransomed convert. What Kant had ransomed him from was Spinozism, and the dread bondage of the outer world. What Fichte conceived himself to have learned from Kant was therefore this: The rational subject builds its own world, and the dead external world is naught. What Fichte added to Kant, as he went on, was however somewhat elaborate, and constitutes, along with the strictly Kantian elements, his own system, which is almost universally but rather inaptly named “Subjective idealism.”
Let me state it, too, first in rough outline, then a little more systematically. As everybody knows, Fichte accepted Kant’s result in so far as Kant said that space and time are facts only for our consciousness, and that we can’t know any things in themselves beyond us. Only Fichte went further. He denied that there can exist any things in themselves beyond consciousness at all. The world that we spiritual beings know, however bard and fast it may seem, however helplessly we ourselves may individually be subjected to its facts, is still, in the last analysis, there only in so far as we recognize it as there for us. The world, then, is the world that the self makes. So Fichte’s chief principles are these: (1) All philosophy has its source in one primal truth, namely, the truth that living and voluntary selves freely choose to assert themselves, and so to build up their whole organized world; (2) The moral law is, in consequence of this, really prior to all other knowledge, and conditions all that we theoretically know. For as you see, knowing a world is for Fichte making a world, consciously recognizing the truth, acting then in this way or in that. But the law of action, the moral law, thus becomes for Fichte the basis of all theoretical knowing; (3) The apparently fatal outer world about us is simply, in Fichte’s bold and stirringly fantastic words, “the stuff, the material (the opportunity), for our duty, made manifest to our senses (‘das versinnlichte Material unserer Pflicht’).” Beyond all this, however, in the fourth place, Fichte went later, when he developed more clearly a doctrine obviously latent and implied in his earlier works, namely, the doctrine that the universe of the self-asserting and world-creating selves, each of whom sees about him in daily life simply the very stuff and fibre of his moral law made manifest to his senses as an opportunity for his moral work, — that this universe of selves, I say, constitutes the life and embodiment of the one true and infinite Reason, God’s will, which, itself supreme and far above the level of our finite personality, uses even our conscious lives and wills as part of its own life. This doctrine Fichte himself, in one of his later works (“The Way to the Blessed Life”), identifies with the teaching of the fourth Gospel. According to this view, you see, God, in so far as he reveals himself, is indeed the vine, and we, in so far as we truly live, are the sap-laden and fruitful branches. The only real world is the world of conscious activity, and so of spiritual relationships, of society, of serious business, of friendship, of love, of law, of national existence, — in a word, of work; as for matter, that is the mere show stuff that is needed to embody, to express, to give form, stability, outline, as it were, to our moral work.
I may put Fichte’s theory of the external world in yet another fashion, thus: In company with another spirit, so Fichte thinks, I can only work in case he and I have a sense world in common. Hence our common devotion, our social enthusiasm, our duty, requires of us all that we try to embody our ideals in the same sense forms. If we succeed, we all see the same houses and streets, the same people moving, the same flags waving. Seeing thus in common, we can work in common. If we did not find out how to work in common, we should express the vagueness of our immoral isolation in the separateness of our various sense worlds; in other words, we should dream or be delirious. I dream when I am not at work. When I am strenuously active I am awake; and therefore, in so far as I am effectively righteous, I see the same stuff that my fellow-workers see. Matter is thus the mere condition of our common tasks. Each one of us creates it for himself. We create together and in agreement, in so far as we want to toil for a common purpose. And the rationality of the divine plan secures to us a power thus to create and to work together. Meanwhile, good and bad men, noble and base men, strong and weak men, really do not see precisely the same sense world. The seeming outer world for any man actually varies with his moral perceptions. The sense world is saner and more orderly for the cultivated man than for the savage, for the good man than for the man absorbed in the pleasure of the moment, for the wise man than for the fool. And thus the doctrine conforms, thinks Fichte, to the actual facts. “The necessity,” says the philosopher, “with which the belief in the reality of phenomena forces itself upon us is a moral necessity, the only one that is possible for a moral being; herein our duty reveals itself.” And thus we have, in the barest outline, the famous “subjective idealism” of Fichte. One might better call it “ethical idealism” in its extremest expression. So much, then, for my first rough summary. And now what shall we say of this sort of idealism?
A bold, yes, an extravagant doctrine! you will say. Kant’s things in themselves have gone out of this world of Fichte. Yet somehow we at first scarcely miss them. Kant, to be sure, felt quite out of place in Fichte’s fantastic universe, and publicly expressed his repentance, ere he died, that he had ever encouraged this young disciple so freely. “Save me from my friends,” cried Kant, very sincerely, in a printed note of explanation. The transformation lay of course in Fichte’s determination not merely to do away with Kant’s things in themselves, but to see at once into the very heart of the moral order, whose supremacy Kant had only postulated. If you now ask me, however, whether, as modern idealist, I myself accept Fichte’s statemnent as the final truth of the doctrine, I respond of course at once that I do not. This isn’t the idealism that has, as idealism ought to have, a deep and genuine respect for the natural order and for experience. Fichte’s easy disposal of the whole external and natural order is, indeed, not only bold, but quite unwarranted. The modern student of nervous physiology, of the facts of evolution, and of the interdependence of the physical and moral worlds generally, is not likely to find Fichte’s “ethical idealism” anywhere near to the last word. More philosophical surprises await us hereafter; upon newer insights the thought of to-day is based; and in some, not in all respects, the whole later German idealistic movement, which Fichte began, represents to my mind, as you will later see, a circuit to one side of the main stream of modern thought. Only, as we shall learn, from this circuit thought returns enriched. This experience also will have its part in the outcome; and he who has not once fairly viewed Fichte’s universe will see less than he ought to see in the universe of to-day.
As an experience, then, as one more of the many ways of looking at truth, I want you to consider this doctrine. Think of Fichte, when you read or hear of him, as one embodiment only of that beautiful, that profoundly wise and instructive, waywardness of German thought and sentiment, which we all know so well to-day in song, in story, and in the drama, as well as in the other arts. It is this same waywardness that has given us “Faust,” and Heine’s “Buch der Lieder;” that instantaneously transforms the whole universe for us in any song of Schubert’s or of Schumann’s; that builds worlds and casts them down in fiery despair in a Wagnerian trilogy. In presence of this waywardness, not, indeed, of the Germany of Bismarck and of the two Williams, but of the now almost dead romantic Germany, whose empire, as Jean Paul said, was of the air, — in presence of this waywardness, the world is once for all plastic, changeable; a world of divine or of diabolical ideas, but of ideas that are not so much eternal as capricious. Fichte makes this ideal world a moral one. Others, as we shall see, will find this universe of the selves a universe of romance, of sentimentality, of anything but hard fact. Yet think not that this capricious world utterly lacks truth. The real world, too, once for all flows; flows and changes throughout its whole existence, as Heraclitus long ago said; and preserves, too, its sacred and permanent logos just by changing. Well, it is the office of the wayward to note the various aspects of just this change, this plasticity, this seemingly hopeless variety, under which the eternal truth presents itself to us. In the world of the wayward, nothing seems fast. View follows view, romantic theory chases romantic theory, until we begin to fear that nothing is true, and that here, even as in Hume’s skeptical world also, if we find the Holy Grail itself, “it, too, will fade, and crumble into dust.” But, if we watch patiently, we shall see that, from this very wealth of forms, the true form which is present through all the changes will in some fashion ultimately come to light. Fichte’s moral universe, where matter is only our duty made manifest to our senses, and the universe of the romantic school, where all is sentiment, are, after all, fragments of the true faith. That thought is the thread which is to guide us through the labyrinth. The truth is the whole. Even the fantastic has its part therein.
V.
But let us look a second time and more closely at Fichte’s view. The only perfectly clear thing, he says, at the outset of philosophy, is that there is a self. Any self will of course do, but some self one must start with, namely, of course, his own. Now a self asserts, “I am.” It also equally asserts, “Something exists beside me; there is a not-self.” If you don’t believe that this is always asserted, Fichte invites you to try it and see.[2] Well, here forthwith is a puzzle. I assert that I exist; and then I assert that something exists beside me. Now I can of course know myself, it would seem, but how can I get outside myself to see what is not myself? How come I to guess at the existence of something other than I am? Fichte’s solution is simple. I don’t guess at it; nor is it a fact forced upon me from without, in any fashion. My true self freely chooses to recognize the existence of something beside myself as a fact. To be sure, I, in my private, empirical, momentary capacity, seem not to choose, but helplessly to find this outer existence. Really, however, it is my own, my deeper self, whose choice is at each moment shown to me. But, then, observe, unless I thus chose to recognize something beyond myself, I should have nothing to do, I should have nothing to resist, to fight, to win, to love, — in short, to act upon, in any way. The deepest truth, then, is a practical truth. I need something not myself, in order to be active, that is, in order to exist. My very existence is practical; it is self-assertion. I exist, so to speak, by hurling the fact of my existence at another than myself. I limit myself thus, by a foreign somewhat, opaque, external, my own opposite; but my limitation is the free choice of my true self. By thus limiting myself I give myself something to do, and thus win my own very existence. Yet this opposition, upon which my life is based, is an opposition within my deepest nature. I have a foreign world as the theatre of my activity; I exist only to conquer and win that apparently foreign world to myself; I must come to possess it; I must prove that it is mine. In the process of thus asserting a foreign world, and then actively identifying it as not foreign and external, but as our own, our life itself consists. This is what is meant by work, by love, by duty.
But this process, thinks Fichte, is essentially an endless one. The more of a self I am, the more of a world outside me I need, to develop and to express my energies. A busy man needs, and therefore posits, a world full of the objects of his business. Without this asserted world of objects, he, as busy man, would cease to exist; he would, so to speak, retire from business; he and his busy world would stagnate together. This, then, is Fichte’s central thought: Your outer world, your not-self, is just as large as your own spiritual activity makes it. Fichte tries to show in detail how the various forms of our recognition of outer reality, such as perception, imagination, space, time, causality, and the rest, arise. Into such details I have no time to follow him; but the essence of his doctrine consists in identifying Kant’s theoretical and practical reason, and in saying that all our assertion of a world beyond, of a world of things and of people, merely expresses, in practical form, our assertion of our own wealthy and varied determination to be busy with things and with people. Thus, then, each of us builds his own world. He builds it in part unconsciously; and therefore he seems to his ordinary thought not to have built it at all, but merely to find it. Each of us sees, at any moment, not only the world that we are now making by this act, but the world that we have made by all our past acts. And hence our whole life is thus consolidated before our eyes; our world is the world of our conscious and unconscious deeds. Thus we often regard it as our fate, and talk of an external substance, as Spinoza did. In this we are wrong. No activity, no world; no self, no not-self; no self-assertion, no facts to assert ourselves upon. So, at least, Fichte teaches. But, you will say, is not the outcome of all this a sort of solitary self-existence, where each one of us is shut up to his own life? Has the spiritual world no absolute reality? Is it, too, the mere dream of our activity? No, thinks Fichte, not so; and here comes a part of his doctrine that was to himself the hardest part. He never made it perfectly clear, although he tried again and again. To you I can only suggest it. When we reflect upon our inner activity we find it, after all, not an individual self-will, but a deep longing for universal life. The true self, therefore (and so far the thing is indeed clear enough), the true self isn’t the private person, the individual called Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the impecunious tutor, the wavering lover of Johanna Rahn, the professor in Jena, falsely accused of atheism. This true self, thinks Fichte, is something infinite. It needs a whole endless world of life to express itself in. Its moral law couldn’t be expressed in full on any one planet. Johann Gottlieb may be one of its prophets; but the heavens could not contain its glory and its eternal business. No one of us ever finally gets at the true Reason which is the whole of him. Each one of us is a partial embodiment, an instrument of the moral law, and our very consciousness tells us that this law is the expression of an infinite world life. The true self is the will, which is everywhere present in things. This will is, indeed, the vine, whereof our wills are the branches. Fichte has innumerable ways of trying to tell finally and clearly the story of what the infinite will is and does. It is eternally asserting itself afresh, through countless finite wills. Each one of these finite wills, as moral agent, builds its sense world, and finds, in this sense world, the manifestations of other agents. For all the agents, as ministers of the divine, work together. The moral consciousness says to each, “If I am real, so also are these. Work with them; respect their rights; honor their freedom; join with them to build a higher and freer world than any of us now see.” In this organization of life, even here on earth, in this kindliness, this honorable conduct, this social unity, which constitutes our better life, something of the divine will is thus realized. But the problem of its complete realization is an endless one. Nowhere, in all the infinity of countless worlds of moral struggle, can the divine will be fully realized. As I myself seek to assert myself all my life long, but never succeed fully in my task, am always struggling with obstacles, casting aside all that I have won, in order to pursue new triumphs, even so the divine will is restless through all its worlds, and pulses from self to self, from attainment to attainment, in an everlasting search for a complete self-realization. The true God is, therefore, as Fichte holds, existent in our universe as the pulse of its moral order, as the life of lives, the eternal spiritual self-creator, whose work is never done, who rests never, and who is no one individual being anywhere, but who is the live and organic unity of all beings. Even herein, however, thinks Fichte, he finds his highest peace, that in endless toil he shall reassert himself, and shall win the world which is his embodiment.
VI.
The completest popular statement possible of Fichte’s system is given in his own words in his book on the “Vocation of Man.” This work was first published in 1800, shortly after Fichte left Jena, and was no doubt meant to justify him, in the eyes of the general public, against the charge of atheism. The argument of the work falls into three parts, denominated respectively, “Doubt,” “Knowledge,” and “Faith.” Under the first head Fichte describes the views and problems of his own pre-Kantian period. Under the second head he sets forth the revolution produced in his thought by the influence of Kant. In the third part he explains the conceptions of the moral order and of the infinite will. The style is eloquent, tireless, too full of explanation and of illustrations; the work as a whole is profound and inspiring. Let us hear yet a word of Fichte’s own from this book, in a fine passage where he appeals direct to this infinite itself. “Supreme and living will,” he says, “whom no name names, to thee may I lift up my soul, for thou and I are not parted. Thy voice sounds in me, and mine again in thee; and all my thoughts, if only they be true, are thought in thee. I comprehend thee not, yet in thee I comprehend myself and the world. . . . Best fitted to know thee is childlike and submissive simplicity. ... I know not what thou art for thyself, . . . and after thousand lives lived through, my spirit will comprehend thee as little as now, in this house of clay. For what I have once won to my comprehension becomes even thereby finite. . . . Nay, I wish not to know of thee what thou art in thyself. I know thy bearings on my life. . . . Thou producest.in me the knowledge of my duty. . . . Thou knowest what I think and will; . . . thou choosest that my free obedience shall be effective to all eternity; . . . thou doest, for thy will is itself Deed. Thou livest and art, for thou dost know, will, and do, and art ever present to my insight; but what thou art I shall never wholly know through all the eternities.”
This, you see, is Fichte’s theism. The essence of it is, with all the analogies between the two, something very different from Kant’s postulating of a God beyond the world of sense. The fact is that, for Fichte, my own vocation is the central fact of consciousness. But what my vocation is, is a matter for deeper consideration. And, if I duly consider my vocation, I find that there is a measureless strength of restless will about me, which demands an infinity of time in which to work out my vocation, and an infinite business to meet, with its magnitude, the endlessly significant office that I choose for myself. Plainly, then, I, the true self, am not the mere self of the world of sense, the self who eats and talks, and has this name. It might be truer to say that I, the real, the deeper, the relatively impersonal, or, rather, if you like, the genuinely and essentially personal self, need, and so express myself in, the world of social business. All we human selves are thus one true organic self, in so far as we work together. And this organic self we all of us experience just in so far as we do toil together. But not even this larger self of society can fully express the vocation which constitutes me in my true, in my deeper personality. No, my true vocation is endless, is eternal. By it I am linked, not through a mere postulate, but through all my deeper self-consciousness, to the very essence of the divine personality. When I reflect upon this truth, lo! my earthly existence, in its darkness and limitations, vanishes from before my eyes. With you I stand in presence of the divinest of mysteries, the communion of all the spirits in the one self whose free act is the very heart’s blood of our spiritual being. Nay, must it not, then, thinks Fichte, must not this be true of us? We are dead, and our life is hid in God. He is the only self. His will is the only will; his self-assertion lives in our every deed and love; his restlessness trembles in every throb of our hearts; his joy thrills in every triumph of our courage.
Well, in this thought, thus eloquently suggested by the restless and unsatisfying Fichte, you have the beginnings of the post-Kantian German idealism. The question, “Who is the true self?” thus becomes central in thought. Kant had really made it so, when he made all reasonable experience a continual appeal of my momentary to my larger self. Fichte merely universalizes the problem. The world is the poem thus dreamed out by the inner life. Who, then, is the dreamer? That is the question of the romantic period of German speculation. If you remember this as the central problem in all that is to follow in the two succeeding lectures, you will have in hand the thread that will guide us through this labyrinth of German speculation. Do not tremble, I beg you, before the mysterious seeming of the region into which we enter. The thread, firmly held, will soon lead us back again to the study of the natural order, back again to the kingdom of modern science, to the region where the facts are indeed stubborn, but where the deepest problems, as the idealists will meanwhile have taught us, must needs be spiritual. To teach, indeed, just this lesson, the spirituality of the stubborn world of outer fact, was the true mission of these idealists, who so often despised facts.
Notes
[edit]- ↑ The present sketch is dependent largely upon that of Julian Schmidt, as given in the fifth edition of his Geschichte d. deutschen Literatur seit Lessing's Tod, vol. i. p. 347 sqq.
- ↑ Cf. the noteworthy passage in the Grundlage of 1794, Fichte’s Werke, vol. i. p. 253: “Dass es ein solches Setzen gebe [namely, of the Nicht-lch] kann jeder nur durch seine eigene Erfahrung sich darthun.”