This philosophy contains nothing speculative, but it demands the presence of the speculative element. As the philosophy of Kant seeks in unity its Idea of the Supreme Good, wherein the opposites have to be united, so the Fichtian philosophy demands union in the ego and in the implicitude of faith; in this self-consciousness in all its actions makes its starting-point conviction, so that in themselves its actions may bring forth the highest end and realize the good. In the Fichtian philosophy nothing can be seen beyond the moment of self-consciousness, of self-conscious Being-within-self, as in the philosophy of England we find expressed—in just as one-sided a way—the moment of Being-for-another, or of consciousness, and that not as a moment simply, but as the principle of the truth; in neither of the two is there the unity of both—or spirit.
Fichte’s philosophy constitutes a significant epoch in Philosophy regarded in its outward form. It is from him and from his methods that abstract thought proceeds, deduction and construction. Hence with the Fichtian philosophy a revolution took place in Germany. The public had penetrated as far as the philosophy of Kant, and until the Kantian philosophy was reached the interest awakened by Philosophy was general; it was accessible, and men were curious to know about it, it pertained to the ordinary knowledge of a man of culture (supra, p. 218). Formerly men of business, statesmen, occupied themselves with Philosophy; now, however, with the intricate idealism of the philosophy of Kant, their wings droop helpless to the ground. Hence it is with Kant that we first begin to find a line of separation which parts us from the common modes of consciousness; but the result, that the Absolute cannot be known, has become one generally acknowledged. With Fichte the common consciousness has still further separated itself from Philosophy, and it has utterly departed from the speculative element therein present. For Fichte’s ego is not merely the ego of the empiric consciousness, since general determinations of thought such as do not fall within the ordinary consciousness have likewise to be known and brought to consciousness; in this way since Fichte’s time few men have occupied themselves with speculation. Fichte, it is true, in his later works especially, wrote with a view to meeting the popular ear as we may see in the “Attempt to force the reader into comprehension,” but this end was not accomplished. The public was through the philosophy of Kant and Jacobi strengthened in its opinion—one which it accepted utiliter—that the knowledge of God is immediate, and that we know it from the beginning and without requiring to study, and hence that Philosophy is quite superfluous.
[2. Fichte’s System in a Re-constituted Form.]
The times called for life, for spirit. Now since mind has thus retreated within self-consciousness, but within self-consciousness as a barren ego, which merely gives itself a content or a realization through finitenesses and individualities which in and for themselves are nothing, the next stage is found in knowing this realization of self-consciousness in itself, in knowing the content in itself as a content which, penetrated throughout by spirit, is self-conscious and spiritual, or a spirit full of content. In his later popular works Fichte thus set forth faith, love, hope, religion, treating them without philosophic interest, and as for a general public: it was a philosophy calculated to suit enlightened Jews and Jewesses, councillors and Kotzebues. He places the matter in a popular form: “It is not the finite ego that is, but the divine Idea is the foundation of all Philosophy; everything that man does of himself is null and void. All existence is living and active in itself, and there is no other life than Being, and no other Being than God; God is thus absolute Being and Life. The divine essence likewise comes forth, revealing and manifesting itself—the world.”[405] This immediate unity of the self-conscious ego and its content, or spirit, which merely has an intuition of its self-conscious life and knows it as the truth immediately, manifested itself subsequently in poetic and prophetic tendencies, in vehement aspirations, in excrescences which grew out of the Fichtian philosophy.
[3. The more Important of the Followers of Fichte.]
On the one hand, in respect of the content which the ego reaches in the philosophy of Fichte, the complete absence of spirituality, the woodenness, and, to put it plainly, the utter foolishness therein evidenced, strike us too forcibly to allow us to remain at his standpoint; our philosophic perception likewise tells us of the one-sidedness and deficiencies of the principle, as also of the evident necessity that the content should prove to be what it is. But on the other hand self-consciousness was therein posited as reality or essence—not as a foreign, alien self-consciousness, but as ego—a signification which all possess, and which finds an answer in the actuality of all. The Fichtian standpoint of subjectivity has thus retained its character of being unphilosophically worked out, and arrived at its completion in forms pertaining to sensation which in part remained within the Fichtian principle, while they were in part the effort—futile though it was—to get beyond the subjectivity of the ego.
[a. Friedrich von Schlegel.]
In Fichte’s case the limitation is continually re-appearing; but because the ego feels constrained to break through this barrier, it reacts against it, and gives itself a resting-place within itself; this last ought to be concrete, but it is a negative resting-place alone. This first form, Irony, has Friedrich von Schlegel as its leading exponent. The subject here knows itself to be within itself the Absolute, and all else to it is vain; all the conclusions which it draws for itself respecting the right and good, it likewise knows how to destroy again. It can make a pretence of knowing all things, but it only demonstrates vanity, hypocrisy, and effrontery. Irony knows itself to be the master of every possible content; it is serious about nothing, but plays with all forms. The other side is this, that subjectivity has cast itself into religious subjectivity. The utter despair in respect of thought, of truth, and absolute objectivity, as also the incapacity to give oneself any settled basis or spontaneity of action, induced the noble soul to abandon itself to feeling and to seek in Religion something fixed and steadfast; this steadfast basis, this inward satisfaction, is to be found in religious sentiments and feelings. This instinct impelling us towards something fixed has forced many into positive forms of religion, into Catholicism, superstition and miracle working, in order that they may find something on which they can rest, because to inward subjectivity everything fluctuates and wavers. With the whole force of its mind subjectivity tries to apply itself to what is positively given, to bend its head beneath the positive, to cast itself, so to speak, into the arms of externality, and it finds an inward power impelling it so to do.
[b. Schleiermacher.]
On the other hand the ego finds in the subjectivity and individuality of the personal view of things the height of all its vanity—its Religion. All the various individualities have God within themselves. Dialectic is the last thing to arise and to maintain its place. As this is expressed for philosophic self-consciousness, the foreign intellectual world has lost all significance and truth for ordinary culture; it is composed of three elements, a deity pertaining to a time gone by, and individualized in space and existence, a world which is outside the actuality of self-consciousness, and a world which had yet to appear, and in which self-consciousness would first attain to its reality. The spirit of culture has deserted it, and no longer recognizes anything that is foreign to self-consciousness. In accordance with this principle, the spiritual living essence has then transformed itself into self-consciousness, and it thinks to know the unity of spirit immediately from itself, and in this immediacy to be possessed of knowledge in a poetic, or at least a prophetic manner. As regards the poetic manner, it has a knowledge of the life and person of the Absolute immediately, by an intuition, and not in the Notion, and it thinks it would lose the whole as whole, as a self-penetrating unity, were it not to express the same in poetic form; and what it thus expresses poetically is the intuition of the personal life of self-consciousness. But the truth is absolute motion, and since it is a motion of forms and figures [Gestalten], and the universe is a kingdom of spirits, the Notion is the essence of this movement, and likewise of each individual form; it is its ideal form [Form] and not the real one, or that of figure [Gestalt]. In the latter case necessity is lost sight of; individual action, life and heart, remain within themselves, and undeveloped; and this poetry vacillates betwixt the universality of the Notion and the determinateness and indifference of the figure; it is neither flesh nor fish, neither poetry nor philosophy. The prophetic utterance of truths which claim to be philosophical, thus belongs to faith, to self-consciousness, which indeed perceives the absolute spirit in itself, but does not comprehend itself as self-consciousness, since it places absolute reality above Knowledge, beyond self-conscious reason, as was done by Eschenmayer and Jacobi. This uncomprehending, prophetic manner of speech affirms this or that respecting absolute existence as from an oracle, and requires that each man should find the same immediately in his own heart. The knowledge of absolute reality becomes a matter pertaining to the heart; there are a number of would-be inspired speakers, each of whom holds a monologue and really does not understand the others, excepting by a pressure of the hands and betrayal of dumb feeling. What they say is mainly composed of trivialities, if these are taken in the sense in which they are uttered; it is the feeling, the gesture, the fulness of the heart, which first gives them their significance; to nothing of more importance is direct expression given. They outbid one another in conceits of fancy, in ardent poetry. But before the Truth vanity turns pale, spitefully sneering it sneaks back into itself. Ask not after a criterion of the truth, but after the Notion of the truth in and for itself; on that fix your gaze. The glory of Philosophy is departed, for it presupposes a common ground of thoughts and principles—which is what science demands—or at least of opinions. But now particular subjectivity was everything, each individual was proud and disdainful as regards all others. The conception of independent thought—as though there could be a thought which was not such (Vol. I. p. 60)—is very much the same; men have, it is said, to bring forth a particularity of their own, or else they have not thought for themselves. But the bad picture is that in which the artist shows himself; originality is the production of what is in its entirety universal. The folly of independent thought is that it results in each bringing forth something more preposterous than another.