A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

In his later teaching Fichte succumbed to the victorious Spinozism of the period. He conceived God as an Ego whose infinite impulse is directed toward Himself; he conceived finite things as products of this infinitely active consciousness. The finite products find their vocation in imitating the infinite producer, which imitation consists not in the activity of producing other finite things through the categorical imperative, but in the “blessed life” of sinking into the infinite.

What a Moral Reality involves. Since reality is this process of moral development, its conditions will arise out of itself and be its own creation. Since the world is reason coming to itself, it must develop its own conditions out of its original task. All the acts of history must be explained as the original “deed-act,” as Fichte calls it. Fichte thought that the whole business of philosophy consists in showing what is involved in this original “deed-act” of consciousness, this attempt of consciousness to think itself. Since self-consciousness is reality, this will be the same as showing what reality involves.

1. In the first place, consciousness always involves the consciousness of something else. To use Fichte’s technical language, the Ego posits itself (since it is a moral process) and in the same act it posits a non-Ego(which is the necessary object of consciousness). “The absolute Ego asserts a distinguishable Ego against a distinguishable non-Ego.” It is like a boy who feels the call to become a lawyer. He asserts himself in that call, and at the same time in that assertion he creates his life’s career. His career in the law is his non-Ego. Both the Ego and the non-Ego are creations of that absolute Ego, which is the ever surging duty or God. While both the Ego and the non-Ego are the creations of that absolute Ego, which is cosmic duty or God, yet each limits the other. Ego and non-Ego are correlative terms; both originate in the free act of God. The world is, therefore, the creation of the real self as the condition of its own activity. It even creates its sensations as the given materials of its knowledge. The world is the material of duty put into sense forms. While we create matter in order that we may be active in it, the spatial and temporal forms, its categories, limit our activities.

2. In the second place, this awakening of the Ego to a consciousness of itself involves a curious contradiction. Duty is by nature contradictory. Duty calls me to know myself and to perform my task, and yet in that call duty prevents the task from being performed. In attempting to know duty completely I am always under the condition of an opposing and limiting non-Ego. The non-Ego is essential to the Ego and at the same time thwarts the Ego’s full knowledge of itself. So long as the non-Ego exists, no complete knowledge of myself is possible. A limiting non-Ego makes the Ego limited, and therefore prevents complete knowledge and fulfillment of duty. Duty calls upon us to perform a task, but under conditions such that it cannot be performed. So long as the boy strives in his legal profession, duty appears; butso long is duty rendered incomplete. Moral progress is endless, but that only shows how contented we must be with the process of striving and not with some static condition. To strive morally is reality; the goal is nowhere. The contradiction is seen in the eternal contrast between what is and what ought to be, between the moral task and the actual performance. We are under the requirement to perform, and in the requirement is the restraint. The dialectic process is endless. First there is the stage which Fichte calls the Thesis in the call of the absolute Ego. The next stage is the Antithesis, seen in the mutually limiting Ego and non-Ego. The next stage is the Synthesis, in which some accomplishment is gained, but which becomes only the Thesis for another Antithesis; and so on infinitely. The terms Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis are important, for they are employed by Fichte’s successors, Schelling and Hegel.

Romanticism.[61] “We seek the plan of nature in the outside world. We ourselves are this plan. Why need we traverse the difficult roads through physical nature? The better and purer road lies within our own mind.” (Novalis.)

Romanticism was a great European movement which lasted about a century from 1750 to 1850; and it would be perfectly justifiable to speak of the intellectual period in Germany from Lessing to Heine as Romanticism. Rousseau and the French Revolutionists, Ossian, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wagner were in the forefront of this world-wide movement. The Storm and Stress Period was aphase of it; and so even was the Period of Classicism that followed. Goethe and Schiller were Romanticists, and Classicism was only an episode in their lives. The Period of German Classicism (1787–1805) was different from the Classicism of the seventeenth century, because it was thoroughly infected with Romantic germs. If one is to take account of the different phases of German thought after Lessing, one mentions first the Storm and Stress Period, then Classicism, and then the Romantic movement proper from 1795 to 1850. Some of the literary names connected with the Romantic movement have already been mentioned,—Richter, Tieck, Wackenroder, Novalis, the Schlegels, Schiller, and Goethe. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are the philosophers of this Romantic movement and embody its spirit in different degrees. The true philosophical exponent of it is Schelling.

Romanticism is an accidental and inadequate name for this world-wide literary and philosophical movement. In general it means the exalting of the individual, “who admits no law above himself.” The Romantic individuality is dominated by unrestrained fancy, is animated by feeling and passion, and prefers the vague and mystical to the clear and defined. In literature Romanticism is contrasted with Classicism. The Classicist emphasizes the type, the Romanticist the individual. The Classicist defers to traditional form and law; the Romanticist has no common canon even with other Romanticists except the right to disagree. The only common principle among Romanticists is subjective—the truth of the individual intuitions, which in the case of the historical Romanticists found expression in the play of fiercely egoistic wills seeking self-realization.The historical Romantic movement was a passionate and mighty reaction against the previous shallow intellectual life with its narrow conventions. Romanticism was a revolt against the period of the Enlightenment, which scorned what it could not define. These Romanticists were discontented with typical ideas and with logical reasoning about them. They challenged the universe, because it was not obedient to their egoistic cravings.

It is very clear what the dangers as well as the greatness of this German Romanticism were. The dangers of the movement lay within itself, in its aristocratic exclusiveness, its reluctance to face the forces of evil, its lack of strength and of firmness of character. Yet the age itself may be largely responsible for these. Its strength lay also within, in its deepening of self-consciousness, in its rejuvenating and ennobling the whole expanse of being, in its intellectual conception of man’s most intimate relations to himself, to his companions, and to the world around him. Sometimes, indeed, the spiritual force of this small band shows itself quite capable of strong action in the outer world. Napoleon himself ascribed his downfall not primarily to diplomacy or to the bayonet, but to the resistance of the German Ideologists.

Goethe as a Romanticist. We have already spoken of the resurrection of Spinoza’s doctrine and its acceptance as a model by this time. The Romanticists, following Spinoza, conceived of nature as a unity in which the divine manifests itself in its fullness. Nature is Reason in Becoming. So fitting, indeed, for the time was Spinoza’s pantheism that Goethe, the literary exponent of the period, made it the central principle of his poetic thought. Goethe can be understood only as the Romantic Spinoza. The philosophy that underliesGoethe’s work is noted here as an example of the Romantic movement.

Like all the Romantic philosophy, Goethe’s philosophy was a personal revelation, and not a formulated doctrine for universal application. Like all the Romanticists, Goethe was a highly strung personality, and his philosophy was conceived to be true by himself only for himself. He did not look upon the trivialities and the conventions of life as mere limitations of his personality, but as a fall from truth. Truth is realized by man when he is in vital interchange with the universe. Therefore Goethe was in full agreement with Spinoza in longing for emancipation from human littleness and in his desire for the infinite. Goethe differed from Spinoza’s pantheism in his own way; for Goethe conceived man to have an independent function in the infinite. Man makes his contribution to history and does not merely passively appropriate the products of the world around himself. Man reacts upon the world, he resists it, and becomes alive to the joy of it.