The advance from Kant to Fichte was preparing alike among friends and enemies, and this in two points. The demand was in part for a formal complement (a first principle from which the Kantian results could be deduced, and by which the dualism of sense and understanding could be overcome), in part for material correction (the removal of the thing in itself) and development (to radical idealism). Karl Leonhard Reinhold (born at Vienna in 1758; fled from a college of the St. Barnabite order, 1783; in 1787-94 professor in Jena, and then as the successor of Tetens in Kiel, where he died in 1823) undertook the former task in his Attempt at a New Theory of the Human Faculty of Representation, 1789. Kant's classical theory of the faculty of cognition requires for its foundation a theory of the faculty of representation, or an elementary philosophy, which shall take for its object the deduction of the several functions of reason (intuition, concept, Idea) from the original activity of representation. The Kantian philosophy lacks a first principle, which, as first, cannot be demonstrable, but only a fact immediately evident and admitted by everyone. The primal fact, which we seek, is consciousness. No one can dispute that every representation contains three things: the subject, the object, and, between the two, the activity of representation. Accordingly the principle of consciousness runs: "The representation is distinguished in consciousness from the represented [object] and the representing [subject], and is referred to both." From this first principle Reinhold endeavors to deduce the well-known principles of the material manifold given by the action of objects, and the forms of representation spontaneously produced by the subject, which combine this manifold into unity. When, a few years later, Fichte's Science of Knowledge brilliantly succeeded in bridging the gap between sense and understanding by means of a first principle, thus accomplishing what Reinhold had attempted, the latter became one of his adherents, only to attach himself subsequently to Jacobi, and then to Bardili (Outlines of Logic, 1800), and to end with a verbal philosophy lacking both in influence and permanence.
In Reinhold's elementary philosophy the thing in itself was changed from a problematical, negative, merely limiting concept into a positive element of doctrine. Objections were raised against Kantianism, as thus dogmatically modified in the direction of realism, by Schulze, Maimon, and Beck—by the first for purposes of attack, by the second in order to further development, and by the third with an exegetical purpose. Gottlob Ernst Schulze, professor in Helmstädt, and from 1810 in Göttingen, in his Aenesidemus (1792, published anonymously), which was followed later by psychological works, defended the skeptical position in opposition to the Critique of Reason. Hume's skepticism remains unrefuted by Kant and Reinhold. The thing in itself, which is to produce the material of representation by affecting the senses, is a self-contradictory idea. The application of the category of cause to things in themselves violates the doctrine that the latter are unknowable and that the use of the pure concepts of the understanding beyond the sphere of experience is inadmissible. The transcendental philosophy has never proved that the ground of the material of representation cannot, just as the form thereof, reside in the subject itself.
Side by side with the anti-critical skepticism of Aenesidemus-Schulze, Salomon Maimon (died 1800; cf. Witte, 1876), who was highly esteemed by the greatest philosophers of his time, represents critical skepticism. With Reinhold he holds consciousness (as the combination of a manifold into objective unity) to be the common root of sensibility and understanding, and with Schulze, the concept of the thing in itself to be an imaginary or irrational quantity, a thought that cannot be carried out; it is not only unknowable, but unthinkable. That alone is knowable which we ourselves produce, hence only the form of representation. The matter of representation is "given," but this does not mean that it arises from the action of the thing in itself, but only that we do not know its origin. Understanding and sense, or spontaneity and receptivity, do not differ generically, but only in degree, viz., as complete and incomplete consciousness. Sensation is an incomplete consciousness, because we do not know how its object arises.
By the removal of the thing in itself Aenesidemus-Schulze sought to refute the Kantian theory and Maimon to improve it. Sigismund Beck (1761-1840), in his Only Possible Standpoint from which the Critical Philosophy must be Judged, 1796,[1] seeks by it to elucidate the Kantian theory, holding up idealism as its true meaning. In opposition to the usual opinion that a representation is true when it agrees with its object, he points to the impossibility of comparing the one with the other. Of objects out of consciousness we can know nothing; after the removal of all that is subjective there is nothing positive left of the representation. Everything in it is produced by us; the matter arises together with the form through the "original synthesis."
[Footnote 1: This book forms the third volume of his Expository Abridgment of the Critical Writings of Professor Kant; in the same year appeared the Outlines of the Critical Philosophy. Cf. on Beck, Dilthey in the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. ii., 1889, pp. 592-650.]
The last mentioned attempts to develop the Kantian philosophy were so far surpassed by Fichte's great achievement that they have received from their own age and from posterity a less grateful appreciation and remembrance than was essentially their due. A phenomenon of a different sort, which is also to be placed at the threshold between Kant and Fichte, but which forms rather a supplement to the noëtics and ethics of the latter than a link in the transition to them, has, on the contrary, gained an honorable position in the memory of the German people, viz., Schiller's aesthetics.[1] In its center stand the Kantian antithesis of sensibility and reason and the reconciliation of the two sides of human nature brought about by its occupation with the beautiful. Artistic activity or the play-impulse mediates between the lower, sensuous matter-impulse and the higher, rational form-impulse, and unites the, two in harmonious co-operation. Where appetite seeks after satisfaction, and where the strict idea of duty rules, there only half the man is occupied; neither lust nor moral worth is beautiful. In order that beauty and grace may arise, the matter-impulse and the form-impulse, or sensibility and reason, must manifest themselves uniformly and in harmony. Only when he "plays" is man wholly and entirely man; only through art is the development of humanity possible. The discernment of the fact that the beautiful brings into equilibrium the two fundamental impulses, one or the other of which preponderates in sensuous desire and in moral volition, does not of itself decide the relative rank of artistic and moral activity. The recognition of this mediating position of art may be connected with the view that it forms a transitional stage toward and a means of education for morality, as well as with the other, that in it human nature attains its completion. Evidence of both views can be found in Schiller's writings. At first he favors the Kantian moralism, which admits nothing higher than the good will, and sets art the task of educating men up to morality by ennobling their natural impulses. Gradually, however, aesthetic activity changes in his view from a preparation for morality into the ultimate goal of human endeavor. Peaceful reconciliation is of more worth than the spirit's hardly gained victory in the conflict with the sensibility; fine feeling is more than rational volition; the highest ideal is the beautiful soul, in which inclination not merely obeys the command of duty, but anticipates it.
[Footnote 1: The most important of Schiller's aesthetic essays are those On Grace and Dignity, 1793; On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 1795-96; and the Letters on Aesthetic Education, intermediate between them. Cf. Kuno Fischer, Schiller als Philosoph, 1858, 2d ed. (Schillerschriften, iii., iv.) 1891-92.]
CHAPTER X.
FICHTE.
Fichte is a Kantian in about the same sense that Plato was a Socratic. Instead of taking up and developing particular critical problems he makes the vivifying kernel, the soul of criticism, his own. With the self-activity of reason (as a real force and as a problem) for his fundamental idea, he outlines with magnificent boldness a new view of the world, in which the idealism concealed in Kant's philosophy under the shell of cautious limitations was roused into vigorous life, and the great Königsberger's noble words on the freedom, the position, and the power of the spirit translated from the language of sober foresight into that of vigorous enthusiasm. The world can be understood only from the standpoint of spirit, the spirit only from the will. The ego is pure activity, and all reality its product. Fichte's system is all life and action: its aim is not to mediate knowledge, but to summon the hearer and reader to the production of a new and pregnant fundamental view, in which the will is as much a participant as the understanding; it begins not with a concept or a proposition, but with a demand for action (posit thyself; do consciously what thou hast done unconsciously so often as thou hast called thyself I; analyze, then, the act of self-consciousness, and cognize in their elements the forces from which all reality proceeds); its God is not a completed absolute substance, but a self-realizing world-order. This inner vivacity of the Fichtean principle, which recalls the pure actuality of Aristotle's [Greek: nous] and the ceaseless becoming of Heraclitus, finds its complete parallel in the fact that, although he was wanting neither in logical consecutiveness nor in the talent for luminous and popular exposition, Fichte felt continually driven to express his ideas in new forms, and, just when he seemed to have succeeded in saying what he meant with the greatest clearness, again unsatisfied, to seek still more exact and evident renderings for his fundamental position, which proved so difficult to formulate.