Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic

by William Wallace

But, as was to be expected, the unity and force are paid for by a considerable surrender of catholicity. If Kant's utterances are fused into comparative simplicity, the unification does not embrace the whole of the Kantian gospels. What Fichte did in his earlier stage—the stage by which he counts in the history of philosophy—was to emphasise and exhibit in his systematic statement that priority or supremacy of the 'practical' over the 'theoretical' reason which Kant had enunciated, and to put in the very foreground that self or Ego which Kant had indicated, under the title of 'transcendental unity of apperception,' as the focus which gives coherence and objectivity to experience. But to put the final presupposition at the head and front of all, as a principle originating and governing the whole line of procedure, is really to modify in a thorough-going way the whole aspect of a doctrine and its inner constitution. Kant's way is quiet analysis: from the given, or what is supposed given, up regressively to its final presuppositions, its latent prius. He shows you the thing is so, apparently without effort, by judicious application of the proper re-agent, as it were. Fichte, on the contrary, pours forth a strong current of deduction: Let it be assumed that so and so is, then must, or then shall, something else be; and so onwards. Instead of a glance at the secret substructure of the world, you see it, at a magician's mandate, building itself up; stone calling to stone, and beam to beam, to fill up the gaps and bind the walls together. And you must not merely read or listen. You are summoned as a partner in the work; a work the author feels, only half-consciously, he has not yet quite accomplished, and where therefore he complains of the bystander's dullness.

This, one may say, was a new conception, certainly a new practice, of philosophy. Kant had indeed hinted that the pupil in philosophy must 'symphilosophise'; but practically, even his aim had been to describe or narrate a process of thought with such quasi-historical vividness and detail that the listener was sympathetically carried through the succession of ideas which were called up before him. What had been generally given in philosophical literature was a sort of historical account of how thoughts happened: a succession of pictures presented with the interposition here and there of a little reasoning, expository of connexions. You enlisted your reader's sympathy: you set his imagination to work by translating the logical process into a historical event—the Logos into a Mythos—and blending with your narrative a little explanation as to general drift and relations, you left him to himself to enjoy the Theoria. The nearest approach Fichte makes to this polite and easy method is in the 'Sun-clear Statement,' where he, as he says, attempts to 'force the reader to understand' him. But probably these things cannot be forced. And for the rest Fichte's characteristic attitude is to request, or command, his reader (or pupil) to think with him, to put himself in the posture required, to perform the act of thought described. He has not merely to be present at the lecture, but personally to perform the experiment. It is not a mere story to be heard and admired and forgotten. De te O pupil! fabula narratur. If it be a play, you are the actor as well as the onlooker: and the play is not a play, but the drama—the nameless drama—of the soul transacted in the unseen sub-conscious depths which bear up its visible life.

You do not therefore begin by getting a fact put before you. Your fact, in philosophy, must be your own act: not something done and dead, passive, a thing, but something doing, alive, active: your introspection must be, let us say, an experiment in the growing, responsive, quick life, not anatomy of the mere cadaver. Think, therefore, and catch yourself in the act of thinking. Get something before your mind's eye, and see what it involves. It matters not what you perceive or feel: only realise it fully and penetrate its meaning and implications. It is of course the perception of something here and now. And you would be, in ordinary life, eager to get on to something else—to associate the present fact to something perceived elsewhere, to draw conclusions about things yet to come. But if you philosophise, you must check this practical-minded impatience and concede yourself leisure to ponder deeply all that the single perception involves. Be content to sit awhile with Mary, by the side of Rachel of old. Let Martha bustle about. Fichte tells you that your perception rests,—and you, you see that it rests, on the 'I am that I am,'—on the I = I, i. e. on the continuity, identity, and unity of the percipient self. Make the statement of what you perceive, believe it, that is, assert it: and you have—done what? You have pledged your whole self—falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus—to its truth: its background is your whole and one mental life. And is that all? You have also called the world to witness: your statement—if, as it professes, it form an item however slight in the realm of knowledge—requests and expects every other 'I' to acknowledge your perception. Your certainty of the fact rests on the certainty of your self: and your self is a self certified by its ever-postulated identity with other selves, so on ad infinitum. In affirming this (whatever be your statement) you affirm the Absolute Infinite Ego. Heaven and earth are at stake in every jot and tittle[2].

At which plain frankness there was much cachinnation and even muttering among the baser sort. Even wiser heads forgot—if they ever knew—that Leibniz a century before had startled the world of his day by a view that 'the Ego or something like it[3] was, under the name of monad, the presupposition of each and every detail of existence in any organic total. It was useless for Fichte to repeat[4] that his philosophical Ego was not the empirical or individual ego which he in this every-day world had to provide clothes and company for. It is hard to persuade the world that it does not know that 'I am I,' and what that means. Later, therefore, Fichte, going along with the movement of contemporary speculation, and willing to avoid one source of confusion, tended to keep off the name of Ego from the absolute basis of all knowledge and experienced reality. But unquestionably the absolutising of the Ego is the characteristic note of his first period in philosophy: and it rings with the spirit of the heaven-storming Titan. It means that the cardinal principle and foundation of man's conscious moral and intellectual life is identical with the principle of the Universe, even if the Universe seem not to know it. It means that self-consciousness—the certainty that I am I and one in all my manifestations—is the highest word yet uttered. In, or under, the surface of human knowledge and belief in reality, there is a transcendental Ego—a self identical with all other selves,— infinite, unlimited, unconditional, absolute. The certainty of human knowledge—and therefore of all reality in consciousness—is the Absolute,—an absolute certainty and knowledge—but an absolute with which I identify myself,—which I am, and which is me. This is the absolute thesis—the nerve and utter basis-laying—at the ground, or rather under the ground, of all I know, feel, and will.

This, then, is the thesis at the very foundation of all Wissenschaft: and therefore figures at the head of the Wissenschaftslehre,—the name Fichte gives his fundamental philosophy. But alone it is powerless. A foundation is only a foundation, by being built upon. The position must be defined by counterposition: thesis by antithesis: ego by non-ego. Ego, in fact, is first made such, as set against you. In other words, the perception we assumed to start with does not merely suppose and indeed pre-suppose the absolute Ego; but it sets in the absolute Ego an ego and a non-ego,—sets against the lesser ego, something limiting and limited, something defining it in one particular direction; or, if the original consciousness we started to examine was an act of will, then, it may be said, the non-ego appears as about to be limited and defined by the Ego. Be our consciousness, therefore, practical or theoretical, of action or of knowledge, its fundamental characteristic is the conjunction (correlation with subjugation) of an ego and a non-ego. It is always a synthesis of an original antithesis[5]; of self and not-self. But every such synthesis which brings together into one a self and a not-self, is possible only in the original thesis of a greater self—an absolute Ego—which includes the not-self and the self it contrasts within its larger self. The unity of the first principle[6] (A = A, or I = I) parting or distinguishing itself into the opposition of A versus not-A, Ego set against non-ego, re-asserts itself again in consciousness (perception of objects, and action upon them by will) as synthesis, i. e. a conjunction (not a real union). And this synthesis is either the limitation of the Ego by the non-ego or the limitation of the non-ego by the Ego. The former gives the formula of theoretical, the latter that of practical consciousness.

We begin with the absolute Ego. It is absolute activity, utter freedom. It is the source of all action, all life. Yet if thus implicitly everything, it is actually nothing. To be something, it must restrict itself, set up in itself an antithesis:—by the setting up of a not-self, at once limit and realise itself: translate itself from ideal absoluteness and unconditionality into a reality which is also limited and partial. All consciousness and action exhibit this antithesis of a limited self and an outside and adversative other-being; but the antithesis rests upon the medium of a larger life, a thesis which transcends and includes the antithesis, and which leads to that alternating adaptation of the two sides to one another (their synthesis) which actual experience presents as its recurring phase[7]. The Wissenschaftslehre leaving the absolute Ego in the background deals with the play that goes on in human experience between the correlatives to which it has reduced itself;—the antagonism, but the moderated and overruled antagonism, of Ego and non-ego.

Observe the contrast to the ordinary methods of expression. Popular language—if the popular philosophers are to be trusted as its exponents—says 'an impression is produced by an external object on the senses, and causes an idea in the mind.' The 'object' works a series of marvellous effects on a mind, which—to begin with—is hardly describable as anything more than an imagined point of resistance, getting reality by being repeatedly impinged upon.[8] Fichte's statements are rather interpreters of the vulgar phrases, which say 'I hear, I see';—as if, forsooth, the 'I' did it all. According to Fichte, the 'I,'—the absolute 'I,' is the real (but secret) source of the position in which consciousness finds itself limited by a non-ego. But within the finite ego and its consciousness there is no reminiscence or awareness of this its great co-partner's—the absolute ego's—act. For the finite consciousness, the beginning of its activity—i. e. of all empirical consciousness, lies in an impulse or stimulus from without—a mere somewhat of which we can predicate the very minimum of attributes. It is only felt as opposing: and this is the first stage or grade of theoretical consciousness: Sensation. But in the perpetual antithesis—in the self-opposition which is the radical act of consciousness—the mere limitation of Ego by non-Ego is confronted by the underlying activity of the Ego which re-asserts the limitation as its own act. Thus while we are, as it were, impressed, we re-act against that impression—we set it forth before us, as ours, and free ourselves from its immediate incumbency and oppression. Instead of mere sentiency or feeling, we have a perception (or intuition) of it.

It would be out of place, here, to try to write the interpretation of that marvellous and difficult piece of dialectic—the Wissenschaftslehre;—a theme to which Fichte returned again and again up to his death, ever modifying details, selecting new modes of exposition, and gradually, perhaps, changing the centre of gravity of his system. It will be sufficient to note the two purposes which it keeps in view. On the one hand it is a systematic theory of the categories. It begins, as we have seen, with the three co-ordinates of all reflection,—identity, difference, and reason why; it proceeds to the co-relative principles of activity and passivity; to condition, quantity, &c. And its work is to show how these forms naturally emerge in the recurrent antithesis which arises in consciousness, and how again they are brought together by the overmastering Absolute thesis into a synthesis, from which the same process re-appears. How much this corresponds in general conception to the Hegelian Logic is obvious, and Fichte has the merit of the original suggestion. With this however he conjoins—what Hegel has relegated to his Psychology—an evolutional or developmental theory of the mental powers. We have already seen how sensation is forced by the latent intelligence to rise into perception (Anschauung): the line of psychological development is carried on by Fichte through imagination to understanding and reason. Hegel's work is far more complete, definite, and detailed: but that need not keep us from giving due homage to the suggestive sketch of the originator of the conception[9].

But the theoretical consciousness is not all; and as we already know, the practical Ego is supreme over it. In it lies the key to the mystery of the stimulus—the shock from the unknown—which awakened the activity of the Ego. The non-ego is only a mass of resistance created by the Ego so that it may be active; only a stepping-stone on which it may walk; a spring-board from which it may bound. Only so much reality has the non-ego; the reality of something which may be shaped, made, made use of. Call the something which the stimulus (Anstoss) pre-supposes, the thing-in-itself (after Kant): and if you ask How are things-in-themselves constituted, you get from the Wissenschaftslehre the answer: 'They are as we should make them[10],' Or, as it is said in another place: 'My world is—object and sphere of my duties and absolutely nothing else[11]:' if you ask whether there is really such a world, the only sound reply I can give is: 'I have certainly and truthfully these definite duties, which take the form of duties towards such, and in such, objects; and it is only in a world such as I there represent and not elsewhere that I can perform these duties which I cannot conceive otherwise,'