Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Chapter 5 The Romantic Philosophers — Fichte
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WE HAVE looked at the movement which we have been discussing, namely, Romantic idealism, from the point of view of its philosophic background, that is, Kant's critical philosophy. We have looked at it also from the standpoint of the political revolution, which failed in its first undertaking. The after-effect of this revolution was to emphasize the self-consciousness of the individual of the period. In the first place, Rousseau had undertaken to find In man the principles upon which he could reconstruct the state, substituting a rational form of the state for the arbitrary form which belonged to the medieval system. This, as we have seen, proved an immediate failure, and the Napoleonic imperialistic regime came in to take the place of this attempted rational state. I have said that the effect of this was to throw individuals back upon themselves. Theoretically, they undertook to go back to the old regime. And, returning to the regime from the standpoint of their own self-consciousness, they discovered in it what they had not discovered before, namely, what is called its "romantic tang." They discovered the medieval period and all the fascination of its pageantry, of the characteristic figures of the period-the knight-errant, the saint, the magician, and the learned man-and they discovered the adventure that went with it. They went back into that old pageantry with a fascination which it had never had for them before. That is the romantic phase of the movement, this return to the old world from the point of view of the new self-consciousness.
On the philosophical side, this meant the return to the old rationalistic world, especially as Kant had left it, from the point of view of the self regarded as a thing-in-itself. Just, as in some
(86) sense, this older world was reconstructed from the point of view of their romantic imagination, so a return was made to the transcendental philosophy of Kant from the point of view of Fichte's self, the self of Schelling, and that of Hegel, the romantic self which was identified with the Absolute Self, in which individuals were conceived as mere finite expressions of this larger Self. An attempt was made to deal with the problem that philosophy presented from this standpoint. And we can find that out of which this problem arose, or at least the materials it used, in Kant's antinomies.
Those antinomies represented for Kant the attempts of the mind, its reason and understanding, to go beyond experience, beyond the phenomenal world, to a noumenal world which it was necessary for Kant to postulate. Every attempt of that sort, according to Kant, meant an antinomy, a contradiction in the terms that were used. For him these antinomies served as the sign of warning that the mind had got beyond the limit of its own legitimate use. The only path, as Kant saw it, by means of which one could leave the field of experience, with its fixed forms, was through the postulates of conduct. Here one did not profess to know, in that one knew that one could not know; but, nonetheless, one postulated a world of things-in-themselves, and particularly postulated a free will, that is, a self that is free and which could, for that reason, assume obligations.
The Romantic idealist started from this postulate not as a postulate but as something which is directly given in experience -not only given in the sense of obligation, which Kant recognized, but given also in conduct, in the experience of freedom. Romanticism also recognized antinomies, that is, it recognized that the passage from the conduct of the self, this free self, over into the field of experience took place over contradictions or oppositions.
There are three attempts to deal with the problems to which this situation gives rise-those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In a certain sense these represent a progression, a development.
(87) That of Fichte is an attempt to solve the problem of the self and its object in terms of moral experience; Schelling deals with it from the point of view of aesthetic or artistic experience; and, most fundamental of all , Hegel deals with it in terms of logical experience, the experience of thought.
In a certain sense, there is an advance in these three undertakings. The common problem is that of bringing the world which seems to be independent of the self into the experience of the self. It is quite true that in any self-experience we have both subject and object. But it does not follow that the experience that one has of one's self is veritable. One is often deceived in regard to himself. This is especially true in a romantic mood. But at least the self is there as an object in experience. One senses himself as there, and he is there in the attitude which he has at the time. The object is there, and the subject is there. The two are brought together. But now the problem arises, can that mode be used to bring over into the self the world which is seemingly not the self? Can the world which is independent of the self be brought into its self-experience? The experience which we depend upon for the direction of our conduct, that which we call "objective," has to do with things that are not ourselves. We have to find out about them. They are in some sense foreign to us. We have to learn their ways; learn what nature is, what its laws are. Can this world of reality outside of us, the world with which we have become acquainted, be brought into this relation of subject and object which we have in self-consciousness? This, I say, was the problem of the romanticists. This was the problem, the adventure which called these thinkers. Given a subject and an object of knowledge in the self-experience itself, can one go out to the great universe that dominates the self, that precedes and antedates it, that outlasts it, that is so independent of it, and capture that universe and make it a part of one's own self-experience?
The Romantic idealists came back to the process of the self. We have seen the background of this. The self was looked at not as a static affair; it was not conceived of in the medieval
(87) sense as a soul that was born into the world with the body and changed the body, a self that was endowed by a divine fiat. Rather, the self was looked upon as a certain process, something that is going on.
The first characteristic of this process which Fichte laid stress upon was that it involved a not-self. The very existence of the self implies a not-self; it implies a not-self which can be identified with the self. You have seen that the term "self" is a reflexive affair. It involves an attitude of separation of the self from itself. Both subject and object are involved in the self in order that it may exist. The self must be identified, in some sense, with the not-self. It must be able to come back at itself from outside. The process, then, as involved in the self is the subject-object process, a process within which both of these phases of experience lie, a process in which these different phases can be identified with each other-not necessarily as the same phase but at least as expressions of the same process. This, you see, makes a different thing out of knowledge than does the copy theory.
The copy theory of knowledge goes back to ancient thought. It assumes that the object impresses its form on the mind. A favorite analogy, of course, is from vision. In some way the form of the object impresses itself on the retina, and from the retina on the mind itself. The camera obscura of the eye has served unwittingly on the part of philosophy as determining knowledge from the impressions of experience. As Aristotle thought of it, the form of the thing in some way floated through the eye into the mind. It impressed itself there on the mind. Sometimes the mind was spoken of as a wax tablet on which the form was impressed. This is an analogy of which the empiricist made use. It Is a static theory of knowledge. Knowledge is simply the reception of a certain form impressed upon the mind. The object in this case does not necessarily involve the subject. It involves the mind as something on which it can be impressed. As far as the doctrine is concerned, that mind might be subject or not.
The first attack made upon the problem, the one made by
(89) Fichte, was through the development of the Kantian principles into the philosophy of romanticism. Specifically, he utilized the moral experience which was the center of the Kantian metaphysics. In this moral experience, as we have seen, the individual identifies himself with his duty. In this philosophy Fichte took a step beyond Kant. Kant never got beyond the formal character of conduct. Our conduct is moral, he says, in so far as it is universal. We test it by seeing whether or not we can make a universal law out of the maxim of our act. The Fichtean position is one that goes beyond this and identifies the self with the task to be performed. This Fichte presents as the reality of the moral experience that one finds before him something to be done and then, in the doing, finds himself identified with it. It is not only a task: it is his task. He is involved in it. And the accomplishment of the task, the doing of the duty, realizes the individual. It is just in so far as one does what he has to do that he becomes really moral. It is only in so far as he identifies himself with an undertaking that he achieves himself. We speak of this process as the "development of character," and we speak of "character" as the core of one's personality. Now, character is attained only in so far as one does identify himself with the situation which presents itself before the moral vision. Selfhood is attained in a process in which the individual identifies himself with his task. The individual realizes himself in that process.
This is the point of approach in Fichte's philosophy. For the individual the world is always a task to be accomplished. It is not simply there by chance, as something that just happens. It is there because one realizes it as a field for one's endeavors. It is not a world simply in so far as there are sensations, in so far as there is the movement of masses of bodies. It is a world, a real thing, just to the extent that one constructs it, that one organizes it for one's action. The objects about one are means of conduct. They take on meaning in proportion as one uses them as means. The ground is something to tread upon. The objects about one are all implements. The universe is a field of
(90) action. It is organized only in so far as one acts in it. Its meaning lies in the conduct of the individual; and when one has built up his world as such a field of action, then he realizes himself as the individual who carried out that action. That is the only way in which he can achieve a self. One does not get at himself simply by turning upon himself the eye of introspection. One realizes himself in what he does, in the ends which he sets up, and in the means he takes to accomplish those ends. He gets the rational organization out of it, sees a relationship between means and ends, puts it all together as a plan; and then he realizes that the plan of action presented in this situation is an expression of his own reason, of himself. And it is not until one has such a field of action that he does secure himself. This process, according to Fichte, is what is continually taking place. The self throws up the world as a field within which action must take place; and, in setting up the world as a field of action, it realizes itself.
This is, of course, just putting into philosophical form the rediscovery of the medieval period as that in which the self could imaginatively act and then come back upon itself. In this the process is carried out in a dramatic fashion, under an aesthetic mood. Fichte raises it to a process within a moral world in which the individual organizes the world into a field in which he must act.
However, the problem is not yet solved. It is true that the meaning which our world has does lie in what we are going to do with it. The meaning of the world is not to be found in its atoms and molecules, in its electrons. Their framework, whether they shall take on the form of trees or of men, depends upon the experience of those who inhabit the world. You can look on it as just a congeries of electrons, but that does not make the universe that we inhabit. All the meaning of life is something that depends upon living beings, upon conscious beings, beings with eyes that paint the world in its colors, with ears that give it its resonances. It is this world that arises out of the individuals that live in it. And yet, this world of physical things is there,
(91) and it is there seemingly before the self comes into existence in it. In fact, it seems to be a condition for the existence of the self. Fichte simply assumed that the Absolute Self, which is the organization of all selves, built up such a world, set it up as the field of endeavor, that it might realize itself. But there is an independence about this world. It is the scene of endeavor, but still it is a scene that has to be given before endeavor, in order that the latter can take place. Our scientific picture of the world is independent of the individual who inhabits it. He comes into it, and it may be the scene of his endeavor. It may take on his values, the values of society, but still it is there in advance of him. It does not seem to be dependent upon him in any way.
This was the period in which evolutionary thought first appeared. It was presented first in the hypothesis of Lamarck, later in that of Darwin. Thus, the conception was before men; and that conception holds that man and all that man means his self-consciousness, his values-are dependent upon the prior development of a physical universe-the appearance of continental masses which kept the earth from being completely immersed. It is quite possible, quite conceivable, of course, that the water might have covered everything. There is enough water to cover the whole of the earth if the continents should be plunged into the depths of the sea. Had this been the case, man, of course, would not have appeared. What life there would have been would be the vertebrates in the ocean, and perhaps not even these. There might have been only unicellular forms that float upon the surface of water. It would seem to be simply by chance, then, that the world developed such a species as man. After all, it is our scientific knowledge-the most clear knowledge that we have that presents man as an accident and not as an essential product of the nature of the universe.
Of course, it is true that on the moral side man is the center of the universe. The moral world is there because of man, for, if there was no self-consciousness, there would be no morality, no claim that one could make upon another, no society with its contentions, customs, and laws. Morality is dependent upon
(92) man; and as long as Fichte remained within his moral philosophy, he could conceive of the self as responsible for the world. But when he attempted to make the development of the world itself simply a phase of the moral experience of man, he found himself in a clash with the surest knowledge that we have. The attempt to build up science, knowledge, out of this moral experience was not successful on Fichte's part.
Of course, Fichte had attempted this on the basis of the development of a dialectical argument which goes a step beyond what Kant called his "transcendental logic." Kant, you remember, said that there was an analytic logic that simply breaks up an idea into its different parts and then affirms one of those parts of the conception-for example, the conception of man as having essentially an animal nature, and of that animal nature as being, in its very essence, mortal. You cannot think of an animal or of man without also thinking of mortality as a part of them. That, says Kant, is the pure analytic process, a process in which you are merely confirming an idea of an object which already belongs to it in the very conception of the object itself. If you say, "Socrates is a man," you already state, in the conception of Socrates as a man, the idea of mortality. But, Kant contends, when we come to the sort of judgment with which he started, that is, the judgments that we find in the axioms of Euclid, we come upon judgments that are of a different type. Kant's illustration was of a straight line being the shortest distance between two points. You can analyze the idea of a straight line as much as you want and you will not find in it the idea of the shortest distance between two points. This latter is something added to the former idea; and Kant asked how such judgments, which he called "synthetic judgments a priori," could be formed. It is easy enough, he said, to see how we can form empirical judgments involving something new. You find out something about your friends, you add to your ideas about them through experience; but that is not the process of synthetic judgments a priori but of synthetic judgments a posteriori. That is, they are empirical judgments, in which we find
(93) something that we did not find before, but something that has been given through experience. But judgments such as the Euclidian axioms are judgments that stand at the beginning of your science. You have them as postulates with which you can start. Kant's explanation of this is in the forms of the mind which determine the nature of our experiences. They are, so to speak, the capital with which our science operates. These forms are given in advance of experience and make such synthetic judgments a priori possible. Now this sort of logic Kant distinguishes from the other analytic type by calling it transcendental. Thus we can affirm everything of our experience which belongs to the structure of the forms of the sensibility and of the understanding. At least, Kant thought so. He was quite sure that he had the whole structure of our possible experience, that he had anatomized the whole of our experience and could show just what its form was and must continue to be. But this description is static. According to it, the forms are all there and nothing is added to them. They do not require any process of development.
Fichte's world was not one of static forms. It was a world in which there was opposition between the self and a not-self which took the form of a task that had to be done, an obstacle that had to be overcome. He undertook particularly to show that moral conduct consists in the assimilation of the not-self to the self. He assumed that the self set up, posited, a world that was a not-self and that this not-self had to become the self. That is the antimony which Fichte says has to be overcome in moral conduct. This is the central point in his position. The very thing that we feel we must do is the thing that seems foreign to us. It represents interests which we do not recognize, which are not our own, And yet we feel the moral necessity of making them our own. Effort that has to be expended is effort not simply in doing something but effort expended in making something one's own interest which at first is not an interest. And yet one recognizes that this interest which is not one's own ought to be a part of one's self. One has certain obligations to
(94) the group to which he belongs. These are duties which really make him a part of the community. They cannot be divorced from the person. He is a free member of the community, but on the condition that he exercises the rights and the duties of citizenship. It is this that makes him a free member of the community. There could not be any community unless the individual did do his duties, and yet he finds them to be a nuisance. He does not want to take the trouble to vote, to enter into a campaign. He wants to do other things that he feels are identified with himself, things which he is interested in doing. And yet he wants to be a member of a democratic community, and he wants to have the rights of citizenship, with all that citizenship means. That is something which is not the self and yet which is essential to the self. That is the attitude which we all recognize as appearing in our moral life. Moral conduct consists in so assimilating this obligation that it becomes a real interest of the individual and not just a disagreeable duty. It is to that phase of the moral life that Fichte comes back in endeavoring to present this view of his in regard to the nature of the self, namely, that it constantly transcends the not-self which is to be made part of the self.
The antinomical contradiction is there, but it is in a different form from the Kantian one which indicates the limits beyond which knowledge cannot go. Fichte says the contradiction represents an actual step in the development of reality, of the self. The self grows by overcoming those obstacles, by making them its own interests. That assumption that reality is a process of development, the development of the self, is the first step in the idealistic dialectic. This is what reality is. And this development takes place over obstacles or contradictions.
Fichte can, of course, point to other phases besides that moral phase to which I have just referred, but this is the one that is central to his position. He can point particularly to the very nature of the self. The self is a type of experience which we attain only by becoming, in a certain sense , not-selves. That is, we cannot get the experience of ourselves as selves except in so
(95) far as we take the attitude of another and regard ourselves from that point of view. There may be the experience of pleasure, of pain; there may be the presence of colors and sounds about us; and yet these do not become ours in the sense that we recognize them as ours unless we can in some sense distinguish ourselves from other selves. We have to realize ourselves by taking the role of another, playing the part of another, taking the attitude of the community toward ourselves, continually seeing ourselves as others see us, regarding ourselves from the standpoint of those about us. This is not the self-consciousness that goes with awkwardness and uneasiness. It is the assured recognition of one's own position, one's social relations, that comes from being able to take the attitude of others toward ourselves. We cannot recognize our rights in demanding them of others without being ourselves in their place and recognizing their rights. We have to put ourselves in place of the other to recognize the self. Here again Fichte can come back to a character of the self which involves a not-self. There must be a not-self in order that the self may exist.
Fichte's idealism, like that of others of this Romantic idealistic school., is what is called "Absolute Idealism." That is, it assumes that there is an Absolute Self of which our selves are mere finite expressions. We have seen that, for Kant, the conceptions of the infinite and the finite represent one of the antinomies or group of antinomies that indicate the limits of our possible knowledge. For Fichte it represents the relationship between the finite self and the Absolute Self. He said that the self could not posit itself as a finite self without at the same time positing an infinite, unconditioned, and Absolute Self. To posit one's self as finite involves identifying one's self with the Absolute. As Fichte expressed it in a picturesque way, "I create God every day." It is the very experience of realizing one's self as a finite self that involves the assurance of the identity or centering of the self in the Absolute Self.
Fichte lived during the early part of the nineteenth century, when Germany was under the domination of Napoleon. The
(96) French were in control, and naturally there arose among the Germans a national sense of opposition to this invasion of the outsider within their borders; and there arose among them the national movement which finally, in conjunction with the movements in other countries, drove the French out of Germany and led to the defeat of Napoleon. It was a great national and moral movement in Germany, and Fichte was one of its spokesmen. In Berlin, where he had been appointed professor of philosophy, he delivered a series of addresses to the German people, in which he summoned them to their task. They were very stirring addresses, and called out echoes throughout the whole of Germany. They emphasized a new type of national life, one that was not expressed in the relation of the Hohenzollerns to their subjects.
Frederick the Great was the man who had, up to this time, administered Prussia from the top down. He was a monarch who recognized himself not simply as monarch of the state but also as the state. His control was absolute. He took his subjects with him into various wars in which they had no immediate interest and which were of doubtful moral character-those wars in which Poland was defeated, in which Prussia seized Silesia from Austria, wars of the Austrian Succession, wars in which Frederick was fighting for the aggrandizement of his house and of his kingdom, but wars which were not an expression of a popular movement. They were not wars that grew out of an expression of a demand of the people for an interest with which they identified themselves. The immediate successors of Frederick did not have his genius or his power; but, nonetheless, there grew up under the conditions of the new period an ideal of a national life that could defend itself against the invader and establish itself again on its own, new national basis. It was out of this movement that the nation at arms arose. The army of Frederick the Great was an army which he chose from among the people for the purposes of his military undertakings. This new movement was the one in which universal military service, with the nation as such in arms, appeared for the first time.
(97) Furthermore, there was behind this movement a recognition that there must be intelligence, a popular intelligence, one that did not come simply from the populace up or from the top down, but which permeated the nation as a whole. With this military service went popular education; and for a few intensive years there grew up in Prussia a national life which made an entirely different power out of it, one that was able to cope with the genius of Napoleon and with his armies.
The immediate political and social background of Fichte, then, was the war in which the western and eastern states drove Napoleon out of Germany and Austria. With this background, Fichte appealed very vividly to the national sense of the Prussians, presenting this task to them as one which the people themselves had to undertake. He pictured a German nation which had certain definite duties before it which it must meet, but meet with intelligence, comprehension, with a recognition that morality rests upon intelligence. It was distinctly a historical situation in which the people had to create their own approach, and create it in terms of a task which they had to fulfil. They had to realize themselves in that task. It is, of course, in such a movement of defensive warfare that, in the past, a nation has come most completely to consciousness of itself, has achieved a national self-consciousness in fulfilling such a duty as that of meeting an enemy already within its borders, an enemy already breaking down the organization of its own state. Here, then, is a task which has to be accomplished, something that has to be done, in the face of danger and suffering of every sort. And in that there is attained national self-consciousness which does not exist under ordinary conditions. Under the latter, we buy and sell, we carry out our usual social processes. In a vague sort of way we all know that we are members of the same community, but we are not conscious of it. We find ourselves in more or less hostile relations with our competitors, and we do not identify ourselves with the community as a whole. But in other moments, such as this of which I have been speaking, when the community has to defend
(98) itself against an enemy that has already taken possession, people get together in a common undertaking, identify themselves with each other, and get that larger self-consciousness to which Fichte was appealing. This occurs in just that sort of a situation which I have expressed metaphysically as the self realizing itself in the not-self, finding its not-self in the duty which it has to perform, and in doing that duty, in making it its own., reaching a higher self-consciousness than it had before. Warfare is not the only way in which that has been achieved in the past, but it is one of the most common ways. It seems to be the easiest way in which people can recognize themselves as belonging to the same community, the same group. This they achieve in that attitude of defense against a common enemy. And it was just such a situation that lay behind Fichte and which he put into his form of the Romantic philosophy.
This situation he conceived to be not only the very process of national consciousness but also that of the universe itself. This very not-self, this separation, so to speak, of the task from the person who has accomplished it, is what Fichte comes back to, to explain the world as something that is there over against the self and which the self cannot control, or at least for which the self does not seem to be responsible. The moral situation to which I have referred is one in which, to a certain extent, we do create our own field in so far as we assume a certain task. But the world itself is a world of physical things, is one which is not the self. It is a not-self in a different fashion. The task which one does not want to assume is a not-self. But that it is a task at all is due to the fact that we accept it as a task. We accept the universe. The moral universe, like the physical, is there because we do accept it. If we did not have a moral attitude toward it, it would not be there. But, seemingly, the physical world is there anyway, and that was the problem that Fichte had to work out philosophically.
How could he take this moral point of view over into the situation in which the individual does not set up a not-self as a task and then overcome it? How was he to identify this
(99) subject-object relation with that of our cognitive experience, with that of the world we are aware of about us? Can these two be brought together? That was his problem. How could he take our awareness of a world there independently of us and identify it with this moral attitude in which the individual does set up a task which, for the time being, lies outside himself but with which he later identifies himself? That, as I say, was the task of Romantic philosophy as Fichte presented it, or as it presented itself to Fichte. He must make the subject-object relation as it appears in our moral experience a relation of the knower to the known, a relation between that which we sense and the organism which senses it, a relation between that which we think and the mind that thinks it. Can one identify this relation with the moral relation? Fichte undertakes to do this, and it is an undertaking in which he was only partially successful. The picture he presents of the world is that of a task, a picture of a not-self which in a certain sense is foreign to the individual. It is something that has to be overcome, and, being overcome, is made a part of the self. If, now, Fichte could conceive of the world in a moral sense, he could conceive of it in some sense as the creation of that self.
Remember how Kant left this problem? For Kant there was a world of science, of knowledge. Of course, science is nothing but exact knowledge. The world is determined by the very characters which the mind has stamped on it. The mind gives these laws not by choice but because they reflect its structure. They are parts of its own structure; they are molds, so to speak, in which experience falls when it comes to the mind. But the mind does not give itself those laws in the same sense in which a man regards himself as giving the character to his act. Here he feels his own responsibility, for he recognizes the act as coming from his own initiative. Thus he is responsible for his act in a way in which he is not responsible for the laws of nature which are given in the forms of his sensibility and of his understanding.
But Fichte conceived of the world as being essentially moral,
(100) not simply as something that is known. It has moral significance, for it presents itself as a task, as an accomplishment that must be carried out. If the self could be free, if it could have initiative in its moral conduct, then, if the world was a moral world, it could be the creation of the self. The self could be free in giving its task, just as it is free in doing or not doing its task. And yet the world is, of course, independent of any one finite individual's self. That is, in some sense we find the world given. We are born into it; we die, and it remains behind us. How is it possible to conceive of the self as creating such a world? From the moral standpoint one does, in a certain sense, create his immediate world. That is, one makes it his own task. One finds himself in the midst of an immediate environment, something that is there; but he organizes it from the point of view of his own responsibility. That responsibility may be infinitesimal as compared to the whole universe, but still that universe exists for one as that for which he is in some sense responsible. He has to get his day's work done. He has to select out and organize this world about him in such a way that he can carry out his task. The ground on which he treads, the means of transportation which he selects, the building he enters, and the apparatus that he uses are all organized by him with reference to his particular function. It is only in so far as it is there, organized in this way that he can act on it, that he can do his duty. One is always organizing one's world with reference to one's duty, with regard to the function which he has to carry out. He looks at the world from the standpoint of the means which he can make use of to carry out his function. That may be a small part of the world, but for him it is the ground upon which he can tread. Everything is, in his mind, organized with reference to carrying out the act which is his own.
So much for the world so far as the particular individual is concerned. If we extend this response and take in all the individuals in society, we can see that they can all, in some sense, create the world in which that society lives, calling out the ideas that belong to that society. All men are, in some sense,
(101) organized in so far as they belong to a single society; and as that society clears its land, sows its crops, builds its buildings, it creates a world in which it can definitely live, and each man has his part in that society as a whole.
Now what the philosophical imagination of Fichte did was to go beyond this conception which united man with society, and to conceive of the man as an integral part of the universal Self, that Self which created the universe. We are all of us, as St. Paul says, parts of one another. That is true. We all of us have content which belongs to us only in so far as we share the selfhood of others. We see ourselves as others see us. The society that we belong to gives us our peculiar selves. We belong to that society. We are what we are because we belong to that society, and yet that society is nothing but an organization of selves. Now, what Fichte did was to conceive of an Absolute Self which is just such an organization of all selves; an infinite Self which is the organization of all finite selves. Then, just as society sets its tasks in terms of the act of all its members, so this infinite and Absolute Self sets the task for itself in terms of all the functions of all the finite selves that go to make it up. The universe as such is, then, the creation of this Absolute Self in the same sense as cultivated areas and great metropolitan areas are created by the society that lives in them. This Self creates its own world, and it creates it as a set of things to be done. Fields are cultivated to be reaped, to grow the grain that can be harvested. The means of transportation, the tasks that have to be carried out on the part of the personnel, everything of this sort, is an expression of the function of some member of society. Now then, enlarge this conception so that you can conceive of an Absolute Self that is made up out of an infinite number of different --selves, and the universe as the expression of that Self, as a casting-up, so to speak, of a place in which that Self can act, as the expression of the task which that Self has to carry out, and you get Fichte's conception of an Absolute Self of which all individuals are merely separate parts. In this view we are all parts of God. We each have a finite part in an infinite creative power.
(102) Organized in the one Self we, together with an infinite number of other selves, create the universe. And for Fichte this creation is moral, for he conceives of the world as an obligation, as a task which the Absolute Self has to carry out, has to fulfil.
This, then, is the point of view from which Fichte built his philosophy. And we have seen that it goes back to a point in Kant's philosophy. Fichte assumed that the self is causal, productive, creative. It is, however, in the moral realm that these characteristics apply to it. Accepting Kant's two postulates, that in the moral realm we determine our conduct and that the mind, through its forms, determines the character of nature, Fichte turned to the moral world and found it to be the field of action. It is what it is in order that the self may act. And, without going back to the metaphysics of it, we do find that situation in our own experience to a very considerable degree. When we make a moral decision, we have more or less definitely determined the character of the situation. If a man, for example, assumes that he is under obligation to undertake a certain duty in the community-that, for example, he should go and be a watcher at the polls-he places this over against each of the other of his different obligations. He has to relate them all to one another. If he carries out this duty, he may place himself in considerable danger. He has to consider what that danger would mean. He has to relate it to his other obligations. He has to consider, on the other hand, what his duties as a citizen are. In doing all this he constructs a certain definite field which has the form which in some sense he gives to it. That is, those values as related to each other are values which express the man. What he does will be an expression of the man himself. If he is of a timid nature, he tends to avoid obligations that come to him from outside, and prefers to let somebody else carry on the public functions of the community; and the chances are that he will construct the sort of situation in which his own immediate interests will bulk larger than any others, while those of the public will be given an insignificant character. The sort of a world in which he will live will be very different
(103) from that of a man who recognizes his public duties, who comes forward even under conditions of considerable risk, standing on his own legs refusing to be jolted, taking the duties that come with the occasion, and playing the part of a good citizen. His world will be a different world from that of the other. The comparative values which they give will make out of their actions and out of the objects upon which they act two very different sorts of situations. Each creates a definite field of action by the attitude that he takes.
Now this is true, of course, in another sense in regard to our sense perception. Our vision, our attitude, our contact experiences, do determine in some sense the sort of world in which we live; but over this we have no control. If we have eyes, we live in a world of colors. If we are colorblind, these colors are perhaps limited to only two. If we have islands of deafness, there are certain parts of the sounding world that are shut off from us. In the other case, the moral case, the man also determines the sort of world he lives in. He builds up the world in terms of his duties, his obligations, and thus makes it of one sort or another.
It is to this sort of constructive character of the world that Fichte comes back. And here, I can say in passing, his philosophy branches off from Kant's, which was entirely formal in character. Fichte recognizes this constructive character, as was shown in the illustration above. A man builds up a world in which the self-government of the community can take place, in which the political rights of the individual are respected. There are certain values which are identified with himself, and his conduct tends to build up such a world as that. In this sense his conduct is creative. What the situation is depends upon ourselves. We may have the souls of rabbits and retire from everything that involves risk, live in a little world which is secure from danger; or we may have a sense of moral adventure and go out to live in a broader, wider world. It depends upon the individual as to what kind of a world he lives in. Fichte, in going back to Kant's self as a creative power, identified that creative
(104) power with the moral impulse, the impulse to map out a world which constitutes one's duty.
And here Fichte comes back to that moral self that I have already referred to by way of illustration. The duty that arises before a man at the time of an election is distinctly a not-self. He does not want to take the time, run the risks, go to all the inconvenience which the occasion requires. This is something that distinctly lies outside of himself at the time. He is interested in his immediate environment, in an immediate occupation, and here is something which presents itself from outside. For the time being, it is distinctly, definitely, not the self that the man is up to that time. If he accepts this as a duty, builds up this world in which he feels he ought to act, he is definitely, perhaps, for the time being, unwillingly, identifying himself with it. What it comes back to in the end is that a man cannot keep his self-respect and not accept these obligations. He cannot let somebody else do what he ought to do. He feels that he has to identify himself with this particular situation. He has to make it his own. This is definitely what takes place in such a situation. First of all the task appears as a not-self, as something outside of himself. He has to come to terms with it. It is disagreeable, foreign to his own immediate interests; but it is just through recognizing it as, for the time being, foreign to his own interests that he can get an idea of himself, that he can come to a higher self-consciousness than he had before. He comes to see himself as a person shirking his duties in the community, as a person "letting George do it," refusing to take over the tasks that belong to him. He sees himself in this situation from the point of view of this not-self which he created when he set up this particular task before him; and by identifying himself with the not self, he definitely becomes a larger, a more effective self than he was before.
It is in that sort of a process that the individual recognizes a not-self, and from the point of view of that not-self that he recognizes the self that answers to it. Then, through the actual doing of the duty, through the accomplishment of his task, the
(105) individual becomes a larger self. Fichte assumed that that process, a subject-object process, was the fundamental one in the universe. Therefore, he was not concerned with the relation of substance and attribute. This dynamic process, which is opposed to Kant's static account of the problem, Fichte found in the moral experience of the individual. If a self is to be a self, it must achieve this in the identification of itself with the not-self, thus overcoming any opposition between the self and that which lies outside of it. This is the fundamental process of the universe from Fichte's point of view. In its duty the self recognizes itself as a not-self, then it identifies itself with the not-self and so becomes a larger and more effective self. Thus, from Fichte's standpoint, the relation of the subject and the object, in the moral sense, is the fundamental relation in the universe.
Of course, the basic metaphysical relation is that of subject and object. Fichte wanted to distinguish the philosophy of the Romantic school from that of the philosophy which, in some sense, largely influenced this movement, namely, that of Spinoza. He found the distinction between these two in this: for Spinoza, as has already been said, the fundamental relation was that of substance and attribute, while for the Romantic school the fundamental metaphysical conception is that of subject and object. Spinoza said that there could be but one substance. He defined substance as that which is the cause of itself. From this definition there could be only one such substance. Fichte's philosophy too, like that of the other romanticists, centers in the conception of one Ultimate Being; but in this case it is described as an Absolute Self in which all finite selves center. Fichte insisted that the self is created in its moral conduct. But what reference has this to the universe? The latter exists about us seemingly not as the result of our own experience, of our creation. It is there in advance of us and will be there when we are gone. It has an infinite extent, and we are finite and ephemeral creatures. In what sense, then, can we be its creators?
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The three different attempts made to answer that question are those of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The first attempt was a severely moral one. It does not, perhaps, present itself in the guise of adventure, the romantic attitude. The justification which Fichte gave for this attitude is that which I have been presenting. We are under obligation to identify ourselves with this world which is there before us. That is, the world exists as a field of moral endeavor. The reason that it seems to be so independent of us is that it is a duty, something that has to be done, in a certain sense an obstacle to be overcome. But when the duty has been done, then that which was foreign has been identified with the self. I have described this process in regard to the duties of citizenship. The process is, of course, from Fichte's point of view, a moral self-experience, that of meeting a world which is not the self and making it the self. The duty which is done ceases to be the not-self and becomes the self. And not only is this true, but it is only from the point of view of what was the not-self that one is able to realize the self. First of all, one may regard one's self from the standpoint of disapprobation. He sees the thing he ought to do and does not want to do. He sees that he ought to love, but actually he hates. This is that division which St. Paul presents so poignantly. The "other man" has to be overcome in some sense. One looks at himself from the standpoint of duty. And then there comes approbation from the standpoint of the achieved self, the quiet conscience which indicates that the individual, the self, is at peace with himself. Thus it is revealed that it is only from the point of view of the not-self that the individual can reach himself. It is not simply that one grasps the world in making it himself, in doing his duty, but that one grasps himself in identifying himself with that duty, He gets a standard from which to judge himself when he identifies himself with the duty he ought to do. Then he can pass judgment on himself. When the duty is done, he can be at peace. He has in this way identified himself with the object.
It is not only an adventure in capturing the universe, so to
(107) speak, and bringing it within the range of a self-experience, but it is also an adventure in discovering one's self, a mutual experience both for the world and for the self. That is an experience which we go through with unaffected by the sense of duty. It is a step beyond the position of Kant. You remember, Kant sets up a categorical imperative. One must make the maxim for one's act a universal law, and one must act solely from his sense of respect for law, not from inclination. For Kant, immorality is only that conduct which is motivated without this respect for law, this sense of duty. We must do what we are to do from a sense of duty. From Kant's standpoint, if an act is done from inclination it is not moral. It is not necessarily immoral, but it is non-moral. Epigrammatically, Schiller put it thus, "How can I be sure if I am right in loving and assisting my friends? If I do it from affection, I am doing it from inclination and may be wrong. If I am to be sure, I must hate them. Then, at least, I will know that when I assist them I do so from a sense of duty." But the Romantic moralist goes a step beyond Kant. His doctrine is: So succeed in identifying yourself with your duty that it becomes your inclination. Your friends are yourself, and you can assist them with the real affection that goes with friendship. It is true that, at least in moral experiences in which there is a problem involved, we go through exactly such an experience as this to which Fichte comes back, the experience, that is, in which the world takes the form of a task to be performed. If it is to be done, then everything takes its relationship to that task. The whole thing is simply a field within which the task is to be carried out. The world as it was, and as it is to be, is there as the field in which this very disagreeable thing has to be gone through with. It is a field of moral undertaking and endeavor. Now, after the task has been performed and we have come to realize it in terms of our own self, then this attitude of separation, of division, is overcome and we do identify ourselves with the very interests that we have gone into.
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Take the situation, let us say, which is represented in the experience of Father Damien, a Catholic missionary who went to the leper settlement on the Hawaiian Islands and lived among them, identified himself with them. It is a picture, at least to the outside world, of a person who is acting the part of a martyr. He gave himself up to the case of those who had a loathsome disease and shut himself up there practically for life. In fact, eventually he died of the disease. This is a striking illustration of a sensational sort of the way in which duty may appear to a man as something which is utterly foreign to all his inclinations. He is called upon to identify himself with that from which he instinctively withdraws. Duty is that which is outside of everything identified with the individual himself. In the medieval period one of the ways of laying up treasure in heaven was to wash the feet of a leper. That is the sort of situation in which, seemingly, the duty is something which is just a task, which is not a part of the individual self.
Take another picture; that of the scientist who is intensely interested in the study of leprosy. He is interested in identifying the microorganism responsible for it. He welcomes the opportunity to go and work, and to live among the lepers, to carry out this task of his. He is dealing with a disease to be overcome. He carries with him the modern weapons by means of which this dread villain can be overcome, and he goes joyously to the battle. It is not a task which is put upon him that is not himself. It is a task he has sought. He has asked for the opportunity to go out there and live among the lepers. It is true that part of his panoply is defensive. He takes the proper aseptic precautions against the disease; but, nevertheless, here is the task of caring expressed in a much more profound way than Father Damien could. The enthusiastic research man is completely absorbed in his duty, in the thing he has to do.
Put the two figures together, so to speak. First of all, here is something that has been done that is not one's self, and yet one can enthusiastically identify one's self with it. It is that experience which is at first something outside of one's self but
(109) which can become identified with one's self-such an experience as that which Father Damien seized upon, which accomplishes the goal of the Romantic philosophy. It is the experience of bringing the world within the range of the experience of self-consciousness, that experience in which the object of consciousness has the position of the self of which consciousness is aware, the position in which both subject and object are one. To the extent that this can be attained, the romanticist can put the subject-object relationship in place of that of substance and attribute.
This is the sort of situation that could be presented at the time of Fichte because Germany, in its fight with Napoleonic imperialism, was going through the throes of coming to national self-consciousness. The people as a whole were getting self-conscious. They were learning their history, the history of the political situation in which they lived, learning it in terms of a nation which was subject, which had lost sovereignty over itself, which was a vassal of Napoleon. They came to realize the duty that the nation owed to herself-to free herself from these bonds. That duty had to come in terms of a national self-consciousness, of seeing the situation in terms of being German. And Fichte's addresses to the German people were calling them to become aware of themselves in this way. He presented it as their duty to do so. Fichte had a very vivid sense of that mission which the German people have so definitely carried on. And he called on them to have that sort of clear, objective consciousness which belongs to science, but to reach it through a sense of national self-consciousness. How far those two can be brought together is another question, but Fichte undertook to arouse that national self-consciousness in terms of intelligence, of scientific endeavor, as well as to arouse the people to a sense of moral obligation. There was, of course, even at this time, more popular education in Germany than elsewhere in the world and more satisfactory apparatus for bringing about popular training intelligence. Germany's political history had been one in which she had been deprived of the national self-con-
(110) -sciousness which had come much earlier to the French, the English, and the Spanish. The Germans, having been deprived of it, found this the time, at a somewhat belated period, for the development of national self-consciousness. And they got it at the moment of meeting the enemy, of throwing the enemy out of their borders. It was at a proper time, then, that Fichte presented this task of Romantic philosophy to the German people.
