FICHTE and his Wissenschaftslehre

In the Foundations Fichte expresses the content of the Tathandlung in its most general form as "the I simply posits itself." Fichte is suggesting that the self, which he typically refers to as "the I," is not merely a static thing with fixed properties, but rather a self-producing process; yet if it is a self-producing process, then it must be free, since in some as yet unspecified fashion it owes its existence to nothing but itself. This admittedly obscure starting point is subject to much scrutiny and qualification as the Wissenschaftslehre proceeds. In more modern language, and as a first approximation of its meaning, we can understand the Tathandlung as expressing the concept of a rational agent that constantly interprets itself in light of standards that it imposes on itself, in both the theoretical and practical realms, in its efforts to determine what it ought to believe and how it ought to act. (Fichte's indebtedness to the Kantian notion of autonomy in the form of self-imposed lawfulness should be obvious to anyone familiar with the Critical philosophy.)

Given the difficulty of the notion, unfortunately, Fichte's Tathandlung has perplexed his readers from its first appearance. The principle of the self-positing I was initially interpreted along the lines of Berkeley's idealism, and thus as claiming that the world as a whole was somehow the product of an infinite mind. This interpretation is surely mistaken, even if one can occasionally find passages that seem to support it. More important, though, is the question of the epistemic status of the principle. Is it known with the self-evident certainty that Fichte, following Reinhold, claims must ground any attempt at systematic knowledge? And how does it serve as a basis for deducing the rest of the Wissenschaftslehre?

Fichte's method is usually said to be phenomenological, restricting itself to what we can discover by means of reflection. Yet Fichte does not claim that we simply find the fully formed Tathandlung residing somewhere in our self-consciousness; instead, we construct it in order to explain ourselves to ourselves, to render intelligible to ourselves our normative nature as finite rational agents. Thus the requisite reflection is not empirical but transcendental, i.e., a postulate adopted for philosophical purposes. That is, the principle is presupposed as true in order to account for the conditions for the possibility of our ordinary experience. Such a procedure leaves open the possibility of an alternative account of our experience, which Fichte claims can take only one form. Either, he says, we can begin (as he does) with the I as the ground of all possible experience, or we can begin with the thing in itself outside of our experience. This dilemma, as he puts it, is the choice between idealism and dogmatism. The former is transcendental philosophy; the latter, a naturalistic approach to experience that explains it solely in causal terms. The choice between the two, as Fichte famously said in the first introduction to the Wissenschaftslehre from 1797, depends on the kind of person one is, since they are mutually exclusive yet equally possible approaches.

If such a choice between starting points is possible, however, then the principle of the self-positing I lacks the self-evident certainty that Fichte attributed to it in his earlier essay on the concept of the Wissenschaftslehre. There are, in fact, those who do not find it at all self-evident, namely, the dogmatists. Fichte clearly thinks that they are mistaken in their dogmatism, yet he offers no direct refutation of their position, claiming only that they cannot demonstrate what they hope to demonstrate, namely, that the ground of all experience lies solely in objects existing independently of the I. The dogmatist position, Fichte implies, ignores the normative aspects of our experience, e.g., warranted and unwarranted belief, correct and incorrect action, and thus attempts to account for our experience entirely in terms of our causal interaction with the world around us. Presumably, however, someone who begins with a disavowal of normativity, as the dogmatists do (since that is the kind of person they are), can never be brought to agree with the idealists. There is thus an argumentative impasse between the two camps.

Fichte's remarks about systematic form and certainty in "Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre" give the impression that he intends to demonstrate the entirety of the Wissenschaftslehre from the principle of the self-positing I through a chain of logical inferences that merely set out the implications of the initial principle in such a way that the certainty of the first principle is transferred to the claims inferred from it. (The method of Spinoza's Ethics comes to mind, but this time with only a single premise from which to begin the proofs.) Yet this hardly seems to be Fichte's true method, since he constantly introduces new concepts that cannot be plausibly interpreted as the logical consequences of the previous ones. In other words, the deductions in the Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre are more than merely analytical explications of the consequences of the original premise. Instead, they both articulate and refine the initial principle of the self-positing I in accordance with the demands made on the idealist who is attempting to clarify the nature of the self-positing I by means of reflection.

Once Fichte postulates the self-positing I as the explanatory ground of all experience, he begins to complicate the web of concepts required to make sense of this initial postulate, thereby carrying out the aforementioned construction of the self-positing I. The I posits itself insofar as it is aware of itself, not only as an object but also as a subject, and finds itself subject to normative constraints in both the theoretical and practical realms, e.g., that it must be free of contradiction and that there must be adequate reasons for what it believes and does. Furthermore, the I posits itself as free, since these constraints are ones that it imposes on itself. Next, by means of further reflection, the I discovers a difference between "representations accompanied by a feeling of necessity" and "representations accompanied by a feeling a freedom" – that is, a difference between representations of what purports to be a objective world existing apart from our representations of it and representations that are merely the product of our own mental activity. To recognize this distinction in our representations, however, is to posit a distinction between the I and the not-I, i.e., the self and whatever exists independently of it. In other words, the I posits itself as limited by something other than itself, even though it also initially posits itself as free.

The nature of this limitation is made increasingly more complex through further acts of reflection. First, the I posits a check, an Anstoß, on its practical activity, in that it encounters resistance to its will when it acts in the world. This check is then developed into more refined forms of limitation: sensations, intuitions, and concepts, all united in the experience of the things of the natural world, i.e., the spatio-temporal realm ruled by causal laws. Moreover, this world is found to contain other finite rational beings. They too are free yet limited, and the recognition of their freedom places further constraints on our activity. In this way the I posits the moral law and restricts its treatment of others to actions that are consistent with respect for their freedom. Thus, by the end of Fichte's deductions, the I posits itself as free yet limited by natural necessity and the moral law: its freedom becomes an infinite task in which it seeks to make the world around itself entirely compliant with its will, but only by doing so in an appropriately moral fashion that allows other free beings to do the same for themselves.