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On The Vocation of Man (1799), Books I and II, featuring Mark, Wes, Dylan and Seth.
What is reality? Fichte is known as a key interpreter of Immanuel Kant who removed the idea of the “thing-in-itself,” i.e. reality apart from how we interpret it, from Kant’s system. Kant had described how human faculties impose structural features like space, time, number, and causality on the world of our experience, i.e. the phenomenal world, but still retained as essential to ethics and religion the idea that there is a true world behind the phenomenal that we can’t know, but we can act in accordance with. Fichte thought this latter idea wasn’t necessary, and the part of this popularization of his system (the more difficult work being his Wissenschaftslehre, a.k.a. The Science of Knowledge) that we read for this discussion ends in pure idealism, which means that when you know anything, you’re really just being aware of a part of yourself. The work is a series of introspections, like Descartes’ Meditations, but doesn’t ask “what can I know?” so much as “what is my vocation?” i.e. “what am I supposed to do?” …which in turn requires that he interrogate what he can know.
Book I, “Doubt,” presents an observation of nature that points toward us as integral parts of it, with all of our actions determined in the same giant causal web that determines everything else. He finds this very distressing, so Book II, “Knowledge” reverses course and establishes (through a dialogue with an imagined “Spirit,” much like in Boethius) idealism, where human freedom is recovered (if the whole causal web is my own production as ideas, then it wouldn’t make sense for that web to itself determine my actions), but at the cost of everything just being empty and meaningless: just my mind playing around. We’ll be covering book III in episode 272 where faith allows him to recover this meaning.
A little epistemological history: You might think like Locke that all we’re really acquainted with is our own ideas, but that those ideas were caused by something out in the world. Hume introduced into this the idea that causality is really not something out in the world at all, but a pattern of expectation imposed by our minds. Still, for both of these figures, the ideas we’re immediately aware presumably at least somehow represent or resemble objective things out in the world. Kant made Hume more radical by saying that it’s not just causality we impose onto our imagery, but that everything that makes up a “thing” is something that our knowledge faculties introduce. What’s ultimately interacting with us to produce all those ideas of things? We have no way of knowing (though we can have faith).
This notion of Kant’s was labeled “transcendental idealism” because a) the world we’re aware of is made up of our own ideas, and b) what makes those ideas take the shape that they do has something to do with structural features of the mind that we can’t actually observe but which we can know about by reasoning about what we do observe: Those features of mind transcend what we actually experience, so any reasoning about them is called transcendental. But Kant wasn’t really an idealist in the manner of Berkeley, because while for Berkeley the entire metaphysics was just made up of minds and ideas, Kant also had in his system the noumenal realm (the thing-in-itself) behind the phenomena.
Fichte’s system is more like Berkeley’s: We literally know only our ideas, and everything we reason about those ideas, such as that they’re caused by noumena, is also made up of ideas, and though, sure, some ideas purport to refer to or represent other ideas, we never escape the realm of ideas in any sense. Causality is a pattern in our minds. A mind itself is just a complicated idea. The “I” who has the ideas is also an idea. So we can still do science, but what we’re exploring is the relationship between various types of ideas. The subjective-objective distinction does not indicate a divide between mind and world but between two spheres of mind. Clearly, having an idea of “mind” like this means you’re not just focusing on what people are perceiving, remembering, or imagining right now, but claiming that there’s this idea-structure that exists even when no one is at that moment thinking of it. For Berkeley, this idea-structure was explicitly God’s mind, and as we’ll see next episode, that’s essentially Fichte’s strategy as well, though he has a more Kantian, i.e. practical, argument for God’s existence than Berkeley’s.
With this overview in mind, what insights does Fichte gain from his neo-Cartesian armchair reflections? While he first in thinking about the interlocking system of nature, a second pass (still in Book I) convinces him that actually, experience doesn’t tell us either way whether we’re part of the big causal machine of the world or not. This was the Kantian position, and Kant’s “practical” philosophy posited that our nature as acting beings takes advantage of this ambiguity in our metaphysical position by assuming that we simply must be free. Whereas in the phenomenal world of our experience (and of science, which is a systematized extension of experience), everything always happens for causal reasons, Kant identified the ego itself as transcendental: as one of those pieces of our explanatory apparatus that has to exist for experience to make sense, but which we don’t ever actually observe. There has to be something, thought Kant, that makes all of my various experiences specifically mine. Instead of (like Sartre, who specifically critiqued this) just saying this is a structural feature within experience, Kant insisted that the transcendental ego lies behind experience, into that otherwise unknown realm of the noumena. Since causality is only something we can reliably attribute to the phenomena, there’s no requirement that the transcendental ego must itself have any cause, and so, due to that practical reasoning (again, that we simply can’t help but think that we are really free and responsible for our actions, not simply caused by our biology), we get to conclude that freedom exists in the noumenal realm even though it can’t exist in the phenomenal realm.
Fichte’s theology (again, anticipating next episode, which has already been recorded as I write this) will take a similar position in that he thought that we live simultaneously as causally affected bodies in this world and as perfectly free spirits in an eternal realm, but that eternal realm is more like Plato’s heaven than it is “the truth” of the world that we’re living in right now, divorced from the filters of our perceptual apparatus (i.e. one of the ways that Kant’s view is characterized). Fichte’s position is instead more like Plato’s and Spinoza’s: We participate in the eternal insofar as we use our reason. But reason is not just a matter of contemplation on the model of pondering eternal truths of mathematics, but in paying attention to those aspects of our psychology specific to our status as rational animals, which Fichte identifies as moral characteristics. Whereas Nietzsche mourned detachment from our animal instincts, this is exactly what Fichte encouraged: Turn away from your base instincts and instead heed the dictates of conscience by treating others as ends-in-themselves and seek to find common ground with those others to put all of our wills ultimately in alignment under the guidance of virtue. If you do this, you’ll be acting freely, because you as reasoning being will be the legislator of this law (as Kant put it). Since for Fichte, experience in itself doesn’t teach us whether we’re free or not, faith in your own freedom requires a leap; in this sense Fichte anticipates existentialists like Kierkegaard even as this “leap” is underwritten by practical reason a la Kant. (For another example of using practical reason to jump to a conclusion not established by theoretical reason, see Pascal’s wager.)
Fichte’s method of self-reflection allows him to conceive of this freedom in terms of that self-reflection: If I were an animal, I would go ahead and just follow any given urge. Because I’m human, I can stop and reflect on that urge and ask whether it’s really right, whether I should really follow it. Though the dictates of conscience are always clear (or so Fichte implies in this work; he may well have a more nuanced picture of ethics elsewhere in his corpus), I can always choose to further reflect on that urge of conscience too, to ask whether it’s really right or not, and then if I decide that it is, I can again ask whether my decision that it is may have in fact been caused by some subconscious, pernicious influence (my brainwashed upbringing) or is otherwise suspect. This ability to always second-guess ourselves through further acts of self-consciousness, i.e. attempts to deliberate and reason, is at once our strength, in that it’s what distinguishes us from animals and constitutes our freedom, and our weakness, in that we can be forever in doubt and unable to actually will anything (Nietzsche’s complaint!). On Fichte’s account, what stops this reflection and so sets self-imposed limits to reasoning (making a good person merely partially examined) is faith.
Buy the translation Wes used, or get the archaic one online.
Image by Charles Valsechi. Audio editing by Tyler Hislop.
Transcript
0:00 Mark: Foreign. You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 271 are something like, what is reality and how do we know it to be so? And we read books one and two of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's book the Vocation of Man in 1799. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer perceiving the quality of our podcast, but annexing a bunch of extra quality.
0:36 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin having a midnight dialogue with a wondrous spirit. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan,
0:46 Wes: in one sense, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but in another I just am Cambridge, Massachusetts.
0:53 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey being that which I am, because in this particular a position of the great system of nature, only such a person as I am absolutely and no other is possible. In Middleton, Wisconsin, you would be the
1:07 Wes: determinist, which Fichte finds revolting.
1:14 Mark: I feel like I often have these midnight communications with three spirits designed to rake me from my errant ways. But it's just another episode of the Partially Examined Life. Which one of you is the spirit of Christmas Future?
1:27 Wes: The spirit is kind of an asshole in this. Neither of them comes off.
1:34 Dylan: Well, I want to know if the thees and thous and the canst are part of the German. Is the German rendered in some kind of archaic form such that you would naturally translate it that way or.
1:48 Wes: I don't know. What translation are you reading?
1:50 Dylan: I'm reading the one that Mark posted.
1:52 Mark: It's just a public domain one. I don't remember when it's from.
1:54 Wes: Mine is by Peter Preuss.
1:58 Mark: Is that why you ordered a special one and waited for it to come in the mail rather than using the.
2:02 Wes: Yeah, I started doing the physical books again. Just for sanity's sake, I printed mine out on paper.
2:11 Mark: Oh my gosh.
2:12 Wes: Yeah, so there's not that same archaisms. But the unfortunate thing is Fichte wrote this later on and he was doing this for the general public and he was trying to be accessible and in a sense, literary. And I think probably it is true that of the German idealists, he's the best writer.
2:29 Dylan: That's not a very high bar. I mean, a bar so low you can trip over. Right.
2:34 Wes: So anyway, there are fun things to read by him, including his appeal to the German public as part of the atheism controversy he got into or Addresses to the German Nation. But in this case I don't think it works very well as a literary device. I don't think the dialogue is necessary. It makes it more confusing. But I do think that this is a nice explication of his system as a whole. You know, it takes a lot of work, I think, but you do get his system out of this.
3:02 Mark: Actually, William Smith is the cheapy 1906 translation that most of us used here. It's readily available, you know, in any form in PDF or text.
3:11 Wes: Available to thee. Yes.
3:14 Mark: So it's divided into three books. And I was looking at this, you know, in starting the first book is that he's kind of doing his version of Descartes meditations, but clearly was going to take it way farther because you can look ahead in book three and see this is all about ethics. I don't know if he's most famous for the ethics, but definitely famous for being like Kant and a student of Kant, but actually really leans hard into the idealism charge that Kant is not really an idealist. There's the world of the phenomena that science can give deep explanations of.
But how do we know how that relates to the real world? Like, do we have any notion of what the real world actually is? All we know is this world that is conditioned by our senses. And so there's this distinction between the phenomenon and the things in themselves. And Fichte, as sort of the first major interpreter of Kant, was the guy, I think, before Hegel, before any of these others, who decided that the thing in itself, that real world, there's no justification for talking about it at all. It really can't exist. And so therefore, if the world that we experience is conditioned by our senses, by our.
What we are as human beings, then it's not that we're reaching out to some foreign material and conditioning it's. And creating this intermediary thing. It just must be more like what Berkeley thought in his Idealism created by us whole cloth. So that's what the second book is about. And that's the one where he snaps into this dialogue format. Reads like the Consolations of Philosophy by Boethius talking him, oh, spirit. Yes, in books one and book three. That's not. It's just something he picks up for that one thing to convince himself of this very counterintuitive.
4:52 Dylan: I just wanted to put a little check mark because this whole thing about the extent of the idealism, and I don't know how far it's going.
4:59 Wes: It's going as far as you think
5:00 Dylan: it is then it's not going as far as Mark said.
5:04 Mark: Well, we should say that we don't actually know how this ends. I mean, we've read some secondary sources,
5:08 Wes: but I know how it ends.
5:10 Mark: Book three. So book two is the idealism stuff. And it ends kind of on a cliffhanger of like, wow, this is terrible. I've established with you, with my own mind that idealism. But that leaves nothing is real. I am not real. Like nothing should have any moral consequence. You should go right down the well of nihilism that Nietzsche was so afraid of. And so book three is the thing that's going to save us from that. We didn't read that for this time, we're going to read it for next time. So we'll be able to say more definitively this is just my hypothesis and stuff based on the secondary stuff and what looked like in book two.
5:42 Wes: Yes, your hypothesis is correct, but I want to sketch, because the first book gives us the motivation behind all of this. And some of that is this whole problem of the thing in itself, which is a problem that commentators on Kant. It was just a big discussion once Kant published a critique of Pure Reason. That's all people talked about. But for Fichte, the main motivation is simply the free will determinism problem. And in book one, we get a sketch of determinism and how that undermines the possibility of human freedom and therefore how that undermines the possibility of morality.
So in order for there to be such a thing as morality, we really need to be. The way book one ends is, you know, is not subject to any external forces. Well, it turns out that a system of transcendental idealism, well, you wouldn't even call it transcendental. A system that sort of takes Kantian transcendental idealism as its point of departure is useful for that. And much of book two is just a description of how everything is constructed. So if you ever wanted some nitty gritty details about how space is constructed, how we get a sense of external objects, how causality works, look to it turns out there are sensations or not of external objects or modifications of ourself.
There's a part on relation which ought to be reminiscent of Locke where he says that's not something perceived from the outside, that's something we construct. We construct space as a kind of substance, we construct the idea of external objects, and then in the end we even, it turns out, construct the self. That's the way at the very end of it, everything becomes an illusion. Everything becomes a construction and that sets us up for what's going to save us from this. And in the third book, then new problems arise, right? Like solipsism, which he's going to address in the third book.
How is it possible for there to be multiple minds all having the experience of the same reality? Because his ultimate conclusion is that it's not like Kantian transcendental idealism, where I just produce the form of experience, right? And the data comes from outside. The data comes from things in themselves affecting our sensibility. Then we construct that into spatio temporal objects. So for instance, my keyboard is spatial because my consciousness constructs it that way. But it's not like I can do what I want willy nilly with the content. There's something mind independent that determines that the keyboard is here in front of me.
In this way, I have no control over that. With Fichte, I am responsible for the content. I'm responsible for everything. That's very confusing. It sounds solipsistic. His solution is going to be very much like Berkeley, and you may think of it as a cop out. There are even similarities to Schopenhauer, which is that, yes, our individual wills create everything in the world, but there's a harmony between all of our wills because we are part of one greater will. You call it God's will. And so everything harmonizes. Reminiscent of Leibniz as well.
Even though we're not going to do book three this time, it helps to know where we're going because otherwise it's very, very confusing.
8:45 Seth: When I got to the end of book two and I saw that we were in the tragic position of solipsism. And then book three is called faith. It was pretty obvious how we were going to reconcile this. So I'll leave it just as Wes complained about on our Indian episode. How is this not just a rehash? I'll ask that we try to, once we get into that last reconciliation section, how this is an advancement any different than Cartesian or Leibnizian resolution of the epistemological problem. But I think the free will and determinism thing is much more interesting to focus on here.
9:23 Wes: Or how is it different from Berkeley? Or it seems to introduce a mind independent element at the end. So does it matter whether the mind independent element is matter or God, things in themselves or this or that? What does it matter as long as there's that element?
9:38 Seth: Well, there's a tease where the Spirit says at the tail end the reality in which thou didst formerly believe. A material world existing independently of Thee of which thou didst fear to become the slave has vanished. The material world arises only through knowledge, and it is itself our knowledge. But knowledge is not reality just because it is knowledge. And then he ends by saying, but in vain wouldst thou labor to create this reality by means of thy knowledge, or out of thy knowledge, or to embrace it by thy understanding. If thou hast no other organ by which to apprehend it, thou never will find it, but thou hast such an organ. So he's going to resolve the validity or the assurance of the epistemological relationship by something extra epistemological.
10:21 Mark: I want to clarify though, that quote you just gave. Knowledge is not reality just because it is knowledge. In other words, it sounds like it's saying just because it's knowledge doesn't mean it's reality. That's not the relate. It's no, it's saying it's giving a new definition for what knowledge is. Knowledge is only being hooked up with images. We can't even say representations because representation would refer to something that is being represented. But it is knowledge is only knowledge of images. That is just going to be one of the bullets that he's going to bite.
And I'm trying to think how different that is from Berkeley, right? Berkeley would say yes, of course there are physical objects. It's just that those physical objects actually are ideas. You thought that they were material substance, but material substance ends up being a self contradicting concept after I've had my way with it. And so now we see all along that it was just ideas that you in fact were referring to. And you can do all your science and use your language as you were before. It's just what you really mean is something about ideas and not about some extramental mythical thing.
11:30 Dylan: To me it read very different than Berkeley. Berkeley to me just jumped to everything's an idea, reality doesn't exist. He's like, screw that. I mean he just jumps to it. Spends a lot of time maintaining, trying to go back and forth between there's a world, how do I experience the world? How do I see it, how do I think about it? We have two dimensions of consciousness. There's this kind of tether that he's kind of going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth between and to me, by the time I got to the end, even though we had ideas with the things that we work with, he was, I could just be wrong. But it felt like he was maintaining a connection between the mind independent world and the world of our ideas.
12:20 Wes: So I think this debate will actually have to wait until the next episode because we really have to have read book three before we arbitrate the difference between Berkeley and Fichte. Right. We don't know what the tether actually is going to be until book three, even though I foreshadowed it. How do we categorize this? Hegel called this subjective idealism, and we're going to do Schelling after this, and called that objective idealism and treated himself as the synthesis of those two things. And as a subjective idealist, he's supposed to be more akin to Berkeley. But in the third book, I think that is an important discussion. What kind of idealist is he? But we can have that with the third book. Ultimately, a lot of this is very difficult and needs to be worked through.
13:03 Mark: Even book two, ignoring what's going to come after that. I will stick to the comparison that to me, this whole thing reads like Descartes. Even though he breaks away from his sort of meditation format and changes to a dialogue format in part two, he's still doing something that I would. I mean, I guess he's known as one of the earliest phenomenologists. Right. Hegel has his book Phenomenology of Spirit. But that's not one person sitting back in an armchair and like, what does the wax look like? To me, Like, Descartes is doing something like, more like phenomenology, more evidently like phenomenology than what was going on in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
But Descartes obviously quickly goes to considering these abstract arguments that have nothing to do with the content of experience. Right? The ontological argument for the existence of God has nothing to do with the fact that he's sitting in a chair wondering about how he's constructing the world. But Fichte is doing that throughout here. And it's just that he's being, I don't want to say more careful, but he's willing to second guess himself. He's doing something similar to what Locke was doing. Right. As you said, Wes, you know, he has sections in here where he was, what is substance?
What is essence? What is, you know, all these different things, relations, these categories of things that, you know, Locke had a chapter each on, he's going to do in his armchair, more cursory way. But he's also willing, when he sort of reaches an end point to like, huh, I see where I. How I got to this point, but I'm unsatisfied. Like, this makes my heart Hurt. So I need to back off and sort of do another meditation from a different point of view, a different starting point. So it ends up being a little more complex. And the fact that he is willing to, as I was saying before, by the end of book two, redefine what the word knowledge is.
You thought that knowledge was knowledge of the world. Now I'm going to tell you that the only thing we have available to us, the thing that we've always called knowledge, is just knowledge of images. It's really just. It's gotta be something I want to call it. See, I keep wanting to just say image representation, these all. Or illusion.
15:12 Wes: Yeah. And we're familiar with this. This is just on one level. We could just treat this as Kant. Right. It's his treatment of the thing in itself that distinguishes him from Kant and gives us the sense that maybe he's not a transcendental idealist, but a subjective idealist. I love Berkeley. Kant rewrote the second version of the Critique of Pure Reason. And I mean, one of the things he wanted to do with that is to respond to the criticisms that he was simply like Berkeley. And no, he said, I'm not that kind of idealist. And really, he's not even an idealist.
Strictly speaking, transcendental idealism is a very, very weak claim about the fact that we have what Locke called secondary qualities. Everything turns out to be a secondary quality, including space and time. And then we are determining the form of experience in relation to data that does come from the outside. For Fichte, the data cannot come from the outside. That's the important thing. We have to produce that ourselves as well. We have to produce the determinant content of experience. And in the end, what I like about the very. The end of book two, what made it such a cliffhanger that I had to skim ahead.
I'm like, I gotta figure out how he fixes this, because this is crazy. Which is one of the things I actually love about Fichte is it seems crazy to say that the self produces
16:29 Mark: the entire world and the self produces the self. Like, how could that even make sense?
16:34 Wes: Yeah. And the self produces the self, which is actually, I think, a really good insight. It's Fichtean, and it gets us back to some of our reflections on personal identity. The third book will be very, very interesting, but I think we could work through this. I suggest we don't spend a huge amount of time on book one. Book two is by far more complicated and lays out his system. Book one is just, hey, Here's a sketch of determinism, which is to say what at the time they called materialism and also dogmatism. Those two things are synonymous. Dogmatism and idealism were put in contradistinction to each other. And book one sketches the materialist dogmatist position. Book two is the idealist rebuttal to that.
17:17 Mark: I have a series of points that I pulled out of book one that I least kind of wanted to run through.
17:22 Wes: Yeah, you want to start us, Start us somewhere.
17:24 Mark: So it's like he's noticing like Locke was. Yeah, I'm contemplating the world around me. Let's think about nature. Actually, before he even gets into that, his overall concern is what am I and what is my vocation? Right. What is the point of this book? And in other words, what am I supposed to do? He states right up front the whole title of the work, the Vocation of Man. This is going to be a work of ethics. And his overall method is just going to be, I need to examine this for myself. People have told me what I am, told me what I'm supposed to do, but I need to take this into my own hands.
So that sounds like Descartes again. A lot of it sounds like phenomenology specifically, but he doesn't have that word. And he doesn't have at least if he's going to come up with the basic idea of phenomenology. In other words, I'm not going to posit that there are objects beyond my perceptions. I'm just going to describe my perceptions. That's at least something he seems to be discovering in the course of this work.
18:18 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. He starts off by saying, hey, much of our knowledge is actually secondhand. We should put ourselves more into a position of doubt. But then in the beginning, he's turning away from that more Cartesian project, focusing on consciousness. And he's going to derive determinism in a very interesting way. I mean, it's something we've talked about many times. We're all familiar with the idea that we, you know, as material beings, we are sort of cogs in the wheel of nature. We are subject to all these external forces that determine us.
And even our thoughts and our willings ultimately can't be free because of that. You know, if you know the conditions early on, seconds after the big bang, and you know the laws of the universe, then you know everything Wes is ever going to do, there's no freedom and therefore there's no morality. But yes, in the beginning Here he's going to give us this cool Fichtean variation on that in terms of the forces of nature and how they speak through us.
19:28 Dylan: I find myself in just this kind of position of feeling like I had a different experience of the book. I agree that the first book is about determinism. But even just insofar as the title is reflecting as entitled, Doubt is the whole way chewing on things about the world that just seem to have. And the determinist position, like one example, is saying, I must already be, in a certain sense, that which I shall become in order to be able to become. So I must possess a twofold being in which the first shall contain the fundamental determining principle of the second.
20:05 Wes: Yeah. There he's sketching a way out. If there's a way out of determinism, that's the door.
20:10 Dylan: Yeah. And so I guess that's my fundamental experience of the book, is that in the first chapter, chewing on determinism in a way in which I feel like everything that he's saying, he's acknowledging is true, he's working through. But he comes up with unsatisfactory conclusions about it. The fundamental tension is one between the experience of a kind of deterministic causal experience of the things outside of myself and then my experience of freedom, the experience of things being as they are, having to be what they are, and the way they are, and having fixed properties and the fact that things are changing all the time.
And he's sort of chewing on that tension the whole way through and never exactly saying something that isn't true, but it's not true in exactly the right way. That's why I find that the fundamental conclusion is so dissatisfying. Because it's the process like what I just read. You're right, that's sort of the gateway to the next book and thinking that through. But to me, that already is resting on a lot of thinking through what the nature of that doubt is and laying the groundwork for that problem. And I thought, in a very interesting
21:21 Wes: way, we should say what he means by doubt here. What's in doubt? What's in doubt is the possibility of freedom. The skepticism here. When we mean skepticism, the most pressing problem, the most pressing skeptical problem is skepticism concerning human freedom. The possibility of having a will because of determinism. The doubt that's being produced here by the deterministic picture is a doubt that there can be such a thing as morality. And that's where he gets. By the end of it. He says, on page 22 of my edition given determinism is freedom thinkable.
And then he's going to give us a little foreshadowing of how it would be thinkable. To be thinkable, I must make myself and in a sense, the whole reason to mention already having become what I have become merely in thinking purpose already I am what I become. That is kind of Meno's paradox approach to this, in which I must connect willing to deliberative thinking. And he'll say something like, I'm first a thinker and then an agent. So this is one of the ways out of this problem, is to start thinking about thinking as a precondition for the possibility of freedom and an escape from determinism, or what he calls servitude to nature.
22:46 Mark: Just the structure of this book is a little funny in that it's about 35 pages long in my edition. In the first 25 or so pages is him, as Wes was saying, developing this actually pretty cogent picture of determinism. Like, let's look at what nature is. And it seems like everything is connected. That if you change, you know, if a butterfly flaps his wings. He doesn't use this analogy, but, like, I might have be a different person, right? Like, to imagine a world in which one little thing about me was different would be to imagine a completely different world. Everything is causally connected, as Wes was saying, is sort of if you know the conditions.
23:24 Wes: Hair example. Because that's the most hilarious one, right?
23:27 Mark: You have the quote there.
23:28 Wes: If I knew, like the curvature of one hair on your head and then I knew all the laws of the universe, I could derive every thought you would ever have. It's beautiful. I don't think that's true, but it's beautiful. Yeah.
23:40 Mark: And. And he manages to sketch so, you know, around pages 23, 24, that you could even have a fully functioning ethics in this deterministic system. Right? Because everything has a prior effect, right? It's just a matter of the principle of sufficient reason. Like that we just. Everything appears itself as to have been. It is the way that it is because of. In fact, this is a connection between determinism in the case of causality and determining in the case of just like, what is that thing? Right? He starts out the whole thing of like, when I think of the world, nothing is fuzzy. I mean, yeah, my perception of something could be fuzzy, but if I literally focus on it, I see like, a
24:19 Dylan: cat has to actually be a cat
24:21 Mark: or not a cat. Like, everything has a determination in this case. And so once you get that word in there, determination. Everything is determined. Then it's, well, what makes it a cat? It's nature. You can connect that to causal determination pretty easily. So sort of like the nature of the world. The only thing that's sort of relative within this is that he says, in each individual, nature beholds herself from a particular point of view. So, yeah, we can pick out particular powers, particular causes in nature, but really there's just one big power, one big cause.
It's just a matter of, like, what are we trying to explain right now? And so as a cog in that machine, I can think about some of the things that I do are caused by the fact that I'm like a plant, you know, that I'm a being that has appetites. And some of these things are caused by uniquely human. My rational faculties. And so right there, moral striving. Yes, we've got the distinction between virtue and vice. That something is virtuous if it's those human parts of our determined nature that are determining it. And if it's vice, if it's just like, I need more sex and food, and I will do what I need to to get that, you know, that the animal parts of us and the fact that we couldn't have chose something else doesn't change the fact that one is, you know, virtue and one is vice.
And we're going feel the sting of conscience when we do something that's out of vice, you know, So I really like this whole picture. But he, at the end of 25 pages or so, says, wow, okay, I've got this picture. It all seemed to make sense, but, man, it sure is unsatisfying because I sure want to feel like I am actually responsible for my actions. I actually can try and do something different. Maybe I need to revisit this whole thing from sort of the other point of view. In other words, starting with my experience of my own human freedom and figure out what comes out of that.
Can I get at the same phenomenon from the other direction? And so that's what the remainder. The part Dylan was quoting from of this book is. Book one.
26:19 Wes: He tells us why he's bothered. Right? Because guilt, he says, for instance, something very reminiscent of Locke, which is guilt and responsibility would only have meaning in positive law. They would lose any ethical meaning if we're completely determined. So that's reminiscent of Locke saying. Right. Guilt and responsibility are only forensic concepts. Essentially, they're only legal concepts. If we accept this picture of determinism to be capable of ethical action, it has to be the case that I could have done otherwise I could be free. And the way this ends is he will say, for there to be free will, we must be free of the influence of all external forces, which is a very radical view.
It's not just that we need to be free at certain select points or responsive to reasons or some other compatibilist positions you might want to sketch out. He's an incompatibilist. We got to be free from all the forces of nature at some point here.
27:16 Mark: So around page 29, page 30, he said it was rash to extend the net of causal determinism to beings with intelligences. So like, okay, maybe my description of nature was good, but maybe I'm not a cog in the machine. And ultimately he in this book says, I guess neither freedom nor determinism is sufficiently supported by experience. Page 31. For the first, there is no other recommendation than its mere conceivableness. For the latter, I extend a proposition which is perfectly true in its own place, beyond its proper and natural boundary. If intelligence be merely the manifestation of a power of nature, then I do quite right to extend the principle to it.
But whether it be so or not is the very question at issue. And this question I must solve by deduction from other premises, not by a one sided answer assumed at the very commencement of the inquiry. So he admits that he wasn't really doing straight up phenomenology, which would have yielded certain results. He was just making a leap. It looks like everything is part of a causal network. Probably I am too, but am I really justified in that? He doesn't think there's justification either way, and his heart certainly wants there to be freedom.
28:20 Wes: And I think Dylan's intuition that this all looks true. This is our material, typical naturalistic framework, materialist view of the world. And if we were Kantians, we would say, yeah, this is empirically true, this is empirically real, except the appearances are all in some sense in our heads and it's transcendentally not true. At a transcendental level, determinacy is false. At an empirical level it's true. Fichte is going to move beyond that polite distinction.
28:48 Seth: I want to just click down a little bit into the distinctions he makes and how he gets to that point, because I think it's worth spending a couple minutes on. The narrative for him is the experience we have of nature, of the world is constant activity, constant movement and being and becoming. So we never have an experience of something spontaneously coming to existence. There's always an antecedent and so you, you extrapolate from that this notion of causality, that there's a chain of causality in the sense of nature. The first thing he does is go to the necessity, the absolute necessity.
So all the laws of nature, everything's determined by these law and the way they are, couldn't be otherwise. But the next thing is he talks about that conditioning, sort of what you might call first order experience or sensation. So there's a part of us that's caught up in this deterministic web and it's these thoughts or these experiences, but we have a consciousness of these things which we think of as the source of our freedom or our free will. The ultimate conundrum in book one is he asked the question of consciousness. Is it material, in which case it's fully determined by all the laws of nature and you have no actual free will, or is it different than the material world, in which case you lose the possibility of causal efficacy.
So you might have consciousness of what's happening in your body, but you can't actually have any material. You can't will something because you can't that consciousness. You can't make something happen in this material world, like make your body move or what have you. Like you're just observing yourself being causally determined. That's the way I read book one is that fundamentally the issue is either consciousness is causally determined, in which case we have no free will, or it's not causally determined, in which case we have free will but it's completely powerless because we can't really.
We're not really able to make any causal impact on our decisions. Either way, we don't get what we want, which is moral responsibility and all that. Is that a fair reading?
30:57 Mark: I think so. I don't know that I saw that emphasized, but I'm now reading our last episode's discussion of, or, you know, two episodes ago, of Purusha and Prakriti into this. So I like that. That consciousness either is a cog in the machine or it's merely a witness, a fundamentally different kind of thing and could not exhibit causal influence.
31:15 Dylan: Yeah, yeah.
31:16 Wes: He does have an interesting way of approaching this, which is to say I'm not really going to worry about mind body interaction. That problem and the way he gets around that is to talk about what is in my translation is called an anthropogenetic force. So it's kind of a monism. So he will treat the mind and body as sort of harmonious developments, two sides of a single anthropogenetic. Force. It's not that bodily movement produces thinking and willing or vice versa. They both happen harmoniously from this underlying force. That doesn't really help me, right? Because in the end I'm still a product of this force. So I don't get out of the problem that Seth described by being a monist and evading the mind body problem. I don't have to think that objects, material objects are bouncing off of me and influencing me in order to still be subject to the problem of determinism.
32:19 Dylan: This is the indecision regarding. Is it determinism or is it free will? My state of indecision is put an end to by forces external and invisible to me which limit my activity as well as my immediate consciousness of it. That is my will to one point, just as an indeterminate activity of a plant is limited in another. It is I myself, independent and free from the influence of all our forces who put an end to my state of indecision and determine my own course according to the knowledge I have freely attained of what is best. Then he begins the last section, the ultimate section.
Which of these two opinions shall I adopt? Am I free and independent, or am I nothing in myself and merely the manifestation of a foreign power? It is clear to me that neither of these two doctrines is sufficiently supported for the first. There is no other recommendation than its mere conceivableness. For the latter, I extend a principle which is perfectly true in its own place, beyond its proper and natural application. If intelligence is merely the manifestation of a power of nature, then I do quite right to extend this principle to it. But whether it is or not is the very question at issue.
And this question I must solve by deduction from other premises, not by a one sided answer assumed at the very commencement of the inquiry.
33:32 Wes: That turns out to be a good translation. I mean a readable. So I was imagining from what you guys were saying earlier, this wasn't so readable.
33:39 Dylan: But wait till we quote from book two, Daniel.
33:41 Wes: Yeah, well, it's hard going. And however you translate.
33:45 Seth: Translated.
33:46 Mark: Yeah. Let's get into book two.
33:47 Seth: I found a copy of the German text. I can't guarantee that this is the original German text or updated, but if you look at the German, it's not anachronistic with the I's and the thous and the duhadist and believist and bleakist.
34:02 Mark: Wacky 1905 translator.
34:04 Dylan: Yeah, I should have followed my inclination just to buy the book. I should have done it. This is the first time I Think in a long, long, long time. I've read one of these 1905 translations, and I've been confirmed in my desire that I shouldn't do so.
34:18 Wes: If you're going to go through the
34:19 Mark: trouble to print the whole thing, you pay just as much in ink as you.
34:23 Wes: That's true, I did, and I decided to start buying books again. How much would it just cost to print them myself?
34:31 Mark: So, Book two, knowledge. Yeah. Between these two, he really does do the locky in sort of going through how do we get ideas of colors, how do we. You know, there's a lot of faculty stuff here of what is immediate, what ends up being intuition, what ends up being thought.
34:47 Seth: I think it's worth pointing out the literary device that he employs right off the bat because it's kind of a hard left turn. So book one is much more on the Cartesian or Meditation. I find myself confused, and I think of this and I try that, and I find this and much more sort of introspective, phenomenological in that respect, or protophenomenological. Book two starts like this. I'm just going to read the first paragraph and a half.
35:18 Wes: Yeah, good. I'm glad. Glad you're doing that.
35:22 Seth: Book two. Knowledge. Chagrin and anguish stung me to the heart. I cursed the returning day which called me back to an existence whose truth and significance were now involved in doubt. I awoke in the night from unquiet dreams. I sought anxiously for a ray of light that might lead me out of these mazes of uncertainty. I sought, but became only more deeply entangled in the labyrinth. Once, at the hour of midnight, a wondrous shape appeared before me and addressed poor mortal. I heard it say, thou heapest error upon error and fancy thyself wise. Thou tremblest before the phantoms which thou hast thyself toiled to create.
Dare to become truly wise. I bring thee no new revelation. What I can teach thee, thou already knowest, and thou hast but to recall it to thy remembrance. I cannot deceive thee, for thou thyself wilt acknowledge me to be in the right. And shouldest thou still be deceived, thou wilt be deceived by thyself. Take courage, listen to me and answer my questions. And so the remainder of the book is a dialogue, a dialogue in a very, very Platonic sense, where in many respects, Fichte is playing the role of the interlocutor and the spirit is playing the role of Socrates, teaching nothing, saying, asserting nothing, but simply questioning Fichte to come to these conclusions of his own.
And as he says, remembrance, in other words, to pull the knowledge out of himself, there's a point at which he says something to the effect of being taught something is never as meaningful or isn't really knowledge out of a book. Like if you read a fact, it's not really knowledge. In the same way that if you come to it on your own, but. And so just as a literary device, it's like a complete about face and you get into this back and forth dialectic, which I actually was pleased. It reads really quickly, really well. I thought I liked it.
37:23 Wes: I can't stand it. I had to go through and do my summary and just translate it into a. I find it so unhelpful. Something that's already very difficult conceptually, you know. And your spirit, the way that your spirit speaks, that spirit in your translation speaks would drive me even crazier.
37:43 Mark: I kind of like the fact that, like a Platonic dialogue, it means that, you know, he can say things that end up not being the final conclusion, you know, that just. This is something I'm considering right now. It seems reasonable right now. But I do like the idea of like, you know, Descartes is sat down in his chair and is right. His first meditation. Now I've come back for my second meditation. I took a bunch of peyote. And so this is what comes out.
38:06 Seth: Yeah, well, I think we have to at least accept a nod to the fact that this is intended to be a popular work. And he's trying to create a literary and pedagogic device that will help the reader arrive at the same conclusions themselves as opposed to this being. I don't know if you mentioned this at the beginning, Mark, but, you know, he was a renowned teacher and most of his works came out of his lectures. So the stuff we're not reading that's more scholarly and philosophical and systematizing treatise like, is probably much, much, much more.
38:43 Wes: It's totally different. Totally different.
38:45 Seth: It's totally different. I'm sure it's completely different than this. So, I mean, just accept the form for what it is and just marvel at the fact that there was a time in history when somebody thought I should write a popular work that everybody in my country could read to help them understand the limits of their knowledge and how their self constructs itself through its own very being. I mean, that kind of shit would never happen today. You. You could never write a book like this and expect a broad audience to read it.
39:18 Wes: I think it was popular actually, and I Think he wrote this right after he got fired from Jena University because of the atheism controversy. And he needed to write to make money. So he's a guy who's passionate about communicating with a broader public, and you have to respect that, especially for German idealists.
39:38 Mark: And, Seth, your comment reminded me. I thought you were going to point out. So there's a preface here. The very last paragraph of the preface is. So he's talking about sort of the book as a whole. I must, however, remind my reader that the I who speaks in this book is not the author himself, but it is his earnest wish that the reader should himself assume this character. That he should not rest contented with a mere historical apprehension of what is here said, but that during the reading he should really and truly hold converse with himself, deliberate draw conclusions and form resolutions like his imaginary representative. And thus, by his own labor and reflection develop and build up within himself that mode of thought, the mere picture of which is presented to him in the book. So it's just right stated out what you were just saying as a literary analysis there.
40:21 Wes: And Mark, you know, it is like, as you mentioned, very phenomenological. And you have to say, when he talks about spreading points out into lines and stuff, you have to kind of think about that and see if that is your experience.
40:35 Seth: Yeah. That especially comes to light in this dialogue when he's talking in the early part. So he's talking about colors and surfaces.
40:44 Wes: Is he using the word sensation in your translation, by the way?
40:47 Mark: It's sensation in a lot of places or sensory stuff.
40:49 Seth: Yeah.
40:50 Wes: Okay, good. All right.
40:51 Seth: Literarily, you may not have liked it, Wes, but, I mean, it's as good a version of. Hey, do you understand how at least so much of what you think of as given in perception is actually constructed by you kind of a thing? So he talks about. They're going through the concept of having this experience of red. And the spirit is getting him to acknowledge that he's not actually having an understanding of red out in the world. He's having a sensation of red. And the consciousness is just of that
41:21 Wes: sensation as a modification of the self,
41:24 Seth: as a modification of the self. So you can't understand why the self is modified in the way that it is. It's just. That's what happens. That's what it means to exist. There's this constant stream of modification which you've come to call color and shape and all these sorts of things. But, you know, he starts with color, but he also then starts to talk about extension and this is always one thing that I've. I can't remember. It's a common philosophical thing where you look at a three dimensional object from one side and your perception is just of the one side, but you construct essentially the full three dimensional object in your brain.
You know, what the. And you create depth and all these sorts of things. And he gives a very, I think, straightforward account of how, when you really acknowledge that, you have to call into question what's actually happening. I think this is a very, very good and very clear phenomenological interrogation of what we actually are getting from our experience versus what we're creating and
42:25 Wes: an argument for construction that would then
42:27 Dylan: apply to more plain constructions of what's happening on the inside. Everything from you're extrapolating what's on the inside of a body based upon having seen the body to extrapolating the laws underlying. I mean, there's, I think he makes effectively a direct comparison between the extrapolation of laws on the inside of the activity of the world as akin to that kind of extrapolation that you're doing when you see three dimensions, when you see only one side, just to bring
42:57 Wes: it back to the beginning and sensations. This is the whole veil of perception idea that contemporary analytic philosophers are so critical of.
43:07 Mark: John Searle's whole book that we read. Yep.
43:10 Wes: And Locke was accused of this as well.
43:12 Mark: Can we read actually page 38? So maybe Seth, I'll be spirit and you can be I. Just for the first half of that
43:19 Seth: page, I'm going to be I. Okay.
43:21 Mark: Yes. So I'll start as Spirit. Dost thou see thy sight and feel thy touch, or hast thou yet a higher sense through which thou perceivest thy external senses and their determinations?
43:32 Seth: By no means. I know immediately that I see and feel and what I see and feel. I know this while it is, and simply because it is without the intervention of any other sense. It was on this account that thy question seemed strange to me because it appeared to throw doubt on this immediate consciousness.
43:50 Mark: That was not my intention. I desired only to induce thee to make this immediate consciousness clear to thyself. So thou hast an immediate consciousness of thy sight and touch? Yes, of thy sight and touch. I said thou art therefore the subject, seeing, feeling and circumstances. And when thou art conscious of the seeing, feeling, etc. Thou art conscious of a particular determination or modification of thyself.
44:17 Seth: Unquestionably, it's a little clearer in the
44:20 Mark: broader context of this, but just that is getting the interlocutor fichte. Himself to accept the thing that Searle and others are saying, no, you do not. You actually perceive objects out in the world. But no, no, whenever I have a perception, it's because I have this sensation. The only thing I'm aware of is the sensation. If you want to think of this in terms of, well, you could be a brain in a vat and have the same sensation. You know, you could do that whole thought experiment to pull these away. But Fichte is able to do this just by making you actually look at the phenomenology. And he thinks that this is a legitimate move, a legitimate description of your experience.
44:56 Wes: Yeah, what I'm feeling is not my. My translation is, you know, I'm seeing my seeing, I'm feeling my feeling. So it's not that I'm feeling directly and immediately an external thing.
45:09 Seth: And.
45:09 Wes: Yeah, again, reminiscent of Lockean secondary qualities, where if I'm conscious of a red sensation, then I'm conscious of my idea. In particular, things get different for secondary qualities, which are supposed to be a kind of substance in a way which we'll see that Fichte is going to deconstruct that as well.
45:29 Mark: Yeah. So you can go on to then say, okay, it's part of this experience that when I have this immediate sensation, you know, that I'm sensing something, that it has a reference to something else usually at least. So you could say all that stuff about perception presents itself as having an object, and this object presents itself, if it's a physical object, as being in space. But those still all end up then being. If you've admitted that thing that he's admitted on that one page, then all those things end up being inferences, intuitions. Somehow annex uses that. Not a connection, but an annexion is this word he makes up.
46:06 Wes: Give me context so I can figure out.
46:08 Seth: Yeah, we don't jump there yet because that's a real complication.
46:12 Mark: The point being that the only thing you're really experiencing is like, what's in your mind, the blue image or whatever.
46:18 Dylan: Just stop for a second, okay, because this is the part that all the justs I find really frustrating. Right. Because it's always maintained through here. Even if it's that I am experiencing red in this case as an experience of my own, as a secondary quality, and everything is a secondary quality that I am thinking about my thinking it is still that there is some connection to the outside world is maintained. And that's sort of the whole fundamental conversation. Right.
46:52 Wes: He rejects that. He rejects the idea that external objects
46:55 Dylan: are causing any Right now, he's been very carefully going through the phenomena of experience. And we are maintaining, on the one hand that clarifying my experience of sensation and my extrapolation to quote, unquote, the real world. So, yes, what I mean by red is more complicated. But it's not as if the world is not affecting me as a sensory being. There is a source of those sensations.
47:22 Wes: He absolutely rejects that.
47:24 Mark: But I see where Dylan's probably getting this.
47:26 Dylan: I mean, look at this point, right? It's either that, you know, you go down this brain in the vat kind of thing, right? The universe doesn't exist. It's us acting on ourselves only and the fact that we have sensations at all. Right? Now, throughout this, he's been maintaining that there is something that is the source of those sensations. And it may be confusing. And what we think about when we're thinking through those sources of sensation, that the thing that we're thinking on is not the sensations, it's that we're thinking on the thinking of them.
47:57 Wes: He's going to say we attribute our sensations to external sources. But I think he's going to. I mean, I think we'll get more at this as we work through it. But my sense is that he rejects external objects as the sources of sensation. Even though we make those attributions and we'll get there. We should try to get there step by step because otherwise it's going to be impossible.
48:18 Dylan: That's fine. What I will say is that my experience of it has been that he has carefully maintained a tether to the world. And that might be wrong.
48:28 Wes: The only true world is the self. The self produces. The self is the source. The self is the thing in itself that produces all the sensations.
48:35 Seth: So, wait, wait, wait. I gotta say, I'm with Dylan on this one. I feel like the lifeline, the tether, is still there. The point that the spirit is making is you think you know about X, but really what you know about is Y, which is a different thing than X. It's not making the claim that X doesn't exist or that you have no relationship with X. Although at the end of the book, he's worried that that's the case. What it's saying is, really, if you're going to talk about knowledge, if you're going to talk about the way that you conceive of understanding things, you say you have sensations, you say you're having experience of the thing, but really all you're having is consciousness of having a sensation of something. So it's this second order thing. And that's the limit of the movement at this point.
49:22 Wes: Anyway, Fichte is very famous for his rejection of the thing in itself and the external law of the idea of an external thing in itself causing sensations. So we should. Maybe I'm wrong, but we're not going to understand this unless we work through bit by bit, because it's a very complicated sequential argument that culminates in that position.
49:43 Mark: If you want to stick around and go through those steps with us, you will have to hear part two of this discussion, which is the next thing in your feed. Go check it out.
[…] Learn more about Kant’s phenomena vs. noumena in this very old episode Partially Examined Life episode. We return to the topic (in part) in our current two-episode run on Kant’s follower Fichte. […]