Ep. 272: Fichte’s Idealist Theology (Part One)

0:07 Mark: 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 question for episode 272, something like what, if anything, does our relationship to the world entail that we must do? And we read book three of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's the Vocation of man from 1799. We'll also be filling in a few points on book two, left over from our last discussion. For more information, please visit Part

this

is Mark Linsenmayer, Vocation still undeclared.

0:36 Seth: In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin recognizing that faculty in myself, which is not understanding. In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan

0:46 Mark: with a vocation that is beyond space and time. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey

0:54 Dylan: acting not because I know, but knowing because I act.

0:56 Mark: In Middleton, Wisconsin.

0:58 Seth: Mmm, that's a good one.

1:00 Mark: So our second session on this book. We should sum up where we are at this point. We didn't quite finish. There's about 15 pages left in book two, so a lot of the elaboration of the details of what his idealism amounts to are in there. I guess I was surprised that rather than book three being about working out the philosophical problems with idealism, for instance, it's not about that at all. It's more given that we have no way of referencing something objective, in other words, beyond any possible human thought or conception, or not even just human thought, but my personal thought and conception.

Given that we're basically in a position of solipsism, why doesn't everything just turn meaningless? Why don't we get eaten away by nihilism? Well, we just have to have faith and basically go back to the natural standpoint, asserting that, yes, there really are objects in the world that are shared and objective and our actions really do have consequences and other people really are real. And then once he thinks he's established that through faith, then he sort of backdoor slips in through very Kantian means, belief in an afterlife, belief in God, even though it's kind of a weird conception of God, it's not necessarily belief in the whole Christian tradition.

He doesn't get into Jesus and things like that in here, but he definitely becomes a transcendental theologian, like, you know, Emerson.

2:22 Dylan: Just because I dislike the fact that the chapter is titled Faith, even though I know I. I'm sure that's the word in German. Preuss, in his introduction, points out that Fichte himself preferred the phrase creative imagination in the science of knowledge. The other reason is that this doesn't seem to go down the Kierkegaardian route. But we can't avoid the fact that he uses the word faith. But I think that it requires a lot of qualification.

2:47 Mark: Well, yeah, faith has a lot to do with ultimately with conscience, right? And our privileging of a practical orientation to the world, which is to say the domain of practical reason and the possibility of ethical action, and the fact that we are obligated to do things, certain things, and can act out of that obligation that we are free. Those are the sorts of things we have faith in, right? We just say, yes, I could tie myself up in lots of skeptical worries if I like, and ultimately those are irresolvable. So, you know, I can say, well, free will, determinism, problem, how am I ever going to resolve that?

And his answer is, you're not. You're not going to resolve it. But in a way, we're obligated to make a choice. And we're obligated either to say, okay, we're nihilists, everything is determined, or what we're really obligated to do is to say, yeah, there is such a thing as freedom. We're obligated to say there is obligation. We're obligated to say that we can be ethical agents. And then if we make that leap of faith, then lots and lots of consequences follow from that. And in fact, Fichte's whole system of idealism is predicated on that sort of leap of faith.

He wants to preserve the possibility of freedom. And to do that you have to come up with a very interesting epistemology and ontology. He will directly address this worry about how we share an external world with each other in this third chapter and gives a very Berkeleyan sounding explanation of that.

4:17 Seth: But we'll get to that in our back and forth. Prior to the episode, I said part three has one move. It's a significant move, but I wasn't sure what else there was to it. And the more I've reflected on it, the more, I mean, I kind of want to take my more textual layperson's. He wrote this for laypeople. And I want to take my more practical layperson's approach to it. And I'm brought to this point where he's saying something to the effect of all the things that I've talked about up until now make sense if you're just being speculative or contemplative.

But as soon as you realize part of what existence is, part of what Being a human being is, is to act, eat, make choices, whatever. You're brought to the realization that there's something beyond mere speculative or there's something beyond understanding. It's the Heideggerian phenomenological, the kind of ur experience of acting in the world, which just puts the lie to the epistemological dilemma of the separation between the subject and the world. You can't be a human being living in the world, acting, choosing, and maintain the skeptical solipsistic stance.

5:36 Mark: Yeah, and it seems very pragmatic. As you say, you can take any of your intuitions, any of your thoughts, and you can make that an object of reflection, and you can question it, you can be skeptical about it. And then even if you affirm the original thing through your reflection, well, you can take that reflection, reflect on it, you can keep going up the ladder of reflection, and there will always be something that you can doubt. And so doubt has to stop somewhere. If you're going to act, you might as well make it stop right at the beginning and just not start on this project of Cartesian doubt, of philosophical reflection.

That seems sort of reasonable, but then going from there and saying, therefore I've shown that everybody lives a life by faith. And let's see how far I can run with that. Based on, we expect the world to be just, and if things don't turn out that way and bad things do happen to good people, it's not that that theoretically gives us grounds for believing that there is an afterlife in which everything does work out, but it as a practical necessity. And this is exactly from Kant, makes it so that we have to believe that, you know, our sensibility tells us that the good is the good is the good, you know, as Plato's monism of the good.

So if it doesn't appear that way on earth, then there must be some other realm that in fact we are working toward all the time. Everything seems to be working toward progress. And so, in other words, that's kind of a Hegelian progress through history. But then, insofar as history doesn't seem to actually be progressing, or there are limits to how far it can progress, there must be an even greater world that we live in more primarily as moral beings. He refers to it as an eternal world.

Yeah, even if the world is perfectible, that doesn't relieve us of the need for this supersensible or eternal world. But I do want to emphasize that when listeners hear the word faith, they're going to be thinking primarily of faith in God, which is eventually implicated. But his leap of faith begins with faith in our freedom and our capacity to be autonomous ethical actors. And then everything else comes as a byproduct of that. What's really interesting about early modern philosophy and then the German idealists is often God is there to plug up these epistemological holes.

Right. If the world is nothing but ideas, and Berkeley's answer to how we share the world is through the fact that the world is basically God's mind, or God is synchronizing our minds. Descartes, you know, how can we believe in a world with external objects? Well, we first need to prove the existence of a benevolent God, and then that God guarantees that there's a correspondence between our thoughts and those objects. So similarly, these constructs about a super sensible world and an afterlife and a God, they're kind of there to serve the purpose of elaborating a system in which the concept of freedom makes sense.

Basically, you know, you can still suspect, okay, these guys are religious and they're just sort of trying to save the appearances when it comes to religion, but really I think their focus is on the concept of freedom. And strangely enough, they have trouble elaborating an explanation of that without positing God and all the rest of it.

8:53 Dylan: I think you're right, Wes. I see the underpinnings of freedom in his discussion early on about our urges to know. And there's a way in which that urge that we have is a sensible, palpable experience that is a proto experience of freedom. It makes freedom as a sensible experience. Freedom has to be true, because I have that kind of a priori urge to know.

9:22 Mark: That's a good point, because right early on he wants to say, well, if we want to even assume we can know anything about the world, if we want to assume we can know the truth, then we must start from the practical. This is the really innovative thing about Fichte, which is practical reason is going to be prior to theoretical reason, when for previous philosophers it's entirely the other way around. Right. Theoretical reason has priority. Fichte is going to say no. If you want to believe that it's even possible to know the truth, you can't start with science and theoretical philosophy. You have to start from the standpoint of the practical, which is of course a hugely influential idea in the subsequent history of philosophy.

Yeah, let me put this out there just as a question that we can try to answer as we go, because I did read him as more of an existentialist as opposed to Kant with the idea of what hold does practical reason have over us? And for Kant, you are literally contradicting yourself through your actions. In order to speak, there must be certain things that you have to assent to, that these are not things that can be argued about. And in order to act, in order to hold yourself as a coherent self at all, like all that stuff is supposed to ultimately ground why you should believe in God in heaven.

Whereas I think for Fichte, he's kind of more honest about it, that you can choose to ignore your conscience, you can choose to be a solipsist, you can choose to doubt everything and just treat the world like a big video game. I hope you don't do that. Insofar as you are doing that, you're actually acting more like an animal. You're not really asserting your reason, but it's not that reason. Like two plus two equals four tells you that you have to believe. Like, it is something of a leap.

11:08 Dylan: I agree with you saying you aren't asserting your reason, but I think it's you aren't asserting your freedom, which is asserting your will. That's the character that you have. It's an act of your will that claims the freedom as the thing that you act on.

11:23 Mark: We should highlight here, I think what you guys are saying is right, which is that here's my spin on it, my dramatic spin on it, which is that there's really no good reason to believe in morality. We all ought to be error theorists, really, when it comes down to there's no scientific grounding for the concept that we ought to do anything. So let's take that radical position. And then here's the caveat. Unless we want to take the thing that Fichte takes very seriously in book three, which is the concept of conscience. Just this feeling that certain things are right and wrong, that when human beings do certain atrocious things to each other, we can call that unethical and wrong, and that can't simply be an illusion.

And so at that point, we kind of have to make a choice. Are we going to be skeptical theoreticians who can't find any grounding for morality and the real world, naturalistically conceived, or are we just going to say, no, actually, conscience is more important, and that's going to be my starting point. And in fact, I'm going to show you how I can derive the external, sensible world from that standpoint, because I'm just that good as a philosopher that I can do that.

I also found it interesting to compare this to Schopenhauer in the idea that will is an external thing is the thing in itself. We've already seen that for Fichte's idealism, everything is me. What seems like a subject, well, that's me. What seems like an object, well, that's part of me, floating up as an object in front of me, being contemplated by me. And the way that he is then going to connect us to other people and to God is actually very Hindu. Really reminded me of some of this Brahmanistic stuff that we were reading before, where the world itself ends up being will. It's just that again, if you are a solipsist, the world is my will. But no, it ends up being sort of a larger will of which I am an aspect, I am a part, I'm a point of view within the

one eternal infinite will.

13:18 Seth: Yes.

13:19 Mark: So really there's a big will that is God and that we all somehow partake of that. Or, you know, we can get into that. But that's. Remember how Schopenhauer thought that like. Yes, the world in itself is actually will. It's just. It's a mad capricious will. Whereas for Fichte, it's a will more like Plato's will.

And it's there. I mean, it serves two purposes really for Fichte. It allows him to explain how it is that we can say we are unconditioned and completely free and completely self determined, when what that means is to obey a law. It's kind of a weird thing, right? We wanted to escape the sensible world and escape the web of natural deterministic causality, only to what? To find ourselves in a super sensible world in which we're completely causally determined, if we obey the law or the law is laid down and we don't issue it. So if we're part of a grander one eternal infinite will that issues those laws, then there's some sense in which we can make sense of the idea that we're issuing those laws to ourselves, which is important for this idea of freedom.

And then the second thing he's going to explain by that is just how are our minds synchronized? Right? If everything were idealists and everything is in our heads, how is it that we all have the same experiences of the objects outside of us? You know, how do we come into contact with each other? And he's just going to say that agreement is basically brought about by the one eternal infinite will. It's brought about in a really interesting, innovative way, which we should talk about because it involves conscience, it involves the way conscience affects us and the way our practical orientation to the world elicits the descriptive world.

It's like is comes from ought to ultimately, but it's grounded in the one big eternal ought.

15:03 Dylan: Just as like a side comment, the way you described it, Wes reminded me of this question that comes up for me whenever I read this is a problem. How is it that since everything is in our minds, that people actually interact with one another, how is it that we actually interact with the world? How do we solve that problem? And it just makes me think of things like Zeno's paradox and other kinds of paradoxes where that kind of absurdity ought to make you realize that there's something wrong with what you were thinking, that it might be a rich wrongness, but it means that the theoretical understanding that you have, there's something deeply wrong with it if it's violating that kind of thing. And the fact is, you're bringing it up as well. How can it be true that this is happening? And even posing the question that way is revealing that something went amiss.

15:55 Mark: You just haven't taken that epistemological red pill or whatever it is that would allow you to take all this stuff seriously.

We might want to look at. I'm trying to think if we've already read somebody like this, but somebody who just denies the Cartesian first person standpoint, not in favor of a materialist. Let's just start by describing the world, because I think that the phenomenologists are right that we only conclude what we do about the world because of our own experiences. Like, that's where kind of you have to start. But you might think that you need to start from a social position.

Right.

I remember we talked about this recently with Butler, just in terms of ethics, that you could start with ethics, like thinking about the categorical imperative as it relates to you. Or you could say fundamentally, we are starting philosophy from a we, right? We speak a language, we think in a language. This is something that we are sharing with other people, very much like this practical contradiction that I was talking about about practical reason. If you even think for a second that you might be the only consciousness in the universe, well, you're thinking that with words that you got from other people.

So there should be some we built into that. And maybe if you start an epistemological enterprise from that point, then you don't have to do as much work to then build back other minds into it. I'm not sure how Fichte clearly, methodologically, he's starting with a point of individual doubt, but the fact that he gets to a point where there really is this insuperable we that ends up being God, basically. We never actually read any, like, Hegel philosophy of religion, but we know from what we've read about the phenomenology that Hegel's notion of God is that, well, society and culture evolves such that we gain a gradual consciousness of ourselves as a people, and that eventually there's sort of a world consciousness of itself and that is God.

So God is the destination rather than something that's been there all along. Fichte is clearly not that weird. He has a more traditional notion of God than that. But there is something like. I was comparing it to the Hindu thing again, where you might have to make room, as we did in our Indian episode, for arguing that there is a particular part of the world consciousness that is the Creator part and that is in charge, as opposed to just saying we're all nodes in the vast skein that is the God world.

I feel like Mark is very close to religious conversion here. You're going to come full circle from where you were.

I have gained a religious tolerance for reading different theologians. Had we read this. I skimmed this when we did Schopenhauer the first time, and I was really disappointed when I got to the idealism part and just like had would have no interest in book three. But in this one, now that we've spent all this time with Augustine, that apparently Fichte was very influenced by and Plato, that Fichte was very influenced by Plotinus, more so that we haven't read yet. A good reason to read Plotinus, but I'm kind of interested in, like, what the various flavors of these sort of theologies are.

19:00 Dylan: Fichte is kind of the nicer, more palatable uncle of Schopenhauer. He's just not as grumpy and nasty and argumentative.

19:08 Mark: Whereas Schopenhauer feels like the grumpy old man, Fichte feels like this very passionate, earnest adolescent, basically, when you read him, which is really funny in light of the theoretical complexity of some of the stuff he's doing. It's so analytical and complex and, you know, especially in some of his other works. But then it's like a excited golden retriever, you know, that's excited to do calculus or something.

19:35 Seth: I'm sorry, did you just say a golden retriever who's excited to do calculus?

19:39 Mark: Did you? That's Fichte. Yeah, there it is.

19:44 Seth: Well, he's passionate about again. Well, I'll go back to what we were talking about in the first round of Fichte, which is he was a pedagogue. I mean, he taught. And even if you read the summary, it sounds like he didn't exactly love being a teacher and would have preferred to just write without the burden of being a teacher. He was a terrific teacher. So he clearly cared about improving others and helping them improve themselves and education. And it comes across in this particular work. It's not simply a set of instructions or an argument. It's with the narrative structure, the spirit, these sorts of things. He's trying to pull something off literarily as well as philosophically for the purposes of persuasion and to educate. And he's a lot more interesting to me because of it.

20:32 Mark: Can we start on the text? We'd by the end of our second half, I thought gotten through the important stuff in book two. Wes, you were reflecting that you thought a lot of important stuff was left. There's about 20 pages in my version. The point that I had ended on, I called the crux part of it was Things do not appear to thee through any representation of the thing that exists and can exist. Thou art immediately conscious. There is no other thing than that of which thou art conscious. Thou thyself art that thing. Thou thyself by virtue of thy infinitude, the innermost law of thy being. The paragraph after that, the same self which contemplates but now floating as an objective presentation before the subjective. That was something I put in bold. The objective and the subjective are just

both parts of the self. Do you see anything about a mirror near here?

The subjective appears as the still impassive mirror of the objective. That is about a page earlier in

my notes, I have it that we left off on a section which he's worried about how our consciousness could ever supply any determinant content to our experience. The Kantian transcendental idealist position is that there are things in themselves that they affect our minds, that the data comes from the outside and that we supply the form. So be space and time and causality and all that. But that doesn't mean we're solipsist and we're just making everything up whole cloth out of our own own minds. He's worried about how we could ever provide our own determinate content.

You know, he brings up the mirror thing because he's describing a sort of natural standpoint in which it seems as if we need our consciousness to be, quote unquote, swept away by things the way we normally think. Of it is just. We think that the consciousness is just kind of a passive mirror to things. What he's going to suggest is that we're not actually just passive mirrors. Or that if we work passive mirrors, consciousness itself would be something that would have to be constituted in the act of mirroring. Which suggests that if the actual activity of consciousness is constituted, then why not the content as well?

And then we have to say, if we are producing up the determinant content of the world, then why this particular content? Why certain qualia? Why red? Why do we see things in colors, for instance, or something like that? Why construct the world in spatial terms as opposed to in some other way? So the question is, how do we explain, for instance, the generation of spatiality from consciousness? The basic answer is that he's trying to claim that objects are projections of ourselves. We project them outside of ourselves as a way of intuiting ourselves.

Essentially, we know ourselves through knowing of these sort of object projections.

And is it important then for us to get straight on the faculties and connect these to Kantian faculties? Because, for instance, I mean, we have a lot of what we perceive as just sensation, the color red. But then something like the existence of space in general. That's not something we simply sense, as we were talking about last time. It's like we synthesize. We put together a bunch of different sensations. As, you know, you look from right to left and you put those different sensations together and come up with an idea of space. And I think that's what he's talking about is intuition.

Following the way Kantian thinks about space and time is that these are syntheses, but they're not abstract syntheses. He wants to just, I think, distinguish intuitions from thoughts. Whereas thinking about if space itself might be an intuition, but an object and its particular position in space is a thought, right? That we have. How do we know how far away something is from us in space? Well, it looks clearer, it looks bigger, if it's closer, that kind of stuff. But the whole knowledge of how space works and the fact that if something is farther away, it's going to look smaller.

That those are all, I believe, the work of thought. And so thought ends up being very important and giving us the whole idea. Reminded of the chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology, Force. And the understanding that that's a later stage than mere sense perception. When you get to the abstraction of there is something out there, that is exerting a power over me, right? In other words, the whole idea of an object itself Right. Rather than just the sensation of color, the idea that there is something that is causing that sensation of color in me, that's the idea.

Again, think about the way Locke described all this powers being out in the world. That is the work of thought. Even though it happens instantly, we should be able to sort of decode it and figure out, like, well, why do I think this? I'm putting different sensations together and coming up with this idea of a power.

Yeah, this is very good. I think. Yeah, we should emphasize that because in a way, with Locke talking about primary qualities and powers. Right. Power is one of the ways of Locke talking about the thing in itself. And if you say that the power is really in the mind. Right. When we're talking about these powers, these functions of the mind and faculties, what Fichte is trying to say, ultimately, is that we come to be aware of these things as external because we're becoming aware of these powers and functions that belong to our own mind. So when we think about what is an object. Right. As opposed to little bits of disorganized sense data, our sense of the objective really is intimately tied to subjective self intuiting, that is awareness of the activity of our own faculties. Does that connect with what you're saying?

Yes, it just adds the piece that, again, all these things could happen instantly. It's not like I infer that there are objects in the world. He explicitly says we don't infer that, but yet it's still a thought because it's the kind of thing that you could take apart into its constituent perceptions. Sensations. I don't know that he uses the word perception here. I want to avoid that because there's an achievement that perception implies. I successfully perceive the thing as opposed to a mirage, and I only think I perceive the thing. So it's just sensations and then thoughts.

And the sensations, he thinks, always refer implicitly to concepts of self. That it's not just that when I sense red, I'm really sensing me because I am all there is. Yes, that is part of his picture too. But it also has that more Kantian notion of when I'm having perception of red, part of that, the content of that perception is that it's me doing the perceiving.

Yeah. The objective is me being aware of myself as intuiting to be aware of my own. I manufactured the objective out of. Well, manufacture is a misleading word because the other thing you'll say about it is that it's transparent. So this kind of goes back to the Kantian empirical realism thing. Where once we say that objects are constructions, you know, appearances within the realm of our mind, then our access to them is immediate. There's no longer any talk of how we interact with things outside of us and mediation and all that stuff. And so I think something very similar is going on here where the objective is self awareness of myself as intuiting. He'll say the thing is transparent to the mind because basically it is the activity of the mind itself.

Which is weird because maybe I'm just not understanding transparency correctly because science is always trying to investigate more about things because the things are not transparent. And how my brain produces the image of the things in me is not transparent. Like all these things are things that can be investigated. So there must be something. If you're saying it's transparent, it must be something more surface level from the point of view of a deep investigative science. Some more surface level phenomena that the transparency is supposedly capturing.

28:25 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, this whole category of things that become indubitable or they're certain, just like you had in Descartes and you have it in Kant. Here you have in Fichte is you find out what are the things that I, well, I guess are transparent, that I know for sure, that are not subject to my skepticism. And I use those things in part either as a wedge to ground something or as a grounding itself as a place to tie me down and solve my problem.

28:54 Mark: Part of the immediacy is just the gestalt factor in perception, where we can talk all we want about construction and seeing only a certain side of the object and then building it up and having only certain limited sense data available to us that we have to synthesize over time in the imagination. But if the object itself is in some sense in the mind, then our access to it, we no longer have to think of it as we might be inclined to, as some kind of inferential process. So for instance, it's not like there's an external object in the world that sends little blips of data into us.

And then we have to take all that stuff and say, all right, how am I going to reconstruct this in a way that corresponds to the outside object. There's no question of mediation between us and an object in the external world. The quote unquote external object is just within us and we have completely trans. Transparent immediate access to it as a piece of our own mind.

29:50 Dylan: Yes, but what's transparent and immediate is insofar as it's been created by our own mind. That's where you can be wrong about it right here. Wrong would be it becomes a consistency argument. So I decide that I'm wrong because later on I have another concept in my mind, and I've decided that those two concepts, they're related to one another, say the two sides of the object, or I've decided that they have to be the same. So now I have an inconsistency I need to resolve. And so I will do a number of things. One thing I might do is I might refine what I meant by that concept in order to make it be about the same thing.

But all of that activity in Fichte would be occurring within these transparent objects of my mind. And so then you're left with the question of why the heck did I decide in the first place what was the input or what came to me that pushed me in the direction of having two things I needed to resolve and therefore make an adjustment such that the middle term was the same, which I think Fichte would say is the urge to know it's not going to be complete enough because you don't know what is it that I'm doing when I walk around the object and I decide, well, actually, it's the cylinder.

It's not a rectangular prism. And I get that by walking around it. I look at the top of it and I say, oh, well, it's not a square on the top, it's a circle on the top. And therefore it's going to be a cylinder. It's not a rectangular prism. And in the way we're talking about it, I would have all those understandings within my mind, but then I would decide I was wrong about two sets of things that had to do with the same thing. And then I have to resolve it. I'm being confusing, but I'm trying to figure out how you get back to being wrong about something.

If you have everything in your mind, why are you not always right? What does it mean to be wrong?

31:37 Seth: I've been staring at the screen, looking at Dylan's facial expressions, trying to figure out what he was talking about. In the last part, I finally understood. I was like, oh, no, that makes perfect sense. How could you be wrong, right?

31:51 Dylan: If it's all in your head, how could you ever be wrong? That would be the question. If it's all transparently in your head. No.

31:56 Seth: I think that's a great question, though. Is there a sense in which having a concept of correctness and incorrectness or truth and falsity, however you want to characterize it, is that in itself A way to defeat the idealism, the solipsistic idealism. In the same way that he's trying to use this notion of faith or the notion of action, I guess, is the fact that we act, we have an urge to act, we have to act and we have this moral impulse, which in some sense it doesn't defeat idealism in some kind of ontological way. What it does is it basically says this sense in which you feel as if you can be divorced from the real world with your understanding just is impossible.

And I wonder, Dylan, if the whole idea that you have an idea of being incorrect or falseness or failure, maybe that's where it comes from, failure that you have an action that you undertake to try to achieve a goal and you fail to achieve that goal.

32:56 Dylan: I like that a lot because it brings us back to the fact that knowing comes from acting. And there's this kind of, for me at least when I'm reading things like that, there's this wonderful kind of iterative accretion that you get. And that the theoretical becomes a consequence of the practical. And it's a constant refinement of the theoretical based upon the practical. Yeah.

33:21 Mark: In fact, what's so interesting about the later sections of book two, he wants to derive spatiality from our self awareness as practical beings, as crazy as that sounds. Right. He wants to say why is it spatiality in particular? Because that's the only way that I can be conscious of myself as a practical being. I don't fully understand the argument, but I think it has something to do with becoming aware of myself through intuition and then having to posit, sort of ground my finitude by saying I'm related to some kind of limiting whole, something like that.

And then the next part of it is he's going to explain, well, why do we think there are external objects? Why do we think that there are things in themselves? And then he'll give a long explanation of how it is that we want to relate our sensations to space and how that makes us come up with the idea of external objects. I think what he's trying to do is to tell us how all this is predicated on the practical subject's attempt to know itself or something like that, or its self awareness.

So I think I can answer Dylan's question just with that distinction of faculties and things that we do with our minds that I brought up earlier, that there's sensation and intuition. Bottom of page 74. For me, he's talking about where does space? Space is not something that we produce by merely sensation. It's not just a sensation of space or intuition. Spirit asks, this cannot be. Intuition is immediate and infallible, says Fichte. What is contained in it does not appear as produced and cannot deceive. But I must train myself to estimate, measure and deliberate upon the size of an object as distance, its position with respect to other objects.

Is the truth known to every beginner that we originally see all objects in the same line, that we learn to estimate their greater or lesser distances, that the child attempts to grab distant objects as if they lay immediately before his eyes, and that one born blind who should suddenly receive sight would do the same. This conception of distances is therefore a judgment, no intuition, but an arrangement of my different intuitions by mean of the understanding I may err in the estimate of size, distance, etc of an object. The so called optical deceptions are not deceptions of sight, but erroneous judgments formed concerning the size of the object, etc.

So Jud is just part of thought. So the way that we can be wrong is. I think you were referring to this, Wes, is that because we're finite, like we only have certain range of stuff in our intuition. And then we have to do some work to put it together. And we could put it together wrong. And anytime we're making any claim about anything in the world that there is a book in front of me. Well, maybe it's not really a book. Maybe I'm looking at a mirror and the book is behind me. That would just require my moving around and getting more evidence so I could put my intuitions together in a more accurate way.

36:16 Dylan: I agree. But all of these words, accuracy and putting my intuitions together, all are presuming that I'm tying together something in the world to my thoughts. And we started down this road by talking about how our thoughts have an immediacy and transparency to them.

36:37 Mark: In Fichte or objects, appearances.

36:41 Dylan: That's why the question raises up right. And so if all of the appearances are really acts of our minds that in some radical way don't have a connection to the world, our minds are acting on objects in our minds.

36:55 Mark: They produce the world. That's what he wants to say. So it's not that they have no connection to the world, they have every connection to the world because they are the source of it. And intuitions are transparent in the sense that they can't be false. Just think about the epoché with the phenomenologists. This is Husserl. I'm not going to think about whether there really is an Apple out there. I am absolutely certain that I have perception of Apple. And so if you think that all we ever have are those intuitions is I have perception of apple now.

And even the fact that we've built up this idea of appleness from all these different things, yes, that is a construction, that is an abstraction from different perceptions to create a concept. And once you've done that, you've created an objective thing, even though it's all out of your mind, you've created an objective thing that you can therefore be wrong about because you find that, you know, apple is built out of these sort of intuitions. But then this thing that I think is an apple, I cut into it and I find it's paper mache. So I was confused about which intuitions.

I thought these were Apple intuitions, but they're not.

So ultimately we would need a coherence theory of truth. But also for someone like Kant to be wrong about things, we need a mind independent reality of some sort. Kant does that with the thing in itself and data. So we are getting data. And those synthetic acts by which the faculties create our objects for us, those are infallible in a sense, just in the same way that the world is what it is. You can't say the world is false, the world just is what it is and the objects just are what they are. But our judgment is something else. Like Kant wants to explain objectivity in terms of the fact that the understanding and the intuitions have built the world beforehand.

And then we can come to it at a more reflective level and make judgments about the world. And those things can line up in some meaningful way. Does it mean they have to line up? No, the judgments don't have to line up. And I think the question of how that happens is complicated. But it's also complicated, even if we're not idealists, to explain error.

Can you read in your translation where it has 1, 2, 3. So for me it's page 77. I've attained the fullest insight into the origin of my conception of objects out of myself. And then he gives three points. Are those delineated in your translation?

Yeah, it's on page 55 in my translation. Because I am, I. I am aware of myself and that partly as a practical being and partly as an intelligence. The first consciousness is sensation and the second is intuition, unlimited space, one by one.

That's hard to understand in itself.

So this is what I was trying to suggest that what he was doing is that he's saying that. Remember earlier on, right, when he said sensations are just awarenesses of our own condition, that sort of veil of perception idea. When I have a sensation of something, the qualia is in my mind, right? And then what I'm doing with intuition, those are organizing sensations in space. So I generate a surface, for instance. Sensations are atomic, like maybe an experience of a color you can think of as atomic. And then space is constructed out of those things. And now he's associating those two different aspects with understanding oneself as a practical being on the one hand, which is

40:12 Seth: to say as an actor, something that senses.

40:16 Mark: Well, the practical being as an actor.

40:18 Seth: Is he there yet in this section?

40:20 Mark: This is a kind of recap, this 1, 2, 3.

I mean, he says practical being. I don't remember how much he said about practical being earlier than this. Certainly he has a lot to say later.

40:29 Seth: He has a lot to say. That's exactly my point. Yeah, he has a lot to say later. But how much has he said up until now about being a practical being? I didn't mean to interrupt your flow, Wes, but.

40:38 Dylan: Yeah.

40:39 Mark: Well, we have to figure out how to connect whether he comes early or later, the idea of a practical being to sensation. He's going along his lines of bifurcation of the theoretical and practical reason, and he's associating practical reason with sensation and theoretical reason with intuition of space in particular.

40:57 Seth: My reading of this particular section was that if you tie it into the previous page where he talks about the strength and weakness of perception, so we have these sensations. You have a sensation of an apple that's on your desk, and you have the sensation of an apple that's hang from a tree that's 50 yards away. There's some action that you take to judge that this is a sensation of the same thing, but one which is stronger, the one that's closer up, and one that is weaker, which is the one that is further away. So there's a disambiguation of you don't just have some pure manifold of intuition or some canvas on what you're painting.

You're having a sensation of an apple up close and one far away, and the one far away is weaker. So you exercise a judgment that you relate the two things as being the same object. But the fact that one is a weaker sensation, one is a stronger sensation, gives you the intuition of distance and space. Were they to be spatially coterminous or similar, they would have a similar strength of their sensation, but they don't. So there's some kind of judgment associated with the sensations. Which he calls intuition, which yields space. I don't understand why it also doesn't yield time.

In my reading of this particular section, what he's saying is I'm two things. I'm a sensing thing and I'm a judging thing. I'm a practical being. I'm intelligence. The first part of me is sensation. The second part is intuition, which is to say I have sensations. And those sensations come by virtue of being a conscious of myself and about my own sensations. Not just that I don't just have sensations with no reflective consciousness about them. I have sensations with reflective consciousness. And so the reflective consciousness about those sensations which tells me they're stronger or weaker relative to each other, yada di ya, gets me to intuition, which yields these higher order concepts like space.

43:05 Mark: I like that idea that we have sensations that then get combined to create intuitions. And the intuitions get combined to create thoughts and judgments. But that sort of make nonsense of this idea that somehow I as practical being am associated with consciousness as sensation. Like we don't have any consciousness of sensation. As you said, it's all of our consciousness is not mere sensation. It is shot through with theory. It is shot through with judgment. And so to be a practical being, you need a lot of complex stuff to say it's associated with sensation. Doesn't make much sense to me at all. He's saying this shorthand for something that I think he's. Some more important point later.

I think maybe I led us down the wrong path by misreading this. Maybe when he says first consciousness is sensation, he's just speaking temporarily. He's not saying the former and the latter. So maybe he's not really. He's not associating the practical with.

That is correct.

That's all right. These errors can be informative and it's my fault.

Can you read point two on your list? Then let's keep going with your translation.

Okay? I want to give the bigger picture of the section, which is just that he's trying to explain our positing of external objects. That's the whole goal of this whole little argument. Because they're neither sensed nor intuited. They're thought. And so how do we have these two things? Sensation, intuition. That's fine. Color space. How do we combine those things in such a way that we think that there are objects outside of us causing our perception? So that's where this is headed. All right. So number two, I cannot apprehend something unlimited. For I am limited. Therefore, through thought I limit a certain space. In space in general and place the first in a certain relation to the

last of my translation. I therefore set apart in thought a certain portion of universal space and place the former. In other words, the portion in a certain relation to the latter, the universal space. I don't know if that was actually a clear translation or just the fact that I was reading it made it clear to me.

Yeah, you know, I'm not sure why in number one, we start with unlimited space. Exactly. And then we have to kind of drill down to just if you think intuition.

I mean, I guess I'm just reading Kant into this. But if you feel like that intuition is a certain biological base level abstraction from sensation, it just thinks creates the Euclidean three dimensional space, even though we never experience it actually extending in all directions. Like it's sort of just part of the way it's given to us. That I could go farther.

Number three, the standard by which I measure this limited space is the measure of my own sensation. This is what Seth was just talking about. According to the principle which one might formulate and express perhaps as follows. What affects me to such and such a degree is to be placed in space in such and such a relation with the rest of what affects me. What's important about this is we might wonder how sensations and spatiality, maybe they're not related at all. Right. How are they related? And then it becomes interesting that they, you know, in fact they are related. We can say something about spatiality by looking at degrees of sensation.

So I'm in a world with these things. We shouldn't be asking. This is, I think, very much presaging. The practical is more fundamental than the theoretical. Because how we know that the apple is far away as opposed to the apple is near, is because of stuff we can do with it, is because we reach out for it and it's not there. And so that is how we get the whole idea that there's an array of things in a space immediately around me, which is fundamental, our starting point for any future. That the telescope has to be in front of me before I can think that the telescope is seeing something that's really, really far away, that I could never possibly reach.

Once we've put sensations in space. That's how we come to this idea of an external object affecting us. So he'll say, the property of the thing has its origin in the sensation of my own condition. And space which it fills has its origin in intuition. So here thought comes in to posit the external object. The two are connected by thought. The first is transferred to the second, so sensation is transferred to space. What we said above is of course true. By being placed into space, that which property is only my condition becomes a property of the thing for me.

So what he's saying is, you know, look, sensations are what I experience. When I experience the sensation is my own condition. How do I come to think of that as the property of something outside of me? I project it into space. So say, but it is placed in space not by intuition, but by thought. So it's not like we immediately experience it in space, but by thought, by measuring and ordering thought in this act, there is, however, no thinking up, no creating by thought, but merely a determination of what is given in sensation and intuition independently of thought.

By saying we're idealists and our minds are creating all this stuff, it's not saying that our thoughts, our fantasies are drumming up all this stuff. It's that we are given these capacities of sensation and intuition and the way those end up interacting. I still don't know if I've answered the question that you raised, Wes, is However these objects arise in us, they certainly have the appearance that they are discovered that they are not. Even though our minds are supposed to be transparent. That ficta is trying to answer the question of how our minds can create content as opposed to merely form.

Kant is all down on the form thing, but he thinks, as you keep saying, that the content is somehow filtered data through the thing itself Fichte has chopped that off. There is no thing in itself and yet we still have the appearance of content. I don't know. Has he given a sophisticated account for why we might have the unexpected? Just by saying that the givenness of intuition is so complicated and we only have a finite glimpse of any bit of it, that we're always going to be constructing something based on limited data. So that is how we seem to find unexpected content out in the world is because, yes, it's all ultimately coming from us, but it is coming in a piecemeal way, something like that.

It's like what we do when we have a dream, right? We supply our own content.

49:16 Seth: In that situation, I just went to the German and I was trying to figure out where this term practical came. It only shows up one other time in book two, the word practical. But in finding it, I think I came across a section that kind of addresses what you were just talking about, Mark, is this is a bottom of page 71 in the one translation. This is him responding to the spirit after an extended diatribe by the spirit. It Must be a twofold consciousness. Sensation is itself an immediate consciousness. For I'm sensible of my own sensation. But from this there arises no knowledge of an outward existence, but only the feeling of my own state. I am, however, originally not merely a sensitive, but also an intuitive being. Not merely a practical being, but also an intelligence.

50:08 Mark: We've again tied the practical sensation.

50:11 Seth: No, my point is that the only other place in this book where he uses it, he basically says that to be sensible is to be practical.

50:20 Mark: Sensible, I like that. Yeah, yeah. Not sensible and sensible, but sensible. Yeah, yeah, yes, sensitive.

50:26 Seth: I guess. I intuitively contemplate my sensation itself. And thus there arises from myself and my own nature the cognition of an existence. So I have this sensation. I become aware that I am a thing sensing. I become aware of my existence from my sensation. Sensation becomes transformed into its own object. My affections as red, smooth and the like into something red, something smooth. You want to know how we get from content to things? It's the same way, or I should say the mechanism that gets us from sensation to self. The natural extension of moving from sensation to self. It goes from sensation to sensation of something.

51:17 Mark: I think the way to think about this is just that. And this may give us a hint as why he's associating sensation with the practical and intuition with the theoretical is just that at the point of sensation, if it really is just of our own condition, we are still with the subject. Right? And the theoretical as an intelligence is people are interested in knowledge. We are oriented towards the outside world. And so that's what that we get with intuition and of space and then thought. But the way to think about objects is the naive way we think about them is that they're things in themselves outside of us.

For Fichte. The objective is we are looking at our own intuitive activity in relation to ourselves, in relation to sensations. So it's this very interesting form of self awareness. Actually, ironically, not awareness of independent things in themselves. It's awareness of the activity of our own faculties that feels objective to us. Gives us this thing above and beyond mere sensation or mere spatiality. But like there are objects causing this in us. It's just a way of saying, I'm grasping, like Mark talking about power, right? Like, yeah, we're grasping a power.

It's just not the power of the thing in itself. It's the power of the self.

Well, and this is making me want to misuse Heidegger and his concept of being in the world that when I'm aware of self, it is not like a Cartesian evil-genius type. I can close my eyes and I'm just aware that there's a non relational core self that I'm aware of. And everything is supposed to kind of derive from that. No, it actually being aware of yourself in Fichte's sense, in the phenomenologically more accurate sense is being aware of these acts of sensation, acts of consciousness. It's always me in relation to something objective. That's still me for Fichte, keep that in mind. But that being in the world, in other words, consciousness of self is consciousness of being in the world. It's just get rid of your idea of the world as being something external when you're thinking about that is just a core piece of phenomenology.

53:32 Seth: Right. So if Fichte had written book three first, or if book three came first, he would be a proto Heideggerian.

53:41 Mark: I think we just want to say why is he going through this exercise? He's worried about us being ourselves, objects who are subject to necessity, to determinism and therefore having our freedom undermined. And what he's shown is that in fact, no, that's an illusion. The objects are in us, produced by us, and therefore it's we who determine them, not them who determine us. So screw them.

So I'm not going to edit my intro where I said we read book three and we were going to finish up book two because on this we've mostly been talking about book two, but all with book three in mind. And really the details of the theology are much less interesting than the stuff we've been discussing. The fact that if you take idealism seriously, there should be a lot to explain.

54:30 Dylan: And our beginning, I thought was a reasonable summary of what you're going to have to do in book three.

54:36 Mark: So yep, we will get into the nitty gritty of that. However, in part two supporters, that is the next thing in your feed. Thank you so much for listening.

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